August 29, 2008
RSR Research: What Does Twitter Mean for Retail? I Have No Idea
By Nikki Baird,
Managing Partner, RSR Research
Through a special arrangement, what follows is
an excerpt of a current article from Retail Paradox, RSR Research’s
weekly analysis on emerging issues facing retailers, presented here for discussion.
I’ve tried to be a premiere social networker myself, but barely managed a few
blog postings (I had a great run for about a week) and signed up for Facebook
and MySpace at others’ insistence. So it is with great trepidation that I embark
on an examination of what Twitter can mean for retail. Because I don’t get
Twitter at all. You can find me at twitter.com/nikkibaird, for what it’s worth.
At least with Twitter, unlike my blog, the posts are guaranteed to be short.
So what did I find? Well, first of all, Twitter could do itself a huge favor in helping out brands by making it easier to find them. Right now the search is very undifferentiated. I knew that Zappos.com has a Twitter account and that employees at Zappos.com are pretty active on Twitter, but a search of “Zappos” yields individual users who have the last name “Zappos,” individual users who happen to work at Zappos, and then the company
account itself. I think a “brand fan-feed” could
be useful, but it’s got to be easier to find them.
Second, even if you don’t really get what all the buzz is about, you need to be monitoring Twitter. Because the people who do use it often have a lot to say about the brands they encounter every day. They may be limited to 140 characters, but they’ve learned how to maximize the impact within those limits. A fan-feed could easily work both ways – it could serve as a way for the brand to communicate to enthusiastic subscribers, and also as a grouping function that lets lots of enthusiastic fans talk to each other through the fan-feed.
Third, develop a policy for how employees can use Twitter. There are a lot of employees who identify very strongly with their companies and publicize it on their Twitter accounts. Gen Yers, being the digital generation that they are, have not necessarily been that clean about maintaining boundaries between their personal lives and their work careers. They’re bringing that same mentality to Twitter, where it (apparently) is not that big a deal to identify yourself as a store manager or department lead at a retailer, and then complain about customers, products, or management in the “life feed” of your everyday life. How embarrassing could that be for a brand? Just do a search on your favorite retailer on Twitter and see for yourself.
Finally, get your brand on there. There were quite a few “placeholders” for brands where it was unclear if it was the brand itself, or just a cybersquatter – perhaps a Twittersquatter. Search Coca-Cola for a good example. I won’t link to it because I don’t want to encourage it. But even if you update your brand’s feed once a week with an early look at what’s in the circular on Sunday or what new store is opening tomorrow, that’s better than someone else coming along and hijacking your brand for a few quick advertising hits.
I do think Twitter has something to offer for brands – my favorite retail-related account at the moment is RetailerDepot, which hands out online coupon codes as it finds them. The Amazon
GoldBox feed isn’t too bad either.
Discussion Questions: What do you think Twitter can mean for retail? What does it say about the opportunities and challenges of social networking sites? How should retailers and brands be responding?
BrainTrust
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Discussion Questions
Poll
Twitter is great! Long live Twitter!
The concept of location-based messaging implies location-based selling opportunities, spontaneous brand experiences and purchase occasions. This is the dawn of ubiquitous retail or ambient retail.
Near a pop-up store at a concert or sporting event? Special messages to subscribers at different locations. Set up messaging and membership privileges at different locations and notify about these. Purchase from mobile-enabled devices with GPS too.
Retailers haven’t figured out social networking at all. Take a look at the sites–Facebook, Second Life, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc, then try to identify which retailers have a strategy for them. Pretty thin stuff.
CUSTOMERS: Teens are going to drive Twitter’s success. Adults will have no desire to Tweet that they just went to H&M and picked up the cutest top!…but teens will.
RETAILERS: Retail marketing officers should set up Twitter profiles and then provide offers to their followers. Every high-schooler will want to be a follower of Starbucks, for instance.
Within the next year or so we’ll know whether these sites are a distraction, or a benefit to retailers. The best way to find out is to ask your teens whether they Tweet!
With all due respect to Gene Hoffman, the undisputed grandmaster of RetailWire rhymes….
So Nikki tweets,
Now ain’t that sweet?
For on that score
she’s got me beat!
I barely text,
At my kid’s behest.
And now I wonder
what the hell’s next????
Does anyone have a Smith-Corona or Royal in their attic I could buy?
