Wednesday, December 08, 2010

Mobile Internet Empowers Social Shopping



As social media has been rocketing those past few years, with successful social media like Facebook, or Twitter, companies have tried to leverage this mainstream to take advantage out of it. Indeed, as people are spending more and more time on these social media, they are getting influenced by it, especially as they are following most of the time brands among other friends and families. In terms of customer relationship management, you need to deal with this new feature, because you can’t only deal with one customer anymore, but with its whole community, which will have an impact on what he is going to buy.

It is bringing complexity to CRM, but it adds fun to it as a professional, and also it gives once again more power to customers. I have recently read an article about Myshopanion, which is a fast growing start up of the Silicon Valley. They have developed an Iphone app (unfortunately ONLY an Iphone app, when will people consider Blackberry and Android users?) which helps you find “social information about the products you are shopping.

Part of your decision making process, the opinion and advices of previous customers or “experts” of the products will help one customer to make his decisions. And as people have more and more choices to make, they want tools which help them access this information right away.

This is exactly what Myshopanion is doing. As it is held on a mobile phone, you may access it at any time, which makes the delivery of information very easy. The information is based on users opinion and reviews. And it is delivered fast: you may scan thanks to your smartphone a product to access information of one product.

I believe this company will try to monetize thanks to targeted advertising. Imagine, if someone is looking for information on computers, you may add some commercials about a good offer, which might be appropriate while the customer is actively seeking for the product.

In terms of customer relationship management, social shopping is for sure a trend to look after. It looks sort of like products reviews websites, but bettered.