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The universe is chock-full of awesome things coming last. Like retirement, dessert, fat ladies singing and nice guys.

“Last” is definitely the new “first” and our panel at Shop.org, Social Commerce: 7 Strategies That Work is the last-est! Wednesday 3:30-4:30 in the “Customer Experience” track is where all the savvy show-goers will be for the perfect end to Shop.org.

Top 3 reasons you should come…

1. The real deal. We’re going to skip the hype, dive into the details of actual initiatives and get our panel’s point-of-view on social’s real role in digital retail.
2. All-star panel. The top minds from Sears, Jones Apparel Group and Diapers.com/Soap.com will tell us how they’ve used social media to move the needle on their businesses.
3. Happy hour. Yes. Unless the teamsters shut us down

Ron Offir, President of eCommerce at Jones Apparel Group, Josh Himwich, VP eCommerce Solutions at Quidsi (Diapers.com/Soap.com), and Ryan Ostrom, Director of Multi-Channel Brands for Sears, will be sharing the inside details of their social initiatives, sneak peeks at new ideas in the works, and data on what worked and what didn’t.

Topics they will cover…

• Creating the “Everywhere Experience”
• Facebook Pop-Up Stores
• Making In-Store a Digital, Social Experience
• “Like” as the New Review
• Mobile-Friendly E-Commerce Makes Money
• Letting Your Customers Own the Brand
• Using Facebook Connect for your site registration

Plus you’ll hear the top 3 social innovations they think should be on retailers’ radar for the near future. Plus 1 bonus idea from me!

We hope to see you there!

Follow Andrew Sirotnik at twitter.com/asirotnik

Unless you’ve been putting in time at a mountain monastery, you’ve heard about Google Instant: Google’s innovation launched yesterday to deliver real-time search results as you type keywords in the search box.

Much of the buzz has been around efficiency – getting better results faster. For digital retailers, I think the bigger significance is that Google Instant has transformed search into a great shopping jumping off point.

Searching is now browsing.

The experience Google Instant delivers is very similar to guided browsing (i.e. parametric filters) that you see often on ecommerce catalog pages like this one for The North Face. The consumer doesn’t have to know exactly what they want – they can simply select from a list and the site responds to their interests. It’s an iterative experience.

Like everyone else, I want a cashmere camel coat. In the screenshots above, you see that I get relevant shopping results at “camel cashm…” and can then easily browse between sweaters, coats, cardigans and scarves with the results visually updating real-time.

Google Instant will eventually come to Google Shopping.

It’s very significant that “Shopping” is in the primary navigation at top, prominently featured in the left navigation, and a link in the search results (e.g. “Shopping results for camel cashmere cardigan”). You can absolutely count on Google bringing the Instant capability to their Shopping tab, equipping consumers with shopping filters, view/sort controls, and taking the experience one step closer to a full shopping experience completely outside of retailers’ websites.

Portable content + SEO considerations.

What this means for digital retailers is two things at first glance: 1) increasing the quality and portability of your content, and 2) reviewing your SEO strategy in light of Google’s shift. I don’t have “how-to” answers for the above (yet) – there are many great conversations going on right now and what it means, ranging from recommendations that brands refocus on core/root keywords to povs that seo is now irrelevant because “no one will see the same web anymore, making optimizing it virtually impossible.”

What I know for certain is that digital consumers want the experience that Google is making a reality. Savvy brands and retailers will take advantage of it.

Follow Andrew Sirotnik at twitter.com/asirotnik

The title’s a lie. I love Gilt and have no intention of giving it up completely (even though the private sales aren’t private and they seem to selling every brand under the sun). But I did tire of receiving 1-2 emails every day and finally pulled the trigger and unsubscribed.

Treating customer service interactions as new opportunities to engage.

Gilt really gets digital customer experience. Instead of offering the usual insincere apologies, they deliver a beautifully designed ‘unsubscribe’ screen with an unapologetic “How can I help?” attitude that puts the consumer in control and makes them like Gilt more as a result. It’s very easy to choose “reduce the number of emails I receive” rather than severing the relationship completely.

