Kmart Introduces Real-Time Consumer Interaction via Twitter

Something interesting happened on the way to Fashion Week in New York City; Kmart is now allowing certain participants at this year’s fashion summit to interact and request products from them simply by tweeting. The retailer has equipped a limited number of influencers and bloggers with what they are calling “survival kits”, loaded with an assortment of items to help them get through the week in style. The list includes items such as “lip balm, breath mints and stockings”, and by communicating with the Kmart twitter feed they can get a refill on any of these items almost immediately. This is a novel example of a retailer not only recognizing but leveraging the utility of social media at a major event.

Did other retailers notice what Kmart has done here? This could be a powerful tool for all grocers, small and large, to allow shoppers within their stores to tweet questions, comments, suggestions and ideas directly to the store, enabling real-time give and take between shoppers and retailers. What do you think? If your local grocer or favorite retailer were using a tool like this, would you use it to communicate with them while you shopped?

Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s Check-In Rewards Mobile App

CKE Restaurants, which owns Carl’s Jr and Hardee’s, has an iPhone/Android app that allows people to check-in at their local fast food locations to be rewarded with a chance to win free stuff. The interface is very clean and at first glance the prizes appear to be pretty substantial, including anything from a dollar off your next soda to free burgers. The Wheel of Awesome, which is also available on both companies’ Facebook pages, is able to ramp up the rewards that an individual is eligible to win based on their frequency of application usage. Once a coupon has been awarded, the winner has 7 days to redeem it by showing their “winning ticket” at the point of sale. This is a great example of a way for restaurants/retailers/grocers to reward their customers through location based services, leverage the functionality of social media, and ultimately increase brand awareness and customer loyalty by applying a simple and fun ‘game-layer’ to what would otherwise be ordinary, everyday coupons.

Gowalla 3.0 Integrates With Major Social Media Outlets

With the release of version 3.0, Gowalla has taken the lead in location based services as “the richest virtual check-in application available”. According to their CEO, Josh Williams, v3.0 is meant to begin reshaping the company into “a socially curated guidebook”, or in other words become a portable summary of things to do, informed by the opinions of your friends and connections on the Gowalla social network. This is a significant pivot for the LBS provider because up to this point they had appeared to be losing ground to Facebook Places, Twitter and Foursquare with regard to user base; this new version will allow Gowalla users to share and aggregate information across these different platforms and provide an “application-agnostic” location based check-in service for consumers. This shift is particularly relevant for retailers to take note of because it represents a major opportunity for them to begin generating brand and store awareness across all of these social media platforms simultaneously. The net effect for these manufacturers and merchants should be an ever-accelerated sharing of data from a consumer to their group of friends and followers, allowing customer reviews, thoughts and opinions to move across the spectrum of virtual friendship at unprecedented speeds. As unbelievable as it may sound, this release of Gowalla 3.0 means that information sharing via the internet and social media just got even faster!

Foursquare, PepsiCo and Safeway Form LBS Loyalty Program

Safeway launched a pilot customer loyalty program this week at 300 of its Vons grocery stores in Southern California, combining location based services  from Foursquare and special offers from PepsiCo. The results of this trial will have very important implications for the customer loyalty programs of retailers everywhere; if these three companies can prove out this “check-in” loyalty model, then we should expect to see many others like it across all types of retail.

The most glaring omission from this pilot program is the lack of a digital wallet tied to individual customer loyalty accounts, which would allow for the check-in reward to be processed and realized without requiring the shopper to do anything beyond simply checking in via Foursquare. Ultimately it seems that LBS and customer loyalty programs are a natural fit, but this most recent model is still a few steps away from realizing its full potential.

Facebook Messages Raising the Bar for Relevant Messaging

Facebook has released a beta version of a new form of messaging to a select few of its 500 million users that has important implications for the digital communication methods of retailers. The new platform allows easy filtering of Facebook messages, SMS, MMS, and emails within a personalized “social inbox” tied directly to each user’s Facebook friends. This platform puts a new premium on the delivery of promotional messages that are relevant, timely, and valued, and those retailers who miss the boat will risk losing the communication channel with their users. The traditional methods of mass-messaging to any email address or phone number on record will no longer be effective; the time is now for retailers to start using point-of-sale software capable of collecting and synthesizing data about their customer preferences and segmentation.

Facebook Adds Deals in Effort to Make Places App Relevant

Looking for ways to increase their penetration in Location Based Services (LBS), Facebook announced yesterday that they’ve added an application called Deals to their platform. Currently only 4% of online adult Americans use LBS applications to let their friends know where they are throughout the day. As an incentive, Facebook has teamed with 21 businesses (so far) to offer deals to users who check-in to certain locations around their cities; Gap is offering  a free pair of blue jeans to the first 10,000 people who check-in at a Gap location on November 5, 2010; Macy’s is giving shoppers 20% off for checking in; REI, Starbucks and 24 Hour Fitness are all offering to donate money to various charities for every check-in at their locations. These rewards are clearly more pragmatic and meaningful than the badges and titles that users on Gowalla and Foursquare have competed for up to now, and should provide greater incentive for the general public to at least start considering the use of LBS. Ultimately, Facebook needs to remove as many barriers-to-use of this LBS functionality as possible; the most powerful delivery method of these rewards will be the user simply collecting and storing their credits in a digital wallet, as opposed to “proving” that they’ve checked in to a store clerk before they can claim their discount at the point of sale. The user could then simply check-in at various locations and the store would instantly recognize their account and provide discounts automatically. What do you think about Location Based Services? Do you use them currently? Would you check-in for a free pair of Gap blue jeans?

