'Brand Democracy', The Times/Raconteur

Thursday, May 05, 2011

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Community: These days even Jimmy Choo has embraced the world of Facebook and Twitter. James Silver says that smart companies see the commercial opportunities in community

Just a few years ago, the attitude of many household-name retail brands towards social media could be best summed up as: avoid at all costs. With their noisy democracy and seemingly limitless potential for PR gaffes, social platforms - such as Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare - represented unacceptable risk.

But that was then. Fast forward to today and social retail has been transformed from experimental marketing add-on to being viewed as integral to building huge and loyal communities around brands, driving conversations with customers and ultimately boosting traffic and sales.

Jimmy Choo Ltd is a case in point. Two years ago the high-end shoes and handbags fashion house, didn’t ‘do’ social. All that changed in autumn 2009, when the company launched a limited edition collection called Project PEP, to raise cash for the Elton John AIDS foundation. It signed up social media agency FreshNetworks, who created a competition called Jimmy Choo 72. The promotion created a buzz and further social campaigns, including a ‘real time’ treasure hunt conducted simultaneously in Central London and ‘virtually’ on Foursquare (to launch a range of designer trainers) followed.

Today, the luxury brand is not simply a convert to the social cause, but ahead of the pack. The Jimmy Choo official Facebook page has 605,380 ‘Likes’ and its Facebook users are among the most active of all fashion brands. “Facebook is now their second biggest driver of traffic to their e-commerce site, after Google,” says Matt Rhodes, FreshNetworks’ client services director. “People who have clicked through from Facebook to the Jimmy Choo site, have higher conversion rates, high basket value and higher site visit value [than visitors via other routes].”

The iconic fashion label’s attitude to social media, is mirrored in varying degrees across the retail sector, from brands with ‘entry-level’ Facebook pages and Twitter streams to companies creating fully-fledged social ‘events’. In a memorable phrase, Guarav Mishra, the respected director of digital and social media at MSLGroup Asia, says social marketing, at its best, is “all about creating movements instead of moments”.

The Mars Inc-owned brand Skittles created one such ‘movement’ with a recent campaign entitled Dazzle The Rainbow, which featured the stunt artist David Phoenix, challenging the Facebook community to submerge him in the sweets over 24 hours in a London shop-front. Every visitor who clicked through to the live event via the Skittles Facebook page, added Skittles that were then showered on Phoenix every 15 minutes.

“The shift to social is about growing and deepening a conversation with a group of people who are interested in your brand,” says Patrick Gardner, chief executive of Stockholm and Amsterdam-based digital agency Perfect Fools. “Instead of just running campaigns which say ‘Buy our product’, it’s about maintaining a long-term discussion, fuelling it with entertaining things to talk about.”

But while stunts certainly create talking-points, there are other - arguably more effective - ways to fuel conversations, while boosting basket value. Social commerce company, Reevoo.com hosts (at the time of going to press) 2,226,636 “impartial” reviews and peer-to-peer recommendations by verified owners about electrical products from 120 retailers including Sony, Currys, Dixons, PC World and Orange. By getting customers to post reviews and talk to each other, chief executive Richard Anson claims that retailers who deploy Reevoo see revenues leap by 18% on average - worth a total of £8 billion a year.

According to Anson, brands have only just started to understand the disruptive power of social media. He points to the rise of check-in services such us Facebook Places or Foursquare as the next game-changer. “Soon you’ll check in to a department store, browse products while reading reviews on your smart-phone, while your Facebook friends join in the discussion. And all of that will happen in real time.”

Social, by numbers:
- 16,295,048 - number of Facbeook Likes on the official page for Skittles (source - FB)
- 50.1% - percentage of China’s 420 million online users, who use social media (source - Nielsen)
- 231 - the number of friends the average Brazilian has on social networks (source - TNS Global Market Research)
- £285 million - UK social network advertising spend projected for 2012 (source - e-Marketer)
- 155,046 - Top Shop followers on Twitter (Twitter).

(The Times/Raconteur, May 5th 2011)

Posted by James Silver - On Thursday, May 05, 2011

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