Social Media Marketing

Social media is as easy to control as the ocean. Some days are so calm you wonder if the world has taken a day off. Others are filled with activity that sends customers and prospects clicking to your site. And some days bring hurricane-force winds that threaten the foundation of your business.

Sephora has announced the launch an online social shopping community for Sephora customers.  Customers can use the service to talk about the products they're buying, discover trending products, and write product reviews to share with others.

In a post on its Facebook page, Wal-Mart launched the deals app Crowdsaver, which unlocks a discount once enough consumers opt in - much like the group deals phenomenon the start-up Groupon has made popular in recent months.

We’ve found that YouTube has broad appeal and, unlike virtually any other channel, YouTube videos allow us to tell stories that we couldn’t convey in print or other online media. We create original content that you can’t see anywhere else for YouTube fans and the active blogger community.

Part two of this series examines what impact social media will have on retail going forward. In particular, opportunities to bridge online and offline customer experiences in order to seamlessly integrate multiple touchpoints and selling channels are identified.

YouTube is the second most trafficked search engine on the web; if you aren’t using this service for your business, you're missing out on reaching tons of potential customers.

Social commerce has shifted into high gear. E-commerce continues to grow at increasingly rapid rates and experts predict that online sales could grow to as much as 30 percent of total retail sales over the next few decades.

The introduction of Facebook's Community Pages combined with the social media site's launch earlier this year of Places, a location-based service, has put the relevancy and longevity of other outlets like Foursquare and Gowalla into question seemingly overnight.

Brick-and-mortar retailers badly want to tap into Facebook's 500 million users. Retailers realize that for a growing number of Facebook users, it's no longer just a website. It's a new platform, one of the "big new disruptors" in the online world, according to experts assembled at this week's Shop.org annual retail technology summit in Dallas.