There’s a lot of talk going on, the week after Black Friday (and this week’s ‘Cyber Monday’, though in my opinion that’s completely invented by some smart marketing person with viral skilz) on the success of online stores. I read a few articles on how to engage social networking when selling something, and I read one particular article over at HitWise on how stores should build social networking into their stores to be successful.

I think it should be the other way around. True, if you can get your customer loyalty up so high that customers will linger around your store and exchange stories with fellow shoppers, that would be great, but I think allowing for feedback like Amazon does is as far as it goes. But instead of turning shoppers into community-members-that-will-sell-to-other-members (in the end, that’s the idea, right?) why not go into existing communities?

Campari has made quite an impressive move, with their Hotel Campari campaign, which has been online for a while now, and strictly in the form of user-generated content on community sites like YouTube, MySpace and Flickr. ReadIWriteWeb has an excellent piece up on the campaign, including an interview with the responsible marketer at MRM Worldwide, Niccolò Magnani:

“Our strategy was to focus on viral seeding and social networking, no traditional media adv online. I have no idea of the exact number of people going from Social Networks to Website [...] because we worked with a lot of social networks.

More than quantity, what I like to point is the quality of the relationship between users and Campari. Client is very happy about the close relationship between the brand and the users.

What I like is that we created a community of people that we can further talk about red passion.”

Basically, Campari set up themed profiles at a bunch of social networking sites, creating some buzz and driving traffic to the campaign’s website, Hotel Campari (not necessarily work safe but definitely Salma Hayek safe!). It’s a great move I think, but there is the risk of over-marketing. Also, the fact that they’re faking it, might create some community backlash -but perhaps in that scenario there’s no such thing as bad publicity.

On the subject, I’ve had this idea (readers of these pages apt at programming should find more ideas I want executed and use for my non-programming self!) of a container box, or list, that you can fill with items you would like as a gift for an upcoming birthday, Christmas, anniversary or wedding (duh!). I shall name it the ‘Birthday/Anniversary/Christmas/Bridal List’. Heh. But seriously, imagine you being able to build a list from several different shopping sites, with thumbnailed items, price and a short description and a link back to the store where you had found it, so your friends can buy it in a few clicks. Then, like all those slide show widgets littering MySpace, load it up to your profile page, paste it in your blog or wherever, and allow your friends to access the list’s discussion page (as well as other users to go straight to the product page on the shop’s website), where they could talk about your lame taste, suggest gifts among themselves, or decide who buys you what. Obviously, you should be excluded from access to the discussion page or be able to see which items have been crossed off. No more duplicate gifts, exactly what you wanted and people talking about products.

That’s a triple win situation, is it not? The only difficulty would be perhaps in how to ensure that you as the list owner do not see it (kind of like a reversed registration/login) -perhaps some social control could be helpful, by giving all friends and family access to all other friend’s and family’s details. I’m sure you’ll figure out a way.

Update: This is insane, and a nice addition to the ‘fakin’ it’ theme: Fakeyourspace (again, content warning is in order!) lets you add fake friends to your social networking site, with weekly fake comments, for real money. This just opens up a whole new page for any student of sociology…