Overlooking and Discounting

Working for multiple companies and various company types, from small to enterprise, does not always create the best scenario in terms of openness to suggestions and offered insights.

I once suggested to some people in a certain company that all data, both apparently pertinent and questionably unnecessary, should be shared across all their social networking and commerce channels. They frankly told me, “We don’t do that here…” Another old-fashioned client of ours said that Project IN:FUSE is trying to do too much. I was stumped! Are we not supposed to do more than what clients expect from us?

Some people’s thinking processes are really difficult to follow. The pretentiousness that is a low but constant buzz in any business analytic field makes me yawn, more than watching a re-run of the “Soup Nazi” Seinfeld episode.

Look at something like this:

It is a simple and straightforward engagement formula by the Web Analytics Demystified Team, which most of us have probably seen. Now, it is smart yet palatable, and that is my point. The science of engagement analytics becomes approachable when there isn’t some geek spouting unintelligibles about eVars this or latency that. That is the other piece of the rub: We analysts always think that we are so smart until some client challenges us to present our technical ideas in layman’s terms.

No matter how complicated it gets, the Web is still the purest form of the unadulterated and predictable science of audience responsiveness. Hence, it is a worthy ongoing battle to convince clients of the power of capturing every click path and of paying attention to what any customer does in the Web. We may not always know the answers to the what or the why in terms of customer activity in the Web, but to not look for the answers at all is like throwing money away.

Who Is Most Engaged with E-Mail?

Gmail users click most

While the differences between Webmail properties such as Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, AOL and Hotmail may seem subtle, their user bases do not behave alike.
A study of success metrics for marketing e-mails sent through MailChimp’s distribution service showed that Gmail users were most likely to open and click on e-mails.
Open rates varied from a low of just over 20% for e-mail sent to AOL users to a high over nearly 31% among Gmail users. The click rate on e-mails sent to Gmail accounts was more than 7.4%, compared with rates between 4% and 5% for Yahoo!, AOL and Hotmail users.

Messages sent to Gmail accounts also had the lowest hard bounce rate, though other data indicates Gmail’s spam protection may be so stringent that messages disappear without producing a bounce. A 2009 Return Path study, for example, found a 23% nondelivery rate for marketing messages sent to Gmail. (For more information on nondelivery, see “Are You Deceived by Your E-Mail Delivery Rate?”)

According to comScore, Gmail is the third-most-popular e-mail property among US Internet users, though it posted the highest growth rate between July 2008 and July 2009. Unique visitors to the service rose 46% to nearly 37 million.

Yahoo! Mail and Windows Live Hotmail had significantly more visitors, at about 106 million and 47 million, respectively.

MailChimp suggests that demographic factors could be at work when it comes to the willingness of Gmail users to open and click on marketing e-mails, so the service’s continuing growth could bring its metrics closer to the average. But for now, the user base may be particularly friendly to e-mail marketing.

The Race to Be an Early Adopter of Technologies Goes Mainstream, a Survey Finds

For decades, the adoption and use of the latest technologies was limited to a subculture: Whether called “tech enthusiasts” or “gadget geeks,” the implication was that most of the world got along fine with older, established products and services, while a smaller group pursued the most leading-edge technology.

But according to a study released Wednesday by Forrester Research, a marketing firm based in Cambridge, Mass., a shift has taken place. What used to be the pursuit of a few has become decidedly mainstream. We’re all gadget geeks now.

According to the study, which surveyed 53,668 households in the United States and Canada by mail, half of all American adults are gamers. Sixty-three percent of American households have a broadband Internet connection. Three-quarters of American households have cellphones and PCs. And nearly 10 million American households, out of nearly 118 million, added an HDTV in the last year, a jump of 27 percent over 2007.

“There’s really no group out of the tech loop,” said Jacqueline Anderson, an analyst with Forrester who was one of the study’s authors. “America is becoming a digital nation. Technology adoption continues to roll along, picking up more and more mainstream consumers every year.”

High-definition television sets were one of the fastest-growing consumer technologies in 2008. Over the next five years, the company forecasts, nearly 39 million households in the United States will get their first high-definition set, bringing total market penetration for HDTV to nearly 70 percent.

The study also found that despite the recession, online spending remained strong, with older consumers leading the charge. On average, those consumers spent $560 in the last three months, although “20 percent of that group spent more than $1,000 online in the last three months,” Ms. Anderson said. Given the tumultuous economic climate, “that’s a lot of money,” she said.

