The socialization of parts direct

The Socialization of PartsDirect
Considerations, strategies, and tactics
Kevin McFall, Product Manager

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INTRODUCTION
Socialization of PartsDirect

3
Influential Social Media Facts
• Social networking is most popular online
activity, with 62% of adults using it and
22% of time online spent on sites like
Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest
• Social commerce sales expected to
reach $9.2 Billion by the end of 2012;
$14.25 B in 2013 and $30 B in 2015
• 192 million people will shop online by
2016 spending avg. of $1,800/person/yr
• 20% would purchase within a social site
• 40% of Twitter users regularly search for
products and 12% of consumers have
purchased a product online because of
info they found on Twitter
• 60% are willing to post about
products/services in FB to get a deal
Why do we want to socialize SearsPartsDirect?
Source: http://thesocialskinny.com/99-new-social-media-stats-for-2012/
HELLO
MY
NAME
IS
Part
No.
79578
7538

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Social Media for Business
• 91% of social marketers see improved
site traffic due to social media campaigns
and 79% are generating more quality
leads
• 90% of marketers use social media as
part of their everyday business operations
• 43% of marketers have noticed an
improvement in sales due to social
campaigns
• The most popular social networking
tool for marketing is Facebook – being
used by 92%, followed by Twitter (84%),
LinkedIn (71%) and blogs (68%)
• 65% of the world’s leading companies
have an active Twitter profile
Why do we want to socialize SearsPartsDirect?
Source: http://thesocialskinny.com/99-new-social-media-stats-for-2012/

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Social Strategy Must Align to Current Vision & Strategy
Vision Strategy Tactics Measures
Vision: Become the 1st choice and trusted partner for repair & replacement part consumers by
offering the industry’s best shopping and search experience with unmatched “how to” support.
Strategy:
Grow the Core
• The Sears brand(s) and Home Services market position as the premier repair authority have helped to develop our Core DIY
customer base. Our most immediate opportunity is to grow, develop, and leverage that base.
• Sears Home Services is the nation’s repair authority, and SPD can leverage that trust & knowledge to grow traffic, conversion,
and affinity.
Drive Integrated Sales
• Our brick & mortar locations and advanced supply chain management system provide a key differentiator between SPD and
our competition.
• SPD is uniquely positioned to offer an integrated shopping and local pickup experience.
Grow our Non-Sears Share
• The broader parts market presents our largest growth opportunity as we more effectively leverage our repair content and
online capabilities to serve a broader base.
• Development of a 2nd (non-sears branded site) will be key to accessing that market and extending through our commercial
sales team.
• Defining and executing a Non-Sears Marketing strategy will also be key to growing our share of non-sears sales.

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What business goals do we want to accomplish with Social?
Drive Brand Awareness, Site Visibility, and Externalization
Programs -
I. Accelerate traffic growth and increase sales & profits
II. Drive increase of purchases and average order value
III. Increase awareness of the availability of millions of parts
for ALL major brands of household appliances, power
tools, lawn and garden equipment, and other household
products
IV. Increase visitor frequency among those who visit the site
for the first time i.e., once a year or less often
V. Drive increase of research activity on PD.com
VI. Build community for DIYers with SearsPartsDirect as a hub

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What marketing goals do we want to accomplish with Social?
I. Increase social reach
II. Engage fans through effective content
III. Identify and engage with influencers
IV. Increase lead generation
V. Integrate activity with analytics

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Philosophy of Approach – Build Community
• We don’t want to just go into the social universe and declare:
“We have parts to sell, come and get ‘em!”. We would #FAIL
• We must build trust and garner influence on topics in which we
are passionate and are experts – Home Appliances, Lawn &
Garden, DIY, etc. by contributing thought leadership
• We must do it in a way that is authentic, engaging, targeted
and participatory in those communities and platforms where
our passion for parts will resonate with the greatest relevance
• We can’t and must not go it alone…Let’s Get Social!