Offering ways to connect on other channels / devices.

Better yet is that Gilt takes this opportunity to showcase other ways to connect that might fit better than email with one’s digital lifestyle, including the innovative desktop app Gilt Clock with a sale countdown timer, preview of upcoming sales and a link to the calendar. It’s not a leap to imagine them successfully promoting their mobile / iPad apps here as well. (Note: I took the screenshot above a month or so ago so they may already do this.)

I conducted a quick survey of other retailers’ ‘unsubscribe’ experiences. Most were purely transactional and forced the consumer to choose between ending their relationship with the brand or resigning themselves to the status quo (nobody wins in this scenario).

This is another example of the pure play retailers reinventing the details that traditional retailers might accept as established best practices. I think consumers appreciate it and suspect Gilt sees a return from the effort.

Mariano Ferrario contributed to this post.

Fluid (@Fluid) collaborated with Lipman and Diane von Furstenberg to create a tweet-infused online catalog for DVF’s fall collection. You can experience the interactive catalog here.

Rich interactivity + iPad / iPhone compatibility.

The online catalog is richly interactive but coded so that it can be fully experienced on the iPad / iPhone. The video player, interactive carousels and screen transitions are all HTML5, delivering a great shopping experience and letting DVF reach its audience on the all the devices that matter.

Fully twitter-enabled catalog experience.

To put it mildly, Diane von Furstenberg is an avid twitterer (<@InsideDVF>) and her posts are addictive. The catalog is built around her most iconic statements – like “I always wanted to live a man’s life in a woman’s body” – and letting users retweet her latest posts directly from within the catalog.

Most interesting is that each product has it’s own hashtag – e.g. #jane bolero – encouraging users to tweet out what they like at a product level (they can tweet/share/like the catalog as a whole as well). The result is product-specific tweets with unique bit.ly links to each product detail page that help track the consumer’s path through the social shopping funnel and the traffic driven from their shares, likes & tweets.

Follow Andrew Sirotnik at twitter.com/asirotnik

Follow Andrew Sirotnik at twitter.com/asirotnik

*Thank you* to the people behind the “people’s choice” Adweek Buzz Award! And special thanks to our great clients at Rachel Roy and the Jones Apparel Group. We’re thrilled to get this recognition for the facebook pop-up store for Rachel Roy!

(more on the facebook fan shop and why it worked here)

Follow Andrew Sirotnik at twitter.com/asirotnik

Fluid (@Fluid) recently launched two customization-themed shopping experiences for Sears: Craftsman Custom and The Garage Planner.

Craftsman Custom delivers a premium experience for consumers to tailor a pro-quality tool storage solution to their specific needs and tastes. The experience leverages 3d visualization to deliver a blueprint-like experience that progressively builds into a photo-realistic vision of the consumer’s ideal product, all in real time.

The Sears Garage Planner experience is built on inspirations and “starting point” ideas. Consumers are presented with an interactive photo gallery of shoppable and customizable garage storage solutions. The experience is simultaneously inspirational and actionable, injecting the consumer with ideas and empowering them to make them their own.

Our team has a long history designing shopping experiences for customizable products, including …

• FunStamps (the first personalizable stamps offering)
• Timberland Boot Studio (custom footwear)
• Your Reebok (custom footwear) + facebook configurator
• Design Within Reach FLOR Designer (custom carpet configurator)
• Fine Stationery (card & stationery customizer)
• Vans Customs (custom footwear)

We’re fortunate to collaborate with such great brands to innovate new shopping experiences in such a nascent field. We’re proud to be among the first who have created configurators delivering consumers real-time visualization, product rotation, share-to-phone and integrated social sharing tools.

The business benefits of a better customization experience: 200%+ increase in sales, 16+ minute average consumer engagement on-site, spikes in sharing & heavy engagement with social media customization tools.

Some recent observations, field notes, and expectations looking forward:

• Before the “economic downturn” (or whatever it’s called now), Fluid was seeing RFPs for customization up approx 5-10x showing a sharp increase in interest across industries. The recession put most of those projects on hold.

