Last week I hosted an event with the social psychologist, digital marketer and editor of SocialCommerceToday.com Dr Paul Marsden for WOMMA UK. His presentation on social commerce, below, is well worth a look.

As Marsden puts it, social commerce involves either bringing the water cooler to the cash register, or the cash register to the water cooler: either way, locating peer to peer socialising, sharing and reviewing at the places where we actually buy. Groupon, Diesel and Levi’s are all companies that have shown how successful this can be.

He gave a rousing call to arms for word of mouth practitioners to take ownership of the social commerce space and apply their creativity to this relationship, and I completely agree.  Looking at how WOM can drive and optimise every element of a business – retail, product development, marketing, HR, outdoor, billing and so on – is at the heart of our approach.

Social commerce is simply WOM applied to retail and point of sale.

It’s one great way of using WOM to optimise business, and one of the easiest to prove ROI. It’s not the only element. It works best when combined with a WOM approach to the other consumer touchpoints. But it is often overlooked in favour of focusing on how social affects marketing or customer service.

It recalls one of my favourite 1000heads visuals: WOM is about social interfaces, not social media.

Tags: paul marsden, ROI, sales, social commerce, social media, WOM, word of mouth