Online retail landscape looks bright:

And this trend is set not just to continue but to grow. Bain & Co. forecast that by 2020, 95% of music and 75% of books will be sold online. And even luxury goods, reticient at first to embrace the internet given the lack of advice from trained sales staff they could give to customers, are now enjoying significant sales growth derived from online transactions. A greater proportion of luxury fashion is sold over the internet than mass-market clothing, which is testament to just how much mindsets in the luxury goods industry have shifted.

Multichannel results in greater value transactions:

This is all achieved without mentioning m-commerce. Mobile phones are increasingly being used to research purchases before consumers hand over cash in stores or online. About 20% of sales in 2010 were classed as multichannel, meaning that orders were picked up in store or goods were ordered online after research in a traditional shop or showroom. Deloitte recently published research showing that multichannel customers spent an average £143 per transaction compared with £57 for traditional store customers.

So for those retailers vulnerable to online competition, the future does not look particularly bright. Moreover, research has shown that the more consumers shop online, the harder it is to sell at a healthy premium. This explains much of the trouble for the likes of HMV, and retailers of electrical goods such as Comet and BestBuy.

Key is to create balance:

This throws up a problem that any company operating in the social media space can potentially come across; the issue of creating a balance between not biting the hand that feeds you on two fronts! On the one hand, you need users to get advertisers interested, and on the other, the more you can offer advertisers in terms of presence, the more appealing your space will become. But potentially at the cost of your users..the loyal folk that got you to this charmed position in the first instance!

Treading on the toes of Google+ and Facebook

Twitter intend to offer “brand pages”. Users will still have the option to decide whether they want to visit a brand page or not. So it should not be too intrusive. Furthermore, an enhancement of the “hashtag” system will result in users being able to view content based on their interests and location.

The redesign of the company pages will essentially allow for more customisation from the brands. It will give brands more control over the look and feel of their page, and give them the ability to show embedded multimedia.

Brands signed up already:

Coca-Cola, McDonalds and Disney are just some of the companies that are already signed up. However, it will not be available to companies in the UK until some time in 2012. The objective in social media is to engage in innovative ways with in the desired audience. All you tweeters out there, be sure to let us know if these companies succeed in achieving that through these new channels!

Mobile has a lot going for it:

But smartphones excel not just in their look, but also in their utility. And the consumerisation of the mobile phone owes a lot to the cloud. For much of the personal computing era, the content that people needed for work or entertainment had to be stored on PCs’ hard disks, or on external drives and USB keys. Now huge amounts of data reside in the cloud, and can be instantly retrieved from almost anywhere in the world.

The rise of the cloud benefits the smartphone user in other ways too. It has manifested itself in a multitude of consumer-focused web services from Facebook, which has over 800m users, to a host of smaller firms such as Foursquare, which was created specifically to let people tell their friends where they are.

Find your SoLoMo

A combination of social networking, location-signalling, and mobile computing (SoLoMo) is changing the way we use web services. It is encouraging to use them more frequently on a smartphone or tablet device, than we would a PC.

The proliferation of broadband connections has also helped catapult this into the mainstream. Fixed-line broadband connections are now commonplace, often with a Wi-Fi link at the end of them to allow people to use their devices wherever they are. You can now stay connected to the internet almost anywhere.

For you as a small business with an online presence, our advice is take a look at m-commerce..and fast.  We have been advising on this blog to take social media seriously for many months now, and fortunately a lot of our customers have responded.

Engaging via social media, alerting potential customers of special offers when they are in your area or searching for relevant information around your products via their smartphones..these are yet more opportunities to make e-commerce and even larger part of your business into the future.

You need two websites nowadays:

One thing that this should flag up for businesses, is that a social media presence, has become, at the very least, as important as your web site. Any product-focused operation needs to be where its customers are. Social media’s power to engage an interested audience, and to enable customers and prospects to advocate your brand for free only strengthens this argument.

