Just as social media is not a revolution (it’s just media – get over it), the idea that you have a revolutionary new kind of customer – the social customer – is nonsense too.

Your customers have always been ‘social’ – learning from each other and even benefiting from collective buying power – through intermediaries.  It’s just that digital technology allows customers to shop smarter with their social intelligence by removing space, time and scale barriers.  The revolution, if it exists, is digital – not social.

So here’s an interesting infographic from the UK social commerce platform Gloople that puts the so-called social customer into a broader perspective.  Customers are doing what they always have been doing, i.e. using their social smarts to learning socially and collaborate but now digital technology – particularly technology –  allows them to do it faster, more efficiently and more conveniently.

Here’s a brilliant infographic just out from the Financial Times showing the eye-watering sums that Facebook founders and investors stand to gain from today’s $104bn ($38/share) IPO. From Zuckerberg’s $19.1bn to his dad’s $76m. Not a bad return on genetic investment for Edward – we wonder if he’ll cash in?

Insiders

• Mark Zuckerberg $19.1bn
• Eduardo Saverin $5.2bn
• Dustin Moskovitz $5.1bn
• Sean Parker $2.65bn
• Peter Thiel $1.1bn
• Edward Zuckerberg $76m

• Accel $1.9bn
• DST $1.7bn
• Goldman Sachs $1.4bn
• mail.ru $1.4bn
• Elevation Partners $1.3bn
• Meritch $1.3bn
• Tiger $1.2bn
• La-Ka-Shing $780m
• T Rowe Price $691m
• Interpublic $520m
• Mark Pincus (Zynga) $163.6m
• Reid Hoffman $143.3m

From a commercial perspective, search and social have two different but overlapping value propositions for the user. In a nutshell, search is about finding what you want, and social is about researching what you want.

In a commercial context, we use social media to research options – from the shared ratings and reviews of strangers, to being open to the ideas, endorsements and behaviour of people we know and trust.  When we’ve researched, and settled on an option, then we search.  The fruits of your research are what go into the search box.

Of course, this is a simplification, and there’s granularity to all this – research can be passive or active – passive research simply involves and ongoing opportunistic openness to social influence, whilst active research may involve asking for advice or researching ratings and reviews. But it’s a useful way of seeing how social media and search fit together; here’s a nice infographic from local shopping search engine, Milo, underlining the role of social media research in pre-purchase behaviour – increasingly with a mobile handset. Interesting factoid, ratings and reviews trump search ads in the research phase of a pre-purchase activity.

So are you investing as much in social plugins that customers access to ratings, reviews and endorsements as you are in search ads?

A recent study from ad agency Leo Burnett and its digital arm ARC Worldwide reveals new data on what the social customer really wants from his or her shopping experience.

Specifically, the study, entitled SocialShop, identifies six shopper archtypes:

• Savvy Passionista – These people are social trendsetter and influence other’s shopping behavior. They stay in the know and express their opinions to others via social networks.
• Opportunistic Adventurer – She is your impulse shopper always on the hunt for great deals. The folks at Groupon love her because looks for the unexpected.
• Quality Devotee – It’s all about finding the best product available, and this shopper will spare no time or expense to achieve that goal.
• Strategic Saver – This person is a comparison shopper and will dig for deals.
• Efficient Sprinter – Saving time is the modus operandi for this shopper. As long as social media assists in that way, he will use it.
• Dollar Defaulter - This shopper has a single quest: find the cheapest deals around. Brand loyalty is not a factor where she is concerned.

Leo Burnett suggest several ways brands can appeal to the buying behaviors of each of these archetypes:

• Help consumers discover and connect, and use a variety of social networks in the process.
• Invest to “to good to pass up” deals on daily deal sites and through geo-location mobile apps such as Shopkick.
• Help shoppers build knowledge by providing online ratings and reviews, blogs, forums and YouTube.
• Provide a curated list of top selling products on the brand website and within social media.
• Broadcast special deals on retailer websites.

What drives each of these six types of social shoppers says Leo Burnett? Indulgence (Savvy Passionista), Impluse (Opportunistic Adventurer), Information (Quality Devotee, Strategic Saver), and Utility (Efficient Sprinter, Dollar Defaulter). The better brands are at appealing to each of these drivers, the more meaningful their social media engagement efforts will be.

Understanding how and why people shop using social media is key to maximizing its value from a commerce perspective. It’s the same idea SCT Editor Paul Marsden fostered in 2009 with his post on social psychology - How Social Commerce Works: The Social Psychology of Social Shopping - and is worth a quick review.