Social Media, Social Networks, Social Shopping?

Apparently, social really is the top buzz word in the Internet realm right now. Social media marketing, social networking sites and social search are all hot topics among bloggers. The next big "social" topic is apparently going to be the idea of "social shopping." Joan Voight covers the idea in an article over at AdWeek today.

The idea here is to recognize that just as people are drawn to existing social networks by the need to connect with other people while going about their daily chores (reading the news, checking out blog commentary, wasting time on consumer generated video...), the social shopper is the person that will be convinced to make an impulse buy from the site that does the best job of helping them make an emotional connection. After all, not everyone is online to price shop for a specific purchase.

The article cites a new study by technology research firm Gartner and explains the social shopper this way:

But it's not as simple as offering up warm fuzzies to get them in the door...

Basically, the companies that figure out how to make the social shopper or hobby shopper (i.e. impulse buyer) happy are going to find themselves riding the next way of etailing success. It makes sense...if we're working on giving the people and the search engines what they want, isn't this the next step?

Jordan Warren, president of Agency.com tells AdWeek that businesses need to look to successful e-tailers like eBay and Amazon to see current examples of e-commerce sites that embrace this line of thinking.

While eBay does a nice job of appealing to the emotional side of shopping, (after all, how many times have you walked into a store and gone into a spending frenzy to make sure you got the last metal Snoopy lunch box?) Amazon is probably the best example today of a site that's packed with useful content that's aimed at pushing the sale with little risk of sidetracking the customer.

While not every business has the money to put into an ecommerce system that can run such complicated matching algorithms (x% of people also looked at this product, x% of people purchased these products, etc...) nearly any business can allow for things like user generated product reviews and links to complimentary products.

Let's not forget that these are the type of features that help both users AND search engines place value on your site. The internal link love that's exchanged on a site like Amazon is astounding. The keyword long tail impact from all those customer reviews is also astounding. After all, what better way to reach the people that will type a million variations of a product name in a search box than to pack the page with a million variations of a product name?