Our own Jason Billingsley led a talk yesterday at Shop.org’s Annual Summit in Las Vegas titled Is There A Role for Social Media in Modern Retailing?.

One of the examples Jason mentioned in his session is EyeBuyDirect’s Wall of Frame - a gallery of photos uploaded by site visitors using a try-before-you-buy tool that superimposes a virtual pair of frames on your photo.

Each user can upload multiple photos, and each is accompanied by the product image and details, with a button to buy the style.

With a photo and a little skill, not only can you get a much better idea of how a certain style will look like on your face, but you can also get opinions from friends and strangers. You can email the link to your friends, or post yourself on Facebook. Or, fellow Wall of Framers can leave comments (but very few people do).

Unless you’re a thirteen year old girl, chances are you don’t go shopping with an entourage, so posting to Facebook is a great way to get peer opinions. And it’s a great way to encourage word-of-mouth through social media in a non-spammy way.

The Wall also gives an alternative way for customers to browse products - scanning faces, one could keep an eye out for a “person like me” - others around your age or face shape.

Although I think this is a fantastic merchandising tool that helps customers see the product in-context and reduce fears, uncertainties and doubts. But I think a few things could make this even more effective:

1. The Wall of Frame is very analog to navigate. There are over 1800 photos uploaded, and you can only browse them page by page. There should be some defined tagging system so you could filter photos - by gender, age, face shape, style category (classic, sport etc), material (plastic, titanium etc) and product name — so customers could browse people like them and styles they like.

I say “defined” meaning pre-determined. If you let customers self-tag, you’ll get so many variations the tag-sonomy can grow out of control. Tags may mean something only to the tagger, or just be too uncommon to be valuable.

2. The product pages don’t leverage the user generated photos. The tagging system would have a secondary purpose to navigation - whenever a photo is tagged with a style, it auto-appears in a gallery on the product page. Remember, not everybody lands on your home page first and figures out you have a Wall of Frame. If you’re doing your job with SEO and PPC, chances are you get a lot of traffic landing on product pages.

Seeing people wearing frames with a link to the try-on tool may be a stronger call to action than the current top-left hand icon that is easy to overlook. People don’t expect to find this type of tool to begin with, and the faint icon looks almost like a watermark.

3. There are no reviews/feedback on product pages or Wall of Frame pages. Did Sally who uploaded 4 photos 3 months ago purchase something? Was she satisfied? Was the Wall of Frame preview an accurate representation of what the frames actually look like on? Are they comfortable? Also, the product pages don’t have reviews and ratings - a feature that consistently tops customer wish lists of what they like to see from online stores.

Nevertheless, I think this is a very neat tool and should I ever require glasses (hey, I’m a blogger - it’s almost inevitable) I’ll be back to play around with it.

Luxury retailer Cartier recently launched a MySpace presence for its Love by Cartier campaign. But it faces an interesting reputation management issue: since MySpace already has hundreds of profiles that use the name Cartier (it is a surname, after all).

If you type in “Cartier MySpace” in Google, this is what you get:

If someone really wants to find the page, they may head over to MySpace and use it’s site search box, and still not find the official page:

You have to type “Love By Cartier” in Google or MySpace to get the link to the Cartier MySpace page (at time of posting, algorithm changes or incoming links to Cartier’s page may change that).

Yahoo’s algorithm does select the right page for “Cartier MySpace”:

Though you can’t control how Google matches pages to the search term (duplicate content filter in action), you can build links to the page you want to rank well to help boost its “Page Rank” which may cause it to beat out other pages in the search engine’s index. (If the search engine indexed 500+ pages from MySpace relevant to the term “Cartier”, it only picks 1 to show in search results, 2 if it uses an indented second result).

Cartier could also nag MySpace to tweak its internal search to rank its page tops for “Cartier” searches, especially since this is an advertising partnership between the two.

This is also an example of why brands should really claim their social network profile names / domains / Facebook Pages and Groups proactively, even if they just sit on them. It’s easy for net citizens to beat you to the punch which makes it harder for you to be found in search engines and social network searches.

Ed Whiting from Travel Remark put together this eye-opening video about Facebook travel applications. Just for fun, take a guess how many travel-related Facebook applications there are before you click play (the grand total will be revealed at the end).

And this is just one category of commercial applications, folks.

When Facebook applications were launched last year, first movers in ecommerce included Blue Nile’s Wish List and Backcountry’s Steep and Cheap. I give credit to these retailers for giving it a shot. Unfortunately, almost a year later you can count the number of daily users for these apps on one hand.

Other social shopping applications like StyleFeeder and Polyvore get a few thousand daily users - not bad, but they are definitely the exception.

Challenges in Social Shopping Facebook Application Marketing

1. Application Aggro - Requests to add applications from friends are no longer trusted. Much worse, in fact - it has turned friends into perceived spammers and prompted many Facebook statuses along the lines of “stop sending me [radio edit] applications!

2. Saturation - At this stage in the game, there are so many applications that to get popular, you have to be remarkable. You have to provide so much value that people will add your application and risk losing friends to evangelize your app with invites.

3. Commercialization - Judging by daily average users, it’s clear that Facebookers would rather buy and sell each other than buy real products.

4. App ADD - Even if someone adds your application, that person has to be really motivated to use it on a regular basis. Otherwise it will inevitably be removed.

5. Co-dependency - Many apps depend on a sufficient number of your friends’ participation for there to be any practical value (Facebook being a social network, after all). If a user doesn’t have mutual friends with the application, he can get no utility out of it.

Given these conditions, I don’t think there’s a future for e-tailers to win at this game. What do you think?

Facebook recenly released a guidebook for businesses titled: Facebook Insider’s Guide to Viral Marketing. Don’t get too excited about the title, just because you set up a Fan Page for your business and buy a few social ads does not mean you’ll unleash a profit-virus, or even make a ripple in the pond. But the guide does help you understand what Facebook has made available for you and how to get a Page all set up.

Considering the price (free) it certainly isn’t a bad idea to put one up. Especially since any of your fans can set up a page on your behalf without anyone knowing it wasn’t you, so it’s a good idea to be the first out of the gate so there’s no confusion and you can control your introductory message and the way your Page functions yourself. Other users of Facebook could still set up unauthorized Pages, but at least the early fans won’t be usurped by the unofficial Page.

Get Reviewed on Facebook

Unlike Facebook Groups and Sponsored Groups, Facebook Pages are like people — they can add applications. One application that is useful for online retailers and other businesses is Reviews. Reviews can only be added to Pages, not individual profiles, so you won’t find it in your regular applications search, but you can view the application page through the link.

Continue Reading:
Get Your E-Store Reviewed on Facebook »

Many of us wonder what the Elf Yourself campaign could have been if it were a bit more focused on sales. Maybe it would have looked a bit more like Irish Spring’s Get Irish Now campaign?

(Due to annoyingness of sound, I have posted a screen shot in lieu of video. You can see the video here).

Yep, that’s me. I’ve Irishified myself - even down to an Irish accent. (Now, if only it could talk like an Irish pirate…)

Do consumers still get a kick out of this kinda thing? Or is this just another “me too” campaign? Irish Spring did do things a bit differently, which might give this a better shot at success:

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Get Your Irish On - Here Comes Another Viral »