But there has been a backlash among the Internet population about the control online behemoths such as Facebook and Google seem to have over us. These brands are much maligned in the media..we are constantly told that these people cannot be trusted.

Facebook and Google: Friends or foes??

People have a choice. There are plenty of search engines aside from Google. There are numerous other ways to organise and enhance social lives, or to promote your brand in a positive way, other than Facebook. These are just two of the best at what they do. We use them for convenience and for the quality of their service if nothing else.

If Google started to give erroneous and irrelevant results on a regular basis, we would soon turn away. And the same with Facebook..if it was really that intrusive and “Big-brother”like, we would soon delete accounts…and the population would fall at a much faster rate than Facebook users are currently jumping ship.

Friends for sure:

Rather than being perceived as dominant and oppressive control freaks in the online space, these two brands should be embraced and appreciated for the great things they are. There are very few people reading this, who will not have benefited from either brands myriad of great services. If that wasn’t the case, we would soon be off to use someone who could give us what we want!

A whopping £5.2billion was spent online in the UK during April of this year. This equates to £82 per person, and a year-on-year increase of 19%. Figures the High Street may well never reach again. Indeed, the High St is reporting some of its worst results in years.

One of the key factors in driving e-commerce is comparison shopping. Instantaneously, consumers can find the best price for what they are looking for. People are still shopping, but they are increasingly savvy. They are going online to find the best deal.

With the advent of social commerce channels, and mobile applications, growth in e-commerce is forecast to continue. Indeed, those multi-channel retailers – those with both a high-street and an online presence – have seen the fastest growth in the past year.

It is when recognised brands such as Tesco, House of Fraser, and John Lewis, are focusing on their online presence, that you know online retail is truly coming of age. Indeed, John Lewis’s online sales have risen 24% in the past year.

The development of technology has clearly assisted these retailers in their ability to facilitate successful transactions. Now the challenge for e-retailers both big and small, is to integrate the growing number of sales channels to ensure a clear marketing message and consistent customer experience.

Many foresee mobile commerce soon overtaking desktop internet access and are gearing up with shopping applications for mobile phones. This means consumers will expect to receive relevant messages based on where they are.

So if you are a traditional shop, get serious about the web and its possibilities to ensure long-term success.

But what are the best practices employed by brands that are generating tangible value from Facebook and the “Like” button? This is easily the most widely adopted social Plugin, and you do not need to be a globally recognised brand to reap the benefits.

Social Plugins more effective than your marketing team!

The average Facebook user has 130 friends. If you can persuade a user to share a story about your business on Facebook, then it’s not only a great cost-effective marketing tool, but the real magic lies in the fact that is a personal referral from a friend to a friend. This is a significantly stronger sell that if a company is “pushing” a generic marketing message out there. Incidentally, there is nothing more old hat than that, and Facebook users give such marketing strategies very short shrift!

By optimising the Facebook Like button, you can generate significantly increased traffic to your website. Levi’s is a great example of this; over 40% of their increased visits came from Facebook after they added the Like button to their website.

Know your customer; then Optimise:

Not only does the Like button transfer the marketing/purchase funnel into a viral loop, but it also enables tracking to a much greater extent than before. By tracking interactions, you can then determine how effective the Like button actually is with regard to engagement and conversion rates. Facebook Insights also enables you to get a better grasp on the demographic profile of those who are engaging with your content.

As with Google Analytics, knowing your customer is the key to optimisation. With the data gleaned from Facebook Insights, you can optimise elements such as the style of the Like button, and where to place it on the page for maximum interaction. The more you target, the more effective the Like button can be for you and your business.

Some companies; Mercedes-Benz being one, have achieved a phenomenal Facebook presence by adopting this strategy. But for many, they are beginning to realise, that the measurable effects of a multitude of “likes” are actually minimal.

In fact, they are simply a forced public display of an opt-in to a brand’s social news stream. It is not what it was first presumed to be; brand advocacy.

