A new social media study reveals that fashion brands have a significantly stronger social media presence than other UK retailers, by actively utilizing various platforms for the benefit of both the customer and the business.

Having measured the fundamental rise of ecommerce over the past decade, eDigitalResearch is now monitoring retailer’s social media as part of its benchmark activity, assessing brand’s presence over several different sites and their efforts to engage in two-way dialogue.

Assessing some 72 UK retail sites by looking at volume of followers alongside active interaction between the brand and consumer, the research found that fashion retailers are encouraging a larger degree of cross-communication through well-established Twitter accounts and Facebook pages. Topshop and River Island claimed the top two spots, recording a large number of followers and higher levels of customer engagement. ASOS came in third, with New Look and Next completing the top five.

Ed Handasyde –Dick, Social Media Manager at eDigitalResearch comments, “It is not surprising that brands aimed at a younger, more dynamic audience came out on top. We are beginning to see more content-driven marketing from many multichannel fashion retailers, such as in-house produced magazines, focusing on subjects that potential customers regularly talk about. It is only natural that consumers are turning to social media platforms to engage and identify with their favorites brands. The next challenge is for companies to utilize all this user generated content and integrate it into within their future marketing and business plans.”

The recent rapid development of mobile technology and the opportunities it provides for retailers is also becoming more apparent, with companies beginning to develop mobile sites and apps for consumers. Sitting just outside the top four, Next and Marks and Spencer’s, have recently launched mobile sites, cementing their commitment to developing their future ecommerce strategies. However, with a slightly older target market, who are less likely to be social media savvy, they both miss out on achieving higher positions as they have lower levels of customer engagement and interaction.

Somewhat unsurprisingly, fashion websites who target an older demographic, and electrical retailers, scored rather low, with many not even having a social media site presence. Most grocery sites also had low scores, with many only having just developed a social media strategy. For these sites, the conflict going forward will be to try and find engaging content that will captivate consumers and their online target market.

Source: www.theretailbulletin.com

Yes the news is correct. This time around it’s ‘Zara’, the Spanish retailer that has decided to enter the market of online retailing. It has started via opening its new online store in France, Spain, Italy, Portugal and the UK.

The group already sells a home range online, but its revamped website will offer fashion lines which have only been available in its stores until now.

The push into Web 2.0 world is seen as a defensive move that comes amid fears of a decline in High Street spending of consumers.

As per the news floating around, H&M is believed to be following in Zara’s footsteps by the next fortnight; and Gap already began online sales for the first time outside the US last month.

The trend seems to be picking up as online retail sales have boomed as more people get high-speed Internet connections and time-pressed shoppers take advantage of shopping from home or work. Also it seems that online stores add to rather than cannibalize physical stores; hence they tend to bring in additional sales.

Here are some interesting facts as per industry observers/consultants:

• Shopping on the net is expected to see sales grow to £94bn ($144 bn) in Western Europe by 2014, from £56bn in 2009, according to consultants Forrester.
• But online sales still only make up a small proportion of total sales. In the UK, only 8% of total sales in July were made online, according to the Office for National Statistics.
• Zara made a small profit in the year to the end of January 2010, after recording a sharp loss during the previous year. It is hoping to see a 10% rise in revenue linked to its online store.

For more information, do refer to www.zara.com. Also I would recommend you to download and browse via the new application for Iphone/Ipad launched by Zara; available now on Itunes.

It’s like the most persistent sales clerk you’ve ever encountered.

Major retailers are working with a new smartphone application that tracks and offers promotions to shoppers as they move from outside the store, to counters, to cash registers — even inside the dressing room (now that’s persistence).

The app, called Shopkick, is now available on iPhone and will be available by fall for Android phones. And with five major companies supporting it — Macy’s, Best Buy, Sports Authority and American Eagle Outfitters, along with the Simon Property Group, the prominent mall operator — it is getting a big introduction.

Customers with the Shopkick app will get points (called kickbucks) for entering a store. Pick up a putter at Sports Authority, and points drop into the app. Stop in the dressing room at American Eagle, and more points arrive.

The points are redeemable for gift cards at the retailers, along with music downloads or credits toward Facebook games. It takes a lot of points, however, to earn even a $5 gift card, although the stores say they may adjust the point system to make points more valuable.

Whether shoppers will get a kick, so to speak, out of being followed — and pinged from one floor of a store to the next — remains debatable. What retailers see as sophisticated marketing, privacy advocates see as intrusive. Shopkick knows “where you are, what you buy, your spending habits, passions, excesses,” Jeffrey Chester, the executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, said via e-mail.

