Peter Kim asked a handful of thought leaders in the social media space to give their predictions for the top trends of ‘09.  Here are a couple related to social commerce:

Charlene Li: Shopping Goes Social (also reprinted on her own blog)

After a devastating holiday season, retailers will eagerly seek a way to improve results other than driving demand with deeper discounts. One option they will investigate will be how to insert people and social connections into the buying process, illuminating and influencing for the first time the Black Hole Of Consideration. As they lick their wounds in the first half of 2009, retailers will watch from the sidelines as media companies implement open social technologies like Facebook Connect and the Open Social Platform. But as the holiday season launches early after Labor Day, shoppers will find options to see what friends are recommending, buying and rating integrated into the shopping experience.

Jeremiah Owyang: eCommerce Goes Social

The recession will force revenue results out of social technologies –marketing must prove its worth to actually changing the bottom line.  Although customer reviews are nothing new on popular eCommerce sites like eBay and Amazon, in most cases, consumers use the critiques from people they don’t know.  Now with connective technologies like Facebook Connect, Google FriendConnect, and OpenID, consumers will now be able to see reviews, experiences, and critiques from people they actually know and trust.  As a result, expect to see eCommerce widgets and applications appear in popular social networks, as well as when visiting existing eCommerce sites the ability to login with your Facebook or Google identity.  As an example, next time I’m shopping for a laptop, not only will I see reviews from editors and consumers, I will now know which one of my friends uses an Apple computer, and what they think of it.

A couple recent studies by BIGresearch that look at purchase influence factors across all media - traditional and online - shed further light on the importance of the personal advice network.  As a pair, they paint an interesting picture: person-to-person product recommendations are the #1 influence factor on buyers (at least for a number of product categories), and they are the preferred way for recommenders to deliver their advice.

One study, conducted for the Retail Advertising and Marketing Association,  shows that word-of-mouth is the top influence channel for electronics (44.4%) and apparel purchases (34.3%).  In electronics, product reviews came in second (36.8%) and retail advertising inserts came in third (29.2%).  In apparel, retail advertising inserts came in second (33.3%) and in-store promotions came in third (30.4%).

The other, reprinted in eMarketer, shows that across all age groups, the primary means through which people communicate product recommendations are the traditional ones - face-to-face, email, and phone - with blogs and communities far behind.  What’s significant here is that the leaders are primarily point-to-point channels, not mass communications channels, highlighting that people with advice to offer prefer to deliver it directly to the person who needs it.  (OK, people could be email blasting their product recommendations to their friends, but I suspect the dominant mode here is more targeted.)

The New York Times ran a piece today heralding the imminent arrival of Facebook Connect - significant as an indication of the huge expected impact of the feature.  My guess is that for brands and online merchants planning their social commerce strategy, the anticipation of Facebook Connect will be matched by an equal measure of head-scratching about how to make the best use of it.

Its predecessor, Beacon, had significant flaws.  But for merchants, it also had a particular beauty - clarity of purpose.  It did just one thing (sending “stories” to their customers’ Facebook pages so friends could see what those customers bought).  And it provided all the infrastructure needed to do that.  Just pop a bit of code here and there, and you were up and running.

Facebook Connect, on the other hand, is a tool kit which can be used in many possible ways.  In addition to posting stories back to Facebook, it offers the ability for shoppers to bring their Facebook friends with them to the merchant’s site.  Sounds exciting, but what does that really mean?  What features and applications should sites build around that capability?  And where does the technology to take advantage of this potential come from?

My belief is that the killer app for Facebook Connect for online commerce is going to be “trusted reference systems”.  If you sell online, and all-of-a-sudden you can know the friend-network of your shoppers, what is the most powerful use to which you can put that information on your site?  It is: to tell your shoppers what their friends have bought from you, while they are shopping.  Shoppers who see that friends buy from you are going to be more likely to do so, too.  They’ll get ideas from seeing what their friends have purchased, so they’ll buy more.  And they’ll be able to see who among their friends they can turn to for advice if they have questions, so their whole shopping experience will be improved.

We’re on the brink of a new phase in online commerce where brands and merchants of all sizes will be able to put applications driven by social graphs on their sites.  For those who take advantage of this opportunity, the potential to create value for their business is tremendous.  (Not to be coy, at TurnTo, we are excited to be the leading provider of turn-key trusted reference systems that make it a snap for sellers to add these social commerce features to their sites.  If you are wondering what Facebook Connect can mean to your business, we’d like to talk to you; please drop us a line.)

Rubicon Consulting just published a great study about on-line influencers.  But the most striking thing about the study: for all the importance of user-generated online content, personal advice is still by far the most influential factor in purchasing decisions.  Here’s the chart of their data:

In a nutshell, they showed: “Advice from friends is better than advice from strangers.”  For sure, companies should be thinking hard about how to influence the people that generate all that anonymous online content.  But the data shows that the biggest leverage still comes from activating the personal advice network.