Levi's Social Shopping: The Shape of sCRM Things To Come

Useful post over at Web-Strategist by Jeremiah Owyang offering a walk-through of Levi’s deployment of Facebook social plugins to enable social shopping and benefit from word of mouth marketing on their e-commerce site – at minimum cost.

The post comes on the back of an earlier post in which Jeremiah summarized the Facebook’s bid to become the social glue that binds the web together – noting that the innovations (see summary table below) are;

1. A precursor to true sCRM (social CRM)

2. A solution for adding social features to corporate websites – social without tears

3. A challenge to Google

Jeremiah does outline the potential downsides and risks of integrating Facebook social shopping tools (see table below), something that has been echoed by DecisionStep. But in this latest post, Jeremiah appears genuinely impressed with how Levi’s has deployed the technology, suggesting it may give us a glimpse of the shape of things to come;

In the future, the difference between social networks and corporate websites will be hard to distinguish.

In terms of Levi’s deployment of Facebook social shopping, Jeremiah notes four components;

• Awareness: Levi’s homepage indicates that it now has Facebook integration
• Education: Video introducing how users can use ‘social gestures’ (the Facebook ‘Like Button’ plugin) on the site to indicate products they like
• Social Gestures: On product pages, the Facebook Like Button appears next to the product and Levi’s viewers to be the “First of your friends” to like it.
• Social Commerce:  Using the aggregated Facebook data, Levi’s creates a personalized Friend Store based on what your friends like and have suggested you’ll like, hoping to increase up-sell.

Jeremiah notes Levi’s social shopping allows vendors to mimic the peer pressure for purchase that goes on with in-store shopping with friends, the Facebook Like plugin allows users to shop with friends (without having to login to the site) – even if they are not present in space (or in time).  Ratings and reviews from random people may be good but friendsourced endorsements are better.

Jeremiah also suggests that the new Levi’s social shopping model could be useful beyond e-commerce; in-store with a mobile barcode reader, and for the potential of celebrity social gestures (‘likes’) to be hugely influential.  A significant opportunity, he argues, is to integrate Facebook social plugins into sCRM (social CRM) systems to enable more compelling personalized up-sell cross-sell recommendations – but cautions social vendors (e.g. Bazaarvoice, Pluck, Kickapps) to think though privacy issues, especially when their is no login wall.  Finally, he notes that the really big opportunity is to use social gestures to manage inventory and as a source of consumer insight.

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Facebook Social Colonization Matrix – by Jeremiah Owyang

Source: http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2010/04/21/facebooks-crusade-of-colonization/