You know what phrase I’m tired of hearing? “Social Commerce.” Don’t get me wrong – there are plenty of great companies doing interesting things that I would actually honestly characterize as social commerce companies. TurnTo, SkuLoop, and 8^th Bridge come readily to mind. But like “cloud” and “big data” and “optimization”, social commerce has no real accepted definition. A vendor is as likely to enable comments on ratings and reviews and claim themselves in the social commerce space as one that actually helps convert shoppers into buyers using social tools and techniques. The former example – not innovative. The latter example – innovative. And yet, the former could make a case that they do exactly what the latter does. Confusing.

So, needless to say, the show floor at Shop.org was populated with “social commerce” vendors. No less than 49 of them, out of the approximately 230 vendors exhibiting at the show. I get it – they are trying to be “out there” – forward thinkers, thought leaders, cutting edge vendors at the most cutting edge retail technology conference.

Contrast that with the sessions at Shop.org. In my copious amounts of spare time, I managed to make two: my own (I was moderating) and most of Jamie Nordstrom’s. But in those two, a wake-up call. Not the jar you out bed, harsh reality intrudes kind of wake-up call, but the refreshing, I just had a great night’s sleep kind.

I’ll start with my own session. I had representatives from Advance Auto Parts, Redbox, and ComScore on my panel, and they were there to comment on which cross-channel marketing tactics were hot and which were not. The hottest technologies to my panelists? SMS. How-to videos. Twitter promotions. QR codes were interesting, but no one really felt their company had figured it out yet. Not hot? Pinterest. Mobile apps (Advance and Redbox split on this one – Redbox has a very successful app). Community (though ironically, when asked about “connecting shoppers to each other through the brand” both the panelists and the audience agreed that this was a ‘hot’ marketing tactic).

And yet, for all the distance that the panelists put between what one would think are screaming-hot tactics (Hello? Pinterest!) and the somewhat old-school tactics that they say work best for them, they still have all the same problems as a retailer trying to tackle the hottest marketing tools. Because fundamentally cross-channel marketing success comes down to internal alignment. To having different groups that own fundamentally different communication channels work together to create a single, compelling customer experience. You may wrinkle your nose and say, “What? SMS? Really?” but one, how can you argue with results (and both Redbox and Advance love the results they get), and two, whether Pinterest or SMS, it still comes down to basics: the customer experience. That’s why the phrase “social commerce” annoys me so much – because it’s not about enhancing the customer experience. It’s about (for most cases – note my exceptions above) piling on to a trendy term. As my kids would say: social commerce? Whatevs.

So turn now to Jamie Nordstrom and one of the pinnacles of customer experience retailing. To have him stand up at Shop.org and say that the customer experience is changing and their company, which has ridden on the success of its customer service commitment for over 100 years, must change with it, was powerful. Some of his story will sound very familiar – their catalog business took up the eCommerce charge in the late 1990’s, and built it into a separate business, complete with separate products and prices, all the way down to its own HR. Around 2004-5, stores started seeing customer disconnects, where customers came into the store looking for products that were only online or asking about prices or offers that stores had never heard of. It was the company’s commitment to customer service that made them realize they couldn’t perpetuate those gaps in the experience – they had to close them.

One of my favorite lines from his speech – he’s been tasked with bringing eCommerce back into the fold, and he’s pushing this notion of one experience for the customer, no gaps. He said, “I kept hearing, ‘But who gets credit for the sale?’ and I kept saying that the customer doesn’t care. We’ll figure out the accounting later.” He also said that the company is only increasing its investment in stores – “Our stores are still who we are. Just because you have great stores doesn’t mean that customers will be okay with a crappy website, or vice versa.” And, just to remind us all that the company is in no way stodgy and old school, he predicted that cash registers will someday be extinct in Nordstrom stores. Like, in this decade.

The company is not resting on its laurels. It’s innovating. Besides acquiring flash sales sites and other interesting pieces of the digital puzzle, the company invests in startups, and tries all kinds of flashy, innovative things – including, I would hazard to guess, social commerce things.

But it all comes back to the basics. The most important thing is the customer experience. As Jamie Nordstrom said, “You have to try a lot of different things and talk to customers about it. If you ask your customers, they will show you the way.”

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Bonus thought of the week: If you were to come up with a more shopper-oriented name for social commerce, what would it be? In other words, how can you turn the phrase “social commerce” into something that is meaningful to an actual consumer? Let me know your ideas! I’ll post a follow-up piece. nbaird@rsrresearch.com