Social Media Commerce For Dummies

By Marsha Collier

Capture customers and sales with social media commerce

Social media commerce is a booming industry. By using social networks in the context of e-commerce transactions, brands large and small are making their products more available and more convenient for customers. This one-of-a-kind guide introduces you to social media commerce and explains how you can use social media to provide better customer service, collect payments online, and build your customer base. Online marketing expert Marsha Collier helps you determine where you have the best opportunity to reach your market, which sites you should integrate with, and much more.

• Your customers are communicating with each other via social media; making purchasing opportunities available on social media sites adds convenience for your customer and opens up new sales opportunities
• This step-by-step guide explains social media commerce and shows what you can accomplish
• Helps you determine the sites where your business should have a presence
• Demonstrates how customers can help promote your brand as they recommend products and services to others on their social networks
• Author Marsha Collier is the undisputed expert on eBay and a recognized authority on social media marketing

Social Media Commerce For Dummies helps you offer your customers better service while giving them the opportunity to share information about your product with their social media contacts.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Nov 8, 2012
• ISBN: 9781118461501

Marsha Collier

With over a million copies of her books in print, Marsha Collier is the top-selling eBay author. She also teaches at eBay University events and is an eBay PowerSeller.

Book preview

Part I

Prepping for Social Media Commerce

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In this part . . .

In the moving target that is social media commerce, it’s important to grasp the basics: the how’s and why’s. In Part I, you get up to speed on how social media can work for your business. Also, you find some tips on deciding how much time you need to spend online to achieve your goals.

Chapter 1

Social Media Commerce and Your Bottom Line

In This Chapter

arrow Understanding social business, social commerce, and social media

arrow Monetizing through connections

arrow Understanding how technology changes communication

arrow Evaluating social media outreach versus tried-and-true marketing

arrow Preparing your online strategy

Technologies change and, we hope, improve the way we do business, but the modes of transmission also change. What’s new is old — and what’s old is new.

Traditionally, news about a subject or product was broadcast through advertising, marketing, word-of-mouth, and even gossip. Broadcast media concentrated on manipulating customer emotions. The brands were king and often got away with calling the shots. Stores ran daily sales on one line of merchandise and then another to keep up with projected figures.

The public came to depend on promotions, and stores could sell little at a retail price. The continual fire sales lost their charm, and the practice dwindled. You can fool some of the people some of the time. Many retailers weren’t acting like people or respecting the customer.

Technology disrupted the way business was done and the way advertising was delivered. No longer is it considered a successful campaign to broadcast relentless sales and discounts to prospective customers. The public has tired of obvious manipulation.

Transparency in communication is the key to business now. Connecting with the customer through social networks brings business and brands into the day-to-day lives of the public. In this chapter, I provide a brief history of the transition and ideas on how you can make the shift to new media.

Social Commerce Beginnings

Back in the 1700s, the town crier rang his bell and made proclamations in the town square. These criers were the sole means of communication with the populace, which was mostly illiterate. When literacy spread, people craved more information and the newspaper was born. Our nation’s first daily newspaper, the Pennsylvania Packet and Daily Advertiser (see Figure 1-1), ran ads on the front page, giving those in a trade or with goods to sell a platform for marketing. The daily newspaper is one of the first examples of reaching customers by combining content with marketing.

Today, content-based marketing gets repeated in social media and increases word-of-mouth mentions; it’s the best way to gather buzz about a product. It worked in the past and it does now.

Think back to the first days of television, whose sponsors crafted messages that would blend with the entertainment value (content) of the show. For example, Phillip Morris, the cigarette manufacturer that sponsored I Love Lucy, protected their brand to the extent that the word lucky was forbidden on the show so that the audience wasn’t reminded of a competing brand, Lucky Strikes.

As advertising progressed through the years, marketing created catchwords that carried messages through word-of-mouth.

Figure 1-1: Front and center on our country’s first newspaper: Ads!

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Person-to-person contact is a proven method to build sales. During the Great Depression, the Avon lady and her samples were welcomed into homes. With 25,000 representatives in the field, sales grew to $6.5 million in 1939, from just under $2.8 million in 1929. Trust, education (content) and personal contact built the sales network today to 6.4 million representatives in 100 countries. In the History section on the Avon website, they remark that long before Facebook, It connected women, who were otherwise isolated and immersed in domestic life, in what the company calls the original social network. Indeed it was.

In 1991, the World Wide Web was put online by Tim Berners-Lee, and forward- thinking commerce types saw a new opportunity. Jeff Bezos founded Amazon.com in 1994, and in the following year, Pierre Omidyar started a person-to-person marketplace called eBay. These early online sellers made a name for themselves by offering discount pricing and a vast array of merchandise, but they added a new twist: Their sites were also social networks. Buyers could comment, leave feedback, and post reviews of the items they purchased. Customer service took a new turn.

Thus began — for a few smart companies — social commerce.

Defining Social Media, Social Business, and Social Commerce

Grab a cup of coffee. The new train of thinking you’ll need to wrap your head around is all about being social. Commerce has always been propelled by people. Whether a business is serving the customer (B2C, business to consumer) or selling products and services to another business (B2B, business to business), making a sale always starts with an interaction. In today’s business atmosphere, initial and ongoing contacts and interactions must build trust.

