Head over to the Facebook pages of Amazon’s specialist sites, Soap.com, Diapers.com, Wag.com (pets) and YoYo.com (toys), and you get to vote for which brand you most want 30% off during the upcoming US national shopping days, Black Friday (11/25) through Cyber Monday (11/28). Nice way to stimulate demand with a demand-driven deal app.

Users get to vote between two options (e.g. Cover Girl vs Revlon) ten times in this ’Battle of the Brands’ Facebook app, with the brand with the highest total amount of votes offered with a 30% discount 25-28 November.  We like the extra incentive to share the app – if shared 1000 times, Amazon donate $1000 to the Red Cross, and if shared 2,500 time, $2,500 will be donated.

This is simple and smart social commerce.  One to emulate?

This is the second in a six-part series on social commerce heuristics – a term I refer to as “rule of thumb” – that provides practical examples of social shopping psychology. Part one has to do with the social proof (following the crowd). Today’s installment deals with following authority figures.

When you think of fashion, which designer comes to mind? How about cooking, or technology, or any of a 1,000 topics that may be of interest?

I have a lexicon of people who influence my thinking around certain topics. For example, when it comes to marketing, author Seth Godin is the name that tops my list. As it relates to social media technology, Robert Scoble is the first person I think of.

I’m sure the same could be said of you, as well. Whether its a celebrity figure or personal friend, we have a natural tendency to rely on the opinions and advice of those we consider to be knowledgeable and trustworthy.

In other words, part of our social intelligence is a “follow the authority” rule of thumb – taking the cue from people who know what they’re talking about.  It sounds simple, but it’s a social rule of thumb that makes us smarter than we actually are.

Marketers can take advantage of this behavior and have throughout the years. For example, how many times have you seen a television commercial for toothpaste where the phrase “four out of five dentists recommend” is used? (I always wonder about the odd man out.)

Social commerce provides yet another avenue through which marketers can leverage the influence of authorities. Customer ratings and reviews found on ecommerce websites are one classic example, where we defer to the authority of experience, but social shopping has introduced an entirely new genre of influencer marketing. Let me cite the following examples as proof-positive.

Martha Stewart and OpenSky

When it comes to tastemakers, especially as it applies to cooking and entertaining, there is no better example than Martha Stewart. Last week, I discussed her recent alliance with social commerce startup OpenSky where Stewart curates a list of product recommendation for followers. To date, Stewart has recommended 10 products, most of which are offered at discount prices.

Jessica Simpson and Beachmint

Social commerce company Beachmint draws on the influence of a number of celebrites – actresses Jessica Simpson and Kate Bosworth, stylist Cher Coulter, and TV stars Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen – to market products through its three shopping channels: JewelMint, BeautyMint, StyleMint. (A fourth, called ShoeMint, is scheduled to launch soon and will be headlined by actress Rachel Bilson.)

Kim Kardashian and ShoeDazzle

Fashion retailer ShoeDazzle takes advantage of the popularity spawned by its co-founder, the controversial Kim Kardashian, who uses her unique fashion sense to promote products from designers such as Lanvin and Alexander McQueen.

Zane Lamprey and OpenSky

Products curated by celebrities are mostly those that appeal to women. However, men are beginning to get in on the act, as well. TV host and author Zane Lamprey, known as the World Drinking Ambassador, is an OpenSky curator. His product recommendations, which include such items as a beer pong portable tailgate table, hangover cure coffee and a set of “upside down” beer glasses, certainly have masculine appeal.

Friends as Authorities

Even though brands can leverage the influence of well-known celebrities, perhaps even more influential are recommendations that come from social network friends. A number of social shopping sites have emerged that take advantage of that aspect, such as:

• Buyosphere allows users to ask questions about product recommendations and receive answers from the community.
• Givvy is a social shopping Facebook app that relies on user-submitted products and human curators to supply its inventory.
• ShopSocially, a site at the forefront of this new genre, gives users the opportunity to ask friends a shopping question or share purchase information with them.

Other sites in this genre include: Svpply.com, Pinterest and online mall StoreEnvy.

Teen Fashion Haulers

Teenage girls are exerting influence by using videos to talk about their latest fashion purchases. Called “haulers,” these tech-savvy young women are posting homemade videos to show off products and not for nothing. Popular 16 year-old teen hauler Bethany Mota has garnered an audience of over 370,000 subscribers on her YouTube channel and her videos have been seen a whopping 11 million times. So popular has Bethany become that she is now offering advertising opportunities for brands.

Thanks to Bethany and others, retailers have taken notice of this trend. JC Penney has even created a blog just for the group. Called “Haul Nation,” it is an “integrated social media marketing program” that provides teens with the opportunity to share their fashion style with the world.

