Welcome to the age-old world of social commerce! What? Were you expecting that I was going to tell you that social commerce was a startling, fascinating, frenetic, and new way of selling products? If that’s what you were thinking, I suggest you fasten your seatbelts, now, and pull them tight. Social commerce is ancient! I would not be surprised if soon after the caveman invented the first chisel, he looked around for someone he could trade one with. Look at this amazing new thing to carve with. I’ll trade you one for some of those nuts and berries! Well, maybe their language wasn’t so clear, but people have been socially interacting around the exchange of goods almost as long as people have been on Earth.

No matter where you go in the world today, and I go all over the place, the one thing you can find, no matter where you are, is a central market area of some sort. Okay, so in first-world countries, that’s likely a mall or a city center filled with expensive and elegant stores. But travel to developing countries, and you’re still going to find a physical marketplace. Humans need commodities, and the ones who shop for those commodities need merchants to sell them. Not only that, but the people who make or sell one type of commodity still need many other types of things, too. So whether they come with coins, credit cards, or goods for bartering, people are going to interact with other people to exchange their currency or goods for the products and services they need. So, let’s get it right from the beginning: Social commerce is as old as humanity.

Now, I won’t disagree that the ways we interact to exchange goods and services have changed. That is very true. But the changes, dramatic as they seem within the last ten years, have actually been happening all along. Let’s take a look at a relatively recent change that reverberates throughout our marketplace even today. I’m not talking about Facebook or Twitter.

AN UNLIKELY MILLIONAIRE

Sarah Breedlove was born on December 23, 1867 in Delta, Louisiana. She didn’t begin life with all of the advantages a child should have. The Civil War was still a fresh wound for our country. When she arrived, her state was barely limping back from devastating years of war, and she was born African American in a time when such a respectful term for black Americans hadn’t even been invented. And life didn’t get easier for Sarah. She was orphaned at the age of seven, married off at the age of fourteen, and had her first child by the time she was seventeen. By the time she turned twenty, she was a widow. That is a lot to handle when, by today’s standards, she would just be getting ready to set out on her own.

Like many African-American women of her time Sarah used a process to straighten her hair. Unfortunately the “process” included huge quantities of lye—an extremely harsh chemical used in soaps of the time. It did straighten hair, but it could also cause it to fall out! On top of everything else, Sarah was losing her hair, and she wasn’t happy about it. One evening she decided to come up with a better type of hair treatment, hoping it would restore her hair. She mixed up an ointment in her bathtub and began applying it to her scalp. As she continued to use it instead of lye, she noticed that not only did her remaining hair look healthier, but also new hair had begun to cover her scalp in the sparse places! That’s when she got a great idea and became what we would call today an “accidental entrepreneur.” She never set out to build a business, let alone an empire, but she knew she wasn’t the only woman having trouble with her hair treatments. Maybe some of her neighbors would be interested in her new ointment, too.

That’s when Sarah Breedlove became Madame C. J. Walker, the woman who would go on to become America’s first self-made female millionaire! But, that’s getting ahead of the story. I just like stories to have happy endings, so I put it out there right now.

Sarah began small. She went door-to-door in her area, talking to other women about her new ointment. She found her neighbors, accustomed as they were to the old ways, skeptical of her newfangled product. So, she started giving demonstrations of her ointment right there in her prospective customers’ kitchens. The ointment was a hit! It became so popular, and the demand for it increased so quickly, that she just couldn’t keep up with production, marketing, sales, and distribution through her door-to-door business model of one person. Plus her customer base was drastically limited by the number of doors she could knock on in a day.

That’s when this creative and brilliant young woman came up with her next great idea. She contacted her family, friends, and past customers—her social network—and trained them to demonstrate the ointment in customers’ homes, giving prospective customers something valuable for free to make a sale. She also encouraged the women who bought and believed in her product to tell their friends—social spread—and to invite them over to their homes for coffee, tea, a demonstration of the ointment, and the chance to buy what they saw sold. Now her trained sales staff did their demonstrations not just for one woman, but for a room full of women who had gathered together with friends to see about a new product. Voilà! Social commerce!

