Paul Dunay, The Global Managing Director for Services and Social Media at Avaya, gave this description of social commerce in an interview in eMarketer:

Social commerce is working with or using your social graph, which is defined as your followers or your friends, and allowing them to help you make buying decisions.

Social commerce can be anything from a buying suggestion or recommendation—perhaps a tweet from a Dell outlet saying, “Hey, we have a special on this”—to something like Facebook Connect.

Facebook Connect would allow you to go to a Website like Dell.com and authenticate yourself using your Facebook profile, allow your identity to be known and access your friends so you could spark up a chat. So I could say, “Hey, Jeff, I’m looking at this new fancy laptop or this netbook. I heard you bought something. Would you recommend this to me?”

So you could almost take your friends shopping with you. That is the potential with this example.

Hey Paul, come look at the sites using TurnTo.  Your vision is alive today!

Here’s what Citysearch CEO Jay Herratti told the New York Times last week regarding their recent trial of Facebook Connect:

In the four months the site [Citysearch] has been testing Facebook Connect, 94 percent of reviewers have published their reviews to Facebook, where an average of 40 people see them and 70 percent click back to Citysearch. That has translated into new members: daily registrations on Citysearch have tripled.

If you are an on-line merchant, don’t leave all the Facebook Connect fun to the publishers!  With tools like TurnTo, a Facebook Connect implementation is far easier and quicker than you might imagine.  And results like those from Citysearch show the benefits can be dramatic.