Social networks’ evolution as marketing vehicles is one sign that most consumers really do get it. With that said Twitter has a long way to grow. To reach the customers you need to reach; you need strategy. Creating an effective strategy requires research, planning, analysis, experience. Twitter is built around a chat-like interface that leads to a large, diverse social community. Figuring out how to tap this group is still a wait and see.
Twitter is unproven yet for retail but definitely has potential. Part of it is up to customers and whether they’re willing to engage in the medium. For those that do, it can absolutely be a real time way to drive traffic multi-channel, as it’s perhaps the best way for marketers to reach customers via mobile.
It is interesting that there are a number of retailers with Twitter IDs but I’ve yet to hear from them! Much like with Facebook, it seems many (if not most) retailers just aren’t quite there yet.
So, mobile phones equipped with internet access could access twitter, thus adding it to texting, instant messaging, and the more established social media as wireless points of communication. Hooray for the wireless providers. My daughter stuck me with a $500 texting bill last month. I’m a little bitter.
If retailers and brands haven’t figured out how to respond to the opportunities of the older social networking sites, of course the potential of Twitter will also be overlooked. Membership on social networking sites is free, but a commercial solution may lie in brands and retailers sponsoring for-pay site memberships that offer enhanced features. Like “free” TV, the programming/features would carry occasional promotional messages.
I have been tweeting, Facebooking, Friend Feeding, Deliciousing (you get the picture) for quite a while. I have taken on the self-appointed job of being an early adopter and pioneer to how Retail may use social media. Anyone who would like to chat further, feel free.
With that said, from the sales and marketing perspective, these are the tools not of the future but of today. Those who do not jump in with both feet may just end up with no feet!
But let’s not forget the other angles. Several very visible and well respected folks in the Social Media world like to make the point that the size of your community is a great asset to most business. They also like to say that they see the decline in corporate web sites as most of us like to check out others with our friends and communities before we trust your web site. And then there are the aspects of using social media such as Twitter to actually do your work. I am starting a series of blogs on this very topic but since a tree fell on my house today, (yes, it’s true on the anniversary of Katrina and it wasn’t even raining) alas I have gotten behind. At any rate, put this thought in mind and do read this wonderful post from Chris Brogan, a highly read author in the social media arena.
Now, imagine that you are a store manger in say, Las Vegas, or whereever, then you fill in the rest of the blanks and see if you can’t do some branding, marketing and selling…Read this.
Social Networking allows retailers an ability to get inside consumers heads and obtain honest, real time feedback on brand perception or even the receptivity of future offers/items or store format concepts.
Social network ad spending is expected to be a $2.7 billion business by 2011. From an advertising perspective, consumer data will be amassed by sites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and others. This will enable retailers an ability to reach 18-34 year olds who live in a certain part of the country and enjoy photography, for example.
Social networking can also be a rather inexpensive way to drive viral sharing of your content. It’s a bit of the Wild West out there but retailers have always coveted a deeper understanding of the voice of the customer.
Absolutely–Twitter can be a phenomenal promotional tool. At the moment my view is that the audience skews toward the technically savvy style leaders–folks in the marketing and technology industries, primarily–but it’s growing so fast that I could be wrong. After all, I’ve only been on a couple of times this week! 😉
And that’s the point–or one of them. A key virtue is that at 140 characters a post, growth happens fast. In a matter of minutes, the announcement a brand puts out goes all around the world, from one group of followers to another. So imagine being able to pull off the equivalent of the old Kmart blue-light special, only nationwide, in the space of a couple of hours, on the strength of a tweet, or a series of them:
“Back to school: BrandName jeans 50% off at all US StoreNames, 1-3 pm local time tomorrow, 8/15/08: 2 hrs ONLY!”
“4 hours from now: BrandName jeans 50% off at all US StoreNames, 1-3 pm local time today, 8/15/08: 2 hrs ONLY!”
And so on.
High IQ retailers look for new media. They’re early adopters who invest wisely. Low IQ retailers are early adopters who invest excessively in new media or late adopters who invest only after having foregone major profits. Whether it’s Twitter or Facebook or mobile e-commerce sites or e-commerce itself, it’s obvious that only a few retailers know the magic window of time and the worthwhile level of investment. Most retailers invest too late or too much or both.
