This recent article from Advertising Age discusses the measures Home Depot has taken to spark online interaction with their customers, by creating hybrid positions known as social-media store associates. Executives at Home Depot quickly realized that in-store associates were their best source of product information, and decided to focus on them when assembling their online team. Brad Shaw, Home Depot’s Vice President of Corporate Communications, summed it up best:

"The way to stay fresh and current is to stay in the aisle with vendors and customers. We also wanted to be able to market them as real store associates. These are not call-center people or marketers or merchants or my communications team."

So with that in mind, The Home Depot initiated a rigorous selection process, evaluating their in-store associates, seeking experienced, knowledgeable, tech-savvy individuals who would spend two days a week as an online resource for customers. After being selected, the social-media store associates are then trained in Atlanta, and begin posting on a “dark site” to refine their style. The associates are also given a flip camera, so that they may record video responses, as well as tutorials. As a result of these measures, Home Depot’s online How-To community has thrived, even surpassing their original goals:

"We're seeing that [the social-media store associates] are becoming a center of gravity for content, in general, inside the company. Anywhere someone wants a how-to video shot, they're coming to us," Mr. Shaw said. "We knew our associates would be good, but it's just incredible to us just how great they are on the content front."

While some companies scramble to retrofit the principles of social shopping into their business models, the fact that Market America was built with these concepts in mind proves that we are truly ahead of the curve. It also provides a real validation that our company has always been on the right track. In the arena of social shopping, many companies are beginning to catch on to the benefits of online customer interaction. While they may be catching on, I have no doubt that our determination and innovation will make it quite difficult for them to catch up.