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After creating a successful pop-up shop in Facebook for their Rachel Roy brand, Jones Apparel Group decided to create a “fan shop” for their Nine West brand. Only fans of Nine West on Facebook can access the “Shop Lookbook,” and they get a 15% discount through the end of the month on the items offered.

The flash-based store within Facebook (shown above) was easy to navigate. Several products were available, and fans are allowed to “like” and “share” them. Items are added to a shopping cart, and clicking on “Go to Shopping Bag” takes the user to the Nine West e-commerce site where they can view their cart and see the 15% discount. Its a pretty seamless experience that leverages the e-commerce site nicely.

Due to theses efforts, both of the Nine West brands have significantly increased their “fans” in Facebook. This is the equivalent of opting-in for future wall postings, which are typically promotions.

Social Retailing will continue in new and innovative ways and it is essential for retailers to recognize the need to take the store to the customers and instead of expecting customers to always seek them out.

1. Profiling/Foot-printing/Mapping

• Identify social network channels, e.g; social media neighborhoods, third party influencers, etc

• Identify activists target habits – online by segment

• Identify Opinion leaders in the group – This is done by targeting activists who frequently offer or are elicited for category-related advice

• Identify the best “Social media marketing” practices against each group and their habits

• Listen and monitor the tone of the communications online, so any social material we create is in the “tone and speak” of the online communities.

2. When in Rome!

No social media campaign should be undertaken without due diligence. The community not organizations owns the social channel. Due diligence in social media is to “listen”. Providing a clear insight into “What’s on our minds”; “What’s our emotive triggers”; “How are we speaking – tone and language” ; “Where are we hanging out online – What is the online social neighborhood?”.

This research and preparation grounds any strategy and recommendations, it is also a process of ongoing analysis to keep up with our society and their thoughts to best serve the right message, the right engagement, at the right time, for maximum viral input.

3. Monitor

* So you can use blogs for ongoing research and, following the conversation threads to track influencers and engage with them as advocates
* Posting feedback, helping your client through training to conduct an ongoing, resource light post back strategy and implementation
* Providing snap-shot tracking reports
* Monitor the activity with access to your own analytics to see where the uptake and successes are to prove:
* Measure the volume of traffic
* Breakout the volume of uptake generated by the social media marketing activity as opposed to the normal traffic
* Measure the impact of the social media marketing activity

4. Engage Meaningfully

We will engage with specific elements of the blog community to create new highly emotive conversations and useful content pieces to the online wider audience than the traditional activist base you already has. We will create debate to the broadest reach of audience who may not even be aware of the issues. We will put the issues front of mind through powerful emotive commentary that they can connect with. We will understand the emotive arc through the initial research phase of the activity, because we will ask them.

5. Enable the Discussion by:

* Listening to online conversations
* Identifying opinion leaders
* Developing content based on what is learned
* Participating, commenting and generating interest
* Becoming a resource
* Supporting your client to build your online personality through the training program
* Syndicating RSS content
* Using your social media user generated content, cut up and repurposed for Online Consumer Relations.

6. Optimize By:

* Increasing your linkability
* Making tagging and bookmarking easy
* Rewarding inbound links
* Helping your content travel
* Encouraging the mash-up
* Implementing “Keyword” strategy incorporation
* Developing contextual links within the body of the content
* Citation strategy

7. Report KPI’s

1. Pre-activity word of mouth benchmark report will be supplied at the start of the research,
2. Ongoing snap-shot reports to measure results. The reports will measure social media marketing & advocacy success
3. Ensuring Check’s and Benchmarks are enabled by: 1.Using ‘control areas’ where the word of mouth campaign is run in order to measure the effect of the campaign, 2. Measuring changes in word of mouth pre-and post-actions and track online word of mouth to measure changes of the ratio of word of mouth, 3. Tracking recommendation rates and how they change over time, 4. Including an online element that allows use of web statistics and online feedback to measure reach and participation levels, 5.* Reporting on the brand behavior within the environment and the impact on the brand as a result of the new social contact methods
4. Final Report: In Summary What Should be the Outcomes of the Social Media Marketing?
   * Speaking the voice of the individual
   * Targeting influentials
   * Encouraging engagement with the community
   * Being sensitive to “social speak”
   * Creating critical authenticity
   * Becoming highly interconnected
   * Make news travel fast
   * Enabling feedback and interaction as a fundamental core of your activities

One of the number one complaints about social media is that it takes too much time.

Companies considering the leap into the land of blogs and tweets often run screaming into the night after they glimpse the reality of what it takes to launch and maintain a worthwhile social media presence.

I don’t blame them. The onslaught of digital information is overwhelming, but there is hope. The key is in being selective.

We all know that it’s the kiss of branding death to try and be all things to all people.

The same goes for social media engagement. Unless you have a dedicated staff ready to spend all day, every day monitoring every inch of the Web and churning out top-notch content, you need to be choosy about how and where you spend your time.

This isn’t rocket science, you say? You’re right. But it’s amazing how many people - even professionals - fall into the trap of trying to be everywhere, all the time. In this highly competitive market, it’s easy to start making judgments based on the fear of missing out on something.

The 24/7, real-time nature of social media sets businesses running faster and faster on the proverbial hamster wheel. You start by monitoring here and there, then you launch a company blog, set up a facebook fan page, start tweeting, create a professional group on LinkedIn, develop a collaborative community for crowd-sourcing industry-specific solutions, and so on and on and on. Before you know it, running your social media efforts takes nearly as much time as running your core business.