Phase 1: Like. Phase 2: Advocate

Advocacy goes beyond an affinity with a brand and can be extremely effective at influencing other people’s behaviour. 90% of people said they would trust word-of-mouth recommendations from people they know according to the Nielsen Global Online Consumer Survey.

So if the wisdom of friends is becoming ever more relevant, how can you use social technologies to stitch together the wisdom of friends and increase the flow of advocacy of your brand?

Between 5-15% only of all pasts that past through people’s newsfeeds on Facebook are ever viewed. So to improve upon this, the “recommend” button was introduced. This is a form of advocacy as people are effectively saying when they use it, that “this is something which I like, and think will also be of specific interest to you”

The Google “+1″ button works along similar lines. Using this has the same effect; it publicly gives something your stamp of approval.  These stronger advocacy tools may well influence current SEO, giving much more weight to search via social interaction. That remains to be seen. But it does indicate that social media is moving into a new phase, where companies will be expected to work much harder to earn engagement and advocacy.

Fans must become genuine advocates. To achieve this, brands must create more meaningful and valuable interactions with people. It is no longer enough to be “liked”.

With so many apps and services now available to consumers, how can you gain a march upon your rivals. The answer is the same as it has always been. Content. But rather than you producing the content, it is the consumer’s content that you want. Our put another way, their data. Their tweets, their photos, their purchase history, and social relationships. Once you know what they are about, then you can communicate with them in a useful manner. This is how you create value for your customers and build long-term relationships.

To achieve this, the old buzz words still apply. Transparency and trust. Consumers have the control because they are the owners of the data. So the best strategy is to give them more control. By giving control to consumers, we have seen the advent of citizen journalism and brand advocacy. Citizen journalism has helped significantly to bring down governments (Egypt, Tunisia) and brand advocacy is the “sweet-spot” for e-tailers or indeed anyone with a brand. Through working with audiences more effectively, the results have been tremendous.

Those brands who have achieved success have given up some control, in order to gain a voice and social influence. They have basically put people before technology. All brands should follow suit.

Some are so used to e-commerce, that they are reluctant to embrace f-commerce fully. In fact, that out of most major retailers, there are only 10% or so, that are generating decent sales via Facebook.

But interest is starting to grow both from retailers and users alike. Consumers have more trust in Facebook, and are therefore seen as more likely to use it as a buying channel. Moreover, the introduction of Facebook’s only currency; Facebook credits; and the enthusiasm of Facebook to make it more widespread, is making transactions easier too.

Facebook is already seen as a great source for online discounts and deals. Companies are incentivising their followers in a variety of ways to acquire that all important Facebook endorsement; a “like”!

If you as a retailer, can make the prospect of buying on Facebook attractive, then you will do well. It just simplifies a process by eliminating a funnel or link in the chain. Followers see a deal, and they can click on the Facebook shop page of the relevant retailer and buy more easily. And buyers live simplicity a lot. If you can attract conversions without users having to leave Facebook, your sales and return on investment will go up significantly.

This is a good thing for both Facebook and Skype, and of course for those on Facebook. Video chat is not only immensely popular, but it is a great deal easier this way than having to leave Facebook and download Skype separately.

The service is so clean and simple, that take-up is bound to be high. Some Facebook features in the past have been far too difficult for users to get their head around, but this is quite the opposite.

Many friends and family members use Facebook as a means of keeping up-to-date in terms of what’s going on in each others’ lives. This new feature will bring real-time video conversation to all the photos and messages. This is a much more enhanced communication tool as a result.

Group video chat in addition to mobile chat have both been promised by Mark Zuckerberg, so watch out for these. As we have discussed before on this blog, Facebook is where the people are, so it is a question of providing the right features to not only keep them there, but ensure that they remain on Facebook for longer each time they visit.

With these latest efforts, Facebook is essentially transforming itself into a telecommunications platform. Perhaps the next feature will need to be a Facebook telephone directory delivered to our door in the old style!