Tips for social success

In a session at ECMOD 2012 in November, Lucy Uren of Rowen & Wren shared her tips for social success. Uren, a former John Lewis designer, launched the niche homewares business in April 2011 following prelaunch activity on Twitter and Tumblr. 


At ECMOD, she explained how Rowen & Wren had a social strategy right from the start and how the brand continues to engage with customers over social platforms. In true social-media style, she shared a few of her top tips:

• Blog: Rowen & Wren typically posts blogs three times a week, and topics range from spotlighting new products, highlighting press features, and posting photos that customers have sent in of Rowen & Wren pieces in their home. These blogs are then automatically posted on Facebook and Twitter for maximum exposure. Rowen & Wren is also a guest blogger on a wedding blog and Uren advised exploring opportunities that will allow you to blog for other people.

• Twitter: Uren recommended tweeting up to five times a day, with 10am and lunchtime among the more popular times to tweet. She said Twitter tended to be the social network used by journalists and bloggers, rather than consumers, so Rowen & Wren tailors tweets to appeal to the press and uses the medium to communicate with prominent stylists and bloggers.

• Facebook: This is the social network where most of Rowen & Wren’s UK customers are found. Because it’s such an accessible platform for customer interaction, Rowen & Wren uses Facebook to share images and blog posts, inviting its customers to become friends of the brand.

• Pinterest: According to Uren, Pinterest is “outstanding”. It directs more traffic to the Rowen & Wren website than either Twitter or Facebook. Much of the activity on Pinterest comes from the US, but Uren says a growing number of UK traffic is generated by the site. To use Pinterest effectively, Uren recommended following and attracting influential “pinners”. If one of them “re-pins” any of your products, the result could be a huge spike in traffic and potentially sales. Uren said she pins every evening—a mix of Rowen & Wren’s products and interesting images from around the web.--MT

ECMOD plays host to tech and social innovations

One of the main themes to come out of last month’s ECMOD Direct Commerce show was the importance of technology and this was clearly evident on the exhibition floor with the likes of software services firm Omnica, shopping cart software specialist Etail Systems and business management software company Brightpearl all showing off their latest technologies.

One piece of news to be confirmed during the show came from digital asset management specialist Aproove, which announced a partnership with marketing services company Brightsource to help improve its print management and marketing services. Brightsource implemented Aproove’s instant artwork approval tool to reduce the bottlenecks that come from managing client's work.

Some more news from the floor came in the shape of transactional data expert Abacus, which launched a new data cleaning and suppression service, DataCleanse, at the show. The new tool cleans data, merges duplicate records, updates records for customers who have moved house and removes deceased individuals or companies no-longer trading as well as flags customers who have requested not to be contacted, through the mail and telephone preference services.

There were also some very eye catching promotions on the exhibition floor from exhibitorsHavas EHS, which hit the sweet spot by giving away candy to visitors, and the Metakineticteam, who were offering free popcorn on their stand, while the Specialist Works took the crown for “smartest” giveaway with its brain stress ball.

Back onto the technology theme, some of the conference sessions stressed the importance of innovating through new channels. In the Future of TV Shopping session, Richard Burrell, director of European market development at QVC, said new technology is an “opportunity not a threat”. For example, at QVC, smartphones are now the fastest growing channel with customers watching a segment on their mobile phones and buying on the web.

Social media was a hot topic too. In a session titled “B2B: Building Customer Loyalty”, social media and mobile were heralded as the leading force in the future of b-to-b. Guy Magrath, global head of ecommerce at Electrocomponents, said that with around “75 percent” of the population estimated to own a smartphone in the future, mobile will be “the way forward”. He added that mobile “will be big in b-to-b and the b-to-c environment”.  Richard Askam, founder and managing director at Intervino, also believes social media will be big and says “people used to go into a pub to talk, but now you go into social media.”

Chloe Thomas, the author of eCommerce MasterPlan, and Martin Harvey, the founder of direct marketing performance management firm Harvey2, in their session “Does social media have a valid role in ecommerce?” explained the importance of adding social media to your website and used the example of Firebox, which displays Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+ and email buttons on its product pages, as well as a customer rating option.

Lucy Jewson, the founder of Frugi, speaking in a panel session on the second day of the show echoed their comments. She said Frugi uses social media to ask customers about business decisions. Frugi has launched “a secret Facebook group” where a customer can become a “crusader” for the retailer. The childrenswear brand asks these crusaders to look at new designs and give their feedback as well as getting them to trial potential new products.

Another topic to come out of the conference sessions was the importance of communicating with customers. In the session“B2B: Building Customer Loyalty” Charles Barnett, managing director at Lyco, stressed that “communication is absolutely key” when building customer loyalty—for example explaining to a customer ahead of time that a delivery may be late. The session’s chairman Steve Bright added that companies need to “take ownership of a problem” and then follow that problem through to solution.

