When it comes to the web, one name that doesn’t exactly jump out at you is Sears Holdings Corporation (SHC). Certainly, you might think that during a economic downtime, the parent company of Sears and Kmart has more pressing things to worry about than social networking. But it is thinking about them. And tomorrow, it’s launching a couple sites to prove it.
MySears and MyKmart were built to foster a community around the long tradition of shopping at those retailers. The idea being that this community would not only be interested in buying things, but would be interested in rating items, having discussions about items and giving feedback to the company itself. Perhaps if you got users to interact and form this community, eventually they’ll keep coming back to Sears or Kmart to do their shopping, was the thought. And after over a year of testing, it seems to be working pretty well.
Yes, MySears and MyKmart have actually be around in one form or another as a testing ground for a while, Rob Harles, SHC’s VP of community, tells me. It started out as an experiment to see where it would lead. And even with the sites officially launching, it remains an experiment, he says. But it’s one the company is getting much more comfortable with.
The sites have been built in conjunction with Viewpoints, a consumer review social networking site. And as Harles tells it, SHC seems to have a pretty good grasp of what could conceivably work and what won’t. It doesn’t, for example, want to build another giant social network like Facebook or MySpace. Instead, it aims to stay within its reach, engage customers, and eventually, hopefully, create a sense of the small town shopkeeper who knows all of his customers, as Harles put it. That may be a bit of wishful thinking on the part of a company that owns Kmart, one of the world’s largest retailers, but at least it’s thinking small rather than thinking too big.
Something else Harles said that made a lot of sense to me is that SHC also doesn’t want to restrict users into having to create yet another profile on yet another social site. He hopes to use various other site’s APIs to help his customers fit MySears and MyKmart into their online social lives that already exist. He wouldn’t go into specifics about what exactly he was thinking about with this, but one could imagine sites like this using something like Facebook Connect to tie Facebook profiles to MySears and MyKmart accounts.
Harles conceded that when the project first launched, the sites were limited to the demographics you normally associate with Sears and Kmart — which is to say, older house moms. But over the past several months, various other groups of users have come to try out the sites and find out information about products. But he notes that a network like this may be good for the parents of the Facebook and MySpace generations to step into the social graph.
Sure, a lot of the elements on these sites are the old tried and true standards of just about every other social networking site, but it’s good to see old stalwarts of retail attempting to transition into the new age. An age where online customer feedback and input is important. And they’re apparently willing to keep on shifting along with the ever-changing web.
Good
In concept, I almost like this but the experience of aggregating reviews from other retailers as part of it makes no sense to me. I think the ViewPoints site is actually pretty cool and they’ve done a nice job with the UI, but they’re pulling the content from people like Amazon (and many others) and then using it as a conversion tool on Sears – sure can’t be something Amazon will stand for a long time. This is evident in the following page where Sears isn’t in the Where to Buy (clearly the product / review didn’t originate there), it just points you to a search results page on Sears.com where the product in unavailable – and they don’t even make swap out recommendations.
http://www.myse...rol-review-59d9
Great concept, wrong application in my opinion.
These reviews are not aggregated from third party sources (eg amazon.com in your post), but rather from viewpoints.com itself. Viewpoints is not trolling external sites and populating its (or Sears’ or K’Mart’s) content/reviews.
Since I run the community, I can confirm that there is no aggregation (even from viewpoints). All reviews are generated from Sears or MySears. we do let members review anything however, even things we do not carry. We also retain reviews from past products or out of stocks. That is our policy. But thanks for your comments, they are helpful. We will be making changes regularly based on our members’ feedback.
Rob
awesome. when is TC gonna have an article on the power of “MY” prefix and how it has changed everything? where the orgins of “MY” started, the power of its presence, what it all means, and where its all going? is it a fad or will it be around forever.
MyLocator.me – its personal
your a tool
Companies can be very successful with social networking sites, especially if they include exclusive offers to their members (similar to how companies offer exclusives to their followers on twitter).
possibly adding a affiliate program for these sites to increase e-commerce traction
This is about the only things Sears and Kmart did right for the past 8 years.
Kmart is a liberal virus.
lose
Good for both companies. Isn’t most social media still something of an experiment? So why not have been fiddling with it for a couple years when a direction reveals itself?!
Sears and Kmart are pushing forward into an area that few companies have been able to monetize. I think they are on the right track to be able to offer goods and services based on a customers likes and dislikes keeping it real versus a mass appeal. Everything is cyclical and small town values and store fronts could make a comeback…..they are right there and ready.
Great stuff!
Good for Kmart. There’s little downside to adding another level of engagement with your customers, regardless of how much of an experiment you feel it is.
“My______” has to be up there with “Got_____” for the most bastardized tagline. From an audience point of view “My” doesn’t even make sense, it never did. The “My” is actually a “Your” and an “Our”. When the third person says “then they will click on My____, it makes sense but when I (the user) arrives My____, falls flat—then the “My” is actually and “Our”. I’m confused even talking about it.
Then there’s also the “Is this a ______-killer?” meme when it comes to sensationalizing a new application or service.
I noticed that Walmart also has its own social networking site called mywalmart.com. But good for Kmart for doing that.
I came across a website that has a listing of all the websites starting with “My”. You think of a name and there.
Social network is here to stay – we like it or not. It will definitely evolve over a period of time and companies/individual will find their own ways of user engagement.
Probably these big companies are realizing that they can add more value and make it more profitable by reaching a small targeted customers at a personal level than reaching out to millions over a billboard.
I use RPX to allow members of existing social sites (Facebook, MySpace, even Google or Yahoo) to join my site – it’s very, very easy to do. Of course if they want to integrate with each API separately, that is their choice, but for those of us without that sort of time, RPX makes it super simple.
Just some thoughts – great looking site!
Allen
http://www.madtownlounge.com
Missing the boat completely…
Consumers are already engaging in conversations about Sears & Kmart, on Twitter and Facebook and YouTube and Wordpress and Craigslist and Beebo and the list goes on for so long that it makes no sense to build another mountain to spend money driving traffic to. Why aren’t Sears and Kmart trying to engage consumers in those existing communities? Why isn’t customer service available via Twitter (like Southwest and Comcast, etc.)? Why can’t I buy from Sears.com through an application on Facebook?
On the upside, OpenID technology (Google Friend Connect, Facebook Friend Connect, etc.) are being integrated now in so many new sites (like we just did for http://www.10ThousandDoors.org), that consumers will come to expect to maintain their network connections across all websites offering any “community” features. Eventually, if Sears/Kmart doesn’t, they will again stand-out among retailers online in consumers’ perception as a step behind the times. Hope not – I hope they will add the OpenID soon – I like these brands and their potential, especially in this economy.
Actually, Sears and Kmart (owned by the same corporation) are actually on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn (!).
There is a larger ViewPoints Community that both MySears and MyKmart are spinning off from, so this is really more like drawing out content and discussions that are already taken place. It sounds like they may be using Facebook Connect in the futre, too. Also, the sites are all connected, so it if you go to Sears.com, you learn about MySears.com. My point is that it is all integrated… more so that some other retailers.
I think they are doing a lot of things right here and will likely learn a lot.