Social Media Marketing

Call it the Facebook backlash. The company's disappointing initial public offering has increased scrutiny throughout the social media space, including in the fashion world. Brands are now analyzing their social media efforts more than ever and are asking a key question: What's the return?

Branded shopping apps are the strongest driver behind unplanned purchases, branded content on social networks drives people to try new products, and texts and social media are most likely to influence where people shop, according to a new study released today by Ryan Partnership, an integrated marketing agency that is part of the Hyper Marketing, Inc. network. The 2012 Ryan Partnership Digital Retail Study comes out just 18 months after the company's last retail study.

Walmart is deploying a new internally-built search engine to power Walmart.com and ultimately increase sales conversions from searches. The Polaris search engine, developed by @WalmartLabs, has been in use for the last few months onWalmart.com and has already boosted conversions to sales by 10-15 percent, the company said. Polaris grew out of the semantic technology brought over through Walmart's acquisition last year of Kosmix, including Kosmix's social genome project, which connects people to places, events and products. While Kosmix founders Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman, who led the newly established @WalmartLabs, have moved on, Walmart is making good use of their technology.

CrossView, Inc., a cross-channel commerce solutions and services provider, released the results of its 2012 Cross-Channel Readiness survey that looked at retailers across a variety of categories, gauging improvements and declines in enabling customers to shop in-store, online, in call centers and via mobile with a consistent brand experience. This year's study showed improvement in several key areas from last year, particularly in mobile commerce, social sharing and consistency in marketing promotions.

What wildly popular social network Pinterest lacks in revenue, it makes up for in users — 20 million to be precise. But after raising an eye-popping $100 million round that pegged the company's worth at $1.5 billion, internet-bubble theorists and venture capitalists wanted to know how this social network could possibly make money. Pinterest has yet to reveal a strategy, but a new feature from online retailer Zappos.com could offer one possible business model.

The Jones Group said Tuesday that its Nine West banner has launched a new YouTube network called Channel 9 that will feature premium programming and user-generated content. "What we are creating goes far beyond providing branded content," said Richard Dickson, Jones Group president and CEO. "Channel 9 is a new and innovative first-to-market portal for the footwear and fashion obsessed that will bring brand-adjacent content and entertainment to viewers."

Here's a look at a few key takeaways — and fun perspectives — via tweets sent during eTail East, which took place in Boston Aug. 13 to Aug. 16:

How do you measure the reputation of a brand in social media? According to Yomego, a social media agency based in the U.K., you first have to measure the "reach" of a brand, which is the "noise" that's being generated in social spaces, or how much the brand is being mentioned. Then Yomego says you have to measure the "popularity" of a brand, which is actually the positive satisfaction level of all that noise. What follows is a list of the U.S. retail industry companies that had the best social media reputation in 2011, according to Yomego.

Over 1,000 retailers are gathered in Boston this week to attend the eTail conference. Nicolas Franchet, who recently left eBay to become head of e-commerce on the global vertical marketing team at Facebook, gave a keynote address on Tuesday morning and took questions from the moderator, Bob Cell of MyBuys, and then from the audience. In the spirit of social networking, we've "retweeted" some attendees’ comments from the keynote session.

The New York Times recently ran an article detailing how F-commerce is doing. For anyone in need of a refresher, F-commerce was one of those ideas everyone was really excited about when it first popped up back in 2009, but it never really took off. Gap, J.C. Penney, Nordstrom and ASOS all shuttered their Facebook boutiques shortly after launching them. (We did an informal reader survey on the topic back in February: the majority of the 100-plus responders had never heard of F-commerce.) The Times is now reporting that although larger brands have bombed, small businesses are benefitting.