An apology was followed by an acknowledgement of past mistakes “This time we want to get it right”  and sensibly their tweeter wouldn’t be drawn on information about the mysterious intern who was blamed for the original micro-blogging misdemeanor.

The content and tone of their tweets, plus the absence of  product promotion suggests Habitat is expecting to go through a period of penance before starting to push its penant shades, faux flowers and topiaries once again.  

I wonder if this unnecessarily negative though. Twitter is an exciting, fun  medium and a more confident return with some clear benefits to customers signing up might have hit a better note.

Less than half (45%) offered any kind of editorial material beyond basic product descriptions and just 10% of allowed users to submit comments or product reviews. Only 15% incorporated a blog, a tool known to be valuable for improving customer engagement and search rankings.

This despite it being well established that engaging visitors on your site through blogs will result in more sales. If this is the situation with the top 20 retailers, then the overall market take up must be even lower. It may just be that we’re reaching the end of the early adopter phase of social media online, at least for etailers. In five years time, I wouldn’t be suprised if that figure reverses.