Social Commerce Management

 

The social commerce marketplace must be actively managed, and supported by each of the professional participants in the relationships.  This can be very difficult due to the wide cross section of participants and their interest in managing and supporting the relationship.  The retailer owns and must actively manage their interrelated social commerce marketplace across all partners because the retail owner has the greatest the greatest benefits and as a result the greatest investment riding on the success of the marketplace.  The retail owner of their social commerce marketplace must spend the time and effort to continuously and actively manage the interactions and changes demanded by the marketplace participants.

The retail owner of the marketplace has the greatest interest in the success and as a result must focus the greatest effort and attention to the marketplace to ensure that it remains fresh and interesting to the participants.  The social network participants and interactions are only related and a part of the market because of the customer interest and this can change on the whim of customer interest.  As a result, the retailer must implement a robust organization that interacts with participants and monitors all social commerce marketplaces and social networking trends along with third party shopping and purchasing tools.  There are so many interactions and tools in this social commerce world that it requires a full time focus of savey support teams to monitor and react to the changes in the market and customer demands.

Retailers can acquire these skills by acquiring start-up eCommerce companies such as is being done by Wal Mart or they can acquire these skills through recruiting talent and building the organization internally.  Each of these methods have their own challenges and benefits, chief among the challenges is overcoming legacy culture that was developed over the years.  Acquisition of capabilities is easy by comparison to the challenge of changing the culture in a large organization.  Leadership must embrace and drive the culture change in addition to the changes to succeed in the social commerce marketplace.  You cannot simply acquire the capabilities and then expect to succeed, leadership must focus and nurture the changes to the culture that are required for social commerce practices and methods to take root and gain the ability to maintain the culture and the growth in the social commerce marketplace.

Social commerce and the social commerce marketplace are focused on the rate of change and the speed to deliver in order to be successful and the most important aspect is the long term focus and support of leadership to encourage the change in culture required to recognize and support the change.  Leadership must take a long term and very patient view that will require a great deal of investment to take root and organically grow and support the marketplace.  This cannot simply be purchased, it must be grown internally.

And now for the audience participation portion of the show…

ECommerce will have wide ranging impacts on both the retail and manufacturing sectors.  How can you focus these abilities to improve the consumer's experience?  Improving the consumer’s experience will require a re-evaluation of the sales channels, the manufacturing channels and practices and the supply chain channels and practices from the raw materials to the consumers’ homes.  In order to ensure and maintain success in this new reality you must harness the tools and capabilities in many new areas.  How can you support these continuously changing requirements?