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

Converse Goes Back to School with Laughter and Style

Time certainly is precious and I tend to make mine as productive as I can, but I have to give a shout of thanks--and laughter--to Converse for stealing 14 minutes of my time today.

It all started with a spelling bee. The Converse Spelling Bee. (Make sure you've got your speakers turned up.) Then Chucks In Soda for a Week, Kissing with Ross and many, many more. I was laughing out loud. I can only imagine the entertainment value to the teen boy who is probably closer to their target than I am...especially as he faces the end of summer and the prospect of clothes-shopping for school this fall.

Overall, Converse does a great job staying true to its brand legacy, and also continuing to push forward into the future. I loved it when the brand started letting consumers design their own Chuck Taylors, giving fans an even more Personal experience. And I love how the Converse Spelling Bee and collected sites create entertainment and inspiration that let those fans engage and deepen their attachment to the brand.

Fourteen minutes I won't get back, but 14 minutes I'll remember with a laugh, especially when I'm doing back-to-school shopping with my son next month. He might even give me a reluctant but knowing nod that I've stumbled onto something that even he thinks is cool.

What's Next: Sebastian Professional Products

Known for "blowing the lid off creativity," Sebastian Professional Products is doing it again with a new site we recently launched. While the brand started small in the 1970s, today Sebastian is a global brand shaping hair fashion.

Using original, engaging content (stunning behind-the-scenes-of-the-shoot photography and video), we created an experience designed to inspire and inform aspiring stylists and beauty junkies about what styles are coming next. (Bryan, that's you...time to rethink Aveda!)

The experience goes beyond the products, to looks and how to get them, to up-and-comers like cult blogger Cory Kennedy (and how to connect with Cory), to hair professionals setting tomorrow's styles, and countless videos and photos that let consumers inside the Sebastian photo shoot.

With all this inspiration, so much pressure to have a great "do" in our office. ; ) Check out Sebastian Professional and see What's Next for you.

Pickens Plan Delivers its Message Via OPEN Media

While the campaigns have been occupying the airwaves, it's exciting to see that presidential candidates aren't the only ones advancing their causes and engaging consumers with web 2.0 technologies.

If you haven't already, meet T. Boone Pickens, billionaire, oilman and founder of a plan that proposes the building of windfarms (with turbines 410 feet tall) to help the US diminish what he describes as our addiction to foreign oil. Headquartered at PickensPlan.com, Pickens is using dozens of OPEN vehicles to explain the plan, share the plan and push the plan.

The site offers a truly on-demand experience that gives people ease, control and efficiency. It's also very networked--making it easy to "join," "talk," "share," and "organize" around the cause. And it ties into more than 30 services (Del.icio.us, Twitter, Digg, MySpace, Ma.gnolia, etc.) through which you can bookmark and share the plan itself.

Of course, the Pickens Plan isn't just about the site, the octogenarian is networked through Facebook (T. Boone has 3,611 friends and the Pickens Plan has 2,952 fans.), MySpace, YouTube, Twitter and LinkedIn.

While T. Boone Pickens is focused on teaching the world about the power of wind, the way he's gone about it can teach marketers a lot about the power of the engaged consumer.

Personalized Gift Registry Makes for Inspired Shopping

As we move into wedding season, I find myself faced with many of the same efficient-but-sterile wedding registry sites. While I truly appreciate that they're typically smooth shopping experiences, most don't endear me to the brand--or the couple for that matter. That's why I was so delighted to get a more personalized Alternative Gift Registry this week.

Sponsored by the Center for the New American Dream, the mission of the alternative registry is to focus on gifts that emphasize "the bond you share" with the couple versus just spending a lot of money. For example, gifts on the registry I received included:

• your old books or board games
• grocery store gift cards
• fridge magnets
• your favorite music
• no more junk mail (which links to an organization you can pay to stop your junk mail)
• plus a number of traditional gift registry items (not surprisingly they are earth-friendly products)

While this socially conscious angle is definitely intriguing, what I found even more compelling (as a wedding guest), is that the registry has a "Description" column, where the couple can add all kinds of details to help explain either what the gift is or why they want it. This single area adds to the wedding guest experience--especially if you've ever attended nuptials for a friend and don't know the spouse-to-be very well, or, frankly, don't know the couple very well. Moreover, with the age of the bride and groom rising with time (one of my 6 sisters just turned 50 and got married for the first time!), most already have glasses from Crate and Barrel or mixing bowls from Williams-Sonoma. Besides, given the state of the economy and world affairs, many couples are asking themselves, "Do we really need more stuff?"

If nothing else, I have a lot more unique ideas, not to mention,  conversation starters for people I meet at their wedding.

VS PINK Winning Facebook Popularity Contest

In what he described as a quick audit of Facebook Pages, blogger radical trust cited our client, Victoria's Secret PINK, as the most popular brand on Facebook, with 384,177 fans. (At the time of his audit, PINK was number 3 in terms of all Facebook Pages, behind Barack Obama and Chris Moyles.)

Through its Facebook Page, PINK excels at all four quadrants of our O.P.E.N. framework, creating an experience that makes it easy for PINK fans to get closer to the brand they love (On-demand), gives them a sense of belonging (Personal), entertains them with digital goodies (Engaging) and, of course, connects them with other fans (Networked).

While the experience has cool perks, like a Flash feature to get fans' attention at the top, and a mobile opt-in they can do right from the Facebook Page, PINK is popular because it's impressively relevant to young women in the collegiate set. PINK has radical appeal because it's focused on getting its merchandising right--and creating a center of gravity online and  off.

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!

O.P.E.N. Watch—Retail Edition

As part of our tireless quest to find O.P.E.N. experiences, and as a continuation of our long-standing (11 years!) holiday assessment of the e-retail space, our retail team spent the holiday shopping season online, studying the intersection of social media and e-commerce. I'm excited to share their findings, O.P.E.N. Watch -- Retail Edition, which we just published on our site. (And in the spirit of "open," free for  you to download, share, or email me yours comments!).

For those of you who like your information in smaller bits, check back here because I'll be featuring some of the great examples they found.

One of my favorites was Home Depot's Light Up the Neighborhood contest, where people could upload images of their house all decked out in holiday lights and vote on their favorites. It hits on the P (personal), E (engaging) and N (networked) experiences of the O.P.E.N. framework. Plus I love that Home Depot created an experience that tapped into an existing activity (holiday decorating) and encouraged a positive behavior fueled by an existing mindset--one-upping one's neighbor.

What was your favorite? Find one you like from the study, or share an O.P.E.N. experience you've found on your own.

Yankee Candle Turns Off Its Online Christmas Lights Early

As the "last-chance-to-get-it-under-the-tree" emails hit my in-box, our e-retail analysts are hunkering down, sifting through their holiday shopping experiences and getting ready to write them up in our 11th annual Holiday E-commerce Watch. (If you want to make sure you get a copy, let me know!)

Our team is focusing on e-retail innovations and trends, and e-commerce experiences that are O.P.E.N. The focus is clearly forward, upward, and into the future--not who did what wrong, a tally we had to keep in the early days of e-commerce.

So I was shocked to see this holiday shut-down from Yankee Candle. With a large homepage caution message that brought me back to 2000, Yankee Candle announced December 3 on its web site that "due to the current volume of orders" it couldn't guarantee orders for Christmas delivery.

Unanticipated demand? Poor Planning? But to their credit, Yankee Candle makes it very clear on the homepage that you can't get orders shipped for Christmas, and it uses the rest of the real estate to re-direct consumers to alternatives--online gift cards or the retail stores. Good for them for being transparent and doing what they can to minimize customer disappointment.

Apple Speeds Up Search

I never thought the act of completing a word and clicking the "search" button on a site's search bar was really all that arduous or time-consuming. But I also never thought going to the movie rental store was a chore (now it is!). Or buying CDs at the store (ditto). Netflix and iTunes have not only made those processes significantly more streamlined - on-demand  -  they've changed (and increased) the way I consume these products and experience their brands.

So I was surprised and delighted when I started typing a word into the search box on Apple's site. Before I finished the word (it was "radio"), a small window popped up under the box with a categorized list of results--text and images. I could immediately see what results came in for the online store, retail stores, products, movie trailers, downloads...Apple is not a case study for an OPEN BRAND, rather, the antithesis in many regards. But this is a small step in the right direction.

I don't know how new the functionality is, but I haven't seen this kind of innovation around the search bar (on a destination site, versus a search engine) in a long time. The innovation on its own is promising, and hopefully, pretty soon I'll wonder how I ever lived without it.

Clinique Brings Personalization to Packaging

As the first of the holiday gift ideas start floating into our email boxes, I thought this was a great one to showcase. (At least, I thought so until I tried to buy one, but I'll get to that in a minute.)

It's pretty self-explanatory--upload a picture and Clinique puts it on a bottle of Happy perfume. It looks easy, it's not a bad price, only takes 10 business days, and voila, what a hot gift. Which gets me to the down-side. I tried lots of pics and they were either to big or too small for the site's requirements--according to all the error messages I kept getting. An associate here at RI had a little more success. She was able to upload an image, see it on a bottle and order it. They even offered her the opportunity to "showcase" her bottle design online. I'm anxious to see this OPEN experience and find out what Clinique customers are Happy about.

Brands Need to Think B-to-We as i-citizens Enter the Marketing Love Triangle

While it'll be a handful of months before The Open Brand comes out, some of the key ideas are available now. Matter of fact, today's AdAge enewsletter featured a piece I wrote about how brands need to connect not just with consumers, but with consumers' communities in order to be culturally relevant. (Note: if you happened to get the newsletter, it's just below the article about Sir Martin of WPP.) It's about the triangulation of communication that's required between the brand, the consumer and communities. It's about finding the intersection of shared passion. We call this new relationship model The Love Triangle. The article also talks about how some brands are starting to get it right, like PINK. Check it out and feel free to post your feedback, your ideas at our wiki.

Launching The OPEN Brand

What a whirlwind of a week! I just left Las Vegas, where I had the opportunity to share and discuss more ideas from my new book The Open Brand in my keynote address at Shop.org's Annual Summit. What a great event--and some nice coverage from the blog Variable Markup, and an article and video from WebProNews.

And while the Shop.org presentation marks the beginning of a busy season on the road, the writing,editing and tweaking of the book itself ended this week. See the picture below of the book in layout!  Plus, we've just launched a great Open Brand microsite and wiki. Please come check them out--you can download a sneak peek of the book and learn about the O.P.E.N. Experience Framework. But most importantly, please engage in the dialog and share some of your own thoughts!

Twitter Makes Sure We Know What It's Doing

I've been following Twitter for a while now. And I'll confess, while I clearly see the relevance of Twitter in the lives of Digital Millennials (not just in social, but even in retail scenarios), I haven't partaken--er, Twittered--for my own personal benefit. I just don't need or want yet another way to communicate and to be communicated with. Can you relate? Truth is, I have registered -- research -- so there's not much holding me back except resistance to be always on. It's bad enough that I can barely make it out of the elevator at the close of a workday or through my daughter's softball game without tending to my Treo, and now my iPhone.

I found a recent update from Twitter's co-founder, Biz Stone, particularly interesting. In addition to the news that Twitter has hit Hollywood, I learned that Twitter is making a change in its functionality because,

"Folks have noted that there's too much overlap and confusion between 'friend' and 'follow.' As Twitter has evolved, these two concepts have emerged in parallel and clouded things up. So, in the spirit of simplification, we are no longer going to define people as your 'friends.' The functionality of adding people remains, but the interaction is focused on the term 'follow' instead."

How O.P.E.N. of them, really. And not just to listen to the core audience and respond, but also to be cool about people posting "updates" that they're not too happy with the change.

So to answer to the ultimate Twitter question: What are you doing? I imagine the official Twitter answer to be, "Right now we're doing what our members want us to do."

Worth paying attention to. And, maybe my Twittering time will come, but in the meantime, I'm an interested follower--no pun intended.

Prince Finds New Ways to Set His Music Free

More than anything, more than money even, I'm starting to really get the idea that Prince wants to make sure his music is heard. From reasonable concert  tickets prices, to more, smaller venues, to a free downloadable song, to last week's attention-getter, FREE CDs inserted in copies of UK paper The Mail, Prince appears to be making great efforts to give his fan what they want, his music. In short, Prince, formerly known as the Artist Formerly Known as Prince is an Open Brand.

So maybe Prince didn't use the web to offer the entire album as a free download (hint, hint, nudge, nudge...call me, P), but he's definitely embracing the spirit of the medium, where content is out there for the taking, where consumers can go deep on demand and get the information -- or entertainment in this case -- they want, with great ease and, at times, little cost.

Between moves like Prince's (he's not the first to give music away this way, Peter Gabriel did it just last month in The Mail, and also helped establish We7, an ad-supported music download site), and initiatives like Starbucks' Hear Music program, and oh, maybe, iTunes, we're facing a whole new way to think about, acquire and enjoy music. Frankly, I'm partial to Prince and Peter Gabriel's if-you-love-it-set-it-free philosophy, so perhaps I'll see you on We7.

JCPenney Connects with Consumers on their Desktops

I have yet to see the actual widget (I found nothing of it on the JCP site), but Adweek reports that JCPenney is launching "an old-school version" of a web widget called JCPToday. (As a side note, I know technology's shelf life is fleeting, but "old-school" seems a little harsh with Newsweek calling 2007 the Year of the Widget.)

Streaming product offers, fashion tips and reminders of personal events gives JCPenney a valid, maybe even valuable reason to reach out to consumers more often and on a more personal level.

So much more than email, the article quotes Kate Donaho, group creative director at T3, the shop that helped JCPenney with the its widget, with a realistic set of expectations:

"We don't view it as a mass-marketing vehicle," she said. "We're banking on this being a useful way to reach a highly engaged set of customers. We don't expect millions of downloads of this by any stretch."

No matter how "old-school" a desktop widget might appear (to a techie, that is), its ability to help JCPenney O.P.E.N. up by making it On-Demand (the "O" in O.P.E.N.) and Personal (the "P"), is smart, realistic and, hopefully very lucrative for JCPenney.

American Express Serves Cardholders with The Members Project

In an industry characterized (at least in my mail box) by the incessant hawking of low--or no-- interest rates, American Express' new initiative, The Members Project, is an exciting new way to keep and maybe even win consumers.

American Express Cardmembers can go to The Members Project site and register (which costs nothing, but for which American Express donates $1 to The Members Project). Then Cardmembers can either submit a project they would like the company to fund, or "read, rate and discuss" all the other projects (at this point, 4,915) fellow Cardmembers have submitted.

Submissions will be accepted until June 17, at which point an advisory panel will help American Express narrow the list down to 50. Then, starting July 3, Cardmembers can come back and vote for the project (of that top 50) that should get the funding.

How smart. How O.P.E.N. How enticing. Getting American Express to consider and possibly fund a project that benefits my community/constituency/cause beats a low APR any day. This makes be want to belong to the brand.

O.P.E.N. at ATG Insights Live

I've just returned from Charleston where I had the honor of delivering the opening keynote address at ATG's Insight Live. What a great conference--hundreds of smart, passionate people talking about next-generation ecommerce, which spanned conversations around demanding customers, emerging technologies, the social web and more. Chris Anderson was also there with his Long Tail presentation and a moderated discussion with some ecommerce experts.

In my address I shared excerpts from my forthcoming book The Open Brand: When Push Comes to Pull in a Web-Made World, including the book's cover or covers. Over the past few months, we have explored dozens of cover designs and even mocked them up and placed them in a Barnes & Noble store to evaluate the shelf appeal. We then concluded that these covers were 2 of our favorites. So, in the spirit of The Open Brand -- we decided to let conference attendees text their vote in while I spoke. At the conclusion of the presentation,I revealed the winner. Which do you think won? Which would you choose?

The winner....white. By a wide margin.

Also, it was fun to reveal our "prototype of the future" using the Nike brand as our test bed. Always the innovator, always pushing the web to the next level, we felt Nike was one of the boldest brands capable of embracing many of the principles of The Open Brand. We showcased how a brand like Nike could become less push, more pull. Less about the super athlete, more about the everyday athlete. Less about one shop, and more about thousands of shops.  We named it NikeYou. Maybe someday we'll be lucky enough to bring it to life and you can see for yourself.

One More (Substantial) Vote for Consumer Control

Do you feel important yet? You should. ; )

If TIME magazine's naming "You" Person of the Year wasn't enough of a signpost, Ad Age's awarding its esteemed Agency of the Year status to "the consumer" should spell it all out nice and clear...consumers are king. And the communities they build and participate in are altering the marketing landscape of monologues as we once knew it. And, that's the focus of my upcoming book, Open Branding! (Email me if you want to be alerted for details.)

I was happy to see once-reluctant Ad Age acknowledge that consumers have long been in control--today they just have more ways to communicate what they have to say, which makes consumers either a more significant threat or a more valuable asset. I say the latter.

What TIME and Ad Age have done is acknowledge the impact of everyday folks (with an internet connection) as they cast their votes, write reviews, craft blog entries and choose when and how to engage with media. This consumer should not only be recognized, respected and rewarded with your attention, but invited to participate in shaping what the brand hopes to become.

Control has indeed shifted. And suddenly this isn't big news anymore. It's just the order of business.