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

I recently read Kapil Ohri’s article on afaqs, on the site’s makeover – the shift from blogs and gangs to trends and forums and the ‘mandatory’ buttons – Facebook and Twitter. Its early days, so it’d be unfair to make a comment on the numbers, even if they were to be considered a parameter of success/ failure. But while, on buttons, I think YouTube videos would’ve been a help. More on that in a bit. A revamped GoG, and the Pantene vs Dove war for hairspace being fought offline and on blogs (Karthik, L Bhat) gives me enough food for thought.. and opinion.

Sunsilk Gang of Girls: GoG could have (like an industry person commented on the afaqs post) integrated Facebook in a much better way. Check out what Levi’s has done at their online store. Instead of separate registrations and profile, Facebook’s plugins could make life easier for the user and automatically bring in the ‘gangs’. It could get them to pull their own photos from Facebook for the ‘Makeover Machine’, suggest it to friends, and so on. Or build a Twitter app that uses the display picture. It could have perhaps thought bigger and had their ambassador (Priyanka Chopra?) interact with the users through her own identities on these platforms. Or used a location based tool like Foursquare (or FB Pages or later Google Places) to start building a resource for salons and tips at each place (think of a Burrp! for salons), maybe in sync with a YouTube channel for tips.

Pantene: Good Morning! They obviously missed a little thing when they didn’t pay attention to the pwnage of DNA at the hands of the Times Group during the former’s launch campaign in Mumbai back in 2005 (?), or the more recent Airtel- Reliance DTH fun. Not to mention the cliche that after a certain point, the only person who gets teased is the brand manager. Ok, I won’t overstate, but c’mon this is a real-time era AND they did walk into a Dovetailed ambush. Since the internet already has made them un-mysterious (thanks for that info, Karthik), maybe Pantene should have just added those FB page and Twitter links to their mass media communication, and solved the mystery immediately online. Mind you, thanks to our dismal internet penetration, they could still demystify it again on mass media, later, after perhaps, adding the content from their online and offline activities. (think non market research agency 80%) That way, there would’ve been at least some buffer against a Dove’s sneak attack. Arguable, but possible.

Dove: All of us should take the time and remember the controversy over the ‘campaign for real beauty’. But hey, they saw an opportunity and used it. Effects on long term goals are again arguable.

A little note on ‘low involvement’. I wrote about brands, content and new media platforms in the last post, in the context of the Old Spice campaign, and also mentioned the importance of ‘intent’ and setting objectives. Once the ‘why’ is done, the relevant crowd can be identified, along with the platforms and activation strategies – ‘(to) who’, where and what. (Read Rohit Awasthi’s comment on Karthik’s first post) When the ‘right’ content is pitched to the ‘right’ people at the ‘right’ time (and the ‘right’ platform too), very few categories are low involvement.  (read Naina’s comment on that post) And that’s the beauty of the web in general, and the tools that social media have provided marketers. Old Spice could be seen as low involvement too, until they did this campaign.

But having mostly seen communication as advertising (except arguably PR), creating content for social platforms is in itself quite a challenge for brand managers. Even if they were to  view ‘social’ as ‘media’, it requires a complete realignment of how media and content strategy is done, mostly because the mechanics of distribution are completely different. At a fundamental level, brands are dependent on users of platforms to create a buzz, and money doesn’t always work. At this point, tools can help with the ‘time’ (including location and other contexts) and ‘people’ (interest), and the way it works, if the ‘content’ is done right, people will get other people.

Therefore brand managers need to make a more diligent effort. The fragmentation of traditional media does not seem to have made much of an impact on the costs involved in using them as distribution channels. So when ‘social media’  presents ‘free’ channels, brand managers see a value proposition and jump right in with a TVC and or/other weapons of mass mediocrity. Brands, I believe, need to invest a bit more on who they’re trying to reach, and then invest some more on building content and designing networks and constructs (irrespective of platform) that will drive the crowd to interact with the content and share it more. Content and people that will drive more connections, and help meet everyone’s objectives.

But yes, until Augmented Reality allows me to scan a shampoo and tell me how many of my friends liked it, and think I should use it, (though my hair won’t last that long ) lets keep playing all the shampoo games we can play. And while on using social platforms purely with a sales objective, I’m reminded of how Grandma uses her laptop. (vid below) Can it be used for those purposes? Of course! But is that its best case use? We can argue

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vg6emajJmEo

until next time, sometimes brand strategies can be real poo!!