Kelly Mooney's blog about the online shopping experience from the customer's point of view -- MooneyThinks.com

Countdown to iCitizen

We're burning the midnight oil here at Resource Interactive with less than 2 weeks until iCitizen, an intimate, invitation-only symposium for Resource clients.

Since our first gathering on this topic in 2006, we've continued to investigate the new consumer we refer to as an iCitizen--consumers empowered by the social web, personal brands who create, share and influence others using the digital tools of the web. And we have an amazing list of keynotes, panels and iTalks to inspire ideas and discussion that will help us understand how to reach and leverage iCitizens today and in the future.

• Supporting this year's theme of The OPEN Imperative, I'll be leading an iTalk about the implications of OPEN as a macro trend.
• Joseph Jaffe, author of Join the Conversation will share insights about how marketers need to adapt so they can stay relevant to consumers who are texting, Friending and Twittering their days away.
• Duncan Watts from Yahoo! Research will talk to us about the power of interacting with networks of people versus the elite few.
• Doc Searls, co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto, will talk about the changes that have to take place in order for all these exciting ideas to come to life.
• And, of course, much, much more!

While the symposium itself will be limited attendance, with the help of my colleagues at Resource we'll be blogging and documenting thoughts, questions and ideas throughout the experience, so you can be in the loop. More on that soon!

What Is Zappos Doing?

As most brands debate the merits of and policies around blogging, some digitally-adept CEOs are further ahead--140 characters ahead to be precise. Yes, they're twittering. And with each tweet they're both mining and sharing insights, and communicating directly to the digital elite that they "get it" or who appear to be early adopters.

Online shoe retailer Zappos has almost 200 of its employees twittering. Zappos even tells you how many followers each employee has. The most popular twitterer is CEO Tony Hsieh with more than 2,700 followers. His tweets about what he ate for lunch, a conference call with MC Hammer, his passion for Red Bull, and going on Oprah. He also tweets to ask if people like the company's new TV ad, to ponder whether he should open Zappos.org, to lament waking up one day and finding his company server had gone down, and to tell all his followers to quickly twitter their favorite pair of shoes and company value so he could give some products away.

Hsieh believes in it so much he twitters about trying to convert people to it and he even posted an essay and instructions about why and how to twitter. (Sounds like twitter has its own brand advocate on its hands!).

This might not be for every CEO, but without a doubt, he's stepping up the game in cultural relevance. Granted, it's only one tactic from the brand-building arsenal, but it's an interesting first step to becoming more of an open brand-- one that's on-demand, personal, engaging and networked. If you care what Zappos is doing or other fav brands or friends, time to get twittering  to be in the know.

Wal-Mart Responds Well to Honest Feedback

The truth can hurt. Or, as in the case with Wal-Mart, maybe it can help too. In response to a deeply disappointed consumer's one-star review of 1/2 carat diamond stud earrings, Wal-Mart responded. Literally Wal-Mart responded to the review apologizing "if you felt the description of the product was inaccurate," and also responded by updating the images of the earrings to "clearly show the color of the diamonds".

So I may not buy diamond earrings from Wal-Mart (or anyone else actually--I'm not really a diamond girl), but I will buy that Wal-Mart has good intentions with the latest launch of this new site feature.

My This, My That

I've been pondering an article I read in the Sunday NY Times last week about the rise of "my" everything on the Web. MyCoke or MyAOL, and, of course, MySpace. It takes me back to a lot of meetings we had in the mid-to-late '90s where we tried to convince a host of clients that this was the way to go. Granted, technology was clunkier and consumers were wary back then. But times have changed.

Today consumers can't get enough of "my" from the brands they love. Writer David Browne talks about the rise of the My decade, similar to but more technology-inspired than the Me Decade of the '70s. Plus it's less about individuals being selfish (the reputation of the Me Decade or Generation) and more about individuals wanting connections--with friends, colleagues, and, of course, brands. Seems every brand is trying this out--creating a version of their experience expressly tailored to an individual. (This must make the founders of Peppers and Rogers smile..or maybe smirk). And clearly, lots of consumers actually want it.

So what does this pronoun trend mean? Today it's about how consumers get closer to brands and vice versa. And this closeness can't be underscored enough; "my" speaks to possession and even ownership -- of information, content, and the brand itself. Plus, what better place for thousands or millions of people to claim and hold a piece of a brand than the web; the web is the relationship hub.

Most brands are just starting to explore what the My Generation is and means, but aren't quite (yet!) delivering on it. "My (insert brand)" can be engaging, fun, inspiring, helpful. It can be the place where I not only track my purchases, view my rewards, get offers, save content, preferences or favorites, link to reviews and other personal contributions to the brand, keep a log of my customer service inquiries, see my transactions from other channels, change my communication preferences or IM a service rep. We're far, far away from most brands having a digital hub that goes beyond historical purchases.

"My" is definitely here to stay. The value proposition has room to grow immensely and consumers want increasingly personal experiences from the brands they choose to engage with. No more being treated like a stranger, or like everyone else for that matter--not if you're a "regular".

But, "my" or "me" is only one piece of this story. It's just one vertex of what we call the Love Triangle, the new relationship model for open brands. It is an inverted pyramid with "individual" in one top vertex and "community" (representing the "we" or "our" where consumers congregate around shared passions) in the other. The last vertex is the brand as bottom-up enabler, in lieu of top-down dictator.

For the brands that begin to understand their Love Triangle, the pronouns will no longer matter. Consumers will simply feel, "I am the brand. We are the brand."

