Exercise 1 - Moosejaw...Bring on the Madness

Moosejaw Mountaineering is a distinctive retailer that has a thriving internet business and shops throughout Michigan (Ann Arbor, Birmingham, East Lansing, Grosse Pointe, Partridge Creek, and Rochester Hills) and in Chicago, Illinois.  Moosejaw carries its own brand of clothing as well as other featured brands of outdoor apparel, footwear and equipment such as North Face, Patagonia, Marmot, Black Diamond and Arc'Teryx.  Their company motto is ‘At Moosejaw We Sell the Best Outdoor Gear and Apparel in the World and Have As Much Fun As Possible While We Do It.' 

I recently discovered this online organization when my daughter requested a black North Face Denali jacket to endure the european winter in Paris during her Fall semester abroad.
Receiving my stickeredpackage was a delightful "brand event" in itself, as Moosejaw wants to make sure that every customer who receives a package remembers it...and I was no exception!  The SWAK (Sealed With A Kiss) sticker adds a personal touch as it is actually signed by the shipper who boxed the order.  Inside my package, I also received a "Nice Note," once again personalized by the shipper, thanking me for my order and providing contact information along with a Moosejaw bumper sticker and a current Moosejaw catalog.  The packaging alone made quite an impression on me and I wondered back then who was this Moosejaw Company?  I am so glad to have this oportunity via lesson 1 to explore it along with their use of social networking with social media tools.   

The Moosejaw website actively engages their loyal fun, young, edgy, customers and reflects an informal, yet enthusiastic attitude combined with a wicked sense of humor.  Their mission is "to make shopping as much fun as backpacking the Chilkoot trail, climbing in Yosemite, mountaineering in the Himalayas or playing red rover with the neighbors who you don’t like that much but they’re always ready to play any game in the cul-de-sac so you make do."  If you're offended by ridiculous commentary don't click on the Moosejaw Madness section.  The Moosejaw promise includes:

MOOSEJAW GUARANTEE - A LIVING WILL

The Moosejaw Living Will is our Product Guarantee. It means if you aren't thrilled with your purchase, return it AT ANY TIME as long as IT'S IN SELLABLE CONDITION and as long as you aren't dead..thus the Living Will.

Immediately on the home page, one comes across the icons for twitter, facebook, and flickr in the upper right hand corner and right below that is LIVE CHAT ,"home of the fastest typists and best dancers in the world. Maybe second best dancers." There are 11,478 followers on Twitter, 33,820 fans on Facebook, and 700 members of Moosejaw Madness on Flickr where you also have the RSS option to subscribe "to a feed of stuff on this page" and/or bookmark in Delicious.  The Twitter site includes an RSS feed of MoosejawMadness tweets that contains frequently updated content of their devoted Twitter fans or even get updates via SMS by texting follow MoosejawMadness to 40404 in the United States.  Fans even submit photos wearing the clothing with stickers and flags every week via Flickr and many get featured authentically in the catalogs.  Its Facebook site features an entertaining full-screen display of Moosejaw Morass Winter 2011 (80-page) Catalog. 

By Item Number

*We didn't actually count so that number may be wrong

Perhaps the most unique feature on Moosejaw's website is the link to Moosejaw Mobile  which also provides an interface specifically for mobile phones vs. its standard site and where customers can read hundreds of reviews from other trusted Moosejaw customers on their iPhone.  Bringing product reviews to mobile is an innovative way to reach their tech savvy customers. 

The Moosejaw Blog is monitored by Creative Director, Gary Wohlfeill whose motto is Love the Madness and who boldly announces on the Blog's heading that "The Moosejaw Blog was just named Fourteenth Best Blog Ever by Vegetable DIgest" (Don't look for the issue of Vegetable Digest because I completely made this up).  The latest new year's blog describes The Moosejaw Frenching Service designed to help their customers who can’t muster the courage themselves to ask the person they would like to french at the stroke of midnight!  Just an example of Moosejaw's uniquely effective activities to literally build relationships, interact and engage with their customers through their online blog...  

SocialMention brought up 483 mentions with 2% strength, the likelihood that Moosejaw is being mentioned in social media; 16:1 sentiment ratio of positive to negative mentions (64+, 4- and 415 neutral); 31% passion, of being talked about repeatedly; and 27% reach is the range of influence.  Moosejaw is mentioned an average of once an hour, mostly in such sources as photobucket, stumbleupon, digg and youtube.  

HowSociable? gives Moosejaw a visibility score of 315 which is comparably lower than Backcountry's score of 893.  Similarly, comparing the two on the backtype graph confirms the 426:26 tweets and 8:1 friendfeeds in Backcountry's favor.  Technorati was not an effective social monitoring tool in this case, as it did not bring up any related posts for Moosejaw, and only a measely 3 related posts for Backcountry.  

Moosejaw customers are essentially treated as familiar friends and are also given incentives through reward points on both Twitter and Facebook.  They successfully interact with their customers through multiple channels: email, texting, web browsing, mobile, Facebook, Twitter to maintain a transparent presence.  Although most dialogue about Moosejaw appear to be positive, I noticed on their facebook page under Review, that a handful of 1-star reviews in the last month have not been addressed...at least not publicly, which may lend itself that they are also human and not always perfect!