Ms. Anderson also pointed out that families were a big driver behind the widespread adoption of technologies. The popularity of video game consoles like the Nintendo Wii, which took a decidedly different approach from other game-console makers by appealing to nongamers and families, created an opening for more digital entertainment to enter the home.

Families are also more likely to have gadgetry like MP3 players, digital cameras and digital camcorders. “They have little kids so they want to catalog those memories,” Ms. Anderson said. In addition, 86 percent of families with children had mobile phones but were also more likely to use mobile phones with more features like music and video playback.

The study also suggests a growing reliance on the Internet for commerce, communication, entertainment and social lives, said Charles S. Golvin, an analyst with Forrester Research, and a co-author on the study.

“The digitization of our daily lives has been steadily ramping up over the past decade,” Mr. Golvin said.

One area that appears to be slower to catch on is home networks. The survey found that 33 percent of households in the United States with an Internet connection reported having a home network, up from 28 percent a year ago. Although Ms. Anderson says that figure is relatively high, the adoption is still lower compared with the adoption of other home technologies.

“The barrier to entry for a home network is a lot higher than for an HDTV, where all you have to do is buy one,” she said. “There are more components and you have to understand how to connect them. Many people had the components for a home network before but didn’t necessarily understand what it meant to put them together or why they’d want to,” she said. In the next five years, the company forecasts, more than 30 million households will install a home network, bringing market penetration to just over 50 percent.

Already, Mr. Golvin says, more people are migrating away from the home and office to use the Web and turning toward their smartphones. About 15 percent of cellphone owners were using the Internet on their phones in 2008, the study found, showing that, for a growing number of Americans, there is an increasing “expectation that all the same services and resources are available to us no matter where we are,” he said.

Design Your Customers' Decisions

There is a vital lesson buried in the August 19, 2009 Jet Blue announcement that they were suspending sales of the $599.00 "All You Can Jet" promotion they'd debuted only seven days before. Any student of Behavioral Economics could have predicted that an "all you can eat" approach would inspire vastly different behavior than if Jet Blue had charged a lower fixed fee plus $1 per mile. Similarly, over a decade ago when AOL switched to a usage-independent flat price, connection time increased four times more than they anticipated.

"All you can eat" is an entirely different price than "very, very cheap."

Traditional economics says that lowering the marginal price from $2 to $1 should have a similar effect to lowering it from $1 to $0 — but experience and experiments have both shown that the traditional demand curve acts in an odd manner when we reach $0 marginal cost. Jet Blue's executives should have known better.

But the Jet Blue management team is not alone.

Many executives assume their customers are more rational than they really are. For example, most leaders believe in enhancing the options given to customers, but increased choice can actually freeze decision-making by overwhelming the shopper. Excessive options is a key reason that an average of 60% of all online shoppers abandon their purchases mid-stream. Behavioral Economics is the study of how people really think as opposed to how we think they think. To some of us, who were never fully convinced by the hyper-rational assumptions of neo-classical economics, it is a welcome return to reality.

Yet, many firms have such a deep case of rationality-itis that they continue to treat their customers as if they were designed by Adam Smith. In working with Dan Ariely, we've begun to apply a set of ideas from Behavioral Economics in real world settings, around four distinct areas: framing, aversion, social context and timing — what we call FAST decision-making designs — and their impact can be significant. Our aim is to make the choice process easier for the customer.

In their famous recommendation engine, Amazon combines framing and social context, which gives the shopper an easy way to traverse millions of possible selections. In our work with clients we have found that it's possible to increase choice to a higher value and higher-priced product by as much as 10 or 20% by framing the option that is contextualized to them (e.g., "Someone like you also bought this other book.") This is consistent with Amazon's belief that their recommendation engine increases the average purchase by 20%.

In our world of information overload, every new choice is an effort — so companies need to give as much thought to the process of choice as to those choices and options themselves. For instance, Dan noticed that the Economist, at one time, showed three options for their potential subscribers: online-only for $59.00, print-only for $125.00, or online and print for $125.00. He designed an experiment, using his students, in which 84% chose the $125.00 for print and online, 0% chose print-only, and only 16% chose online-only. Any rational manager would say the $125.00 offer print-only offer was useless.