In another session called “Helping Santa Retire”, Tom Allason of Shutl highlighted the importance of feedback and how a business can use communication to its benefit. He explained how Shutl used communication to gain responses, such as asking your customers where they heard of you and what you can do to improve. This type of communication enables your business to get vital feedback from customers about how you can enhance your service and which social channels are working for you.--JD

Dart’s data--social media

You might talk the talk, but do you walk the walk? These two reports show that consumers want more interaction with brands via social media, but that businesses aren’t effectively measuring this engagement, potentially losing out on a very lucrative channel.

Global interactive marketing provider ExactTarget found that nearly half of UK consumers interact with brands on Facebook and nearly a quarter of those are more likely to make a purchase from that brand. Based on more than 1,400 consumer interviews and surveys, the report also shows that 7 percent of all UK consumers have followed a brand on Twitter, with 32 percent of those saying they are more likely to buy from the brand after following it on the social network.

Research by EPiServer, a multichannel digital marketing and ecommerce software specialist, revealed that only one in ten UK businesses effectively measure ROI of their social media outreach, despite more than half increasing their investment in social media over the past year. The survey, which asked 250 UK marketing decision makers, also highlighted that 17 percent of respondents said they are planning to set up more social media channels in the coming year, but only 22 percent of firms said they have a social media or community manager in place.

Send your report, study or whitepaper to jamesd@catalog-biz.com.

Magicbox gets social

We like to think that all the catalogues and websites we’ve reviewed read the articles and act upon the advice they’re given. When an email from magic-tricks retailer Magicbox landed in my inbox this week, I was instantly reminded of the website review we published in September by BT Fresca’s Sarah Hughes.

In her review, Hughes commended Magicbox for using video on its website and making use of user-generated content, but suggested it go a step further by “inviting happy customers to post videos of themselves performing their newly acquired magic tricks”. The email I received this week confirmed that Magicbox was indeed taking this route.

In the email titled “Want to win £100 of free magic?”, Magicbox invited recipients to celebrate the launch of its new customer video reviews feature. Taking up more of Hughes’ advice, Magicbox incentivised customers by offering the best video £100 in free products from the Magicbox website.

Adhering to further customer engagement best-practice, Magicbox then introduced additional social elements to the email—customers could enter the competition by posting their videos on YouTube and sending a link to Magicbox as well as by uploading them directly to the Magicbox site. A shortlist will then be posted on Magicbox’s Facebook page and fans will be invited to vote for their favourite.

In her review, Hughes said it was clear that Magicbox is committed to improve its online presence where possible. Certainly that seems the case with Magicbox integrating more content-rich features and social-media elements into its website and its emails. Wonder what more tricks it has up its sleeve.--MT

Off-topic but on target

This week I chaired a Q&A session at Onepost’s Ask the Expert event. During the session, in a segment about social media, one of the delegates asked whether it was “acceptable” to blog about his personal hobbies and interests—such as posting poems, or favourite recipes—on his company’s blog. The consensus at the table was that he should steer clear of off-topic posts. After all, the amount of information all of us have to consume on a daily basis is so vast (according to one speaker, a week’s worth of New York Times content is more information than a person living in the 18th century would consume in his lifetime), that it is probably best to stick to what your audience, or rather potential audience, is expecting from you.

Nigel Cliffe of Cliffe Associates said potential customers could find it a turn off to read more personal blog posts. As the delegate was a director of a business-to-business company selling niche educational supplies, his customers were buying for business, rather than pleasure. Blogging about the founder’s daily life, therefore, may not be of interest to readers. If there are too many posts that appear irrelevant, Cliffe warned that readers eventually will tune out. They will miss the posts that are of interest; those that drive brand awareness and ultimately, sales.

On the train home (which was running late, so I had plenty of time to think it through) I began to wonder whether off-topic blog posts could work for that delegate’s business. Take Hush for example. The loungewear cataloguer has built its brand on recommending books, hotels, and even chocolate brownies in its enewsletter, catalogue, and customer magazine. According to founder Mandy Watkins, this tactic works. She sees an uplift in sales after each email broadcast and at the trade fairs she exhibits, customer feedback usually centres on how much they love Hush’s newsletter because it offers them something different.

Another business is Joules. This cataloguer/retailer, which has its roots in the equestrian market, has built its brand around the strapline “Living the good life”. Its blog is full of stories of pancake races and updates from the Joules vegetable patch. These editorial features have seemingly little to do with selling clothes, but here and there you’ll find news of store openings, and dates for upcoming shows where customers can meet the Joules team face-to-face.

Then of course, there’s Boden. A brand built around the founder’s personality. But all of these examples are from consumer catalogues, not business-to-business merchants. The trick, as always, is knowing your audience. For the delegate at yesterday’s event a more personal approach could work, if done right. He is a former teacher and now sells supplies to special-needs teachers; posting a poem that is a play on words for example, could then be used as a classroom teaching aid. Or posting a recipe, provided that it is child-friendly, could be used by a teacher overseeing an after-school club. In short, off-topic posts may not be as random as they first appear.

