Social Commerce
Defined
I thought you might find this interesting - Gail Judd
An Introduction to Social Commerce
Social Commerce is a new phenomenon that has taken
the e-commerce world by storm. Unlike many technologies to emerge
over the years, social commerce has had a rapid adoption. A few years
ago, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn were not common terms in
our vocabulary. Few could have predicted how pervasive the social
technologies have become not only online, but also in our daily lives.
Put simply, social commerce is the concept of
word-of-mouth, applied to e-commerce.Social commerce has taken word-of-mouth
where it never really existed before, the online shopping world. Customers
now are looking for ways to leverage each other�s expertise, understand what
they are purchasing, and make more informed and accurate purchase decisions.
Retailers need to understand their customers and what they expect out of the
shopping experience to develop a successful social commerce strategy.
This whitepaper will focus on the definition of Social
Commerce, the benefits of social commerce to retailers, the different
components and how IBM has enabled Social Commerce in WebSphere� Commerce
Version 7.0.
The Basics of Social Commerce
Social Commerce is the marriage of a retailers
products and the interaction of shoppers with the content. It comes in
many forms, although the most common and adopted is online ratings and
reviews. As the use of the internet has evolved, shoppers have increased
their expectations of the retail interaction experience. It is no longer
enough to have standard product descriptions with static text and
standard descriptions. Shoppers want detailed product descriptions that
include product specifications and information on how the product works;
instructions and how-do tips and videos. Essentially, shoppers are
looking for more information to gauge the value they get for their money
with specific products. Shoppers have transferred the social in-store
shopping experience to the online experience and now, expect an
interactive and more social experience online.
Today�s shoppers are looking for transparency from
retailers. Providing the opportunity to share knowledge, insights, thoughts
and opinions ensures that retailers are offering a more social experience
online and adds significant credibility to a website. As retailers introduce
social commerce to the online experience, it is critical be authentic and
genuine when speaking to shoppers, who are passionate about products and
their brand. The social web is here to stay, it�s no longer a young adult
phenomenon. In fact, the fastest growing demographic on Facebook is now
woman between the age of 45 and 55, who also happen to hold a big piece of a
family�s purse. By personalizing the experience, retailers can engage
shoppers and transform them into brand advocates.
Social Commerce Impact on Retailers
In many cases, retailers were on the forefront of
social technologies such as enhanced conversion rates after integrating
ratings and reviews into product pages. Conversion rates are one of
three primary benefits retailers can enjoy by pursuing a broader social
commerce strategy. By making their entire retail experience social, and
leveraging the unique components of social commerce from a technical,
application and strategic perspective, retailers can turn their sites
into communities, where conversations flourish around brand, product,
and lifestyle-oriented content � creating a larger, more vibrant, and
more effective online experience leading to return visits and increased
sales.
As shoppers have adopted social technologies, merchants
and manufacturers have responded by providing features such as ratings and
reviews and integration to Twitter accounts, where shoppers share promotions
and new products. Companies are innovating the shopping experience with
social technologies such as a Facebook store and integrated social
campaigns. Social Commerce is redefining the way brands and retailers are
interacting with customers.
The Key Components of Social Commerce
Social commerce can deliver several key benefits.
Fist, social commerce drives new online visitors. By deploying a social,
search-optimized content on their sites, retailers organically can
increase their search engine page rank and attract site visitors through
the multitude of new access points created by this content. Custom
content with product relevant topics, categories, and lifestyles �
whether created by users or professional content creators � can drive
new traffic to the site. For example, a home and garden retailer hosting
an article about �How to Build an Outdoor Deck� would attract users
searching for related terms on major search engines � in turn acquiring
highly qualified new site visitors. Retail strategists and marketers
should examine content as broadening the top of the marketing funnel �
building traditional �awareness� � not through print ads or network TV
spots, but rather through today�s corollary: search. Understanding the
science of deploying SEO-friendly content is key: even the top position
on the second page of Google search results gets less than 1%
clickthrough rate.
The second benefit of implementing a social commerce
strategy is increased engagement. This engagement is created primarily by
integrating social applications into the core site experience of a retail
website. By giving shoppers the right tools to interact with product and
lifestyle-related content on their social commerce destination, retailers
enable those shoppers to build preference for that content and the products
and brands represented.
