This article is in continuation
to my previous article on “Tweet-o-Commerce”.
[Link: http://snehshahani.blogspot.in/2014/12/tweet-o-commerce.html].
Previous article describes Tweet-o-commerce and how it will change the way we purchase real time products. Once Tweet-o-commerce becomes successful it will have a huge impact
on traditional e-Commerce platforms and digital marketers. e-commerce platforms
might have to modify the way in which they work and include real time component
while digital marketers will get a new tool to sell new kind of products as
well as old ones.
Difference from Traditional e-commerce platforms: Push vs Pull
Traditional e-commerce platforms
are optimized for ‘pull’ of a product. They have search facility,
categorical/hierarchical arrangement of products to enable better searching. While
“Twitter” is optimized to ‘push’ the product as it has UI for advertising.
People come to “Twitter” not just to purchase but to get their daily feeds and
in this session our advertisements can be pushed. Though “Twitter” has facility
to search in the form of #hashtags but it is not well structured as compared to
traditional e-commerce engines.
Impact on e-Commerce platforms
Current e-commerce platforms will
have to evolve a lot to compete with Tweet-o-Commerce if it becomes successful.
This is due to the intuitive nature of Twitter, which provides excellent user
experience and ease of purchase by just few taps on mobile platform. So
traditional platforms will have to attempt making certain changes in order to
compete with Twitter. For example they may start providing live updates of new
items in their platform.
One thing that traditional e-commerce
platforms are good at is they provide highly intuitive interface in ‘pulling’
the items that customer wants, while Twitter will be a very good platform in
‘pushing’ items to the potential customers. So customers will still go to
traditional e-commerce platform for pulling the product. So the traditional e-commerce
platform may attempt to provide ‘push’ functionality by using gadgets described
below.
Gadget 1: Recommender Gadget
Recommender gadget will show
currently hot items in market. This gadget should have capabilities to
provide/show personalized items based on the interest of current user. This
personalization may be done based on cookies or the user profile. This can be
done by using different profiling techniques.
Gadget 2: Pub-Sub gadget
E-commerce engines will have to
develop mechanisms to provide push messages to their users. These mechanisms
can be in the form of publisher-subscriber where customers will get push feeds
only for the type of items for which they subscribe. For Twitter this can be
done by using keywords in the form hash tags. User will subscribe to a set of
hash tags.
Impact on the life of Digital marketers
Digital marketers definitely get
a new tool to play with, with the advent of Tweet-o-Commerce but they will need
to add new skills to their current portfolio. Digital marketers will have to
acquire domain knowledge of temporal items and design new ways to sell those.
This would be a totally new domain added to digital marketing portfolio if this
becomes successful.
Such a marketer should be able to
prepare catchy one liner advertisements which should convey the message in
short. They should be able to track the sale in real-time and modify the
campaign accordingly at the same time. Time is very important in such push
based real time commerce. So taking decision to modify the campaign should be
very fast. Apart from that retrospective analysis of the impact of a push
message has to be done quickly to ensure that same mistake is not repeated.
Conclusion: Push based e-commerce will have a major impact on the
way we think and if successful it will revolutionize the digital marketing by
opening a new market segment of selling those items which were not being sold
through computer based platform.
Disclaimer: The terminology introduced in the article like Buying
Tweet, Tweet-o-commerce are author’s own and does not reflect Twitter’s views
on the same. These terminologies are introduced with an intension of increasing
the readability of the article.