Prepare For Record Holiday-Season Sales For Online Retailing

Posted on | September 1, 2010 | No Comments

Author: Mohit Bhardwaj Online retail sales during the 2009-2010 holiday season have recorded a remarkable growth as compared to overall sales in the retail market. A steadily improving market condition, better supply-chain management and additional benefits on online shopping have together played a major role in swinging shoppers’ preferences towards online stores.

According to a report published by National Retail Foundation (NRF) – sales recorded during November and December 2009 is up by 1.1% over the same period in 2008. This came as a surprise as most of the experts including NRF predicted that shoppers would be reluctant to spend on online retail considering the bottleneck situation due to the economic recession. Read more

How Starbucks Used Social Media to Get One Million to Stores in One Day

Posted on | August 16, 2010 | 1 Comment

From Mashable, author: Jennifer Van Grove - Starbucks’s Vice President of Brand, Content and Online, Chris Bruzzo, is on stage at the Mashable Media Summit and he just revealed that last year’s Free Pastry Day was a whopping success, driving more than one million people to stores.

As we noticed, activity on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook became electric on the day of the event as the free pastry news spread in digital form.

 Bruzzo’s credits fans with the idea to use social media to drive new business, and his remarks confirm that the swell of social media activity drove customers to visit Starbucks stores in droves.

Bruzzo also speaks to the success of the company’s Tax Day green initiative to get customers to bring in their own tumblers in exchange for free coffee, which — like Free Pastry Day — was primarily promoted online via their Facebook Page. Also, the company’s MyStarbucks Idea has generated more than 80,000 ideas and Bruzzo credits Product Manager Brad Nelson for helping them tap into the power of Twitter. Read more

Wegmans Markets On Twitter: “Social Media, It’s Where Our Customers Are At Already”

Posted on | August 8, 2010 | 1 Comment

Author: Rachel Barnhart– Erica Tickle and Aaron Thompson have a nickname at the office. “We’ve been called ‘Tweet and Retweet,’” Thompson said. That’s because the Wegmans Web marketing staffers helped convince the grocery store that the time was right to Twitter.

For one thing, a fan was tweeting under Wegmans name, misleading customers. “The conversations were happening, but we just weren’t there,” said Thompson. The pair also knew Twitter was gaining in popularity. “I think we just needed to get out there and dip our toe in, and see that people really love Wegmans and they like talking to us about how much they love Wegmans,” said Tickle.

“Social media, it’s where our customers are at already,” Thompson, said who happens to be married to Kodak’s Chief Blogger. Tickle and Thompson trained the Consumer Affairs Department on the ins and outs of Twitter, which limits each communication to 140 characters. Read more

Tesco’s Fresh & Easy Markets: Twitter Wine Tasting Event Pays Off

Posted on | August 2, 2010 | No Comments

British mega-grocer Tesco’s North American experiment, Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Markets, with 159 stores in California, southern Nevada and Arizona is utilizing social media in a unique way.

Fresh & Easy is having its customers share their wine tasting experience as a Twitter social media event.

Here’s how it works: Customers must come into Fresh & Easy to buy their wines, many of which are on sale and are Fresh & Easy private label items. As part of the promotion, Fresh & Easy is also offering other, selected store items for sale.

The Twitter wine tasting promotion is a way to leverage and increase sales during the promotion period and engage their customers with the brand in social media. The Freshy & Easy wine tasting event has shown promising results and is a unique way to drive customer traffic to the stores as well as align its high value customers with its brand.

About SOS eMarketing
SOS eMarketing creates engaging experiences for customers in the digital world. For more information about topics in this article, contact SOS eMarketing about social media, branding, integrated eMarketing, food marketing:

SOS eMarketing
David Schwartz
760.345.5069
sosemarketing@gmail.com
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How Trader Joe’s Uses Social Media By Doing Nothing

Posted on | July 25, 2010 | 1 Comment

By Arielle Patrice Scott  – Trader Joe’s has captivated the hearts of young people. Gen Yer fans have created entire Ning networks, Facebook pages and unofficial YouTube commercials all to show their TJ love. The incredible aspect of Trader Joe’s and their strong social media presence is they are doing little to nothing to encourage it. In fact, I would argue 98% (minus 2% just to give me a buffer) of all TJ content is user generated. That’s an incredible feat, so let’s look at why!

TJ’s Fan-Generated Campaign Results Metrics
517,212 Unofficial YouTube Commercial Views
129,137 Facebook Fans
Over 5,000 Facebook Groups
20,781 Flickr Photos
2,349 Ning Forum Comments

Why It Works
Trader Joe’s is a company that grew almost entirely from word-of-mouth. Historically, the best word-of-mouth takes place simply because it’s an incredible product or service. No one needs help from the brand itself to talk about the product. TJ’s is just that – an incredible product that people are willing to evangelize. Thus, the social media marketing is entirely in the hands of TJ fans, which is the most uncontrollable, yet rewarding place to be for a brand. Not to mention, free. Read more

Socially Conscious Marketing: Green Mountain Coffee

Posted on | July 17, 2010 | 2 Comments

Author: Stephanie Larkin - Pick the best coffee beans available all over the world, roast them to perfection, season with an advanced social conscience and a mission to help change the world, flavor with a very savvy sense of marketing and business and you might end up with one of the most successful specialty coffee businesses in the world. Ask the founders of Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, the specialty coffee business that started as a small café in Waterbury, Vermont back in 1981 and recorded nearly $350 million in sales in fiscal 2007.

