Social commerce and collaborative value creation

Abstract

Social networking destinations facilitate content, collaboration and commerce via peer-to-peer connections. User participation in social networks have grown exponentially and there are market opportunities in mining and gathering intelligence with regard to participants in the social networks, the content exchanged between them as well as their peer-group networks. User networks and the content generated establish a relationship between these entities which in turn provides an avenue for enterprises to monitor customer behaviour and gain valuable customer insights. End users benefit from the collective intelligence of their peer-network thereby enabling them to make better product and service decisions. Businesses have realized the importance of Social Media and most businesses are leveraging social media and social networking destinations for enhancing their brand and reputation, generating sales leads, marketing, commerce, recruitment, brand enhancement etc. Therefore enterprises need to ease and streamline their interaction with participants in social networks and identify and engage key participants in social networking destinations. A report by Booz and Co. estimated the market size of social commerce and its growth from 2010 to 2015. The graph clearly indicates a potential increase in market size for social commerce which may significantly impact the revenue generation of company participating in social commerce activities.