How to do Social Selling Properly (for the benefit of Facebook, Google and Twitter…)
The value of goods and services purchased online in 2012 was USD 440 billion, a figure that will grow to USD 668 billion by 2016. That’s a pretty big market.
So here’s an interesting question for you: is online retail mature?
Online retail is pretty much the same as it was 10 years ago: the business model is established, the payment and product discovery infrastructure is in place and consumers understand and accept online retail as a major, sustainable online service category.
We all know that online retail is still a growth market, but is it a mature market?
I think the answer to this question is NO WAY: I just cannot accept that in, say, 100 years people will still be buying products and services via online shops, just as they do today.
Surely there must be a way to fuse online retail with social relationships so that one peer could sell a product to another peer? I am not thinking about selling used goods, like on eBay. I am thinking about selling new merchandise, like Amazon. So every person on the planet could become a retailer and, with wireless devices, every face to face interaction could become a point of sale.
If this were possible then the online retail market would explode into billions of potential sales points and we would have a billion-strong global army of ‘social sellers’ each of whom would be focused on selling specific products and services they knew and were passionate about.
Question: What would this do to the online retail market as we know it? Answer: Serious damage.
When I think about social selling, this is what I’m thinking about.
If the market were to evolve in such a direction then in years to come we would look back at today’s online retail ‘shop’ model as being very crude.
Surprisingly, Google and Facebook do not appear to appreciate the potential of social selling:
Facebook seems unable or unwilling to implement any revenue model that does not involve selling advertising, while Google is focused on better enabling online retail in the wider sense using products like Google Wallet and Google Shopping.
So how might social selling work?
Read on to read a detailed social selling ‘use case’, a description of the social selling model and diagrams for the underlying value chain and ecosystem. Source Generator
Research, Ltd.
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