Posted Date: 7/25/2011

Beyond "Likes" – How Social Media Builds Revenue

By Jessica Binns
S-commerce, f-commerce — for marketing departments, there’s a whole new lingo to learn these days.

Social commerce and even Facebook commerce are drawing attention as apparel brands and retailers dedicate marketing and advertising dollars to these significant new channels. Most companies have established some sort of presence on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or blogs, but how can brands and retailers capitalize on these social media platforms? How can social media help to boost the bottom line?

The l-P-O-S-T-m way
Brands know why social media is important, but they struggle with how much to do with these platforms, when to do it and especially where to do it, says Rob Begg, director of product marketing for Radian6, a social media monitoring company.

Adam Metz, director of social business for The Pedowitz Group, a demand generation agency, says apparel companies that decide to foray into social media would do well to follow the l-P-O-S-T-m methodology when developing a plan.

• Listen. Use social media monitoring tools (Lithium and Radian6 are examples) to find out what consumers are saying. “Where are our customers’ watering holes?” Metz asks. Begg agrees: “Listen for your brand and parallel subject matter. Find out where people are talking about activities that people would use your brands for — and for your competitors.”
• People. Whom are you trying to reach? Metz cites American Girl as an example. “Are you trying to reach six-year-olds or their 38-year-old parents? Actually, the biggest spenders are grandparents. Forty-three percent of baby boomers are on social web,” he explains.
• Objective. Define a core business objective for establishing a social media presence.
• Strategy. Write your social media strategy. “That’s the hardest part,” Metz cautions. “If you’ve never written a competitive strategy, read ‘The Art of War’ and ‘The 33 Strategies of War.’” 4
• Tools. Choose which social media tools — or platforms — to leverage. “The problem with apparel brands is that they choose their tools first,” Metz says. “I’ve had social media strategies that didn’t even include Facebook or Twitter. Write your strategy with your customer in mind.”
• Measure. Companies should measure their results and progress weekly, focusing on both analyzing and monetizing. The former involves looking at how many friends and followers you have and how many clicked through from social media to your site. Monetizing involves money metrics. “So they added to something to their cart, but did they check out? Are they net new customers?” Metz asks.

Selling through Facebook
Lately, there’s been considerable interest in what some are calling f-commerce, or Facebook commerce. Some companies, such as JCPenney, have chosen to include their entire inventory on Facebook so that consumers can shop their full range of offerings without leaving the social networking site. But not all agree with this approach.

Oracle Retail’s David Dorf, senior director of technology, believes that building a full-fledged commerce page within Facebook doesn’t work. “If you take your e-commerce and jam it into Facebook, I don’t see the advantage,” he says.

Yet recent results from the 2011 Social Commerce Study, jointly conducted by NRF Shop.org, comScore, and Social Shopping Labs, found that Facebook and even Twitter are promising selling channels. Thirty-five percent and 32 percent of survey respondents who already follow a retailer would buy directly from Facebook and Twitter, respectively, if the option were available, according to the study.

Dorf stresses that promoting your products through Facebook’s news feed is the optimal way to engage your fans. “Build a small store in your news feed so that fans can like the item or comment on it and can click and buy it right now,” he says. “That gets more traction than duplicating your e-commerce efforts.”

Jessica Binns is associate editor of Apparel magazine. She can be reached at jbinns@apparelmag.com.




Pacific Sunwear Explores the Social Side of
Customer Service

Pacific Sunwear (PacSun), a retailer of men’s and women’s apparel and accessories for surfing and skateboarding lifestyles, is active on Twitter with more than 21,000 followers, but uses the platform primarily as a one-to-one communication tool.

“We try to monetize it in terms of driving people back to our site,” says Michael Frank, PacSun’s social media strategist. “It’s not a great sales tool. Twitter is used to comment on things happening at large. People aren’t looking to be ‘sold’ on Twitter.”

Indeed, PacSun’s Twitter coupons met with lackluster response, says Mondy Beller, vice president of e-commerce. “Our Facebook fans are the most loyal, so we’ve done Facebook-only promotions.

“A lot of companies don’t appreciate that Facebook is becoming another customer service outpost,” Beller adds. She says PacSun has a staff member from customer service monitor its Facebook page so that if an issue arises, that conversation can be moved off the wall and addressed quickly and effectively.


PacSun’s strategy

PacSun, which operates more than 900 retail outlets, brought its social media team in-house in December 2010 after it had been outsourced for well over a year.

“When you outsource, people don’t understand your business,” explains Beller. “You need someone who sits in the building and lives and breathes the brand.”
She says the retailer didn’t have a strategy for driving sales from its Facebook efforts and primarily used the platform for garden-variety discounts and promotions when she joined PacSun roughly a year ago. Facebook fans numbered around 325,000.

When PacSun added “like” buttons to all of its product pages on its e-commerce site and the firm really began to focus on developing the Facebook presence, the number of followers quickly swelled to 500,000. At press time, PacSun was rapidly closing in on 1 million fans.

“We really didn’t see Facebook as a significant channel until we hit 500,000 fans,” Beller explains. “We’re not saying, ‘Go buy this;’ we’re saying, ‘Hey, it’s a cool brand.’ We have seen as much as up to 20 percent of our business coming from Facebook.”

Facebook Places is beginning to factor into PacSun’s strategy. When a customer checks into a brick-and-mortar PacSun store, the retailer can fire off a coupon or promotion to that shopper. “We can bounce them a coupon or tell them to enter a contest,” explains Frank. “We can continue that social communication even when they’re in store.” PacSun also offers 20 percent off purchases for shoppers who check in via Foursquare, the location-based mobile platform.

Despite the strong empirical evidence, PacSun is on the fence about building a dedicated Facebook fan shop. “Although our fans are influenced by friends and peers, we’re not sure that building a secondary e-commerce shop would compel more people to buy,” Beller explains.
 
PacSun uses Radian6 to monitor its online presence, tracking overall online media impressions in which the retailer is getting mentioned, which includes Facebook, Twitter, mainstream news, blogs and video posts.

“We want to see the overall landscape of what people are saying about the brand and dial down into whether it’s positive or negative,” says Frank. The company generates weekly reports calculating new followers throughout all channels, identifying challenges and gauging the effectiveness of posts on sites such as YouTube and Facebook.

Finally, it’s essential to create an ecosystem in which each social media channel plays a distinct role, says Frank. “YouTube is vital — we’ve created our own videos with clickable links to our website.

It’s a touch point and access point for driving people back to our site,” he explains.