Towards the middle of last year, I’d written a column at afaqs on how social and commerce were in a relationship. A few months later, I revisited the premise on a tangent and wrote an article for Kuliza titled “Social + e-commerce ≠ Social Commerce“. (pg 25)
All through last week, after the Bloomberg report, in which a Forrester analyst phrased it as “But it was like trying to sell stuff to people while they’re hanging out with their friends at the bar“, I’ve been reading post after post proclaiming the demise of what has been called f-com. (Facebook Commerce) It finally made me tweet this
So, expert comments now indicate that social commerce == facebook storefronts. No longer funny
— manu prasad (@manuscrypts) February 24, 2012
I realised later that a similar statement had already been made – “Opening a storefront does not mean you have a social commerce strategy…” ~ Justin Yoshimura. In fact, f-com itself should only be one part of a brand’s larger Facebook strategy. The advice being given to brands, along with the news of the demise, is that they should make their own e-com sites more social. Fair enough, but what I don’t get is the mutual exclusivity. Indeed, if brands have adopted an f-com strategy that basically allows users to buy the same things available at their e- store, I wonder why they thought users would flock there. Yes, it does give the brand visibility, proximity to the customer, use of the social graph (like, recommend, share) etc but to the user, there’s really no value. In fact, f-com checkouts are apparently much slower.
Examples of ‘inherently social businesses’ (entertainment, music, games) are being taken as exceptions to the closure trend. IMO, every business (arguably) is inherently social, the trick (actually the hard work) is in finding the social context. Many brands have created value through fan-exclusives, (Heinz) CRM initiatives (Starbucks) free sampling (Pantene) etc. I can understand that coffee is probably social, but shampoo and ketchup?
Part of the fault is to do with the astronomical predictions on the kind of sales these Facebook storefronts were going to generate, part of it is to do with the trigger-happiness that unfortunately shadows most of everything on social platforms. If brands learned to also pay attention to interest graphs on the network, and create scenarios that use the inherent (and phenomenal) social graph and new features like friction-less sharing better, Facebook can play an excellent role in the overall e-com strategy. As always, the answer is in focusing on user behaviour and experience and not allowing technology and fads to create a myopic vision. The old adage holds – Fail fast. Learn fast. Fix fast.
until next time, f-c’mon
