Larry Freed, the head of ForeSee Results which is a market leader in customer satisfaction management, recently spoke at the the Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibition in Boston. In his speech, he gave 6 best practices for online retailers.

• Satisfaction drives conversion, loyalty retention, word-of-mouth and financial success.
• The consumer is in charge — which speaks to low switching costs, high competition and increased consumer knowledge.
• You can't manage what you can't measure. This basic theory applies to every management scorecard.
• Measurement is hard; don’t fall for gimmicks.
• Integration of Web metrics magnifies value.
• It takes only two things to survive and thrive in this economy: Be fiscally responsible, and satisfy your customers.

Twitter is a social messaging and microblogging site where you can post messages in 140 characters or less. The site has grown at a phenomenal phase, growing at a staggering 1,382 percent on an annual basis.

As such, it is not surprising that both celebrities, businesses and gurus have immersed themselves on Twitter. Businesss use Twitter to communicate with their customers and target market, alert users of deals and promotions, provide customer service, expose Twitter users to their content, and drive traffic back to their website.


Pete Cashmore, founder of the social media guide website Mashable.com, is ranked #27 in Twitter with 670,666 followers. All of his Tweets are Mashable posts. But instead of just repeating the title of the article, he often adds his unique spin to drive more interests -- and clicks -- to his posts.

Cashmore's tweeting is also a good example of how to brand your business in Twitter. He uses the business name "mashable" as his Twitter name, while giving his business personality and face by putting his name and photo in his bio page.

Guy Kawasaki, author of several best selling business books and venture capitalist, has about 123,075 followers. His Twitter posts typically combine a useful or interesting news items from various sources, with a link back to his website. In each post, he almost always put in a "see also" referencing his RSS aggregator site alltop.com. It's a clever way to market his website without being spammy.



Tony Hseih, CEO of Zappos.com, is ranked by Twitterholic.com as #36 with 628,707 followers. In one interview, Hseih revealed that his company doesn't look at Twitter to drive additional traffic. In fact, his posts are mostly his personal thoughts, updates of his day, events at the office -- instead of straight out promoting Zappo.com deals. Twitter for Zappos is more about branding, serving a way customers (and even employees) to see that they are real people. Their goal is to develop personal connection with the Zappos brand.


Zappos.com even offer Twitter training for their employees, and to date, 430 employees are on Twitter including Hseih. The company also has a special subdomain in their site twitter.zappos.com that covers the posts of all their employees, public mention of Zappos.com, collection of pics posted on Twitter (twitpics), and even their tutorial/quick start guide on using Twitter.

In an article in BrandWeek, PepsiCo's point man for social media Bonin Bough discussed how their company is using social media. PepsiCo is one of the big companies that extensively uses social marketing to push their brand and create meaningful conversations with consumers.

For Bough, the first part of using social media is asking the right questions:

• How do we start integrating social media into the overall organization?
• How do we look at some common platforms and services that we might be able to use across the organization?
• What are some new strategies and platforms that we might explore?
• How do we continue to bring those influencer voices inside an organization?

One of Pepsico's efforts in social media is the launching of PepTrends, where top PepsiCo communicators, influencers and Twitter users gathered for a day to tweet about emerging global trends. The Peptrends discussion on Twitter (about 2,000 so far) are exchanged by using the hashtag #peptrends, and the chats focus on "Total Convergence, Local versus Global, and Social Media (and its impact on business, relationships and privacy)."

OfficeMax launched today a new product line by Peter Walsh, a professional organizer from the TLC show Clean Sweep. The product line, called [In]Place System, includes various organizing must-haves such as document wallets and file folders, portable file totes and rolling case files, and color-coded hanging files and expanding files that can be used alone or together as an organizational system. The line will be available exclusively in OfficeMax stores.

For this launch, OfficeMax focused on tapping the blogosphere to get pre-launch buzz for the product line. The steps the company used are:

• Reach out to about 250 women's interest and organizational bloggers
• Send them product samples in advance
• Create a blogcast entitled "Work Life Organized Blogcast," which was a 40-minute live video featuring Walsh and OfficeMax's VP of marketing Julie Krueger.

The blogcast was intended to demonstrate the organizational system to these bloggers. Walsh and Krueger discussed organizational tips and strategies, and how [In]Place System products can be a solution to workplace clutter.

The strategy paid off. The campaign resulted in 65 blog posts, 1,020 Tweets and two YouTube videos, among other posts in the blogosphere. By reaching out to a passionate (and highly targeted) audience, OfficeMax was able to successfully get the word out about their new product line.

Here's an example of a blog post resulting from the campaign:

The focus of this new system is managing paperwork. I hate managing my paperwork but this new system from Peter Walsh actually has me excited to organize and declutter.

Let me tell you why. All the systems fit together, work together, and expand together. You are not tied to one color scheme as all the pieces are transparent, which also make it easy for you to see what it is inside. You can grow your system as you go.

This is the kind of endorsement you'd want from your target audience before your product even hits the shelves!

Demory's Christmas Memories is a 10-year old retail store selling Christmas items in Hagertown, Maryland. They don't have a strong Web presence, but their 3,000 sq. ft. store is one of the best of its kind in the Mid-Atlantic area.

In an interview with Selling Christmas Decorations magazine, owner Steve Demory gave this advice that is useful to those running a small retail business:

At first we bought what we liked, and then we realized that we were missing a large segment of our potential customers. We started to listen to people more and make notes of what products they asked us for that we didn't have. We bought more of what people were looking for and our business improved. However, we
don't go for gimmick items that saturate the market and then sit on shelves.

UPDATE (4/26):

Because of a bridge closure on their road from August - December 12, 2008, Demory's Christmas Memories is now for sale. The bridge closure has dramatically reduced the number of cars passing their road until the detour. With fewer cars, their sales also plummeted.

The business has fought the county on getting a temporary bridge put in. The state actually approved it but the County Commisioners voted it down. Given the difficulty in securing financing, the owners have decided to sell their well establised Christmas store.