The friction-free future of e-commerce 3.0

2010 was the year of social media: Mark Zuckerberg was named Time's Person of the Year, "The Social Network" seemed poised for Oscar glory, and Facebook exceeded Google's daily traffic. Certainly there were hiccups along the way - privacy settings, ease-of-use and the Google Buzz debacle - but no serious commentator currently considers the social Web to be anything but an established part of the media universe.

For all that, monetization of the social Web has been a story of extremes. While Zynga scored more than US$1 billion in sales of virtual farm machinery, the vast majority of social Web entrepreneurs struggled to find the right technology to create a viable business model. Survey after survey found that larger organizations used the social Web for creating buzz, rather than sourcing customers, and that consumers directed to products via social recommendations were much more likely to try the product, but were no more likely to purchase than those who stumbled through the door from paid search ads.

The broadcast effect of social media platforms creates the buzz but the narrowcast of known and trusted connections is what makes sales. In other words, presence on Facebook (through fan pages, "Like" campaigns and advertising, etc.) does great things for bringing a product into global awareness, but the actual selling process demands a more e-commerce-like, demographically tuned and personalized approach.

Delta Airlines, for example, discovered that, while the buzz of using social media for advertising purposes generated positive effects, the company could create real, measurable results by deploying a ticket reservations app that was embedded within the Facebook experience.

Read the full article on E-CommerceTimes.com.