Social Commerce and The People’s Republic of Facebook

Posted on 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!

The Beatles Sell 2m Songs on iTunes – From Social Media, not Search!

Posted on by RichardAKent

This is fascinating and a wake up call to those who doubt the future of social commerce.

The following  are excerpts from an article on Danny Sullivan’s Search Engine land blog…

Billboard magazine reports that The Beatles sold more than two million individual songs worldwide and in excess of 450,000 albums in its first week on Apple’s iTunes Music Store. (The Beatles’ catalog was added to iTunes on November 16th.)

According to Experian Hitwise, it was social media — not search — that drove a lot of the online interest and, more importantly, the online traffic surrounding The Beatles addition to iTunes. Consider this stat: On November 16, the first day Beatles songs were available on iTunes, 26% of UK traffic to Apple.com came from social media, about double the amount that came from search.

And Hitwise says Apple received a “huge spike” in UK traffic coming specifically from Facebook. The week prior to The Beatles launch on iTunes, Apple was the 86th most popular outbound destination from Facebook; after the launch, it jumped up to the 20th most popular. Hitwise says that one in every 200 web site visits that left Facebook went straight to Apple’s web site.

To an extent this demonstrates that you reep what you sew – sew what? (sorry). Certainly the blogosphere was buzzing with word that,  according to Apple, “Tomorrow will be a day you’ll never forget” the day before the announcement that iTunes was to offer Beatles songs. But the fact that Apple chose to seed this information on social media so heavily shows just how important this movement is going to be in the future?

What is the long term future for search marketing given the consolidation of social and search functionality between Facebook and Microsoft in apparent alliance against Google?

Facebook Launches ‘Deals’

Posted on by RichardAKent

As social commerce has grown over the last few months through sites like Groupon and location based apps like Four Square and Gowalla, Facebook today dropped their bomb in the middle of all of this.

Facebook Deals launched today in beta and is only available in the US to those businesses who have claimed their ‘places’.

‘Deals’ offers local businesses the chance to launch four types of deal – one off, group, loyalty and charity and the opportunities it affords local businesses are growing customer loyalty, growing through WOM (word of mouth) and recruiting new customers.

Let’s look at each.

Growing Loyalty – A local retailer can create a deal whereby a discount can be claimed if a customer checks in between 2 and 20 times.

Growing through WOM – If the average facebook user has 130 friends, the hope is that a deal will viral through you fans network very quickly.

Acquiring new customers – with 200 million people using Facebook through their mobile device, an opportunity now exists to attract nearby potential customers to your store.

This all sounds great and the sheer size of Facebook means the potential is staggering for local businesses.

But just a few months after Twitter dropped their offers function, I guess Facebook are treading lightly.

A gamechanger? What do you think?

The North Face Tests Geo-Fencing

Posted on by RichardAKent

Fashion brand, The North Face, are to test geo-fencing in an attempt to promote offers and tailored information to opted in customers.

31 of the their stores have been selected for the test which will identify people who have previously opted in to receive these messages via SMS, once they enter a 1.5 mile radius of a selected location. People will effectively check and check out when they enter or leave a location.

As customers will have been profiled by the brand previously, the potential to promote relevant offers directly to people near a store is a tempting thought. Of course opting out is easy – a customer simply has to text ‘STOP’ and they’ll stop receiving these messages.

This seems like a great example of a brand grabbing the bull by the horns and capitalising on the increased usage of Facebook’s Places and Four Square by becoming an early adopter of the technology.

I can imagine a shopping trip in the not too distant future, simply being a case of turning up at the mall, grabbing a coffee at at the shop offering you the best deal on coffee that day and then just waiting for the offers to roll in.

The New Twitter – New and Improved?

Posted on by RichardAKent

Yesterday, the head honchos at Twitter invited a select group to a presentation of the new Twitter.com offering people a faster, but crucially a much richer experience.

Here’s the official line.

Over the next week, they will be inviting you to use the new version on your own Twitter page. So what’s new about it?

Firstly and most strikingly is the format of the new design. The right hand side of the page now accommodates any media elements that were before a click away. So if somebody tweets a video clip or picture, you can now see this without leaving the page. You can also now see the origin of a tweet by clicking an icon that opens up the thread. The threads to direct messages are now also going to be visible.

Additionally, you will now be able to see a greater amount of information about those tweeting.

To make way for this new functionality, Twitter have taken back a large amount of the background. So in future, you will need to sharpen up on your profile biography, the content of your tweets themselves and worry less about your wallpaper imagery.

Just why they have felt it necessary to launch new Twitter, is surely a response to the rise of various Twitter clients – Seesmic, Hootesuite, Tweetdeck etc. etc. They are now trying to keep us at Twitter.com by taking the best of the functionality that these clients offered and appending it to the main site.

And why would they be doing this?

To offer advertisers the amount of impressions necessary to attract the big bucks.

Indeed, co-founder Biz Stone said, the new Twitter opens up “new revenue-generating opportunities.” Well, 90 million tweets a day can’t be ignored.

Here is Twitter’s publicity video for the new format.

I think it all looks pretty cool and I can’t wait to use it myself.

I would love to know your thoughts on the new look and your opinions on the reasons behind the change.