Unlike apps like Foursquare, Shopkick tells retailers when users are inside, not just near, a store.

Shopkick goes further.

On Monday before the launch of application, Mr. Roeding stood on a slim strip of sidewalk on 46th Street in Manhattan, trying to avoid Times Square tourists as he demonstrated the app. As he stood a few yards from the entrance to an American Eagle Outfitters store, the app showed him all the nearby stores where he could check in — including American Eagle or the tiny candy store nearby. For each check-in — which did not require him to actually go inside — he could receive 0 to 2 points.

As per Mr. Roeding “Foot traffic is so important, Why does no one ever reward anyone for visiting a store?” By actually going inside the American Eagle store, the app told him, he could earn 35 kickbucks. The app knows someone is in a store by listening for an audio transmitter placed in each participating store; the phone’s microphone picks up the signal, which people cannot hear.

Once inside, Mr. Roeding swiped through offers: a 15 percent discount, a sale on jeans. Enter a dressing room, once a shopper tries on clothes, sales rise, retailers know and posters on the walls offer points for scanning the bar code.

“It’s the first reward programs for desired behaviors,” Mr. Roeding said.

Shopkick earns a small fee for each kickbuck a customer earns. If a customer buys something after using the app, Shopkick gets a percentage of the price.

Right now, it takes a lot of kickbucks to earn anything — a $5 gift card at American Eagle requires 1,250 kickbucks. And retailers limit the number of eligible visits each day, so someone cannot sprint in and out of Best Buy all afternoon.

Soon, the retailers would become more sophisticated, giving points or promoting items based on sex or age, where people live, how frequently they shop or their buying history.

The companies can even weave in rewards-card numbers, as Best Buy is already doing. With that, “we have the ability to target down to even an individual level,” said Mike Dupuis, the vice president for marketing and operations at American Eagle Outfitters Direct, the Web and mobile division of American Eagle.

With advent of applications like Shopkick, its only a matter of time before many such applications shall hit the market and further fine tune their settings to meet customer requirements, based on the valuable learnings from this particular experiment.

For more info. visit http://www.shopkick.com/

RT ceoSteveJobs @Twitter: “Floppy disks, trackballs, serial ports, dial-up modems… All gone. Now it’s time to kill the mouse.”

The recent tweet from Steve Jobs pretty much sums up the story. In the years I’ve been using computers, monitors have grown thinner and more vivid in their picture displays, and the technology that runs them has grown faster and less expensive. But two things have remained relatively constant: my keyboard and mouse.

Yet that’s about to change. I’m pretty certain I will never own a traditional mouse again, at least when I use an Apple computer. Instead I will own a trackpad — a Magic Trackpad.

The new gadget, which was announced by Apple last week, and works only with the company’s computers, looks more like a large silver tile than a mouse. But when it’s properly connected, it affords a traditional desktop computer a multitouch mouse, just like those available in most Apple laptops today.

The trackpad works like an ordinary laptop trackpad, where you slide your fingers to control the cursor on the screen. Once you become comfortable with it, you can take full advantage of its features, which include two-finger scroll on Web pages, pinch and zoom on images in Apple’s Preview application and a number of other multitouch features.

Clothes have come a long way since their origin, from the bare necessity of just covering your body, to being fashion statements and now we see another big step in the history of clothing.

Developed by Barbara Layne from Concordia University in Canada and Janis Jefferies from Goldsmiths College’s Digital Studios, the prototype garments aka ‘Smart clothes’ could soon be helping their wearers cope with the stresses accompanied by modern life.

The ‘Smart Clothes’ monitor physiological states including body temperature and heart rate. The clothes are connected to a database that analyses work out a person’s emotional state. Media that could include songs, words and images, are then channeled to the LED display and speakers in the clothes to calm a wearer or offer emotional support.

The ‘Smart clothes’ are made from textiles woven with different sorts of wireless sensors. These can track a wide variety of tell-tale biological signs including temperature, heart rate, breathing and galvanic skin response. Data is gathered passively and used to trigger a response from a web-centric database previously created by the wearer. The clothes connect to the web via a smartphone.

When the wearer is detected as being in a particular emotional state, the database will send information or media to the clothes to help try to change a person’s mood. To accomplish this, the clothes are fitted with display made of LEDs and have speakers built in to the hood. The display can show scrolling text or simple images and the speakers can replay music, sounds or pre-recorded messages from friends or family.

