Speck Launches F-Commerce Social Referral App; Every Touchpoint Becomes a ‘Shoppable’ Moment [screenshots]

Turn every consumer touchpoint into a “shoppable” moment.

That’s the dream of digital marketing agency Resource Interactive, and this week the company came one step closer by making your Facebook profile commerce enabled.

Resource Interactive partnered with Speck, a company that designs premium form-fit protective cases for digital devices, to launch a new way for consumers to share and shop.

Speck consumers will now be able to commerce enable their own Facebook walls simply by clicking the “like” button on a Speck product page. It’s the first ever social commerce campaign fed by social plugins on an ecommerce site, according to Resource Interactive.

How It Works

The process is extremely simple. When a consumer “likes” a product on Speck’s website, a Facebook stream campaign pops up on their Facebook wall and enables their Facebook friends to buy the product directly from the consumer’s Facebook wall. The action also appears in friend’s newsfeeds.

What It Means For Brands

Instead of pushing messaging into the news feed of consumers, Speck allows consumers themselves to virally spread products to their own network. The message doesn’t come from the brand, but as a “liked” recommendation from a friend. By enabling the transaction in the news feed, Speck is facilitating a more unobtrusive form of marketing – i.e., no spam – with the added benefit of making it easy for consumers to buy in the moment.

“Consumers trust other consumers, especially those inside their own network. Because the referral comes in the form of a ‘like’ from someone you know it has a greater chance of being viewed positively,” said Jeremy Jacobs, product manager for Resource Interactive.

What It Means For Consumers

Consumers will see immediate product recommendations from their friends. “Likes” appearing in the news feed are nothing new, but enabling consumers to complete purchases in the news feed from those trusted updates has never been implemented before, says Resource Interactive.

The company believes that lowering the barriers to consumers by enabling shopping and checkout within the news feed and having socially fed recommendations in the form of “likes” is the key to driving brand value and enabling successful distributed commerce.

Speck Facebook Tab Store

Not only does Speck use the friend-to-friend option for social selling, it also has an fanstore on its Facebook page. The store works in the same manner as the news feed version in that purchase transactions are fully managed within Facebook.

However, according to Jacobs, the transaction is actually processed through Speck’s ecommerce shopping cart, exactly the same way it would if a customer were to make a purchase through the website. “The same security measures that are implemented on the website are in place on Facebook as well,” Jacobs added.

Conclusion

Our view is that f-commerce is really fan-commerce – friend-to-friend sharing of product likes, information and purchases. We are more likely to be influenced by people we like and that reciprocal influence creates a social bond. This means f-commerce works best when it’s driven by people selling to people, rather than brands to people.

Resource Interactive and its client Speck seem to have reached that same conclusion and, as a result, are harnessing the power of Facebook in a way that’s synonymous with other forms of social sharing on the network.

Furthermore, through its use of Facebook social plugins (the Like button) on its ecommerce site, along with its Facebook page and accompanying fanstore, Speck has incorporated both sides of the social commerce equation – helping people connect where they buy and buy where they connect. In that sense, the vision of its platform provider Resource Interactive – making every touchpoint a “shoppable” moment – is becoming an approachable reality.