Unlocking Social Commerce: Talking The Consumer’s Language
Abstract
Partners built on blockchain solutions enhance and compliment existing marketing tactics brands use. As new touch points, they provide the most logical and rapid way to deliver consumer engagement solutions enabling brands to take advantage of the opportunities crypto solutions offer. Brand owners are then enabled to focus on their core — building the brand, communication and product solutions that satisfy their consumer needs whilst operating in the domain their consumers choose to live and communicate.
Growth Of Consumer Acceptance
Given the way in which consumers have sought to be connected, blockchain and crypto currencies are a natural place for consumers to gravitate. Taking advantage of the technology to play where the consumers already exist, is the most obvious, and perhaps important play for brands. The peer-to-peer approach of blockchain technology, being open and verifiable, plays to the constructs of social transactions. Smart contracts are programmed to trigger transactions when conditions have been met, no dispute. This makes blockchain and crypto currencies very consumer acceptable creating an engaged and dynamic relationship.
The “open economy” has already generated confidence. OpenBazaar created a P2P eBay like platform and crowdfunding solutions have also led it. The move to more core marketing solutions, ones that rub up against current social touchpoints is rapid. These have provided a new landscape for businesses and brands to work with.
Social Influence and Social Commerce
The obvious area of adoption in this new landscape is within social and social influencer platforms*.
The number of Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) and others who seek to influence or have opinions to share about brands they use and love increases weekly. This has reduced control for brand message management, especially on platforms such as YouTube and Facebook. Social influencer platforms provide the answer. With consumer uptake of these platforms, brands are able to focus less on mitigating negative messages more on the truly positive, brand ambassadorial messages that may have previously been lost.
Social influencer platforms enable brands to move beyond Key Opinion Leaders into the space of “everyday influencers”, people driven by true passion for the brands and products they advocate, not a payment.
Consumers upload their review video or post. The strongest, the most interesting and the most relevant can then be curated by the brand in question and promoted. The influencer is then paid for the use of the review and in some cases, any sales they help drive.
Social Commerce platforms most recently leveraging this consumer trend are then able to help that brand drive immediate sales through integrated in-app buying solutions, further enhancing the brand investment value.
These Platforms Are Sticky
These platforms work for consumers because they are more ‘real’. They are not just friends and family opinions, but people with real world experiences. Whilst there are paid-for and promoted reviews on such platforms, they are mixed in with non-paid examples. Consumers also know, that the vast majority of such influencer posts are created before the brand chooses to promote them. And because of the organic nature of such posts, they remain real enough that consumers will return to the platforms, not just when they are in a purchase mindset, but also to be entertained, informed and inspired.
Benefits For All
Platforms built on blockchain come with benefits existing social media platforms don’t. Data collated through the cycle of post, promotion and consumer reaction, enables brands to readily see which influencers ‘work’, which don’t and which ones they may be better off partnering with based on the commercial impact they have. And it is not just the brands that can leverage on the data, influencers can also use it to sell their services. Good for all.
The field is also levelled, in favour of brands and more everyday reviewers. This makes the platforms more ‘real’. Big name KOLs have a role in marketing and communications but can become inaccessible, their value diluted by working across too many brands and with the fame of being a ‘KOL”, expensive**.
Not so different from a Tripadvisor review posted on a hotel’s website, social influencer platforms and the use of crypto currencies enable the reward of “hard working posts” from more everyday reviewers to be used extensively. Influencers or more core consumer reviewers can also choose to promote certain reviews they create so brands are more likely to see them, choose them, use them and so they benefit themselves.
Because of the mix of review as entertainment, social influencers are more wide ranging in appeal. Consumers go to not just see and hear reviews as part of the purchase process they are currently engaged on, but also places of entertainment.
Making Influencers and Cryptocurrency Work For You
To succeed in this evolving influencer space, brands and businesses need to be open to the new technology and not see it as some risky concept. They should also acknowledge that this cryptocurrency approach works well for all parties.
1) It plays to the desires of influencers for immediate gratification (payment) where 60 or 90 day payment terms are not readily viable
2) It enables organisations of all types to have greater transparency on where investments are made, how they are used and the impact they have
3) Both know payment is made for delivery of agreed conditions through smart contracts
A brand is able to pay through standardized campaign buying channels, either direct or through an intermediary such as a media or creative agency. This gives access to a wide range of influencers, the veracity of those whom confirmed by the blockchain technology. This also enables brands rapid and easy access to real influencers on a global basis. Efficiencies come further removing the need to deal with multiple exchange rates and small amounts of money for multiple parties.
For the influencer, the payment can then be used to buy products or special deals for that brand or others through the platform. The more savvy may see it as an investment in a cryptocurrency for future growth. This creates a virtuous circle of reward, recognition and growth for all.
Risks Of Holding Back
For many, the ability to sell through a blockchain-enabled platform carries huge benefits. It is possible to understand exactly who has bought your brand, when and how. As tech enables the facilitation of data integration, blockchain and crypto will together be able to provide a level of attribution transparency not seen before.
It is therefore possible to envisage those companies that do not rapidly take advantage of the rapid growth in social influencer platforms, blockchain and crypto currencies to become challenged. Those that do not engage, as many did not in the earlier days of eCommerce to protect traditional retail and RTM strategies, risk being left behind. At best they will be excluded from where the true consumer conversations are taking place.
About Ben Tuff:
Ben Tuff is Fanfare’s Global Marketing Advisor, responsible for ensuring that Fanfare articulates its role as a key marketing partner for global brands and their affiliate businesses in enabling them to drive business growth through Social Commerce powered by Blockchain. Beginning his career in the PepsiCo group of businesses, he spent 14 years working in a range of marketing, insight and sales aligned roles. In 2006, he moved to Shanghai to lead the consumer strategy team for the Greater China Foods business. Since 2010, Ben has been working within WPP, first as the global Samsung client lead for Kantar, the world’s largest consumer insight and strategy group. Connecting expertise, he created a network of global thought leaders to deliver solutions in areas including media, social and digital, communications, branding and B2B strategy. At MEC (now Wavemaker) as Managing Partner, his role has been to build and develop media solutions for key clients to drive growth, delivered principally from a data and technology perspective driven by programmatic, social and content solutions. He can be contacted at bentuff@fanfare.global
* The Sociable, “Is Blockchain Incentivizing Social Media while Decentralizing the Attention Economy?”, 18th January 2018
** Marketing Interactive, “The numbers behind #KOL marketing”, 23rd march 2017