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Philosophy of Approach – Customers as Advocates
• We must also seek to engage
customers & others to
evangelize our brand and to
amplify our messaging
• To enable them to become
ambassadors for PartsDirect –
we will have to acknowledge
and care for our customers to
pave the way for them to
become advocates
• We will help brand them as
influencers, experts, & DIYers

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RECOMMENDATION PLAN FOR
GETTING STARTED

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Where do we start?
1. Determine what the achievement milestones should be
2. Determine how we want to measure success and what we want to measure in
order to identify key trends, influencers and useful intelligence
3. Consider identification of a dedicated community manager/moderator resource
(salary level < $90K /yr)
4. Understand best practices of the Sears OBU Social Media Team and what best
practices we might be required to follow
a. Is there a Sears Social Media Policy and/or Brand Key for social we must adhere to?
b. Are there prescribed rules of engagement?
5. Recommended tactics
a. Formulate content development, frequency and distribution plan
b. Execute blogger identification / outreach and customer advocacy program
c. Platform profile deployment
d. Publish, monitor & engage
e. Plan, create, execute, monitor and measure social media campaigns

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Where do we start? Content Recommendations
• Develop a Content Strategy:
– Content types we should acquire / produce / share / engage with:
> DIY Solution videos
> How To Tips & Care Guides
> Manuals
> Parts content
- Model diagrams
- Parts images
- Parts descriptions
- Parts prices
> Top Accessories content
- Accessory images
- Accessory descriptions
- Accessory prices
>Crowdsourced / UGC
• Create an editorial calendar
– Daily, weekly, monthly, seasonal
schedule of topics and post types

13
Where do we start?
Blogger Id & Outreach Recommendations
• License list of relevant DIY, Appliance, and L&G blogs with
greatest scale and reach
• Determine which bloggers have the most influence in terms
of reach, amplification and engagement
• Identify the bloggers that are most receptive to engaging
with big brands, then begin the engagement

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Where do we start? Understanding Platform Impact
Source: eMarketer – Marketers Watching Google+ for SEM
http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1009381&ecid=a6
506033675d47f881651943c21c5ed4

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Where do we start? Platform Recommendations
– YouTube – Over 800 million unique users visit YouTube each month; Over 4
billion hours of video are watched each month; 72 hours of video are uploaded
to YouTube every minute; 70% of YouTube traffic comes from outside the US
– Facebook – 901 Million Active Users (50.3% of U.S. population); 137.6 MM
monthly uniques spending avg. of 7+ hours on site/month. 250 MM photos,
57% Female, 425 MM mobile users; accounts for 60% of social media xactions
– Twitter – 140 Million active users generating 1Bn tweets every 3 days
– Google+ - 250 Million active users
– Pintrest –Fastest growing and 3rd most popular social platform (10.4 Million
Users+) and biggest traffic referrer back to sites from a social platform. Time
spent on site for avg. user is 98 minutes per month. Projected to account for
40% of social media driven purchases by Q2 2012. Buyers referred from
Pinterest are 10% more likely to buy and spend an average of 10% more than
visitors from other social networks. See Land’s End Canvas brand case study
Blog – 56,412,071 WordPress Sites,
367 million visitors, 2.5 Bn PVs

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Where do we start? Platform Recs Cont’d.
• Set-up profile pages on the following list of recommended and most
appropriate social platforms for our content types and audience goals
• Minimal platform set-up requirements & current status:
– YouTube – Active; keyword tagged & skinned with PD branding
– Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/partsdirect is currently held by a
European Automotive parts provider. SearsPartsDirect is available, but that
might relegate us to being seen as a Sears only solution
– Twitter – Account exists but is inactive and account access is probably lost
– Google+ - Can use PartsDirect gmail account to set up profile and establish
DIY Circles and conduct Hangouts
– Pintrest – The fastest growing social platform and driver of traffic back to
sites. Pintrest is well-suited to PartsDirect business with regard to visuals like
model diagrams and parts images; however, if there is any concern around
right to redistribute images (i.e., 3-D view providers) we should insure we
negotiate rights to use off-platform or proceed cautiously.
– Blog – Add a blog to PartsDirect.com using WordPress or other platform

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YouTube
Channel Features and Capabilities
• Video titles have SEO value and
can be keyword tagged to drive
additional optimization
• Videos are portable and can be
easily shared including
embedded in other sites
• Subscriptions can be a key
engagement metric
• Can share links, photos, video,
and locations
Limitations
• Can’t schedule or automate
posts
• Can’t proactively message or
communicate with individuals
other than to include their profile
links in the context of the post
and hope they have the
appropriate notification turned on

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• Measure attention score
• Early attention score is low
• Late attention score is high
• Include steps
• User annotations
• Create calls to action
• Spotlight annotation that drives users
to landing page
• Link to other related videos
• Perform keyword research and tag
videos accordingly
• Transcript – After you’ve recorded the
video, grab the transcript and upload it to
YouTube.
• Social Media Engagement –Share the
video 2 to 3X per week
Engagement Tactics
• Drive increase in number of
subscribers by posting videos
in various communities and
on sites where videos can
provide answers i.e. Quora
• Add YouTube tab to PD FB
page
• Publish YouTube Videos to
Pintrest
• Create interactive video
reinforcing ease of a certain
installation type e.g.
http://www.youtube.com/heine
kentheentranc
Profile Build Tactics
YouTube