But when Dan removed the $125.00 print-only offer, 68% of people bought the online product for $59.00 while only 32% shelled out for the $125.00 bundle! In other words, the higher-priced option was chosen less than half as often. By having the decoy of $125.00 for print-only, the customer could make an easy comparison to the other $125.00 offer in which they got online for "free." Even something as simple as choosing a magazine has enough complexity in it that a decoy choice can radically change buyer behavior.

If Jet Blue had understood the implications of Behavioral Economics, they may have raised the price on their offer — but despite the data that shows the power of designing the decision process, few companies trust Behavioral Economics because stands in the face of much of the economic logic executives were taught in school.

Every manager should remember that in a world of excess choice, an easy place to differentiate is in the careful design of the decision process itself. It is especially powerful in the ever-increasing realm of e-commerce. Few companies have optimized their customer choice process to make the most of the web. Fewer still do regular experiments to find out how their customers really act instead of how they are supposed to act, and they are leaving money on the table because of it. So ask yourself: is your company's choice process optimal — and do you have data to prove it?

More marketers use social networking to reach customers

Ford Motor has high hopes for Fiesta, a popular model abroad launching in the U.S. next year.
So how does it introduce the subcompact car to Americans?

A massive ad blitz on TV? In-house promotions at dealers nationwide?

Nope.

In April, Ford tapped 100 top bloggers and gave them a Fiesta for six months. The catch: Once a month, they're required to upload a video on You Tube about the car, and they're encouraged to talk — no holds barred — about the Fiesta on their blogs, Facebook and Twitter.

"It's extremely important to this company's history," says Scott Monty, whose job as head of social media at Ford was created about a year ago to take advantage of the growing social-networking wave. "It's about culture change and adapting to this ongoing way of communicating. The bloggers are fully free to say what they want."
Social-media services, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and countless other websites, have had a profound effect on how millions of Americans — especially those under 35 — interact with others (or don't), shop and view brands. It's a real-time digital lifestyle, powered by smartphones and netbooks, that often colors what products they purchase, how they view brands and where they spend most of their waking hours.

Marketers have noticed. Social-networking services increasingly are indispensable business tools, says Forrester Research. According to its survey of 1,217 business decision makers worldwide late last year, 95% use social networks to some extent.
And 53% of more than 300 marketers planned to increase social-media marketing spending this year, according to a Forrester presentation in April.
Some of the biggest companies — Ford, Levi Strauss and Chevron, to name a few — are reengineering marketing operations to embrace digital tools to more nimbly brand products, support customers and cash in on the social-media wave. In doing so, they are creating online communities and aggressive outreach programs, and being brutally honest in talking directly to their customers/followers/fans/friends.

"It was an easy call. This is where our customers are," says Megan O'Connor, director of digital marketing at Levi's. The more-than-150-year-old company last month launched a social-media program on Facebook and Twitter along with a larger "Go Forth" traditional marketing campaign. Its goal is to burnish its brand name among young men.

Grown up digital

At their core, social networks are fostering a blistering number of personal connections and chatter online. The share of Americans 18 and over online who use a social-networking service more than quadrupled to 35% in 2008 from 8% in 2005, according to Pew Internet & American Life Project.

"It's the modern-day version of knitting — to kill downtime," says Kaitlin Villanova, 26, a social-media strategist in Brooklyn who is an avid iPhone user. "I use social networking to communicate, bank, comparison shop, everything."
Facebook is up to 250 million members, 50 million of whom joined in the past three months. In April, they spent 13.9 billion minutes on Facebook, up 700% from April 2008, says Nielsen NetView.

More than 300,000 businesses — one-third of them small businesses — have a presence on Facebook. Members of its fastest-growing demographic — those 35 and older — have enormous purchasing power, a powerful incentive to marketers.
Twitter has about 40 million users who each day produce a staggering amount of tweets, Twitter's quaint word to describe short messages. Its users spent nearly 300 million minutes on the site in April, 3,712% more than in April 2008, Nielsen says.
Increasingly, consumers don't search for products and services. Rather, services come to their attention via social media, says Erik Qualman, author of Socialnomics, a new book that explains how social media have changed how companies do business.

Social-networking-savvy businesses have appointed social-media directors to help:
•Add customers quickly. When software maker Intuit built a site for small businesses in late January, it integrated elements of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, the social network for business professionals. After 12 weeks, it generated more than 1 million visits and helped spike QuickBooks unit shipments 57% in June, year-over-year.

