Social commerce in practice

Retail Week yesterday hosted a webinar on social commerce that highlighted both how much retailers have to gain from engaging with their customers, but also the many questions they have concerning how they should go about it.

For the first time ever, I hosted a panel of experts who were all women – I’ve since been told it looked like an episode of the TV show Loose Women. I hope the chat wasn’t quite as inane, certainly the questions we received from viewers watching it live were sensible and thought-provoking.

A lot of the discussion and debate around social commerce – where retailers bring together social media and ecommerce – so far has been about how etailers can get involved, what resources they need and what rules they need to follow.

We talked through all these points, and all three of my panel members  - Mireia from ecommerce platform provider ATG, Jennifer from ratings and reviews expert Bazaarvoice and Jo from B&Q’s multichannel team – gave practical examples and shared some of the results they have achieved.

Questions asked included whether retailers should set up their own social networking sites or not, whether it’s possible to integrate social commerce and customer relationship management systems and strategies, and whether social commerce can really make money.

But perhaps the most enlightening was a question about what you do if your customers start to communicate with you too much.

The panel were adamant that you can’t have too much of a good thing. If you have customers who want to engage in dialogue you should channel that, not only so your staff can learn from it, but to allow other customers to benefit as well.