The Social Commerce Dream

Social Commerce is the dream of impulse buying on digital media come real. Careless, flawless, and not least frictionless shopping on mobile, tablet, surface and yet-to-be-invented digital interaction devices with augmented reality. You may agree that we are still a bit far from it in 2021, or perhaps you are one of the pioneering consumers trying out every new way of shopping available.

With social media, brands can interact directly with consumers. So, marketing has become interactive, the customer voice has become audible, and social commerce could have the power to make shopping great again.

What is social commerce?

The concept of Social Commerce was coined by Yahoo back in 2005. It represents the activation of a purchase behaviour triggered by social media interactions. But Yahoo couldn’t make it work, and more than 16 years later, it is still looking for its final form. Ecommerce first emerged out of dusty distance-buying post-order catalogues. Its first embodiment on the internet was text-rich, image-poor and devote of any emotional dimension. In a parallel trend of comparison shopping, rational buying became the default for internet shopping and deals-sites were the most fun places around.

In recent years, the internet has become more commercial, and by projection both more fun and more superficial. Social media helped make a shift away from human-to-machine relations and back to human-to-human relations. At least we got that far. Emojis conquered text messages crying out loud, that “emotions are back”. 📢❤💥

Perhaps these are indications that full-scale social commerce is actually possible despite its long journey in the dark.

What features will make social commerce successful?

The features of social commerce allow for a wholesome social experience within in a full ecommerce journey. We propose to define its components as the following list of commerce-enabling elements:

• A product catalogue (also called a product feed)
• A product selection and check-out feature
• Peer-to-peer (social) communications related to products and services
• Influencer integration
• Live video
• Behaviour-based ad targeting
• Shopping enablement in rich media (such as product tagging in images or video)
• Reviews, ratings
• Recommendations
• Fulfillment
• Client services

Social commerce today emerges from two different horizons: On the one hand, you have the social media-enabled ecommerce into which Amazon falls. And on the other hand, you have the ecommerce-enabled social media such as Instagram and the Facebook Shop. Let’s have a look at these species in more detail.

Social-media enabled ecommerce

Most ecommerce platforms integrate a number of the elements we mentioned, but Amazon is the most advanced social media-enabled ecommerce model with reviews and ratings, peer recommendations and “people also bought” as driving elements. We can also put Etsy, Vinted and Shein in that category. To take the example of Amazon, it is pushing further into social media and hoisting itself up the funnel with things like the following:

• Amazon posts: social posts on “brand stores” and now coming to product detail pages
• Influencer integrations: activating the ecommerce dimension of influencer partnerships by allowing them to build a store front directly on Amazon with products from their partners
• Live commerce: live video product presentations of products on Amazon Live. Around the clock Shoppingtainment.

Where Amazon is still very much at the end of the purchase journey for most users, it is trying to build a more entertaining user journey opening up for upsells and impulse buys. It’s social gaming platform Twitch may come to play an important role in the set-up moving forward. The strongest element in Amazon’s social commerce play is clearly the Live commerce initiative. It feels like the return of TV Shopping and merchants are flocking to the opportunity to present their products in a live stream on the platform. Build more awareness, give their products a more humane touch, show the founders, reach new audiences, nudge users further towards the purchase. Real humans, real emotions, real persuasion.

Ecommerce-enabled social media

On the other extreme of the spectrum, Pinterest and Instagram have long been considered the most advanced social commerce players. With slowing user growth, it has become essential to monetize their audiences more strongly in order to survive, and ecommerce seems like a much more powerful economic model than advertising.

Instagram has the power to recommend fashion items that make people buy. At least that is the case for Andreas Reiffen, founder of Crealytics and heavy internet users. Where traditional commerce was always based on the location, location, location paradigm whereby the location of a business and its flow of traffic was determining for its’ success, the success parameter for social commerce could be closer related to the quality of the recommendation.