• Those brands that continued forward became increasingly strategic around customization, seeing it as a brand and business building opportunity. In many cases increasing scope and decreasing timelines in an effort to get to market quickly with robust offerings (a differentiation/barrier strategy).

• Interestingly, over half of these brands are in verticals outside of footwear.

• Embedding up-sells in the customization experience has proven so effective that some retailers are pricing base models at-or-under cost and attaching costs per attribute selection (e.g. premium colors, extra set of laces, etc.).

• Providing the consumer with simple, intuitive social tools — both providing the ability to chat real-time with friends & ability to engage one’s facebook network without ever leaving the customization experience — has become a priority among most of our clients (and now considered a best practice within Fluid).

Finally, three predictions:

1. Customization experiences will take shape in ways that are more subtle and less overt – more about great digital shopping and less about “configurators” per se. This is what most consumers want. Thoughtful experiences that embed customization vs. customization being the main draw will help launch this consumer-driven approach to digital shopping into the mainstream.
2. Customization will make the notion of a crowd-sourced economy a reality. Champion and Keds are first movers (and got a lot of brand benefit as a result + some satisfaction at beating Nike to market I’m sure
3. Customizable shopping experiences will increasingly be deployed exclusively to social channels like facebook. Customizing something lends itself superbly to a community atmosphere – expect to see brands fully leveraging all that facebook has to offer in that regard.

Follow Andrew Sirotnik at twitter.com/asirotnik

Fluid (@Fluid) launched a fan-only pop-up store on facebook for Rachel Roy last week. The insider shopping event gave the brand’s facebook fans early access to Rachel Roy’s new jewelry line collaboration with British r&b artist Estelle.

The pop-up store was live for 5 days only delivering fans a uniquely branded shopping experience around the limited edition jewelry collaboration plus one facebook-only exclusive item which sold out within the first 12 hours (all the items sold out completely before the 5 days were up). The insider event was a marketing success as well, increasing Rachel Roy’s fan base by 25% in the first day alone.

We had a fun time designing this: great brand + great clients + thoughtful use of social media = meaningful customer experience that delivers real value, makes them want to buy and love the brand more as a result.

Here are some thoughts from the strategy & design team on why it worked…

• Differentiated brand + shopping experience. There have been some research reports circulating lately that show consumers want to be able to shop on social channels. Importantly though, consumers do not want your ecommerce site pasted into facebook. They want a layered experience that blends a differentiated brand experience with awesome content (like the shareable photo & video gallery) with a great product experience.

• Not an “e-commerce” template. Fluid’s launch for Rachel Roy is built on a productized software-as-a-service solution (Fluid Social) but consumers would never know it. The technology is designed from the ground up to be easily customized and uniquely branded (proof coming in 2 weeks when we launch another one – stay tuned . Consumers and retailers hate templates and for good reason: nobody wants to shop someone who is indistinguishable from their competition. When you look at some of the templated “facebook lookbooks” out there that deliver an identical experience for athletic footwear as they do for womens fashion, it’s an easy prediction that consumers will devalue those brands that embrace generic sameness, especially in social media.

• Authentically social. We were surprised to see so many self-described “social shopping” implementations out there that completely lacked basic social functionality. Fluid integrated standard facebook “like” and “share” functionality throughout the entire experience, delivering users the social elements they expect. It makes for a great shopping experience to see that 90 other people “liked” the Petal Ring – far more meaningful in this context than product reviews.

• Limited to fans only. It’s impossible to overestimate how much consumers value insider status and benefits. As long as you are serving up real value – and avoiding exclusivity for exclusivity’s sake – your consumers will appreciate it, share more and have a stronger urge to buy.

Follow Andrew Sirotnik at twitter.com/asirotnik

It seems like you can’t open The New York Times lately without seeing Vic Gundotra touting Google’s latest innovation or acquisition (disclosure: Fluid worked with Vic when he was at Microsoft — we’re fans).

