Social Media Marketing

It appears that J.C. Penney is a leading yuletide marketing warrior based on the Promoted Tweets it's purchased with terms involving competitor Target with Black Friday only four days away.

Nick Swinmurn, the founder of Zappos, has introduced a new social media startup that uses monetary incentives to get users to share clothing they've already purchased. RNKD (pronounced "ranked") is a new kind of social site that both rewards consumers and benefits brands.

Listen in as Anthony Modano, vice president of design and marketing at Work ’N Gear, discusses best practices for retailers conducting contests on Facebook during the Social Marketing and Commerce Retail Case Studies session at the Retail Marketing Virtual Conference & Expo. Register for the on-demand version of the full-day event here: http://virtualshow.retailonlineintegration.com/fall/registration.

Luxury retail customers demand sophistication from their brands. At the high-end of the retail sector, that means developing a robust online strategy to increase your brand’s online social influence. Luxury retailers like Nordstrom are confounding the marketplace by outperforming other retailers in today’s sluggish economy.

A number of merchants including Burberry, H&M and Macy's have launched brand pages on Google+. As of Nov. 8, Burberry had 12,349 followers, H&M had 10,383 and Macy's had 10,767. According to the official Google blog, "So far Google+ has focused on connecting people with other people. But we want to make sure you can build relationships with all the things you care about — from local businesses to global brands."

Social media isn't just about connecting people with people. It's also about selling people stuff. The launch of Google+ Pages is an attempt to make that social network more useful for businesses, allowing businesses and plus users to connect via Google Hangouts and to +1 businesses and so forth.

Etsy’s online recommendation tool, Gift Ideas for Facebook Friends, provides a list of suggested items that relate to the likes and interests of your friends on the social network.

As Zellers gears up for the holiday shopping season, the retailer has decided to put its fans in charge of holiday planning during the busiest time of the year. The Festive Finale campaign will see Zellers' shoppers making the tough decisions — choosing the Facebook exclusive coupon each week, picking the in-store music playlist and recording the radio ads for national broadcast.

We asked executives, “What one question would you most want answered about social media for business?” The two most popular responses: “What can I measure that will get me buy-in from the entire organization?” and “How can we measure social media ROI?” Both questions are about metrics and how to write the business case to justify a focused social media initiative.

RadioShack's 2010 holiday program took top honors at the fifth annual Forrester Groundswell Awards in the "Business to Consumer North America: Energizing" category.