User profiles, groups, blogs, forums, photos, videos,
comments, ratings, reviews and recommendations are all critical social
applications which can be customized, combined and deployed to power a range
of user experiences, including:
� Shopper Show-and-Tell � Blogs, photos, and comments
enable shoppers to share their product experiences ,which helps provide
informative perspectives for prospective shoppers making purchasing
decisions about the product
� Product Page Discussion � Ratings, reviews,
recommendations, and comments power Q&A-type experiences around products,
enabling shoppers and staff to interact around product features, benefits
and use cases.
� Project Journals � Photos, user profiles and blogs
enable shoppers to establish product journals that chronicle the use of
products.
� How-to Guides � User, employee and expert-created
articles and videos provide shoppers with valuable, influential information
on product usage, and provide retailers with a wealth of informational
reference content.
In addition to integrating these social applications into
the core site experience, retailers should create and deploy custom
applications designed to enable entirely new engagement opportunities on the
site. Custom applications deliver a new experience for shoppers and build
long-term preference for the site as a destination and should be tailored to
fit that particular retailer�s business or brand. For example, for a health
and lifestyle retailer, a custom application might be a calorie counter � an
application that would provide shoppers with a rock-solid, benefit-laden
reason to visit and re-visit the web site (or corresponding mobile
application) on a daily basis, further engaging that user with the online
experience.
The third and final benefit to social commerce is that it
can drive conversion among new, engaged visitors. By leveraging social
technologies that allow shoppers to discuss product benefits, features and
use cases, retailers enable those shoppers to influence each other in the
purchase process. Nielsen reports that 70 percent of people trust
recommendations from unknown users online, while Forrester has shown that
nearly half of US online adults read ratings and reviews at least once per
month.
Other social commerce strategies are more creative, and
deliver huge potential for increasing conversion rates. For example,
effective deployment of descriptive content � whether user reviews,
comments, blogs, or professionally-written product descriptions � in a
search-optimized fashion can bring in shoppers with high intent to purchase
from long-tail search phrases, searches which typically signify high
purchase intent compared with more generic product search terms. E-marketer
reports that a �Q1 2009 Razorfish survey of social network users found that
some 29% reported sharing their views online at least every few weeks, while
10% said they made such contributions at least every few days�. As shoppers
get more comfortable with sharing their opinions through social networks, we
are set to see an even greater impact.
Social Commerce also brings other advantages to
retailers. When customers share their opinions about product, it is
beneficial for retailers to listen and respond to feedback. When products
are poorly rated by a number of people, there is a good chance that the
product is not performing as expected or potentially a manufacturing
problem. By having visibility to these issues early, retailers can affect
customer satisfaction dramatically and reduce return rates.
Social commerce success requires retailers to adopt their
shoppers� frame of mind. Ultimately, a retail site is like any other site
from the user perspective: users come there to consume and interact with
content. By giving users more content to consume and more ways to interact
with that content, a retailer succeeds in providing the user what they are
looking for. In return, the retailer is rewarded with increased brand
loyalty and preference, demonstrable with higher traffic volumes, engagement
metrics and conversion rates.
Integrating Social Commerce into the Retail Software
Platform
For many retailers deploying social commerce
capabilities as part of an integrated retail software platform can bring
significant additional value. The IBM Retail Industry Framework is a
software platform that provides integration, process optimization and
analytical capabilities. It enables retailers to integrate products like
WebSphere Commerce with other solutions, and in the context of social
commerce, it provides the capability to be deployed in different
channels or integrated with other applications.
One example of using this approach would be to integrate
with a text analytics solution like the IBM OmniFind Analytics Edition. This
would enable a retailer to analyze the customer interactions in order to
gain deeper levels of insight such as understanding sentiment trends, or
identifying unusual or unexpected patterns in the interactions. With this
information available, it would help the retailer to answer questions such
as:
�What do customers love and hate about my products?� and
�What new markets and opportunities should we pursue?�
WebSphere Commerce Version 7 is a core component of the
Retail Industry Framework software platform. The WebSphere Commerce Version
7 Social Commerce capability enables the creation of user-generated content
and tracking the creation of social content for marketing and community
building purposes.
How IBM WebSphere Commerce Version 7 Helps Retailers
Leverage the Power of Social Media
Social Commerce in WebSphere Commerce Version 7
enables the creation of user-generated content and tracking the creation
of social content for marketing and community building purposes. The
types of user-generated content that can be created out-of-the-box
include Blogs, Social Profiles, Ratings and Reviews and photo galleries.
Through platform providers such as Pluck, additional modules such as
forums, videos, comments, and other applications can also be deployed.
