The Official Fluid Blog

As Kenmore’s social media agency of record we get a fair number of trips in to Chicago. Here are seven observations from our latest:

1. Fluid’s Rachel Roy fan-only Facebook shop resonates – with fans and with clients. Andrew, our CXO, explains why it works here. A 25% increase in fans in the first 24 hours is worth talking about.

2. Lucky magazine is integrating digital into publishing and fashion in great ways. In this month’s issue: Daily Deals for their At Your Service, QR code promos and ads using ShopText (think text-to-give becomes text-to-buy or sample).

3. Social media expertise is excelling in-house. As more brands hire community engagement or social media managers we’re finding big opportunities for strong partnerships. Client understanding will lead the shake out of social media vendors and offerings. Yay.

4. It’s time to upgrade my iPhone. Why? Video. What sparked this thought? I watched a guy clean and squeegee the windows near SFO security with more gusto, style and love than can ever be imagined. It was awesome. He needs to be seen.

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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.

A bronze to be exact. Or for those of you who once swam on a summer league team, a white ribbon. (Just for the record: In 2010 we’re going for gold!)

Social Commerce Today ranked the top 10 Social Commerce Highlights of 2009. In a list showcasing stiff competition, Fluid Social tied with Facebook Connect for allowing shoppers to shop together in digital commerce – quite nice company on the podium.

We edged out GroupOn. Which, in my opinion, is one of the smartest, most compelling companies currently gaining volumes of buyers. Commerce is now content and I’m cheering it on.

What’s particularly smart about this blog list? It markets the blog as much as it showcases the winners. If everyone on the list writes about being written up marketing is amplified by 10. Seth Godin recently showed the power of this tactic for the collaborative eBook What Matters Now.

We at Fluid hope your new year is off to a great start. We like the looks of what 2010 holds.

Side note: According to a Marist Poll, 48% of Americans say they are likely to make a #newyearsresolution this year. 33% remember making one last year. The delta may mean that the mind is quite forgiving of what slips.

Public accountability helps make resolutions stick. Writing on this blog every Tuesday is one of my resolutions. Now you know. More importantly, now I know you know. Bring on the Tuesday Musings…

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.

The other night I let my son configure a pair of Vans slip-ons for his 6th birthday. Watching him and his 3 year old brother navigate the process was informative. Two key things I observed:

• My son moused-over every single option for every single product part (not kdding…he methodically moused over every option). This was only possible because Fluid Configure uses client-side technology (Adobe Flex in this case) to do the image previewing, meaning you don’t need a round trip to the server to generate the image.  Using server-side imaging technology this could take an hour or more.
• My 3 year old son asked, “Can we turn it over?” Specifically, even as an observer to the process he wanted to view the product from multiple perspectives. While Vans doesn’t feature the incredible rotation of Your Reebok, but it does show the product from multiple views with great responsiveness.

Overall it was gratifying to see them  quickly grasp the experience, move through the configuration process and take great pleasure from the emails and SMS’s they were able to send letting their family know about the shoes they had just designed. If only the design of their shoes could have been so positive.

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.