"Social (media) is one of the key trends driving our business," says Kira Wampler, social-media marketing leader at Intuit. "It's more than pure marketing. It's about fast connections with customers and building an ongoing relationship."
National pizza chain Papa John's added 148,000 fans on Nov. 17 through a guerrilla marketing campaign on Facebook. It offered a free medium pizza to anyone who signed up to be its fan on Facebook. The promotion gained it thousands of customers and drove its Web traffic up 253%. It now has more than 300,000 fans and hopes to top 1 million by the end of the year.

•Word-of-mouth marketing. Sometimes a company's best advocates are its customers. Just ask Best Buy and MyFICO, the consumer division of Fair Isaac, which invented the FICO credit-risk score used by lenders. They've built specialized online communities where their customers freely evaluate products and services.

Those who visit MyFICO's community website are spending 41% more than other customers, says Lyle Fong, CEO of software Lithium, which helps build online communities for more than 150 companies, including MyFICO.
Nine in 10 consumers trust their peers more than marketers, according to a recent survey of 25,000 by Nielsen.

The Federal Trade Commission is in the process of amending guidelines that would require bloggers to disclose their relationships with marketers whose products they endorse, says Mary Engle, associate director of advertising practices for the FTC.

•Enhance customer service. For more than a year, Comcast has pioneered the use of Twitter to talk directly to customers. Its Twitter page, @comcastcares, has 28,000 followers.
Comcast's blueprint for unfettered customer support — no more waiting on hold on the phone — fomented a movement. Software maker Sage North America, to cite another example, routinely receives instant feedback from hundreds of people within an hour on specific products and services. "It is a living, breathing, 24/7 think tank of users and employees," says Ryan Zuk, a company spokesman.
Besides being instant, such feedback is cheap. Typically, companies have relied on third-party focus groups that let them observe the reactions of customers during a two-hour session that can cost $10,000 to $15,000, says Natalie L. Petouhoff, an analyst at Forrester Research.

Lenovo has seen a 20% reduction in call-center activity in the U.S. over six months because nearly 50,000 customers go to its community website for information about laptops.
•Speak directly to customers. Blogs, Twitter or Facebook can be an ideal forum for CEOs to offer customers a candid viewpoint.
When a hack attack disabled Twitter's service for hours this month, co-founder Biz Stone gave up-to-the-minute updates on the company's blog.
The Carphone Warehouse, Europe's leading independent retailer of mobile phones and services, has a simple credo: It says, "I'm sorry" when necessary on its Twitter page for customer support.

"There is no gap between the CEO and customer. They now talk directly to each other," says Promise Phelon, CEO of UpMo, a career-management website. "The network is so connected, there's no need for a middleman."
"These customers want honesty, and quickly," says Shiv Singh, who wrote a report on social-media marketing for ad agency Razorfish.

Challenges ahead

But with rewards come risks.

Reaching out to millions of consumers who thrive online around the clock requires an investment, a different type of thinking and some courage, says Petouhoff. She spent six months on a just-released report on monetization of social-media tools at 20 companies, including Lenovo and Intuit.

Many companies — reflecting the general public's sentiment toward social media — fall into two camps: Those who embrace it and those who eschew it. "Those that don't know how to get their arms around it seem to be held back by worrying about the legal implications of customers helping customers, and about being too honest with customers," Petouhoff says.
Most corporations are still wedded to a traditional marketing approach, based on TV, radio and print ads, says Charlene Li, partner at technology consulting firm Altimeter Group. "Ford and Levi's are at the avant-garde of social-media use, but they are not typical," she says.

A social-media plan is hardly a guarantee of success, Li and others say. While some companies — especially market leaders such as Starbucks and Nike with consumer products — are predisposed to the medium, others aren't. Tightly regulated health care providers, for example, may think twice about making the public's comments readily available on Facebook or Twitter.

"Social media is not the messiah," says Michael Brito, social-media strategist at Intel. "It is one of several tools."

Still, a growing number of marketers can't afford to ignore millions of potential customers who are consuming media in new ways.

Three-fourths of men ages 18 to 34 say they spend most of their time in front of a computer screen vs. 18% in front of a TV screen, according to a survey of 50,000 by AskMen.com, a lifestyle website. Those who don't have a social-media plan don't at their own risk, say marketing experts.

"Companies have no choice. This is where their customers are going," says Shel Israel, author of the forthcoming Twitterville: How Businesses Can Thrive in the New Global Neighborhoods.

"Companies have no choice. This is where their customers are going."

