| Retailers offer ‘My’ networks to give customers a community — and a forum for feedback
To “really connect with our customers,” Sears’ and Kmart’s parent company is providing consumers a sense of place and ownership not available on other social media locations.
 Sears Holding Corp. launched the social networking sites MySears and MyKmart with the simple goal of learning about their customers by giving them a voice and a place to talk about themselves, the products they buy, and their experiences at the two retailing giants.
The sites have attracted a different demographic from the usual social media denizens, and more than 200,000 total members, and that population is growing rapidly, says Robert Harles, vice president of community for Sears Holding Corp.
“We started with the premise that we really just wanted to get to know our customers better,” Harles says. “It’s not more complex than that. We started to think about how we could use [social media and networking] to really connect with our customers. It’s something we felt was important to our business, and another form of communication we could apply to understand the needs, concerns, and hopes of our customers.”
The interest is there, Harles says, because the company didn’t just start a site that would serve its own purposes for marketing or sales, but a site that belongs to and changes with the community that participates in it.
“We’re trying to make this [site] what people want from it, rather than fitting them into a framework that works for us. It may evolve into something completely different, something that we didn’t imagine, but that’s great. We’ll be flexible enough to handle that.”
Though the concept has been around for a year, Sears recently revamped and rebranded the sites into the review- and discussion-based sites they are now. Sears hasn’t been doing much marketing or promotion of its “my” sites, just invitations to existing customers, word of mouth, and through search engines and links on the existing Sears or Kmart Web sites. But judging from the response they’re getting just from more “organic” means of recruitment, they may have found the right approach to social networking.
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Attracting a different community
The concept of “my” sites may be a couple of years old, but they are certainly viable entities. Though Twitter’s popularity is emerging, MySpace still has a moderately active community, and Facebook a very active community. As Harles says, “The jury’s still out on these; no one’s got the answer.
“We know that a majority of people are on Facebook. That may be the place where everything evolves going forward, or it may be a different place that we don’t know about yet,” Harles says. “…If we provide real value and meaning, if we answer questions and give people good advice, if we provide good connections for them to connect to other people, then I can’t imagine people wouldn’t want to participate in that.”
It’s clearly not about choosing one or the other, it’s about experimenting with all the channels and engaging with customers where they are. Sears still has a presence on Twitter and Facebook, as does Kmart, with a “deals and news” Twitter feedand a Facebook fan site.
Aside from this, their greatest social media focus so far has been on their “my” sites. By building their own social networking platform, the retailers could develop it to serve their purposes and continue to change it based on the needs of their customers. MySears and MyKmart, they’re finding, can be more dynamic than existing sites, and that also allows them to focus on their customers.
What is perhaps a little surprising, especially at the beginning, is that it was their customers that overwhelmingly joined MySears and MyKmart — the family-oriented, slightly older crowd, the type that aren’t particularly inclined to engage in social networking. These users, Harles says, jumped quickly at the opportunity to be a part of their own social media world. After all, Facebook and MySpace were overrun by their children.
“When we first started, I was most interested and blown away that we had a more traditional crowd that was family oriented and skewed a little older,” Harles says. “…As it has evolved, it’s given them a nice way to toe-dip into social media. We’re getting a lot of people in there you wouldn’t typically anticipate as being involved in the social networking experience.”
The featured user on both MySears and MyKmart last week was a woman with five grown kids – including two sons and a son-in-law in the military — and four grandsons. In her profile, she says “You can find me… Sears most of the time of with my kids or grandkids.” She has written posts to her blog, participated in several forum discussions, and reviewed KitchenAid products, the Nintendo Wii, and Marley & Me: The Movie.
The sites launched in June 2008. MySears was redesigned in March; MyKmart followed suit this month. As they have become more established, the sites have attracted the younger, more prototypical social networking personae as well, such as the user who lists herself as “all about practical, twenty-something.”
Learning to take criticism
All these members have helped turned the site very quickly from what Harles says Sears originally envisioned. “Getting to know them was certainly the first object,” he says, “giving them a voice, letting them tell us what they think. But as the community gets larger and broader, which it is [doing] very quickly, there are more things that people want to do.”
This, he says, has made way for “getting advice on things you’re about to purchase, connecting to other people who have similar views to yours.” And it’s a place to blog, engage in discussions, and submit and rate ideas for Sears and Kmart and see whether they’ve been implemented by the staff.
“We’re not set on trying to rein in what our customers do with it,” Harles says. “Our members are really taking the lead in driving the next iterations of the experiment. We really want to build an engaging experience and get people coming back – that’s the core of it.”
Being flexible, though, hasn’t always been easy for a retailer that’s more than a century old.
Soon after MySears and MyKmart launched, they got comments from across the spectrum. Right away Harles says they tried to resolve issues or problems, and started the “Ideas” section of the “my” sites to catalog suggestions about the stores or the Web sites they’ve received and whether or not they’ve been implemented.
Moderators weed out profanity, personal attacks, and spam, but Sears and Kmart neither censor nor approve comments. Customer service reps jump in to address specific problems, but members are free to post bad reviews of products or stores as they please.
“We felt this would only have value if we got the whole picture,” Harles says. “Sometimes people might post a bad review or someone might talk about a personal experience that’s really difficult to hear, but I think it’s important to hear that and for people to see it. And what’s more important is we follow up — let’s raise our hands and apologize and fix it. We’re not perfect yet, but we do try to respond when we can, and most of the things we do are quite public.”
It seems their efforts in appeasing customers so far have been received favorably. Harles says most of the response they’ve gotten has been “overwhelmingly positive” and that customers are impressed that the chains own up to their shortcomings or mistakes in public.
MySears and MyKmart are also places where employees and customers can talk to each other. Though there are many more customers than employees signed on, Harles says they’re planning on soon clearly differentiating between the two, thereby encouraging more of an exchange between them.
“I think about this as a tool to go from being a very large company and having so much distance between us and our customers to returning to the days of the shopkeeper where you knew a couple hundred people and you knew them very well,” Harles says. “They came to you because they trusted you. That might be a tall order, but at the end of the day if we can use these tools to return to our roots, that would be a major benefit and to us and our customers.” |
