Today I read yet another post by Paul Marsden over at Social Commerce Today, but for the first time I didn’t agree with him… the horror, the horror! :)

The original post, about a possible ‘bubble 2.0’ around social commerce, is here: Bubblicious? $1.5bn investment pours into social commerce startups.

My comment was as follows:

Paul, leaving aside the possibility of a new bubble, I’m not sure I agree with the widespread trend of extending the term ‘social commerce’ to members-only flash sales and group buying as well. Hence, if a bubble is coming I don’t think it’s a social commerce bubble, if it makes any sense.

Flash sales services are actually quite anti-social, since they are members-only and they’re not driven by purchase volumes, which actually are one of the main constraints. And with group buying - at least for the successful ones - the initial core component of sharing the deal to make it tip (ie a real incentive to share) vanished under either negligible tipping thresholds or simply because of the vast number of subscribers made sharing unnecessary for deals to tip and the business to go on. You may say that Groupon is indeed social because it’s the collective power that enables a deal to exist in the first place (same for Woot in a way), to which I’d argue that it should therefore be listed in a different category, because the definition/type of *social* which applies to Groupon et al is not the same applied to other services. And the aforementioned sites account for more than 90% of the funding discussed in your post.

I don’t want to make a fuss over terminology but I believe that there isn’t yet an accurate definition of social commerce / social shopping (actually, there is and you coined it - “helping people connect where they buy and buy where they connect”), or one that everyone understands and uses correctly. It’s much easier to define eCommerce and I’d expect almost everyone to get it right, but my feeling is that social commerce is whatever you wanted to be and can be very deceiving (or the hot catchphrase to raise money in 2011), especially when it goes mainstream to people not working in this space.

Working in the social commerce myself I’d really like if the field could be easily defined so that anyone could understand exactly what we’re talking about, but I’m afraid it won’t happen (at least not in the mainstream press / media).