If 2009 was the year that retailers jumped on the Twitter bandwagon, then what will 2010 bring in terms of social media?

If 2009 was the year that retailers jumped on the Twitter bandwagon, then what will 2010 bring in terms of social media?

My feeling is that this year won’t bring any major new platforms that retailers need to experiment with. Rather they should try and get some value out of what’s already out there on the web.

In the early days of social commerce businesses could get away with setting their brand free on the web in the hands of a capable staff member or two; usually someone junior who was using all these sites themselves anyway. Mostly they have got away with this (the Habitat debacle being the notable exception).

But in 2010 I expect to see social media done a lot more professionally. Comet has just announced that it has signed up an agency specifically to handle its social media for the first time; and other major brands such as Marks & Spencer have already taken such steps.

Part of the fun and appeal to consumers of brands expressing themselves online in the early days of social media has been how un-corporate they have been. They have been talking to their customers in the real voices of their staff, who in many cases mirror their target customer demographic. Once you hook up with an agency, you must be careful that this is not lost.

On the plus side, if anyone can prove the return on investment for social media of all kinds then it should be an agency trying to prove its worth. Aside from a few well-publicised (and much retweeted) examples of the results social media can have on retailers’ sales, there is not much yet that retailers can use to benchmark themselves against.

2010 should be the year when we start to hear more about social commerce success and failures, and the accepted rules for how retailers can make best use of the web in this way really begin to be formulated.