Integrating Social Media into Electronic Commerce Applications

Abstract

In this chapter, the author takes a look at how organizations can integrate Social Media technology into their current electronic commerce environment. While electronic commerce technology has been around for many years, social media technology is emerging as the dominating force in commerce itself. Organizations must evolve their online environments in order to progress to the next level of service delivery. Social Media provides the basic technology for creating a network of customers who are passionate about the company’s product offering. The key here is the commitment of the customers throughout the business lifecycle. Social Media includes a variety of technologies and concepts such as social networking, weblogs, wikis, Really Simple Syndication (RSS), social tagging, mashups, information markets, and user defined content. This chapter will review several different examples where organizations have added Social Media to their environment and impact that integration is having to the entire business model.