Big Changes Coming for Social Commerce and Social Shopping

From eMarketer - Paul Dunay is global managing director of services and social marketing at Avaya and author of Facebook Marketing for Dummies. He talks to eMarketer about the future of social commerce as it shapes up on brand Websites, Facebook and Twitter.

eMarketer: How do you define social commerce?

Paul Dunay: Social commerce is working with or using your social graph, which is defined as your followers or your friends, and allowing them to help you make buying decisions.

eMarketer: What role does Twitter play in social commerce?

Mr. Dunay: Social commerce can be anything from a buying suggestion or recommendation perhaps a tweet from a Dell outlet saying, "Hey, we have a special on this" to something like Facebook Connect.

Facebook Connect would allow you to go to a Website like Dell.com and authenticate yourself using your Facebook profile, allow your identity to be known and access your friends so you could spark up a chat. So I could say, "Hey, Jeff, I'm looking at this new fancy laptop or this netbook. I heard you bought something. Would you recommend this to me?"

"You could almost take your friends shopping with you."

So you could almost take your friends shopping with you. That is the potential with this example.

We're in a period now where we're all starting to get comfortable with Twitter and get comfortable with using Facebook and LinkedIn and a lot of these other tools, and now we're about to expand.

Read more about, The Future of Social Shopping

This is all about collaboration... He goes on to talk about Facebook Connect, which is great, but I think Google Wave will be the real killer app for social commerce and social shopping.

"Recommendations by personal acquaintances and opinions posted by consumers online are the most trusted forms of advertising globally. The Nielsen survey shows that 90% of online consumers worldwide trust recommendations from people they know, while 70% trust consumer opinions posted online." Nielsen Global Online Consumer Survey

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