Social Commerce
Description
1.
Defined by Steve Rubel in the Micro Persuasion blog athttp://www.micropersuasion.com/2005/12/2006_trends_to_.html
"Social commerce can take several forms, but in sum it means creating places where people can collaborate online, get advice from trusted individuals, find goods and services and then purchase them. It shrinks the research and purchasing cycle by creating a single destination powered by the power of many.
One shining example of social commerce is Yahoo!'s Shoposphere. As David Beach from Yahoo describes it, the Shoposphere is a place to discover interesting and cool products thematically arranged into Pick Lists by other shoppers."
2.
From the Wikipedia:
"Social commerce is a subset of Electronic commerce in which the active participation of customers and their personal relationships are at the forefront. The main element is the involvement of a customer in the marketing of products being sold. e.g. recommendations and comments from customers. This happens for example when customers publish weblogs with their shopping lists. The term was first introduced by David Beisel and then picked up on by Steve Rubel, and originally referred primarily to sites such as Yahoo!'s shoposphere, and Shopit, where the social component is primarily recommendation and review.
However, the term has been expanded to include a variety of collaborative commerce activities, where the social participation may extend beyond recommendation to collaborative purchasing, such as microPledge, BountyUp, TimeXchange, or fundraising (Bring Light, ChipIn, Crowdfunder, Causes on Facebook). The Street Performer Protocol is a popular system for collaborative purchasing." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_commerce)
More Information
Recommended example by Steve Rubel: http://blog.treonauts.com