Free Advice for Target

Robert Scoble is meeting with the Target Corporation this morning and is asking the blogosphere for advice for the retail giant. Here are some ideas I think Target should consider. They fit within our agency's Micro Persuasion philosophy of find, listen, engage and empower...

Find: As Robert says, Target should identify its most influential online evangelists and vigilantes and potential evangelists and vigilantes. Using PubSub and Feedster are a start, but I would not ignore Google too. At CooperKatz, we score each in-bound blog link/mention on a qualitative assessment scale from one to ten via a customized brand blog barometer. Target should be doing this as well.

Listen: Once Target knows who its influencers are, it needs to listen to them actively. The company needs to view each blog post as legitimate feedback. More importantly, it needs to identify what are the most powerful currents of conversation in the blogosphere – e.g. the ones that are the most relevant to the company and its products/services. I call this a company’s "higher holy calling." Only after Target has completed find and listen, will they be ready to engage and empower.

Engage: Target has lots of opportunities to launch blogs that will help them engage in a dialogue with their constituents. Here is just a sampling…

• The Designer's Blog - One of the most obvious is its Designer's Boutique. Here, Target showcases leading designers like Michael Graves and Isaac Mizrahi. Why not have these thought leaders blog together on the Web site? I’d love to hear why they’re working with Target and what their vision is.

• RSS Coupons – Target should start customized RSS feeds that alert consumers when new items that match their interests are on sale. This will drive people to the web site and the stores.

• Target is big on giving back to the community. Several sections of its web site are devoted to it. Target could create local blogs for each of its core markets that chronicle how they help the community and, more importantly, starting conversations with them on how they want to be helped.

Empower: At the highest level, Target should use the blogosphere to empower people to tell stories. And what better people to empower than those they have helped through their corporate giving programs. Target already has a Flash-enabled section of their web site where they give people they have helped a voice. This is a good start, but why not also empower them to lead a conversations? Right now the stories are static. Bring them to life!

These are just my thought-starters. What are yours?

Comments

[rob]

Thaks for the tips! Very cool.

[Liana Evans]

Great post Steve! I think this can be applied to just about any retailer - brick & mortar or otherwise. I wonder if Starbucks should be reading this, as Gary Stein pointed out at SES in NYC the "I hate Starbucks" website coming up in Natural Search Results, I think someone should email your post to them! :)

[Bruce DeBoer]

Steve - we all know what free advice is usually worth but this is a great post. I'll send visitors from Synthesis over here to take a look.

Thanks again.

[Cathy Thompson]

Under engage: A perfect candidate for Target to use blogging and RSS is the website's Red Hot Shop, which is trendy, topical and always changing. They already use it to promote web-only products, so a blogging extension and converstion there would be natural.

[Jeremy Pepper]

Well, Target is already looking for a PR person that blogs, so they get what they need to do already.

Nice pitch for the business, though.

[Joshua Messinger]

A great post Steve!

[Pete Blackshaw]

Agree with most of Steve's suggestions, but the discussion here is too focused on amplifying the positive. That's important, and we should leverage all means to incent and drive "evangelism," but Target and all the retailers have other issues that consistently erode and challenge their brands. For example, bloggers were not kind at all to Target over the Salvation Army issue, an issue that continues to haunt the brand in search engine queries. Bloggers are consistenly playing back frustration over "exchanges and returns" (certainly relative to other retail players) and disappointment with customer service, or key aspects of the website. It's very easy to discover on Google that the author of the wildly popular Daily Kos blog posted on his site a very negative letter he sent to Target about a negative experience. The point is this: the blogophere reflects and plays back both the good and bad dimensions of a brand's equity, and Target needs to (1) first listen to the feedback/buzz, and (2) use good and bad blog commentary as an "auditing" tool to rethink and re-engineer current operations. Proactive blogging can serve as a "first line of defense" in addressing tough issues, and in a more intimate, informal and more "believable" manner...but it's only half of the "blogging strategy."

The brand also needs to just get smarter about segmentation modeling. If bloggers are impacting awareness, trial, shopping behavior of other consumers -- just about everyone agrees with this point, and more research is confirming it -- the big brands and retailers need to do a better and more systematical job of figuring out who within their database is a blogger, or an influencer, maven, or so-called "connector." For example, I have personally filled out just about every feedback or survey on Target.com or on the Target corporation website. There's nothing in the profiling operation that suggests the brand is attentive to "influence." I could have the most powerful shopping blog and Target would never know. They simply don't ask. The great news here is that even modest segmentation work (zeroing in on bloggers within the current franchise) will yield spectacular numbers. I know this because I've run the numbers across a host of major retailers.

Completely agree with Steve re: RSS feeds across the site.

-- Pete Blackshaw, Intelliseek/BlogPulse