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Google+
• It’s all SEO Friendly, but +1s help more
• No character limits on posts
• Ability to filter in-bound and outbound
streams by circles
• Ability to edit, delete and link to posts
• Can disable re-shares and comments
on posts
• Can share links, photos, video, and
locations
• Limitations
• Can’t schedule or automate posts
• Can’t proactively message or
communicate with individuals other
than to include their profile links in the
context of the post and hope they have
the appropriate notification turned on
Profile Features and Capabilities

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Engagement Tactics
1. Post publicly useful and relevant
content to keep people up-to-date
2. Follow relevant members
3. Schedule and launch Hangouts for
live online gatherings around a
relevant DIY topic with your
Circles
4. Manage Circles effectively.
Sharing the right content into the
right Circles at the right time
5. Listen. Be sure to stay up to date
on your page and what is being
said about the SPD brand.
Respond to comments
• Engage with relevant circles
• Share content with people who have already
demonstrated they are interested in it
• Don’t convolute stream with irreverent posts
• Create DIY, part seeker and other specific
topic circles
• Engage in other related and relevant circles
by sharing content in those circles
• Create a compelling content mix: not all about
PD (i.e., other influencers and companies in
the space, interesting facts, blog posts, etc.)
• Share the PD G+ page
• Incorporate G+ badge on PD.com and in
PD.com emails
• Share certain circles with others
• Create and conduct Hangouts to deliver “live”
thought leadership (i.e., like a webinar)
Google+

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Facebook Page
• Use timeline to tell linear story about the history of PD.com site
• Incorporate key historical milestones and attach image and text
descriptions allowing fans to comment and like (Img size 843 x
403 pixels)
• Ability to highlight and pin information and important posts for up
to seven days at the top keeping them from being buried in the
wall stream
• Apps have more prominent position on the page; however max
display of four at a time (App thumbnail image size 111 x 74
pixels)
• Admin and insights dashboards
• Each tab/app still has a unique URL so you can drive traffic from
inside or outside Facebook to any ‘landing page’ you wish.
• Can share links, photos, video, and locations
Limitations
• Limited to display four visible apps at a time
• Pricing, purchasing and contact information off limits
• Call to action for ‘Liking’ page also off limits
• Also see competitor pages
– https://www.facebook.com/PartSelect
• Follow best practices in building
out page
• Insure privacy settings are wide
open so that content is SEO
friendly
• Incorporate contextual About text
• Use photos, Likes counter,
Locations, Gift registry
• Use app pages as landing pages
Video explains Facebook Timeline
Page Features and Capabilities

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Engagement Tactics
1. Create a specific voice for the posts
2. Create a sense of ownership among
the DIY community members by using
welcoming words like “you” and “yours”
3. Post on a regular basis, which can
include scheduling posts. We’ll have to
be consistent and show that the
community is viable. Also select day
parts that align with peak site traffic.
For instance, early evening when
customers are at home in front of their
appliances.
4. Initiate conversations with visitors by
posing questions and fielding answers.
5. Use the page as a resource hub of
information for visitors to learn
everything they need to
6. Share industry news not just info on PD
7. Get recommendations from community
on what they want to see / learn.
8. Offer contests/giveaways
More tips: http://www.jeffbullas.com/2012/02/29/10-powerful-tips-to-increase-
fan-engagement-on-facebook/
Facebook Page

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Twitter Page
• Utilize new profile page that allows for both a
profile image and header image to showcase
brand and product
• ‘About’ section should be used to convey
PartsDirect URL, value prop and personality
• Build lists of influencers across varying topics
• No current distinction between user or
corporate pages.
• Promoted Tweets can be used as paid media
to a targeted audience
• Can proactively message or communicate
with individuals via mentions or Direct
Messages (DMs)
Limitations
• Visible posts are limited to 140 Chars.

