Social Ecommerce - the brand new revolution in Social

E-commerce was, until recently, the hottest topic around. Traditional brick and mortar commerce was no longer the only real approach to shop. Web 1.0 started with that. Soon after, the now omnipresent Web 2.0 dawned on us, as more users came online and interactions began to happen. Videos and high-speed broadband made syndication possible and with that the sharing of content. Blogging has now become the way of life. Forums have become commonplace. You can't do much without Youtube today.

The world of Web 2.0 is onto yet another change. Blogging is giving way to micro-blogging as an easier path to convey information. Twitter led the way and still to-date continues to. It has become so easy for anyone to share their thoughts, news, opinions, reviews, opinions and agreements to other people’s thoughts and views, and to share links of what they like and what they do not like, all in a 140 character snippet. “Viral” marketing truly caught on fire. And when that happened, Social began to take shape with the arrival of various social networks. Facebook has made it possible for users to interact with people they know, trust and wish to become friends with, with ease, sophistication and in style. Social Media Marketing and Social Networking today lead to one thing - Facebook. With the large 600 million user community, Facebook has taken the world by storm, sufficient to say that Facebook would be one of the top most populous places, if it were a country. True, Facebook could be its own country and with the social currency, its own bank too! Social networking has now become the de-facto standard, with people spending more time on Facebook than all other sites put together.

The e-world is on the move again, in the right direction. Social Networking and Online Commerce are mixing. E-commerce and Social Networking are joining forces and the result is fascinating. Welcome to Social Commerce! A variety of names and paths - S-Commerce, Social Market, Social Hub, Social Shopping, Scommerce, Social E-commerce, Social Ecommerce, Social Marketplace - all of them lead to the same destination - Social Commerce.

Wikipedia calls Social Commerce as the “Use of social media via social interaction and user contributions to assist in the online buying and selling of products and services”. So what exactly does this mean and why is this so useful? Simply put, people trust other people than products, brands or companies. When people hear good or bad things about anything, whether a product or a service, and the more they hear about it in a particular direction (good or bad), they naturally incline to the decision that the services or products is as-such, without having to try the same themselves. This makes sense and is true for everything in life, personal or business. That’s why references, referrals and reviews are worth more than anything else one could offer or seek in making a decision. The world of e-commerce, with its challenges surrounding buying or selling products or services remotely, where one cannot touch and feel the offering prior to purchase, particularly will benefit from social interactions and user contributions in a manner that is beyond words. It is more than just a welcome change to be finally able to buy a services or products knowing and trusting what other users say, rather than attempting and trying to convincing ourselves to believe what the services or products owner self-claims. This is cool, is it not!!

The world of Social Commerce applies just as equally to services as it does to products. Social Shopping is fast becoming the way to buy products today. Social Marketplace is fast becoming the way to seek services. Social Commerce has seen over $2 billion in investments in the first quarter of 2011 alone. This is the new way of business. Social Commerce - the way forward it is.