No Social Media Revolution, No Social Customer [infographic]

Just as social media is not a revolution (it’s just media – get over it), the idea that you have a revolutionary new kind of customer – the social customer – is nonsense too.

Your customers have always been ‘social’ – learning from each other and even benefiting from collective buying power – through intermediaries.  It’s just that digital technology allows customers to shop smarter with their social intelligence by removing space, time and scale barriers.  The revolution, if it exists, is digital – not social.

So here’s an interesting infographic from the UK social commerce platform Gloople that puts the so-called social customer into a broader perspective.  Customers are doing what they always have been doing, i.e. using their social smarts to learning socially and collaborate but now digital technology – particularly technology –  allows them to do it faster, more efficiently and more conveniently.