CfP: Focus Theme Section on "Social Commerce"

Guest Editors:

• Thomas Hess, University of Munich, Germany
• Karl R. Lang, City University of New York, USA
• Sean Xin Xu, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, China

Theme:
Social commerce is a new form of electronic commerce where individual Internet users, who are often non-professionals, are included in the offering and the evaluation of products, services, and suppliers. In doing so, they contribute “the wisdom of crowds” and create social media in e-commerce contexts (Surowiecki 2004). Social commerce is concerned with both physical and digital goods and can be based on fixed line networks but also occur over mobile networks. It can be organized on dedicated sites like online communities or social networks or it can be incorporated into commercial web sites and e-commerce settings. It may have salient impacts on both consumers and companies (McAfee 2006).

Sociologists have long recognized that the marketplace and commercial transactions are socially embedded and do not occur in strict accordance with a purely rational economic calculus. The ease and speed with which social relations and interactions can be created and organized on online platforms and linked to ventures that pursue commercial interests raises important open questions for e-commerce research that this special issues aims to address.

The huge number of Internet users combined with years of experiences with the Internet and the low barriers for implementing new services on the Internet have led to the increasing adoption of social commerce platforms. For example, Amazon has extended their shopping network to include non-professional suppliers, that is, it allows consumers to act in the role of both shopper and seller on their site. Amazon also encourages their customers to share user-generated content in the form of ratings, reviews, lists, and discussions.

But while some platforms are open and give users access to data, content, and peer users, others are still fairly closed and control to a large extend what users can do and how they can interact with each other. Mash-up sites, like Google Maps, for example, let users creatively combine Google supplied maps with user-generated objects and make these co-created customized maps available for others, resulting a wide range of themed maps that include recommended tourist trails, hunt and treasure maps, distributed art exhibits, among many others. Apple, on the other hand, has strict rules and oversight for their i-Phone application platform and controls who can offer apps to their i-Phone customers and reserves the right to reject any applications (which may be developed by commercial third-party developers or non-professionals) they deem inappropriate or undesirable.

While incorporating social commerce capabilities clearly creates business value for traditional e-commerce companies (like Amazon, e.g.), many new ventures are still seeking a profitable and sustainable business models. YouTube, for example, has had tremendous success in orga­nizing the sharing of user-generated video content and has demonstrated operational excellen­ce in scaling their content sharing platform to unprecedented levels, but at the same time it has not been able yet to leverage the huge level of user activity and touch points that occur on its platform and link them effectively to its envisioned advertising business. Facebook has built a social network of a staggering 350 million users, but has been struggling to grow revenue streams that offset its rising operating costs. Similarly, Twitter has seen very rapid user adoption but has been slow in monetizing its service.

Some studies tell us that a lot of customers do not trust in aggregated recommendations of other users. Also there are some open questions on the technical level regarding the algorithms for aggregating recommendations, interfaces to payment systems, and linking of social platforms to identity systems.

Topics:
Invited are submissions in the topics including, but not limited to:

• Social platform and service innovation
• Social computing and social software applications
• Social networks and digital consumer networks
• Social networks and bookmarking
• Peer-to-Peer-distribution and superdistribution
• Recommender systems and social intelligence
• Payment systems
• Identity systems
• Social mobile services
• Co-creation online communities
• User generated content
• Virtual worlds
• Social business models
• Pricing strategies for social commerce providers
• Incentives of contributors in social commerce
• Social commerce and market efficiencies
• Payoffs to companies in social commerce settings
• Social commerce and the “traditional” e-commerce
• Customer behaviour and consumer decision-making in social
• commerce environments
• Intermediaries and value chains
• Management and governance issues in social commerce
• Organizational design of social commerce ventures
• Social aspects in electronic market structures and auctions
• Democratization of computer-mediated communication

All papers will be peer reviewed and should conform to Electronic Markets’ publication standards.
Full papers are invited to be submitted by August 31, 2010. All papers must be original, not published or under review elsewhere. If you would like to discuss any aspect of the focus theme section, please contact the Editor for the focus theme section.

Methodological and theoretical pluralism is part of the journals policy. We welcome submissions using qualitative or quantitative methods. We also would like to encourage submissions of interdisciplinary work by authors from different areas. If authors have any questions regarding suitability of their work for this special issue, whether topical or methodological, they should not hesitate to contact (one of) the co-editors.

References:
McAfee, A. P. 2006. Enterprise 2.0: The dawn of emergent collaboration. Sloan Management Review 47(3) 21-28.
Surowiecki, J. 2004. The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies, and Nations, Doubleday, New York, NY.

Contact addresses:
thess@bwl.lmu.de
karl.lang@baruch.cuny.edu
seanxu@ust.hk
or editors@electronicmarkets.org

Important deadlines:

• Submission Deadline: August 31, 2010
• Feedback to authors: October 15, 2010
• Revision deadline: November 15, 2010
• Acceptance decision: December 15, 2010