Social Sights

Pistachio Mascarpone Biscuit with Vanilla Bean Extract

It’s all about engagement right!!  If you have spent any time with me at all you know I use this phrase often.  After wrapping at shop.org 08 a few hours ago I can certainly say it was all about engagement.  Retailers are trying to figure out what to do next, where to go with their sites, businesses and figure out a positive ROI on every tactic they deploy.  With the hard times ahead this holiday season for retailers they have two options.

Option 1.  Batten down the hatches and hope to weather the storm, this typically means cutting spending on paid programs, trying a couple of inexpensive gimmicks but generally using the same tactics just with a finer point on the pencil.

Option 2.  Use this time to innovate, this typically means trying some things that have never been done before, it means increased spend rather reductions, but the innovations are often the game changers.

I am a fan of option 2; Why you may ask….well consider who these retailers are competing against, some direct competitors but ultimately every company that is trying to go after the next dollar the customer will spend.  So if all of the other companies are cutting back they are going to have less reach and less effectiveness which ultimately allows you to take that piece of the market that has been left on the table.  So how do you do that… well let’s take social media as an example.  Let’s say you decide to launch a community in time for the holiday season where your customers can engage on areas of passion—there is plenty of passion around the holiday season so I will leave that creative to you—- but if you created this community (the innovation), you start affecting a couple of your traditional activities.  Take SEO for example, with community you get thousands of people writing content at your site, some of it will be product specific but some of it will be how your customers contextualize and talk about your product in a broader use.

Now that you have all of this content and the search engines are crawling through it, when a customer searches on Google your site may show up not because of the content you created or the SEO practices you optimize but because of the customer doing the work for you.  Let’s continue that example; customers often refer to products in their own language, I experienced this at the shop.org social event on Tuesday night at LAX in the Luxor hotel.  There were many tasty treats being served (bear with me here) and each of those treats had a name that the chef had designated to them, pistachio mascarpone biscuit with vanilla bean extract was one such example….now I happen to be sitting with a group and a colleague brought over a selection of those items we all tasted the truffles, the chocolate mousse and the pistachio mascarpone biscuit with vanilla bean extract ….then someone said “WHAT IS THAT?” pointing to the Pistachio Mascarpone biscuit with vanilla bean extract and someone said “A Green Square Treat”….now why is this relevant… well,  retailers have names for products and descriptions are written by copy editors who get input from merchants (similar to how chefs name their creations) that then gets optimized for search purposes, but if the customer is searching on Google for “A Green Square Treat”  because that is what they , their friends and influencers refer to it as, how are retailers going to get their  “Pistachio Mascarpone Biscuit with Vanilla Bean Extract to show up?  Retailers need to leverage the wisdom of their collective customer base.  So by using social media Retailers will have the advantage of customers creating search relevance at their site….So go ahead Innovate, after all it might end up reducing your SEO and content creation spend, make current programs way more efficient and get retailers into a closer relationship with their customers!!!