Social Sights

Etailers! Engage The Social!!!!

It’s Monday and I am heading to the welcome session at Shop.org 08, a conference that focuses its program around online retailers.  As I prepare for the conference I started thinking about the challenges etailers are facing right now.  Most of the usual stuff is on the list, economy, supply, pricing, marketing effectiveness.  Which made me start thinking about some of the bigger challenges these companies are going to start facing as a result of social media.  There is a well known stat that come from someone way smarter than me that I use all the time—“there will be more user generated content created in 2008 and 2009 than all content that has ever existed”.  This is a huge paradox that online retailers have yet to really realize its impact.

Online retailers have many programs they depend on including, SEO, SEM, Paid Search, Affiliate Programs etc.  These programs will all come under fire as they try to compete with the ever growing user generated content.  If each email sent, content written, word purchased and affiliate paid are represented by drops of water, then the user generated content represents the Pacific Ocean.  The programs will just become less and less effective and unable to compete.  Retailers must  “Engage the Social” and start figuring out ways to embrace their users as creators, collaborators and use the collective wisdom.

More to come on this topic this week as I discover new concerns at Shop.org.