Social Commerce: The End Of The Beginning

Adrian got me thinking about the fall of deals a la Groupon and Living Social:

Adrian Chan, End of daily deals, or are social deals still ahead?

As Mashable reports, daily deals may be at the end of an era.

The daily deal space was bound to contract. Retailers and marketers know that deals do not loyal customers make. And their novelty has worn off for both customers and retailers.

But most interestingly, deals offered by Groupon and even Facebook failed to become social. Groupon hasn’t yet tried to socialize its deals — using sharing models to enhance deals and galvanize distribution, for example. Facebook, in spite of being ideally positioned, still has difficulty un-intrusively blending commerce with its users’ social networking activities.

The promise of socialized deal distribution, benefiting customers (and their friends), as well as retailers, still stands. And deserves closer examination. Mobile commerce, for example, is nigh upon us. Payment systems should soon provide a boost to both mobile and social networking commerce. And social networking services will inevitably get smarter about what their users (and friends) are interested in.

Years ago, I started theorizing about social commerce, particularly with regard to recommendations by trusted sources. If you are planning a trip to Hawaii, wouldn’t you like recommendations about lodging, activities, and restaurants by trusted sources? I went so far as to make a pronouncement:

In the future, all commerce will be socialized.

I still envision a future where social curation is integral to social commerce, and some interesting starts have been made, but as sometimes is the case, the future in question was farther off than I might have thought. I think we haven’t yet moved over the threshold I had envisioned. We are perhaps at the end of the beginning of the social revolution, and the next stage is around the corner, linked to the rise of social operating systems, genius mobile devices, and ubiquitous connectivity. That will be the platform where the revolution will really explode.

I think this ‘Women & Empowerment’ approach at Eileen Fisher is very clever. Real women, their lives and work, and how clothing fits into that. The you can ‘shop her look’ and get an ensemble or parts of it, in effect, showing solidarity or finding shared identity. Expect to see more biography and less catalog in future commerce, as an adjunct to social commerce. I expect that the follow-on to this should be to allow us to follow Biola Odunewu, and see what she is wearing next week. That would be adding the social dimension, and deepening the value of biography.
Zoom

I think this ‘Women & Empowerment’ approach at Eileen Fisher is very clever. Real women, their lives and work, and how clothing fits into that. The you can ‘shop her look’ and get an ensemble or parts of it, in effect, showing solidarity or finding shared identity.

Expect to see more biography and less catalog in future commerce, as an adjunct to social commerce.

I expect that the follow-on to this should be to allow us to follow Biola Odunewu, and see what she is wearing next week. That would be adding the social dimension, and deepening the value of biography.

If a Facebook user “likes” a web page, the owner of that web page can now make posts to that user’s wall. Did you catch that?

Justin Kistner, An army of likable objects: The new Facebook marketing strategy

So, a brand like The Gap, and put Facebook Like buttons across their website. As hundreds or thousands of consumers ‘like’ some specific product, The Gap can turn around and post messages on those consumers’ Facebook walls, like a promotional discount.

I am not sure that this lines up with people’s innate sense of social connection. Just because I say I like someone or something, I don’t expect that to lead to that person or product being able to spam my friends.

This is where Zuckerberg’s attempts to stripmine social networks will fail. People won’t accept billboards in their living rooms. Yes, we have come to accept the Nike swoosh on our hats, but we actively choose to wear those. We won’t accept the merchandizing of social gestures.

(via digital crumble)

Ping In Your Library

Apple released a new version of Ping in iTunes 10.0.1. Don’t let the .0.1 fool you, this is a big step forward.

Cosmetically, the biggest change is the provision of a sidebar that stream of updates from those you follow on Ping, but the biggest advance is that you can post and like music in your own library.

Federico Viticci, iTunes 10.0.1 Goes Live with Ping Sidebar

The most important feature introduced in this new version of iTunes isn’t the sidebar, though: you can now like and post songs / albums directly from your Music library.

This was the major goof in the initial Ping release, as I stated when it first came out (see iTunes Ping: Social Music).

Here’s how the streaming sidebar looks, with the post edit textbox opened.

And each song in your library can be liked or made the subject of a post by a pulldown:

So Apple is starting to make the changes necessary for Ping to be actually usable. I am still waiting for recommendations of people to follow, and finding other people’s posts on music I like. Maybe the naysayers will start to retract their snarky commentary, although I guess we will have to wait for a few more ‘minor’ releases like this one.

