Customer Relationship Management:Facebook or own community ( part 2)

Taking it further from where i left about the debate on creating a Facebook community Vs investing on own

Social Commerce: Companies around the globe especially in the Retail CPG space are vigorously working towards making commercial sense out of Social Media, and quiet obviously the trend is reaching to other verticals like manufacturing, telecom etc. If Amazon tries to give you user comments, reviews about the product that you are about to buy, eBay gives you reviews about the seller ( the percentile satisfaction index) , they can be considered community inputs/social inputs to help your decision making . On the other side, Facebook has announced that Gifts are going to go and something new 'Facebook Credits' would come in, their own way of turning commercial , in fact P&G has already announced selling MAX range of cosmetics on Facebook. The above four examples show that the ecommerce space is undergoing a 'Social Change' too, While Facebook would took a step further to being a commerce site, it would take them some time before companies start to believe that they can sell more than mere Cosmetics, that too- if I got it right, at a whopping 30 % margin. On the other hand the E Commerce sites of Best Buy, Macy's etc would scale up fast and with more customer trust, if they are able to crack the social influence bit. Having a company owned site to do e commerce would be a better option than doing ecommerce over Facebook any day,

While I was writing this came across the news that Amazon has tied up with Facebook, and would show recommendations using Facebook Connect

The power of Social Analytics: Time when social is getting serious, time also to make analytical sense out of it is important, today tools exist that can tell you in detail about which type of customers like you the most, which geography, what gender, what age group, who are the key influencers for your brand, who are the customers pivotal for key conversations, who are the most influencing lots, who are the most supportive customers... etc etc etc and all of it in real time , it is therefore important for companies to not just invest in these tools but derive the social conversations to platforms that enable these tools to dig the depth of data that they want . Unfortunately one of the big challenge if one were to completely depend on Facebook for a company community is this, the free to use public platforms do not give you all these details of this sort. If we go through the scanned date available with either Facebook, twitter or any such site today the details are more on surface to make judgmental call, coupled with the fact that one has to then go on mapping user profiles across these networks to begin with to make sense of user behavior, an uphill task. Company owned communities definitely have an edge over here, as they provide single user identity to track all the user trends across communities, forums, discussions etc, making more sense around analytics.

Time to develop a more strategic approach: Time is now for us to take a call between Facebook way of community and own community, my recommendation is to think long term and invest in something that can grow they way you want it to grow, rather than something which is not in your control and in long term becomes difficult to handle. Yes there would be initial challenges to get customers, but then if companies manage to use the Facebook and Twitter of the world to drive customers to their site coupled with the content that has value to the customers ...they would definitely come. In a long term using Facebook and Twitter ( or whatever is the new baby in town that Techcrunch says) as enables of traffic to companies community site is the way to go, they definitely can coexist and create a company driven ecosystem rather than all driven by customers.

Other points: Now these are issues that media is full off every very next month and therefore would not write much, but definitely pose a serious threat