In addition to Google dominating all-things-mobile, some recent significant announcements:

•    Goggles
•    Acquiring Yelp (almost)
•    Selling direct to consumer (beginning with the Nexus One)
•    Real-time search

Any of the above looked at individually are significant and innovative but not a game changer in their own right.

But when you look at them as a coordinated whole, what begins to emerge is that Google is assembling a new breed of multi-channel ecommerce platform with the potential to deliver consumers a complete shopping experience without ever needing to interact with a retailer’s website, app or social presence.

Whether this is master plan or strategic by-product is up for discussion. But add to the above list the foundation that Google already has put in place:

•    Search UPC codes
•    Shop Savvy
•    Package tracking
•    Google Checkout
•    Google Analytics
•    Catalogs
•    My Shopping List, Gallery View, parametric filtering, etc. etc.

It’s an easy leap to envision this scenario:

A consumer searches Google for “spring trenchcoat belt.” Google returns her a product grid of trenchcoats in interactive merchandising displays allowing for zoom and multiple views across a range of brands. More interesting is tagged user-generated content (e.g. my colleague Vanessa’s twitpic of herself trying on a red Ledstone Trench at Burberry on Spring Street). Real-time results deliver relevant posts/tweets from other similarly focused shoppers. User reviews (courtesy of Yelp or similar) deliver a trove of ratings and geo-located user opinions including the best places to buy online and the best local stores in your area.

Sound familiar? Sounds like your ecommerce site except with more choice, more functionality, and more options making it better for the consumer. Sounds like a pretty awesome digital shopping experience to me – one that decidedly shifts the balance of power to the consumer and turbo-enables the digital shopping patterns we all saw emerge this holiday.

Perhaps most interesting is that Google is not bound to the need to convert. Instead, they benefit most by embracing a new paradigm of the shopping funnel as a non-linear, cross-brand, multi-branched journey. What makes this so powerful is that this is what consumers want and, most often, is in opposition to what individual retailers want to control.

The scenarios get more interesting and paradigm-bending:

• Find the perfect chair while browsing a home design magazine in airport lounge at JFK  >  use Goggles to identify the product  >  mobile search for best prices online + local availability in Seattle  >  share my shopping list to my wife who goes to see them in person and buys from our local design store.

• A Patagonia brand loyalist is shopping in a Patagonia store  >  decides on the jacket he wants but wants to make sure he isn’t overpaying  >  mobile UPC search returns not only best prices but comparable jackets from other outdoor brands  >  even more relevant is the user-generated content, specifically one outdoor enthusiast’s tweet linking to a mobile video where he demonstrates the advantages of The North Face Mercurial Jacket  >  former brand loyalist is now comparison shopping.

There are many more scenarios, all plausible, readily possible and direct outgrowths of consumer behavior patterns that are already happening (brands and retailers are catching up).

The most interesting thing here is that consumers are driving this. They want this new shopping paradigm to fuel their rapidly evolving digital lifestyles. Google’s genius is their relentless commitment to a user-centric strategy and ultimately leading consumers to a vision of their own creation.

Follow Andrew Sirotnik at twitter.com/asirotnik

I finally got a chance to read Forrester’s “US Interactive Marketing Forecast, 2009 – 2014”> (being trapped on planes does have its benefits). Overall there were no big surprises that differed from what we’ve all experienced anecdotally over the last five years: the shift to digital and the focus on experiences continues to build momentum. The usual notables:

• Consumers expect and value interactive branded experiences and punish those who don’t deliver
• Marketing groups are emerging as “strategic leaders” within their organizations (i.e. setting strategy vs. merely executing)
• Interactive marketing’s effectiveness is universally proven and acknowledged and marketing spend is shifting accordingly

Though we’ve seen the above in many articles recently about digital agencies taking the lead, I recommend reading this study for the interesting (occasionally surprising) details embedded in the research. My short list:

Search marketing will dominate because of consumers.
Evolving consumer behavior = more inventory to sell. Think longer multi-word search phrases vs. keywords of the days of yore. Equally important is the rapid adoption of consumers searching on mobile = more volume. All this demand begets more search engines and more innovation in advanced tools for marketers.

