Swedish-Style Social Commerce – Pop-up Shops for Blogs

Here’s a smart idea from Sweden.  Pop-up Shops for Blogs.

To seed buzz and demand for the opening of a new online store, Swedish interior design retailer Lagerhaus (no they don’t sell lager) has implemented an interesting variation on the online pop-up fan-shop trend.

Rather than take the traditional route of opening a temporary pop-up shop on their Facebook page, as Oscar La Renta, Burberry, Chanel, Joop!, Electronic Arts, Heinz, and others have done, Lagerhaus created a distributed pop-up shop widget for blogs – and invited leading popular interior design blogs to embed the widget on their blogs and customise it with their favourite products (see campaign video below).

Readers will know we’re big fans of pop-up fan-shops to promote product launches and advertising campaigns, but what’s smart about this alternative blog-based pop-up shop campaign is the extra reach and credibility they have.  By embedding the pop-up shop on popular blogs, more people are more likely to see it – than on a brand’s Facebook page, and it will have  implicit, if not explicit, third-party endorsement from the blogger hosting the pop-up shop.  It’s social proof, baby.

The pop-up shop campaign generated 13,000 peer-to-peer invitations to the fan-only opening of the online store, increased Facebook fans by 226% and interactions 360%. The pop-up e-shop campaign was run by Prime PR, (digital agencies take note, having wrestled control of social media budgets, PR agencies are making a land grab for social commerce), and has been shortlisted for the European Excellence Awards.

Of course, we’d like to have our cake and eat it too – pre-launch pop-up fan-shops on Facebook and blogs. Using iFrames, this is technically possible – embedding a pop-up shop across social media.  Take a look at the inspired, brilliant and free Launch Effect blog theme for viral launches from NY digital agency Barrel (review), add in e-commerce, widgetize it, and pull into Facebook – and you’ll be in pop-up fan-shop heaven.