We often hear of Web 2.0 being centered around the idea of social networking among friends, family, co-workers, acquaintances, and some guy you just met on the street five minutes ago.   Facebook, MySpace, and the rest of their ilk remain popular for one reason: they make it easy to communicate with a catalog of friends and other users in an often disconnected world outside of a desktop.  So much so, micro-blogging services such as Twitter and Jaiku are the current Silicon Valley darlings because they focus on the core communication element of Web 2.0 technologies with ease and simplicity (“What are you doing?” in 140 characters or less in Twitter’s case.)

How then, does social networking translate into the ecommerce sphere of influence?  There’s a lot of potential there.  Read user reviews on Amazon.com for instance; read the comment threads after each review.  Ask yourself this question: “After reading the reviews on the Zune, am I more likely to buy it or look at the other recommendations?”  There’s inherent value in a user review because potential customers acknowledge those reviewers used the product, tested it, and cared enough to post about their experiences.

That’s why you have Amazon and eBay opening up their Web APIs to allow developers to leverage their technologies and use their own websites as development platforms to create basic, customized storefronts.  When you add feedback forums, communities, chat rooms, discussion boards,  and dynamic buying guides, there is global customer interaction that cannot be emulated by a simple drive to the local brick and mortar retail store, where the primary advantage is actually being able to touch and test drive a product before purchasing it.

This is where the scalability and flexibility of our ECF product comes in.  No longer are you tied to an “out of box” solution that shovels you the features you don’t need.  But rather, you get a powerful .NET framework built with well written code that gives you a solid foundation to build the ecommerce solution you want it to be with the latest available technologies.  If you’re a company that sees social commerce as a way to drive sales far above the bottom line, then build and extend the ECF to leverage that functionality.  Or if you happen to like a third-party solution, such as Community Server, as your social networking tool, then you can integrate the ECF and CS seamlessly because you have the full source code at your fingertips to weave your own modular tapestry.

Communities and social network may not drive markedly increased sales for online retailers, as a July 2007 report from JupiterResearch found.  Only about 12 percent of online consumers purchased more because of community and social networking sites.  However, as Web 2.0’s de facto definition of itself is the era of social networking, social commerce becomes a critical marketing strategy for a burgeoning generation that sees the Facebooks of the online world as integrated in their lives as iPods, movies, and episodes of “Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County.”

And that is why, with our ECF product, you work with your needs in mind.  Social commerce, then, becomes a reality.