Social Media

Social media is the communication among people in which they create, share or exchange information and ideas in virtual societies and networks. Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein define social media as "a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content." This new form of media makes the transfer of text, photos, audio, video, and information in general increasingly fluid among internet users. Social Media has relevance not only for regular internet users, but business as well. Platforms like twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin have created online communities where people can share as much or as little personal information as they desire with other members. The result is an enormous amount of information that can be easily shared, searched, promoted, disputed, and created.

 

Furthermore, social media hinge on mobile and web-based technologies to create highly interactive platforms through which individuals and communities share, co-create, discuss, and modify user-generated content. They introduce substantial and pervasive changes to communication among organizations, communities, and individuals.

 

Social media vary from traditional or industrial media in many ways, including quality, reach, frequency, usability, immediacy, and permanence. There are many properties that stem from internet usage.

 

This is the who and the where of social media users.

1.   72% of all internet users are now active on social media

2.   18-29 year olds have an 89% usage

3.   71% of users access social media from a mobile device.

 

Geocities, created in 1994, was one of the first social media sites. The concept was for users to create their own websites, characterized by one of six "cities" that were known for certain characteristics.

Social Commerce

Social commerce is a subset of electronic commerce that involves using social media, online media that supports social interaction, and user contributions to assist in the online buying and selling of products and services.

More concisely, social commerce is the use of social network(s) in the context of e-commerce transactions.

The term social commerce was introduced by Yahoo! in November 2005 to describe a set of online collaborative shopping tools such as shared pick lists, user ratings and other user-generated content-sharing of online product information and advice.

The concept of social commerce was developed by David Beisel to denote user-generated advertorial content on e-commerce sites, and by Steve Rubel to include collaborative e-commerce tools that enable shoppers "to get advice from trusted individuals, find goods and services and then purchase them". The social networks that spread this advice have been found to increase the customer's trust in one retailer over another.

Today, the area of social commerce has been expanded to include the range of social media tools and content used in the context of e-commerce, especially in the fashion industry. Examples of social commerce include customer ratings and reviews, user recommendations and referrals, social shopping tools (sharing the act of shopping online), forums and communities, social media optimization, social applications and social advertising. Technologies such as Augmented Reality have also been used with social commerce, allowing shoppers to visualize apparel items on themselves and solicit feedback through social media tools.

Some academics have sought to distinguish "social commerce" from "social shopping", referring to social commerce as collaborative networks of online vendors, and social shopping as collaborative activity of online shoppers.