I started this book with an anecdote about how the world appeared to have changed before I started writing. People were Tweeting in a live conference, people were expecting to announce their presence at a coffee bar over the Internet. Closing the book down I see things are changing again.

I’m taking my family out for a day. We are very excited – well, two of us – because we’re going to see The Doctor Who Exhibition at London’s Olympia. Doctor Who is one of the top family TV programmes in the UK, surrounding a time travelling face changing hero who travels the universe righting wrongs.

There are exhibits in the foyer before you get to the main thrust of the thing, which is a sort of virtual adventure in which the audience takes part. But what’s interesting is that you get invited to link into the exhibition’s own WiFi network. I start to wonder what for; is BBC Worldwide so insecure that they think we’re going to want to check our emails and do a bit of web surfing while we wait to be spifflicated by aliens?

But no. What it is, is an idea in which you log on to this specific network, you fire up your phone’s browser and it offers you information on the exhibits as you approach them. When they first appeared on the show, lots of extra little bits and pieces like that. Then at the end of the exhibition there is the inevitable souvenir shop, and you get daily discounts if you’re on the network. They pop up on your phone, they’re cheaper than the prices on the shelves, and if you show the phone to the checkout staff you get the cheaper price.

Let’s get the cynical stuff out of the way first: this could of course be a dirt cheap gimmick to attract the gadget-obsessed Doctor Who fan to go and buy some daft souvenir because he or she thinks it’s a bargain when simply ‘not buying’ would have saved them even more money. There is also the motivation of ‘put the slow moving stuff on an apparently limited offer whilst persuading people they’re only getting it because they’re part of some sort of elite,’ which can be a means of reducing stock. I’m not a cynic – much – but I acknowledge the possibility of those motivations.

The move tells us something about the shop and the exhibition’s expectations of the customers. The Doctor Who fan is likely to fall into one of three categories. First, the vast majority are ordinary viewers who might go to an exhibition if it’s there but won’t queue for a t-shirt. Second, the children, who will want their parents to buy them something. Third, and probably most interesting from the social media point of view, the later adolescent/lifetime diehard is a demographic in his or her own right. They are likely to have a lot of the shows on DVD already, and will have bought a high definition TV.

And of course they’ll have a smartphone. Or rather, enough of them will have a smartphone to make the scheme worthwhile. Someone has clearly sat down with a spreadsheet and a realistic forecast of who’s going to be all technology’d up and will therefore take part.

They’ll be comfortable attaching this phone to a network they don’t actually know. This has implications for the branding of the company offering the network and the confidence people have in it. There had been no major reports of widespread smartphone hacking as this book went to press; if this changes then presumably that trust dynamic will alter as well.

Getting at extra information this way is going to feel natural to this sub-community. They’ll be out there and able to make a commercial difference to an enterprise because they’re expected to respond.

There’s an argument that says we shouldn’t extrapolate too much from this just yet. The Doctor Who fan is a peculiar beast in marketing terms; he or she is likely to spend more than average on souvenirs of this sort of visit, they will be affluent and this in itself informs the idea that they’ll have a mobile device.

If this were restricted to this particular exhibition it would be a fair comment. But it’s not.

It’s a dominant player in the Smartphone market and this is important because of the amount of tourist apps which are coming to its phones and no others. They may well point the way forward for a whole new wave of social commerce/social media applications. There are now areas in the UK in which you don’t even need an app; visit particular areas of London and your Nokia phone automatically offers you a song that was written in the area so that you can listen to something genuinely local on your headphones. This marks a clear expectation that many people will have the right phone and be comfortable with using it for applications other than simply phoning.

Of course this is just a market evolving. It’s a little like a discussion we could have had 15 years or so ago, when mobile phones were transitioning between being a rich person’s toy and being a mainstream gadget you’d see in just about everybody’s pocket. You can now say the same about Smartphones – at least if you’re targeting the affluent customer.

There is of course a side issue – for the purposes of a business book – of what happens to the other customers, the great Un-Digitalized.

This is a minor issue compared to others elsewhere. In the chapter on innovation I looked at Marriott Hotels in Mumbai and spoke about the potential employees and how they were standing outside, bewildered about what might be going on in the affluent surroundings of the extremely luxurious hotel which appeared more like a fortress to them.

This isn’t a book on social history or social engineering. It’s not a campaigning book, it’s about businesses engaging. There are massive issues surrounding the hotel and Marriott is aware of them – by offering jobs to the people it can, it’s doing something about it.

Our topic for this book is of course social commerce. There are huge gains to be made by people who can take advantage of this but as I said about social media in my previous book, this has to be part of the mix and not the whole thing. Yes of course you can get a load of people together and sell them things which they couldn’t afford individually. Done electronically and in a collaborative way this is becoming known as social commerce, but as I said in Chapter 1, done without the electronic overlay it still exists and is called ‘retail.’ Spread the ownership around a little and you have, with an electronic overlay, crowdsourced your funding; in the ‘real world’ (not that I’ve ever understood why people insist on creating a divide between Cyberspace and the ‘real world’ – if I’ve handed my money over and got something in return that’s real enough for me) it was called the Co-Operative movement. It’s being revived by newer businesses in projects like London’s ‘People’s Supermarket’ and there will no doubt be others.

My point is that there are huge assumptions in social commerce. Assumptions about your most likely customers, their levels of engagement, and what they want out of any deal; assumptions about their willingness to become part of a business rather than just buy from it. There are massive amounts of customers out there to whom these assumptions won’t apply. In my last book, I said that social media had to be part of the mix; it shouldn’t dominate as it applies to only part of the possible customer base. This is even truer of social commerce. It’s one facet of, rather than a substitute for, a business plan.

Using the technologies and engagement techniques highlighted here, though, you should be able to make good contact with those customers, clients, and potential part-owners who want to engage in this way. Your reach should grow and your business should increase.

Good luck!