1-800-Flowers.com

1-800-FLOWERS.COM announced today that it's made an equity investment in Flores Online, one of Brazil's leading floral and gift retailers. 1-800-FLOWERS.COM has teamed with San Paolo, Brazil-based BR Opportunities, which has also taken an equity stake in Flores Online.

1-800-Flowers.com announced the signing of a 45-store franchise development agreement for its Fannie May Fine Chocolates division with GB Chocolates. The agreement calls for 45 new Fannie May franchise stores beginning in December 2011, with all open and operating by year-end 2014.

Monica Woo will be joining Sears Holdings as vice president and chief marketing officer for Sears on Aug. 15. Woo will be responsible for directing the overall marketing, brand and advertising programs for Sears. Prior to Sears Holdings, Woo served as chief marketing and strategy officer for FreshDirect. In this role, she was responsible for all revenue generation, merchandising and operations of FreshDirect’s web and mobile stores.

Baby boomers, college students, young professionals, empty nesters — you name a demographic, it's represented on Facebook. As a result, social networking sites, particularly Facebook, present tremendous opportunities for supporting your strategic needs for new customer acquisition every day.

Retailers (or any marketer or publisher) seeking higher conversion rates must adopt an “innovation attitude” to guide them amid a fertile landscape for new ideas, advanced technology and customer behavior learnings. So advised speaker after speaker at last week's Shop.org Merchandise Summit in Huntington Beach, Calif.

On day two of the Retail Marketing Conference in Orlando, Fla., last month, a panel of executives from Best Buy, Dell and 1-800-Flowers.com took part in a roundtable discussion on how their businesses have evolved their brand, e-commerce and marketing strategies to differentiate themselves from their competition through innovation.

Several retailers have been attempting to turn their Facebook "fan" pages into sales engines since the strategy first began surfacing last year. For instance, there's 1-800-Flowers.com, which says converting its fans on the social site into customers takes a lot of the same tweaking and prodding seen elsewhere in the advertising world.

Social networking is certainly the rage today, but I'm advancing the theory that most direct marketers don't use it to its fullest capacity. A few weeks ago, I spent about four hours looking at Facebook sites for my favorite retailers, catalogers and online merchants. Many were good at initiating conversations and trying to build brand loyalty. Very few, however, followed the basic tenets of direct marketing by using that communication to either build their databases or encourage purchasing. Social networks are places to build community. But that can go hand in hand with marketing and selling.

If you spend a lot of time in the great outdoors doing your thing, you’re probably in the doghouse. But a print, online and social media campaign launched this fall by Cloudveil Mountain Works, a Jackson, Wyo.-based outdoor sportswear marketer, is just for you. Cloudveil is offering customers and prospects the chance to buy apology gifts for anyone they may have offended by spending too much time skiing, fishing or climbing in the mountains.

Having come a long way from its modest beginning as a chain of floral shops in metropolitan New York, 1-800-Flowers.com usually has set trends, not followed them.