We recently chatted with author/blogger Lee Eisenberg about his new book, “Shoptimism: Why the American Consumer Will Keep On Buying No Matter What,” which explores shopping behavior from both the consumer and retailer sides, social media, academic and marketing research, and Mr. Eisenberg’s own experiences. Interesting stuff. A clip from the full interview on eMarketer Total Access:

eMarketer: How has the recession changed the way we shop?

Lee Eisenberg: My book’s subtitle is “Why the American Consumer Will Keep On Buying No Matter What.” Now that’s not to say that the American consumer will keep on buying the same way, or the same things in the same stores. But where there’s a will to shop, we will find a way to shop. We’ll never stop shopping and the sales side will never stop selling.

I think the recession has rebalanced our mindset. Most of us are now more mindful about what we buy than we were a couple of years ago. It’s not to say we won’t be spending money on big-ticket things or designer labels and so on. But I do think we’re placing a much bigger premium on value, and by that, I don’t mean absolute price. You read a lot these days about cost per wear, which is to say you take the price and you divide it by the number of times you wear it, or the amount of use you’ll get out of it, and that equals value. Value proposition is far, far more important today than it was a couple of years ago.

…

The other thing is social media. Every survey says 85% of us would trust what the rest of us say about a product or a retailer more than what an advertising agency says about its client. That’s a big change that’s not going to go away as the economy improves. These retailers have to learn that they don’t have the power to regulate or project their brands the way they used to.

eMarketer: How should multichannel retailers approach online versus offline shoppers? Are they one and the same? Is one more valuable?

Mr. Eisenberg: The brand values, voice and principles must be the same whether you’re delivering those in a store or online. That said, I think you’d be hard pressed to find any retailer that won’t tell you that the best customers are the cross-channel ones. It isn’t an “either/or.” It’s an “and/both.” A customer who shops two or three ways is going to spend more than a customer who only shops one, even if that customer is a heavy shopper in that one platform.

The full version of this interview is available here, to eMarketer Total Access subscribers only. Every day they have access to new interviews with digital marketing leaders and trendsetting entrepreneurs. Some other interesting interviews/case studies on retail:

• How Facebook can be a Revenue Source for Retailers
• Best Buy talks Social Commerce on Facebook
• Case Study: Marketing in a Tough Economy
• Retailers Will Focus on Basics This Holiday Season
• How the Davids of the E-Commerce World Can Beat the Goliaths

Great stuff here from David Armano on several trends we can expect to see from social media in the coming year. A snippet:

2. Corporations look to scale
There are relatively few big companies that have scaled social initiatives beyond one-off marketing or communications initiatives. Best Buy’s Twelpforce leverages hundreds of employees who provide customer support on Twitter. The employees are managed through a custom built system that keeps track of who participates. This is a sign of things to come over the next year as more companies look to uncover cost savings or serve customers more effectively through leveraging social technology.

I think it’s interesting that he mentions Best Buy’s Twitter efforts as their main social media play. Twelpforce is definitely a boon to their marketing program, but to me, it’s more of a customer service initiative. Best Buy’s really interesting social media program is their Facebook page.

Essentially, they’ve set up a virtual storefront — customers can search for products, ask friends to review it before they buy, or go directly to a purchasing page on Best Buy’s website. It’s targeted, it’s instant word-of-mouth, and now, it could be legitimately driving purchases. Analyst Jeffrey Grau recently spoke with Best Buy’s Senior Director of Interactive Marketing & Emerging Media, Tracy Benson, about the Facebook commerce site.

What you can’t do today is execute the cart in Facebook. So in our next integration later this year, you’ll actually be able to purchase in the cart through Remix. You’re essentially launching a commerce application in the background that really is pulling from BestBuy.com, but you don’t actually have to leave Facebook to go to BestBuy.com to purchase.

This goes way past the customer service efforts of Twelpforce — now we’re talking sales, revenue generated straight from a social media presence.

Most brands are finally starting to catch on that consumers want them to interact on the social web, and we’re seeing more companies dip their toes in the water. (See these case studies.) But beyond the community building, “let’s have a conversation with our customers” mantra of many a new media marketer, I think many brands may be missing out on the real potential to earn revenues on social platforms, at least, except for Best Buy.

We’ll see how it pans out. Happy 2010.

