Holiday-hungry retailers go in for Socialized selling
When the retail going gets tough, the tough tweet.
Retailers have waded deeper and deeper into social media in recent years, going viral to reveal a bit of personality or simply pump promotions.
Yet this year’s holiday season, retailers are taking more chances in a medium both tantalizing — it’s free and instantaneously reaches thousands — and terrifying as companies’ once highly controlled voices can be twisted, taken out of context or taunted in a fickle online community with extreme distaste for flagrant self-promotion.
The tools vary, from Twitter, a modern-day telegraph requiring its typically younger users to communicate in “tweets” of 140 characters or less, to Facebook, a slightly less edgy online bulletin board that’s taken off with baby boomers in recent years. Even less Internet-savvy retailers feeling the economic crunch are ramping up blogs, cell phone texts or e-mails.
That’s because social media can mean moola. This holiday season, 28 percent of shoppers in a national poll said such interactive marketing influenced their gift-buying, according to market researcher ComScore Inc. Retailers listened, with 47.1 percent of online retailers polled by their trade group saying they’ll increase social media use.
Any edge is needed as retailers — many still stung from last holiday season — fight for the few dollars consumers are willing to part with. The National Retail Federation predicts sales in November and December will total $437.6 billion, a 1 percent decline from last year’s 20-year holiday season low of $441.97 billion.
