You may have seen the recent news about Facebook testing ‘Offers’ for Ecommerce sites. Brands will be able to push digital offers through the timeline to their communities and these will be redeemable for the first time on the retailer’s website at checkout.

At present this functionality is in test phase with a small number of Facebook’s closely affiliated brands (read brands that spend millions in advertising with them!) but if successful could be extended to encompass the same functionality that Bricks and Mortar offers provided 2 weeks ago. Facebook has a habit of testing functionality way in advance, and in December they were obvioulsy enthused by the results.

Why is this relevant? Well, brands can now monetise their existing Facebook community as long as they have a direct online retail element. It means that we have the opportunity to start pushing online redeemable vouchers to Facebook fans and test how engaged specific communities are and how open they are to sales opportunities. So, what’s the ROI of your Facebook communities? Quite a big deal, I’m sure you’ll agree.

There’s no time table for when Ecommerce Offers could become publicly available. When it does come into force, coupons will be free to run, but brands will pay Facebook to show their Offers to more people (just like FB ads). Do you think this finally offers brands the ability to monetise their Facebook communities?

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As all eyes focus on the social commerce landscape for 2012, Dimensions Mall, has dropped a veritable bomb less than a month into the year.

While 67% of retailers are already planning to use Facebook to drive traffic through to e-commerce in 2012, not to mention Coca-Cola, Disney and Starbucks, the three largest brands on the social networking site, already selling products directly, Georgia-based Dimensions Mall has gone one step further.

As reported by Social Media Influence, the company is developing a virtual shopping mall, where consumers create their own custom avatars to take them around realistic-looking stores, try on outfits in virtual dressing rooms and share the experience in real-time with family and friends.

The mall is packed with social functionality, such as profile pages, where shoppers can share and review purchases, as well as regularly updated products, offering shoppers access to items that are ‘trending’ at that moment in time.

It’s certainly a radical step forward into social commerce – and one intended to revolutionise the communal shopping experience. Will it work?

- Yes, because it appeals to our cautiousness. Shoppers can watch each other’s actions and see what others have purchased, before making their own moves

- Yes because it appeals to our curiosity. Shoppers can explore one another’s social pages for reviews and recommendations, seeking out authoritative views before committing to purchases

- Yes, because, quite simply, we are influenced by the people we like. By making the social shopping experience truly communal and facilitating real-time shared shopping experiences, we are more likely to follow our peer’s actions into purchase decisions

All in all, it looks like a groundbreaking project and it will certainly be interesting to see which brands dip their toes into the water first.

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In October, we unveiled the findings of our social shopping research. We’ve therefore had a few months to turn the data over and tease out any interesting trends …

“If you’d like to reach more women, you might like to consider incentivisation; but if you’re looking for brand advocates, it might be better to target men.”

Without running the risk of stereo-typing (!), we reviewed our data by gender and uncovered some surprising insights around shopping behaviour online. In the world of social shopping, women are the hunters; and, men are often far more “social” when it comes to sharing purchases or connecting with other consumers or brands.

We’ve created a slideshare to illustrate our findings and provide some next step ideas; and these are some of the key points:

• There’s still a marked differentiation in product categories: women are more heavily involved in clothes and beauty products; men lead in sports and technological products.
• Men gather information from a wide range of sources. Women hunt: their research is based on identifying the best prices or lowest discount.
• The female emphasis on discount is also evident in the value they place on incentives and rewards.
• Whilst women are less likely to refer to named sources of information than men; they are more likely to collaborate with others and actively seek advice out.
• Men are actually far more open to the “social” in social shopping. They lead in online mentions and post purchase actions; and nearly always trust the opinion of another consumer more than an expert or someone who works for the retailer.
• Male consumers are more open to being brand advocates than female consumers; and they are also more interested in connecting with other people who are involved with your brand.

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Did you know that…

1 in 3 men wait until Christmas Eve to finish their shopping.

56% of Americans sing holiday carols to their pets.

And 17% of people who Christmas shop via mobile, will be doing it on the bus.

