Orvis Going to The Dogs, Socially
I was talking Monday evening at the eTail opening reception with Kevin Ertell, VP-retail strategies for ForeSee Results, and Brad Wolansky, VP-global e-commerce for The Orvis Company, and the conversation quickly steered to social media.
The question: How can retailers effectively leverage Facebook, Twitter and other social networks? Are merchants going to force-feed its customers with offers a few times a day? Or will their message get lost in the shuffle of other status updates and Twitter feeds?
Ertell said he’s tried tweeting people recipients with a simple request: Re-tweet this tweet, and change the number in the parenthesis by one so he could see how many generations it went forward.
The furthest Ertell has seen those tweets go is the four.
But also, Wolansky pointed out, if a consumer is that interested in receiving communication with a merchant, why wouldn’t the consumer just add its RSS feed to his or her RSS reader?
Wolansky said Orvis is not using Twitter yet, but may have found the perfect link between Orvis, its customers, and Facebook.
Orvis is running its annual online dog photo contest and created a Facebook app to encourage entrants to show off their entries to their family and friends.
If you’re a dog lover and you enter the contest (and you have a Facebook account), there’s no doubt in my mind you’re going to want to show your dog’s photo off to your Facebook friends.
That’s just the way dog lovers are.
Now, every Facebook friend that opens the request to see the entries has a compelling reason to click on to the Orvis Website. Will it turn all these consumers into Orvis buyers? Probably not. But at the least, it will help Orvis raise awareness and visibility to consumers who may have never shopped there before.
And more importantly, without a sales push.