We’ve posted a few great interviews recently from our Total Access database — here’s a quick roundup of the action:

• Helping Wal-Mart Get Interactive: Kenny Tomlin of Rockfish Interactive chats with us about the company’s work with Wal-Mart and the social media forecast.
• Clorox: Rewiring The Brand Experience With Social Media: Mary O’Connell of Clorox talks about the company’s efforts to make digital and social media part of its brands’ success. O’Connell referred to creating a new vision of digital marketing that is “rewiring and re-imagining our entire brand experience.
• Integrated Marketing and Media at P&G: Clark Reinhard of Procter & Gamble describes the integrated marketing and media strategy for launching the Scope Outlast product line, which includes online video consumer testimonials and multimedia tie-ins with “American Idol” host Ryan Seacrest.
• Best Buy Talks Social Commerce on Facebook: We chat with Tracy Benson, the Senior Director of Interactive Marketing & Emerging Media at Best Buy, about the company’s recent launch of social commerce campaigns on Facebook and Twitter.
• The Social Power of User-Generated Content: Sam Decker of Bazaarvoice explains how retailers use customer reviews and stories to drive measurable business results.
• Coke Weighs The Value of Social Media: Carol Kruse develops interactive marketing programs and experiences for Coca-Cola’s global brands around the world. Here, Ms. Kruse discusses Coke’s use of digital media and marketing and the evolution of social media.
• How Honest Tea Brews Buzz Online: Jesse Merrill, the director of marketing at Honest Tea, chats about the company’s word-of-mouth and grassroots approach to marketing.

We recently chatted with Tracy Benson, the Senior Director of Interactive Marketing & Emerging Media at Best Buy, about the company’s recent launch of social commerce campaigns on Facebook and Twitter. Here’s a snippet:

Ms. Benson: At Facebook.com/Best Buy, you’ll see two tabs. One is Shop + Share and the other is Gift Ideas. So Shop + Share is, “Hey, I’m looking for a camera, I’m looking for Nikon D60.” Great. You can put in, “I want a Nikon D60.” Look that up. You’ll get from the whole BestBuy.com catalog, you’ll get the Nikon D60 and you’ll get the same experience in Facebook.

Then you can start wondering, “What do I need to know about this?” So basically anything I post on there then goes out to my wall. I can hear from my entire network and from people who aren’t in my network. What we’re finding is just astounding.

eMarketer: And how successful has this been?

Ms. Benson: Through these tools, our fan base is just growing exponentially. We only put it in about five or six weeks ago, so people are just getting exposed to it. Now all of a sudden we’re offering it and people are trying it and testing it. They are sharing it and then their friends are getting involved. Our viral influence has been astounding in the past two weeks. We’ve essentially grown from 27,000 users to probably close to 900,000.

The reason we’re growing is because people are figuring out the new things they can do with our brand and the new answers and solutions they can get in their environments, which includes this social shopping application.

We’ve made a real concerted effort in the past three months to leverage some of these assets we have and say, “Wow, we get over a billion visits at BestBuy.com and we know our core consumer is one of the heaviest Facebook users. Why don’t we put our BestBuy.com in our Facebook and see what the heck happens?”

So we ran one ad for just 24 hours. No discount. No offer. Basically said, “Hey, get connected with the Best Buy brand. The latest and greatest technologies. Come check it out.” We went from 27,000 fans to 163,000. Then that ad ended.

And talk about the social networks being sticky, these things are sticky like glue. And the viral influence from the 163,000 to the 900,000 in the last 9 days is just amazing.

eMarketer: What are the key things you are trying to accomplish with your fan page?

Ms. Benson: For us it really comes down to generating that brand awareness online in a social space, driving a strong and solid reputation and generating fans and leads that help us enable other people to interact and engage with our brand. At the end of the day we’ll have to get more ROI on a sales perspective, but our intent today is to learn. To learn what’s effective, what doesn’t work, what we need to do more of and what we can scale and do it in different ways.

The full version of this interview is available here, to eMarketer Total Access subscribers only. Every day they have access to new interviews with digital marketing leaders and trendsetting entrepreneurs.

For a soon-to-be-published eMarketer report on social commerce, I recently spoke with Tracy Benson, the senior director of interactive marketing & emerging media at Best Buy about her company’s social media initiatives. She discussed some of the complexities around targeting influential customers—people who share their opinions with a large network of followers.

Ms. Benson said that Best Buy knows the profile of its best customers, understands their behavior and recognizes what these shoppers like because it keeps in constant touch with them. What Best Buy doesn’t know is the extent of their influence.

“What we’re trying to learn right now is whether the same person who purchases a lot from us is also one of our best influencers or is there a different path to the influencers. They may not be the best purchaser in terms of quantity or dollars, but they might be influencing 1,000 people in their network who then become the buyers.”

Where Best Buy needs help, according to Ms. Benson, is with data warehousing expertise. It is difficult to analyze the large number of customer comments collected from social media sites on a large scale. The alternative is to manually look at every customer who comments to see which ones post their comments to a large community of friends.