Can Facebook Become Retail?s ?next Google?

March 2, 2012 - PRLog -- “Social” has of course been the buzzword of the past few years. Now the inescapable fact that Facebook
has more users than there are Americans and that the company has made several well-publicized
moves in the commerce arena mean “social commerce” will be a popular conversation topic in the
months to come.
1
Some of the boldest prognostications have been that Facebook will be “the next
Google.”
2
The most common refrains supporting that perspective were variants of the following:
“With hundreds of millions of users, it will affect everything, including commerce.” (CEO,
social commerce vendor)
“Shopping is inherently social, so it would make sense for a social network to play
a significant role in the shopping process.” (VP, online marketing, $1 billion-plus
multichannel retailer)
However, we would be remiss to not point out that there is no shortage of skeptics when it comes to
Facebook and particularly around commerce. Computer scientist and author of the acclaimed book
You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, Jaron Lanier disparagingly describes the mad frenzy around
Facebook as “digital Maoism.”
3
Data that Forrester has collected with Shop.org for two years has
reflected that social networks fail to drive meaningful revenue for eBusiness professionals in retail,
have a questionable ROI, and are generally ineffective as customer acquisition tools

Furthermore, while Facebook proponents would argue that the best of Facebook commerce is
yet to come, the fact remains that, in spite of an open architecture and several hundred thousand
developers making efforts to develop useful social shopping applications, few, if any, have managed
to create a breakaway success. In contrast, paid search was viewed as a home run in Google’s early
days. Social networks, however, are not yet viewed quite as positively by retailers (see Figure 1-3).
To better understand these findings, we spent eight weeks interviewing nearly two dozen technology
vendors, retailers, and interactive marketers to craft a perspective on the topic. Facebook did not
respond to requests to be interviewed prior to publication of this document. The questions we set
out to answer were the following: How are eBusiness professionals in retail using Facebook? And
why hasn’t Facebook been able to generate more for eBusiness professionals in retail?

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