IN:FUSE Overview

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

In Fuse Overview

View more presentations from Charles Leary.

Social Media Rewrites the Rules for Brands

by Lauren Benet Stephenson June 24, 2009

Gucci is doing it. So are Oscar de la Renta, Donna Karan, Target, Urban Outfitters, Louis Vuitton and Rachel Roy.
Fashion houses, designers and retailers are rushing into the free social media phenomenon that is reshaping not only interpersonal communication, but how apparel, accessories and beauty products are marketed and sold.

They are tweeting, blogging and updating their profiles in an effort to mold their brand personalities on real-time global platforms and form relationships with a community of customers, particularly consumers for whom the Web is as important as a limb.

“Customers can feel like they are part of the brand’s extended family, and therefore the brand itself, while the interactive element further deepens that relationship,” said Alex Bolen, chief executive officer of Oscar de la Renta. “These characteristics address and satisfy that ‘tribal’ part of the fashion consumer — the way in which people identify themselves by the brands they buy.”

A key component of social media “is real-time feedback — an ability to accurately measure marketing results,” Bolen said. “While this aspect of the Internet’s promise has yet to be fully realized, one can adjust, fairly quickly, to emphasize those initiatives that are working best.”
The newness of the platforms has made quantifying the sales impact of social media tough to pinpoint, although companies cite rising Web traffic and more customers using promotions.

“How do you quantify something that prevents a customer service problem that could’ve been a disaster,…[that] can create new buzz for a new product?” asked Paul Argenti, a professor of corporate communications at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business. “How do you quantify that? Where else can you get that kind of instant feedback? It’s all unquantifiable and all incredibly useful.”

Reggie Bradford, ceo of Vitrue, a social media consulting firm, believes it’s important to view the situation in reverse, saying a brand will ultimately be “measured in growth or losses by being there [on social media] or not being there.”

More than any marketing medium, including print, where advertising is suffering, social media give brands a chance to be a part of a dialogue about their own companies. In this new and evolving framework, everyone is a participant. According to Forrester Research, Facebook, with an estimated 200 million users, classifies two-thirds of its users as being of post-college age, with 35-plus the fastest-growing demographic. Twitter, a platform for messages of 140 characters or less that had 20 million unique visitors in May, has 42 percent of its users in the 35-to-49 age range and 20 percent ages 25 to 34.

You don’t have to be famous to get a following, but it helps. The king of the Twitter hill is Ashton Kutcher, who got into the game early and has more than 2.3 million followers. Oprah Winfrey, whose first tweet didn’t come until April — “HI TWITTERS. THANK YOU FOR A WARM WELCOME. FEELING REALLY 21st CENTURY” — now has over 1.6 million followers.
The fascination with fashion has even helped breed followings for Twitterers masquerading as major industry figures, including fakekarl (Lagerfeld) and fakeanna (Wintour). WWD’s own Twitter page has grown to more than 688,000 followers from a mere 200 since its launch in February.

Designers such as Rachel Roy and Charlotte Ronson share snapshots of their personal lives and their company’s activities via social media.
Brands including Gap, Victoria’s Secret, Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, Nike and Adidas also have tapped into YouTube, MySpace and other sites, where their videos, commercials, behind-the-scenes footage and fashion shows are posted.

“Everyone wants to know what makes [designers] tick, why they design, and get closer to the brand,” said Frances Pennington, vice president of global marketing for Juicy Couture.
Ronson said she updates her Twitter fans at least daily “letting them know if something new comes in or something sells well. It’s a good way to keep everyone connected.”

The designer maintains a Twitter page for her business — Twitter.com/shopronson — with 2,084 followers since starting in the last three months. It includes examples of the Twitter-as-marketing technique, such as a recent tweet that said, “Just got in some great Rag & Bone items…hats, ties and belts…come check it out!!!”

Ronson’s attention to her Twitter page has yielded results in her retail site’s traffic. About 10 percent of Ronson’s total site traffic originates on Twitter, and 93 percent are new visitors. Ronson also posts daily updates on her personal Twitter page, Twitter.com/cjronson, which has 11,946 followers, with musings about her day, such as, “I’m watching ‘Funny Face,’ the musical with Audrey Hepburn and Fred Astaire…Need I say more…”

Roy tweets several times daily on Twitter.com/rachel_roy and has attracted 1,672 followers who frequently retweet — the Twitter term for forwarding a message — her posts. The designer mixes promotional tweets, such as, “The entire RR 2010 Resort Collection Lookbook has been posted on Rachel Roy’s official Facebook Page. Check it out,” with more personal tweets — “I found some cute wellies by Hunter for my daughter and I — green for me and purple for her. Here’s a link to more.”