In order to get the balance right between off-topic and more directly sales-oriented, all the experts recommend testing. If you are a b-to-b cataloguer, your customers probably signed up to receive your enewsletters or RSS feeds of your blog posts because what you are saying is directly relevant to their businesses. They want good deals, latest product news, and updates about the sector they are working in. They might not want to hear about your daughter’s recent violin recital, or your son’s winning goal at the weekend’s under-11s football match. Check your stats to see which posts or enewsletters are getting the most visitors, or what your customers are searching for on your website and provide more of what they are looking for. If you are still not fulfilled by only writing a personal blog once in a blue moon, perhaps you should set up a personal account and say whatever you like.—MT

GetTheLabel gets it

In recent months we learnt that fewer than half of retailers have a presence on social networks. From anecdotal evidence it seems that even those that do use social media are failing to integrate them into their email marketing campaigns. That’s why this email from discount apparel etailer GetTheLabel caught my attention.

Here’s what I liked about it:

1. It was personalised—the subject line was “Miri - So you think you know the 80's”? I don’t actually profess to know the 80s—I didn’t grow up in the UK, so everything I know about the 80s was learnt once the decade was over. But still, now I felt I had something to prove. GetTheLabel had succeeded in persuading me to open the email.

2. It linked to a Facebook Quiz—and that’s all it did. There were no products promoted in the email. However, by clicking through to the quiz, respondents allowed GetTheLabel to access their presumably rich Facebook data. The retailer also added tracking code to the click, so it can measure exactly how successful this email was in generating opens and click-throughs. On the quiz I was greeted with questions like "what commercial was Michael Jackson filming when his hair caught fire?", and "which female tennis player won Wimbledon the most times in the 80s?". Before getting my results I was invited to share the app with my friends so they could do it too. This is a neat way for GetTheLabel to spread its message (and discount code, see below) to a wider audience.

3. There was a reward after all—GetTheLabel incentivised the quiz with a 10 percent discount on spends of more than £50. I've blocked countless of pointless Facebook quizzes from my profile, and I am sure others have done the same. But by offering a tangible reward, GetTheLabel has more chance of sustaining attention spans. Also, on the results page GetTheLabel gave me the option of trying more quizzes, returning to my profile, or clicking through to shop at its site. I opted for more quizzes, where I found three more quizzes that GetTheLabel had devised, each with a discount code to reward the Facebook user for his time.

Oh, and if you’re curious I scored 11 out of 15.—MT

All the Rage this Christmas

The real winner of this year’s fight for the number-one Christmas single is neither Rage Against the Machine nor Joe McElderry; it’s social media. And any businesses that still fail to see the commercial importance of networking websites such as Facebook are doomed to be mired in the 20th century.

The backstory in brief: Essex music fans John and Tracy Morter were tired of the annual winner of The X Factor--or as they put up, “Simon Cowell’s latest karoake act”--landing the top spot on the Christmas charts, as has been the case since 2004. So they set up a Facebook page encouraging people to buy Rage Against the Machine’s 1992 “Killing in the Name” the week of 13th December so that it could pip this year’s X Factor winner to number one. The campaign worked, with Rage’s not-at-all-festive ditty outselling Joe McElderry’s cover of “The Climb” by about 50,000 copies—or rather downloads, as “Killing in the Name” was available online only.

The obvious moral to this story is that one should never underestimate the breadth of a social network or the enthusiasm with which consumers participate in an online campaign. A sociologist might go so far as to argue that in our far-flung, techno-oriented world, people are so hungry to connect with other humans that they are especially inclined to get involved in virtual campaigns, as a way of sating their need to belong to a group. If this is indeed true, then online grass-roots campaigns will become more, not less, powerful as the internet becomes more a part of our everyday existence.

Leaving that aside, though, there are several other lessons to be learned:

1) Be careful how you respond to social media. After getting wind of the Rage campaign, Cowell told the mainstream media at a press conference that the Facebook campaign was “stupid” and “cynical”. In many cases, you do need to respond to web chatter concerning your brand. By doing so at a press conference, though, Cowell gave the campaign greater play than it might otherwise have received. He also demonstrated that he perceived the campaign as a threat, which of course established its credibility as one. He might have been better off by having the X Factor finalists respond in the weeks leading up to the final and then having winner McElderry launch a campaign of his own.

2) Never assume. “I now realise I’ve taken too much for granted,” Cowell said after the chart results were announced. “I have got to hold my hands up. I accept that there are people that don’t like The X Factor.” If he’d been more diligent in monitoring his brand (the subject of an article in our upcoming January issue, by the way), he would not have been so surprised. Hell, he could have just rung me (and if you’d like to call upon me in the future, Simon, feel free. I don’t like The X Factor, but I’m definitely a fan of Simon Cowell.)

3) People—and especially British people—like to support the underdog. So if you’re being perceived as Goliath, you may want to consider highlighting a few of your similarities to David.

4) Not everyone buys into the force-fed image of Christmas as a time of cheer and group hugs. The fact that the Morters selected “Killing in the Name” (sample lyric: “And now you do what they told you/Now you’re under control”) for their protest, as opposed to a more seasonal or cheery ditty, underscores this. You can’t get much less warm and fuzzy than Rage Against the Machine. Prior to the next Christmas selling season, you might want to conduct some research amongst your own audience to see whether they’ve overdosed on messages of yuletide cheer and, if so, whether you should take a different approach to your holiday marketing.