Left-Handed Social Commerce

We are all used to the norms of real-world commerce: I want to buy something, say a fold-up bike, so I have to find out what bike stores have such goods in stock, and I drive all over town checking them out, and trying to get a deal.

The web (1.0) changed that dynamic. I can search for fold-up bikes online, compare prices, search for reviews, and then order the bike of my dreams online. Cool.

But I am doing all the work, and even if others help me along the way with advice or recommendations, they don’t get anything for it. And the information that I accumulate along the way usually just dissipates as soon as the transaction takes place: the myriad activities are never bundled together and published for others.

Web 2.0 tools exist to better this situation, but in general, they all fall short of my dreamscape, which I refer to as left-handed social commerce.

The solution I envision will be based on a social media/social networking platform, such as Facebook. I would be able to collate various observations and recommendations made by my contacts or me, as a sort of portfolio associated with the object of my desire: in this case, a fold-up bike. Once I have boiled down what it is I am after — either a specific make-and-model or a bunch of features, like number of gears, size, price range, and so on — I want to be able to post my buy. By posting my buy I mean offering the deal to the world of vendors out there.

In some way, I would like to have the platform anonymize my request for offers so that I can avoid being pestered, and I can filter out offers that don’t satisfy my concerns. For example, I only want offers from bike stores in the San Francisco area, because I want them to be able to fix the bike if it has problems. And I only want offers from highly rated sellers, and sellers that have been in business 3 years or more. Or sellers that at least some of my contacts have recommended. And so on.

But the real flip here is having the offers flow to me, as opposed to me wandering around in the web 1.0 world of pages, following links, like a rat in a maze. Sure, the rat is smart, and can solve the maze. But I don’t want to be a rat in a maze anymore. I want everything to flow to me.

And it’s not like I am consigning the vendors to running a maze: after all, the same platform could flow opportunities to them. A San Francisco bike shop carrying a variety of fold-up bikes could tag themselves appropriately within the hypothetical left-handed social commerce system, and my deal would flow to them. They could add a few parameters — prices, models, etc. — and flow it back to me.

We’d all get out of the maze.

Ebay is a big maze, where buyers have to do the work. Amazon. Whatever. Its all designed to make things easy for the retailer or the auction house. And we run the maze everytime we buy something online.

It’s interesting that I have had this discussion — more or less — with dozens of entrepreneurs in recent years, but I have yet to see a real solution emerge based on left-handed commerce and flow principles.

I also envision that I should get credit — reputation and commissions — based on the folio I develop on fold-up bikes. In a long-tail economy, a really good folio researching the alternatives could get hits for years. I could pass along some small discount to buyers who want the same thing I bought, as well as pocketing a small commission. Why not? When this sort of thing moves to the edge — for example in a social network platform like Facebook — and out of managed sites like Yelp, why shouldn’t we get the tips?

The Future Of Social Networks

Fred Stutzman peers into the crystal ball, and (with reference points derived from a close study of five MySpace competitors) lays out a framework for the future of social networks. He looks at these sites:

  1. Cyworld — he characterizes as the “future of social”
  2. Bebo — he thinks it’s “taking on MySpace”, but it seems more of a replacement for Facebook to me.
  3. Hi5 — a contender from India
  4. Faceparty — another competitor from the UK.
  5. XuQa — “what Facebook could become”

And here’s Fred’s trendline for social networking:

  • Social networking is becoming content-centric. Essentially, companies are building social-enabled sites around content areas - be they cars, music or to-do lists. In this context, social networking adds the logical next layer to content-driven resources. This is an extremely important trend - in the future, all of our content sites will have SNS characteristics. Sites that move early and implement well could very easily steal a large audience pool from established content sites.
  • Social networking is the vanguard of micropayment. As we’ve seen in Second Life, people are absolutely willing to exchange real-life dollars for virtual accessories and karma. Users vest a good part of their identity into their chosen social sites, so monetization possibilities abound; letting users buy little things that make their virtual live better, or more rich makes these sites fun. Indeed, I think fun is they key part - people don’t want to pay to use social networking sites, they want to pay to make their experience better. I believe we’ll be seeing a lot more of this in the future.
  • Social networking for the sake of social networking just doesn’t cut it. Put simply, we want more from SNS-enabled sites than association. If we’re going to invest our time into a SNS site, make it worth our while. Make it a game, make it entertaining, make it useful - but don’t expect us to come if you think its enough to browse our friends profiles.