Had Madame CJ invented social commerce? Of course not! (Remember that caveman with the chisel?) What she did invent, however, was a powerful new business model that is widely used today to sell things from makeup to kitchen products to kids’ toys, and even “adult” toys. By the time she died in 1919, Madame C. J. Walker employed more than three thousand people. She left behind a prosperous business, extensive property holdings, and personal wealth in excess of $1million. For clarity, a million dollars in 1919 is like $13.5 million today. She did this, despite the grim outlook her early life presented. She changed the way many women treated their hair, and she invented a business model that still thrives one hundred years later. Just don’t blame her the next time you get invited to a social commerce party you don’t want to go to! The good she did far outweighs you having to tell a friend you can’t go. She brought social commerce into the twentieth century, and now I’m going to help you make the most of the twenty-first-century version.

Thanks to technology, we have advantages that Madame CJ couldn’t begin to dream about. As we make our way through this book together, we’re going to examine strategies and learn techniques for making today’s social scene work to our business advantage. I am a businessman, first, last, and always. My goal is not unlike Madame CJ’s. Sure, I want to stay creative, try intriguing new business models, and explore potentially rich sources of new customers. But above all these things, I am all about making money. Throughout the next twelve chapters, you’ll hear me say, lots of times, “If what I’m doing is not earning me money, I don’t have time for it. If it don’t make dollars, it don’t make sense.”

SOCIAL. SOCIAL. SOCIAL. SOCIAL.

Throughout the past decade, most of the world has been fascinated with the technologies—first dubbed Web 2.0—now known as the social web. In all this rush to get onto the social web, you’ll hear people talking about social networks as social media, social media as social marketing, and all kinds of things called social commerce. Let’s get the definition straight now, so we can move into our work together with our vocabulary in place. These terms are not interchangeable. Not even close. All kinds of trouble will follow business owners who set out on social media thinking that all they have to do is sprinkle social networks with their products and brand, and that this alone will lead to successful social commerce. We need a clear and simple way to distinguish these terms from one another so that we can make the most of the powerful tools that lie just behind the words.

Figure 1-1

If you simply remove the common denominator here (social), you can now get back to the roots of the terms and see that they are far from interchangeable (see Figure 1-1). They aren’t even close. Media does not equal marketing, although you can use the media to market your products and services. Marketing is not networking, although you can use your network to make contacts for marketing. Of course, commerce stands in a world all by itself. For our purposes, it is and will continue to be the most important term in this book. Commerce, by definition, is all activities, functions, and institutions involved in transferring goods or services from product producers to end-user consumers. Okay, that’s reasonable, and I agree.

Commerce is and always has been about products, consumers, manufacturers, and retailers. Just because you put the term “social” in front of it does not change the meaning of the word. I want to hear that cash register ring—ka-ching! If that’s not happening, it’s not commerce. Throughout this book, I’m going to show you how to use social media to build your presence on social networks so you can use social marketing to achieve real profits through social commerce. I don’t care about “Likes” on Facebook. I’m not interested in how many followers you have on Twitter. And you can’t post enough images on Instagram to impress me. If you aren’t ringing up sales, you have not achieved social commerce success. Period.

THE POWER OF SOCIAL MEDIA

Social commerce is our goal, and to achieve this goal we’ll use social media tools. I think social media is an incredibly powerful thing. So powerful that I believe it saved network TV. If you look back over the last three or four years, you may remember a time when the buzz was all about how no one was watching network TV anymore. With so many media choices, poor ol’ network TV didn’t stand a chance. You can have a thousand cable channels. You can watch everything on Netflix and Hulu. You have social media and YouTube competing, and winning, the battle for people’s spare time. Yep, the end of network TV was near. Until the people at the TV networks decided to take advantage of social media and combine it with their TV shows. It was almost the perfect merging of the old and the new.

While social media sites were taking us away from TV, broadcasters were focusing on lots of different competition shows. From singing wannabes to dancing stars, people tuned in to watch weekly competitions. Programs such as American Idol and Dancing with the Stars became huge hits. People made the time to watch the competitions unfold. A new wrinkle added to these shows was that they had to be watched live. The experience didn’t work if you set your DVR. Why? Because success for the hopeful contestants was based on viewer votes. If you wanted to vote, you had to watch the live performance. If you cared enough to vote, you wanted to watch the second evening to get the results and see if your contestant was still safe. Making this even more compelling was that even if you didn’t watch the live show, you couldn’t help but find out the results whether you wanted to or not. Once the shows were over, the results were splashed all over Twitter and Facebook. It was that immediate.