Social Software providers
WebSphere Commerce requires the use of social
software providers for hosting, storage, retrieval and management
(moderation) of user generate content. There are two categories of
social software that can be leveraged from WebSphere Commerce.
� On-premise licensed social software: With this type of
integration, retailers purchase, install and manage the on-premise social
software that will be used by WebSphere Commerce to store and retrieve
social content. With version 7 of WebSphere Commerce, there is pre-built
integration with IBM Lotus Connections 2.5 for this purpose. The retailer
will be responsible for provisioning the hardware and software for Lotus
Connections. The retailer also is responsible for managing the
infrastructure and configuring the software. The Social Commerce integration
with Lotus Connections 2.5 allows a retailer to enable blogs, photo
galleries and social profiles (Ratings and Reviews are not part of this
offering). The key benefit to leveraging on-premise software is that the
user-generated content resides completely within the merchant�s data center.
� Social Software as a Service (SaaS): With this type of
integration, the retailer is expected to sign a Service Level Agreement
(SLA) with a vendor that hosts and manages social content on behalf of the
retailer. There is support in WebSphere Commerce Version 7.0 for two popular
vendors - Pluck and Bazaar Voice. The integration with Pluck enables the use
of blogs, photo galleries and social profiles Pluck also enables discovery,
comments, video, groups, forums, ratings and reviews, and custom web, mobile
and desktop applications running on its social application server.
Integration with Bazaar Voice enables the use of ratings and reviews with
store assets. Additional SaaS vendors may be added by extending the Social
Commerce solution to a specific SaaS vendor�s content API.
There are various reports that analyze the costs verses
the benefits of SaaS and on-premise software. This paper does not addresses
these details as retailers make these decision based on their unique
requirements. The tools for moderation of user-generated content are
provided by the social software vendor. Moderation of user-generated content
for relevance, abusive language and competitor interference is strongly
recommended for internet facing retailers.
Mash-up Technology
Since the content rendered for the social widgets is
not stored in the WebSphere Commerce domain, the typical architecture
for integrating social content with store content is leveraging
mash-ups. The two broad categories of mashup technology are:
� Client-side mash-ups � Loosely defined this refers to
integration of content from different sources at the client (browser, mobile
device etc) through the use of JavaScript libraries. This type of
integration is used by SaaS vendors to integrate the vendor specific social
widgets in to store pages. This typically requires the use of cross-domain
transports (to side-step browser sandbox constraints) along with DNS masking
to associate the vendor�s IP address with the retailer�s domain to allow
cookies to be sent to the SaaS vendor for authentication.
� Server-side mash-ups � With this type of architecture,
the content is integrated on the server side in the WebSphere Commerce
engine through content/data API provided by the social software and is
rendered as part of the Commerce application to the client.
WebSphere Commerce Version 7.0 uses this architecture to
integrate social content into the store pages in a vendor agnostic manner.
This gives the retailer the ability to switch providers or technology with
minimal updates to the store pages.
The social widgets as depicted in the figure above are
delivered as part of the WebSphere Commerce Social Commerce feature are
generic. These widgets can use the same themes and styles as the rest of the
store pages without any coordination with the social software vendors.
The architecture also uses a Representational State
Transfer (REST) style that allows the retailer to leverage a common social
API for extending the solution. It also allows the use of standard caching
technologies. The solution enables rendering stylized Seach Engine Optimized
(SEO) representation of dynamic social content to improve the page ranking
of the store pages associated with the social content. As depicted above,
these capabilities are out-of-the box, regardless of the social software
vendor. In addition to the social software vendors supported in WebSphere
Commerce Version 7.0, it is possible to leverage the underlying IBM
WebSpheres Mash technology for Social Commerce to integrate with other
third-party vendors or in-house software, without changing any of the store
page integration.
There are other benefits to this solution. Since social
content always flows through the retailer�s site, they can have more insight
in terms of how social activity correlates to the shopping activity. There
are also no issues with private user cookie information flowing un-impeded
to third-party sites, because this is filtered at the server side prior to
leveraging the vendor�s data API.
Social widgets
The Social Commerce user interface widgets with
WebSphere Commerce Version 7.0 extend the functionality of selected
available Dojo 1.3 widgets to create a versatile, customer-friendly
store. These widgets are interactive Web 2.0 widgets that render content
without page transitions. They add new functionality, changing the
appearance and interaction experience in the store.
Social Commerce contains the following user interface
widgets:
� ibm.social.Profile - The Profile widget is used by
shoppers to create an online community profile that contains their personal
information. The information is displayed when the social networking content
created by the shopper is displayed in the storefront.