I agree with Fred totally. Content-free, networking-for-the-sake-of-networking is a pointless exercise, now that we have gotten over the novelty of fooling with these sites. He seems to miss the intensely geolocal aspect of social networks: people naturally network with others that a close to them, physically. And he misses OpenBC, which is a big sucess in Germany and Western Europe. While I think he is dead on re: micropayment, he only touches on social commerce lightly, which is the big bang of our socialized future.

Social networks will become the centerpoint of online commerce. I state this unequivocally. The revolution will be socialized: in the future, essentially all online consumer commerce will be conducted through social means. The Web 1.0 metaphor of wandering around in a warehouse, putting gear into a shopping cart and then heading for a checkout counter, that shopworn motif will be replaced by various social metaphors.

  • Recommendations — various approaches to supporting social recommendations will become the primary starting point for online commerce. Whether buried in the implicit social networks of standalone blogs, or made more explicit in bespoke social networking apps, people’s reviews and pick lists will guide more buying behavior every year.
  • Experiential marketing — as an increasing social consciousness pervades the online marketing world, advertisers will realize that ads are becoming less effective, even when streaming and animated. One answer is what I am calling experiential marketing: individuals or groups will be solicited and directly compensated to try out products and blog or otherwise chronicle their use. With highly trusted advocates acting on behalf of the community these campaigns will become a mainstay of product marketing 2.0.
  • Sponsored aggregation — with a universe expanding into a billion tagspaces, every company could be sponsoring an aggregation of the best material on their defining topics. Canon, for example, could sponsor the leading aggregation of information on digital cameras, culled from hundreds or thousands of correspondents, who might be writing in personal blogs or within increasingly open social networks. These “plazas”, as I call them, will become a great way for companies to support communities of interest, and tap into the collective thinking about their products and their application. Candidly, I am amazed that so few platforms to support plazas have emerged, and I am likewise surprised that Technorati and other systems that define tagspaces have not tapped into this multi-billion dollar opportunity. This will soon turn around, and meme trackers (like Techmeme and Tailrank), social content aggregration systems (like The Personal Bee), and indexing/tag systems (like Technorati) will all be competing to be the leading plazas for tens of millions of products competing in millions of niches.

Beta: MyPickList

Jeff Eichel is the founder of MyPicklist, a new web app that embodies a refreshingly simple but potentially revolutionary approach to advertising on the Web. He writes about the MyPicklist product concept in this post:

[from Social Commerce]

MyPickList.com helps consumers make informed purchase decisions by creating the first social commerce network website on the Internet. In English terms – MyPickList.com drives word-of-mouth commerce “which retailers love” by leveraging the community aspects of a social network.

With mypicklist.com you can search your social network to find and see what products others who you know own –and– whether or not they like them. Moreover, you could learn about the people you don’t know when they recommend a product. With this information, you could make a more informed buying decision about products you are considering – and keep up to date on the ones you don’t yet know you should be buying.

MyPickList.com integrates a user profile and their favorite product recommendations (what we call a pick list) into a tightly networked community. Once a user creates a pick list it can be shared with family, friends or the public.

MyPicklist helps you to create a list of things — ten favorite running shoes, this month’s best CDs, your favorite list of books — and allows others to buy those goods by clicking on the list elements. Jeff has ironed out the affiliate relationships with over one hundred companies, and is rapidly adding more, meaning that the user doesn’t have to worry about that. But you get a percentage of every transaction. His idea is simple: why just recommend that cellphone for nothing? If you think its cool, create a picklist and make money out of that recommendation.

And his technology will allow you to create banner-style ads for these goods as well: you can be your own ad network!

I have written for years that in the future — which may now have become the near future — all e-commerce will be socialized. MyPicklist is an example of that in-context, socialized buying. A well-known fashion critic makes a list of the best fashions for spring on her blog (using MyPicklist) and users buy right there. Of course, in today’s version of MyPicklist, the end of the transaction still occurs at the associated retail website, but I think that will change in time, as well.

At any rate, MyPicklist looks pretty cool, and will fit into the blogosphere very naturally. Go sign up for the beta, which should be rolling out very soon.

[Disclosure: I have a Type 4 relationship with MyPicklist, by which I mean that a/ I am an advisor to the company, and b/ I have a financial interest in it’s future. (For more about various types of advisory relationships, see this.)