Web trackers ComScore recently predicted that $900 million in sales could be spent online today (Cyber Monday), when retailers offer steep discounts and free shipping on their sites. That big number follows an 11% surge this recent Black Friday ($595 million in sales) making this first holiday shopping season after the great economic meltdown of 2008/09 somewhat of a success. I’m going to go one step further and say on behalf of Thirdi and the Senses team that $1 billion could be spent today when all is said and done, because why the hell not? Doesn’t that sound more impressive?

Ecommerce has truly emerged as an increasingly important engine of consumer spending these past few years, and improvements in shopping cart software, website design, and online marketing through social media and other avenues continues to push ecommerce to the forefront of consumer behavior.

Some believe that the next step will be an integration of social media and TV, but there’s been a counterpoint to that claim (by an un-named source close to this Senses blogger who is developing a social media TV platform- apparently it’s tricky!) I think it’s obvious that it will be tough to do the social TV thing because being social and paying attention to Gossip Girl at the same time can be very difficult, as Gossip Girl can be very intense.  So intense that I am commonly silenced and banished from the living room when it is on. So next Christmas shopping season will you be watching the classic Christmas cartoons and ordering things off e-bay during commercials? Probably not, but as the start to this holiday shopping season has shown, the game is changing. TV will obviously have to adapt, as retailers have now discovered. Social media marketing has been a great success as Black Friday sales attest to, and online sales have risen dramatically this Cyber Monday thanks to the evolution of ecommerce.

Marketers have had a lot of fun using social media but it’s been difficult to quantify the results of many activities past. Depending on who you talk to the profit generated by social media is either hidden because the consumer doesn’t generally make a purchase through the platform itself, or because the effects are often strongest concerning brand loyalty or brand recognition but not necessarily translated into purchases right away. Today is the busiest shopping day of the year in those United States of America (Black Friday) and a big social media experiment of sorts is going on. Traditional media has been swept aside in favor of tweets and friends, and today of all days social media and retailers may have an affair to remember.

Several major retailers made significant Black Friday/Cyber Monday investments on a number of platforms including most notably Twitter and Facebook, in anticipation of a frenzy of activity today. Before today’s shopping mayhem began Sears, with more than 150,000  Facebook fans, held a sweepstakes on their website offering items at Black Friday prices early to selected customers they had engaged through their page while Toys R Us is letting its fans vote to determine which merchandise should go on sale Cyber Monday, the first business day after the holiday weekend and traditionally a busy online shopping day. For those interested in Cyber Monday deals I highly recommend www.goeyeball.com (check earlier post for more details)  where you can make your own time and money saving customized bargain hunter bot, AKA your eyeball, that scours the best prices online for selected items.

Social media as a marketing tool works great when you truly have something worth marketing. Regular prices don’t work people into a frenzy like they used to (did they ever?) and the value of social media as a contact point should never be doubted by retailers. I think what we’re seeing today though is a real coming out party for the new media, showing the utility of it in directly influencing consumer patterns over a smaller temporal scale but with incredibly high density or volume. It shows that social media when used strategically (like all marketing should) has profound utility. Just having a fan page or a twitter account isn’t going to drive people to your store (meaning larger temporal and low density or volume) but some of the imaginative uses of social media we’ve looked at in this post, and there are several others we have overlooked,  are examples of social media at work in the business cycle.  Large companies are finding ways to use it that directly can be quantified, hopefully silencing a lot of critics and naysayers in the process.