Social Networks Transforming Marketing, eCommerce
Marketing, eCommerce, CRM, and advertising will be transformed by social networks over the next five years as new technology provides consumers with portable online identities, according to Forrrester Research. In The Future of the Social Web, Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang writes that social experience is disjointed because consumers have separate identities in each social network they visit.
“The Social Web is about to evolve into something much broader than a few social network sites: a consistent backdrop for every online activity. Portable social IDs and the changes they enable will transform how consumers, brands, and social networks interact. This online social experience will evolve through five eras.”
A simple set of technologies that enable a portable identity will soon empower consumers to bring their identities with them — transforming marketing, eCommerce, CRM, and advertising.
- The era of social relationships. This was the first stage of the Social Web, starting in the mid- 1990s with communities like AOL and maturing a few years ago. In this era, people connected to each other using simple profiles and friending features to share information, discussions, and media.
- The era of social functionality. Today’s social networks have evolved beyond “friending” into
platforms that support social interactive applications and provide new meaning and utility to
communities. Even so, social relationships are still locked up within sites. - The era of social colonization. In the next stage of social evolution, starting later in 2009,
technologies like OpenID and Facebook Connect will let individuals traverse the Internet with
their social connections along for the ride. The boundaries of social networks and traditional
sites will blur, making every Web site into a social experience.4 - The era of social context. Next year, as sites begin to recognize people’s personal identities and their social relationships, they will customize visitors’ experiences based on their preferences, their behaviors, and who their friends are. In addition to enabling more intense social applications, in this stage social networks will absorb features of email and become a base of operations for everyone’s online experiences.
- The era of social commerce. Starting about two years from now, as social networks become the repository for identities and relationships, they will become more powerful than corporate Websites and CRM systems. Communities will become the driving force for innovation. As a result, brands will cater to communities, resulting in a power shift toward the connected customer.
destinationCRM.com provides more detail on the report, including an interview with the author. The full report is available here.
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