Mobile Commerce and Social Media merging?

Increasingly, I’m seeing Web 3.0 (aka the “Next Big Thing”) as the collision of two mega-trends. Mobile commerce and social media are intertwining and are becoming indistinguishable. Or, at least, it’s hard at times to tell where mobile commerce ends and social media begins.

Facebook, for example, is the killer mobile application. As of April, there have been nearly 7 million downloads of the Facebook Mobile iPhone application representing more than 25% of the iPhone and iPod Touch market. Personally, I use Facebook more on my mobile phone than on my computer (despite the lame user interface).

Is Facebook on a mobile phone mobile commerce or social media?

Facebook Mobile is definitely social media and it’s definitely mobile. Facebook is hardly alone in not figuring out the commerce part in mobile.

Interestingly, the public sector seems to get it. Lately, I’ve spent a lot of time talking to Universities about mobile commerce. Universities understand that their alumni, fans, and of course, their students all use both mobile phones and social media. After all, Facebook started out as a student-only application.

All university outreach, from recruiting to fund raising to athletics, involves relationships. Social media and mobile commerce technology fit perfectly with university goals to build lifelong relationships.

Universities embracing social media on a mobile phone allows them a very intimate, always-there, reminder to the user of their relationship and how the university has affected their life. Social media also lets users share university info with classmates and friends.

Universities can monetize this through their annual fund raising and recruiting efforts. For example, users can challenge classmates in their social network to donate. Both Vanderbilt and the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill already have basic mobile sites.

Look for social media and mobile commerce to more directly support university advancement in the future.

HSN iPhone mobile commerce application featuring shake2shop

Mobile Commerce is starting be, well… commerce. Home Shopping Network (HSN) announced their new iPhone application that among other things let’s you buy stuff.

So far much of the hype around mobile commerce and mobile advertising has brought back painful memories of the Dot-com days before the bust. Back then it seemed everyone built their business model on ad revenue and the glory of first mover advantage. Today’s conversations on mobile ad revenue and “stickier”, more loyal customers seems to be the same deja vu all over again.

Now we have another great example of a company using their ecommerce expertise to find another way to connect with their consumers and convert eyeballs into revenue. Hallelujah.

Modern consumers use their phone when they’re bored. Look around. Almost everywhere you’ll find someone staring at their phone: in the breakroom, at the DMV, waiting for a plane, sitting on a bus, even standing in line at the checkout. There are lots of places without computers and that are not your retail store. All these other places are opportunities to connect with your customer and create new sales.

“This is another valuable tool for us to reach both existing and new customers with the compelling lifestyle content we offer via HSN TV as well as the broad array of quality products available at hsn.com,” says Brian Bradley, executive vice president/general manager of online and advanced services at HSN. HSN points out that this is possibly the first case of a Live Video “Third Screen”, referring to simultaneous live video on television, computers and now mobile phones.

However, the focus on booking sales in the mobile channel is arguably far more important to the overall mobile commerce industry.

Ecommerce companies are struggling with how best to adapt the web shopping cart metaphor to mobile commerce. Doing business on mobile phones adds additional difficulty because of the fragmentation of technologies (like SMS, browsers & applications) and devices (iPhone, Android, etc.). The successes and failures of the HSN application and others like it will be useful to the industry as a whole.

Industry best practices are still in the incubation stage. Organizations going it alone generally must figure out all the details using trial and error and often with very little objective data or mobile experience as a guide.

This challenge is why more organizations will seek help from outside experts like my firm Mobile Strategy Partners. At least for now, Mobile Commerce is more complicated than ecommerce was in the 1990s. As a veteran of ecommerce and now mobile commerce, I have seen the organizational struggles and the expensive mistakes that could have been prevented.

Mobile Commerce is evolving faster than ecommerce did. More and more organizations are looking for help in getting the product mix right earlier and get to ROI faster.

They’re doing it because if they don’t, their competitors will.