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426 Part Three Key System Applications for the Digital Age

TABLE 10.7 FEATURES OF SOCIAL COMMERCE

SOCIAL COMMERCE FEATURE DESCRIPTION
Social sign-on Web sites allow users to sign into their sites through their social
network pages on Facebook or another social site. This allows
Web sites to receive valuable social profile information from
Facebook and use it in their own marketing efforts.
Collaborative shopping Creating an environment where consumers can share their
shopping experiences with one another by viewing products,
chatting, or texting. Friends can chat online about brands,
products, and services.
Network notification Creating an environment where consumers can share their
approval (or disapproval) of products, services, or content, or
share their geo-location, perhaps a restaurant or club, with
friends. Facebook’s ubiquitous Like button is an example. Twitter
tweets and followers are another example.
Social search (recommendations) Enabling an environment where consumers can ask their friends
for advice on purchases of products, services, and content. While
Google can help you find things, social search can help you
evaluate the quality of things by listening to the evaluations of
your friends, or their friends. For instance, Amazon’s social
recommender system can use your Facebook social profile to
recommend products.

in 2012 to reach 37 million; and the social blogging site Tumblr reached 27
million people a month, growing 166 percent that year. MySpace, in contrast,
has been shrinking but nevertheless attracted 28 million visitors a month in
2012. According to ComScore, about 20 percent of the total time spent online in
the United States was spent on social network sites, up from around 8 percent
in 2007 (ComScore, 2012). The fastest growing smartphone applications are
social network apps: about 30 percent of smartphone users use their phones to
visit social sites. Half of all visits to Facebook in 2012 come from smartphones.
Marketers cannot ignore these huge audiences which rival television and
radio in size. In 2012, 72 percent of the U.S. Fortune 500 companies had a
Twitter account, 66 percent had a Facebook account, 62 percent had a YouTube
account, and 28 percent had a corporate blog. Marketers will spend over $3
billion on social network marketing in 2012 (twice the level of 2010), about 9
percent of all online marketing (eMarketer Inc., 2012).
Marketing via social media is still in its early stages, and companies are
experimenting in hopes of finding a winning formula. Social interactions and
customer sentiment are not always easy to manage, presenting new challenges
for companies eager to protect their brands. The Interactive Session on
Management provides specific examples of companies’ social marketing efforts
using Facebook and Twitter.

B2B E-COMMERCE: NEW EFFICIENCIES AND

RELATIONSHIPS

The trade between business firms (business-to-business commerce or B2B)
represents a huge marketplace. The total amount of B2B trade in the United
States in 2012 is estimated to be about $16 trillion, with B2B e-commerce (online

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