Instagram’s Mothership, Facebook has picked up the challenge in a serious manner with Facebook Shops, a new commerce-oriented solution after their Places and Marketplace. One of the strongest motivators for advertising spend being ecommerce, it is crucial for Facebook to make the connection, especially in a world where cross-platform data integration becomes increasingly difficult (read more about the battle of the cookies here). The impact of advertising higher up the funnel is becoming more difficult to measure and prove.

The most significant step for Facebook Shops is the integration of a payment solution which is already operational in the US market. This will allow for an end-to-end shopping experience from discovery to purchase without leaving the platform. It also opens up for an interesting opportunity: A Facebook Shop with Amazon fulfillment at the back end (combining a Facebook Shop with payment and an Amazon Multi-Channel Fulfillment solution). Ecommerce without a webshop, who would have expected that?

And let’s not forget Snapchat and TikTok. TikTok is building out its advertising offering and is already integrating shopping functionality into the mix. TikTok Shopping, however, is mainly an integration with Shopify enabling for a simple pass-through from the social media to the shop. It looks like social commerce-enablement is becoming a mainstream feature for all platforms. Snapchat has long been integrating its offering with ecommerce solutions and has a similar force of persuasion to TikTok among its users. Snapchats social commerce case studies are an interesting read. Its main tool for ecommerce enablement is a deeplinking feature for linking ads to shops. For younger audiences, these platforms have an enormous persuasion power, but the ecommerce-enablement still requires jumping to another channel.

Ecommerce everywhere

Over at Google, there is pondering as well. Already three years ago, Google went on a mission to provide “shopping everywhere”. I called it an Ozone-approach to shopping (ozone is a variety of oxygen present everywhere around us in the air and with the interesting characteristic that too high doses can be lethal to human beings).

The ozone initiative aimed to provide ecommerce activation in all of Google’s media channels. In search marketing it is already present via Google Shopping and product ads which appear in an integrated manner into search results. But Google is pushing this further with a purchase button and an integration with Google Pay. I call it the Google Buy button although it appears to have a less Amazon-like name in Google documentation.

It is also working on an integration of a purchase function inside videos on YouTube and in images. The approach is similar to the tags Instagram has enabled in its images to link to a product page, but it is reasonable to assume that Google might push this further via image recognition and propose purchases of practically anything you see.

There is an app for it

But what if it all ended up in an app instead. With the open internet being closed up and user journeys more restricted, the place to be is in an app. The superapp phenomenon is expanding beyond China, where WeChat has always been the app to offer everything: Uber, Paypal, Spotify, Messenger, eh I mean WeChat transport, WeChat payment, WeChat Music, WeChat just chat etc.

Superapps are social media by definition and some are natively ecommerce enabled. Perhaps social commerce is already here.

Social Commerce Champions

Taking a first look at the various contenders to the title of social commerce champion and giving them a first rough rating on the features listed at the beginning of the article, the top contenders seem to be Amazon, Instagram (Facebook) and Google. The triopoly of digital advertising are seriously addressing this.

Rough rating of the main emerging platforms for social commerce. Please disagree and contact the author for improvement 🙂

Get social proof, inspire and reach your audience via ads or influencers

Instagram and the Facebook Shop seem like interesting places to go in 2021. For ecommerce players strongly anchored in Amazon, there is social turn to take and a live commerce opportunity to seize where available (US so far). The key will be to understand end users better and engage them with content earlier in the user journey. For brands with little ecommerce penetration, it will be about learning how to drive users to the sale and to take the purchase and fulfilment experience into consideration. An impulse-buy with a 7 day deliver span may not be a viable solution for social commerce. Social commerce is fast, fluid, frictionless and fulfilling.

And in the future, augmented reality may allow for immersive experiences merging the online and offline user experience and creating an entertaining and fulfilling user experience. Facebook heading for the Metaverse and Snapchat activating Augmented Reality in its campaigns, may be signs of an emerging social commerce paradigm.

