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Social Commerce and The People’s Republic of Facebook

Posted on February 14, 2011 by RichardAKent

One in eleven human beings are now on Facebook.

In fact if Facebook were a country it would be the world’s third largest with a population of 585m (it grew by 248m in 12 months by the way!)

Now consider that the entire population of Facebook by definition has access to the internet and therefore has more economic power than possibly any other country.

So when people claim that China is the world’s fastest growing economy – in fact it has officially just taken over from Japan as the world’s second largest – just think about the power of People’s Republic of Facebook.

Of course a Venn diagram would show a huge overlap with the other physical economic giants on the planet – the USA of course would take the biggest slice (147m Americans are registered on Facebook), but surprisingly, the UK comes in at number three (28.4m) – Indonesia is second (32.1m)

Given these numbers, it’s no wonder that more and more brands are looking to monetise their presence on the planets largest social network and so over the last few months we are seeing a rise in the phenomenon of social commerce, but recently renamed ‘f commerce’ for obvious reasons.

There appear to be two distinct ways in which people are directly trading from their Facebook page. One is to show merchandise with ‘click’ to buy buttons, but that simply then take you to the normal online store. This is simply a shop window for the main store. Coca Cola and Barneys New York have taken this tack, by simply adding a ‘shop’ tab on their page.

The other approach is to drop in a store that pretty well replicates the brands online store, but is housed within the Facebook page, allowing fans to shop and checkout, all without leaving Facebook. An API can manage stock levels and make the whole process seamless.

How this will evolve is to be seen. My third party applications allow brands to drop ‘shoplets’ into their Facebook page and the technology behind these will no doubt develop rapidly over the next few months.

But the rush to F Commerce is most certainly on.

A word of warning however. F commerce makes your focus on customer care even more critical. If this rush to push products to the potential market of 585m consumers gets in the way of listening to them and understanding what their immediate needs and wants are, then they will find themselves not even a click away from telling their friends and other fans of the brand just what they think!

Facebook Messaging

Posted on November 16, 2010November 16, 2010 by RichardAKent

Yesterday I sat and watched Mark Zuckerburg and Andrew Bosworth announce the trial of the new Facebook messaging system.

I am left with two conflicting thoughts and so am slightly troubled.

Firstly, the words and phrases they used to describe the new system sounded great ; “immediate”, “personal”, “simple”, ‘minimal”, “short” and best of all, “technology getting out of the way”!

But then watching the demonstration and hearing how it would work with outside clients (including Gmail!), left me quite befuddled! By no means am I a tecchie, which was why the language was so appealing. So expecting to then see a super simple to understand product, I felt slightly let down and confused.

I get the objective – to consolidate all your online conversations with people into one stream (including SMS). The analogy used by Bosworth was his Grandmother’s box of letters sent to her by his Grandfather that she lovingly cherishes – “where’s my box of letters?” he said.

The announcement had been teed up in the press as a Gmail killer and when Zuckerberg claimed ‘Gmail is a really great product”, I was left waiting for the ‘but’, which never came. Even after hearing that “Email is still really important to a lot of people”, I could sense that by people he meant ” sad old people”, but then what we heard was that users of this new product could claim an @facebook.com email address!

Search Engine Land’s comment, “Whatever-you-do-don’t-call-it-email-but-hey-here’s-a-Facebook-email-address-for-you email and messaging system”, raised a smile!

I do get the fact that for a lot of people email is outmoded. My wife says she has “emailed” someone, when what she means is that she has sent them a message on Facebook, so it’s not just the college kids he met, who Zuckerberg claims were the inspiration behind this product, who don’t use email because it’s too slow and informal.

But I remain unclear as to just what has been created here. Over a year in development, commanding more internal resource than Facebook have ever committed to a project before, this is clearly seen by them as a gamechanger.

If it really is simple, easy, short, personal etc etc and really does get the technology out of the way, then I can’t wait. (I’ve applied for an invite to test this thing, so will report if lucky enough to be granted one), but right now I just can’t picture it.

Can you help me shed some light on this?

The Monarchy Gets Sociable

Posted on November 8, 2010November 8, 2010 by RichardAKent

No doubt many of you have already picked up the fact that H.M. The Queen has launched a fansite on Facebook.

This is tremendous stuff and I will avoid trying to make a witty quip on the subject, but have this post simply serve to record this great event!

The iPod toting Monarch now lives on Facebook and I for one see this as adding certain validity to FB – I think that’s just me.

Already on Twitter, You Tube (The wonderfully named “The Royal Channel”) and Flickr, the Queen is now showing how irresistible social tools are in messaging her subjects.

Perhaps this also highlights the older demographic that social tools are now attracting?

Does ‘Like’ Go Far Enough? – Rosa Parks’s Facebook Status

Posted on October 15, 2010 by RichardAKent

Someone I spoke to the other day made a the comment – “What would the Victorians or Tudors have made of social media?”

Got me thinking. And then I read this article by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker – an eloquent condemnation of the notion that it’s social media tools that have empowered people to make real change. He sure has a point.

Martin Luther King didn’t need Twitter to mobilise a movement. He didn’t say “I have a mission statement”, and Rosa Parks didn’t post on Facebook “Rode the bus today – some people got a bit angry when I wouldn’t give up my seat. Let’s start a revolution. Please ‘Like’ this”.

In fact when you consider relatively recent historical events of say the last 200 years, it’s quite humbling to see what has been achieved, all without social networks.

