GLOBAL – As the shops and television adverts have been oh-so-subtly reminding us for the last month, Christmas is on its way. While the festive season gives us plenty of reasons for good cheer, there’s one pain point that comes around on an annual basis: buying presents for difficult people. Read on to find out how Nokia’s going to make that a little easier this year.

We’ve introduced two new Facebook apps that aim to optimise your present-buying powers.

Gift Together is for people who want to group together to buy a phone for a friend, family member or a colleague. It helps them band together, pledge payments, make a decision on the present and go on to buy with ease.

The second application – called Help Me Choose – is really rather clever. As older readers will appreciate, buying presents for teenagers is pretty tricky. When communication takes the form of monosyllables, getting a good idea of what might be their idea of a cool mobile is hard. The app allows gift givers to contact the friends of the intended recipient, without needing to be their Facebook friend, and ask them what the subject would most like – as far as we are aware, this is an innovation first on the network.

Craig Hepburn, Nokia’s global head of digital, said, “Social commerce is the obvious next step in the evolution of digital interactions and business. By bringing people to the centre of the buying process and connecting them together around services and products, it’s possible to create an amazing online shopping experience that replicates how people shop offline with friends”.

Nokia’s working hard in the area of social shopping and you can expect more announcements in the not-so-distant future.

image credit: MrsRaggle