The prototype garments were shown at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences held in Montreal from 28 May – 3 June 2010.

You Tube, the online video broadcasting station celebrates today its 5th anniversary, since the advent of beta version of their website. To add cherry to the cake, follows the news of You Tube managing to get 2 billion hits a day; which based on statistics is more than double the audience of top 3 prime television stations of US.

The journey so far

To get a brief insight on the 5 years history of You Tube, check out this amazing video, which re instills your faith in “You Tube” and how it has made such a powerful impact on our lives.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tlmho7SY-ic&feature=player_embedded

What lies in store for the near future?

In my personal opinion the story of You Tube has just begun and with the backing of Google, only few would doubt the potential of this platform.

Presently ‘You Tube’ has been struggling to run in the black zone as far as profits are concerned. The reason for the same has been the cautious approach of advertisers, who do not feel very confident of running their promos corresponding to video’s that can offend sentiments of certain target audience.

But by the looks of how things are moving; it surely seems that 2010 can be the year where ‘You Tube’ overcomes these problems. They have been putting lot of effort into controlling the quality of content and besides all this, the focus on partnerships with content owners to utilize You Tube as an online television platform seems to be a very healthy approach.
Some analysts believe that Google would nurture this platform to become the most advanced online media store, with mix of movies, soap opera’s, live sporting action, news, political campaigns and etc. etc.

Another important trend to watch out for in the near future is the growing era of generation ‘Y’, who is bound to prefer visual information over textual; And You Tube seems to be the ideal resort for their calling, offering a massive database of video content ranging from every possible field or topic.

To know more about You Tube, do check out the following links:

http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8676380.stm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube

“Social Shopping is a method of e-commerce and of traditional shopping in which consumers shop in a social networking environment similar to MySpace. Using the wisdom of crowds, users communicate and aggregate information about products, prices, and deals. Social shopping can also exist in the real world beyond the obvious swapping of consumer stories with people one knows. For example, when you walk into a dressing room, the mirror reflects your image, but you also see images of the apparel item and celebrities wearing it on an interactive display. A webcam also projects an image of the consumer wearing the item on the website for everyone to see. This creates an interaction between the consumers inside the store and their social network outside the store. The technology behind this system uses RFID”

Source – www.wikipedia.org

Image Source: http://watchmojo.com/blogs/images/3ddressing.jpg

Lets start with the title of Social Shopping, as of now it seems ‘Social Shopping’ is one of those trending topics, which everyone wants to talk about when the question of ‘Shopping in Future’ is brought on the table and how social media along with all the applications and gadgets, enhance user/costumer experience.
To understand the question more deeply, lets look at the two different facets, one of ‘Social Media’ and the other of ‘Shopping as a trend/need’.

Social Media:

By now it’s a known fact to every one in the present times that the know-how as well as the usage of social media is increasing at an exponential rate. It started as a trend with the young; and age demographics suggest that even the elders have been bitten eventually by the trend.

Its no longer a question of whether you like to socialize or not, it’s becoming more of a daily habit like brushing your teeth, first thing in the morning. With celebrities, sports stars to business tycoons making it part of their life style, its not only fashionable to be active on social media but it also acts as your daily dosage of internal news about the world and your friends.

Therefore it’s common to observe people sharing information, getting reviews, flaunting, exhibiting lifestyle, attitude & personality impressions via social media.

Shopping as trend/need

Shopping can be traced back to many civilizations and it’s a trend that has come a long way over the years. Shopping for humans can be defined as an essential need for their survival, but shopping has grown far beyond the world of necessities.

In present times the trend of shopping is way of living your life. It’s a way of exhibiting your choices, tastes and social quo to your social circle and the external world. Shopping can also be described as a very popular hobby for many and they love to talk for hours & discuss about their shopping baskets, the reasons for their choices and so on.

I am pretty sure that by now we can clearly see the strong resemblance in the world’s of  “Social Media” and ‘Shopping”.

To sum it all up, its the same question that comes up, are we waiting for some specific time in the future where we are forced to react to the massive demand of Social Media and integrate into the shopping experience? Or are we going to be pro-active in our approach of tapping onto this demand, which is a certainty even in the present times? I guess the answer will come to light eventually with time.

Meanwhile here is a link to a case study on one of the very few stores that have thought on the lines of integrating this idea: http://www.rfidradio.com/?p=20