Social Media Marketing

It's ironic that one of the oldest brands in America, King Arthur Flour, is reliant upon one of the newer digital marketing channels — social media — to help it find and acquire new customers. In a keynote presentation yesterday at the NEMOA directXchange Fall Conference in Groton, Conn., Bill Tine, King Arthur Flour's vice president/general manager, detailed how the 225-year-old flour company is using social media to find customers.

Our marketing experts will discuss key online and offline merchandising best practices and strategies.

This morning Twitter introduced its Buy Now button, a feature that enables users to make purchases directly on the social network as well as its mobile app. Twitter is the latest social network to integrate commerce into its offering, with previous efforts seeing varying degrees of success.

Gap has triggered a furious backlash after it tweeted a promotional image of an extremely slender model sporting a shirt dress to its 431,000 followers. "Dress up your days in pastel plaid. #since1969," the retailer captioned the image on Monday — linking to the $59.95 dress on its website, where it appears on a different and notably less thin model. Many users were quick to vent their disapproval, not only regarding the model's tiny frame, but the perceived state of her health.

Twitter is rolling out an ad platform called Flock to Unlock that challenges fans to retweet in order to "unlock" new content from a brand. The company's first partner for the program is Puma, which is using Flock to Unlock to help spread its new global ad campaign themed "Forever Faster." In this case, the content is new TV ads that won't actually hit TV until two days later. The campaign, kicking off today, will feature tweets from Puma-sponsored athletes Usain Bolt, Mario Balotelli, Lexi Thompson, Sergio Aguero, Jamaal Charles, Cordarrelle Patterson and Jadeveon Clowney.

As a kid, I would have been a lot more willing to share toys and treats with my siblings, friends, etc., if there was a reward for doing so. My reward for sharing? Avoiding a punishment from my mother. Retailers are taking a slightly different tact to persuade customers to share their purchases with family and friends: they're paying them — or at least giving them cash back for their purchases.

Pinterest's fastest growing retail brands - from Urban Outfitters to Kate Spade - all understand one thing: Image is king. That's what a new ranking of the 500 Fastest Growing Brands on the social-scrapbooking site revealed, according to Stylophane, a social media index and analytics firm. The

Facebook's announcement that it's testing a buy "call to action" button that lets users purchase products directly on its site may give retailers another weapon against their big online nemesis: Amazon.com. While the idea of Facebook's latest move is to reduce the clicks needed to make impulse purchases and not lose the business to begin with, it also means you won't end up going to Amazon to search for the product. "The whole trend is to simplify mobile commerce to move it to one click," said Yory Wurmser, an eMarketer e-commerce analyst.

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A look at how retailers connect with their customers digitally to create a seamless online and offline brand experience.