Think, William Cobbet’s pamphlets opposing the Corn Laws and support for Catholic Emancipation. Think, the Great Reform Acts, the Suffragettes, the Chartists, the Levellers, the overthrow of Ceaucescu and the Poll Tax riots. All examples of people power and mass mobilisation. The power of word of mouth and engagement. “Come down to Kennington Common – bring a friend” probably wasn’t exactly how the Chartists organised themselves, but you get the idea.

And so are we any more different or more powerful than these people in history, now that we have Facebook and Twitter?

Well, as I wrote about this week, a movement of people have persuaded Gap to change their logo inside a week of launching a new one, by mobilising quickly and effectively on social media and scaring the bejeezus out of a major brand.

But now doesn’t that sound lame?

The best we can do through these channels is to persuade a business to change its logo because we don’t like it. I’m not disparaging this event. In the history of business and commerce I think it’s a massive one. One that will be written about for years.

But where are the flashmobs organised on Twitter and Facebook to protest against the travesty that is young carers having their childhoods taken from them as they have to perform the tasks that their handicapped parents are unable to carry out for example?

Have we lost sight of what really matters and of what social tools could really do to help raise awareness and mobilise action? Has the nature of these tools themselves actually isolated and numbed people from what’s really happening in the world?

What if people had clicked ‘Like’ on Rosa Parks’s Facebook status? Would they have left it at that and gone back to their lives?

I’m not sure. What do you think?

Gap’s About Turn – Strength or Weakness?

Posted on October 13, 2010 by RichardAKent

Yesterday was a big day for the retailer Gap.

Having announced that they were to change their logo just a week ago, they have now reverted back to their traditional blue box.

And the reason for this change of heart is the huge outcry and anger amongst Gap’s customers that they have expressed through social media.

Here are a couple of quotes from Gap:

“Ok. We’ve heard loud and clear that you don’t like the new logo. We’ve learned a lot from the feedback. We only want what’s best for the brand and our customers. So instead of crowd sourcing, we’re bringing back the Blue Box tonight.”

“We’ve learned a lot in this process. And we are clear that we did not go about this in the right way. We recognize that we missed the opportunity to engage with the online community.”

As someone who has been involved in a rebranding process for two major high street brands, I know that a logo change is an 18 month process – minimum. For Gap, this must have included customer focus groups, test marketing and a whole host of other research activities before, firstly they decided to launch a new logo at all and secondly undertake all the work necessary to ensure a transition on the ground from old to new.

So for this process to have been turned into a costly waste of time and money inside one week, is astonishing.

I can’t think of another example of ‘people power’ that comes close to this. The Gap logo episdoe will surely become case study worthy for all students of marketing in the future.

And yet the fantastic news for Gap in all of this is that they now know, beyond any doubt, that they have a rich vein of customers who love the brand deeply. Care about it passionatley enough to feel moved to mobilise so quickly and express their feelings. This episode proves Kevin Roberts’ great truth “Lovemarks are owned by the people who love them”.

Of course Facebook and Twitter were the main vehicles for this movement. But the speed at which people were able to organise and mobilise is jaw dropping.

There are now sites selling T-shirts with the words “Logo Fail’ across the chest. This story has become huge.

And if anyone doubted that they can afford to stand by and continue to believe that they don’t have to engage directly with customers, then here is the lesson – Engage or Die.

Of course Gap could have stuck to their guns. They could have done so in a engaging way – “We hear you, but trust us.”

They chose not to.

Do you think they did the right thing?

The Social Egosystem

Posted on September 27, 2010September 27, 2010 by RichardAKent

This article by Brian Solis, paints a fascinating picture.

He echos much of what I have written about here previously in relation to our ‘me’ brands and the narcissism of today’s consumers.

What’s clear is the need for brands to identify their biggest potential influencers. It’s summed up best by this quote “Brands seeking reach, presence, and connectivity must look beyond popularity and focus on aligning with the influential beacons who serve as the hubs for contextual networks or nicheworks.”
But what really permeates throughout this article is the firm belief, which I share, that actions by brands, via social tools, can indeed be measured and deliver an ROI that brands will expect in the future.

I know from my own experience, when an agency sits and squirms at the suggestion that their funky viral project should carry an element of measurement, it’s the first sign you should run away. And when they say that a calculation of ROI cannot even be attempted, show them the door.

The refinement of Twitter will, allowing better profiling based on keywords, history and other variables means that this microblog could well become the dominant force of the social web. The launch of new Twitter indicates that they are developing more ways to keep users on the Twitter site itself and away from various third paty ‘clients’. Combine this with their growing ability to analyse user data and in turn what that means they can offer advertisers and you can see where this is going.

I’ve read recently more and more complaints about Facebook and its user interface. The constant changes are becoming an annoyance. When people become more familiar with new Twitter’s ability to show images, video and sound, the reasons we have for spending time on Facebook may decline

In the week that “The Social Network” is released, Zuckerberg surely needs to get his team to raise their game back at the ranch and avoid the red carpet?

What do you think?

Facebook Down

Posted on September 23, 2010 by RichardAKent

Mark this:

September 23rd 2010

Update 1 1:40PDT: The site is back up for some, if not all, users.

Update 2 1:50PDT: Many users are getting an error message Service Unavailable – DNS Failure. The message is coming from a server at edgesuite.net which is run by Akamai, a provider for many big sites. It looks as if Facebook has changed their DNS to point to this server while they work on the problem.

Just as Mark Zuckerberg appears on Oprah! Conspiracy theories will abound.

Astonishing! Just how this is news. How I’m even bothering to write about it.

So I’ll stop. I feel slightly unclean. As I did after watching ‘Couples Retreat’.