Well, a few years into this frenzy, along came The Voice. No one held out too much hope for it. The market was saturated by competition shows, and amateur singers were all over the place. Ha! This new show wouldn’t have the chops to compete with the giant American Idol. The latecomer, however, came in with some new tricks, with the most powerful one introduced in the second season. The people behind The Voice added social media to the mix. They created the Social Media Lounge where they could share with viewers what people had been saying on the social networks about the performances they’d just watched. The following year, they started sharing this input in real time. They pulled tweets from Twitter and pushed them out to the audience at home during the competition. That’s how important audience engagement has become.

Audience engagement began to spread to other shows. Now the producers of programs like America’s Next Top Model began taking social media into account as a voting platform. It’s not just about the judges, even when it seems to be. People who produce shows want to keep viewers engaged, just like you want to keep your customers connected. If these producers can determine who is trending, whether because they’re popular or obnoxiously entertaining, they know who their viewers are most connected to. The popular contestants add value to the show, but so does the drama caused by the obnoxious contestants. If it were up to you to keep your viewership high, would you send the nasty contestant who gets all the media buzz home, or would you cut the less dramatic contestant who does everything right except create publicity?

The most innovative TV social media integration I have seen is Bravo TV’s Watch What Happens Live, with Bravo’s Andy Cohen (my man crush). He actually has real-time polls and even plays drinking games with his TV viewing audience. It’s all live, interactive, and you see the results as they happen in real time.

Social media is a powerhouse of crowdsourcing, and crowd-sourcing gives you some of the most accurate and powerfully truthful data you can have. I used it to help my publisher decide which cover to use for this book. I convinced the publisher to let me post the three cover choices we came up with on my social networks, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. I asked which one seemed most appealing. The cover you’re holding in your hand was the clear winner (see Figure 1-2).

Figure 1-2

THERE’S SO MUCH TO LEARN, BUT IT’S NOT THAT HARD, FOLKS

Throughout this book, I’m going to share strategies and techniques with you for leveraging social media to achieve social commerce success. I’m not going to lie, there’s a lot to learn, but I also want to assure you it is not difficult to do. I hear it from people all the time. Business owners tell me they’ve spent hours creating campaigns and content. Some of them have spent real money hiring “experts” to help them get their businesses on social media. After spending all this time and even money, they may find they have “Likes” or “followers.” But what they don’t have is increased sales, and they’re not making more money. That may be social media success, but that’s not the same as success in social commerce. I can’t hear the ka-ching.

I’ve been in business long enough to learn not to spend my money on things that don’t bring me a solid return on my investment. And as for time? Well, that’s even more valuable to me than money. I can always find ways to earn money, but time is irreplaceable and none of us knows when it will run out! I am not here to make you a “social media marketing expert.” Instead, I am here to help you use these social media tools effectively to help you make more money. It’s as simple as that. If we’re going to spend our precious time on social media, we need to make it pay off in real money, return on investment. We’re going to explore social commerce concepts, principles, and practices that are eternal. The techniques, tools, and strategies you learn here will apply no matter what new and exciting tools lay ahead. I can tell you, for sure, that those new things are coming.

I recently attended the South by Southwest (SXSW) conference in Austin, Texas, the largest interactive conference in the United States. I was onstage with the Original Kings of Technology (fb.com/OriginalKingsofTechnology) for a great panel discussion. While I was there, I saw the future of social technology. Sure, right now, as I write, Facebook is the number one social network. But I’ve seen technology splash on the scene, create wild and crazy hype, and then age out to be replaced by newer things. Can we all say “America Online”? “MySpace”? I know that today’s Facebook will be replaced by the next great King of the Hill. For our purposes, it doesn’t matter at all. By the end of this book, you’ll be prepared for whatever comes along as we make our own marks in the eternal cyberspace we call social commerce. Who knows, maybe the next great Madame C. J. Walker is reading this book right now. So, let’s get to work!