BlogWell Austin Social Media Case Study: REI, presented by Jordan Williams

Donations Instead of Deals A Facebook Places

Check-in Deals Launch Story

Blogwell AustinFebruary 2, 2011

Context of geo-social at REI

Lower frequency of visit

Don’t play the coupon/offer game

Haven’t seen critical mass w/ our customers

Facebook Launches Places

Could this be the tipping point for check-ins?

If a small % of users start checking-in?!

What could REI do?

Design a promotion/test that is:

Brand right

Has multiple opportunities for success

Does more of what we already do well

Social good for social behavior: donation vs. deal

What could REI do?

Design a promotion/test that is:

Designed for multiple audiences:Customers

Non-profit partnersEmployees

Local giving / local partnerships

How did it work?

68 Non-profit partners selected

$1 per check-in

Kicked off November 5th

How did it turn out? (Part 1)

Slow run rate leads to experimentation

$10 per check-in Black Friday

When in doubt… go all in!

What was challenging?

Tying the timing of a national retail promotion to 3rd party technology product launch

Facebook mobile app updates

UX of claiming deal

Reporting

Location spam

What was challenging?

Low awareness of “checking-in”

Early adopters already have a geo-social life

Lots of early adopters on Android

Privacy concerns amongst consumers

Communications fatigue

How did it turn out? (Part 2)

Incremental traffic during holiday shopping period

We drove over 18,000 check-ins

Drove awareness of our non-profit giving

Drove internal awareness on the power of social

Exponential reach through our non-profit partners

Bottom-line

Privacy issues persist with consumers

Hype outpacing reality (for now)

Platform fragmentation makes tough to scale

Brand right experiments make testing ok

Questions?