SNW INTERVIEW -- Dec 27 -- Advertising is out, friendly referrals are in. TurnTo helps sites harness the power of the friendly referral. Here’s our interview with George Eberstadt of TurnTo. - Mark Brooks
What is your founding story?
About a year and a half ago I was doing some consulting work for a non-profit organization called The Earthwatch Institute. They enable people go on field research expeditions with top-tier environmental scientists. I was helping them figure out some community features for their website, where volunteers could share photos and keep in touch with other people on their expeditions. But it struck me that the most powerful thing Earthwatch could do leverage their community to build their business and get the word out would be to make sure that if somebody who was interested in learning more about them happened to know one of the nearly 100,000 people who have already been on one of their expeditions, that they would make that connection.
I couldn’t find any tools to help them with that. So I started to experiment with some designs, and the light bulb went off when I realized: hey it’s not just Earthwatch. Any organization where a reference is an important part of building the business can use this. That’s when I thought: this shouldn’t be a one-off project, this should be a company.
How would you describe it?
I call TurnTo a “trusted reference system”. It’s really a network of people who all agree to share with each other their experiences in order to help each other make better decisions. And we’re applying it in the online commerce world right now. In tangible terms: it’s a widget, a bit of code that merchants put on their ecommerce site that lets visitors see if they know people who have experience with that site or its products.
How does it work for end users?
From an end-users point of view, if you’re already a TurnTo member and you come to one of the sites in the TurnTo network, it will tell you whether your friends have shopped there and what they bought. That enables you to know who you can “turn to” for advice just when you need it.
If you’re not yet a TurnTo member you would encounter a link that says “see if your friends shop here”. We use emails to identify users, so we just ask you to put in your email and if anybody in the system has you listed as a friend, we can instantly show you who has experiences to share with you. It doesn’t interrupt your shopping process. Our partner sites like that a lot because even for people who are not yet TurnTo members, we can deliver the trusted reference information without taking them out of the shopping flow. We never take the shopper off the site.
For the partner site, it’s pretty straightforward. They put a little bit of javascript on their pages to render the widget, and what we’re doing behind the scenes is matching up the social network data that the users provide with the commerce data that the partner site provides. And by putting those two together, we’re able to tell a user when someone they know has done something that they’re considering.
How does TurnTo make money?
TurnTo has a very straightforward business model. It’s 100% performance based. When a user sees a “trusted reference” on one of our partner sites and then goes on to purchase we get a small commission on that purchase.
Who are your partners?
The sites using TurnTo now cover a board range of businesses. We’ve got partner sites in the travel space, an electronics retailer, a specialty tea company, pet supplies, a ticket broker, a jewelry company, a company that does online education, a tableware site; it’s really all over the map. Three of our partners are internet retailer 500 sites. We’ve only been live a few months, and the response has been great.
