The secret to turning Facebook fans into shoppers

Here’s the second part of our Q&A with Storeya, a Facebook commerce specialist who shares with us the formula for turning fans into shoppers. SMI: One of the big criticisms of f-commerce is that Facebook isn’t built for a shopping experience, that there are too many distractions for the shopper. Rather, it’s seen as a good launchpad to retailers’ sites. Do you agree? Facebook is not a website, it’s an ecosystem. In 2004, the main thing you did online was chatting with your friends.

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Copyright Infringement

On January 20, 2012, the New Zealand police arrested German born computer programmer Kim Dotcom (previously Kim Schmitz) along with three other co-workers. At the time of the arrest he was living larger than life. He lived in a $24 million mansion just outside Auckland, New Zealand. Police seized 18 luxury vehicles and froze $9 million worth of accounts. This is not the first time that he got into trouble. In 2000 he was convicted in one of the largest insider trader scheme in Germany.

This time it is copy right infringement which earned him an estimated $175 million a year. U.S. authorities accused him and his colleagues of willfully and repeatedly violating the copyright law and request that he be extradited to U.S. for prosecution. He founded the online storage service Megaupload.

Jury is still out there. Some say this case will injure investors as well as entrepreneurs that predict a bright future for cloud computing. Some even say that the government action is over reaching which will curb the growth of an industry. The recording industry on the other hand acknowledge legitimate businesses like Dropbox and say the threat from piracy cause far more greater damage to the industry due to lost revenue.

F-commerce is well on its way to $30 billion marketplace: Storeya

We’ve written about the doubts now lingering over Facebook retail, or F-commerce, in light of the highly visible closures of shops on the social network by big retailers such as Gamestop and The Gap. To get the other side of the story we’ve asked F-commerce enabler Storeya to describe what it’s seeing in the market. Not surprisingly, Storya tells us F-commerce is alive and well. The following is a Q&A with Eyal Reich, StoreYa’s founder and COO. We will run part 2 of this Q&A later. SMI: Firstly, can you describe what Storeya does, when you launched and what kind of customers you have? StoreYa is an F-commerce platform designed for automatically importing and syncing web stores to Facebook, fully customizing them to fit both the Facebook arena and the original store look-and-feel

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Buddy Media acquires Facebook ad specialists Brighter Option

With the social networking ad market expected to top $7.7 billion this year , Buddy Media is aggressively staking out its slice of the pie, announcing today the acquisition of London-based Brighter Option , a Facebook ad serving specialist. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Buddy Media says that the acquisition, which came after reviewing 20 companies in the Facebook ad platform space, will make it “the only company to combine social publishing, applications, analytics, commerce and paid advertising in a unified software suite.” Here’s a bit more on that: Brighter Option’s social ad management software enables marketers and agencies to create, monitor, optimise and measure highly targeted Facebook advertising campaigns. It is currently being used by major advertising agencies, including many agencies within GroupM, Omnicom and Aegis… Last quarter, the company’s social ad management software managed more than 92.5 billion impressions for more than 291 advertisers in 42 countries. Buddy Media also announced today that the new alliance has a big-time ad partner in WPP’s 24/7 Real Media. Brighter Option’s social ad management software will be used to power Facebook ads for 24/7 Real Media clients worldwide.

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Social creative: Eurostar integrates real time social media with large-scale advertising

Cross-channel train service Eurostar claims it’s the first advertiser to integrate real time social media with large-scale advertising in a new initiative – ‘ Eurostar Live ’ – which will see Facebook and Twitter comments and pictures projected from 363 digital screens across London. The screens will feature adverts for Eurostar’s Amsterdam service and as many as 4,000 tweets and Facebook updates every day. The brand says that an image uploaded online can be re-purposed immediately to appear on underground cross-track projections and LCD screens, and comments can be live on screen in minutes. The scheme is designed to highlight and bring to life the hidden gems in Eurostar’s destinations (starting with Amsterdam), and specialist bloggers and local experts have been brought onboard to help kick things off. (London’s We are Social says that as part of the effort it’s working with some of the UK’s top specialist bloggers “to help us discover hidden gems in their related fields such as food, music, fashion and photography.”) The brand will also be running competitions via the boards and over Twitter (# eurostarlive ) to create awareness and drive engagement. Director of Marketing and Brand at Eurostar Lionel Benbassat said: “Social engagement needs to run through our entire business, with customers openly sharing their experiences to help inform other Eurostar travelers. We believe that in getting this right, we can in turn enhance the power of conventional channels to drive acquisition and customer loyalty.” He added that while comments will be moderated to avoid anything damaging or libelous appearing, both positive and negative experiences will be included. This is a bold move indeed, especially following a PR disaster in 2009 when the company was flamed for ignoring its social media when passengers were stuck on its trains at Christmas