Twitter is one example of the Retail Industry leveraging the power of Web 2.0. The following are the ways I think retailers can utilize twitter:
1. Use it to provide the latest arrivals or discounts at the store;
2. Utilize it as a medium for the fast paced generation to provide feedback about the stores;
3. Form a network with your frequent shoppers and follow them to understand their interests;
4. Utilize it to build a network for CSR activities.
As others have rightly noted, there are opportunities for retailers to use Twitter for brand-building, reputation management, promotion, and monitoring chatter. But Twitter is just one platform among many; the early adopters are already bouncing among wannabe Twitter successors like Plurk, Pownce, Friendfeed, etc.
What is important to understand about Twitter and the other services is that they are:
* Untethered – People can send/receive messages via SMS or web-enabled phones. As a result, news increasingly breaks on Twitter and people post things on the fly that they might not have taken the time to blog. That makes it a rich source of casual feedback about stores and brands and a powerful extension of direct messaging platforms off the computer and into “the real world.”
* Conversational – Conversational and word-of-mouth marketing are still effective for all the same reasons they were when we first learned about blogs. There is a an effort to reconsolidate conversational channels online (Friendfreed is a great example), but for the time being, they remain fragmented–and it’s important to follow the conversation where it is.
There is almost zero investment required to experiment with Twitter. Yes, some companies are hiring community managers or social media gurus, but there is almost surely a smart communicator in every organization that can join the conversation intuitively in just a few minutes a day. Zappos has over 400 of them!
Find me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/keith_rng
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Twitter is great! Long live Twitter!
The concept of location-based messaging implies location-based selling opportunities, spontaneous brand experiences and purchase occasions. This is the dawn of ubiquitous retail or ambient retail.
Near a pop-up store at a concert or sporting event? Special messages to subscribers at different locations. Set up messaging and membership privileges at different locations and notify about these. Purchase from mobile-enabled devices with GPS too.
Retailers haven’t figured out social networking at all. Take a look at the sites–Facebook, Second Life, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc, then try to identify which retailers have a strategy for them. Pretty thin stuff.
CUSTOMERS: Teens are going to drive Twitter’s success. Adults will have no desire to Tweet that they just went to H&M and picked up the cutest top!…but teens will.
RETAILERS: Retail marketing officers should set up Twitter profiles and then provide offers to their followers. Every high-schooler will want to be a follower of Starbucks, for instance.
Within the next year or so we’ll know whether these sites are a distraction, or a benefit to retailers. The best way to find out is to ask your teens whether they Tweet!
With all due respect to Gene Hoffman, the undisputed grandmaster of RetailWire rhymes….
So Nikki tweets,
Now ain’t that sweet?
For on that score
she’s got me beat!
I barely text,
At my kid’s behest.
And now I wonder
what the hell’s next????
Does anyone have a Smith-Corona or Royal in their attic I could buy?
Social networks’ evolution as marketing vehicles is one sign that most consumers really do get it. With that said Twitter has a long way to grow. To reach the customers you need to reach; you need strategy. Creating an effective strategy requires research, planning, analysis, experience. Twitter is built around a chat-like interface that leads to a large, diverse social community. Figuring out how to tap this group is still a wait and see.
Twitter is unproven yet for retail but definitely has potential. Part of it is up to customers and whether they’re willing to engage in the medium. For those that do, it can absolutely be a real time way to drive traffic multi-channel, as it’s perhaps the best way for marketers to reach customers via mobile.
It is interesting that there are a number of retailers with Twitter IDs but I’ve yet to hear from them! Much like with Facebook, it seems many (if not most) retailers just aren’t quite there yet.
http://www.twitter.com/phil_rubin
So, mobile phones equipped with internet access could access twitter, thus adding it to texting, instant messaging, and the more established social media as wireless points of communication. Hooray for the wireless providers. My daughter stuck me with a $500 texting bill last month. I’m a little bitter.
If retailers and brands haven’t figured out how to respond to the opportunities of the older social networking sites, of course the potential of Twitter will also be overlooked. Membership on social networking sites is free, but a commercial solution may lie in brands and retailers sponsoring for-pay site memberships that offer enhanced features. Like “free” TV, the programming/features would carry occasional promotional messages.
I have been tweeting, Facebooking, Friend Feeding, Deliciousing (you get the picture) for quite a while. I have taken on the self-appointed job of being an early adopter and pioneer to how Retail may use social media. Anyone who would like to chat further, feel free.
