Wal-Mart’s Facebook Deal A Clever Way To Awaken Lethargic Store Managers
Written by Evan SchumanOctober 13th, 2011
Wal-Mart on Tuesday (Oct. 11) announced a deal with Facebook to launch more than 3,500 store-specific Facebook pages. This move could mark the beginning of a key positioning change—both with the world's largest retailer and the many other chains likely to follow Wal-Mart's strategy—of thinking of the Web face of Wal-Mart being one chain instead of thousands of local stores.
Beyond the obvious—strengthening the local friendly face of the neighborhood store—this could alert corporate to stores that are resonating with their audiences and those that are not. It's not unusual for chains to allow specific stores to have very different product mixes based on the manager's read on local customers. In turn, this could enable those differences to be much more pronounced than is practical today with a single walmart.com site. This all presumes, though, that customer interactions with local Facebook sites—especially as measured by the number of "likes" a site gets—is a meaningful metric. That's far from being a given.
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