5) If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em—or try to hire ‘em. Cowell reportedly phoned the Morters to congratulate them and offer them jobs at his record company. So far, they’ve declined.--SC

What's in a tweet?

When talking about Twitter, the word “engagement” comes up time and again. Twitter isn’t meant to be a sales channel, insist the pundits, but rather a means of engaging customers and prospects with your brand. Of course, the purpose of engaging an audience in this way is to foster a stronger bond between them and your company, a bond that is ultimately expected to pay off in greater customer loyalty, retention, and yes, sales.

In reality, though, how many merchants are using Twitter to facilitate two-way conversation with consumers, as opposed to viewing it as just another means of pushing out their own messages without encouraging response?

In a highly unscientific survey, I looked at the Twitter feeds of a dozen merchants from 10th to 17th December. I was pleasantly surprised by how few of those 12 companies used their posts primarily to talk about themselves.



Electricals retailer Comet, for instance, posted 24 tweets during the week in question. Of those, 20 involved its Tweet the Parcel competition (which colleague Miri assures me was great fun). By naming the various prizes in its tweets, Comet was able to subtly promote its product range—and of course the game itself drove traffic to its website. But by also announcing the winners in its tweets, it created a sense of conversational give and take, and aligned its brand with a sense of fun. I’d say it was a win/win all around.

Compare Comet with nursery etailer Kiddisave, which posted a whopping 156 tweets during the week—that’s more than 20 a day. Just about every one of those posts was a straightforward product advert (“Micralite Fastfold Stroller Black also available in red - Kiddisave The One Stop Baby Shop http://bit.ly/8Ax0ua”, “Great savings on Quinny, Cosatto, Stokke® any [sic] many more big name brands - Kiddisave The One Stop Baby Shop http://bit.ly/3dFrx9”). Kiddisave’s Twitter feed did nothing to distinguish the company as a brand, other than to suggest it was a site to visit when pricing products. But in this era of comparison-shopping sites, using pricing as your primary selling proposition, with “one-stop shop” a distant second, seems short-sighted. Perhaps Kiddisave figures that because it has a high customer churn rate (after all, you only need to buy strollers and highchairs for a very limited span of time), engaging with customers to encourage a relationship is a foolish luxury.

Then again, maternity and nursery cataloguer/retailer Mamas & Papas has a similar issue regarding customer churn, but its Twitter feed establishes a brand persona akin to a girlfriend with whom you might sit at the kitchen table over a cup of tea while leafing through a copy of Heat magazine and chatting about your neighbours. A typical Mamas & Papas tweet: “Congratulations to Zoe Ball and DJ Norman Cook aka Fat Boy Slim on the news their baby is a long awaited girl who will be due in Janaury. [sic]” Of its 19 tweets for the week, only six promoted products, and even these maintained a “just us girls” tone (“The perfect heirloom gift for a little girl's bedroom. How cute is this? Boys version too. http://bit.ly/60znke via @addthis”).

Other retailers that promoted product aimed for a colloquial, soft-sell tone as well. All six of Laura Ashley’s tweets for the week were self-promotional, but at least the brand tried for subtlety or a sense of context: “Did you see Kirsties Home Made Christmas? Get the Novelty Chrismas [sic] Bunting as seen on her fireplace here! http://ow.ly/LO28”

Likewise, while two-thirds of Halfords’ 15 tweets were promotional, the auto and cycle accessories retailer injected a sense of humour: “On the third day of Christmas Halfords Twitter gave to me...Three Wiper Blades: http://bit.ly/5nTIEh”. Its other tweets offered vehicle-related news and info, helping to establish the brand as a definitive, qualified source.

A supplier of spare parts for appliances, eSpares is an exemplar of two-way communication. Of its 32 tweets, 22 were responses to the tweets of others, with a heavy customer service component. The remaining 10 tweets were friendly and nonpromotional, along the lines of “Good morning! It's so cold here in London today. I'm thinking I should suggest opening an eSpares branch in Sydney.”

Dolls House Emporium follows a similar tactic. Not one of its 26 tweets touted product; one linked to a blog post, 15 were responses or retweets, and the remainder were simple observations. The closest its Twitter feed came to self-promotion was with this tweet: “It's very very busy here. We're not complaining, in fact we're quite excited about it :)”

The upshot? If you’re using Twitter solely as a push mechanism, and the only things you’re pushing are your products, you’re not taking full advantage of the medium. Failing to take advantage of its pull capabilities—by inviting followers to participate in giveaways and promotions, say, or by posting nonpromotional snippets as conversational gambits—is akin to kitting out your lounge with the latest wide-screen, HD television set and surround-sound speakers, then using the gear solely to watch decade-old reruns of Last of the Summer Wine. Why bother, really?--SC

Blogs, break-ups, and dead sharks

It’s over. I have broken up with one of my favourite blogs.

The reasons, for this post, aren’t important. One element, though, had to do with what I (and apparently many other of the blog readers) perceived as a scolding by the blog editors regarding what they felt were off-topic responses to their posts. It could probably be boiled down to a classic case of both sides talking but neither side listening—and who hasn’t had a relationship that suffered to some degree from that?

