The Official Fluid Blog

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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.

Damn. Should I be concerned?

Bacon currently has 379,844 fans on Facebook. Kevin Bacon has 5,985. With six degree of separation that likely equals an amount that exceeds the number of Facebook fans for your brand.

Unless you’re Coca-Cola (4,007,785 fans), who let two fans keep running their page or Starbucks (5,116,222 fans) who frankly, is Starbucks.

Free shipping for becoming a fan wasn’t enough for JCrew (164,848 fans) to unseat bacon. Although kudos to them for their simple implementation of a proven ecommerce winner.

A brand’s number of fans has become the stuff of bragging rights and for some, night sweats. Rivaled only by the quest for viral video views on YouTube.

My opinion: Kick the leader board to the curb and don’t let bacon get your brand down.
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The dollar is making a comeback. I don’t mean in international currency. I’m talking virtual chocolate cake, garden growing and accountability. Two mind racing ideas from last week:

1. Inside Network and Serious Business released a report projecting U.S. virtual goods to hit $1B this year. It’s a twist on nothing for something driven by Facebook apps like Farmville – which gained a mind bending 18M users in the last month to hit 51M monthly uniques.

Or the goods can be as simple as a $1 virtual birthday gift. Adding $1 seems to make it mean more than when it’s free.

[From an ecommerce perspective: What are you selling that people would want in a virtual form? Or where could we be selling it?]

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New research from Mintel and publicized by eMarketer further reinforces the importance of friends and family members in buying process. This is exactly the type of authentic peer-to-peer feedback, both asynchronous sharing through Facebook and real time collaborative shopping, we enable with Fluid Social.

A nice piece by Jennifer Saranow Schultz ran in the Wall Street Journal this morning describing how retailers are increasingly leveraging a shoppers’ social network to move people through the conversion funnel. In it Jennifer does a great job of capturing the key aspects of the Fluid Social product.

The data we’ve been collecting from our customer installations is proving that comments from friends are the most effective way to drive immediate increases in engagement and conversion.  It is good to see this topic getting attention from the mainstream business press.

Fluid Social takes a fresh look at defining what social shopping is. It is the first product to focus on getting consumers the opinions that matter most – those of their friends and family – at the point they matter most – on your ecommerce site. The product’s genesis is from insights gained through years spent designing leading-edge ecommerce experiences on behalf of our clients. It has been in development for years.

We’ve written a whitepaper to articulate why this is such an important topic and how retailers can leverage existing friendships and social networks to improve the shopping experience, increase engagement and sell more. If you’d like to read the whitepaper please visit the Fluid website. If you need to read more about Fluid Social we can help you with that, too.

In this article from early 2008 Nick O’Neill predicts the existing social networks like Facebook with much larger audiences will overtake the shopping-focused sites like Kaboodle, Stylehive and This Next. We couldn’t agree more – we think the opinions of your existing friends will be more important to driving transactions than those of online “shopping friends.”

Customer and shopper response to date have told us that Nick was right. People are thrilled to finally have a way to get the opinions of their “real” friends directly embedded in the shopping experience. Want to see how? Checkout the latest on JanSport.com.

Some of you may have seen the recent articles published about the latest release of Fluid Social on AdAge and Techcrunch. We’re flattered by the coverage but even more excited by the response we are getting from customers and prospective customers.

We’re excited to point you to a new and improved version of our Friend-Based Merchandising on the JanSport site. The new release not only allows shoppers to see their Facebook friends’ comments on products on the shopping site but it also allows users to start their product exploration from within the JanSport site by clicking on the “My Friends Like” tab. It also pulls comments from friends to feature them more prominently on the site. It also posts to your news feed when you comment on a product or ask a question and features a Facebook application that allows you to zoom in and see a product in multiple colors.

We’re excited about the new release but can’t wait to hear your thoughts. Let us know what you think.

When we discuss Fluid Social, particularly for Facebook, we often get the question of whether a particular brand’s shoppers are actually on Facebook. That question is getting easier and easier to answer as there is overwhelming evidence that soon EVERYONE will be using Facebook regularly. A latest bit of research just showed up on CNN.com.