Make room on the spreadsheet, there's a new Romeo in town. Business' romance with new revenue channels is a tortured tale. E-Commerce is now beloved and has had a home amongst the Excel columns for some time, but the courtship wasn't easy. M-Commerce has just barely made the conversation, let alone the financial and segmentation review, but we're interested and willing to date. Now here comes F-Commerce, strutting his social media bling, all spiffy, full of promise, and Facebook-y.

Damn, I love this guy. And, yes, the "F" stands for Facebook. As in "Facebook Commerce." The next final frontier.

Although I did not make the NRF's Innovate 2011 conference (thanks to the Continental/United airlines "cluster-merge," which bungled, canceled, and otherwise screwed the pooch and my travel plans) - Facebook and the ability to sell products and make money was a topic du jour.

Wet Seal was a prime example. According to Investor's Business Daily, Chief Information Officer, Jon Kubo, explained the company's recent efforts, which included a social-media-driven model search contest, giving customers the ability to build and recommend outfits, and an iPhone game that lets customers run their own virtual Wet Seal stores.

By Kubo's account, the model search started with video postings on Facebook and YouTube and drew 35,000 entries. By involving customers in every step of the contest, the company generated 100,000 store visits, 300,000 YouTube views, and 10 million Facebook posts.

IBD reported that the interactive approach has helped Wet Seal accumulate 1.3 million Facebook fans, placing it among the top 15 retailers by that measure, Kubo says.

By Kubo's estimate, the company's social media efforts are generating 20% of Wet Seal's e-commerce sales. He ranks the return on investment among the best he's ever gotten from a tech project.

At Lane Bryant, we did a model search in the same manner (our winner walked the runway in the Planet Hollywood fashion show we did recently in Las Vegas that was featured on Entertainment Tonight - check out ET's coverage here - see our model winner here). I'm interested in how Wet Seal measured all of this, particularly the store visits. I'll shoot Kubo an email and see if he'll spill the beans.

Many businesses, including mine, are having success driving sales via Facebook. Good news, there's still a long way to go. The discovery of what works and what surprises is much of the fun. But the promise is undeniable, unstoppable, and substantial.

Facebook is now an ecosystem, and hardly qualifies as social media, a website, or even the internet anymore. Me and most of my followers connect by a mobile device decidedly more often than by computer.

But I disagree with Kubo that "engagement" is the Holy Grail. The concept of engagement as a goal is lazy marketing-speak that's too easy to hide behind in the absence of activating a customer or fan base to buy your products in numbers enough to matter (although Kubo says Wet Seal did accomplish that). Rather, I contend, engagement is the first step to social sales, as I outlined in The Art of Social Sales (click to get your copy) two years ago.

The difference between engagement and social sales is that engagement is like chatting in a coffee shop. It's pleasant. It makes both parties feel good. It has value. But the result of social sales is a delighted customer trucking home or to the shopping cart with your products in a bag.

The true art of social sales is understanding how to move your strategy from engagement to consideration to activation to purchase, and to do it with honesty, persuasion, and grace. Potential customers do not follow brands because they mistakenly think they're people. But they will respond to brands which humanize themselves, creating the opportunity for engagement. A good social media strategy must pull the engaged follower through the purchase cycle to reap the rewards of engagement.

Business may entertain social media as an expense in the face of all the chatter about it, but eventually the cash register had better ring, and ring consistently.

E-Commerce. M-Commerce. F-Commerce. There's room for all of these, since it's more about customer channel of preference than which platform wins. The only losers are the businesses not migrating to where its shoppers are headed.

Still, I'd keep an eye on your girlfriend anyway. That Zuckerberg dude may dress a little crappy, but rumor is he's about to throw a hell of a party over at his place.