Social Media @ Wal-Mart – Social Gifting Facebook Application Shopycat Case Study

Wal-Mart has a very active Facebook page where it has close to 23 million likes, close to million visitors to the page and according to a statement from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, he and his top management team travelled to Bentonville, Arkansas to "deepen" its relationship with Wal-Mart. The relationship between Facebook/Wal-Mart is very lucrative for both parties considering the fact that Facebook has one billion monthly users. @WalmartLabs is developing tools and technologies that will help Wal-Mart analyze the relevant information hidden in the hundreds of millions of social media conversations occurring online every day and through mapping social DNA of social networks users and sort through posts, updates, likes, comments looking to target products based on the genome. WalmartLabs defines the "Social Genome" as "a giant knowledge base that captures entities and relationships of the social world.

In November, 2011, WalmartLabs launched an application for Facebook called Shopycat, which currently has close to 20,000 likes or roughly one-hundredth of one percent of Wal-Mart's Facebook likes. WalmartLabs says the Shopycat app "makes gift giving less stressful and more fun "by analyzing their Facebook activity through likes, shares and posts using our Social Genome technology." Shopycat tries to figure out from a person’s Facebook profile what they’re most interested in, but also then has to find that product and match it to a link online. Shopycat is the first social shopping application from Wal-Mart’s recently-formed @WalmartLabs unit which is focused on developing platforms, products and businesses around social and mobile commerce. Along with products from Walmart.com and Wal-Mart, Shopycat matches users' interests to a catalog that includes other sites like bookseller Barnes & Noble and gifts store RedEnvelope.

According to Ifeelgoods.com Wal-Mart case study where they studied customer acquisition by Wal-Mart through its Facebook social gifting application called Shopycat. Ifeelgoods worked with @WalmartLabs to build the user base for Shopycat. In the initial month-long campaign, Ifeelgoods hosted a seamless user experience that gave 10 Facebook credits to users that allowed the Shopycat application and for preventing fraud credits were direct deposited into eligible users’ Facebook accounts. As an added service, Ifeelgoods assisted with driving targeted traffic to the promotion by displaying ads via the Ifeelgoods publisher network, ultimately managing campaign performance for @WalmartLabs. There was a good 42% conversion rate for users allowing Shopycat and a 27% redemption rate on the credits offer, which highlight campaign success. 50% of users shared the Shopycat promotion with their friends, and that viral earned media traffic flow generated an incremental lift in conversions of 25%. The cost per new user was far less than campaign targets, and the users directed to Shopycat from the Ifeelgoods campaign stayed with the app, making up approximately 90% of the Shopycat user base. Shopycat application success has encouraged Wal-Mart to focus more on becoming social media retail mega player.

Social Media Adoption @ Fortune 500 Companies- @Wal-Mart Labs, Social Genome

Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world’s largest retailer and the second largest company in terms of revenue according to the Fortune 500 2012. “Through the innovative fusion of retail, social and mobile, @WalmartLabs is redefining Commerce for the largest retailer worldwide”,according to the introduction on @WalmartLabs. Wal-Mart is developing tools and technologies that will help it analyze the relevant information hidden in the hundreds of millions of social media conversations occurring online every day and use it to understand consumer trends so that they can plan their product assortments, including new products to introduce and supply to secure. Wal-Mart acquired Kosmix, the company behind real-time Twitter filter site TweetBeat, medical search engine RightHealth, and topic-specific engine Kosmix for US$ 300 million and transformed the company into @WalmartLabs with an objective to create technologies and businesses around social and mobile commerce.

According to Anand Rajaraman, co-founder of Kosmix, the company focused on developing a social genome platform that captures the connections between people, places, topics, products and events as expressed through social media — be it a feed, a tweet or a post. WalmartLabs defines the "Social Genome" as "a giant knowledge base that captures entities and relationships of the social world." Wal-Mart has been building their own in-house Social Genome since past few years with both public and private data from social media, tweets, Facebook messages, blog posts, You Tubes, it’s all streaming into Wal-Mart. Streaming in so fast, that WalmartLabs created something they call Muppet, a solution for processing Fast Data, using large clusters of machines. The Labs describes the Social Genome as their "crown jewel." Wal-Mart is essentially looking to combine data on purchase history with data from social networks with actual transaction history.

Wal-Mart is looking to transform itself into a social media retail mega player and it is investing millions of dollars into @WalmartLabs to develop new tools, applications and technologies and also acquire companies who are actively developing mobile and social media applications. Post Kosmix and its transformation into @WalmartLabs, the company acquired mobile point-of-sale app maker Grapple, location-aware mobile ad company OneRiot and a mobile app company called Small Society known for writing apps for clients like the Democratic National Committee and Starbucks. According to recent Wal-Mart press release the @WalmartLabs team continues to evolve Polaris a semantic search engine for browsing products and ease of shopping. In the past year, the group has created Shopycat, a social gift finder; Classrooms by Wal-Mart, a program to make back-to-school shopping easer; Get on the Shelf, a crowdsourcing contest to unearth new products for Wal-Mart; and Social Media Analytics, tools that use social chatter to select items to be carried by Wal-Mart. @WalmartLabs goal is to have Wal-Mart create the next great shopping experience by melding physical stores with online search and social media input.