Can shopping work with social networks?
Looks like the American Marketing Association has its eye on social networks like MySpace as the shopping malls of the Web era. The AMA came out with a survey on Friday that said 47 per cent of people would go to such sites to research Christmas gifts …
Context & Ripple Effects
The American Marketing Association's Friday survey puts a number on an idea circulating through marketing circles this year: that social networks could become the shopping malls of the Web era, with 47% of respondents saying they would visit sites like MySpace to research Christmas gifts.
The pitch lands at an awkward moment for its centerpiece. Earlier in 2006 MySpace was described as the dominant hangout where virtually every teen and twentysomething in the USA socialized daily, but by October the network was already being written off by some users as 'so last year' — meaning the AMA is endorsing a venue whose core audience may be cooling on it even as marketers warm up.
First-order effects
- Marketers reading the AMA survey get quantitative cover to shift holiday research budgets toward social-network placements on MySpace, treating profile pages as product-discovery surfaces rather than pure brand outposts.
- MySpace gains a sales argument for its ad team — an industry-body survey validating it as a shopping venue — precisely while press reports have it losing favor with teens, forcing it to court advertisers harder than it courts users.
Second-order effects
- Rival social networks can now compete for the same marketer budgets by pitching themselves as less saturated or less youth-fickle than MySpace, turning audience-composition data into a pricing lever for ad inventory.
- Retailers face pressure to decide whether gift-research behavior actually converts inside social environments or merely starts there, which determines whether they fund dedicated social storefronts or treat these sites as top-of-funnel traffic sources.
Third-order effects
- If gift research habitually begins on social profiles, the advertising model shifts from interrupting content to embedding recommendations in peer networks — making influencer-style placement, rather than display inventory, the unit marketers buy.
- Industry bodies like the AMA legitimizing social commerce before platforms have built transaction tools sets up a gap between marketer expectation and site capability that whoever closes first — network or retailer — captures the channel.
The trend: Social networks are being repositioned from hangouts to shopping-adjacent discovery venues, with marketer surveys running ahead of the platforms' own commerce capabilities.