dotbox: The 4Cs of Social Commerce - The 4C-able Future - Ashley Heather

Welcome dotbox, our newest MediaBizBlogger

This is the introduction to our four part series "The 4Cs of Social Commerce" which will cover each (Commerce, Content, Community and Context) in greater detail. Please come back weekly to read upcoming installments.

More than Just Facebook

Increasingly, the term "Social Commerce" is coming into vogue. However, many of those waving the flag are industry professionals who narrow the definition to lend credence to their own specialty—often nothing more than building Facebook Stores. This is misleading. Social Commerce is so much more than just fcommerce.

It Is that Big

Social Commerce encompasses a whole array of strategies, tactics and technologies that thoroughly enmesh Commerce with "The Social." It goes without saying that the two have always been inextricably linked. However, recent innovations in the digital space are giving brands, retailers and consumers too a far greater degree of control of how it all unfolds. Ultimately, what is taking place here is a sea-change in how we do business.

The 4Cs

In particular, there are four overlapping arenas that concern us—we call them Commerce, Content, Community and Context—i.e. The 4Cs of Social Commerce. Together, they constitute the very essence of Social Commerce is—which is the next generation of digital commerce, and its latest chapter.

It's Shopping!

At the end of the day, we retailers, brands and their agents are here in this space to drive sales. Digital commerce is at the heart of everything we do. All that comes after is a flowering of this essential core activity—Shopping… But in retrospect, since the crude beginnings of ecommerce, how far we have come!

Gonna Have an Evolution

We see the 4Cs as natural progressive evolutions of ecommerce, since it emerged in the 1980s. Happily, each has been digitally mastered in succession, at intervals of perhaps 3–5 years, magnifying in sum the overall vibrancy and power of all those that have come before. Social Commerce is just now beginning to reach the critical point of its powerful potential. It's been around for a few years, at least, but is only now starting to be understood in sharp focus.

The 4C-able Future

You've heard of the 4Cs of buying a diamond, but we're betting that the way we use the terms to define Social Commerce may be new to many of you. Here they are below in brief:

1. Commerce, ca. 1998

Early on, it was all just a matter of getting your inventory up online and working out a streamlined purchase path and checkout process—the fewer the clicks the better. It was really on the fulfillment end that things got sticky. Not surprisingly, for many large retailers, ecommerce was run as a small division of the mail-order catalogue business. That's essentially what it was, in electronic form.

2. Content, ca. 2003

The Web revolution has removed all limits to the amount of depth a brand can provide its customers. Pictures, video, information and editorial can all help to make a website a destination for those researching a purchase, increasing engagement time and helping to build strong brand affinity. If the content is good, sales naturally follow.

3. Community, ca. 2007

Suddenly, after the advent of Facebook, brands didn't just have customers who bought things; they had communities who shared their excitement with each other, and also virally with still others. Many businesses immediately saw this as the beginning of a 2-way conversation with customers—they wanted to show them they were listening! Others saw it as a 3-way conversation between them, their fans and their fans' friends. What it all meant was that your messaging suddenly had viral organic reach. On one level, this was a very cost-effective way to keep sites lively and informative. But, it soon occurred to the more progressive among us that it is ultimately worth a whole lot more to empower customers to take an emotional stake in the brand, to get involved at every level—and push it forward.

4. Context, ca. 2010

Last but not least, it is Context that most effectively cuts through the clutter to make brands, their collections and individual products and experiences resonate most with consumers. In essence, what it means is personalizing websites and other digital experiences to deliver content according to relevance. There's so much information available. The trick is to boil up the good stuff to the top. There's "The Who" to it: prioritizing the products, content and offers you deliver your customers by social relevance (think degrees of separation). And then there's "The Where"—geo-location is one aspect, but how exactly you are there is also important. For this reason, we all need to think in terms of delivering a consistent experience in all-channel commerce (web, socnet, mobile, tablet, in-store, etc.).

Conclusion

To some unfamiliar with the next-generation digital marketplace, one or several of the 4Cs may now seem like passing fads, extraneous to their bottom line. dotbox is here to offer a different point of view. In this day and age and evermore, businesses ignore any of "The 4Cs of Social Commerce" only at their own peril.

Next Steps

Will your business grow with the future or get left behind? How well you integrate all 4Cs together-as-one will likely be among the most important deciding factors in your ongoing success. Call us. Let's talk.

This is the introduction to our four part series "The 4Cs of Social Commerce" which will cover each (Commerce, Content, Community and Context) in greater detail. Please come back weekly to read upcoming installments.

dotbox CEO Ashley Heather is one of the pioneers at the intersection of ecommerce, social interaction and location-aware services. His companies include Musikube and Entertainment Media Works, which brought us StarStyle, StyleLogue and Plinking—in 2004, among the first Social Commerce websites. In his native London, he was the lead digital consultant at Impact Plus and an executive at Ford Motor Company. He is a frequent speaker at media industry events, including iBreakfast, CTIA Wireless, The Digital Coast Roundtable, MoMeMo, Social Media Week and is an Associate Member of IADAS. He can be reached at ashley@dotbox.com.

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