Even before the Facebook IPO companies began capitalizing on social business. wiredFINANCE covered it here. The hoopla around the Facebook IPO will intensify the focus on social commerce no matter how the stock does.
The initial kick came last year with a Booz and Company study here. In that study Booz reports that one-third of companies already had a senior executive who is responsible for social media company-wide. Among companies that consider themselves best-in-class the figure jumped to 41%. What will the mega Facebook IPO do?
In the Booz study social media emerged as a CEO-level agenda item for many companies. If it hasn’t at your organization, it probably will in 2012 as organizations everywhere scramble to 1) figure out what it is all about, 2) identify a strategy for getting involved, and 3) plant a stake somewhere in social commerce. Social media is not just about communications and entertainment anymore.
The highly anticipated Facebook IPO will have ramifications for all manner of businesses and how they operate. Just as the Google IPO in 2004 changed the search engine business, catapulting search engines into a major marketing driver and changing how companies spend for advertising and evaluate its effectiveness, Facebook’s IPO will confirm the arrival of social networking as a force in business.
With social commerce the big consumer product companies are moving in fast. Here they want to build up a fan base of followers and collect sought after Like clicks. Some are adding rudimentary transaction links so followers and visitors can actually buy something. These are rudimentary because they redirect the buyer to a commerce site elsewhere. But ideally, you want to do your commerce right there on the social website, on Facebook, and make your commerce part of the social community itself.
One promising approach focuses on using the rewards and incentives of a loyalty program to drive the business message viral on social media. The trick will be to find the right message, tone, style, and attitude. Expect to see much experimentation and innovation around the challenge of integrating commerce and social business, possibly through gamification.
This in not unlike what companies went through when the World Wide Web first emerged. Companies were wary at first, slowly establishing websites that resembled little more than electronic brochures. Then e-commerce took hold big. Today even the smallest pizza joint has a website, and B2B and B2C web commerce is pervasive.
Gartner already suggests gamification will be big, with more than 70% of Global 2000 organizations having at least one gamified application by 2014 Economics,. wiredFINANCE identified gamification in the 2012 trends piece here Gamification plays right into social commerce.
Facebook Economics, with over 800 million subscribers and still growing, will drive social commerce and change business as did Google before. As with the emergence of the Web and of Google and with serious money in play Finance won’t want to sit on the social commerce sidelines for long.
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