Getting Social Media into the eCommerce Loop

Social commerce" is a term that may be new to many, although a Wikipedia article claims it entered the lexicon in late 2005, coined by venture capitalist David Beisel. Originally, references were limited to third-party recommendation and review sites, but the term now encompasses "collaborative commerce activities such as social shopping (co-browsing), collaborative purchasing (collective buying power), collaborative filtering (social recommendations), and collaborative funding (e.g. Crowdfunder)," according to the Wikipedia entry.



For most e-retailers, the combination of "social" and "commerce" is decidedly aspirational. Many retailers include product reviews, ratings and employee blogs on their websites, but they find it hard enough to manage the content, let alone find ways to quantify the commercial benefits.

At the NRF BIG Show last week, Bazaarvoice was demonstrating its "social commerce suites," geared toward turning social media content into tangible business for retailers. Bazaarvoice offers its solutions in SaaS (software as a service) form. The company hosts the engine that integrates the user- and employee-created content into the retailers' sites. Content in the retailer suite can take various forms: the "Ratings & Reviews" module manages customer opinions; "Ask & Answer" enables a pre-sale dialog with the retail staff as well as other customers; and "Stories" is for long-form content, generally from reviewers or from employees offering how-to advice. There is another entire suite designed for brands to improve channel sales based with Bazaarvoice-collected user-generated content.



Control -- for both the customers and retailers -- is fundamental to many of the innovations being seen in the social commerce area. Bazaarvoice offers online shoppers the ability to filter reviews by various criteria. A customer could, for example, bring all of the reviews to the top of the list written by those who share their interests or demographic traits. Retailers are given a variety of content management tools and can present social content to shoppers based on their browsing and purchase histories.

A higher level of integration is also seen in the ability of Bazaarvoice products to push content out to Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms. In its demo, for example, the company showed how a customer interested in a product on a retailer website could, without leaving the product page, poll her Facebook account for "friends" who had reviewed the product.

But perhaps the piece of the social commerce puzzle retailers are most anxious for is the ability to aggregate insights from all the social content being generated. Encouraging shoppers to share opinions and experiences may improve trust and loyalty, but it's likely the "social" will earn the right to be paired with the "commerce" when retailers learn how to make use of all this information that's being shared with them and others.