Social Commerce? Just Tell me When!

The advent of social commerce, this is the whole bet and project of this blog and its team.

If numerous signs have indicated premises for this new form of consummation, keep in mind that this is only a taste of what’s to come.

Jeremiah Owyang, analyst at Forrester Research, predicts a bright future for social commerce….after completing 5 key phases of social media:

1. Social relationship phase: people connect with each other and share information
2. Social functionality phase: social networks take on the form of operating systems
3. Social colonization phase: each experience can now be “social”
4. Social context phase: the content is personalized and targeted
5. Social commerce phase: communities define the new products and services

We can see well how social networks complete phase 1. 

Phase 2, the era of applications and widgets, social interconnection is already well advanced.

In phase 3, the one of “shared ID”, individual identities shared between networks and websites is also taking place. Thus, a lot of internet users directly share videos on their profile from YouTube on these social networks.

However, a real “portable” identity is not yet in place, despite having the OpenID standard.

Phase 4, the one of social context, involves the availability of targeted content and seems to me more confusing.  Fortunately, for Jeremiah Owyang, these phases superpose with time, as indicated in the graph above.

This puts the horizon of  social commerce  around 2011!

Will we, impatient social consumers, be able to wait?

See Jeremiah Owyang’s article