Cerado

We had the chance to chat via email with Jordan Crook from Mobile Marketer earlier this week about Scanaroo, our loyalty card app for the iPhone.

Here’s a link to Crook’s side of the story, which we think was pretty-much spot on.

The key graf:

This is really the foundation of why we built the app, and it derives directly from Doc Searls’ drive with ProjectVRM, which has a stated goal of creating “tools of independence and engagement” for the customer side of the business relationship.

That said, Crook really grokked that what we’re trying to do with Scanaroo provides a benefit for both parties.

I saw this tweet today from @FitMenu which said “I’ve turned down loyalty programs to avoid that one more thing to carry,” and Crook noted that “often times, loyalty cards, gift cards and membership cards are not used on a daily basis,” which is exactly right, because it’s currently a hot pain to carry them all around. So, the retailers win, too, by always having the opportunity to have their card easily available.

Related:

Cerado Launches Loyalty Card Organization App (Mobile Marketer)
Scanaroo web site (http://www.scanaroo.com)

From RetailTouchpoints, July 23, 2009:

Providing the ability to reach some 250 million users, the Facebook platform has been established as a pot of gold for retailers, and some are taking full advantage of its offerings.

“Retailers that have a presence Facebook can leverage the social network for extending brand recognition, attracting new customers and staying top of mind with existing customers, and gaining more insight into their customers’ preferences,” says Nancy MacGregor Hill, Communications and Social Media Strategist, Real Time Communications. “Fan or group pages on Facebook are a great way for retail brands to make announcements about sales, offer special promotions for Facebook users, particularly for those who refer their friends, and see comments about customers’ experiences, their questions and other relevant discussions on their wall pages.” All of this, Hill says, is useful in strengthening a brand, supporting other advertising and marketing initiatives and helping serve customers better.

An example of Coach’s Facebook Fan Page Ad
“Whether you are a small local business, or even a well known product or service you will need to give some thought to your audience like, who they are, how do they want to be spoken to, what messages would you want them to receive, and what are the tactics for having them interact with your message,” says Paul Dunay, Global Managing Director of Services and Social Marketing at Avaya & Author of the forthcoming book “Facebook Marketing for Dummies.”

While experts agree that the common objectives for retailers should be branding, community building and intelligence acquisition, it is important to remember that the customer is still top of mind.

“The important thing to remember about social business is that all of the various parties (retailers, customers, prospective customers, etc.) all can—and should be—a part of the conversation,” says Chris Carfi, Co-Founder of Cerado, Inc. & Author of The Social Customer Manifesto Blog. “The dynamic is very different than the ‘customer-as-target’ mentality.”

Here are innovative ways retailers are addressing these kinds of objectives:

* Whole Foods: The organic grocer, with over 100,000 fans on its Facebook page, has done an outstanding job offering information that’s not only relevant to the store, but to the food industry as well. The company knows who’s shopping in the store—customers looking for the best in organic foods. A recent post on Whole Foods’ Facebook page offered an announcement about the USDA National Organics Program hiring enforcement investigators, which was “great news for organic integrity.” So while they do provide coupons and offers relevant to shopping at Whole Foods, they’re very focused on providing more information that gives a backbone to the name.
* Mandee: The small young apparel retailer, with nearly 22,000 fans uses the status feature on Facebook to ask their fans questions about merchandise and fashion preferences, like what colors and styles shoppers are interested in. Who makes the best pair of jeans? They also ask questions that provide richer information, not necessarily relevant to merchandise, but to learn more about their customers, like ‘What concerts you’re looking forward to this summer?’ (because Mandee wants to give out tickets), or whether or not you share clothes with your sisters. They have a strong presence on every major social network, from MySpace and Twitter to My Yearbook and Sodahead, which are geared to younger demographics.
* Sears: The cross-channel retailer, which recently launched “Christmas in July,” offers visitors a real incentive to become a fan: A free $10 Sears coupon. Sears currently has nearly 25,000 fans.
* Coach: The luxury retailer offers Facebook fans an exclusive free gift, but they have to fill out a form which asks for basic customer information, and bring it into a Coach store. This effort has potential to increase store traffic and help Coach to enhance their contact database. The Coach Facebook page has nearly 400,000 fans.
* Zappos: The e-tailer, recently acquired by Amazon, tapped Facebook for a video campaign where fans send in video clips of them opening the box of shoes they just received. The company also developed an application that enables people to show their recent purchases and brand preferences on their personal Facebook pages, creating an opportunity to make huge viral impact. Zappos has nearly 19,000 fans on Facebook.
* MiniUSA: The brand provides a venue where passionate customers have built a community. Nearly 170,000 fans of Mini are connected and rallying around what they are passionate about. They’re sharing pictures, stories and learnings about their cars with each other. “Facebook gives Mini a center-of-gravity around which the fans can congregate and, at the same time, gives them the opportunity to listen to those same customers and learn from them,” says Carfi.

