As the Shop.org Annual Summit quickly approaches, I find myself thinking how far the world of online marketing has come these past few years. We’ve gone from marketing to consumers to marketing with them. It’s no surprise that retailers have been leading the charge in this arena. Of course, online retailers were among the first to introduce product ratings and reviews, enabling customers to influence each other during the purchase process and provide valuable brand feedback.

Now it’s time to take that to the next level. Retailers don’t always think of social media as a way to increase direct traffic to their own online destinations, but they should. Rather than promoting more aggressively than others, e-commerce providers can emulate successful digital media companies, and attract new customers by building and leveraging social communities.

Why? Because building and supporting a retail destination community encourages customers to connect with each other, share their experiences, and make recommendations to each other.  Social networking features like groups, user profiles, forums, blogs, comments, recommendations, and photo and video galleries all add a social “glue” to a retail destination, and make it a place where conversations happen and folks connect, rather than just a place where people shop.

As an example, Lowe’s Creative Ideas encourages do-it-yourselfers to maintain project journals that showcase their use of Lowe’s products.  This sort of “shopper show and tell” attracts visitors via search, keeps them on site with the breadth of engagement opportunities, and has measurable results: Lowe’s Creative Ideas now has over 10,000 fans on Facebook, provides a tangible source of product and consumer insights, and drives in-store, along with online, transactions.
Another important component of online social strategy just starting to gain steam is custom content – and lots of it, at that. Retail destinations are a natural place to have product-relevant content (e.g., “Five Things to Look for in a Fountain Pen”) along with lifestyle and/or how-to content related to products (e.g., “Why You Should Keep a Journal”). By deploying lots – think thousands of algorithmically tuned and professionally produced articles and videos – of well-designed “long tail” content, retailers can organically improve their search engine results, get more shoppers in the “side doors” that long tail search queries represent, and engage them once they arrive.  While media sites like livestrong.com and eHow.com are adding millions of unique visitors annually through custom content, retailers are just getting started.

Retailer custom content even works best when it is not just confined to the site. Smart retailers will let their customers syndicate, share, and distribute the content elements of the online shopping experience across the Web via a technique many call “social bridging.” Social bridging lets retailer sites connect with the Web’s popular social destinations. It makes it easy for enthusiastic members of these sites to communicate their enthusiasm to their friends on Facebook, Twitter and similar services, driving traffic back in the process.

By taking a broader perspective on the potential power of their online destinations, retailers can get more unique visitors to their sites, and increase engagement once there. The key is in building and maintaining vibrant communities that tap into the passion inherent in the retailer’s core audience, spreading that passion to the larger Social Web, and offering up to the community a steady diet of both custom expert- and user-generated content to fuel that passion over the long-term.

At the Annual Summit next week, we’ll have a roundtable discussion on how social media and custom content can transform your business.  Hope to see you there, hear your thoughts and share perspectives.