Instead of jumping on every shiny, new wagon recommended by the so-called gurus, take control of your social media journey. Here are six steps for making sure things don’t get out of hand:

1. Strategy first:  You want to make sure the plan is custom-fit to your needs and capabilities as well as the needs of your target audience.

2. Have contingencies: Even the best strategy sometimes goes awry. Your project is going to be a huge success, but - just in case - make sure you are prepared for anything.

3. Roll-out in phases: Get your toes wet before you attempt a backwards triple somersault with a half pike and a twist. Start small and grow your presence in as organic a manner as possible. Listen well, and your audience will tell you what your next step should be.

4. Enable : In the best case scenario, social media becomes part of your company culture, not a specialty that’s handled by a few select members of your marketing department. Deputize people across your business to monitor and engage, but be sure to keep an overall eye on the conversation, watching for consistency and balance.

5. Target,Target,Target: Finally, narrow your focus. Be brutal. Though it’s highly unlikely that your company can stand out everywhere, if you concentrate on a few key areas, there’s a better chance for greater impact. Even if you wind up with a smaller audience, you’ll be able to have a deeper dialog, and it’s the deeper dialog that leads to actual relationships, a perception of leadership, and business deals.

Are you already engaged in social media? How did you get started? What worked for you, and what was an utter failure? What advice would YOU give to a business getting ready to take the plunge?

For years, classic brand strategy has always been about the creation of a single message that can be used with all of your constituents; investors, employees, senior management and customers about who you are and what value your company provides. Brand managers tend to write it up and paste it on every wall and train every new recruit in it. It’s a classic approach to command and control brand messaging which then gets deployed via all the traditional media and used in every communications channel.

But these days you hear a lot of discussions about the explosion of new media types and formats like RSS feeds, blogs, podcasts, video, communities, micro-blogging and other emerging forms of social media. And it is causing plenty of concern that this disruption of media is eroding the traditional command and control branding that has become such common place for marketers.

Well, I say hallelujah and good riddance!

I believe that there is a very compelling argument that media doesn’t have to be fragmented while at the same time the message need not be command and control anymore. It is only a matter of knowing how to orchestrate it.

One of the first instances of this to hit the marketplace was Ogivly & Mather’s Dove “The Campaign for Real Beauty” (ok yes it is B2C but sometimes we marketers can take inspiration from our B2C brethren) Which won the 2006 Grand EFFIE Award and for good reason, They did a great job finding a powerful attribute of their brand and made a very inviting campaign around it that engaged their key audiences into a conversation. Evidence this by the nearly 3000 blog entries about it, the 2,000,000 viewers of their video on YouTube and you will see that they got the blogosphere humming about an ad campaign. Now I am not professing you drop everything and just do some clever video with your ad campaign, I do applaud the use of video to make their campaign more viral. What can we learn from this as technology marketers? Take a look at my next example.

Now compare this to the “Greg the Architect” campaign from TIBCO. Here is a B2B example that took a very different approach to making their technology funny, and engaging. What they have done is told the TIBCO story through a series of episodic vignettes and allows the viral component to kick in. Viewers are bound to have an opinion on these videos and so is the blogosphere. Also they have given the audience something to react to for better or worse rather than say “we do SOA better than the next guy”. Also don’t forget about the reaction internally to these videos and how that helps give everyone in the organization a conversation starter for the next meeting.

So why is this good news for technology companies? Because for the first time ever, technology companies specifically in B2B can lead the way using technology tools to get their message out to the masses for very little money. Just one tactic like using a video on YouTube can reach 325,000 viewers and engage them with your brand but more importantly with a message that they have sought out. But how to you take something so tactical like a video and make it part of an overall approach to your brand?

Here is the secret.

First, the brand manager needs to architect a single theme that can be used across all media traditional or otherwise. Notice here I didn’t say command and control at all – just to create a theme that is broad enough to use across every aspect of your media plan and “invite” customers and prospects to “engage” with it.

Next, you need to give your customers and prospects the digital tools to comment, to interact, and to add to the conversation. Then you add in more traditional elements of a media plan that all point to the online conversation and you will end up supercharging your media plan!

The bottom line for technology firms is your customers and prospects are perhaps the most savvy engaged technology users of any buyer in any industry. You can’t expect to reach them with traditional media only any more, you need to deliver your message in a way that is targeted to their exact interests. So why not get out there where they talking about your product or service, and give them a conversation starter along with the permission to start a dialog with your brand!

“Well-designed social applications are effective. Social programs leverage the voice of the customer to get messages carried further than ad impressions. If your message resonates with consumers, their word-of-mouth is a more effective medium than any of the traditional media.” - Forrester

It is becoming increasingly evident that social media is having a  profound effect on brands and must be a primary marketing consideration. We believe that it is essential for CPG brands to embrace social media because:

Traditional ways of interrupting consumers (advertising & promotion) are losing their cost-effectiveness. At the same time, new ways of spreading ideas (blogs, permission-based discussions, forums, reviews, social networking) are quickly proving how well they work.

Conversations among the members of your marketplace happen whether you like it or not. Good marketing encourages the right sort of conversations.

Brands that manage to deal directly with their end users have a competitive asset for the future.

Consumers, customers, prospects and peers are discussing your brand, right now in social media; with or without you. Unfortunately, choosing not to listen doesn’t make those conversations go away. ConsumerSphere’s mission is to equip CPG brands to effectively leverage social media to protect and manage their reputations, meaningfully converse with consumers to drive brand loyalty, uncover emerging opportunities, stay competitive and avoid crisis.

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