Victoria's Secret: Tops For Facebook Likes. Sales?

Let's assume that the Facebook era includes 2007 - Current.

Then during the Facebook era, two things happened:

1. Victoria's Secret leads the "Facebook Likes" category.
2. Victoria's Secret squeezed out a compound annual sales increase of 3.6%, barely better than inflation (see page 9 of the appendix in this report from Limited Brands).

Be careful when reviewing faux-metrics or vanity-metrics like "likes" or "influence" or "engagement".  In this case, with the most successful Facebook brand leading the way, total net sales are not following suit.

Also be careful when reviewing the marketing literature of the attribution community.  These folks will link sales to social media, and yet, as we see here, there's not much to look at in terms of sales and Facebook Likes.


Note at 2:53pm PDT:  Take a look at the ad that was served to me when I published this post.

Top Four Articles, March

An odd month for the top-rated articles.

Number Four was "Nordstrom Integrates RSS Feeds and Search".

Number Three was an essay titled "Leaving Eddie Bauer".

Number Two was an article about "Free Shipping And Free Returns At Victoria's Secret".

Number One was an essay titled "Leaving Nordstrom".

Victoria's Secret, Free Shipping, and Google

I am Kevin Hillstrom, host of The MineThatData Blog. I average 135 daily visitors, and have about 300 RSS subscribers. That yields about 158,000 visits a year. In the history of my blog, I only recall writing about Victoria's Secret once.

Victoria's Secret is a gigantic multichannel mega-brand that runs free shipping promotions from time to time.

So when a customer uses Google to search for "Victoria's Secret Free Shipping", why doesn't Victoria's Secret appear in the top ten results, but The MineThatData Blog appears in the top five?

Does the customer who conducted this search want to know about the actual free shipping promotion, or my opinion about a free shipping promotion?

Multichannel CEOs and CMOs: Stop arguing about the USPS and proposed postage increases. Start challenging Google to provide relevant search results. Is Google your friend? Is Google actually a competitor of yours, one that is blocking traffic that should be going to your site? Or does Google make a lot of innocent mistakes, like the rest of us? I'd put my money on the latter --- I would also challenge you to start challenging Google the way you challenge the rest of your trusted vendors, folks you've worked with for decades.


UPDATE 2007.03.18: Here's a couple of searches that produce similar results:

Nordstrom Marketing

Neiman Marcus Blog