7-Eleven Road Trip Rally Connects Brands, Retail and Social Media

This past May, 7-Eleven launched a social media campaign called The 7-Eleven Road Trip Rally, which featured 2 teams racing across the United States for 3 weeks to the Indy 500. They were only allowed to make pit stops at 7-Elevens, and the webisodes all featured challenges that highlighted the brands and goods sold at their stores nationwide. 7-Eleven hired Blip.tv to essentially put together the entire project, and they in turn outsourced the creative content and production of the short films to Happy Little Guillotine Films. Viewers were able to watch up to 5 new webisodes per week, as well as track the teams in real-time on their trips across the country.

By combining reality TV content with social media, 7-Eleven and their partner brands were able to post entertaining videos with their products and services cleverly layered into the content. The next step in the process of engaging viewers with this creative new form of advertisement is making the reality-based webisodes more interactive for everyone watching at home; allow everyone to vote for their favorite team on Facebook and give the winning team extra money to spend during their pit stops; poll viewers on Twitter to decide what they want the next challenge to be; enable everyone watching to “recommend” products for the racers to try at their next stop and reward the people at home with free products/promotional offers from those brands. This hybrid platform of social media and reality TV has virtually limitless potential for brands and retailers interested in product placement – the only question is who will take the next step?

How to Build a Corporate Presence on Facebook

With social media now “fast becoming more popular than e-mail on mobile devices and more convenient for news consumption than the daily paper”, companies and organizations across all industries are competing for social media market share, whether they’re aware of it or not. Brands and Retailers are now able to post hi-resolution images on their pages, which can be very useful for a company looking to engage consumers; Travelocity has already taken advantage of the opportunity and appears to be getting very good feedback from its “Fans”.

Consumer Review/Event Groups and Live Chat Forums are also now possible on Facebook, thanks to the site’s “New Groups” feature. This functionality is practically begging to be leveraged by companies looking to survey, communicate and/or engage their fans. Facebook Questions also falls into this category as a way for companies to talk with consumers at a very base, one-to-one level.

The Golden State Warriors NBA team are a perfect case study in how to turn pedestrian email campaigns into powerful, social media events. Kyle Spencer, the team’s Marketing Director, sent out emails offering fans free tickets to preseason games if they’d log into their Facebook accounts and simply “Like” the team. In total, they sent out 2 emails and increased their visibility in social media by 20% (15k additional Facebook followers). These are some truly impressive results for a minimal capital outlay; with the enhancements being made to the site recently, the only thing standing between a company’s social media marketing efforts and success is its own creativity.

Social Media Teams With Search Engines

Bing and Facebook have announced a partnership to augment normal search engine results with social media data; the intention is to make search results more personalized and relevant by by combining individual preferences with information pulled from Facebook “friends”. From the consumer side, this technology should be very useful in deciding which movie to see or where to go for dinner.

However, the risks of the Bing/Facebook search and recommendation engine run straight to the heart of growing privacy concerns. Facebook has a record of sharing user information without permission: the Wall Street Journal recently reported that of the top 10 Facebook apps, all 10 had moved user data over to ad companies, and some were even capturing and monetizing information about the friends of those users. This means that combining Bing’s search capability with friend activity could potentially make the social media site even more invasive than ever.

The Facebook experience may be instructive for retailers; as retailers acquire and use customer data with greater frequency, the pressure from third parties to help monetize that data in new ways will increase as well. What’s your take on all of this? Does the addition of friend activity to search via Bing add incremental value to the user experience, or have Facebook and Bing really gone too far? Give us your thoughts!

Dunkin Donuts Using Facebook for “Ultimate Fan Promotion”

Dunkin Donuts has run marketing campaigns on Facebook in the past by asking their “fans” to design the perfect donut for a chance to win $12,000. This time the Quincy, Massachusetts-based company is seeking the “Ultimate DD Coffee Fan” by offering prizes to Facebook users who put together the best videos explaining why they love Dunkin Donuts coffee more than anyone else. The Grand Prize includes a trip for two to Costa Rica and 60 months of free donuts, with 10 First Prizes of 12 months of free donuts also on the table. The categories they’ve chosen to evaluate the submitted videos by are “Passion for the Dunkin Donuts Brand”, “Overall Video Appeal” and “Originality/Creativity”. This contest is just one piece of the overall efforts that Dunkin Donuts has put into their Facebook marketing campaign as they attempt to catch up to their “Ultimate Coffee-Grinding Rival” in social media; there are currently just over 2 million people who have “liked” Dunkin Donuts, compared to over 14 million for Starbucks. The fact that these promotions are becoming more widespread and a larger part of marketing for major companies is further confirmation that social media has evolved into one of the most powerful tools in a customer relationship management strategy.