The Android application Angry Birds was one of the most popular games with the Facebook community, as well as social networking apps such as Facebook and Twitter for Android. Sony Ericsson’s signature Android applications Timescape and Mediascape were also regular favourites, as well as email clients and messaging apps such as eBuddy.

Since the advent of smartphones, apps have begun to take the world by storm, facilitating online activity and providing instant entertainment and casual gaming right from users’ pockets. With a total of four handsets now available on the acclaimed Android platform, Sony Ericsson is a firm evangelist of mobile applications, illustrated by its weekly feature on Facebook, App of the Week.

Ben Padley, Head of Digital and CRM for Sony Ericsson, said: “It’s no surprise that social networks have a major role in our fans’ use of mobile applications, such is the popularity of social networking amongst our core demographic.

“In addition, through our various Facebook initiatives such as Fan of the Week, we have seen that our fans love to be creative and share their content and experiences with other fans on the page, so it’s no surprise that they enjoy using our signature Timescape and Mediascape applications either.”

Aside from the Facebook page, fans can also get all of the latest news regarding Sony Ericsson products and services via both the Sony Ericsson Twitter feed, and also the Sony Ericsson YouTube channel.

It does not take a great deal of money to emulate some of the successes of the big corporates in social media. What you need is time, patience, persistence, and the courage to take a few risks into the unknown ..after all no-one can predict exactly what it will take to encourage your followers to share your content. We can help you in all of the above, but alas have no crystal ball..so cannot promise instant success!

All these basically come under the broad category of social commerce which is a system to connect clients to each other through the internet; and then subsequently these connections are leveraged in a commercial sense. There are defined Social Commerce Tools that are accountable for social commerce.

Basically, what social commerce does is  ease communication between consumers and uses their interaction for commercial benefits via a programme which lures buyers to purchase using its various operations. Promoters of social commerce devise clever messages to impress people and uses multiple platforms such as social websites, blogs and forums to let people know much more about the business, its products and features.

Then the marketing guru sees to it that enough interaction between the members takes place about the product and for this he makes use of reviews, ratings, contests and many other kinds of promotions.

The next step is to make a comprehensive analysis of the emerging trends as a result of all the public interaction. Their need is met by offering services, goods and promotions to them. Doing this exercise often along with market measurement are two essential means to learn the ROI of the programs. But a marketer is much more focused on loyalty, client satisfaction, and conversion than mere sales because these are factors contributing to more business on the time scale.

As Facebook carries  huge traffic, programmes like Social Media Commerce or Social Commerce are already being used by these marketing gurus. The social marketers put content on their websites via company blogs, ratings and reviews. The findings from social marketing are combined with larger programmes like in-store, direct marketing and mobile by using social commerce tools which assist in achieving the main goal which  is growth in sales.

It would be sufficient to say that these social sellers must make use of these important social commerce tools to have the results they are looking for. What the marketers should do initially is to collect content by getting consumers to express their opinions about the standard of products of the company. These opinions are significant as they greatly affect the sales of the company. There are social marketing programmes on Facebook like Facebook Social Commerce Applications and Social Facebook Commerce Platforms through which the public opinion is implemented.

Then this customer feedback is leveraged in various marketing strategies. If there are any positive comments concerning the company’s products, optimum use of them is made in all the promotional strategies such as leaflets, advertisements, signboards and even e-mails to impress upon the customers.

Thus, Social Commerce Tools offer successful strategies to achieve core competence in traditional marketing initiatives through case studies, tested practices and a business approach which is progressive and positive.

Custom post types.

Three simple words, but a whole heap of functionality. We’ve already begun development of new sites using WordPress 3 betas but custom post types will really help speed development and more importantly make easier to use and more powerful sites for our clients.

No longer will we be fairly limited with just posts and pages. Anything we can think of could be developed. I’ve already got my eye on a property type. I suspect that quite a few plugins that currently use separate database tables will refactor to use custom post types instead.

Custom menus

Up to now menus on WordPress sites have been limited to either pages, or categories or some complex custom code to create something else. Now we can have an easy to edit menu with anything, pages, links, categories etc. Again helping the most important people, our clients.

With these and everything else that the team and contributers behind WordPress have done as they say, the future is looking quite rosy, it’s going to be an exciting time.

To finish off, I’ve got to mention the WordPress app on the iPhone. Even though I may be in the middle of nowhere being able to write this is brilliant. If you have an iPhone and a WordPress powered site, this free app is a must.

Updated: If you want to view a video tour of WordPress 3 just view it below.

1. Start selling on Social Platforms – Open a Facebook store and simply experiment. It’s fast, inexpensive and simple to implement. It should not only drive your online sales; but will doubtless increase your Facebook followers too.

2. Add Mobile into the social mix – Allow users to share content to mobile via SMS. This is one of the fastest areas of growth in the market. If you implement a share by SMS icon to your site, your sales will jump.

3. Implement Facebook Social Plugins – start by adding the Like button to product pages on your e-commerce site. By doing this, you get your product onto Facebook walls – where click through rates are a fantastic 6.5%. This drives traffic to your e-commerce site. The Like button is the new mini review. See Tripadvisor.

4.  Cross-sell/Up-sell with personal recommendations – 90% of people trust recommendations from people they know vs. 70% who trust anonymous reviews, and 67% of people spend more online after recommendations from friends. Therefore make allowing people to make personal recommendation on your site a priority! See Levi’s.

5. Integrate chat on your e-commerce site – so friends can shop together and discuss products. Luggage brand JanSport saw a 59% increase in product views and a 147% increase in time on site after integrating a Chat feature on its site.

6. Make your website your social flagship – social features are not just for social media platforms. You should use them on your website, by adding social media conversation feeds to your site, whilst exporting your content to social media platforms. Give your customers a multitude of reasons to keep coming back!

7. Bring the in-store experience online to social media platforms – to make all your channels social. Such examples could be live webcasts of in-store events.

I can now update our blog, send tweets and update fb and Linkedin – all from my phone!

Modern smartphones are pretty much a small computer these days and will only get more powerful in my opinion.

Make sure your site is visible on a phone!