It is arguable that people on the internet can be relied upon to deliver information, help, or advice without expectation of any immediate benefit. A distressed teenage girl can post anonymously on a niche teen forum, and dozens of like-minded teenagers will chip in with their advice and experiences. A photographer participating in a voting-based competition can tweet about it and easily garner people to vote for her. Software developers routinely write complex open-source software that is released to the public for free. Therefore, to doubt the existence of digital altruism is unreasonable at best.

I propose that there is immense potential in tapping on the phenomenon of digital altruism to sell more products online. What if, instead of doing research for others or even making micro-donations, consumers on the internet are mobilized to share, review, and humanize brands and products? There is already proof that there exists such energy; the remaining piece of puzzle is to align consumer motivation with business objectives. Of course, many tools already exist to try to get people to become volunteer marketers (e.g. social media sharing buttons, email a friend features, etc.), but how many of those tools actually succeed in making people share and refer stuff to their friends?

Many retailers and sellers alike are accustomed to incentivizing their existing customers to refer products to their friends for discounts, gifts, and other benefits of financial value. I have previously argued that this method is unsustainable. Providing goodies for sharing will encourage spam, and people in the sharer’s network are also unlikely to be happy to know that the sharer is profiting from them. The preferred approach is to unleash this digital altruism via provision of non-financial benefits that are compelling enough to drive action.

Compared to businesses, consumers are less rational and likely to engage in things that do not offer financial returns (or their equivalents). Consumers already commonly discuss products and brands offline, usually with specific non-financial purposes or motives. A sports enthusiast may go on incessantly about the different brands of sports merchandise to show expertise, while an adolescent may talk about a certain brand of electronics with her friends to gather advice and experiences. Even a child asking her parents to buy a particular brand of breakfast cereal is referencing a specific brand and indirectly promoting it. These are common daily scenarios involving brands and products that serve as marketing efforts for the respective businesses, albeit on a small scale.

Business should thus focus on replicating these scenarios online based on a real-life model of how consumers discuss products and brands offline. By providing the necessary infrastructure and education, there is tremendous promise that consumers will begin to behave as in real life. Back to the social media sharing buttons example, how can we improve usage rate, what can be done better? The answer may just simply lie in messaging. “Share this product” alone is not compelling – too vague and possibly desensitizing when seen often enough. “Tell one friend about this item who would absolutely love it” and “Hint someone close to you to buy this item for you” are more specific and compelling calls-to-action that mimic real-life scenarios. Another example is product reviews: “Write a review” sounds like work, a losing proposition for the consumer. What about “Tell us about your experiences with this product and see what others think?”

There are two important reasons not to neglect to leverage on digital altruism in the context of ecommerce. First, the magic of using existing customers and brand loyalists for marketing is that it depresses customer acquisition cost to near-zero, if businesses can somehow find a way to facilitate occurrences that are already happening offline online. Second, any communication done online is scalable using platforms like social media and blogs. While offline conversations are shared among a few people, online conversations can theoretically be accessed by millions of people many times over at anytime and anywhere.

Indeed, this mindset has been our guiding principle in building our social commerce product. Our take on monetizing digital altruism is encapsulated by our software, what is your take?