The upshot is, whereas I used to be a big fan of the women’s-oriented blog Jezebel—visiting it several times a day, posting periodically, recommending it in articles, linking to it via this blog—a few days ago I decided to end our relationship. Okay, I did visit it once or twice during the weekend, but I didn’t click through any of the posts; it was more in the way of phoning an ex-boyfriend just to hear him pick up the phone, then hanging up when he says hello. (Come on, I’m not the only one who’s done that... am I?)

If I’m discussing my relationship with Jezebel in the same terms as one might a personal relationship, that’s because in some ways it felt like a personal relationship to me. Indeed, that’s one of the virtues of blogs and other forms of social media—and one of the dangers.

When venturing into social networking, it’s easy to focus on the upsides: creating and reaffirming customer loyalty, strengthening the bonds between consumers and brand, the potential for word-of-mouth marketing. But bear the potential pitfalls in mind as well. I emailed Jezebel with my concerns prior to breaking up with the blog, and in its defence one of the editors promptly emailed me back. But for every consumer you disappoint who makes you aware of his chagrin, there are sure to be others who simply drop you—or worse, drop you and then proceed to complain about you in his own blog posts or other conversations.

So remember that the opportunity for greater rewards usually comes with greater risks, that you need to listen as well as speak, and that you should never become complacent with your relationships with customers, any more than you should with your significant other. Which brings to mind a quote from Annie Hall: “A relationship, I think, is like a shark… It has to constantly move forward, or it dies. And I think what we got here on our hands is a dead shark.”--SC

"It's a magical world, Hobbes..."

For every avid fan of Twitter and Facebook, there seems to be an equally vociferous social-media sceptic. This little case study should give the doubters reason to reconsider.

A few months back one of my favourite blogs, the Comics Curmudgeon, briefly mentioned an upcoming book about one of the best comic strips in the history of the medium, "Calvin and Hobbes". Author Nevin Martell was offering everyone who emailed him a free copy of the first chapter of his book, Looking for Calvin and Hobbes. I emailed, and several weeks later received my free chapter.

I wasn’t the only one. In an interview with the Robot 6 blog on the Comic Book Resources website, Martell said that more than 4,000 people requested the chapter. “My publishers told me that super successful versions of this kind of promotion in the past had garnered a couple of hundred requests. But then the offer got written up by BoingBoing and NPR, not to mention a slew of comic-related blogs and the Twittersphere, so suddenly I had hundreds of requests pouring in.” The success of the promotion spawned additional blog posts and articles, which in turn generated more publicity for the book.

Martell doesn’t have a deep-pocketed publishing house behind him (if such a thing as a deep-pocketed publishing house even exists anymore). And because his book appeals to a niche market, he wisely targeted niche websites with his offer. In fact, for all that pundits have said that ecommerce levels the playing field for smaller merchants, because of the lower cost of entry and whatnot, I think that social media have levelled the field even more (except, of course, that a field cannot be levelled “more”—it’s either level or it’s not. But I digress…).

Let’s say you sell something niche like pig collectibles (don’t laugh—I used to have an extensive collection of porcine novelties… okay, laugh if you must). Ten years ago you would have had to target general collectibles magazines and forums to promote your products. Now after just a few minutes online you can find websites, Facebook groups, newsletters, and the like for pig owners, pig fanciers, and yes, collectors of pig memorabilia. By setting up a blog on your ecommerce site, linking to other relevant sites, and striking up relationships with other bloggers, you could home in on pig fans without wasting resources reaching out to, say, guinea pig collectors or casting a wider, costlier, and perhaps unprofitable net to include collectibles buyers in general.

And people who participate in niche hobbies are, judging from anecdotal evidence, more engaged with social media than those favouring more-mainstream pursuits. Those of us who are really interested in something as fairly specialised as comic strips or pig figurines or Bronteana (hey, I have very catholic tastes) are usually so excited to come upon others sharing our same arcane hobby that we email and post and forward relevant links with virtually no encouragement.

Which is one reason I've included links to both Martell's book and the Comics Curmudgeon site in this post.--SC

Comfort and joy

Two diverse organisations, John Lewis and Oxfam, are using online video in a similar way: to encourage us to spend some of our Christmas budget at their websites.

In its enewsletter last week, John Lewis included a blurb about its Toy Joy video, in which "we asked some children we know to give our predicted best sellers a test run, and as you’ll see, they had lots of fun". In the three-minute clip, a half-dozen or so kids play with scooters, dollhouses, glow-in-the-dark light sabers, and the like. It's a cute idea; I just wish that the production was a bit less slick. The kids seem more like child actors told to play nicely than "real-life" kids who jumped at the chance to mess about with toys. One of the girls in particular appeared positively joyless playing with what looked like a pretty fun dressmaking kit.

