Social Commerce: From Content to Conversation

Johan de Lange, cofounder of transsmart platforms, is a key Moja advisor. Transsmart has built a new type of payments infrastructure. Nope, no new wallet, no new cards, nothing new to add to the many payment options out there. Rather a new way of looking at payments, possibly even trying to make them disappear, make them a non-event, make them so seamless they become unnoticeable. This post was originally published as an article on Johan’s LinkedIn page, and is republished here with permission.

My first two social commerce posts in this series acknowledge that a change is underway and that the digital channel is shifting from content to conversation (c2c), meaning (to me) that “the digital channel” that we consider personal devices to be, could very well be our entire market in the near future. C2C indicates the shift from a market that drew consumers to content (think websites and mobile apps), to a market where content must follow consumers if it is to be relevant (think messaging). The existence of messaging bots is a direct result of the c2c shift. How else would brands be able to commercialize a messaging stream or a conversation?

Before the shift occurred, we saw the introduction of marketing campaigns in our Facebook pages, Twitter streams, and even YouTube content channels. Companies such as LinkedIn managed to squeeze them in without alienating the business community using their platform. Data analysis helped marketing professionals fine-tune algorithms to a point where contextual content from third parties are “almost” indistinguishable from the user’s own social network content. Initially causing some frustration, this method, once more matured, has become a primary campaign tool and accepted by users on social media platforms.

Just as social media companies get that right, research showed that consumers were spending more time in “chat/messaging” apps than on “traditional” social media apps, making it clear that another shift was underway. The market reacted, messaging companies were sold, integrated, or founded to counter or absorb the threat this move created. Importantly, more focus was placed on finding ways to remain relevant in consumer interactions. Essentially, if brands were not part of the conversation they risked losing relevance. And so, bots were either suggested by some or launched by a few in 2015.

The first rudimentary bots started to appear offering rather limited services (opt-in) to chat users on a few public platforms. As critical mass is needed to popularize such a change, the big names in social media needed to be seen adopting it. Facebook and Google, among the few early supporters, have stepped up and their announcements have set the market buzzing with excitement about bots, bot stores, and “conversational commerce.” It works in a messaging thread, in the conversation stream, in one of two models of bot, both as opt-in options of course:

• The first and easiest is effectively to consider the brand app as another user with your social contact list, so you would have a conversation with the brand via its app much like you would with any other contact of yours in the messaging or chat app. Rudimentary at the moment, the limited responses from the various app bots we do see today are sufficient to accomplish basic tasks such as creating/amending a trip (flights) or searching for something and so on. AI advances promise some amazing progress here and much of the excitement around bots lies with their evolution alongside AI, smarter bots able to understand and “think” for themselves when addressed within the messaging environment.
• The second type would be the contextual model, a bot that pops into your conversation when it senses a relevant topic being discussed. Similar in its potential than the first bot type, the main challenge for contextual bot use would be avoiding the nuisance factor, overextending by popping up in too many chats or irrelevant moments from the user’s experience. Learning how users reach for services during their conversations will lead to more relevant and better focused contextual campaigns.

At Indaba Mobile we, too, have approached the c2c shift through a redesign of our APIs and core platforms, using our experience in messaging these past eight years to build a white label platform brands can own and use for their own curated social mobile commerce offerings. We do this because we believe that the public messaging platforms will soon be crowded with bots and highly competitive (just as the app stores are with apps today) coupled, of course, with our company mission of turning customers into brand communities for all the reasons above.

So, as a concrete example of the c2c move, Indaba focuses on enabling a company (brand) to reach its customers directly through rich content on a curated messaging platform. While our technology creates a chat environment for invited customers and their beneficiaries, much like public chat apps do, it also enables our clients to send these chat users marketing content, surveys or polls, and loyalty rewards or incentives. The platform consists of five layered service offerings, chat/content/rewards/ consumption/marketplace, each layer offering distinctly different actions between the brand and the community, and within the community itself. Indaba, then, helps brands tobuild their own customer community through the free use of the messaging app, using the various service layers to drop content into conversations.

Customers are now enabled to purchase product from the brand for their own consumption too, with the ability to invite beneficiaries into their messaging environment and gift them any of these purchased products. While the relationship between the brand and its community is strengthened, there’s a recognition in the social context that customers only return to an app if there is value there for them too — not only for the brand. So, while brands can send, gift, or sell content to the community, the very same community can gift or sell any of the content items, if approved by the brand. This potentially turns the community into sellers and buyers, enabling the final stage of the platform’s maturity — the marketplace.

Though it’s possible to take this a few steps further, my aim here is not to push Indaba Mobile solutions, but to illustrate the c2c shift and how I view the road ahead. My hope is that you will find some value here to social and conversational commerce questions you may have. I want to stress why bots and conversational commerce is so key to the future of brand communities. Moja is a company that is baking the c2c shift into its platform, strategy, and brand.

Social or conversational commerce is an important piece of the future people-to-machine interactions. Consider what happens to commerce when you change its UI or environment, it is usually massively disrupted. With bots, AI, and a mature conversational commerce platform, one of the most exciting futures I see is where we chat with one another and with machines without having to access different UIs. By text now and with voice in the near future, we can engage with people and machines both in conversation and commerce without disruption. Being part of that engagement is critical to a brand’s social relevance. My mission is to see that future realized. Conversational commerce lays the foundation for that future.