The road to success for Green Mountain Coffee Roasters has been a series of excellent business decisions coupled with right-place-right-time social policies. The Green Mountain label stands for excellent coffee combined with a mission to make a difference in the world. That mission imbues everything that the company does, from sourcing their coffees to point of sale and beyond – the company even uses recycled/recyclable packaging materials. Mission and social responsibility aside, Green Mountain Coffee Roasters owes its success to one factor – the amazing flavor.

The Green Mountain brand is built on high quality specialty coffees. The company began as a small café in Vermont, with a commitment to serving specialty coffees roasted on premises. It wasn’t long before restaurants and shops in town started asking to serve Green Mountain’s coffee. When skiers who had tried Green Mountain’s specialty coffees while on vacation started asking if they could order coffee and have it sent to their homes, the company added its mail

order business, and things just grew from there. These days, you can buy Green Mountain Roasters specialty coffees in your supermarket or order it online, sign up for Café Express to have Green Mountain coffee delivered to you automatically, drink Green Mountain coffee at many of your favorite restaurants, and buy Green Mountain coffee pre-packed into Keurig K-cups – Green Mountain sells the most varieties of coffees in K-cups of any of the Keurig partners. Read more

Modernist Furniture Design – Timeless Classics

Posted on | July 15, 2010 | 4 Comments

Author: Mikey G - Prior to the modernist design movement, functionality took a back seat to the appeal of popular ornamental furniture styles.

The modern movement reintroduced simple efficiency and originality to the home furnishings marketplace, and innovation to home decor. Modernist design schools like Bauhaus and Werkbund revolutionized home furniture. By investing in the creativity of their artists along with modernist philosophies, the introduction of advanced manufacturing methods and new materials for home furnishings design emerged.

Many of the original modern furniture designs are still popular today, like the Eames Chair, the Barcelona Chair, the Wassily Chair and many others. This article presents the classic modern furniture pieces that are still popular today.

The Wassily Chair, also known as the Model B3 chair, was designed by Marcel Breuer in 1925-26 while he was the head of the cabinet-making workshop at the Bauhaus, in Dessau, Germany. Despite popular belief, the chair was not designed for the non-objective painter Wassily Kandinsky, who was concurrently on the Bauhaus faculty. However, Kandinsky had admired the completed design, and Breuer fabricated a duplicate for Kandinsky’s personal quarters. The chair became known as “Wassily” decades later, when it was re-released by an Italian manufacturer named Gavina who had learned of the anecdotal Kandinsky connection in the course of its research on the chair’s origins.

This chair was revolutionary in the use of the materials (bent tubular steel and canvas) and methods of manufacturing. It is said that the handlebar of Breuer’s ‘Adler’ bicycle inspired him to use steel tubing to build the chair.

The Wassily chair, like many other designs of the modernist movement, has been mass-produced since the late 1920s, and continuously in production since the 1950s Read more

“I love the posts you are doing on Facebook, wonderful way to bring people in and intrigue them”

Posted on | June 27, 2010 | 1 Comment

This was posted by a fan of a SOS eMarketing client. We must be doing something right, LOL.

What does your social media marketing say about your business?

Posted on | July 11, 2010 | 2 Comments

Social Media Marketing isn’t kid stuff.

The people who run your social media marketing campaigns and what they post on a day-to-day basis say everything about your company to your customers, business partners and competitors.

Social media is different than traditional marketing and requires a mixed set of professional skills including marketing, PR, advertising, sales promotion, direct marketing, brand management and IT.

Successful social media marketing campaigns, including those by Target, Starbucks and Whole Foods Market, are implemented by those who know the fine art of writing engaging posts and blogs that are a mix of humor, information, marketing/brand messaging and motivating sales promotions.

No one department or discipline covers the full scope of the communications skills needed for a successful social media implementation: Public relations works with short term promotional themes and events, IT delivers internet tools, marketing is a planning function and sales is focused on the bottom line.

A recent study by the University of Southern California Strategic Communication & Public Relations Center found that 25% of CEO’s and COO’s put PR in charge of social media. The study also found that other CEO’s are starting to either set up separate social media marketing groups or outsource their social media marketing to qualified consultants to manage social media activities, including ROI reporting and that these groups, made up of creative writers and art directors get input from all departments. Read more

Building Trust and Friendships with Social Media

Posted on | June 30, 2010 | 1 Comment

Author: Pete Brand
I’ve been in quite a few meetings lately where I listen to people complain about their declining sales numbers and they all seem to be focused intensely on the next tactic to use to increase their sales. Whether it is the new brochure, or the new addition to their website. The problem is …

Simply adding a tactic will never be a long term solution!

I want to make sure I don’t come across the wrong way. I am not saying I have all the solutions or that people who are experiencing declining sales are doing so because they don’t know what they are doing. I know we are in the midst of the worst economic conditions of all time and we are unfortunately all a victim of these circumstances. I personally look at difficult financial times as an excellent opportunity for the cream to rise to the top.

The best companies, and not necessarily the biggest, will thrive in a challenging market.

It certainly doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that when companies and individuals are watching every dollar they spend, they’ll only choose to spend money with a company they trust can deliver on the promises they are making. The days of a company hiding behind it’s size and people believing they are too big to go under are over. Companies are no longer given instant credibility due to their size. Heck, it appears as though the large companies are the ones that are run horribly and inefficiently and are teetering on the verge of ending. Read more

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