I wonder if I am actually a Digital Native? I learned to code when the foundations for the digital economy were laid and I was into the Internet as soon as it was out. I haven’t watched TV since approximately the day the world wide web was launched. I was fairly early on Twitter but did resist quite a long time before opening a Facebook account. I feel really digitally native. And when I was a teenager, I definitely had FOMO (Fear of Missing Out). I even wrote the very definition of it in my little notebook: “So many express trains I have to catch”. The stress of youth in the wide world of wonders.

According to the demographics, however, my children fit the definition of the Digital Native better than I do.

In recent years the term FOMO (fear of missing out) has become quite popular and has even been added to dictionaries. It is usually connected with the always-on generation of Digital Natives – you know – the generation that were raised on Youtube tutorials and who eat Instagram for breakfast. There is actually scientific research showing that the effect of social media on your brain is similar to that of drugs, alcohol and cigarettes. How cool is that? – drugs that don’t hurt your body, only your brain, available day and night.

But social media also has another effect on people. Have you noticed how everyone is always happy and good looking on social media? I reconnected with a friend IRL (in real life) a while back and told him how happy I was for him because he always seemed to be having a great time. And then he said “Ah, you know, a divorce is never fun”. He didn’t even know I didn’t know. When his wife suddenly changed last name on Facebook, that was a big event as well. Most people had no clue. And I count them both as friends. Sort of. Well more than Facebook friends at least…

I think most users of social media feel that pressure of having to look good, be seen with the right people, do the right activities. Do we have any social media burn-outs yet? I think they are on their way for those who are in always-on mode.

And then there are those who are not on all the time. The you’s and me’s. Well, I am actually on quite regularly in my efforts to build awareness for the Search Strategies Report I published, but it just means I have the FOLS more often than most. We are the ones who are a little reluctant to show our faces, our bodies, our kids, our house, our car. When you then, for some reason – personal or professional – feel that you must post on social media, it suddenly strikes you. The Fear of Looking Stupid. FOLS-struck. I have known for a long time that I have it.

And then I recently discovered that FOLS is not just something I have. I think this was in a discussion on Twitter with a new friend who had acquired some internet fame thanks to videos he made and who told about the number of rounds of his living room he would do before going in front of the camera. He is definitely part of this other group of digital natives that are really uncomfortable in front of a screen and seeing themselves on camera. Not that you can see it when he is live of course… In that discussion I suggested he maybe was suffering from FOLS as well. I told him the solution was definitely Nike. I also shared – and regretted afterwards – how stupid, old and with a deformed face, I look when I do video reports. Aargh.

I googled the term afterwards, discovered that Fear of Looking Stupid was real although I thought I had just invented it. Other people talking about FOLS, the younger brother of Imposter Syndrome. I also started noticing discussions on the more professional network, LinkedIn, between people who were surely less digitally native than myself asking how to expand your network on social networks and getting the same range of ever-lasting by-the-book good-and-friendly advice from well-meaning peers: publish outstanding content, share engaging concepts, comment and interact in relevant discussions. “Yes, but what if I look totally stupid when I ask a question?”, what if people I know suddenly realize how Human I am, despite my SuperHero avatar?

The answer is Nike again, Just do it.

The thing is we have an invisible guardian angel. It is the social media algorithm itself. It will come to our rescue whenever we look moderately stupid or give silly or uninteresting comments. When nobody reacts to our publications, the algorithm will penalize that content. Uninteresting. Not worth sharing further. Not monetizable via advertising as people don’t care. And therefore nobody sees it. My new friend in that twitter discussion ignored my last comment – thank heaven – and my silly message just drowned in the vast ocean of never-seen content on the internet thanks to my guardian angel.