This is the social shopping Christmas story …

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As we move into December and with all the attention turning to Christmas, the social media stories that hit our headlines in November may be a distant memory to you. So in case you’ve forgotten, here’s a round-up of all the social media stories that got us tweeting in November.

The Royal Family

To some this may have been more interesting if it was about Jim and Barbara Royle, but November has been full of news stories about the Windsors. At the beginning of the month, The British Monarchy got tongues wagging when it finally signed up to Facebook. The Palace has had a presence on YouTube and Twitter for quite some time but it decided to take the next step into the world of social networking when it launched its official fan page on 8^th November.  To date, the page has nearly 300,000 fans!

And wherever the Royal Family goes, controversy follows. It wasn’t long before anti-royalists posted comments on pictures and updates about a number of controversial issues that crop up time and time again, e.g. Diana, tax payers’ money etc. Fans are unable to post on the main wall, but can comment on updates and photos/video uploads. Some have  received more than 3,000 comments must prove quite a headache for the Royals’ comms team! As a social media agency we wouldn’t usually advise our clients to do this, however the Queen’s Facebook page is a good example of how to manage such a high profile and controversial brand.

Not long after the Facebook page launch, there was another long awaited Royal announcement that got the online world talking. Prince William finally popped the question to Kate Middleton. Within a few hours of the announcement, #royalwedding was the number one trending topic on Twitter followed by Kate Middleton at number two and Prince William at number three. BlogPulse showed that Kate Middleton was the second most featured person on blogs worldwide behind Harry Potter.

The online buzz gave a good idea of the sentiment surrounding the announcement. It was mostly positive (43%) on Twitter, another 41% of Twitter users responded neutrally to the news; and just 16% of tweets about the engagement were negative. Around 32% of bloggers reacted positively, while most (63%) conveyed a neutral reaction. Comments were mostly congratulating the happy couple with others projecting anger about the tax bill.

But, this is one trend that won’t be dying down for a long time. In the days, weeks and months leading up to the big day on 29^th April 2011 there is sure to be a lot of online chatter about Kate’s dress, invitees and all things bridal.

Beatles on iTunes

While everyone was getting excited about an extra bank holiday because of the Royal wedding, iTunes had another announcement that got Beatles fans excited. The Beatles back catalogue was finally available to download on iTunes. This was a trending topic on Twitter as everyone anticipated the announcement; unfortunately it was slightly eclipsed by Will and Kate. But, it didn’t stop Simon Cowell from getting in on the act by making that week’s X Factor Beatles themed!

Christmas

It wouldn’t be November without a few Christmas stories.  Monday 29^th November was termed ‘Manic Monday’ as people logged on to start their Christmas Shopping online in earnest. It was predicted that £22 million would be spent every hour by British consumers! Our recent report into the online shopping explosion shows that customers are the new product experts. People now trust reviews they see online from people they don’t know.  So, as more and more people go online to buy gifts, it will be interesting to see if user generated reviews influence purchase decisions.

Path

Path officially launched this month, a new social network that aims to be more personal. If you’re not a fan of sharing photos on Facebook with people you can’t remember from school, then path offers a personal and convenient solution. You are allowed up to 50 contacts that you can to share your photos, videos and information with. We’ve all singed up in the office and will be keep a close eye on how our clients can get involved.

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One of the most intriguing trends emerging from the social shopping explosion is the re-positioning of the consumer as product expert; the level of trust we now place on strangers.

A recent post on ReadWriteWeb provided some further statistical evidence of this movement with specific reference to the travel industry. Referring to Kevin May’s review of the latest World Travel Market (WTM) Industry Report, Curt Hopkins writes: “Peer recommendations have overtaken specialist knowledge as a make-or-break point for online purchases”, and highlights that online forums and chat-rooms appear to have more influence on travel decisions than travel blogs.

The inherently social nature of sharing holiday discussions and the popularity of travel related conversations across social media could offer some explanation for why these mediums are so popular; but it is interesting to see how this pattern is replicated across other product categories. Whether the experiential nature of travel means that we prefer personal accounts to professional advice; and whether there are some areas where the consumer isn’t always right.

