Know-How Exchange : Student Questions

Look at the evolution of retail as it relates to how society has changed. When society was agrarian-based, retail was central in a village or town. With people spread out by great distances and spending day and night working the farms, the retail outlet was a place to see other people and catch up on the news. With the industrial revolution, towns became cities and cities become divided into ethnic areas. This brought about the "neighborhood" store. The social network efforts of the store were of "belonging." Retail stores provided special products and services specific to ethnicity like food, clothing, and use of the language. The transportation age yielded more centralized retail areas with people traveling from further away to shop. The large department store came about as well as designer specialty stores. Retail created its own "neighborhood" and the "label" was the core of the network. People equated success with ability to shop at these "labels" and retail created an "attitude" around the label. In the Information Age, retail began using loyalty cards and CRM databases. The social aspects of this included special mailings, sales, and services for the "loyal" network. Next, in the internet age, retail moved to both online and physical. Websites provided a "community." Retail provides information and services for their customers. As social networks have grown, retail has followed with pages on Myspace, Facebook, and now Twitter.

So, as society has changed, retail has followed the trends and technological developments and used them to keep the central role in the community by trying to maintain a personalized relationship and a sense of community. This is your framework.

I hope this helps.

Wayde

Dear Junita1610,

Consider stepping back from the jargon and breaking your question down into smaller sections.

And why limit yourself to just retail?

You might benefit by opening up the remit of your question to include the worlds of entrepreneurism, non profits, micro lending, music (Live Aid), art, and movies to name but six, areas that have all given back in one way or another, or that have been used as vehicles to move a message forward.

www.venturebeat.com/2008/10/30/will-social-capital-be-the-next-big-industry...

I hope this helps.

Gary Bloomer
Wilmington, DE, USA

Social Captial equals reach. As a retailer you want to reach your target market. But with all the clutter in advertising...how do you do it? You create a niche. You can create a niche by leveraging the online world.

It seems you are asking about two different markets: B2B and B2C. It's like creating a tribe as Seth Godin puts it. In retail, I believe that social capital is equated to trends. So how many people are interested in your product? How often are you keywords searched? How often do they appear in twitter? How many search results in google? How many hashtags in Twitter? How often is your widget talked about? How can a company leverage that to harness that traffic?

There is an intrinsic correlation between concepts of pop culture and fashion. Fashion like Marc Jacobs or the iPhone. What do you want to capture? You perhaps want to compare the social capital of different retailers and compare. Try search.twitter.com and search different retailers in your realm and see what results....look at their # of followers....how do they engage the audience? Try alltop.com; what are blogger saying?

I think you might need to give us more details about the market you are thinking about, b/c each is a little different.