Welcome to the Social Amp Blog.

(July 13, 2011) – Smashbox Cosmetics, a portfolio brand of leading prestige cosmetics company EstÉe Lauder, and Social Amp, the leading provider of onsite social personalization, have partnered to develop a custom shopping experience based on the preferences of consumers and their friends.

"We've really brought Facebook to Smashbox.com," says Beth DiNardo, General Manager of Smashbox Cosmetics. "As we move forward in an industry where social media is essential for growth, we are excited to be the first beauty brand to implement a comprehensive shopping experience driven by social popularity and consumers' social connections."

Want to know which lip gloss your friends love, or which eye shadow color is hot right now? Social Shop will show you the products trending among your own social circle, as well what's most popular among the Smashbox community at large.

Using Facebook profile data, Facebook "Likes" and consumers' "Wants," Social Amp provides Smashbox shoppers with personalized recommendations based on their friends' preferences, as well as their own. Social Amp's platform and applications embed the social graph and users' social connections directly into Smashbox.com for brand-focused interaction.

"Most brands spend to put up a Facebook page and activate conversations inside Facebook," says Matt Sunbulli, CEO of Social Amp. "With Social Amp, innovative brands like Smashbox now have the ability to activate Facebook-like social interaction on their own sites, closer to the point of conversion. Ultimately, brand sites need to have the same level of social play as Facebook pages, if not greater."

Key features of Smashbox's Social Shop:

• Create and share your own personalized profile page of Likes/Wants
• View your friends' profile pages
• Explore most popular products based on global Likes/Wants
• Explore top products based on friends' Likes/Wants
• Leave comments and participate in conversations about products
• See gift suggestions for your friends on their birthdays

To experience Smashbox's Social Shop powered by Social Amp visit:
http://www.smashbox.com/socialshop

About Smashbox Cosmetics, Inc.

Smashbox Cosmetics is the indie-spirit beauty brand born out of the modern-day image factory known as Smashbox Studios in L.A. Brothers Dean and Davis Factor–great-grandsons of makeup legend Max Factor–first founded the photo studios, and then were inspired by their A-list clients to create a line that would meet the demanding needs of a professional shoot. Through collaboration with world-class photographers and makeup artists, Smashbox Cosmetics debuted in 1996. The brand was acquired by Estee Lauder Companies in July 2010. We believe life is your photo op. The world is your set. We're here to get your camera-ready with our studio-tested products.

About Social Amp, Inc.

Social Amp's market-leading platform harnesses the power of Facebook's Open Graph for business and makes brand's websites instantly social by embedding a visitor's social graph and connections on site. With social applications and tools touched by more than 10 million users, Social Amp is the most trusted authority on Facebook Open Graph marketing.

On behalf of the Social Amp team, welcome to the Social Amp blog. Our inaugural post is a brief primer on the phenomena of online “social personalization” and our company’s efforts in exploiting its benefits for our users and our brands. Check back here for strong opinions about social commerce and other topics in this rapidly evolving space.

Matt

Know Your User

With the advent of the Internet brands were compelled to invest in websites to increase distribution of their services and reach new customers. These destination points transformed the traditional way brands transacted and communicated to customers. In a similar way, the last three years has seen the advent of a new “socially aware” internet built around users’ identities. Dubbed the “Social Graph,” this new web paradigm is rapidly disrupting the way businesses communicate and transact with their customers online.

At its core the Social Graph allows brands to know their customers. As users engage with the web using their Facebook identity- as opposed to anonymous interaction- a user’s experience of your website becomes more intimate – shaped and tailored specifically to the user’s interests and reflecting content and actions taken by their friends and the real identities of global users.

The rapid adoption of social identity by internet users is nothing less than a fundamental paradigm shift in the experience of the web. It is estimated that 250 million people a month currently use their Facebook identity (via FB Connect) to navigate and experience websites. Ignoring this shift comes at the expense of ignoring the familiar business motto “Know Your Customer.” Supporting social personalization for your website must be a top business priority - ignored at the risk of having your customers identify elsewhere.

User at the Center

Businesses and brands have already started to derive value from adding components of social personalization to their website. The source for social personalization comes from the data available about your site users through open social APIs like Facebook’s Open Graph, LinkedIn and Twitter. Within these APIs the scale of actionable user data is in the hundreds of terabytes, and continues to grow at precipitous rates as users change and update interests and friendships within their favorite social networks. With social personalization the user is always in control. All data extracted from social APIs used to personalize a website is opted in directly by the user. At any time the user may remove access to their data within their Facebook or LinkedIn accounts. With the user in control of their personalization, it’s no surprise to see the tremendous growth in adoption. It’s clear that users want to engage.

Benefits to the User

Social personalization provides users with heightened engagement that is reflected in increased page views and greater average time spent on personalized pages versus unpersonalized pages. In addition to lessening registration loops causing churn in traditional login processes, users are able to receive more relevant and more targeted content based on their existing profile interests. Consumers also get the benefit of carrying their circle of friends directly with them to your site. They can see what products their friends have liked, commented on or transacted. They also have the ability to ask a friend about a product without ever leaving your site.

Benefits to Your Site

Social Amp’s applications leverage the viral benefits of Facebook Open Graph to increase traffic to all pages they are placed on. The referral traffic is generated from the News Feed and Search on Facebook and Bing. With an average of 130 friends per Facebook user, the referral benefit is potentially viral as users’ actions trigger a cascade of similar actions from their friends... and the viral chain is repeated.

Social search on Facebook (and soon Bing) optimizes placement of product and article pages based on the level of social activity and engagement they receive by a user and their friends. Increased social activity by a user and friends will cause pages to appear higher within search based on keywords entered by the user.

The benefits, as outlined here, have the potential to leapfrog your site ahead of the competition in the social arena, while driving KPI metrics like upstream traffic and social conversions for product pages on your site.