Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

" A surprising group of retailers are dominating social media conversations and engagement so far this holiday season, led by Nordstrom, Macy’s and Sephora, according to Shareablee Social Scorecard. Kohl’s came in at a much more distant fourth place, followed by Amazon. 

The rankings, which are based on combined analysis of total actions —shares, comments, retweets, and reblogs — on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and You Tube, show an overall 26% increase in engagement and 170% jump in actions this year. This is despite a sharp decrease in posts featuring Black Friday deals, which fell 32% on Facebook and 27% on Twitter.

"What really stood out to us this year is the rise of the specialty store, and not so much the mass marketers,” says Shareablee's founder and CEO, Tania Yuki. “I was expecting to see Walmart and Target ranked much higher, and instead we saw exceptional strength in brands like Nordstrom, Sephora, Barney’s and Neiman Marcus.”...

We can no longer think in terms of rifles vs. shotguns or push vs. pull. It’s not nodes that we need to target, but the networks. We can no longer coerce customers to do what we want, but must inspire them to want what we want.

Now that strategy is broken. Put up an attention grabbing TV campaign today and consumers won’t flock to the stores, but to the Internet.  Their activity will leave a data trail, which your competitors will use to retarget your consumers with competing messages before a purchase event can occur.

In effect, the rise of digital marketing technology means that building awareness is no longer a sales driver, but a lead generation service for your competition.  So marketers have started to look for another way....