For retailers and consumer brands in general, Black Friday is not only ground zero for annual profitability, it’s also their digital performance baptism of fire as well. Every element of their omnichannel offering must line up perfectly, from web performance to ecommerce-centric personalization to in-store product availability.
And if something goes wrong, the world will hear about it – on Twitter.
There are more scientific measures of Black Friday performance to be sure – but Twitter uniquely captures the real-time sentiment of the public at large. Of course, only a percentage of shoppers will tweet their experience, and we can only expect truly disgruntled consumers to tag their tweets with the #blackfriday #fail hashtag combination.
It’s important to mind the important caveats, therefore, that this report only reflects sentiment and not actual performance, and is unscientific in the sense that we’re only looking at patterns in the handful of tweets of people sufficiently motivated to vent their Black Friday frustrations on Twitter.
With those caveats in mind, then, let’s take a look at how retailers have been performing this holiday season, beginning at 6:00 PM eastern time on Thanksgiving Day (all times eastern).
Read the entire article at http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2015/11/27/the-slow-the-crashed-the-out-of-stock-blackfriday-fail-twitter-report/.
Intellyx advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, Dynatrace is an Intellyx customer. None of the other organizations mentioned are Intellyx customers. Image credit: Joseph Leung.
