Hello fellow social media hookups,
tomorrow I’m going to explain some things about social commerce to you. Of course you are all introduced by the subject by our professor on Wednesday, but to briefly catch you up again: it is the combination of e-commerce, which is selling products via the internet and social media. By connecting their social media followers to their e-commerce activities, companies can greatly increase their website’s activity and thereby increase sales. In class we spoke about Blendtec CEO Tom Dickson, who blends all kinds of odd objects in his company made blenders. Did you know that in the five years of making these video’s, the company’s sales have boosted up to 700%? That is truly an amazing example of integrating social media content with the company’s website, where people can make suggestions on which items Dickson should blend next. (Dickson, 2009)
You might have seen examples of social commerce already on the internet, because lots of variants are already used for years, like ratings, reviews and social media optimization. Reviews on products both on social media and on company’s websites are made more easy by giving e-commerce websites social media optimization, like the Facebook Connect option, where people can comment by logging in into Facebook. Amazon uses this concept already for a long time and more and more companies are giving the customers the option to easily review products by letting them log in on their websites through for instance Facebook. (Marsden, 2010)
A less well known concept is that of collaborative online shopping (Zhu et al., 2010). Here people can actively discuss with friends about products they want to buy on a e-commerce website in real time. A good example of this feature is Vans, where people can use a chat option on the website to argue with friends about the benefits of certain products. (Zmuda, 2009) This could actually be a very cool thing if more companies would provide this. Instead of going to town with a friend for buying a few things, you could just make an appointment online to see what’s out there. The most interesting thing though about the article is that Zhu and his fellow researchers (2010) dive into the phenomenon of shared collaborative shopping. This contains sharing the same screen with the friend you are connected with. This seems like an interesting option, though it is not used often already. Do you think that this option needs to be used more often and that it could be useful to you when you want advise from your friends while shopping online?
Marsden, P. 2010. Social commerce: Monetizing social media. [online] Available at:
http://socialcommercetoday.com/documents/Syzygy_2010.pdf [Accessed 12 September 2012].
Tom Dickson, 2009. BlendTec CEO Says Sales up 700% Since Launching ‘’Will it Blend’’. [online] Available at: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6t92m1gwTY> [Accessed 12 September 2012].
Zhu, L., Benbasat, I., and Jiang, Z. 2010. Let’s shop online together: An Empirical investigation of collaborative online shopping support, Information Systems Research, 21(4) 872-891.
Zmuda, N., 2009. Online shopping goes from solo experience to social interaction. [online] Available at: <http://www.crainsdetroit.com/article/20090413/EMAIL01/904139962/online-shopping-goes-from-solo-experience-to-social-interaction> [Accessed 13 September 2012]