People don’t talk so much about Fear of Looking Stupid – do you know why? Well, because they are afraid they will look stupid when they do. So really, be fearless, most of what you publish on the internet will never be seen and most of your comments will not generate any reaction. Just as most web pages are never visited and most blog posts never read. There are very few exceptions: if you have more sworn enemies than loyal friends or prone strongly controversial standpoints. In those cases, you can become infamous really quickly as your smallest false step will be detected and bloated up by those who don’t appreciate you. But frankly, that is the case for a small minority of people and you are surely not one of them, so walk without fear, express your opinions, they are worth it! Share your ideas, exchange with people, like things you like and ask questions when in doubt.

Almost like in real life.

I got there in time for “Recovery” – not from Transportation Weariness – but from something much worse, Google Penalties!! Kaspar and his Search Bro, Fili Wiese, are Xooglers (ex-Googlers) who used to work in the Search Quality teams. They were managing penalties and reinclusion requests at that time and today, this is what they do for a living. Help sites that have been penalised to find their way back into the Google Index.

Doing this is both very easy and very complex. Very easy because all you need to do is to respect all the Google Webmaster guidelines. Work by the book and regularly do audits to make sure nobody has messed up to make your site look bad (Negative SEO is more rare than people think).

Very difficult, on the other hand, because if you do SEO, you are necessarily trying to do things to improve your rankings and therefore possibly moving inside the gray area where you could be penalised if you pushed too far.

Then what do you do? Weeeelll, if you have been penalized, the first thing you have to figure out why (sometimes you haven’t been penalized, you just haven’t been succesful with your SEO ?). Google are not telling you. Then you have to clean up and document what cleaning you do. In this process, make use of some of the many tools available in the market (Kaspar mentioned screamingfrog, ryte, ahrefs, deepcrawl, semrush, majestic, linkresearchtools, botify) and especially the most important one, Google Search Console. And finally, once you have cleaned up – likely using the disavow tool for backlinks you don’t acknowledge if it is a link penalty – you will make your reinclusion request via the Google Search Console. In this phase, avoid annoyance, denial and excuses will not help you. Finally, you will need to wait for Google to react and maybe remove the penalty.

I did a Reinclusion project for a client many years ago and my question to Kaspar today was :

What has changed in the past 10 years on the process for reinclusion into the Google index?

Not much, according to Kaspar, you site still has to abide to the rules. There are more tools available to you, a bit more information in the Google Search Console and Google are dealing with the penalties more efficiently.

Kaspar ended up throwing in a couple of URLs for us. A guide to Google penalties on read.sc/penalties and a tool on disavow.tools.

Let’s Snap over to something else

Bit of a gloomy start of the day but luckily there came this bright moment of the Snapchat session. How to build your brand equity on Snapchat. Quite a challenge for most brands as Snapchat seems such an impenetrable world for many.

Clarisse Gratecap from Snapologie, helps brands work with Snapchat. She explained how the audience you find on Snapchat maybe a little different than what you expect. Of course there are teenagers but in France, the most important user group is 18-24 years old (38% of the population).

More importantly, Snapchat users have a certain level of exclusivity – there is only a 50% overlap with Instragram users. In other words, there are likely audiences on Snapchat you will not be able to address via other channels.

What stands out on Snapchat is the creativity brands are applying to their activities. Clarisse walks us through a number of examples. LACMA using snapchat to make art discovery fun for young people, Stranger Things (Netflix), connecting with fans via immersive experiences inside the TV series settings. A supermarket chain using snapchat stories with snapcodes in the shops to illustrate the story of product freshness. A retailer using a simple game to drive users towards product discovery and of course the great Easter egg search, Snapchat organised via their Maps function.

Clarisse was followed by Margaux Dauce from Michel et Augustin who have been using Snapchat extensively for 2 years. They use snapchat as a conversation channel with their audience and the channel corresponds really well to their values of creativity, authenticity and immersion. They use snapchat actively every day both to an internal and external audience. Their use of Snapchat inspired me to call it #snaplogging.

