Interesting post by Jordan Julien urging brands not to try running before they can walk when trying to monetize social media.

The basic idea is that you need “social equity” (awareness, reputation, and engagement) to do social commerce.

Julien suggests that brands should first run social media marketing campaigns to build awareness and reputation (by offering something on the fun-value axis), and then to build engagement (user participation), before embracing social commerce (to drive sales).

Julien’s 3 phase approach – awareness-engagement-commerce – to monetizing social media is interesting, and makes sense for brands, especially those not selling online directly to the public yet.

But for for brands and retailers already selling online, we wonder if social media marketing campaigns are really a prerequisite to social commerce success; Amazon has never been big on social media marketing campaigns, but this hasn’t stopped it from become the grand dame of social commerce.

Moreover, people don’t expect social media marketing campaigns (yet at least), but they do increasingly expect social media tools on e-commerce platforms (e.g. reviews, user forums).  Social commerce tools are becoming a hygiene factor in e-commerce with or without associated social media marketing campaigns.

And given that it requires sophistication, creativity and skill (and a good agency) to run social media marketing campaigns that produce  reliable and measurable or ROI, we’d suggest an alternative view; brands and retailers should consider running social media marketing campaigns after they’ve implemented social commerce.

But whether you buy into Julien’s 3 phase approach to monetizing social media, his post is good-joined-up thinking, and finishes with a useful summary of the contents of the social commerce toolbox.

• Reviews: User reviews, onsite and syndicated to user networks
• Shopping: Storefronts or promotions in social media
• Sharing: SWYN rules – share with your network (with a personal message) [also social shopping]
• Pricing: Exclusive pricing for people coming from social media (deal feeds)
• Registration: Speed: Let them log in fast with Facebook Connect, Twitter or OpenID and checkout fast with PayPal, Amazon, Google

This is going to be big, Google’s new YouTube Direct service.

Designed for Citizen Reporting, but will allow brands and retailers to run and curate their own YouTube style gallery of reviews, user-generated ads, guides, stories and testimonials on their own websites.  Best news – it’s open source.  Web agencies at the ready…

Continuing our review of social commerce resources on the Web, a presentation below from Ripple6, the social media software company with a community spin on social commerce, entitled “Turning Their Friends into Your Salesforce: Going Beyond Recommendations into Social Commerce”

Top Takeouts

• Customer reviews are great, but customer reviews from people you know are better; allow users to connect and share recommendations – social recommendations
• Users want three things from your site 1) timely and useful information, 2) deals – savings, discounts, specials and exclusives, 3) input from people like ourselves recommendations (taken from Ripple6 video)

Top Facts

• Almost half of online users have made purchases based on social media recommendations – and social media sites are now the most popular source of brand information
• 54% of online community members visit their community at least once a day (71% rate their their community very or extremely important to them)

Top Cases

• None covered but Ripple6 work with Procter & Gamble, Unilever, and other CPG brands selling “social insights” (online research panels) software, “brand communities” (“cloud communities” – multiple portal communities distributed over various sites), and social analytics software (word of mouth insights)

Nice post from Olivia Hayes over at Ignite Social Media, musing on the potential for PowerReview‘s soon-to-be-launched social commerce tool called BrandConnect- a white label customer reviews tool that allows merchants and brands to

• a) collect structured customer reviews and selectively publish those it wishes to (datasheet here) and
• b) enable their customers to syndicate their reviews to their Twitter, Facebook and blog pages (WordPress, Blogger, Live Journal & Windows Live Spaces supported) (datasheet here)…

As Olivia notes Brand Connect is surfing a big wave here built on two digital swells – social media with customer reviews:

In future tense, any business selling products that doesn’t utilize some customer review functionality is absolutely going to see it hurt their bottom line.

I haven’t had the chance to check out the functionality of Brand Connect, but to maximise utility for clients, PowerReviews will no doubt be adding strategic value to the reviews. For example, it would be nice if the reviews get aggregated together to provide the Net Promoter Score (would/would not recommend – predictor of future sales) for store items.  Add in customer spend, and you have a strategic tool for driving online sales (sell more stuff that profitable promoters like).

In terms of the integration with social media, PowerReviews are sensitive to client worries about negative reviews – providing a statge-gate process where clients can review reviews and decide which get  published.  But with one of the advantages of the social web being “realtime”, realtime publication and syndication of at least positive reviews is important.  (a simple “if you like it, tell others – if you don’t tell us” mechanism would work here.)

Here are some screenshots of the tool (click thumbnails to enlarge).

Integrating customer reviews with social media (dubbed “Social Megaphone”) as PowerReviews is doing is smart – it will turbo-charge the effectiveness of customer reviews in driving sales (link courtesy of Olivia’s post) - and make the inclusion of customer reviews even more compelling for brands and merchants.  With the recent launch of Squidoo’s Brands in Public customer reviews service that aggregates free flow (non-structured) social media commentary on brands, this swell is growing…

Piryx is an Austin based social commerce company that offers a payments processing linked to social networking and micro-blogging platforms. Here’s how it works (and see video below). Pyrix has been showcasing its wares at DEMOfall 09 – by running a fundraising campaign for the Jon Bon Jovi Soul Foundation, a non-profit organization working against poverty and homelessness.

Piryx are focusing on developing their social commerce platform with small businesses and donations (charity, political)… They take a 4-5% commission on payments – but the integration with social networking platforms is innovative. It’s be interesting to see how PayPal responds…

In the meantime, we get to post one of the best rock tracks of all time