TechCrunch Social Commerce Panel videos, feat. Groupon, LivingSocial, Payvment, gWallet, Eventbrite, Zong

TechCrunch's last Summer CrunchUp was all abour Social commerce: social currency, social savings, social coupons and social recommendations... See all about it here.

Study says Social Commerce pays off

Via the excellent Exciting Commerce blog:

"Unfortunately there are still too few scientific studies on networking effects in e-commerce. Understandable though, due to limited opportunities to make direct comparisons.

All the more exciting that a new study has been released (PDF) from France and the US with the title “Deriving Value from Social Commerce Networks”, whose results have been recently published in the Journal of Marketing Research. The study examines what happens when merchants begin to network with each other."

Download the study here.

Read the whole article at Exciting Commerce here.

Social Media ROI: Socialnomics

"Faceshopping": Carrefour launches exclusive live shopping deal application on Facebook

Here's a little social commerce app we designed and launched at Publicis K4 for Carrefour, the #2 retailer in the world.

It's called "Faceshopping" and it offers daily shopping deals for Facebook members only.

Launched on September 22nd, it is the first application of its kind.

Reviews are starting to show up accross the Web...

Go ahead and try it for yourself...
All of your comments and ideas are welcome, so we can make it better over time.

(A special shout-out to the fine folks at KRDS for the great work!)

Augmented Reality Video Social Shopping!

Augmented Reality meets Motion Capture meets Social Networking meets Online Shopping :)

Zugara, a California-based interactive marketing agency, has just released a new product called the "Webcam Social Shopper".

It's an online shopping application, which couples the features of Augmented Reality and Motion Capture. The Webcam Social Shopper app allows to seemingly hold articles of clothing up in front of yourself, while it tracks your movements so you can interact with the site's content when standing several feet away from your computer's controls. And it's Facebook Connect enabled, so you can share pictures of yourself wearing the reality-augmented clothing with your friends.

Here's a video demo from Zugara:

Social shopping for real: An embeddable widget to sell your stuff to your friends on social networks

Told'ya helps you build and display a storefront widget in about 2 minutes on your Facebook, Blog, MySpace... and populate it with stuff you would like to sell. Payments are made via Paypal and Told'ya gets a $0.99 cent fee per transaction.

This is social shopping in its purest form (C2C social selling): users sell stuff to people who are in their own social graph, using the platforms where they socialize with them...

Here's a screenshot of my demo store, as only US residents can publish a store:



Update: here's a competing offer called Cartfly, and a demo store widget:



Update 2: here's yet ANOTHER competitor: Put-A-Cart. Man this space is getting crowded...

Social Advertising Best Practices

IAB has just released its Social Media advertising best practices.

"These Best Practices are intended to help
protect consumer privacy, ensure transparency for what and how data is being used, and to define consumer permissions. The purpose of this
document is to provide best practices that illustrate, inform, and
facilitate greater adoption of the medium by defining creative components, data usage, consumer control, and privacy guidelines and by providing social advertising examples."

Click here to download the "Social Advertising Best Practices" PDF.

How to use a billboard in a tourist spot to get instant massive social media coverage of your brand

The McDonald's Picadilly interactive billboard.
See end of video to see what I mean...
Brilliant!
A Leo Burnett production.

"Oldy but goody": a 2007 Social Shopping initiative

The US Lost Boys Interactive Group agency IconNicholson deployed a pretty cool multichannel retail event back in 2007, called the Social Retailing™ concept, for fashion designer Nanette Lepore, to demonstrate how young shoppers could move from online to mobile, interacting through text messaging, instant messaging and email for a unique shopping experience.

Here's a video overview of the project:



Official press release from IconNicholson here.

Facebook valuation update: $15 billion?

As told by Mark Zuckerberg at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco...

"The Facebook CEO basically just admitted to the much-discussed Facebook $15 billion valuation financing, telling interviewer John Battelle: “It’s going well, we’ve almost wrapped things up.”

From GigaOM: Web 2.0 Summit: Zuckerberg Admits to Deal-Making « GigaOM