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Twitter Page
Engagement Tactics
• Build follower base by providing regular
updates via Tweets and remain on consistent
publishing informational nuggets
• Ask for retweets by providing qualitative,
informative and timely posts. Also calling out
other related Twitter handles in the tweet helps
• Tweet on weekends and during busy times of
the day while developing a cadence and
identifying a sweet spot window of time
• Tweets of100 Chars or less, perform the best
• Use links in tweets to drive clicks and retweets
• Use popular and relevant hashtags in tweets
• Tweet images (links), they have 200% more
clicks
Source: http://www.pamorama.net/2012/07/14/11-effective-twitter-strategies-for-
brands/#.UGtSf5iHLj4
• Profile image
• Profile background
• About SPD Bio, includes link
to PD.com
• Metrics: popularity/reach;
engagement/activity;
trust/authority; influence;
amplification; relevance
• Tweet using keywords
already found to be
successful for site SEO
• Tweet about articles relevant
to network
• Build twitter lists and try to get
added
• Find and use hashtags that
are already being used rather
than creating new ones
• Find and use trending topics

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Pintrest Page
• Cork board and pinning concept
• Find images (links or upload) and pin them to the PD board. Create a taxonomy of boards that
reflects site
• Describe pins with no character limits. Use keywords that are SEO friendly
• Link back from pins to source site and create link juice as well as opportunity to link back to a
pre-check out page
• Add video, audio or other images to pins, manually or using 3rd-party tools like Pinstamatic
• Follow others and build a community of followers to view the PD board
• Measure impact using analytic tools

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Pintrest Page
Engagement Tactics
• Pin featured parts,
promotional items, and
images from ‘How To’
content
• Create and populate boards
based on seasonality and
model categories
• Pin ‘How To’ content from
other sources to build cred
as a thought leader and
influencer in the space
• Pin videos from PD’s
YouTube channel
• Proper account set up is critical
• First name last name should be
business name
• About field 200 char. Limit ; use for
SEO and clearly articulate your
business
• Backlinks stimulate SEO and overall
‘search ability’ of content
• Review
http://pinterest.com/source/searspartsdi
rect.com/– Tells you what people have
pinned from our site to Pintrest
• Pin videos from your YouTube and
Vimeo channels
• Edit where destination of where your
Pin links to specifying product pages,
model pages, etc.
• Use keywords in your captions
• Use hash tag to also link to categories

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WordPress or other Blog
Engagement Tactics
• Create valuable content
• Develop a meaningful Blog Roll
• Respond to comments quickly
• Read and comment on other blogs to generate
social karma
• Publish/share PD blog content on other social
platforms and use link shorteners to share
• Curate leading industry news
• Research and integrate the right keywords; use
them in beginning of headline
• Keep posts concise
• Develop theme that matches
PartsDirect.com
• Leverage PD.com taxonomy
• Utilize appropriate WP plugins
• Determine content distribution
license approach (i.e. Creative
Commons)
• Enable RSS feeds
• Set other general, writing,
discussion and privacy settings
• Leverage social integration
Site Build Tactics

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Where do we start? Invite, Monitor, Engage & Measure
1. Select a Social Media Marketing / CRM System
– Expected Outcome: Procure a system that meets the requirements of having
superior listening capability, the ability to publish / engage and to track
engagement with key influencers while also providing rich reporting
2. Create profiles, invite staff, family, & friends to Like, Follow, Comment,
and engage
– Expected Outcome: Create a sense that a vibrant community is burgeoning
around the brand’s social presence
3. Develop/execute plan to monitor social media for SPD brand mentions
– Expected Outcomes: Identify trends and use intelligence to influence product
road map; respond to customer needs and impact CSAT
4. Follow rules of engagement
– Expected Outcomes: Impact CSAT; increase awareness, credibility and
influence; sell more parts; become a source of influence in DIY community

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Where do we start? Invite, Monitor, Engage & Measure
5. Initiate content publishing schedule
– Expected Outcomes: Drive SEO and increase in traffic to the site; increase
brand awareness; improve customer acquisition and conversion
6. Measure and report
– Expected Outcomes: Analyze and determine progress towards success
metrics; adjust execution tactics based on trends

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FUTURE SOCIAL OPPORTUNITIES
2013 & Beyond
• Conduct gamification, contesting and
promotions across platforms
• Bring in ‘in-store’ / OTC store social
activations with geographic social platforms
(i.e. Facebook, Foursquare, Path and other
check-in tools).
• Build out , publish, syndicate unique PD
branded content
• Build ecommerce transactional app on
FB.com
• Explore partnerships with social shopping
sites i.e. Svpply, Shop Savvy, ShopKick,
JustBoughtIt, ProductWiki via Connect
• Seek out Social Integration / Partnership /
Biz Dev opportunities with TV Networks
(i.e. DIY Network, HGTV, etc.)

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COMPETITOR EXAMPLES

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Competitor Examples - LOWE’s DIY Community: IDEA EXCHANGE

33
Competitor Examples PartSelect Facebook Page

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Competitor Examples ApplianceZone Facebook Page

35
Competitor Examples
Repair Clinic
YouTube, Facebook & Twitter Pages

The socialization of parts direct

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