The first is MINT. It aggregates all my financial information from my different accounts whether it be brokerage, retirement or bank accounts. It tells me the categories of my expenditures, my spending trends and gives me pointers on ways to save. But the feature that I find most interesting is the SpendSpace at the bottom of the Trends tab. It lets me compare my spending trends to other people in similar (or different) locations as me. For example, I can compare expenditures in restaurants to other New Yorkers (lower). And more than that, it tells me whether my shopping at specific retailers in a given time period matched others in my location. Apparently, I spent a lot more at Best Buy than others in February. Similarly, my wireless phone bill was lower than other New Yorkers. It is fascinating social information.

The other interesting website is Covester. It is a social investing website that tells me how other people are investing their money. Harnessing wisdom of the crowds concepts, Covester lets you link your brokerage account to other individual investors and fund managers so that you can see how your portfolio performs in relation to theirs. The idea is that you can discover the most successful investors from within the community and start learning and benefiting from their investment choices. Part of the idea is to enable those with the best portfolio to get some financial return by making their investment decisions public. The only problem - investing is about beating the market. If Covester become so successful that everyone knows who you are and what you're investing in, you won't be able to beat the market in the future. 

Nevertheless, Covester is a perfect example of a startup that harnesses the power of the social web. Now just imagine if MINT and Covester were to merge. Wouldn't that be neat? Better still, a major bank in the consumer banking business should acquire MINT and someone like Etrade should pick up Covester.

It was a fun experience with a lot of great questions being asked during and after the presentation. In fact some are still trickling into my email inbox. The audience seemed to have enjoyed the talk and no one questioned the fundamental premises behind Social Influence Marketing. Looks like I found a few more believers in the concepts. Thank you for attending.

A special thanks to the UPA for giving me the opportunity to speak and to my peers Elliot and Mary-Lynne who helped organize the event.

 

But there's a new feature that I like too. And that's the customer discussions. They connect customers to each other to share questions, insights and views about products available on Amazon.com. In other words, they're discussion boards for each product on Amazon. What's refreshing is that Amazon recognizes that I'm not as interested in meeting people on its site as I am in finding books. So rather than design the feature a social network and encourage me to make friends, Amazon focuses on the reason that I'm on the site in the first place. To find good books to read and to learn more about them. Take a look at the guidelines to learn how Amazon thinks about these discussion boards.

If only other companies paid more attention to what we as consumers are trying to do on their websites. We'd have fewer social networks and just more relevant and useful interactive features.