Turning conversations into cash: The Recommendation Economy & Social Commerce
For those of your currently snowed in and "working from home" (AKA PG Tips + Countdown + Sofa + Webmail) who may be in need of some intellectual stimulation you are in for a treat. I had the pleasure of giving a webinar for the PRCA as part of their Digital PR training series on the topic of The Recommendation Economy and Social Commerce - as I promised the participants I share now with you the deck from said presentation - which may be of interest!
In it you will see that I outline what I see as the three key styles of doing social commerce at the moment:
Social Intelligence
- This one is nothing new but is taking new forms as we see consumers getting more and more savvy about the way they shop by leveraging the recommendations and review of their peers to shop smarter - basically making conversations into cash
Social Capital
- Also nothing new but is finally beginning to see a financial benefit for the brands that give people assets that they can leverage as social capital - chiefly because now through things like in video adverts, foursquare rewards and Facebook deals we can link content to cash
Social Buying
- This one is new! You may jump straight to thinking of the likes of Gilt Group and Groupon (particularly given the rumours of the past couple of days about Googles possible acquisition) - but it goes beyond that. Things like F-Commerce - using Facebook based shopping portals are taking social buying into new and different ways. This one is turning cash back into conversations - that in turn can turn back to cash!
As I told the attendees this morning I don't think that any of these operate in isolation, but when used in conjunction can finally begin to move towards answering the WOMMA problem of ROI - lets start making our social communications work harder for us!
Over to you...
Have you seen any great example of social commerce in action?
Do you think that people will really begin to migrating to shopping in the social environment?