Lowe's: An SEO-rich Social destination for do-it-yourself'ers

LowesCreativeIdeas.com has been a big hit for Lowe's. The site now has more than 13,000 fans on Facebook, is a source for product and consumer insights, and drives in-store and online transactions. Lowe's destination also won the 2009 Online Media Marketing and Advertising (OMMA) Web Site Excellence award for Best Social Networking site.

LowesCreativeIdeas.com turns customers into evangelists, allowing them to share and broadcast their achievements in the form of product journals that are powered by blogs, photos, and other social features. Lowe's cleverly encourages the surfacing of product-specific information in these journals, which has provided word-of-mouth marketing benefits for the retailer. The site also provides a window into the lives of Lowe's customers that the company uses to improve products and services on a daily basis. Finally, Lowe's is finding that the customer-driven journals deliver SEO value to the site, as Web users searching for home project insights find themselves at LowesCreativeIdeas.com.

Since 1946, Lowe's has stood for quality home improvement products and superior customer service. This commitment led to the creation of Lowe's Creative Ideas, a free print publication that showcases project ideas that utilize products sold at Lowe's locations across the country. Eventually, customers began sending photos of their projects - backyard decks they had built, gardens they had started, and other home project achievements - all built using Lowe's products.

Faced with customer requests to share their projects online, Lowe's launched LowesCreativeIdeas.com in June 2008. This site reinvigorated the Creative Ideas magazine with state-of-the-art design and social functionality. Lowe's recognized that encouraging its customers to share their home improvement projects in the form of stories and photos would engender loyalty, and that the social features of the site would result in a strongly differentiated visitor experience.