The juxtaposition is engineered to nurture ties with customers. “I hope that my relationship with customers will become more intimate as they get to know me beyond my designs,” she said.
Facebook relaunched its company page platform in March with more options for organizations to elevate “the power of the brand,” said Tom Arrix, the site’s vice president of U.S. sales. The result is a company page that looks identical to a user’s page, with a “Wall” where the company and its fans can post messages, photos and video; a tab for information about the company, and additional tabs where a firm can add everything from sale promotions to trailers for new ad campaigns.

Facebook offers its users the ability to “fan” a firm or brand — a component that sets it apart from a standard company Web site. Once a user has “fanned” a brand, the business has direct access to them and is able to send messages and updates via a constant news feed on the user’s home page.

The result is a “powerful brand advantage….The company is now in the middle of two-way communication with their consumer,” Arrix said.

To join Twitter, a user creates a free user name and password and then sifts through a search function to find friends and companies the user would like to “follow.” Once a user is following a company, the user’s home page is refreshed with every update that company sends. For instance, if LouisVuitton_US tweets “Louis Vuitton’s new Core Values campaign profiled in today’s @nytimes,” all 10,492 of its followers will see this message on their home pages.
Some naysayers may find it hard to understand why a person would invite a company into their virtual personal life by fanning a company on Facebook or following them on Twitter, but millions have done just that.

It remains difficult to decipher what an online following means for companies in the long term. The more established Facebook and MySpace now have retention rates of almost 70 percent, according to Nielsen Media. However, Nielsen Media estimated more than 60 percent of first-time Twitter users neglected to return to the site after a month.

Vitrue created a Social Media Index to measure what people are talking about online. The index is generated from an algorithm that scours the Internet for a specific term on searches and social media networks and produces a score. The higher the score, the more frequently that term has been mentioned on the Web. Vitrue looked at 35 major fashion brands and retailers from May 26 to June 1. The five most-talked-about brands were Gucci, Target, Gap, American Apparel and Urban Outfitters.

These brands are, not coincidentally, active on social platforms. They “leverage their presence on social networks, have great content [updated frequently] and tools for engagement and conversation,” Bradford said.

“Fashion brands are emblematic of a person’s personality and how they want to be perceived; it’s woven into [her] identity,” he said. “Everybody loves brands — whether they’re generic or Gucci. It’s a statement.”

Gucci first became involved with Facebook in November 2008 after noticing that about 50,000 fans had signed up for a Gucci page started by a person unaffiliated with the fashion label. So Gucci decided to launch a company page, raising the fan count to its current total of 402,502.
The weekly updated page contains original video uploaded to the site, photos from events and new product announcements.

The Gucci by Gucci label launched its Twitter page — twitter.com/GuccibyGucci — in March and has 2,840 followers.

The “currency of the Internet is such that if you’re not updating on a timely basis, individuals are disappointed,” said Robert Triefus, worldwide marketing and communications director for Gucci. “In fact, it can end up backfiring.”

Target has used its Facebook page — with 452,856 fans — for advertising its latest designer collaborations. The retailer most recently posted a video of Dror Benshetrit explaining his collection for Target. The chain also used the page to publicize its philanthropic efforts through a user-interactive application. The company launched the “Bullseye Gives” campaign that allowed its users to vote on the charity to which Target should give money. When a user chose a charity, she was offered the option of publishing her choice to her own news feed.

For instance, if Facebook user Jane Smith voted for Red Cross, it would appear on her home page and on all of her friends’ news feeds, with the message “Jane Smith voted for the Red Cross for the Target Bullseye Gives project,” with a link to the Target Facebook page. This component is illustrative of the allure of Web 2.0 — interacting with a customer who then spreads the company’s message.

Gap has a Facebook fan page with 321,875 fans, and is active on Twitter with 5,269 followers. The Gap Facebook page has videos of designer Patrick Robinson talking about the brand, as well as photos of events and original content.

