BI Social Commerce Summit: From Blah, Blah, Blah To Ka-Ching!

The second panel of the day was entitled “Product Discovery + Demand Generation: From Blah, Blah, Blah To Ka-Ching! : Cracking The Product-Discovery Code”

The discussion was about distinguishing your product in the “roar of digital noise” across several social platforms, and tackled the tough task of how to get consumers’ attention through social media and turn that attention into sales.

Featured panelists included:
Katia Beauchamp, Co-Founder & Co-CEO, Birchbox
Chris Bolte, VP of Demand Generation, @WalmartLabs
Brian Lee, Co-Founder & Chairman, ShoeDazzle; Co-Founder & Chairman, The Honest Company
Jason Ross, Co-Founder & CEO, JackThreads

Katia Beauchamp of Birchbox, started the panel by saying “the first thing is to get people to engage”. When launching Birchbox, people said they were interested, but it “wasn’t that simple”. They launched with under 1000 subscribers, before the expanded using social media. Those who signed up were deemed “the early adopters”.

“The secret was getting on the blogs” she said. “It was organic”.

Brian Lee, of ShoeDazzle said that “attacking the social path of Kim Kardashian” got them into the social commerce game. How did they get Kim Kardashian involved? He got a hold of Robert Shapiro through this firm LegalZoom, who gave Brian two minutes to explain why he should link Brian up with his colleague Robert Kardashian’s family.

“Sometimes hustling really does pay off!” Lee said. Absolutely we should all hustle!

The story had a good amount of traction, huge fan base, acquired almost all fans onto ShoeDazzle. Every month or two they have a new celebrity come and design a shoe, and this allows ShoeDazzle to attach that individual’s social graph.

Does social media have a divide between the sexes?

Jason Ross said “no”, and that men are just as social as women, and that social Media is essentially a free retail store.

Chris Bolte is the VP of Demand Generation at @WalmartLabs and spoke about Walmart’s foray into social media. With Walmart visitors being close to 1 billion per month and more and more doing price comparison, social commerce is a must for a major retailer.

“Customers are not looking for different experiences per channel. They’re more like: We want, what we want, when we want it.”

@WalmartLabs was started by the technology of “social genome” To understand trends in social media integrated with location technology.  There’s a  “social sense” with @WalmartLabs, it combine online with in store data to identify actual, specific data trends. @WalmartLabs feeds information back to store and to optimize each store’s performance.  They use all social channels to provide access to Walmart, including Facebook and Twitter.

Out of all social media outlets, which was best for each company? Jason ross and Brian Lee said Facebook, and Katia answered YouTube.