� ibm.social.Blog - The Blog widget is used by shoppers
to view the content of blog entries, create new blog entries, and add
comments to or recommend existing blog entries. Shoppers can view the
content of blog entries and mark content as inappropriate.
When content is flagged as inappropriate, it is sent to
the Site Administrator, who can view the blog entry and determine whether to
delete it from the storefront.
� ibm.social.PhotoGallery - The PhotoGallery widget is
used by shoppers to post photos and view photos within a gallery. Shoppers
can add comments to photos, recommend photos, and mark content as
inappropriate. When content is flagged as inappropriate, it is sent to the
Site Administrator who can view the photo and determine whether to delete it
from the storefront.
� ibm.social.BookMarks - The BookMarks widget adds social
bookmarking capabilities to a store page. It is used by shoppers to create
bookmarks for store pages that contain social content and share the social
content on social bookmarking sites, such as Digg, Delicious, Google, and
Facebook.
� ibm.social.Reviews - The Reviews widget is used by
shoppers to create a numeric rating with review text for a product. It also
displays the average rating for a product.
These widgets can be easily integrated in to the store
pages by including very concise XHTML snippets, such as the following
example that declares a blog widget.
The widgets are loosely coupled with the store pages to
allow the store developer to associate the resource with one or more store
artifacts such as a product, category, store, gift registry or any other
uniquely identifiable entity using the value of the �resourceId� attribute.
The widgets are easily customizable and extensible using simple style
sheets.
Precision Marketing
Social Commerce is about quality user-generated
content. Shoppers are looking for reviews and experiences that match
their own prior to making a purchase decision. WebSphere Commerce
Version 7.0 enables the retailers to track social activity and promote
contribution of content to foster a loyal community.
Precision marketing allows marketing managers to use the
IBM Management Center to define rules and policies focusing on frequent
contributors with various promotions using a number of criteria. Business
users can easily segment users by their level of participation in ratings
and reviews and blogs and provide them with targeted promotions. As a
shopper�s participation changes over time, they can be moved from segments
to continue to foster the retailer-shopper relationship.
In Conclusion
Social Commerce is changing the way retailers and
shoppers interact. IBM is committed to innovate and provide customers
with new technologies and features that help retailers leverage the
power of the online word-of-mouth. IBM provides out-of-the-box
integrations with Bazaarvoice Ratings and Reviews, Lotus Connections and
Pluck Sitelife to accelerate the time to value of social commerce
deployments for our customers and powerful business user tools to
enhance shopper�s active participation.
About the Authors
Gabe Dennison
Since joining Pluck in 2007, Gabe has worked in roles
across marketing and business development to move Pluck into new markets
within the social media industry. Gabe currently oversees product marketing
for Pluck, managing the company�s understanding of the social media
marketplace. Gabe holds an MBA from Oxford University and a BA in English
and History from the University of Texas at Austin.
Stephanie Bourdage-Braun
Stephanie Bourdage-Braun is the WebSphere Commerce
Social Commerce product manager, as an avid user of social technology,
Stephanie enjoys speaking with customers about their social commerce efforts
and in turn enhancing WebSphere Commerce. Stephanie holds an MBA from
Bentley University and a BA in MIS from the Universite de Sherbrooke. She
can be reached at: [email protected]
Madhu Chetuparambil
Madhu is a Senior Technical Staff Member with IBM
Corporation. His interests include REST, Web 2.0 technologies, web caching,
security and performance. Madhu is currently a member of the WebSphere
Commerce Development team and has worked on a number of product development
teams including WebSphere Application Server, WebSphere sMash, WebSphere
Edge Server and Distributed File Systems development. He can be reached at
[email protected].
Gail M. Judd
is a
Fellow of The Business Forum Institute and is currently a WebSphere
Commerce Sales Specialist with IBM Corporation; previously
she was Director of Sales with Rally Round Non-Medical Home Care; Senior
Account Executive with eBI Solutions; National Account Manager for
Financial Statement Services Inc., She was also, during her extensive
sales career Director of Business Development for Spectria (a division
of Rainbow Technologies; Regional Sales Manager for Selectia, Inc. and
Regional Vice President for InfoImage, Inc., after serving with Lotus
Development Corporation. Gail has a Bachelor of Science degree from the
Florida Institute of Technology. Gail has been involved with The
Business Forum for many years.
Visit the Authors Web Site
http://www.us.ibm.com
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