Line: Social

Showing posts with label Social. Show all posts

Tuesday, 21 June 2011

Are you Ready for Social Commerce ?

Isn't it extremely common to ask your family and friend's for suggestions before buying any product ? It has been so for ages and now with the increasing use of social media the same process has come on to the Internet. The social media platforms and communities are becoming big time influencers in online purchase process.Recognizing this, while many retail websites are trying to incorporate community features and build up a community around themselves, social platforms like Facebook and Twitter are taking this a step further.

Social platforms and communities play a major role through out the buying process. At the start of the buying process consumer interest in a product or service can be fueled by a special offer promoted by a brand through Facebook or Twitter. Consumers might also develop interest towards a product when they discover it through recommendations in social shopping sites like Kaboodle, StyleHive etc Typically before making a purchase most people look for reviews and this is when they are influenced by user generated reviews on retail websites and product review sites. Again post-purchase, customers today often connect with the retailer's customer service agents through social networks like Twitter, also customers often resort to communities like forums to learn about product usage and help. So all through the process from, initiating the customers interest in the product to providing them with after sales support the social media platforms are playing a crucial role.

Recognizing this potential of social media and also understanding the fact that people are spending more and more time on social networks, retailers are doing their best to enhance their social presence. In fact at this point when retailers are just working to make their presence felt by serving compelling content to their fans / followers/ friends , it might not be long when they would offer a complete e-commerce experience within social platforms itself.

Unless we have a sudden change in the social media dynamics with the entry of some new networking platform, Facebook would probably take the cake in this evolution. There are a number of reasons to support this.

a) Facebook already offers a high level of interactivity for brands. Once an user becomes a fan of a brand the brand can post updates about special offers and other compelling content which gets posted to the fan's wall.

b) Applications like Facebook Connect allow users to bring their friends along on a shopping session for feedback

c) Advanced Facebook apps are being developed that allows retailers like 1-800-flowers to offer a virtual store front within Facebook itself, allowing customers to complete their transaction process without leaving Facebook.

The e-commerce experience has already changed a lot from what it was a few years back to what it is today and given the way things are going it can be safely predicted that in the next few years E-commerce would complete its evolution to be Social Commerce.

Is your business ready for it ?

Related Posts:
Dell Boosts revenue with Twitter
How to measure success and benefits of Social media campaigns
Social Media Optimization - Two More Rules for SMO
Britney Spears Hiring Social media manager
Generated by BlogIt

BlogIt - Auto Blogging Software for YOU!

Question Answer Site With Social Network Script Comes Together in FamousWhy

Question-answer sites have been a real craze over the last year and besides the highly popular Yahoo! Answers we have also seen a bunch of other question answer sites coming up. There are various advantages of having a question-answer site, the main one being it is based on user generated content. This relieves the users from the headache of generating content for the site and as more and more questions are being answered, the site automatically develops authority in respect to high quality content. Further to this most of this question answer sites have an inherent social networking nature which furthers interaction between users and contributes positively towards the growth of the site.

However for an average webmaster it might not be very easy to set up a question answer website as it typically requires a lot of programming skills. While doing a little research on this I found the Famous Question CMS and was really surprised to see that someone might consider building a CMS for such a niche. Digging more into it revealed some really good features and honestly I was a little impressed (probably more because I never thought that such a CMS would be there).

It is basically a PHP based CMS that has integrated a question answer script with a social media script – undoubtedly a potent combination. The whole thing looks SEO friendly as well – the question answers can be categorized pretty easily, helping in creating thematic content groups, the users also get to create their own customized profile pages. Typical to any social network script, the users can communicate with each other and also have debates. To make the script further user friendly besides its registration and login section, sites built in this CMS would also allow users to login using Facebook Connect.

Keeping in mind the monetization aspect the CMS also has advertising modules built in which allows for webmasters to place ads of their choice in strategic locations. While inquiring about support options, I noticed that the script has a support board and also there is a forum from Famous Why( developers of the script).
With the ease of setting up a question answer website with this CMS I am now a little tempted to start one of my own, maybe I will need some more time to make up my mind.
Generated by BlogIt

BlogIt - Auto Blogging Software for YOU!

Monday, 20 June 2011

Dave Moyer – Inspired by Social Media

Recently, I found myself in the happy circumstance of meeting a young, inspired learner who exemplifies all of the ideas that I believe are important to geniuses in the 21st century.

Dave Moyer is the founding president of Bitwire Media, a social media compendium striving to “educate, entertain, and empower” web users by pushing the boundaries of Web use in society. However, Dave is a presence in and of himself, using Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, and many podcasts (see links below) as well as being a talented writer, composer, actor, and producer off the web.

Interviewing this motivated young man was both enlightening and fun. I hope you all enjoy this video, and Dave, if you are reading this, I wish you every success well into the future!