« Nobody knows nothin' | Main | State of the World 2008 » The Relationship EconomyI don't know Jay Deragon, but he's co-authored a book (with Scott Allen, an acquaintance of mine who's clueful about social network platforms and strategy) called The Emergence of the Relationship Economy that focuses on "relationship-driven commerce," a vision for online commerce that is similar to the approach Paco Nathan and I advocated via FringeWare, Inc. – in 1992, so this isn't exactly new thinking. Our vision for interactive commerce was buried in the industrial-strength broadcast-mode developments throughout the 90s, though the Whole Foods ecommerce projects I worked on had an interactive aspect. In fact, many ecommerce projects paid lip service to community, but they weren't what you would call "relationship-driven." I was part of a consulting team led by Casey Hughes earlier this decade where I strongly recommended just that approach – the company's model was an ideal fit – but I don't think they got it. Back to Deragon – yesterday he made a post that asks the musical question, "Will 2008 be the Year of Social Commerce?" Social commerce, he says, is "the holy grail of economics." He's talking about commerce consulted on or via social network platforms. Okay, forget the tech platforms: do we ever see commerce conducted in social environments? Via social networks? When I was active with the now-defunct FringeWare project, I called it a street market in cyberspace. It made perfect sense that, with technologies that facilitate interaction, we could bring buyers and sellers closer together, which is how you would image markets have forming originally, as person to person trade, inherently social. We've been trending in this direction since 1991-92, when the web first appeared. These marketing folks (Deragon, Scott, and their other co-authors) are presenting this as a dramatic change, but to me it's old news, though we can certainly take it to another level given the evolution of the social web since 2000. My own consulting practice now is all about leveraging web presence and social network thinking to improve business and create targeting messaging and interaction, and though I don't see anyone else with just that approach, it doesn't seem new to me. But I'd like to hear more abut the specifics of "social commerce" – how do you sell through social networks? Does it mean, as I had suggested in the consultation I mentioned earlier, that members of a network sell to each other, and share the profits with the operators of the network? Or does it mean that social network platforms might be useful for the same top-down sales we all know so well – that the social network platform is a place to aggregate "consumers" so that they can buy the same way they've always bought. (This is where Second Life seems to be going.) jon posted this at 9:31 AM |
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