Now in this post I want to talk about Social Commerce. 

 Social Commerce is a buzz, evoking a fusion of Social Media and  E-commerce.  Social Commerce  is a subset of electronic commerce that employs social media tools to assist online buying and selling. Some examples of social commerce are user ratings and reviews, social networking tools, online stores in social networking and social shopping,as mentioned before.

On the web we find different definitions of Social Commerce, I write here some of these:

“social commerce enabling consumers to browse,view and add products to a shopping cart, within the context of a social site,like Facebook or a blog.” Fumi Matsumoto (Allurent)

“social commerce connect and foster active partecipation with customers to help improve your customer experience,includinf ratings and reviews,blogs as well as forums and communities”. (IBM)

But what are the reasons for doing Social commerce?

Fumi Matsumoto CTO of Allurent, the company market leader in powering superior online shopping experiences, in the E-commerce Times talk about social commerce, that offers 7 reasons for doing it. http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/68744.html.

I briefly write here what are these reasons that Matsumoto consider important for doing Social Commerce:

1) Your customer are increasingly spending time.                                                                                                     

2) Shopping is often a social activity and people will want to shop online in the same way.

3)Peer validation that is built into social commerce, and for many shoppers it’s important.

4)Produce discovery is more fun and encourage to impulse purchase when in a social context.

5) If we don’t have presence on social media,your competitors will take illegal the social bran mind-share.

6) Social it’s the mosre cost-effective way to capture traffic and market reach.

7)Social media gives you the ability to extract data and obtain market intelligence more effectively.

“Applying digital technologies which form online channels to market to contribute to marketing activities aimed at achieving profitable acquisition and retention of customers through recognizing the strategic importance of digital technologies and developing a planned approach to improve customer knowledge, then delivering integrated target communications and online services that match their individual needs” (www.theidm.com)

In this post we what to analyses this definition in details:

Digital technologies: a lot of people have access to the Internet; there are a lot of platforms and communication tools that allow us to communicate and interact on the Web. The easiest ay to do that is to use a computer to visit a website, but think about the enormous amount of possibilities we have via email, wireless networks, TV and the Web 3.0.

Achieving profitable acquisition and retention of customers: e marketing has the same objectives of traditional marketing. We want to acquire new customers to enlarge our market but, in addition to this, we want to retain old customer. This has to be done in order to have profitable customers. We have to get rid of unprofitable customers.

Strategic importance of digital technology & developing a planned approach: Marketing is not rocket science. Everything has to be carefully planned and implemented through a pondered strategy.

Improve customer knowledge: this is the core competence of marketing: gain knowledge about your customers. No business is an island. We need our customers to sell our offerings (products or services), but we need to know what customers want, what are their needs and expectations. Marketing and digital marketing are a great way to do that.

Integrated target communications: there are many ways we can use in order to communicate to our customers and exchange information. Sometimes using only one mean of communication is not enough. We need to pick up different means of communication and mix them to make it more likely that the customer will be targeted correctly.

Being connected to the Internet is now everyday stuff. In western societies it is almost impossible to live “unplugged”. Everybody has easy access to the Net and has become familiar with the possibilities we are offered by the virtual world.

Marketers are not aliens, in the sense that they perfectly know how to exploit the usage of the Internet and other mean of communication in order to get their final objective (sales!).

This is why we talk about e-marketing and e-business.

And the Digital Marketing Council (www.theidm.com) has defined Digital Marketing as:

“Applying digital technologies which form online channels to market to contribute to marketing activities aimed at achieving profitable acquisition and retention of customers through recognizing the strategic importance of digital technologies and developing a planned approach to improve customer knowledge, then delivering integrated target communications and online services that match their individual needs”

According to David Siegel (2000)

“E-marketing is not about building a web site, but building a web business… harmonizing the power to customers”

This blog is aiming at exploring the possibilities and the capabilities of digital marketing. We will go into details about the definitions in the next posts.