Social Commerce receives official buzzword status in an April 27 report by Forrester’s analyst Jeremiah Owyang
In a previous March 26 post, I suggested that the millions of Facebook users who are angry about the new Facebook UI are an excellent target audience for a Facebook application delivering the old UI. My futuristic musing that further explored community-defined production were since confirmed by a April 27 report by Forrester Research’s analyst Jeremiah Owyang. Here‘s a video of Owyang speaking in John McCrea’s blog.
Owyang outlines five eras in the future development of social networks. The fifth era is “Era of Social Commerce”, predicted by Owyang to start in 2011 and mature in 2013. In the era of Social Commerce, “Communities define future products and services“.
Can a social network help articulate market demand, thereby influencing production? To humbly quote myself,
Consider Artistshare.com, where fans of musicians sign up to pre-order CDs before they are recorded – and so to finance the very recording of said CDs. We had group purchase in the old world, right, but freeing it from geographic constraints by online connectivity and Web 2.0 community trends could help build a purchase-driven-production model.
Wait, was that the sound of a paradigm change? Market-research is so 1995! Turn the production-and-marketing paradigm on its head. Sufficiently advanced surveys should be indistinguishable from pre-orders for products that don’t yet exist. We need one of those paradigm-changing books with 3-or-less-syllable titles – how about BACK ORDER, or FRONT ORDER, or PREORDER MOB? Draft for appropriately overhyped jacket notes:
PREDORDER MOB is the web 3.o’s way to leverage the future without risk. PREORDER MOB is what lies on the other end of the bell curve from “long tail”, and perhaps should be called “long nose”. PREORDER MOB is a way to create fresh, healthy credit in an economy suffocated by credit crunch.
Wikipedia’s The Street Performer Protocol page lists several ArtistShare-like services.