John Lewis doesn't seem to have uploaded the video onto YouTube, which seems to be a lot opportunity. Oxfam, on the other hand, has a series of videos on the clip-sharing site as well as on OxfamUnwrapped.com. The site sells "gifts that make a big difference"--£30 buys farming tools for a Third World family, £221 a desk and chair at a school in an impoverished community, £25 a goat for a family in need. The print catalogue includes plenty of callouts directing you to the website to "see this gift in action". The video (below) in which a Honduran family shows how the gift of a cow (£80) improved their well-being is more effective than any copywriter's verbiage could be. And if the expression on the girl's face at the 1:25 mark doesn't epitomise "joy", I don't know what does.--SC

ECMOD quickies

One drawback of attending a conference with an especially good programme of sessions and speakers: There’s no way to cover everything you want to. Such was the case at ECMOD this year. Nonetheless, here’s a selection of notable quotes and quick takeaways that I’ve gleaned fromt the conference, which began yesterday and ran through today at Earls Court in London:

• “The successful catalogues we work with focus on having a website better than their catalogue,” said Bill LaPierre of list and data firm Direct Media/Millard during his Thursday morning session. This ties in with one of his truisms of direct marketing in the 21st century: The website is the core business, and the catalogue brings in incremental sales—the reverse of the longstanding conventional wisdom.

• Also from LaPierre: Sixty percent of the success of a catalogue is down to the merchandise, 20 percent to the mailing list, 10 percent to the creative, and the remaining 10 percent to customer service.

• In addition to helping ecommerce sites with their search engine optimisation efforts (by providing more content for search engine spiders to crawl), a blog “kind of builds a personal trust, as people want more and more information about companies these days,” Karen Watson, co-owner and managing director of The Real Flower Company, said during a Wednesday morning session on social media.

• At the same session, Wiggly Wigglers founder Heather Gorringe said, “Podcasts aren’t always thought of as social media, but I actually think they’re the start of it all.” Wiggly Wigglers has had great success with its folksy yet informative podcasts, as well as with other social media. Facebook, for instance, drives about 7.5 percent of all traffic to the rural-lifestyle cataloguer’s website, and Twitter drives another 7.5 percent. Of Twitter, Gorringe said, “It puts us on an even platform with companies that have an enormous budget.”

• Another panelist of the Wednesday morning social-media session, Asos’s James Hart, said, “Your community is not just your customers. Your community is you and your customers.”

• Discussing his company’s launch in the US market during a session on UK brands expanding overseas, Boden managing director Julian Granville noted, “In the US we planned for just about every disaster scenario there is, but we didn’t plan on this much success.” The message: Just as you should have contingency plans for underperformance, be sure you are prepared for greater-than-expected demand.

• Think “free” is the most effective word you can use in an email subject line? Think again. In her Thursday afternoon session, Michelle Farabaugh of consultancy Lenser said that of the emails her company had tested, seven of the 10 most-effective ones had “New” in the subject line.

I’ll be posting more-extensive coverage of ECMOD on our Catalogue e-business website (www.catalog-biz.com) and in the November issue of Catalogue e-business magazine—once my brain cells have processed everything and, just as important, once my feet have forgiven me for wearing court shoes two days in a row for the first time since last year’s ECMOD.--SC

Making print more sociable

Molly Flatt of social-media marketing firm 1000heads wrote an article for the October issue of Catalogue e-business (due to hit desks 5th October) that, among other things, wondered why few multichannel marketers made use of social marketing in their print catalogues. Many mailers include customer testimonials in their catalogues, but that’s pretty much the extent of their word-of-mouth marketing efforts in print.

Orvis has the right idea. The outdoor gear and apparel merchant runs an annual photo contest; the winner’s picture is used as the front cover of its autumn Orvis Dog Book (and the photographer gets a £500 Orvis gift card too). Consumers are the judges; they’re encouraged to vote via the print catalogue and the website. This year Orvis also posted on YouTube and on its own site a video slide show of some popular entries. The video received more than 6,000 views on YouTube in just two months—and you know a significant portion of those viewers clicked the link to the Orvis website, had a browse, and maybe requested a catalogue or made a purchase.

As I was editing Molly’s article, I came up with all sorts of possible ways to “socialise” catalogues, in addition to those Molly suggests (and no, I’m not going to tell you what those are—you’ll have to read the issue to find out). For instance, gadgets retailer Firebox.com runs a fortnightly contest in which it awards a gift card to the person who submits the best photo and video. The contest is promoted on its website and the winning entrants featured, but I haven’t seen the winning photos included in the Firebox print catalogue. Why not?

For that matter, why not ask catalogue readers to submit photos of themselves using/wearing products they’ve purchased from you, then include a smattering of them in the catalogue and on your website? Why don’t more kitchenware merchants solicit recipes from customers, or art-supplies cataloguers run contests for readers to design their covers?

The internet didn't create social marketing; it merely put a flashy shiny gloss on the concept. Cataloguers (and even more prominently, magazine publishers) have long invited their audiences to participate with their brands via contests, testimonials, and requests for pictures, stories, recipes, and helpful hints. The mechanics of setting up a blog or a forum or online product ratings are relatively easy; the challenging part is crafting a compelling, attention-getting reason for your audience to get involved.--SC

Of fan mail and thank yous

Despite all the chatter about social media, it’s still very easy to underestimate its effects. And it’s still very easy to get it wrong.

