Insights 12 – what needs to be on your digital agenda in 2012? Six of 10 – Social Commerce

Social commerce has been on the rise for well over 12 months, and was actually a topic for my presentation at last year’s Insight’s conference. At that time, it was fair to say that the web was awash, with Facebook shops becoming commonplace. With it came the debate about whether or not Facebook users were ready yet or even at all comfortable with their favourite Pages becoming direct sales channels.

The ASOS experiment which made up so many of the headlines has gone quiet and ASOS have (not surprisingly) kept the results of their shop close to their chests – but are Facebook shops ALL social commerce has to offer?

As we have already seen in other videos, the increasing integration of our Facebook data – “the opening of the social graph” into applications, mobiles, the websites we use, as well as now ubiquitous checkins means that at every turn, we are AUTOMATICALLY able to see what our friends are doing, where they are, what they have watched, what they have bought or quite simply, what track they have just listened to.

i.e. things that WE may also want to do or buy.

Now whilst this is nothing new to anyone involved in word of mouth marketing, the big difference is that all of these actions, pre-2012 required a conscious decisions to post to our networks. As such, many of the actions which may have influenced a friend to rent the same film, buy the track their friend is listening to, or be the first to buy the dress that 2 of their friends were looking at on Site X were missing.

2012 will be a much larger and commercially-focussed one for the understanding of what social commerce actually is – the influencing of purchasing decisions through the integration of social data (profile and friends).

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