I learned a number of things in the session. I love snapchat for the face filters and sometimes exchange silly photos or videos with my kids. But practically, today was the first time I scanned a Snapcode. It is a bit like a QR code (which, by the way, I never really believed in).

Clarisse revealed the fact that you can create your own Snapchat Lenses with « Lens Studio » and have snapchat associate a snapcode to go with your Lens. Maybe something to try out as this is a completely free option. Thanks again to Clarisse and Margaux.

As one of the most advanced technologies in Augmented Reality, Snapchat should probably be part of every digital marketer’s roadmap in order to prepare for the future of engagement and of digital immersion.

Dynamic Search Ads (DSA)

It was a day of jumping from track to track. I was particularly interested in the following « SEA » or « Paid Search » track session on Dynamic Search Ads, or DSA as this functionality is something I mention in my “Major trends …” presentation at the European Search Conference a couple of weeks from now. Dynamic Search Ads are present within my « Functionalities » category as a major trend in 2018 and I was eager to see results from how Adquality and their client La Halle using it.

In short, Dynamic Search Ads are a bit of a magic tool in Google Adwords. You put in your URL, you trust Google to match your site with the searches that are relevant for your site and you start getting traffic. Like for many magic tools, it is about taking a Leap of Faith but still not totally trust the algorithm to do a good job.

The motivations for the use of DSA were anchored in the need to expand the reach of La Halle’s @LaHalle search campaigns. And according to Cem Senoz @CemSenoz, Xoogler and now Agency founder shared with us:

15% of search queries every day are new and will never be repeated again

You can hardly guess these search queries in advance and thereby target them once they occur and that is where Dynamic Search Ads come in handy. Google will target for you. Close your eyes, buckle up, and let Google take you on a journey… and you don’t need an agency anymore. Joking aside, when DSA is used intelligently like in this case, you can expand your campaigns profitably. According to Sandrine Ferrari from La Halle this is exactly what her objective with these campaigns was. Increase the proportion of the Web channel in the overall sales of La Halle significantly. Overall, they have seen a growth of almost 20% of sales and reduced the cost of sales at the same time and DSA has been an important contributor to this success.

The use of DSA was first implemented on a part of the catalogue where La Halle wanted to expand their presence. As Adquality explained, it was important to provide the right granularity by providing the URLs corresponding to key pages. While setting up the campaign, the agency would use the existing keywords in other parts of the campaign as negative keywords and thus avoid cannibalizing their existing campaigns. They would also continuously monitor what keywords where driving this new performance and this was used to enrich both the existing campaigns and also inform the content strategy for La Halle.

A great use of a new functionality and even a bit of secret sauce: a Dynamic Search campaign is very compatible with an effective content and SEO strategy. The better the content, the better your SEO results and also the DSA results. We don’t always find this type of virtuous circle in digital marketing.

How about a Privacy detour?

I couldn’t resist it. The Data Performance Summit was just next door and I sneaked in to follow a GDPR session. Privacy regulation and GDPR is still on everybody’s lips – it seems like the passing of the 25th of May 2018 where the regulation came into effect did not actually calm things down. On the contrary, there is a lot of turmoil in Biddable media these days as everyone wants to reduce their risk.

Most of this was not new to me. But just as a summary, here are the points addressed:

• The need to have Consent to use personal data in your marketing – or the reason why you got GDPR spammed on the 25th of May.
• Legitimate interest or the realm where you do not need consent for any treatment of personal data you may have – or the reason why you maybe shouldn’t have received so many GDPR spam emails on the 25th of May
• Login networks – or the concept of centralizing your consent in one place which can then be shared with the various interested parties you are in contact with
• Intra-community differences in the EU: « it’s a mess » according to the speakers
• E-privacy regulation – the next step after GDPR, or the future of EU privacy regulation.