Social is the heart of commerce today. Dictionary-style definitions read this way:

check.png Social media refers to varied methods and web-based applications for online media that enable social interactions. These platforms are accessible to businesses and consumers through scalable publishing techniques via blogs and public sites. User-generated content is augmented by person-to-person interaction and conversation is encouraged. This online arena is the place where social business communication, networking, and social commerce are played out.

check.png Social business is revolutionizing the way companies function and generate value for all involved. This new trend toward internal communication and socially minded organizations transforms from the inside out. The transformation is propelled through relationships within and without the company. Social business connects the internal staff with external vendors and customers. It breaks down the organizational silos that stand in the way of intracompany communication, building mutual collaboration between all departments.

check.png Social media commerce is where the rubber meets the road, where the dollars are made. Social media commerce is the specific use of social media technology and networks to produce commerce, whether on the web or in bricks-and-mortar businesses.

Although the terms sound similar, they refer to three different ways for people (and business) to benefit from pubic exposure and transparency. All three are bound by the word social.

The following strategies can be accomplished through the social media conduit:

check.png Raise awareness of new products

check.png Teach customers how to care for your product

check.png Develop or sell new product lines, based on customer comments

check.png Adapt your business to match customer needs

check.png Promote seasonal bargains and marketing messages

check.png Deliver on your customer service promise

This list gives you just a few ideas. Throughout this book, you will find lots of suggestions to help you change your business into a much more trusted (and profitable) enterprise.

Making Money by Connecting with People

Selling through social media isn’t just about posting bargains on Facebook or Twitter. You must also build trust with today’s customer. Social media engagement leads to a more personalized means of communication versus Tweeting deals and requesting Facebook likes.

Nielsen’s latest Global Trust in Advertising report (see Figure 1-2) surveyed more than 28,000 Internet respondents in 56 countries. The report found that a whopping 92 percent of consumers around the world say they trust earned media (versus paid advertising) and social word of mouth (such as recommendations from friends and family) more than other forms of advertising.

Figure 1-2: Data from Nielsen Global Trust in Advertising Survey Q3, 2011.

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Today, earned media spurs engagement through community versus paid media (advertising), which drives customers to make purchases. To make your message resound with customers, you need to take advantage of social network channels and interact with the community on your website. Buyers no longer trust traditional advertising.

Your website is the hub of your social media reach and should provide tools and features that build consistency and collaboration. (For more on building a more social platform, see Chapter 4.) If you let your customers know your company, their investment is not just in your products and service but also with you and your staff as extended friends.

Paul Chaney, author of The Digital Handshake (Wiley), recently wrapped up the philosophy this way:

Tactics aside, what is of greatest importance is that your social media engagement be marked by authenticity and transparency. People want to be told the truth. They want their interactions with you to be validated by a genuine personal response. And they want the acknowledgement that what they have to say matters.

So the way business connects has changed. Social engagement requires transparency and targeting your words and advertising to the people who are interested in your brand and your message.

Targeting social ads to those who are friends, or friends of friends, makes a profound difference in the impact of your advertising. In another Nielsen study, advertising recall increased by 55 percent when an ad was targeted directly to a business’s social network. Ads become more memorable when social content is referenced.

Content engagement (personalizing to the customer) entices customers to try your business for the first time. Continuing interaction keeps them coming back for more. This technique is demonstrated craftily in the portion of an e-mail from ShoeDazzle shown in Figure 1-3. The sales pitch in the e-mail is tied to and delivered during the month’s horoscope. So as not to leave out those who are not of the Taurus persuasion, the e-mail lists engaging quotes for each sign of the zodiac.

Notice the bottom of the e-mail? ShoeDazzle doesn’t write the traditional Follow Us on Facebook. Instead, they tell their customers that they love to be social — and provide links so that the customer can meet and connect with the brand on social media sites.

Figure 1-3: The social sweet spot of Shoe- Dazzle’s e-mail.

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As a customer, I liked ShoeDazzle on Facebook, and now, when I go to the site, my entry page is personalized with my Facebook picture (see Figure 1-4). Smart, eh? What a great way to make the customer part of the brand.

By the way, I just bought a pair of shoes from them while writing this chapter. See? Reaching out in a personal way draws attention and really does work.

Figure 1-4: My personalized entry page on ShoeDazzle.

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Changing Communication through Technology

After people began trading on eBay and shopping for books on Amazon, the game changed. Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web (sorry, Al Gore) as we know it today, executed his initial proposal in 1989 and put the first website and server online at CERN in France in 1991. Even though the purpose of this early technology was to connect scientists, Berners-Lee saw the future:

The web is more a social creation than a technical one. I designed it for a social effect — to help people work together — and not as a technical toy. The ultimate goal of the web is to support and improve our weblike existence in the world. We clump into families, associations, and companies. We develop trust across the miles and distrust around the corner.

Built to bring the world closer together, this new World Wide Web enabled trust between strangers, businesses, and customers.

