Why Social Recommendation Services Need to Get Even More Personal (Mashable)

Yen Lee is the founder and president of Uptake, a social travel company that pairs personalized recommendations from friends with an extensive, searchable catalog of expert and consumer travel insights. Yelp, TripAdvisor and Amazon user reviews aren't enough anymore. Crowd insights are no longer meaningful to the individual simply because they're "user generated." People don't care about finding the needle in the haystack -- unless they trust the needle in the first place.

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??It used to be that consumers would get purchase recommendations from acquaintances, salespeople, and perhaps even celebrity endorsements on TV or radio. Today, the web offers vast access to a variety of products and services, and countless channels by which to acquire them. The diversity of choice has powerfully influenced consumer preference, but very often, it has left the consumer in a state of flux.

Therefore, a new consumer is emerging, along with evolving web discovery technology that will impact his decision-making process. These three factors will be especially important for today's new era of social recommendation services.

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• Trust: In the past, a crowd's wisdom and insight rendered its recommendations valuable. Today, we not only seek recommendations from qualified strangers, but also from people we already know. Socially connected consumers value and trust the opinions of friends more than the input of strangers.
• Taste: The increase of emotional and personal disclosure on social networks has allowed services to mine networks for unique and powerful insights that boost social experiences both on and offline. We can now tap these preferences to depths we never before imagined. Businesses can build powerful recommendation engines using these insights, triggering user discovery at astonishing rates.
• Time: Consumers don?t have the time to sift through the web's mass of information and insights, especially when we can just ask people we know, and rest assured that their insights are sufficient.?

These trends prove that today's consumers share one overarching priority: personalization. And some companies are already catching on. Spotify took music to a new level by personalizing playlists by taste, and also by enabling sharing with people meaningful to its users. Much the same, Etsy's Facebook connection lets people discover gifts for friends based on Likes and interests.

??Likewise, travel is an innately social experience. We ask people about destinations, share our photos, meet new people on trips, and even plan trips together. However, travel has historically been weighed down by booking and planning processes that lacked recommendations or personalization. Recently though, companies are responding to a new breed of traveler -- one that prefers the unbeaten path, the locals-only establishments and one-of-a-kind adventure. However, today's travelers also want approval from their social circles -- trusted friends with similar tastes, who won?t waste their time with irrelevant information.??

For each of the companies mentioned above, friends provide trusted advice to validate and enhance the consumer experience, making it meaningful and worth the investment. In a year or so, we?ll see that companies will address trust, taste and time to generate ultra-personalized recommendation services for their users.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, OrangeDukeProductions

This story originally published on Mashable here.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/internet/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/mashable/20120131/tc_mashable/why_social_recommendation_services_need_to_get_even_more_personal

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