What is Social Commerce?

Let’s look at a scenario. I want to hire someone to build a ecommerce site to sell my new brand of Vitamin Enriched Poodle Chow. Now, anyone who knows the cutthroat Poodle market will understand that my choice of designer could mean the difference between excelling as a thoroughbred or wallowing with the other mutts. How do I choose a designer for such an important task?

Typically, sites like eLance or GetAFreelancer would give me a trust proxy. They would allow vendors to put together a profile, and allow their clients to rate those vendors on their performance. The end result is a resume of sorts, a kind of dynamic CV that gives me a pretty clear picture of the vendors capabilities but tells me absolutely nothing about the vendor himself.

What is Social Commerce? Well, according to VOIS — a Florida-based site that has recently revamped their site from a general interest social network to a social commerce platform — it’s what happens when you combine the ease of sites like eLance with the humanizing powers of Social Networks. In the scenario I just described, one where the designer’s personal predilections might factor into the final outcome of the project as much as her skill, I could get a much more complete picture of her interests, skill-sets and by extension whether I should hire her or not if I could see a personal profile, take a look at her friends, track her historical contributions to a community and see her dynamic CV.

The social commerce in general and VOIS specifically seeks to create a more natural environment for clients and vendors to interact, one without the artificially barriers typically erected by traditional job boards. An environment that will allow people to find jobs that they enjoy. Herb Tabin, Co-Founder of VOIS said, “I believe we give people a lot of opportunity. We want to provide people with the opportunity to work from home or anywhere, using VOIS’ flexible online work environment, so that they could improve their quality of life, and stop commuting to work. With today’s technology there is simply no need for most people to commute to an office. As long as the service they provide can be performed virtually, such as accounting or legal, being a virtual assistant or web designer, it seems antiquated to go to an office. If you can provide a service someone wants on VOIS, there is an opportunity to find work immediately.”

I think that Social Commerce and VOIS’ implementation of it is a big step in the right direction. Social tools are worthless if left undirected, and using them for the sake of helping people make good hiring decisions is a strong use case especially in an economy that will reward people who are able to make the best use of available talent.

If you are a freelancer looking for a job or company looking for a better way to hire one, I would strongly suggest giving VOIS a look.

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