Urban Outfitters posts promotions and events, and encourages its 101,453 Facebook fans and 27,948 Twitter followers to get involved with the brand. A recent Facebook post read: “It’s your favourite time of the year again — Sale Time. Our Boutique sale starts today online and in store! This means Luella, See by Chloé, Anglomania by Vivienne Westwood, Thomas Burberry, Karen Walker, Peter Jensen et al. are all waiting for you; but not for long!”

Within four days, 72 Facebook users had responded to that post, one of whom recommended a particular Urban Outfitters location, saying, “Best sale upstairs at santana row!”
When American Apparel and its ceo, Dov Charney, were embroiled in a lawsuit filed by Woody Allen over unauthorized use of his image, the company used its Twitter page, with 31,167 followers, and Facebook page, with 133,577 fans, for direct access to customers by posting its official statement on Facebook and linking to Twitter. “We were able to speak and reassure customers,” said Ryan Holiday, an American Apparel spokesman.

According to company estimates, 10 percent of all traffic to americanapparel.net originates from four social media sites — Facebook, Twitter, Chictopia and LookBook.

Oscar de la Renta and Donna Karan have each dedicated a Twitter page to their “PR girls” — Twitter.com/OscarPRgirl and Twitter.com/dkny. OscarPRgirl, which promotes itself as “reporting from inside one of the world’s most prestigious design houses,” began tweeting on June 4 and has 162 followers. A recent tweet: “Hathaway is the new Hepburn: Anne H. looking impossibly chic @ the tony awards in Oscar de la Renta.”

The DKNY page, which launched on May 8 and has 981 followers, bills itself as providing “behind-the-scenes scoop from inside DKNY” written by a “PR girl.” The tweets are personality-laced messages that promote the Donna Karan label, such as “So great! Karen Olivo won the TONY (Award for “West Side Story”). She looked so chic in Donna. Huge pic in the @dailynews.”
Betsey Johnson began her Twitter page, Twitter.com/xoBetseyJohnson, Jan. 23 and has 8,068 followers. The page is updated several times daily with promotional tweets such as “Don’t miss out on our Memorial Day sale! Tomorrow is your last day to save 30%!” mixed with attentive dialogue with her followers — for instance one follower said “doing some damage on the @xoBetseyJohnson Web site. retail therpy” and xoBetseyJohnson responded “Nice! Everyone needs retail therapy! Xox”).

“We saw [social media] as a real opportunity to reach out to customers, to use it as free advertising and be a human voice for the brand,” said Agatha Szczepaniak, public relations director.

Kate Spade coined the term “tweetwriter” — a combination of “Twitter” and “typewriter” — as a tool in the company’s venture into social media. The Tweetwriter is an antique typewriter, which was set up in the brand’s Fifth Avenue store in May. The staff encourages customers to type messages they would like to see on the Kate Spade Twitter page, which has 641 followers. Eclectic entries such as, “from 135 5th ave: i could watch the clouds pass all day” fill the page, giving it a quirky feel. Lindsay Stevens, director of marketing and strategy, said the aim is to project “a collective point of view from our customers.”

Juicy Couture launched an interactive social media platform on its own site, called Club Couture. The technology allows consumers to put together looks from the collection and share the outfits with friends who can then rate the outfit and create their own.

This social interaction has resulted in a conversion rate 162 percent higher than any other part of the site — meaning a user who happens upon the Club Couture page on the company’s Web site is 1.62 times more likely to purchase an outfit on the site than if she had been browsing any other page on juicycouture.com.

It is essential for businesses to have a clear strategy and goals regarding social media, said analyst Diane Clarkson of Forrester Research, who wrote the report, “How Twitter Can Influence eBusiness.” Diving in without them is not a viable option.

Social media is “a little bit of a Pandora’s box,” Gucci’s Triefus said. “If you’re going to get involved, you have to have the resources to be able to do it correctly.”

If a brand isn’t vigilant, a constantly adapting, public organism like Twitter or Facebook might do more harm than good. For instance, a “Twitter storm” is a digital mob of sorts that forms around a topic or current event — which, when negative in nature, can harm a company’s image if there’s no counterpoint from the brand in question.

“We’ve seen Twitter storms with fast backlash when a company does something that [fans] don’t like,” Clarkson said. “I’d want someone accountable for the brand to be behind that.”
What appears certain, however, is social media platforms will keep evolving, proliferating and gaining influence.

“The fashion world is shifting, needs are changing and people’s shopping habits are changing….It’s clear that [consumers on social media] are part of the overall fashion conversation,” Roy said. “And I don’t think that is going to change.”