Social Commerce Resilience

 

Resilience is required for all aspects of social commerce because of the dependence of the social commerce success on so many inter-related tools and participants.  Resilience is required in connectivity between all participants, in technology platforms and functionality and also in the relationships between all of the participants.  This presents a much more complicated challenge than has been taken up by retailers in the past to deal with consumer demands and the supply chain between all partners within the relationships.  Now however and especially because of the available technology and especially mobile technology available to consumers these resilience challenges are greater and even more important to the success of the retailers.  

I have previously said that social networks and mobile technology allows consumers to mold and create shopping and purchasing methods to meet and adjust to their lifestyle requirements.  This is an important piece driving the importance of resilience in the social commerce marketplace.  Then the importance of resilience in the social commerce marketplace has already reached a degree of criticality that can no longer be ignored by retailers and it requires them to take this on as a business continuity challenge to resolve.  As a result of the growth of eCommerce and omni-channel sales in the retail marketplace the resilience of their social commerce marketplace must be addressed as a business continuity requirement to protect to long term viability of their business.  

The Internet provides a level of resilience to support the communications links between the tools, however, any break from the Internet for any extended period of time would be disastrous to the retailer.  Connectivity resilience is also not as easy as simply installing a primary and secondary circuit, it requires separation lines into the retailer and even better, separation of technology.  The ‘last mile’ issue in networks now encompasses both the last mile line into the facility and the technology platform.  As an example, I have experienced an extended outage of fiber even though contracting with two service providers when a cut in the fiber network was experienced by the local provider.  

Next the resilience of social commerce tools and more importantly the social network platform services such as Facebook must be reviewed and addressed.  This gets very difficult because the retailer only controls their own interaction to the social commerce service.  The resilience in this example is the plan for the continuous interaction and maintenance of connections and updates to the platform.  In this case the resilience is the maintenance and timeliness of the communications with these social platforms and tools.  This must be accounted for and supported by the retailer to ensure they are timely in response to consumer interactions and more importantly maintain continuous expansion and utilization of new tools and capabilities.  In this case the resilience is related to maintaining currency in the social network platforms and tools that consumers are using.

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?