Retailers Using Social Technology, Community, And RSS

In addition to the Saks Video Catalog, many retailers are using social technology, community, and RSS feeds in interesting ways. Many in our catalog audience are looking for new ways to have a relationship with customers. Let's review a small sample of brands using social technology in one way or another.

Urban Outfitters has an interesting site that features articles, videos, an RSS feed and a MySpace page.

Neiman Marcus communicates fashion via their InSite Blog.

Ice.com's Just Ask Leslie Blog combines customer questions and short features.

eBags uses bookmarks to tag items you are interested in.

Mac Cosmetics, a $274 million division of Estee Lauder, has customers who are literally inventing products for the brand, sharing the ideas on YouTube. Their product development folks should take a peek at this! My wife found the video when searching for ideas on how to store Mac products. Take a peek at YouTube to see how other folks are doing marketing and product demonstrations for you ... heck, this young lady has almost 14,000 views.

Nordstrom has a MySpace page for their BP division.

Paperspine, an online book rental brand, hosts a blog about books.

Zappos is using Twitter to allow folks to communicate about the venerable online shoe brand.

Patagonia hosts The Cleanest Line, a blog for employees, friends, and customers.

Overstock.com offers a diverse array of community-based options.

Crutchfield has a community section on their website.

Burpee Seeds features their RSS feed on the homepage.

Hallmark has an interesting blog for their Shoebox division.

Here's the Shutterfly community.

Use the comments section to share other ways that retailers are using social technology, community and RSS feeds to partner with consumers.

Positive News: Multichannel Marketer Innovation

I'm going to start each month with good stories in the world of multichannel retailing. The good news could be about people, marketing activities, or strategies.

Here's a few things I noticed this evening on various multichannel marketer websites.

Ann Taylor has a nice "Trends" landing page. What I like is that Ann Taylor has a point of view about their merchandise. Ann Taylor competes in a very challenging market, with numerous direct competitors, and pressure from the high-end and low-end of the market. I like that they are trying to differentiate themselves from their competition.

L.L. Bean's homepage prominently features catalog requests and e-mail signup above the fold. When you have the type of traffic that L.L. Bean has, it is important to try to build a relationship with visitors. Bean is not shy about encouraging the random visitor to engage.

Visit the homepage of Urban Outfitters. Check out the upper right hand corner of the screen. If you don't have anything in your shopping cart, Urban Outfitters scribbles out the View Basket tab, circles the word "empty" on your shopping cart, and points an arrow to the cart. I visited the homepage, and noticed this immediately. Clever! Move your mouse along the links across the top of the page, and see what happens.

Gymboree has a survey on the homepage. Using the phrase "We Listen", they offer you the opportunity to answer four questions about what you think about their Easter line of merchandise. It would be fun to segment those who fill out the survey, and understand if the commenters are high-value customers, and then link that data to actual visitation, shopping cart, and purchase metrics.

At the top of Lane Bryant's homepage, you see two flags. If you are a Canadian visitor, you can click your flag, in order to see merchandise denominated in Canadian currency. It's always good to make your site friendly to our friends living north of the border.

Patagonia has the courage to publish a voluntary recall on their homepage.

Are there any multichannel retailers you would like to praise, multichannel retailers who are doing unique and innovative things?