With that said, from the sales and marketing perspective, these are the tools not of the future but of today. Those who do not jump in with both feet may just end up with no feet!
But let’s not forget the other angles. Several very visible and well respected folks in the Social Media world like to make the point that the size of your community is a great asset to most business. They also like to say that they see the decline in corporate web sites as most of us like to check out others with our friends and communities before we trust your web site. And then there are the aspects of using social media such as Twitter to actually do your work. I am starting a series of blogs on this very topic but since a tree fell on my house today, (yes, it’s true on the anniversary of Katrina and it wasn’t even raining) alas I have gotten behind. At any rate, put this thought in mind and do read this wonderful post from Chris Brogan, a highly read author in the social media arena.
Now, imagine that you are a store manger in say, Las Vegas, or whereever, then you fill in the rest of the blanks and see if you can’t do some branding, marketing and selling…Read this.
Social Networking allows retailers an ability to get inside consumers heads and obtain honest, real time feedback on brand perception or even the receptivity of future offers/items or store format concepts.
Social network ad spending is expected to be a $2.7 billion business by 2011. From an advertising perspective, consumer data will be amassed by sites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and others. This will enable retailers an ability to reach 18-34 year olds who live in a certain part of the country and enjoy photography, for example.
Social networking can also be a rather inexpensive way to drive viral sharing of your content. It’s a bit of the Wild West out there but retailers have always coveted a deeper understanding of the voice of the customer.
Absolutely–Twitter can be a phenomenal promotional tool. At the moment my view is that the audience skews toward the technically savvy style leaders–folks in the marketing and technology industries, primarily–but it’s growing so fast that I could be wrong. After all, I’ve only been on a couple of times this week! 😉
And that’s the point–or one of them. A key virtue is that at 140 characters a post, growth happens fast. In a matter of minutes, the announcement a brand puts out goes all around the world, from one group of followers to another. So imagine being able to pull off the equivalent of the old Kmart blue-light special, only nationwide, in the space of a couple of hours, on the strength of a tweet, or a series of them:
“Back to school: BrandName jeans 50% off at all US StoreNames, 1-3 pm local time tomorrow, 8/15/08: 2 hrs ONLY!”
“4 hours from now: BrandName jeans 50% off at all US StoreNames, 1-3 pm local time today, 8/15/08: 2 hrs ONLY!”
And so on.
High IQ retailers look for new media. They’re early adopters who invest wisely. Low IQ retailers are early adopters who invest excessively in new media or late adopters who invest only after having foregone major profits. Whether it’s Twitter or Facebook or mobile e-commerce sites or e-commerce itself, it’s obvious that only a few retailers know the magic window of time and the worthwhile level of investment. Most retailers invest too late or too much or both.
Twitter is one example of the Retail Industry leveraging the power of Web 2.0. The following are the ways I think retailers can utilize twitter:
1. Use it to provide the latest arrivals or discounts at the store;
2. Utilize it as a medium for the fast paced generation to provide feedback about the stores;
3. Form a network with your frequent shoppers and follow them to understand their interests;
4. Utilize it to build a network for CSR activities.
As others have rightly noted, there are opportunities for retailers to use Twitter for brand-building, reputation management, promotion, and monitoring chatter. But Twitter is just one platform among many; the early adopters are already bouncing among wannabe Twitter successors like Plurk, Pownce, Friendfeed, etc.
What is important to understand about Twitter and the other services is that they are:
* Untethered – People can send/receive messages via SMS or web-enabled phones. As a result, news increasingly breaks on Twitter and people post things on the fly that they might not have taken the time to blog. That makes it a rich source of casual feedback about stores and brands and a powerful extension of direct messaging platforms off the computer and into “the real world.”
* Conversational – Conversational and word-of-mouth marketing are still effective for all the same reasons they were when we first learned about blogs. There is a an effort to reconsolidate conversational channels online (Friendfreed is a great example), but for the time being, they remain fragmented–and it’s important to follow the conversation where it is.
There is almost zero investment required to experiment with Twitter. Yes, some companies are hiring community managers or social media gurus, but there is almost surely a smart communicator in every organization that can join the conversation intuitively in just a few minutes a day. Zappos has over 400 of them!
Find me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/keith_rng