Amazon has announced that it has implemented a range of Social Commerce features based on Facebook Login and Facebook Recommendations. This is a significant move for Amazon, with implications for the ecommerce sector. Amazon has for long had its own social features (such as reviews) but this new move signals a strategic recognition of Facebook, and the importance of Social Commerce.

We’ve called for some time now for tighter integration between Facebook and Ecommerce sites because it is just common sense. When Facebook rolled out its range of Social Plugins at the F8 developer conference this year, it became not just common sense, but easy to do as well.

Despite more than 100 million fans using Facebook Login, the ecommerce sector has been slow to adopt it. Early ecommerce websites tended to be in gaming and fashion, targeting the teen market. But there is one massive and compelling reason to implement Facebook Login.

Visitors like it. And they use it.

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A few months back, with Facebook’s announcement of a “Like” button for the web, I decided to run a quick, highly unscientific experiment to see if B2B content was “likeable”. Put more simply, is B2B content as likely to be shared in the social atmosphere of Facebook as it is to be shared in the more hybrid social/business atmosphere of Twitter.

While I will admit that I personally am more active on Twitter than on Facebook, I gave the “like” button a more prominent position at the top of the post to hopefully even the score a little bit. The results are dramatic – mentions of the content of this blog on Twitter generally fall around 20 or so mentions per post. Facebook, however, is lucky to get one or two likes or shares per post.

While many factors may explain this discrepancy, I suspect that the most reasonable explanation is the differences in social context between the two networks. Content must fit the context of the environment or it feels out of place and awkward, even if the participants are similar.
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In my previous post, I focused on Listening versus Hearing, a distinction I feel is very important, others seem to as well. Friend and colleague Scott Rogers expanded the thought to Listening versus Understanding. In his post, Scott relayed  the following; the dollar value the average person thought a minute of their time was worth comes to well over 3 times the national average income.  In other words, we must cherish the feedback customers give us, because it shows how much value it had to them to provide that feedback.

Customer feedback comes from those whose desire to give feedback exceeds the personal constraints for giving feedback – time, place, personality traits, etc

What about all the people who do not want to talk?

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The Luxor CRM team reached out to give me a briefing on their company and their product set and it was great to learn more about them.  The company, founded in 2000, is located in Toronto, Canada.     They have a relatively small set of customers, around 50 – 60, ranging in size from  5 users to 3000+.

I like that they consider themselves a boutique firm, focused  more on customer success than bringing on new customers.    Their thinking is that 90% of the time CRM deployments fail due to lack of adoption (I agree) and their focus is to create a deployment plan (free deployment) and customized experience that maximizes value while minimizing adoption issues.

What about pricing?

Luxor CRM is confident in their overall solution, their ability to deliver a solid product backed up with services and support to make their customers successful.  They offer a month to month option (no contract required) and see most of these customers convert to a standard contract.  The month to month option speaks volumes and I am hoping to see many more vendors embrace the flexibility this offers customers.

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Spammers and overt sales people peddling low-end transactions -- "buy my thing" -- are a plague that has overrun LinkedIn Groups. The groups feature is a good idea -- let small(er) cohorts of people with shared affinities or interests exchange information with each other. But when a large group of people can interact online, the opportunity always seems to bring out the worst in some people. Spammers around the globe have swamped the discussions and turned a useful collaboration tool into a shameless (and worthless) marketing platform.

However, LinkedIn seems to have realized the Groups function has taken a wrong turn. The site recently deployed a set of technical tools to help group managers reestablish control of their collaborative content. Case in point -- today I received an email from LinkedIn announcing new tools for group managers:

The ability to delete inappropriate content and share group management are great first steps to reducing spam and inappropriate use by members. But the key to better collaboration in a LinkedIn group (or any group for that matter) is a more strategic approach to member engagement.

Here are five steps any group manager can take to improve the quality of exchanges among the members of their group. Better engagement quality provides greater value for group members and also warns off spammers by signaling this group means business - literally!

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LinkedIn, like any other social media channel, is a social networking platform.  This means that people are networking with each other while revealing who they are and what they do.  LinkedIn reminds you to do this when you log in by making sure your profile is 100% complete.  Part of getting to 100% completion is uploading your picture, and here’s all that you need to know about why you should upload your photograph, sizing tips for a successful upload, and what could happen to your photograph if you’re not careful.

That’s right: Your profile photograph could be forcibly removed.  Read on for more details.

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ZoomInfo has probably collected information about you and others who share your name: is what’s there accurate?

It was in the course of researching and authoring a book on LinkedIn for recruiting with my colleague Bill Vick that I first learned about the online business information service ZoomInfo. Why it came up at the time was that it was commonplace for the recruiting specialists we were interviewing to mention using ZoomInfo as one of the tools they used to find out about candidates.

Since then, when I have mentioned ZoomInfo during presentations, it usually seems to be only people with experience in recruiting who know about it.

What I found particularly interesting once I looked into ZoomInfo was the fact that, unlike sites such as LinkedIn where you need to join and then provide information about yourself, ZoomInfo does not wait for anyone to upload their own information and, as my experience and that of others attests, stores and displays information about people who do not even know of its existence.

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The other day I was having dinner with a close friend.  He’s the President of a division of a company.  Eventually, the conversation got around to social media (is it something about me?).  He said, “Dave, I just don’t get it, you keep talking about social media and how important it is, but I just don’t get it, I don’t have time for it, my customers aren’t using it.

As we continued our conversation, he started saying, “I don’t have time to blog, I don’t have time to read blogs—even yours—and I really like your stuff (my ego was bruised a little), I don’t get twitter, Facebook is for kids….,”  he went on, “I’m overwhelmed by information, I don’t need more….,” the litany went on.  I just let him vent.

He is not unusual, I hear this from many senior executives.  I think it’s a result of not understanding what social media is and how they participate.  I think some of what causes this confusion is a caused by some of us who are relatively active in social media.

One of the problems with social media is there is too much of it… and there is too much junk.  I can see how executives and others get frustrated when they dip their toes into the social media pool.  There is a bit of a learning curve to figure out what you should be doing. 

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