iMedia: How easy is it in such rapidly changing times to create and adhere to a web strategy?
Kalma: Everyone always talks about strategy as a big, long-term thing. We approach strategy by understanding what our business needs are today and what we think they'll be tomorrow, and then we come up with a quick and dirty plan. We don't have some master document that says, "Here's the strategy. Stick to it or else." We have to immerse ourselves in the industry and anticipate changes before they happen. Our really bright CEO is immersed in it, and we have an empowered group of employees who are all active agents for us in the social space or wherever. The thing that suffers is documentation. The thing that benefits is advancement of our product. I can live without proper documentation if it means the product succeeds.
iMedia: How does Twitter fit in with your overall marketing efforts?
Kalma: Out of around 1,400 employees, we have 439 actively on Twitter. We aggregate all our employee tweets and all mentions on Twitter.Zappos.com. We aggregate all our brands' mentions, as well. It gives us an internal portal to see who's involved. We're trying to find the right way to bring all the conversations relevant to our brand to one area. By no means is it a final product, but it's certainly the start of something.
iMedia: How quickly can you start something like that?
Kalma: It depends on the initiative and the level of complexity. If it's very complex, we will move more slowly and get project management involved. If it's something relatively low-risk, like Twitter... That idea was conjured up in a cab. From the time Tony [Hsieh, CEO] and I talked about it until it went live was probably a week. It's taken on iterations since then. We partnered with another company for Explore.Zappos.com. The technology was already there, we had to provide a product feed. That was up in a matter of a few weeks. The key is to identify what's big, what's not big, and really go after low-hanging fruit. If the feasibility is there and the possibility of reward is high, we'll jump in and see if it works. If it shows signs of hope, we'll nurture it.
The beta site is obviously a huge project with 100 or so people involved, and a much slower process. It needs to go through more rigorous QA. We're working on improving the internal and external APIs, so eventually, we can build on top of the data set more easily.
iMedia: What medium in the early days was the biggest boost to awareness and traffic?
Kalma: General search. Search and affiliates have historically driven the most traffic for us. As we've gotten better brand awareness, we've seen improvement in direct and organic traffic. SEO remains king in many things we do.
In the future, awareness will come from things that are considered non-traditional channels now but to me are traditional: being active in the social space, and effective and accurate PR. There's also emotional PR -- things that don't seem like advertising, like having over 1 million followers on the Zappos Twitter feed. We'll probably have more Twitter followers than we will customers at some point. That's incredible PR: people who are willingly choosing to follow you. That's the power we haven't understood yet in business.
iMedia: Do you expect to see any ROI from social media?
Kalma: I don't need to see an ROI in social media now, because I believe it's going to evolve and become something wonderful. The fundamental belief we have is that it will become more powerful than any kind of advertising you can do. I'm not saying we don't want to see a return, but if all we focused on was the return on investment, we'd lose our authenticity, sacrifice the brand, and lose the PR value. There's a certain level of intent with some of the things we do, but not with all of it. Our intent is to find out what works and what doesn't.
Susan Kuchinskas is a freelance writer.
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