The other day a friend of mine posted a link on Facebook to some items on the Boden website, declaring how much she wished she could order one of everything. Until I saw that posting, I never quite understood why merchants should make it easy for visitors to their website to post product shots to their Facebook pages. Who’s really going to use that function? I wondered. I’ll tell you who: People who are debating whether to go ahead and splurge, and for whom a few responses from friends along the lines of “Love it!” and “That would be perfect for that wedding you’re complaining about having to attend” will make the difference between pass and purchase. And we’re not just talking kids; my friend is a hard-working mom in her forties.

I responded to my friend’s post by telling her I’d actually met and interviewed Johnnie Boden himself (when I’d started here at Catalogue e-business two years ago; you can access the article here), adding facetiously, “Are you impressed?” Ends up she really was. Things that you and I may take for granted because they’re part of our job--interviewing the heads of companies, attending fashion shows, going to trade exhibitions--are not taken for granted by most of our customers. By offering customers a peek behind the scenes--blogging about a runway show, posting snaps of a catalogue photo shoot on your Facebook page--you’re inviting them into the family. Which in turns transforms admirers into advocates.

But with the great power of social media comes great responsibility--the responsibility of not inadvertently snubbing even one customer or prospect. Unfortunately snubbing is all too easy. A somewhat off-the-track example: I’ve written before about the Comics Curmudgeon, a blog that pokes affectionate but snarky fun at US comic strips. When the writer of the blog launched a Twitter feed (@JFruh) I signed on to follow. Imagine my disappointment when the next day I saw that he had blocked me. And here I had just posted a tweet bigging him up. I was as hurt as if a friend of mine had told me that all those anecdotes I’d regaled him with for years really weren’t very entertaining and that, in fact, I was a big bore he only put up with because I paid for rounds at the pub.

So I wrote a post on the Comics Curmudgeon blog about how I’d been blocked and wasn’t feeling the love. Within a day @JFruh got back to me, telling me he’d thought our Twitter handle (@catalogbiz) sounded “spammy” and that he was sorry, honest. Ah, the love was back!

Now imagine that I had been communicating not with a blog but a multichannel marketer, and that my blog post had been ignored. I could easily have written about this on my Facebook page, my Twitter feed, this blog, my next editor’s letter...

One last anecdote and lesson: Never underestimate the importance of “thank you”. During the weekend I found that my new favourite writer (yes, Miri, I’m still on about John Wray and Lowboy) is on Facebook, so I sent him an email, briefly telling him how much I appreciated his latest book and how it has galvanised my own writing. On Monday he replied. It was a brief reply (“Thank you Sherry. Much appreciated”), but it was a reply, an acknowledgement nonetheless that had me squealing and blushing. (Really--I hadn’t gotten that hot in the face since my 50-second chat with James McAvoy in February.)

If someone has taken the time to contact your company, whether it’s just to post a “love the widget” on your website forum or to email with what may seem like a silly question, make a point of responding. For at least a few seconds, let him feel that he means as much to you as your brand means to him.--SC

Very ambivalent

Littlewoods Direct became Very on Sunday. No, a noun isn’t missing from that sentence. Shop Direct Group rebranded its Littlewoods Direct fascia, renaming it Very and radically overhauling its website. The goal is to attract and retain a young, upwardly mobile audience by offering loads of social-networking features as well as some hip new brands.

So, is the new website Very fabulous? Or is it Very much of a misfire? Or is it Very much a matter of much ado over nothing, or perhaps a work still Very much in progress? (Okay, I’ll stop now with the Very bad play on words—but really, with a name like Very, the brand is asking for it.)

Let’s start with the home page. The product categories are clearly delineated near the top, and in the centre of the page the links to “Hot holiday fashion”, “View our new and exclusive brands”, and “Top offers” are more prominent than that for “Introducing our network”. So far, so good. But could there be a stronger call to action to encourage sales? Absolutely. That the product shots on the home page are minimal, in both size and number, and there’s nothing that says, “Shop now” or “Like this skirt? Click here” hints at the drawbacks of having one website serve two apparent purposes: to engage via social networking and to sell product.

The social aspects of the site, in and of themselves, are fine. Product reviews, of course, have gone from being a nice-to-have to a must-have for consumer ecommerce sites, but Very uses a pleasingly thorough template for its reviews that sets them apart from most others. The product pages also include widgets that make it easy to post the items onto Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter. The live chats with its celebrity designers such as Fearne Cotton, who created an exclusive range for Very, are a fun way to create buzz.

There’s also a forum, and a People networking section: You can sign up, fill out a questionnaire, follow other participants a la Twitter, post comments, and put together product “bundles”, such as outfits or room furnishings. It’s all very kicky, but I wonder if all these networking features will distract site visitors from shopping rather than encourage them to do so.

In the July issue of Catalogue e-business, PR and social-media expert Katy Howell, of Immediate Future, advises keeping community sites separate from transactional sites: “People go to online retailers to shop. For advice they will go elsewhere.”