In 1999, a ground-breaking book on the future impact of commerce and the Internet was published. The Cluetrain Manifesto,by Rick, Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, David Weinberger, et al (Basic Books) in its description of how interactions with customers was about to change in the newly connected marketplace, was a call to action for all businesses. The book was almost clairvoyant in its prediction that the Internet would enable commerce by human to human conversations, thereby radically transforming traditional business practices.

Social media commerce is a byproduct of this brave new world. In the new media (through social media), CEOs and janitors converse and have equal power to change the business atmosphere. Social media is the twenty-first-century way of spreading the word and connecting about a topic, product, professional, or brand. If the topic at hand happens to be related to a product you sell, you have an opportunity to piggyback your message with it and include your call to action.

From word of mouth to 1s and 0s

Pioneers in communication and commerce built platforms that enabled engagement and person-to-person commerce. The following list gives you an idea of how quickly the world has turned digital:

check.png 1978: CBBS, Computerized Bulletin Board System, came online to a few hobbyists over regular telephone lines through modem connections.

check.png 1980: CompuServe became the first online service to offer real-time chat thought their CB Simulator program.

check.png 1995: GeoCities was the first site to promote free personal home pages. Although most pages were pretty basic, the service gave regular people a place to stake their claim on the web.

check.png 1997: eBay (previously Auctionweb), a person-to-person marketplace, introduced a feedback system in which customer and sellers could comment on their e-commerce transactions. eBay also instituted user boards so that eBay members could chat, share ideas, and discuss their sales.

check.png 1998: PayPal, originally called x.com, was founded as a person-to-person payment service. PayPal fueled eBay and future e-commerce growth.

check.png 1999: Blogger, the first free blogging service, opened. They were purchased by Google in 2003.

check.png 2002: Friendster, the first official social network, was created. By 2008, they reached a peak of 115 million registered members worldwide.

check.png 2003: MySpace was developed by some Friendster users, and implemented the latest technologies and higher bandwidth than previous platforms. They reached a peak of 75 million visitors per month in late 2008.

check.png 2003: LinkedIn, the first business-skewed social networking site, began attracting professionals as a way to connect.

check.png 2004: Flickr, a photo- and video-hosting site, initially had a chat room, which was shelved early on. Today, Flickr is owned by Yahoo! and will eventually replace Yahoo! Photos.

check.png 2004: Facebook launched quietly to students of Harvard University. These students opened the site to 800 other colleges in 2005, and by 2006, the site was available to any person over the age of 13.

check.png 2005: YouTube was created by three former PayPal employees as a site where users can upload, view, and share videos. It was sold to Google for $1.65 billion in 2006.

check.png 2006: Twitter, the text-based social networking and microblogging service, was born. Comments, called Tweets, are limited to 140 characters. Today, Twitter users serve up more than 400 million Tweets per day.

check.png 2010: Pinterest, a virtual pinboard for pinning and sharing web-based images, quotes, and all things visual that users find interesting, was created. Within a few months, it became one of the largest social networks on the web.

check.png 2011: Google+ opened as a social networking and identity service as an invitation-only beta. Within two weeks of its limited trial, the site reached 10 million users. By the end of 2011, it had 90 million users.

The digital landscape experiences transitions and progress continually. One aspect that will not change for a long time, however, is the ability to immediately and positively connect with customers.

The end of the cold call

Traditionally, the process of making connections and making appointments took days, weeks, and months. In today’s digital world, connections can be made on the fly. You can find suppliers by a LinkedIn search and hone in on customer bases by using social media tools.

Cold calls are no longer cold; they are warmed by information and data that was never before available. The amount of statistics about you, your business, and your industry stored in online databases makes your business dealings more transparent than ever before. Your personal reputation online adds into the equation and can potentially make or break a sale.

Products, as well, are no longer a mystery. Customers come fully armed with information on brands and models when they shop. Before the digital age, people went shopping during their lunch break. As e-commerce and high-speed connections grew, they squeezed a little time on their work computer for online shopping. Now, mobile technology fuels the online market.

More and more, consumers pick up their smartphones or tablets and conduct research before making a purchase. Customers get an instant and complete picture of a product’s features through news and user-generated reviews. They can figure out which product or service they want — as well as where to find it. Consumers of all ages are embracing social content and mobile technologies. According to research by Nielsen, as of February 2012, nearly half of U.S. mobile subscribers owned smartphones (see Figure 1-5).

The 2011 holiday season was a turning point in e-commerce. A study from Google and IPSOS OTX found that of people who used smartphones for product research

check.png 46 percent went to a store to make their purchase

check.png 37 percent purchased online on a computer

check.png 41 percent purchased on a smartphone

check.png 19 percent visited a store to check out the product and then purchased online on a computer

check.png 18 percent visited a store to check out the product and then purchased online on a smartphone

check.png 8 percent visited the store first and then purchased on a smartphone

It’s clear that consumers shop and make decisions not only from their computers but also from mobile devices. Your window of opportunity to grab customers and wow them narrows and you can no longer be guaranteed of their undivided attention.

Figure 1-5: In February 2012, 50 percent of U.S. mobile subscribers owned a smartphone. Smart- phones trending up!