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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Online retailers embrace social commerce

Frank Sennett The Spokesman-Review

When you place your next fast-food order, don’t be surprised to hear, “Do you want a blog with that?”

OK, the service sector hasn’t jumped on the blogging bandwagon quite that hard — yet. But prominent online retailers are fast adding blogs in hopes of increasing the amount of time and money customers spend in their virtual shops.

Amazon.com got the social commerce ball rolling with its AmazonConnect author blogs. It then added a blog where the site’s book editors write posts about current news and then link to pages for related books.

Shoppers who visited Amazon to learn more about terrorist kingpin Abu Musab al-Zarqawi after he was killed in Iraq could read a blog entry recommending six related books, for instance.

It’s unclear whether blogs will be a “killer app” for retail sites. But Amazon is hedging its Web 2.0 bets by introducing podcasts, social networking via its Amazon Friend service, ProductWikis that invite customers to collaborate on Wikipedia-style articles, discussion boards, content tagging á la del.icio.us, and Flickr-style photo sharing.

The idea is to throw hot interactive features against the cyber-wall and see which ones make customers stick around longest with their wallets open. Cader Books Founder Michael Cader recently posted an editorial on his influential Publishers Marketplace site arguing that all publishers should give those bells and whistles a try.

“Sure, it’s derivative, a bit chaotic, and at times even a little silly sounding, but you may have thought the same thing eight years ago about Amazon’s customer reviews,” Cader wrote. “Once upon a time, furious initiatives like this cost so much you couldn’t even think about offering them yourself. In today’s world, however, you can offer comparable features and more at little or no actual cost.”

It’s an idea with legs. Auction site eBay will unveil eBay Blogs and eBay Community Wiki initiatives during its eBay Live conference in Las Vegas this week. Sellers will be able to use the free blogs to promote their eBay offerings, offer expert commentary on collectibles and discuss their sales experiences, according to Steve Rubel’s Micro Persuasion blog and AuctionBytes.com.

Rubel presented a screenshot of an eBay help page (the link was dead when I tried to access it Friday morning) suggesting sellers soon may be able to connect with customers via the Skype online phone service as well.

“Conversation drives commerce so integrating blogs, wikis and tags into the eBay toolkit is a natural extension to their core platform, which has long included discussion boards,” noted Rubel, a senior VP at global PR firm Edelman. “I would not be surprised to see the company take this a step further and build eBay into a giant social network that lets like-minded buyers and sellers find each other.”

The simplicity, immediacy and ubiquity of the blog platform — not to mention its low implementation costs — should make blogging a key component of such social commerce initiatives for the foreseeable future.

Drilling Down

Remember how fan-accessible former Atlanta Braves owner Ted Turner used to seem when he sat near the field during his baseball team’s home games? Well, Mark Cuban has one-upped his fellow outspoken billionaire. The Dallas Mavericks owner is blogging about his basketball squad’s performance during the NBA Finals at blogmaverick.com.

“How are we ahead?” Cuban asked in a post he wrote during halftime of Thursday’s Game One. “We have not played well at all.” But the Mavericks ended up beating the Miami Heat 90-80, and more than 50 fans commented on the blog post during the game’s second half.

So if you want a chance to jawbone with an NBA franchise owner, visit Cuban’s blog during the Finals. It’s a lot cheaper than a front-row seat.