While “decompressing” in Ohio after years of slugging it out in Silicon Valley,  Simon Rothman (formerly of eBay) had an epiphany “E-commerce doesn’t seem to work for normal people” as he put it in a recent Business Week article. Although I find blanket statements that include the term “normal people”  to seem overgeneralizing it’s hard to argue that small-town America (or how about the red state people, or maybe country folks?) have a lot of stuff just sitting around that could be sold but they don’t trust computers. Computers were invented by big-city folk, (or heathens or sodomites…whatever we people that live in the big coastal cities are commonly referred to by small-town folk).  According to Rothman many people he had come in contact with (salt of the earth blue-collar people I have to assume)  felt that ecommerce was cumbersome, time consuming, and possibly putting people at risk of hacking, malware and viruses.  Hey wait a minute that’s what I think too and I’m a raging liberal west coast urbanite.  So he came up with a platform that would overcome these roadblocks and tap into this $3 billion market for used goods that he felt was out there-  introducing  Glyde.

Rothman has been working very quietly behind the scenes for the past year with some seed money and a simple but good idea. Glyde will charge 10% of the sale number with no upfront fees and $1.25 for custom mailing envelopes provided by the company.  Instead of operating on a buyer/seller honor system where sellers are rated for the quality of product or timeliness of shipping Glyde will employ comprehensive analytics to track sales and shipping activities. The company has also filed for numerous patents on features and processes; as the Bilski Supreme Court case continues in we’ll see if those can even be claimed in the near future.

Though Glyde might not be something new and daring like the original eCommerce platforms it’s worth commending them for reminding us that sometimes you don’t need to reinvent the wheel, you just need to make it better.  Making e-commerce easier and faster should definitely allow Glyde to tap into the less computerized portions of the population and probably take some of us more tech savvy consumers with them along the way.

And for the record, I would love it if we the collective software and internet marketing community could agree upon a standardize form of the word eCommerce (ecommerce? e-commerce? eCommerce?) let’s tackle this one at the next big trade show how about?

The question persists as to how social media can be transformed from idle and pedantic chatter to hard quantifiable profits. Marketing executive like the alchemists of old search for this answer; it is the philosopher’s stone of today’s advertising and marketing industry. A new emarketer survey shows that marketing execs do find value in social media platforms, particularly in engaging customers and communicating with customers, which is no surprise. I believe the very idea of being social is communicating and engaging with others around you is it not? Actually, according to the dictionary social is:

So how do we make the social profitable? And in a way is that act potentially threatening to social intercourse if taken too far?  Can you imagine sitting around with friends at dinner and having an ad pop up every minute? This is the wrong way for marketing and advertising in social media to go. Thankfully the internet (or at least Google) has been moving away from those kinds of bombardments towards interest based advertising, which more keenly anticipates customer wants and needs as specified directly or indirectly by customers.

But how to make money as a social media service yourself is something that even the mightiest of social media platforms, Facebook, struggled with since its inception. Only recently did Facebook post profits after years of being in the red or just breaking even, but some other social media services are getting wise.  LendingClub launched via a Facebook application earlier in May this year and some believe it might be the closest thing to a social media profit model yet.  The service links up Facebook users in a person to person lending network with lower interest rates and less red tape than institutional lenders.  The person to person or peer to peer lending service has been successful and growing, with nearly 350,000 users lending and borrowing more than $66,000,000 in volume. $6,000,000 in loans were facilitated just this past October according to Senior Product Strategist Rob Garcia who I spoke with recently. According to Garcia the company is currently growing at 15-20% peer month, making them the definitive world leader in P2P lending.  After dozens of bank failures over the past year peer to peer (P2P) lending may just be the most attractive alternative to major institutions. Lending Club has even been noted by  the Harvard Business Review for its innovative approach. So here’s an example of a social media business model, but it relies on having an intrinsically valuable commodity in its social exchange, money. Perhaps the old adage “talk is cheap” sums up why social media, like the philosopher’s stone of old, has been so hard to translate into profits. By relying solely on social media to try and make your company successful you’re making a cake solely from icing. It’s one tool, and an increasingly important tool, but don’t expect it to be the driving engine of your marketing plan. This is why CEOs and executives have consistently viewed it with bewilderment, and have rarely claimed it to be be a driving force for profits and market share. The driving force for profits ultimately rests on your product or your service, your image, your message, your identity, quality and your value.  Marketing is about implanting that identity and value in the public mind and attracting their use of your company.  Don’t expect social media to make these things up for you if you don’t have them, and before you sink money into marketing in social media make sure that you can back your hype. Companies can often fail fast if they don’t. All that being said,  across the board from transnational corporations to small businesses in Vancouver everyone has been clamoring to get savvy with this social media thing.  In our guts we’ve all recognized that it’s big and it’s changed things.

As for Lending Club, they might be a social media profit model but once again it’s not the social part that drives the profits. I still believe it’s the demand for what they offer beyond the social aspect that makes them their profit.  So maybe we are still left searching for the stone, but perhaps we’ve gotten a little closer. As Business Week has pointed out, regardless of what the accountants might think social media has drastically changed the nature of business and if they’re not on-board now businesses will be running to catch an increasingly fast train. When I spoke to Rob Garcia of Lending Club he agreed with that sentiment:

“Social Media is a core component of Lending Club’s product marketing and customer engagement strategies.  Person-to-person lending works best in an open environment where our members can engage freely and directly with our brand, where they want, when they want.”

Lending Club represents a new trend in social media that other companies may be wise to observe. The social media value isn’t in talk alone, as was stated earlier “talk is cheap”.  Imagine how much business would get done on the NYSE if everyone was just talking about whatever they felt like. In Lending Club’s case the talk is more focused and common, like those traders on the floor.The company supplants a chaotic social media model with one that has a more disciplined, directed and shared interest at its core. Maybe this is the philosopher’s stone of social media profit models we’ve been looking for.  Instead of wading into the jungle of social media and searching for revenue in the din of chatter, why not give them (us) something to talk about? Something they (we) want, and then give them (us) a place to do it. The city in the Jungle.

Social media profits don’t stop with Facebook. If anyone has proved that Lending Club has.