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?

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?

Social Commerce Execution

 

Execution is important in all aspects of retail and it is especially important in the social commerce practices because of the interaction between social networks, eCommerce and physical stores.  Due to the nature of the interactions and the tools involved in these interactions execution takes on an especially critical requirement and key to success.  There is no other way to succeed without a focus on execution and maintenance of the communications and functionality that makes up the social commerce marketplace.  The social commerce marketplace is a very cohesive framework that connects many moving pieces and because of this it requires a great deal of focus to ensure identification and incorporation of changing customer demands.

Due to the number of interacting pieces that make up the social commerce framework along with the number of participants the social commerce marketplace a dedicated focus is required to monitor and support changes demanded by the participants.  This is a full time job for a team of people because of the intersecting activities and the volume of discontinuous change resulting from these interactions.  There is always a new service or a new network that materializes on the market at unplanned intervals that can suddenly change the direction and impose new requirements on the market.  Each of the interacting pieces that make up the social commerce framework are on different schedules and can be taking different directions based on their priorities and also the participants demands and then each of these changes must be analyzed for impact to the other interacting pieces in order to maintain a cohesive social commerce marketplace.

This is also especially difficult because the interacting pieces and the social commerce participants do not develop a cohesive inclusive plan to address participant demand.  Each participant reacts to the demand and changing market in a manner that is beneficial to their own plans and ability to integrate new demands.  This requires a flexible framework and infrastructure in order to support the changing demands and more importantly it requires a continuous focus on analysis and execution in order to react and incorporate the changing demands and changing capabilities of the marketplace.  

This is a big change for the large legacy retailers, and I believe this is a large factor in their struggles to maintain their place in the marketplace.  In the social commerce marketplace identification of demands and how to address those demands are important and even more important is the ability to execute to meet these changing demands.  There is an old saying that is even more true today in this social commerce marketplace; if you don’t do it right the first time, when will you have time to re-do it?  

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?