Social Media Marketing

Amazon.com's app for iPhone this week added "Flow," an image recognition tool designed to allow consumers to add a product to their shopping cart by merely pointing their phone's camera at it. Flow, as its name suggests, aims to make it as seamless as possible to shop. MarketWatch carried out its own "showrooming" with the app. Scanning a three-bottle package of the hair growth serum Rogaine, Flow immediately found the item on Amazon for $43.85, 30 percent cheaper than the $62.99 price in a Duane Reade store.

So, J.C. Penney's not really where most folks are going to get their Super Bowl commentary, but whoever's running things for the department store's Twitter account figured they might as well weigh in anyway. What could go wrong, right? Well, it's not quite an 

Twitter's plans to bring commerce to the real-time service may have come into sharper view. As of Friday night, New York-based e-commerce site Fancy.com displayed images of what appear to be mockups detailing how goods would be bought on its site through Twitter. The mockups, which have since become password-protected, suggest Fancy.com is one of Twitter's possible retail partners. Twitter has been working on a commerce strategy that would allow users to purchase goods directly through the site

For a boutique apparel and accessories retailer such as Apricot Lane Peoria (ALP), building a community of fans, and ultimately converting those fans into customers, is a top challenge. With a limited brick-and-mortar presence and a modest digital advertising budget, getting brand recognition was a concern for ALP. Enter Facebook.

Outdoor gear and apparel retailer Rock/Creek Outfitters used Twitter's Lead Generation Cards in a Promoted Tweet campaign last year to capture the email addresses of people who entered a drawing to win a free pair of Chaco sandals.

Reddit has "soft banned" Etsy links due to what the site says is a recent rise of spam posts by apparently overeager sellers who don't follow Reddit's rules when promoting their listings on its site. Reddit is an irreverent social networking site where people make posts, often with links to news, humor and politics, and users comment and vote the posts up or down. Etsy sellers have been discussing the benefits of posting on Reddit over the past few months. You can find posts on Etsy discussion boards written by sellers who discover traffic coming to their listings from Reddit.

In a world increasingly filtered through Instagram, a carefully crafted photo shoot starts to look dated. That's why retailers are rushing to crowdsource their product shots, harvesting a stream of photos from social platforms to help sell everything from West Elm couches to Coach handbags. The photos are typically curated in galleries, where each picture is linked to a page selling the product. Increasingly, the amateur images are also showing up directly on product pages, next to professionally styled pictures.

At least one Wal-Mart store had so much extra inventory left over after the holidays that it had to use its outdoor center for storage, according to a Vine video shot by a financial analyst. Brian Sozzi, CEO and chief equities strategist at Belus Capital Advisors, took two Vine videos at five Wal-Mart stores in the Northeast. The first shows an outdoor center used to store surplus items, including big-screen TVs and Campbell's Soup in the wake of the holiday season.

You're probably not interested in the details of our home improvement nightmare. Before getting to the marketing point, some background will help showcase how Lowe's Twitter team truly believes in its corporate mission and understands how to use social media to grow its business.

In a unique holiday move, Best Buy will host a shoppable Google+ hangout on "Last Minute Deals" tonight. For those who don't know, a Google+ hangout is a video chat done through the Google+ social networking website. It enables up to 10 people to interact and share documents, images and videos with each other, and it can be broadcast for others to view. People who RSVP for Best Buy's hangout will be able to watch a group of tech enthusiasts talk about last-minute gift ideas. And they'll even be able to shop for the products as they're being discussed.