We asked survey respondents “Who would you trust to provide you with an accurate opinion on the following products?” With 19.6% of people trusting ‘another consumer online’ over both ‘someone who works at the retailer‘ (10.6%) and ‘a professional journalist’ (4.8%) in relation to travel products, our results echoed the WTM report. And we also found that:

• On average, the only product categories where someone who works for the retailer is trusted more than another consumer online are Sporting/Outdoor equipment, DIY purchases and Property/housing. For property/housing, the difference was only 1%.
• On average, men are more trusting of other consumers online than women. Women also trust ‘someone who works for the retailer’ more in relation to financial services and cars/automotives.
• Women trust the opinion of someone who works for a retailer 7% more than they trust other online consumers in relation to DIY products. Men trust them 0.7% more.
• Less than 1% of people trust ‘A celebrity that you like’, with the exception of their opinion on health and beauty products (1.8%) and fashion (1.6%). 1.3% of men would also trust celebrity’s opinions on sporting/outdoor products.

So what does this mean?

Let the consumer speak

– the travel industry has some great travel communities for people to share travel advice, ideas and recommendations.  So make it easy for consumers to share recommendations and reviews, particularly if you operate in an area where trust in other consumers is high.

Understand the influences

– our research highlights the different sources of influence across the product groups. Understanding these can help to direct where knowledge is provided and by whom.

Collaborate with the consumer

– work with reviews and reviewers to develop your brand and extend your customer base.

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There’s a bit of a quirk emerging in the retail research report detail that, as a social media agency, we’re interested in exploring. It involves fashion. And women. And how we can’t get enough of talking about our clothing – yet we seem to have quite a clear idea of what we want to buy.

As we’re all excited by the recent explosion of social and fashion, we’ve been trying to reconcile our findings and would be interested in seeing what other people think.

This is the story so far.

1. On the hunt

As regular readers will be aware, we’ve been exploring social shopping behaviours and how people are purchasing online. Building on previous research in this area, we’ve been looking at three online shopping behaviours: ‘hunter’ (“I look for the best price”); ‘gatherer’ (“I research for detailed information”) and ‘collaborator’ (“I search for the advice and ideas of other consumers”); and exploring any correlation between these characteristics and the categories or consumers that they are aligned with.

In fashion, hunting tops the bill. Dramatically.

Theoretically, then, online retailers should be competing on price; however –

2. There’s lots of conversation going on as well

Our research is also beginning to suggest that women might be a little bit shy on line. That they are a little more reluctant to share than men and, possibly, a bit more cautious about whom they trust. Given that women are more active on social platforms, this presents another interesting paradox for us to explore; however, it also highlights the things that women do want to talk about. Like shoes and clothes.

Mentions of fashion online and on social media

When it comes to fashion, women are more than happy to join in. In fact, aside from blog mentions (where men dominate in all product categories), women, quite uncharacteristically, take the lead in online reviews, sharing on both forums and social networks.

They are also, perhaps unsurprisingly, more likely to be interested in connecting with a brand.

3. What women want…

As part of our survey, we asked about the services that would encourage future purchases. When it comes to fashion, women’s responses significantly increase. This demand for engagement with brand points to the interesting tension in our findings: fashion shoppers know exactly what they want – but perhaps there’s a bit of an opportunity for them to be swayed.

Fashion retailers’ use of social media has been much talked about in recent months. With m-commerce, f-commerce and geo technology merging the online and offline shopping spaces and a clear demographic overlap between fashion consumers and social media users, this is an exciting and rapidly moving area of online retail.

It’s also crammed with competition and the challenge will be in making sure that shoppers are reached.

One way of doing this is to engage with potential consumers before they’ve got their hunting hat on; another, to build the kind of relationship that keeps consumers coming back – and by making sure that they bring their friends.

Our research suggests how this might be done – but it will be interesting to see how fashion retailers understand and interact with this scenario; and whether fashion will continue to buck the trends in online shopping behaviours.