Purex Models Good Apparel Selling

There are several good things I could say about the Purex site and it's green T-shirt contest, including the nice uses of subtle animation, and the playful t-shirt tool, but I really want to focus on one thing--a really smart functionality that I would have expected from an apparel retailer, not a detergent brand.

So Purex is doing a contest where consumers have tools to design their own T-shirt. Once you're done designing it, before submitting your design to the T-shirt gallery, you can preview the shirt -- on one of four models. And not just in a still photo, but rather a short piece of video where the model is moving around a slight bit. So choose the model you like best or who looks most like you and that model is suddenly modeling your shirt.

And yes, there is one apparel retailer I'm aware of doing something like this. I've been meaning to point out the fairly new Martin + Osa site also leverages video for showing off it's duds in a similar fashion.

Breaking News and Breaking T's at CNN.com

Where do you prefer to get your news?

• Print, for the feel of the newsprint?
• Online, for its breadth and depth?
• Mobile, for its speed and efficiency?
• Or, T-shirts, for their, uh, wearability?

Yes. Seriously. T-shirts.

You'll find T-shirts made from select headlines. Just look at CNN.com for news items with a little shirt icon next to it. Click the T-shirt and it takes you to a beta for CNN Shirt, where you can see that headline one a black, gray or white T. Pick your color, style (men's/women's) and size, and it's yours for less than $20 (including shipping).

I'm all for fun, unique T-shirts. I'm all for the Jon Stewart-don't-take-it-too-seriously approach to the news. And I'm all for discovering new activities to engage consumers online and create new revenue streams. It's not Gucci, but I can't wait to see how "fashionable" News Fashion can become.

Boden Shows Off Reviews

Score 1 for Boden in the show-don't-tell category.

In support of its new product reviews (extra helpful for those of us on this side of the pond), they sent out this email. It's not like I don't  already know that product reviews are helpful, but putting them in an email with the products they were already trying to sell me for "a weekend away" was just so engaging, fun, and, well, Boden.

The subject line, by the way, is, "Pack your suitcase with some highly rated clothes." :)

Method Lusts After Method Lust

Target couldn't pull it off.

But method is. Check it out! Method is acknowledging, embracing and even celebrating the blogosphere -- and one blogger, in particular. In a fairly recent entry on its own blog, people against dirty, method introduces its readership to Nathan, the author of method lust + one man against dirty.

Who is this Nathan guy? Just a big, giant brand fan who wants to share his passion and expertise around all things method. We call Nathan (and millions more like him) an icitizen. Note that Nathan is not an employee of method and he isn't compensated by them (according to method).

Besides, you can't buy this kind of authentic, transparent brand love. Nathan posts multiple entries per day (way, way, way more than method posts to its own blog!), hosts polls and even offers a method lust widget.

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Bad News Travels Wiki-fast

Charlton Heston and Skybus might never have come up in the same conversation... and might not ever again for that matter! But I raise them now not just because this weekend we said goodbye to both the esteemed actor and the low-cost, Columbus-based airline, but because of the manner in which their passing was written into history.

If you've read The OPEN Brand, you know I'm a fan of Wikipedia--not just because it's the world's largest collaborative encyclopedia, but because it's evolved into a news site--and a site that's incredibly reliable for the speed in which it updates. (In the book we cite The New York Times reporting from July 1, 2007 that 250 of the "most recent changes to the English-language Wikipedia were made in the last 60 seconds".) Just as search engines have become my back-up dictionary (we need to know how everyone is spelling all these words we're making up if we want them to find what we have to say about them, right?), Wikipedia is a piece of my news-gathering regimen.

Whether the information is right or wrong or even slightly off-base, it's out there fast and the buzz (or "discussion") behind the article can be even more telling. For example, with Heston, the discussion tab includes conversation around the photo used in the article and whether a more recent one is available, copyright violation because someone stole content from IMDB, Heston's infamous "cold, dead hands" quote, plus style and grammar points.

On Skybus' entry, one of the sources says he/she got the information from a job interview with the airline, which of course prompted a discussion about whether information from an interview is public and ended up revealing interesting information about wages. For the most part these discussions are about facts, but they bring energy and interest to these entries and others.

Fast, in and of itself, is good, but it's not unique. Wiki-fast gets me not just fast news, but the back story, the conversation, the human side of the story. Of course, human may also mean imperfect, but the Wikipedia community works doggedly to monitor and manage the information. Take for example how ad agency Modernista recently made its Wikipedia entry the site's homepage (talk about OPEN!). The chatter on the entry's discussion page debates the appropriateness of this move by the agency, plus it's a fascinating peak into the rapidly changing goings-on of the social web--and I learned a new phrase ("Wikimorally wrong") I can spell-check on Google.

Nike's Job of a Lifetime Makes for a Good Blog

I've visited Nikewomen's NFR (Nike Field Reporter) Blog several times in the last week, trying to really understand it. Hosted by Brittany Jones-Cooper ("your Nike Field Reporter") and supported by 24 NFR Correspondents, it looks like one of the most polished, yet seemingly authentic blogs I've seen from a brand.

Starring Brittany, a 21-year-old selected to run "all over the country to get the inside scoop on today's biggest sports stars," it reads like a blog and looks like a blog--well, looks a little better than most blogs, with nice, large pictures and videos. Frequent posts spanning from personal to product-oriented speak to the focused female athlete across half a dozen categories (events, athletes, music, training, diary and reviews).

It's only been up since the first of the year, but I look forward to following Brittany and her correspondents to see what inspiration (athletic motivation, product recs or otherwise) pours out of it. Maybe I'll even dust off my running shoes and join the fun.