Today’s shopper has fundamentally changed and wants a new buying experience.  Trust in big brands is low.  People want to gain confidence in what they buy from their friends and insight from their community.  Social technologies are enabling this shift in shopping habits. They are maturing from being social for the sake of being social in marketing, to a new and transformative phenomena.These are the finding of a recent study, The Rise of Social Commerce,  from from the Altimeter Group.

The study included 123 retailers and consumer manufacturers and found than 20 per cent of companies already have social commerce strategies.  However the pace of change is fast and 86 per cent of those companies without a social strategy indicated that plan to have a strategy  in place in 2011.

Altimeter makes five recommendations to retailers and consumer product  manufactures as a result of the research:

1.  Shift from transactional to social. Buying needs to be social.  Don’t fall into the trap that social commerce is a sub-segment of ecommerce; social commerce empowers the shopping experience.  It’s an effective aggregator for the voice of the customer into the voice of the community.

2.  Prepare for greater volatility. The viral nature of social commerce makes it very unpredictable. Social makes demand more volatile requiring greater enterprise synchronisation of events and even tighter coordination across the value chain.

3. Unleash the power of convergence. Focus on the redefinition and potential improvement of the shopping experience through the intersection of ecommerce, mcommerce and social commerce strategies.

4. Build horizontally. Start with a blank sheet of paper to determine the horizontal processes and create a true customer-centric value chain.

5. Fail forward. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes. Social commerce is evolving. each technology will mature, and there will be lots of uncertainty along the way.  Experiment and investigate.

Read the report in full: