HFIA, Web4Retail partner to offer Facebook program for retailers

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Furniture Today Staff — Furniture Today, July 29, 2011

DALLAS — The Home Furnishings Independents Assn. is partnering with Web4Retail to bring Facebook marketing to the association’s member stores.

A new program called Facebook Your Business is designed to help home décor retailers connect with customers through the popular social media site, which has an estimated 750 million users globally, HFIA said.

“Staying current with what the Web can offer is important in retail today,” said Mary Frye, president of HFIA. “Facebook offers so much opportunity for reaching customers, especially those who might not otherwise read an ad or come into a store – the younger demographic.”

Web4Retail will design, create and manage a branded Facebook page for each retailer, tailoring each store’s page to match its personality, according to a press release from HFIA. Pages will have focused retail content, store information, promotions, photos and links to product categories.

Basic and standard packages are offered and include daily management of the site as well as providing information regarding shopper site usage provided through Google Analytics.

“We do all the work,” said Denise Keniston, CEO of Web4Retail. “The first phase is to design the page. The second phase is the ongoing community management. We touch every page, every day. We come up with ideas to market directly to the fan. We build the community. We connect directly with the fans.”

Along with its social media services, Web4Retail offers website design, Web marketing, SEO and e-commerce services for home furnishings industry retailers.

Information about HFIA and Facebook Your Business is available on the association’s website at www.hfia.com, from Frye at (800) 942-4663 or mary@hfia.com, or visit www.facebookyourbusiness.net.

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Social Networking Nudge

Colleges are on social media, regardless of whether they have figured out what it is worth to maintain an institutional presence there. A recent survey by the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth found that 98 percent of higher ed institutions are on Facebook, and 84 percent are on Twitter. Those numbers have risen dramatically in the past few years, college recruiters, fund-raisers, and marketers having bought into the value — much of it speculative — of keeping active in those communities.

Foursquare, the most popular of a new class of “geo-social” websites, is included on this year’s iteration of the UMass-Dartmouth study almost as an afterthought. Only 20 percent of campuses have an institutional presence on Foursquare. But those that are using it believe the two-year-old Foursquare could soon emerge as a more powerful — and tangible — tool for engaging with students.

College officials can tell students about events and meetings and resource centers with Facebook or Twitter. With Foursquare, they can actually get students to go to them.

“Students can get to know us through sitting on Facebook or on our website,” says Diane McDonald, director of social media and marketing at Texas AM University, one of Foursquare’s early champions. “But Foursquare actually encourages them to get away from the computer into the real campus and explore it.”

Foursquare uses the geo-locator technology built into smartphones to turn exploring physical places — like, say, a college campus and the surrounding town — into a virtual game by encouraging users to “check in” virtually at places they visit in real life. They can leave virtual notes, or “tips,” about a place for future visitors, a la Yelp.

Users also compete for “badges” and honorary titles based on where they check in and how frequently; for example, if a person checks in at a local café more frequently than anyone else, she is crowned “mayor” of that café. (Foursquare confirms someone’s presence through the phone’s geo-locator.) Businesses sometimes play along by offering free perks for customers who check in frequently. Promotions of this kind are expected to form the foundation of Foursquare’s business plan, which is still taking shape.

Colleges are not coffee shops, of course. “We can’t really offer specials,” says Liz Gross, director of university marketing and communications at the University of Wisconsin at Waukesha. “You can’t say ‘10 percent off tuition for checking in,’ or ‘free tuition for the mayor.’ ”

But colleges can still nudge students using incentives. In the spring, Texas AM held a Foursquare scavenger hunt, giving students a sequence of clues for places on campus to check in. The reward? A 30-percent discount at the campus bookstore.

At Waukesha, Gross says she has entertained the idea of using Foursquare to encourage student involvement in extracurricular activities while at the same time strengthening ties with local businesses. “Maybe if a student checks in at the association for student activities office, then they could be eligible for a discount or coupon for a local [store or restaurant],” says Gross. Studies have shown the positive effects of engagement with campus life on student retention and success, she says. “At its core,” she says, “Foursquare allows you to tap in to student engagement.”

McDonald agrees. “I think there are a lot of opportunities to incentivize certain behaviors on campus, and reward those behaviors,” says McDonald. Create incentives to visit the library frequently, and students might study more. Give them a financial incentive to explore the campus, and they might stumble upon something they would not have otherwise.

But it might be easy to overstate the force behind a Foursquare nudge. First of all, it assumes that students are paying attention — which is far from a guarantee.

“I think it’s a niche play, still,” says Hanson Hosein, who directs a master’s program in digital media at the University of Washington. “I don’t see it getting the kind of critical mass that Facebook has gotten, or even Twitter. The only way this is going to work is if universities can push students on this platform a bit.”

The company, which has 10 million users worldwide, took aim at college campuses earlier this year with its “college badge program,” which lets colleges offer virtual rewards to students for checking in at certain places. For example, students who check in at a campus library after midnight can earn a “bookworm bender” badge. Some colleges have begun building their own branded badges. For example, Syracuse University will soon offer a “Syracuse 44″ badge to users who check in at a certain set of campus venues. Several campus officials talked about the possibility of allowing students to redeem badges for campus bucks — just like a café might offer free coffee to its virtual “mayor.”

Yet it remains to be seen whether students will care about badges, or “tips,” or Foursquare in general. Discounts and prizes might not sway students toward events and activities they would not attend anyway. Rewarding students who check in at a library late on a Saturday night might be a boon for those already holed up in the stacks, but it might not be enough to get students to forgo partying for studying.

“I don’t think it would [create behavior] from nothing, where you’re only doing something because of Foursquare,” says Tim Cigelske, a communications specialist at Marquette University. “[But] I think that maybe it reinforces it.”

Still, it is difficult to count out a tool with such potential to harness the thriftiness of college students, says Hosein. “I think that financial incentive piece is pretty big,” he says. “And it might work.”

For the latest technology news and opinion from Inside Higher Ed, follow @IHEtech on Twitter.

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