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Facebook gaming takes a hit, virtual goods market in doubt

2011 was not a great year for Facebook’s promising gaming business. New data shows that Facebook gamers barely grew at all last year even as the social network swelled overall to more than 850 million users. Could this put in doubt those bullish growth forecasts of a multi-billion-dollar virtual goods market springing up around social gaming? So far, we haven’t seen anybody yet forecast down the social gaming growth projections, though bellweather Zynga’s latest results can only be heaping further doubts that the days of boom-boom expansion appear to be slowing. What could be more worrying though is this piece of research from IHS Screen Digest : At the end of 2010, about 50 percent of Facebook’s monthly active users (MAUs) were gamers. At the end of 2011, the absolute quantity of gamers changed little, and the percentage of Facebook MAUs that were gamers slipped to just 25 percent. MAUs for perennial Facebook game leader Zynga actually declined during the fourth quarter of 2011 to 225 million, down from 266 million at the end of the third quarter, as presented in the figure attached.

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The future of social networking: less social, more reputation-focussed

A few years back, Burger King made waves when it introduced a new app called “ Whopper Sacrifice ,” an edgy way to boost its cred with social networkers . Here’s how it worked: you were rewarded with a free Whopper sandwich for every 10 people in your network you un-friended. Facebook  shut down the app after just a few days rather than see it lose members to the viral free-burger-giveaway. Today, Facebook cannot stop the systematic pruning of networks that happens daily. Many of you are doing the un-friending without the promise of a red-meat-payoff at the end. According to the latest installment of the Pew Internet & American Life research project, since 2009 (incidentally, the year Burger King launched Whopper Sacrifice), social networkers have been getting more ruthless with managing their networks. In the name of privacy and reputation management, individuals are cutting out “friends,” deleting stupid comments left on their Wall and removing their names from embarrassing tagged photos.

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How social media could raise British Gas’s sustainability drive to another level

Once in a while you come across a company initiative that makes you think: “Here’s a firm that’s putting sustainability into action.” That was my reaction (and that of many others) this week when British Gas announced a new incentive to help the most vulnerable members of society cut their energy bills through free loft and cavity wall insulation. British Gas isn’t appealing directly to the elderly, the poor and the disadvantaged. It’s done that in the past with only limited success. Instead, the company is offering £50 to “anyone who refers vulnerable family, friends or neighbours to us for free insulation. We’ll also pay the vulnerable customer £50 for having the free insulation installed,” it declares in a press release. There’s a compelling reason for vulnerable households to accept largesse from British Gas. First, home insulation takes only a day to install and, once completed, can save households as much as £175 on annual heating bills, while cavity wall insulation can bring savings of £135. Indeed, British Gas estimates that “£1 in every £4 spent on heating is wasted due to poor insulation, so energy efficiency can have a massive impact”. The British Gas plan has generated a lot of chatter on news sites, including the BBC, the Guardian and the Telegraph.

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Social commerce spotlight: Retailers pin new hope on scrapbooking site Pinterest

As f-commerce falls further and further from grace, online marketers had barely rested on their laurels before the new social phenomenon du jour swept the social landscape: Pinterest . As our editor Bernhard Warner noted last week, we’re increasingly living our digital lives through appreciation of pictures and images, and sites like Tumblr, Instagram – and now Pinterest – provide instant visual gratification. The difference with Pinterest, however, is that unlike images in Tumblr and Instagram where picture sources are buried beneath a myriad of shares, links and re-posts, pictures are instantly attributable to their original sources. Pin an image from any website and the click-through is already there. The effect this site could have on the e-commerce landscape is huge. In our last column looking at social shopping, we noted that Forrester Research Analysts Sucharita Mulpuru said: “There was a lot of anticipation that Facebook would turn into a new destination, a store, a place where people would shop.

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Is F-commerce really doomed?

2012 was supposed to be the year of social commerce. Expectations grew immense as mega retail brands such as Target, The Gap and Ticketmaster opened up shop on Facebook, home to now 850 million users. Even big-time management consultants had an opinion as they talked of the “Facebook effect” on retail. Booz & Co. calculated the global take from social commerce will grow six-fold to $30 billion by 2015. We captured much of the rapid rise and bullishness of the nascent sector in our “History of F-Commerce” infographic . But all of the sudden, the first grey clouds started to appear on the horizon.

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