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Today we are launching our report on social shopping and its impact on consumer behaviour.

Online retail has traditionally been characterised by price-driven sales and purchase-driven consumers. The focus, for retailers, has been on engaging the latter and maximising the former.

And as a social media agency, we are seeing how social connections are changing this behaviour.

Social relationships on the web have transformed how shoppers are behaving online and dramatically changed the online customer journey. It’s an exciting time for retailers and The Social Shopping Explosion report highlights some of the new opportunities that social retail affords.

Research shows new social behavioural trends

With the rapid growth of social networks and the socialising of the internet, the question of where social media and e-commerce meet  – and how  –  is of huge relevance for retailers today. Particularly in the UK, where internet users continue to lead the way in purchasing online.

In August 2010, social media agency immediate future conducted an independent survey of 2,000 UK internet users to understand how consumers are behaving online.

The results are surprising; the implications for retailers, huge.

Changing the path to purchase

The social web has opened up the purchase cycle. It’s made it easier for consumers to talk online and easier for consumers to share opinions, information and advice. This means that purchase decisions are based on different criteria: the social shopper is increasingly buying on review, recommendation and the advice of other consumers.

Our research found that 46% of consumers are no longer searching purely on price.

This means that retailers can now engage with consumers before they’ve decided what they’re going to buy.

The empowered social shopper

The social shopper is empowered, vocal and increasingly collaborative. They are savvy, knowledgeable, demanding and the rules of engagement are different.

Broadcasting no longer works: brands and customers are talking; and, in the online space, it’s what other consumers say that really counts.

Our research found that 37% of respondents had reviewed or talked about a product online after purchase, fast catching up with those who had discussed it face to face (38.4%). Word of mouth is nothing new. What’s different is where it’s taking place.

Social spaces have created wider networks and, as such, have created a much bigger opportunity for retailers. Our research has found that consumers trust other consumers, even if they are people that they don’t know. This means that every consumer can now drive traffic and purchases via social.

The Social Shopping landscape is in growth

Recent reports from the IMRG/BPS Internet Access and Online Shopping in Britain report shows that online shopping continues to increase. It also finds that the number of internet users visiting social networking and blogging sites for the second quarter in 2010 has increased fourfold when compared to the same period in 2008.

Understanding this changing landscape is key to retailers; and understanding the social shopper is at the heart of their future success.

Exploring the types of shopping behaviour online and investigating how social touchpoints are affecting the customer journey, The Social Shopping Explosion provides up to the minute insights for brands operating in this new social marketplace.

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“The key to social commerce is understanding the roles of the social consumer and the parts they play in the grand production of your marketplace.”[1]

By 2012, online retail sales in the UK are predicted to hit £44.9bn.

And social is changing the way we shop.

Image by dominiccampbell via Flickr

In 2007, Gartner identified two types of online shoppers: hunters and gatherers; those who shopped on price and those who researched products online before making their purchase decision.

Traditionally, online retailers have catered towards the hunters. They’ve recruited customers via search and retained them via email marketing. Price has often been the deciding factor: these customers have already decided what they want to buy.

In August 2010, immediate future surveyed 2,000 UK internet users.  As a social media agency, it’s important to us that we really understand how people behave online.

We found that nearly 50% of consumers are still in the consideration phase. They haven’t yet reached the point in the purchase cycle where they know what they want.

We also found that there are new opportunities for retaining customers post purchase.

Social retail is fundamentally changing the way that consumers shop, and the relationship between customer and brand. It is creating new opportunities for interaction that open up the consideration phase; and different ways of keeping the relationship going beyond the initial sale.

On the 12^th of October, immediate future will be sharing the results of this research at the Internet Retailing Conference.  We will reveal:

• How social retail is transforming the customer journey for online shoppers
• How different types of online shoppers behave along the purchase process
• Motivations to buy and incentives to return for online shoppers
• How online shoppers are talking across social spaces
• How online shoppers would like to engage with the top online retailers

If you’d like to reserve a copy of this report, please click here http://www.immediatefuture.co.uk/resources/social-shopping-explosion

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