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7.1 Social Commerce: Definitions and Evolution 203

7.1 SOCIAL COMMERCE: DEFINITIONS A major origin of social commerce (SC) was the develop-
AND EVOLUTION ment of Web 2.0 technologies, as previously mentioned.
With these came commercial applications, which included
The term social commerce was defined in Chapter 1. Social activities in social networks and the use of social software
commerce (SC), also known as social business, refers to such as blogs and wikis. A major driver of SC is the global-
e-commerce transactions delivered via social media. ization of business. This prompted the need for collaboration
of employees, partners, and customers, sometimes world-
wide. Web 2.0 applications created an efficient and effective
Definitions platforms for such collaboration. Web 2.0 is a major con-
tributor to social media, which is the major driver of social
As it is a new field that involves several academic and pro- commerce. For details, see Turban et al. (2016).
fessional disciplines, there is no agreed-upon definition or The development and rapid growth of mobile comput-
description of the content and boundaries of the social com- ing and smartphones have also facilitated social commerce.
merce field. Regardless of its definition, the field is growing Mobile commerce is the basis for SC models such as location-
rapidly both in the USA and elsewhere. For statics and trends based applications, social networks, and consumer/company
for 2015 and 2016, see Bennett (2014). For the impact of the networking.
technology, see ShopSocially (2013). The magnitude of the A major emphasis of SC is its marketing orientation.
field can be seen in Bennett’s infographic (2014). Traditional marketing activities were applied to Internet mar-
For additional discussion, see bazaarvoice.com/research- keting in the mid-1990s, when companies began building
and-insight/social-commerce-statistics. websites and using e-mail to advertise their products for sale
off-line. As the Web developed, marketers applied the Internet
to facilitate e-commerce transactions. Until that point, mar-
The Evolution of Social Commerce keters controlled brand messages and continued their adver-
tising and other communication monologs to customers and
Social commerce emerged from the integration of several potential buyers (prospects). With the emergence of social
fields, which are shown in Figure 7.1. For example, Marsden media, marketing communication changed to a dialog with
and Chaney (2009) show how social media contributes to Internet users, and many marketing strategies evolved or
sales, making it a social commerce application. completely transformed to support social commerce.

Figure 7.1 The major roots of
social commerce Sociology, Internet,
Marketing Social Web E-Commerce
Behavior

M-
Commerce
Social Internet
Marketing Communities Web 2.0

L-Commerce
Social
Networks

Social
Media

Social
Social
Commerce Media
Marketing