Michael Parekh (ex-Goldman Sachs internet analyst - used to be fairly
influential in his day) put together a really good post about what an Amazon
blogging service would look like. This repurposes and re-imagines a lot of the
stuff I'd put together at the end of last year re: Amazon's problems with
community. As opposed to my POV - which was that Amazon, as a retail store,
will never have the ability to cross over into the community space in a real way
because it's brand will be a barrier - Parekh seems at give Amazon the benefit
of the doubt, and feels they have real, leveragable community assets.
Regardless of whether Parekh or I are right about Amazon's brand, his
points I believe, can easily be transferred to what portals can do in the shopping space. For instance, the following snippet seems like something that portals should have done on launch of their blogging services:
"Now what if you could give the reviewer/blogger a piece of the action on a purchase, that was automatically credited to your Amazon account? Why, this would be like something TypePad has done, in partnership with online ad company Kanoodle, where TypePad/Six-apart Pro bloggers like myself, who are paying a monthly fee, could get any ad-related dollars to credited against their monthly payment."
Of course, that integration does encourage click-fraud, so a more realistic end-result would / will be a conversion based revenue share approach. But, this clearly could be done, and done quickly.
How would this benefit a portal? Well, the second link in Google's results for
"Bell
motorcycle helmet" is a review. The first result under "Canon
a70" is a review. These reviews all serve to qualify traffic and drive into
transactional media. The potential upside in terms of SEO is
significant (of course, only if the portal manages to optimize these reviews properly).
Comments