Social media will overtake email marketing.
It was no surprise to see social media as the fastest growing digital marketing category (projected 34% compound annual growth rate in spend). What surprised me though was the projection that social media spend would catch up with email marketing spend within two years (projected $1.6B in 2012) and then effectively double in the two years to follow (projected $3.1B in 2014).

Mobile app consolidation.
It was equally no surprise to see mobile marketing as one of the fasted growing categories (projected 27% CAGR). What was interesting is the prediction of fewer applications that are more strategically founded, better targeted, and more meaningful to the consumer. Expect some backlash and a correction from paralyzing consumers with 40,000 + micro-apps, many of which are not built on meaningful ideas.

5 takeaways for what this means for digital retailers and brands forging direct relationships with their consumers:

1. Business-as-usual is a dead notion.
Successful brands will look inwardly both critically and creatively to continually re-structure themselves and their budgets in alignment with consumer behavior

2.  Better understanding your consumers.
Personas of even two years ago need to evolve to better capture evolved and divergent consumer behavior patterns and their digital lifestyles.

3.  Mobile shopping is now standard best practice.
The holiday reports of consumers price-comparing in store armed with mobile scanning and searching apps shows a rapidly evolved digital behavior that will only grow. Whether or not retailers expect a direct ROI from developing mobile site and app experiences, the savvy ones will consider them standard elements of their ecommerce foundations.

4.  Embracing the shopping funnel as a (not necessarily linear) consumer journey.
The brands that win will take a multi-faceted approach to delivering meaningful shopping experiences where consumers wish to spend their time. Consumers in turn will connect with brands and products but on their own terms. It’s no longer (only) about the fewest clicks to cart or conversion per visit.

5.  It’s not about mobile or social media – it’s about ideas worth talking about
(credit: Amy Lanigan, colleague at Fluid @lanigan). Retailers will need to shift from “we need to do something on facebook” to spending more time developing winning strategies that can be executed context-appropriately across channels.

Follow Andrew Sirotnik at twitter.com/asirotnik

An article in The New York Times this morning headlines that luxury brands, once wary of the web, are now embracing it. The most interesting piece is on Christopher Bailey, Burberry’s chief creative officer: “…high-end brands should go further in trying to give Web stores the rich texture of physical stores. ‘Whether they are walking into our store on Bond Street or tapping in from India or China, it’s about making sure the consumer is getting the same experience…’”

This resonates. Fluid’s philosophy on designing customer experience is that sometimes it’s good to go outside.

When you do, stop by REI’s Seattle flagship store in Seattle. A 3-story high climbing wall dominates the entry. There’s a rain room, a bike trail, a hiking boot test course, and a JanSport play treehouse swarming with marauding children. The interior design and finish details are rustic and rough-hewn, evoking a carefully architected outdoors experience.

Virgin Megastore in Hollywood has 100+ interactive kiosks that offer as much entertainment value as they do access to inventory. And it’s a great place to see bands. And, of course, there’s always Apple. You get the idea.

The point: these elements of the in-store experience are not about thrusting product at the consumer at every opportunity.

Rather, the objective is to create an “emotional moment” with the customer — immersive, uniquely branded and entertaining. Experiences designed to meaningfully connect with the customer. And, by doing so, foster a deeper relationship with the brand, a gratifying experience, and eventually more sales.

Most online retail sites aren’t especially fun. They are usable, clean and bright. Super functional, searchable, and safe. But compared with real-world shopping, they are sterile. Today’s e-commerce sites are like retail spaces 25 years ago: white boxes, bad lighting, uninspired fixtures. Products are well organized and findable but there’s not much retail therapy happening.

The evolution of the in-store experience will absolutely be echoed in the digital realm in one form or another and then taken further than it can be in the physical world. It is inevitable. The online store will soon be the ultimate “full price” flagship, a store experience fueled by interactivity and media, free from the constraints of square footage and physics.

Proof points: Fluid’s recent launches for Vera Wang Princess and Craftsman Customizable Tool Storage

Whether or not brands are ready to embrace this point of view, consumers are demanding it.