Interesting press release Tuesday from Borders and Gather.com announcing a joint project in which shoppers at Borders can click on to a link to Gather.com and share their thoughts on books, music and other entertainment.
Love the quotes from the two CEO’s:
“The power of social networking and social media is changing the way companies interact with their customers,” Gather.com CEO Tom Gerace said Tuesday in a statement. “Borders is a brand that appeals to highly educated and highly informed adults who are the core of the Gather.com community.”
“Conversations about books, music and movies happen every day at work, at home, at dinner parties, and just about everywhere,” added Borders CEO George Jones. “That’s what makes our business so dynamic.”
Now two things strike me about this story. First has anyone heard of Gather.com? I know I had not.. A DM News article from November says that “Gather.com’s 130,000 members and 1 million unique visitors in November ranged in age from 30 to 60, 72 percent had at least four years of college education and they tended to be an informed, engaged group of consumers”.
A social web site with only 130,000 members is an extremely small group compared to other social sites. In November I blogged about the top ten social sites and Gather.com was not on that list and I have not heard anything that would indicate that they have broken into the top ten in terms of members or traffic since then.
This appears to be a great deal for Gather.com as it generates lots of publicity for then plus Borders will send out emails to its members pointing them to content on the Gather.com site.
But what does it do for Borders? Well interestingly the Press Release says that “Borders, which on Monday reported disappointing sales for the holiday season, is expected to announce more initiatives in March.”
It appears to me that Borders.com is seeing its market share slowly evaporate and decided that they had to do something to make Wall Street happy. Social Marketing is hot so why don’t we get a partnership with a social media site. The fact that they chose Gather.com and not Facebook.com indicates to me that Borders is not really serious about social marketing. Combined with a press release that basically says if this doesn’t work we will try something new in 3 months tells me that this relationship will slowly fade out by summer.
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david, you must not get any of the Boston stations in new hampshire, Gather.com was all over the media last year. Tom Gerace appeared to be everywhere at once. I’ve tried Gather.com through mitx.org. It’s okay, but the branding is off for a b2b solution. I was getting consumers querying me in a business organization.
Since they are a Boston based company I would hope that you had heard of them John
I am not sure if the rest of the country has! The point I was trying to make was that while this is a great deal for Gather.com, you have to wonder why Borders did not partner with a more prominent social media site.
While sheer numbers are always desirable, targeting is just as important. Gather’s audience is tightly linked to public radio, writer types, readers, high education levels and income. It’s a very accurate target for Borders to hit. Facebook and MySpace are more shallow online communities, whereas Gather promotes more of an intelligent reader-writer interaction. It was a smart move for Borders.
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