Social Media Marketing

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.

Walt Disney apologized to customers after demand for limited editions of its princess dolls crashed the Disney Store website. More than 1,200 Facebook users posted comments when the company acknowledged that the site was “extremely busy” and that it “won’t allow such high volume to check out simultaneously.”

The furor erupted when the company put the last five models in its Disney Princess Designer Doll Collection for sale on its website for $59.50 each. All of the dolls — the characters Tiana, Jasmine, Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty and Pocahontas — sold out the same day, the company said.

Retailers taking advantage of marketing in the digital world might see more of a benefit at the check-out counter. The NYU Stern School of Business Center for Measurable Marketing joined social media monitoring company Crimson Hexagon to complete a recent study that revealed a positive correlation between social media and store traffic.

Ikea is teaming up with YouTube to bring us one step closer to never having to participate in reality. By accessing a customer's Facebook account, Ikea U.K.'s YouTube app uses social media information to build "everything you need to be happy in bed."

Old Navy has partnered with Telemundo to launch a telenovela-style miniseries for the web. The Spanish-language web novela, "Estilos Robados" (Stolen Styles), is a six-part miniseries that launched Oct. 14 and will air on Fridays through Nov. 18.

International beauty product retailer L'Occitane en Provence is luring shoppers into its stores and to interact with it on its U.S. Facebook page by offering a voucher to pick up a free tube of hand cream in-store if the page reaches 250,000 "likes," enabling the retailer to build its Facebook fan base, drive in-store traffic and acquire customer data.

The hype surrounding the launch of Google+ went into overdrive a few months ago when it debuted to a select group of beta testers. But now that the service has been opened to the public, a new report claims that the social networking site has suffered a staggering loss of roughly 60 percent of its traffic.

Wal-Mart is launching a Facebook app that customizes marketing for each of its nearly 3,600 U.S. stores, allowing tailored communications about local deals, events or limited-distribution products. Eventually, Wal-Mart also hopes to use the My Local Walmart app to grow its site-to-store e-commerce program and evolve it into an individualized marketing program.