Conclusion

Following tastemakers, trendsetters and authority figures holds particular appeal to shoppers. From media mogul Martha Stewart to budding fashionista Bethany Mota, the advent of social shopping has given just about anyone an opportunity to serve that role.

Why set up shop on Facebook?  To sell more product?  Nope.

To build your brand. Yep.

That’s the approach that CPG giant Unilever is taking to launch a brand extension to its billion-dollar mega-brand Axe (‘Lynx’ in the UK) in the UK, ‘Lynx Attract for Her’.  A first 100 cans of the hither-to men-only brand went on sale to the brands 700K+ fans on a pop-up Facebook fan-store.

100 cans at £3.25 ($5.11) netted the brand all of £325 ($511) when they went on sale at 4pm, January 23, 2012 – and sold out pretty much immediately.  Why bother?

Cynics will call it a PR stunt. Unilever can claim “launched on Facebook” credibility for the youth-oriented Lynx Attract for Her. And in the trade press, the stunt has captured headlines.  Good for Unilever sales teams negotiating shelf space in supermarkets and drug stores, and good resumé fodder for the digital team too.

But we think launching products with pop-up stores on Facebook, and more generally brand-building with pop-up f-commerce is smart branding.

Why? Because word of mouth is critical to branding, particularly at product launch, when adoption rates can be accelerated by word of mouth. And Facebook is essentially a word of mouth platform. Ultimately, a brand – a trademark imbued with value – exists in the mind and on the lips of customers, not as a label on a product.  So the more positive word of mouth you can stimulate at product launch the bigger and better your brand.  So from a branding perspective, it makes good sense to launch on Facebook.

Moreover, research shows that word of mouth makes brand advertising more effective (essentially because it adds source credibility to advertising messages), and with Unilever throwing a multi-million pound advertising campaign behind the Axe/Lynx for women launch, the pop-up fan-store will help with advertising effectiveness.  Essentially the Axe fan-store will build brand value by activating brand fans (700K+ registered on Facebook) through fan-first exclusivity.

Another advantage of using a temporary pop-up fan-store (as opposed to an Asos style permanent store) is that Unilever neatly sidesteps the politics of a brand selling direct to consumer and risking the wrath of retail partners; Joey Kau, e-commerce manager at Unilever, said, “There are no plans to move away from our current distribution channel and we’ll continue to distribute products in the way that we have been doing.”

There’s often a disconnect between the worlds of sales and branding, but ultimately branding is all about sales – specifically your ability to extract margin.  From a commercial point of view, brand building is all about increasing your ability to extract margin by imbuing your brand name with value.  By imbuing a brand with word of mouth value, pop-up fan-stores in social media can have a powerful brand-building effect. Kudos Unilever.

The midwestern city of Omaha, Nebraska is famous for a lot of things – steaks, the College World Series, Boys Town and, of course, Warren Buffett. But, social commerce startups and beauty products? Not so much. That is, not until Bloom.com.

Bloom, which launched in August 2011, is one part e-commerce site and one part social network. Referring to itself as a “social beauty store,” its actually a well integrated mix of both. “Think Facebook meets Match.com meets Zappos,” said a recent press release and you get a sense of where the startup is headed with its strategy.

Bloom’s mission is that women “never buy the wrong beauty products again.” Through “social beauty” they are able to harness the wisdom and experiences of thousands of women, to provide an unbiased, trusted source for all things beauty. The way that works is Bloom user’s complete a public “beauty cabinet” with one of the site’s 150 “top beauty brands” and, in return, receive “Best4You” recommendations from other women who are considered to be beauty matches. It’s taste graph thinking applied to personal beauty and cosmetics.

Sharing her personal reasons for starting the site, Bloom CEO and Founder Julie Mahloch said, ”I wanted a place where women could join together and share their honest opinions and experiences…a place that would ‘know’ each woman and their needs and remember which products worked or didn’t work…a place that would recommend the ideal products for each woman based on HER beauty profile.”

Bloom was in the news last week due to the fact it recently received $5.4 million in Series A funding from Capricorn Investment Group, which, incidentally, happens not to be based in Omaha, but in Palo Alto, California, a place normally associated with tech startups.

However, unlike so many startups, Pinterest for example, Bloom is a social commerce site with a business model, something that Capricorn’s co-founder and chief investment officer Stephen George attributes to the fact the company has its roots in the midwest. “Ultimately, it’s almost perhaps a Midwestern thing — instead of building a social network and figuring out how to monetize later, Bloom actually started with an ecommerce platform,” George said.

Maybe it is that midwestern mindset of neighbor helping neighbor that underlies Bloom’s business model and philosophy. Hopefully, it’s that same mindset that will attribute to its continued success. Not all startups have to hail from the east or west coast. Bloom.com proves that great ideas can come from America’s Heartland as well.