Developing a Social Commerce Strategy

Last month I wrote about an emerging trend that I was following – Social Commerce.

The idea that you need to take the point of sale to wherever your customers are talking is intriguing for a number of reasons, not the least being I started a separate business that sells products into a couple of customer segments that are heavy Facebook users.

Over the past two years, we've focused a lot of effort on socialising how we sell and introducing social content and services into this business and specifically the ecommerce platform; the challenge going forward is whether we need to try and create a sale at the point of social. The reason I say this is that “Like”, “Poke”, “thumbs up”, or “someone like me” has become the trusted source for purchasing decisions – and into this we have to factor the Bing/Facebook alliance:

”Starting today, Bing is integrating data from your friends and social network into search results. This could include information on "likes", reviews, photos and links from your friends into your search experience.“
The Bing/Facebook Alliance – Oct 15, 2010

As this starts to become more disruptive I'm convinced we need to in fact segment our strategy and develop a whole approach that enables commerce at the point of social. If I look at Facebook for example my thinking now isn’t that I want to be active on Facebook (through fan pages, and advertising) so as to connect and get them over to my ecommerce site; rather I want to treat Facebook as its own parallel universe – I want to contain the whole connection, engagement, and then transaction within Facebook – with the exception being subtle prompts that the fan could leave Facebook and source additional information from our other channels if they need it.

Now as I start to forumulate this strategy, it (in simple terms) includes the following considerations:

1. Specific fan pages based on the demographic we want to target
2. Product bundles, offers that are unique to the platform – and in saying this I don’t mean discounting (don’t get me started on Groupon) – I mean value-add, uniqueness.
3. Facebook ads targeted across brand awareness building, special offers, feedback capture, polls etc.
4. An ROI that might be measured across a different time period than a traditional marketing campaign.

Have I missed anything?

Finally, one question keeps coming back to me - and I have to admit I don't know the answer to this one - Will users actually purchase on a social platform like Facebook?