Carfi adds that retailers need to assess the benefits of Facebook on an individual basis, like what business objectives they can measure. “Metrics can fall into a number of different buckets: Financial/ROI metrics, activity metrics, or others,” he says. “Instead of looking at the Facebook activities in isolation, look at how the whole business is doing (gaining market share and investing in expansion), like MiniUSA, which has seen significant increase overall.”

Dunay, who pens the Buzz Marketing for Technology Blog, says having a Facebook presence, like a Web site, is a fundamental tactic, which calls for posting updates and interesting content as frequently as possible. “Be sure to get your employees involved,” he says. “Encourage them to become fans and drive the conversations to create a thriving community. This is the key to growing your fan base ‘virally.’ Keep in mind Facebook pages are indexable so be sure to write your content with good SEO in mind.”

Scanaroo
Simplify. Save. Share.

Scanaroo is an iPhone app that helps you simply and easily carry all those cards that are cluttering up your life. Just take a picture of the card with your phone’s camera, and file it away. It’s like spring cleaning for your bag or wallet.

Scanaroo helps you use your iPhone to keep track of all your loyalty, insurance, library, membership and other cards.

It keeps all of your information at the ready to help serve you (instead of the other way around).

You can download Scanaroo at http://www.scanaroo.com.

On July 2, RetailTouchpoints featured a great article about how the retail industry is evolving to embrace social media. Some key thoughts from the article:

For those retailers, just starting down the social networking path, industry experts recommend the following key strategies for social media:

• Get Personal: Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh handles the company’s Twitter account, putting a friendly face behind a big company. Hseih also follows people back for that extra special personal touch.
• Let Customers Know What’s Happening: One of the main foundations of social networks is the real time updates and information sharing. Let customers know about store openings, in-store events, promotions, etc.
• Ask Questions: Apparel retailer Mandee posts questions on Facebook through the status feature, which provides rich, real-time customer intelligence on preferred styles and colors to assist in merchandising decisions, as well as understand customers on a more personal level.
• Be Engaged and Participate: Retailers need to monitor feedback by listening to what consumers are saying about the brand and respond accordingly.
• Be Relevant: Post information not only relevant to your brand, but to people who shop in your stores. Whole Foods posts recipes for organic dishes on their Twitter site. People want useful information that can help them make informed decisions.

Read the rest here.

(This article originally appeared in MobileMarketerDaily on July 1, 2009)

On the surface, there are stark differences between business-to-business marketing and business-to-consumer marketing: audience size, volume of sales and magnitude of purchases. But as mobile becomes ubiquitous for connecting with customers, are we starting to see a convergence between the two?

I would contend that the answer is, yes – if we have the courage to think creatively and move beyond the already-tired clichés of mobile marketing such as text campaigns and mobile couponing.

In fact, with a bit of creative thought, the opportunity for connecting with new customers in both audiences is quite remarkable if we concentrate on the experiences that can be provided with today’s mobile devices.

So what are the ways that we can get creative?

Let’s look at the root of that word, “creative” for a second. It stems from create.

Every one of our prospective customers – both B2B and B2C – has not just a tiny screen onto which we can foist our message, but now has the ability to create things as well – photos, videos, conversations and relationships.

Let’s look at the taken-for-granted camera phone capabilities.

Again, why not think about how we can bring prospects into the process by enabling and encouraging them to be a creative part of the sale, instead of a passive recipient?

In the B2C case, we can, for example, encourage contests and participation where customers take their photos with the most interesting/scenic/extraordinary usage of our products and submit them to a community site.

Similarly, we can encourage B2B customers to send their sales reps photos of their unique environment/circumstance/prickly problem so that the reps can better understand the situation and propose an insightful solution.

In the B2C case, we could encourage video testimonials to be pulled into a powerful montage.

In the B2B case, we can gather videos of customer best-practice tips to illustrate how our products perform in the real-world and how they are being used to solve real problems in an efficient manner.

But, more important than the technical tools, why not enable prospects to easily connect with the people and information they need to make a decision to buy?

It is all about the connections and the relationships.

In the B2C case, a great example of this would be making it easy for customers to locate and, after the initial sale, create reviews of their experiences with a product from other customers.

Similarly, in the B2B realm, this entails providing tools to connect the prospect with other similar past customer references, testimonials, case studies or a knowledgeable sales associate.

The upshot is that for both B2B and B2C we have a real opportunity with mobile: the opportunity to differentiate based on how we encourage, empower and enable active, social customers instead of passive targets.

The organizations that crack the code on this are going to be the winners in using this medium.

So let us use mobile to bring both B2B and B2C customers into the process, instead of simply throwing marketing messages at them.

Let’s challenge ourselves to start conversations, and enable prospective customers to engage with us and with each other, regardless of what bucket  – B2B or B2C – in which they have historically been classified.