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.

… 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.

*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)

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.

Prior to the change we did a survey. We wanted to know the degree to which people were getting involved with brands on Facebook. Are fans in it for the arm candy or are they locked in long-term? Is all of this brand fanning one big booty call?

The results: 35.3% described their relationship with brand pages as Love ‘em and Leave ‘em.

The rest of the results…
29.4% Married: I work for the brand, product or company
17.6% Arm candy: I fan a brand so people will know I’m affiliated with it
11.8% Booty call: I’ll visit every once and a while
5.9% NA: I’ve never fanned a brand, company or product
0% Hot and Heavy: I’m actively involved & engaged with the fan page

The great news? This is changing. Brands are giving fans a reason to return. One of the best reasons to return as I see it? Shopping.

Our FanShop has proven it. And kudos to Levi’s for being the first to bring Facebook’s liking social plug-in to life with gusto. The media implications of this are impressive. When my “like” of 501 Jeans meets my wall meets Vitrue’s estimate of FB page wall click through rates at 6.5% we have another measure of ROI in social media. Boom.

I am a fan of liking content. And of having this liking explode outside of the confines of Facebook. But I miss fans of brands. A “Fan” is clear cut and cheering for you. Is a “liker” really going to paint their face and take a stand on behalf of your brand?

Although our Love ‘em and Leave ‘em fans likely weren’t doing that anyway.

Now we shall all see if “Likes” are enough to get us into a long-term relationship. I’m optimistic about the prospects.

Cheers,
Amy

Please note: Our survey was informal and distributed via social media.

Fluid Experience’s Merchandiser component enables merchants to frequently update their site with fresh content without having to involve the IT department. Merchants simply upload content to the administrative tools, group them into a merchandiser and then deploy. The whole process takes a matter of minutes. The look and feel of the merchandiser is template based and can be configured with brand appropriate themes. This allows business users to add new content without worrying about veering off design. You can also customize the interaction your users experience, allowing them to navigate through banners with seamless cross-fading, scrolling or pagination. Our Merchandiser component can also contain shoppable lifestyle imagery and interactive SWFs for an extra degree of interactivity.

To learn more about implementing rotating banners on your site, contact support@fluidretail.com

When we think about great real world shopping experiences, there is a common theme to every flagship store and back alley pop-up shop: excellent product presentation. In the offline world, it’s guaranteed that there will be a real live product to pick up, inspect and share. You need only watch shoppers in a average apparel store to see how picking up an item, holding it up and glancing in the mirror creates an emotional attachment.

This simple act is so basic in the offline world that it’s too easy to overlook when envisioning the online experience. While best practices dictate things like the Add to Cart button being above the fold and intuitive search and browse functionality, it’s important not to lose sight of the basics:

Outstanding product presentation is a ticket to the game. Without it, consumers are may look elsewhere for this emotional attachment.

Scene 7 was kind enough to validate this philosophy in their recent “What Shoppers Want” survey. The Cliff’s Notes version is this:  shoppers want rich, vivid product imagery and the ability to browse views and colors and zoom in with simple mouse over actions. Clicking is too much work.  They want to “go big” and inspect every last detail of the product with minimal effort,  just as they would in the offline world.

At Fluid, we designed Fluid Experience from the ground up to produce rich, easy-to-use product displays that are unparalleled in the e-commerce landscape. Almost as important, we made them incredibly simple to build and change so you can experiment and find out what delights your customers.

In the spirit of going big, we took a few minutes to put together a demo that does just that. Simple mouse movements change views and expose zoom. Plus you can click View Larger for even greater detail and zoom. We think you’ll agree that it’s difficult to go back to just an average product image.