And while there’s much to be said for making the online shopping experience more social, just as offline shopping is, making it too social could suppress sales. Think about the gaggles of teens you see at shopping centres, trying on sunglasses and hats, leafing through magazines, sampling CDs. How many of them buy much of anything other than sodas and sweets?--SC

A howl of a product

Still not convinced that user reviews can boost traffic to and sales on your website? Then consider the current best-selling apparel item on Amazon.com: the Three Wolf Moon t-shirt.

You won't see this shirt featured in Vogue or in Harrods; as blogger Michael K of Dlisted (where I came across this marvel) writes, "don't act like you've never worn this shirt with denim cut-offs and wedge sandals while working the ho stroll in Panama City Beach, FL". Even Homer Simpson wouldn't wear this T, though Cletus definitely would.

The only reason this item could possibly have topped Amazon's apparel list has to be the product reviews--319 and counting.

A sampling: "After checking to ensure that the shirt would properly cover my girth, I walked from my trailer to Wal-mart with the shirt on and was immediately approached by women... The women that approached me wanted to know if I would be their boyfriend and/or give them money for something they called mehth. I told them no, because they didn't have enough teeth..."

"I am a member of Parliment and bought this T Shirt on my expenses. Since wearing this in the House, I have had a strange longing for roadkill and burgers..."

"So I tracked my package before I left for work today and realized that it would be delivered around 1pm. Around noon I told my manager my dad fell off a ladder and that I had to leave work to take him to the hospital. Pulling out of Taco Hell all I could think of was 3 Woof Moon shirt and where to make the public debut, and that 3WM would give me the guts to ask Tonya the deep fry girl to a drive-in movie tomorrow..."

"Before the 3 wolves and moon t-shirt I was just a crazy cat lady wearing 'hang in there' kitten t-shirts. Now that I wear my 3 wolves and moon t-shirt people definitely take me more seriously. Especially that lady that keeps calling from the electric company. If I'm really lucky I'll have the confidence to leave the house soon too..."

If Amazon had censored the comments--and many of them are much too rude for me to repeat here--there's no way it would have sold so many of these shirts. So let's chalk one up to the power of unadulterated user-generated content. And when you have a few minutes, check out some of the other comments on the shirt's product page. Just don't blame me if you fall under the spell of the three wolves and find yourself howling at the moon.--SC

Linking in to web 2.0

Web 2.0 can be exhausting, no? So many channels to maintain, and so many to follow. In the spare seconds between editing our print magazine, Catalogue e-business, and putting together our enewsletters, and updating our website (http://www.catalog-biz.com/), and of course writing for this blog, and posting to our Twitter feed (twitter.com/catalogbiz), I sometimes wonder if all the effort is worthwhile.

So what did I do last Friday afternoon? Implement another web 2.0 effort: the Catalogue e-business LinkedIn group. I emailed invitations to some of my LinkedIn contacts on this side of the Atlantic, my colleague Miri did the same, and we referred to it on our Twitter feed. I figured maybe half of those we’d invited would sign up, and that would be that.

So I was thrilled to see that before the weekend was out we already had more than 60 members. And a significant portion of them weren’t people we’d invited, but instead were LinkedIn contacts of our contacts, along with several who’d come via Twitter. A number of these people were new to both Miri and me, and so were perhaps new to Catalogue e-business as well.

My point? One, that social networking does indeed help you reach people you might not have been in touch with via your traditional channels as well as enable you to strengthen your relationship with your existing audience.

And two, that Catalogue e-business has a LinkedIn group, and I hope to see you on the membership list soon.--SC

Missing a trick

In January I became a dog owner. As it’s the first time I’ve ever owned a puppy I signed myself up to as many pet supplies enewsletters as I could find. And being rather “green” at this puppy lark I was particularly open to offers, advice and information from specialist retailers and dog experts. I was disappointed with what was presented to me.

I was unimpressed to find just one page of pet supplies on Catalink, and some of the catalogues featured weren’t that relevant anyway. Ditto iPoints, which had some great offers on pet insurance, but only two pet supplies retailers signed up to its scheme.

Pet supplies retailers are also missing a trick with product despatch. So far I’ve ordered from two different stores and neither put special-offer leaflets in my parcel. I didn’t get a catalogue or a free sample or even any third-party inserts for related items from other retailers. So tell me, why should I come back?

Maybe I’m being too harsh. Some of the websites I’ve looked at do have lots of information but I have to dig deep to find what I am looking for and it's not presented in the most user-friendly way. The enewsletters I’ve received since January do a basic job of putting product in front of me but I am not getting “added value”—a factor so often talked about by email marketing gurus. I want a bit of hand-holding. I want to feel reassured. I want some more social-media elements in the emails—reviews, links to videos, how-to guides, buyers' guides, ask the expert features, tips, health advice, competitions… I want the retailer to know I own a young dog and I want offers to suit my requirements. In short I guess I want to be treated as a new parent.

Maybe I just haven’t been signing up to the right enewsletters or buying from the right shops. Go ahead, prove me wrong: show me that there are some truly engaging pet supplies catalogues and enewsletters out there and earn a ticket out of the dog house.—MT