transaction Archives - TheWayoftheWeb

Respected Venture Capitalist Fred Wilson often talks about the action taking place in the comments of his blog.

So I’m surprised more people haven’t picked up and reposted his comment from a post at the end of January.

If it’s a bit too small – Fred is revealing Twitter is the 3rd biggest referrer of transactional visits to handmade marketplace Etsy, with Flickr at number 2, and Facebook at number 4.

And Etsy is generating over $1 million a month in revenue, with $100 million worth of goods sold in 2008.

Now this might not convince everyone – after all, Etsy sales are by a large number of individual and small retailers who will be promoting their items individuals through Flickr, Twitter and Facebook – and the scale is the aggregate of those referrals – the ‘Long Tail‘, if you will!

So essentially there are 100s, if not 1000s of people handling social media marketing and customer service for their products, which doesn’t tackle the scale issue of large companies changing the way they do business, and utlising social media.

But there were 300,000 people in the California Gold Rush, and noone continued to deny there was gold in those hills.

Out of a long and convoluted debate on Twitter came one important point which is easy to overlook when you’re dealing with social media and buzz marketing. It’s one that other people have alluded to, when they’ve written reminders that social media marketing isn’t the only tool in a digital marketing toolbox, but I haven’t seen it stated clearly…

Some people won’t want to be social.

There, I said it. As a Community Marketing Manager, and a fairly social person, it’s easy for me to think about ways to integrate community into everything I do, and provide research and solutions that show the power community marketing can have.

But a proportion of people just want a clean transaction.

So to prove you really can put community everywhere – in this case it’s about listening and facilitating those members of the community to be able to go straight to the action/transaction and bypass community if they want. And allowing everyone else that wants to engage, to be able to do it on their terms, and be encouraged to do it.

I’d wager those seeking a clean transaction will either be performing a chore – paying a bill for example, and that the clean transaction seekers will be a minority, because industries have been striving to that end for years, and it isn’t working…