Benefit Cosmetics

The Internet Retailer editors liked the bold graphics, video tutorials on how to use its cosmetics, along with the social features, including a tool that lets consumers post and answer product questions, and a social club that connects Benefit fans with others around the world.

Sur la Table

Innovative navigation that puts relevant deals right in the front of the shopper caught the attention of the editors when they reviewed Sur la Table. For this site, Fluid focused on interactive merchandising and conversion.

Wag.com

Fluid helped combine the hallmark efficiency of Quidsi, the parent company of Diapers.com and Soap.com, to deliver a whimsical experience that changes the way people shop for pet supplies.  Internet Retailers’ editors noted the site’s novel navigation approach, which lets pet owners browse by animal type — not only cats and dogs — to find needed products in one section, each with its own color scheme that serves as an anchor. Wag.com has the benefit of learning from sister site Diapers.com, which was also developed by Fluid.

Follow this link to see the complete Hot 100 list of companies.

-The Fluid Team

Fluid is excited to see you at eTail East in Boston this upcoming week (Aug 8-11). On the agenda:

- Booth #52: Our product and agency teams will be showcasing how Fluid can have a positive impact on your digital commerce plan. Stop by with hard questions or just to say hello. We’re looking forward to meeting you in person.

- Aug. 8th 2:25pm session: Fluid presents “Social Commerce: 5 Strategies that Work.” I’ve 20 minutes to show you cutting edge industry examples of what is working in social commerce and to put a stake in the ground about what two trends will hit next.

My end goal: Get your minds racing with ideas for your social commerce plan. And arm you with examples (ideally a few you’ve never seen) to make the case for action in this area.

Contact Isaac Newton to set up an in-person meeting. (How can you resist meeting Isaac Newton?) Safe travels!

Cheers,
Amy

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!

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

… while magazine reading and entertainment viewing are getting the early consumer buzz on the iPad, the real play for brands may be as an e-commerce platform. Commerce and on-the-go buying has been successful on the iPhone, but the small screen size and limited visuals have shortchanged many efforts. The iPad brings the capability for better graphics and video, a touch screen for an experience more akin to catalog shopping, social networking, an easier way to swipe or touch to buy, and even cost saving and green appeal with the use of less paper for weekly flyers and catalogs…

… The internet allows for great shopping tools to find the best prices or get reviews, but it’s missing the pizzazz — the reason why we want something in the first place,” said Brad Spirrison, managing editor of Appolicious. “With the iPad, now you can have great content combined with a great pathway to e-commerce all on one device. That’s a game-changer.

Why do retailers think they have to wait for the iPad to change their
approach to digital merchandising? Why do they think that the iPad is
the first device and opportunity to combine great content with eCommerce?

The iPad didn’t need to be a game-changer for eCommerce – it’s just a
touchscreen browser – but it makes people think differently about web design and experience, and all of the opportunities and design concepts that were available before the iPad (but which they rejected as “too edgy”) now seem acceptable. There is no reason why eCommerce web sites could not have been doing some of the things that people are doing with the iPad – the only difference is mobility – but why should mobile experiences be more engaging and content driven than a desktop (or laptop) web experience?

There is no reason why every digital shopping experience cannot be more rich and engaging, regardless of the device delivering the experience. Retailers and merchandisers have been stuck in old patterns and “traditional” ways of thinking about the web on the desktop, and the iPad is presenting an opportunity to “think different.” We should take this opportunity and run with it to create better digital shopping experiences for our customers, and in doing so we can also create great shopping experiences for any device or platform.

How did Old Spice make virality happen?

Let’s step back a moment and first take a look at something else that appeared on the Web this week: Google’s Paul Adams shared his slides from a presentation about the real structures of social networks. It’s a long (216 slides!), detailed, and fantastically informative lesson on how social communication and interaction occurs.

Why Google is Scared of Facebook, or How Social Networks Really Work

Starting on slide 147 he discusses the role of influencers in social networks, and on slide 159 he presents a graphic of how people think influencers work and how they actually work.

Go look at the diagram, because Old Spice is using this influencer diagram to create viral videos via Twitter where Isaiah Mustafa (the handsome, shirtless Old Spice guy from the television commercials and YouTube videos) creates personalized videos for people:

Old Spice is Making Custom Videos (via Mashable)

Old Spice helped these videos go viral by starting with seed videos created for influential people (e.g., Perez Hilton), because they know that if they reach people who have large audiences the influencers will share these things with their audiences if they like them, and especially if these things feature the influential person. Once the seed was planted and influential people started responding via Twitter, Old Spice created new videos for people who responded. It grew (well, it really exploded) from there.

Influence the influencer, and you influence all of their followers, too.

Time: 10am PT / 1pm ET

Speakers:
Andrew Sirotnik, Fluid, Founder/CXO
Amy Lanigan, Fluid, Director of Strategy

A sneak peak:
- Sold out sales on Facebook
- Liking after Levi’s
- Mobile sharing during shopping
- Live streaming chefs

There are still a few slots available. Register here.