Dan Weingrod

Dan Weingrod is a digital and social media strategist and works as a trainer for Econsultancy.

Can social identity improve ecommerce?

A recent Gartner press release suggested a major change in the way we might interact with ecommerce in within the next few years. Their prediction is that by 2015 fully half of retail customer identities will be based on social network identities. The report’s main thrust is on the impact of this shift on IT and security infrastructure, but what is much more interesting is the potential for a more direct connection between purchase and social identity.

The logic behind this potential growth is the frictionless “log-in with Facebook or twitter” option that allows customers to skip the laborious sign up or registration process. But the obvious question that arises is: What happens when social identity becomes purchaser identity? When you consider the potential meshing of purchase data with social data there appears to be a huge opportunity here for e-commerce sites to improve sales and build loyalty.

How the 2012 presidential campaign will affect social media strategies for 2013

As businesses look at their plans for 2013 its time for them to seriously consider adopting a maturity model for social media. For many marketers social media is looked upon as an immature media, but when Nielsen titles its 2012 report “Social Media is Coming of Age” perhaps its time to stop treating social media as a wild child and instead approach it as the rapidly maturing media that it is.

Adopting a maturity model for social media will require businesses to evolve their thinking and approaches, as well as their use of resources, in order to take advantage of social media as a mature media form. One way might be to adopt some of the strategies that Obama For America campaign used in the 2012 presidential campaign.

Instead of being liked, try being more interesting

It’s often a challenge for financial services companies to find new and more effective strategies for social media.

One major reason is that all too often, social media strategies are based on making brands more “likeable” and using social media to get more likes on Facebook or more followers on twitter.

But there’s a different more effective approach: instead of being more likeable, how about being more interesting?