I am really a supporter of privacy regulation as I think we need to defend the degree of freedom we have in our societies and that was not necessarily the case with all the personal data circulating on the internet (a couple of articles I wrote that may be of interest: Start making sense again – How to figure out if you are Human)

Let’s just round this up with a really useful trick. IP addresses are personal data according to GDPR. And IP addresses are used for things like geotargeting and for server logs and more things. But by replacing the last 3 digits in an IP address, it becomes anonymous data although you can still geotarget to some extent. Useful trick in some cases.

IA, Chatbots … Future of Search

Back to our main topics, Search marketing. The last session of the day is about Chatbots. When they first started to appear, I admittedly saw them as a potential future for Search. The new interactive Search interface. Now, a couple of years later, we have come close with the combination of Voice assistants (Google Home, Amazon Alexa, etc) but there are some obvious challenges like the economic model – what happens when you are not looking for a product…

This last session of the day had three speakers presenting different aspects of Chatbots. Not so much about AI and the Future of search but interesting nevertheless.

Javier Gonzalez@javierhelly from botly insisted on the potential for Chatbots as well as the fact that the first generation of bots had not been particularly convincing. They were too linear and inflexible. The second generation of bots are both flexible and conversational. They are also connected with company data bases and can therefore provide more than a superficial exchange with the user.

Javier showed a few client examples of 2^nd generation bots for clients like La Poste, Blablacar and FDJ.

The following presentation by Caroline Chupin @CarolineChupin ‏ from SNCF was also a good illustration of the evolution. She presented the Ouibot, a proprietary bot development deployed across the various platforms. They started out with a Facebook messenger bot, later built a bot for the Google platform and then for the website and now recently joined the bot on Amazon Alexa. At this point in time, the Ouibot can be used to search, book and alert but not yet to buy tickets. Several people in the audience asked whether the bot was able to inform about strikes and Caroline told us that this was a project they had now started working on so people could interrogate the bot about strike times and availability of the trips you planned.

Seems like the start and the end of this post  is talking about SNCF and the Parisian Transportation Gods… and may they be with us in the Future!

This was the write-up for Day 2 on SMX Paris 2018. The write-up for Day 1 can be found here: AI as a service, AI for SEO, Vectors, Clusters and Audiences
I live-tweeted a lot of this on my Twitter account @soanders in French/English. Please follow me on Twitter to keep up to date on my activity.

“A Web presence may only be a part of your communication strategy, but for some (bright) companies, it has become a part of their marketing strategy, and for other (brilliant) companies it has become a part of their global strategy.”

In 1997 the word on the street was already “Content is King” but most companies would not have understood that a real revolution was under way. Building a web site was a must – nobody questioned it and therefore didn’t really know what to do with it once they had it. When you had a web site, you were on the internet and anyone in the world could find you.

The main themes in Internet marketing in 1997 were clearly focused on the strategic position of this media. Web sites were built on the basis of a printed Graphic Design as if they were brochures and budgets were established for the creation of a Web site only. Once it is launched you will have visibility for ever.

At the time there was little thinking beyond the Website. Few companies would have an Internet Strategy with defined landmarks and objectives.So what did Internet Marketing look like back then? The below model was my view of the matter at the time:

• Entry Marketing: getting the visitors to your website
• Exit Marketing: optimising the outcome of the visit

All of this still exists today although the names are different. Instead of Entry Marketing we talk about Acquisition or about Inbound Marketing and instead of Exit Marketing we talk about Engagement or Conversion Optimisation. This same chart would look something like this today:

2 big things have changed in 2012. 1) Big Data. The amount of data available for marketers has exploded and 2) Interweaving channels. Communication channels are interweaving and the Zap generation of “fragmented consumers” are constantly changing their behaviour within Digital Media.

Digital Marketing is no longer about optimising a structured path of Economic Man through an Internet Funnel – it is about wiring contents for maximum distribution and it is about constantly tweaking multiple levers on the basis of thousands of data points to maximise the value users take from content and bring back to brands, rock-stars and products.