The local stores are the pillars of any community. Traditionally, they have been more than just sellers. They provide information about products, trying to personalize their offerings to people (or at least helping people choose the best products for their needs). Local retailers are always concerned about foot traffic and sales. But their problems are more acute since they dont have the web sales/traffic to fall back upon to make up for any foot traffic. Companies such as Groupon solve this problem partly by their outrageous deals but this is not a sustainable for retailers as this only gives them a temporary boost.

At DoTogether we have always been about friends of neighbours and other experts helping you find the products we need. Over the past couple of months, we at DoTogether through our partnership with Retailigence have been using a unique approach to help local retail. Instead of outrageous deals, we enable you to ask questions about your shopping needs and get personalized recommendations about products, stores from your friends, neighbors and even the stores themselves. These interactions let the stores and influencers connect with local buyers without spending a ton of money on SEO and such. By building these communities of trust locally, we enable buyers to get great personalized local recommendations while still shopping local. Our unique rewards system still lets local retailers incentivize local shoppers. Plus local shoppers still get the benefit of doing their research online and saving time.

As much as we love online shopping, there are a lot of products for which touch, feel is very important. Hence are the local stores. We at DoTogether are doing our part to help build and strengthen the relationships these local retailers have with local shoppers.

We at DoTogether have been experimenting with Facebook applications for a long time and have a fairly good idea about the internals. Most of the concerns are unfounded and baseless.

I wanted to share our perspective on the related Privacy issues. 

#1. The general nature of the privacy problem is not new to Facebook. If you ever have wanted to do something social, you have to bring friends and family into it. 

•  If you have emailed someone, you have had to give Yahoo/Google their Name and email address. Which actually they use to run ads.
•  If you have used Evite, you have told a bunch of people to come to some place. Also given out their name/email to Evite.com
•  If you have a phone, you will be listed in whitepages.
•  The place where you live is on Google maps with street photos and turn-by-turn directions.
• If you bought something online or offline, you have given out your credit card information.

#2. We still use these apps because they provide a service that you want and that service requires some "minimal" amount of data

• In most cases the apps can only get information such as Name and photo of your friends.
• For anything more, Facebook requires app developers to "ask" for specific permissions.
•  Did you know? Facebook never gives out your email address to applications. They just give a proxy email address and send all email themselves on behalf of the application to you.
   

#3. Golden Rule of Online Presence and Safety still applies no matter what you are doing online.

      " Watch what you are typing and sharing" - whether it be in your email, comments, wall postings, photo sharing.

Lastly, at DoTogether, we let the user decide. The user has to specifically invite friends or post stuff on their wall or share their email address with us. Every thing is done so that you can do more with your friends than chatting and sharing photos.

Rahul@DoTogether.com

 Our facebook application : http://apps.facebook.com/DoTogetherMall - A social application to get shopping tips from friends. Thousands of products from all the popular stores like Forever 21, Target, Macys, Nordstrom and many more.

Over the past few months, we at doTogether have been busy at work
readying our Facebook application platform for the retailers. We have
been busy building a good team, trying things out, scratching our heads,
looking at data, building the product and then trying it all over again.

The social media landscape, especially Facebook, is at a point where
the retailers seem to be sufficiently invested to be trying out different things.
In the past, most of the retailers had Facebook Fan pages, allowing them
to send out messages and for fans to post their comments and photos.

This is a good start but this does not allow the retailers to capture the
conversations fans have with each other or with non-fans in a real meaningful
way. Some retailers like Best Buy go a little further with some applications to
interact with the fans.

doTogether aims to change this by providing retailers with tools that
let their fans have a conversation about the retailers products and the retailers
being able to capture the tangible benefits of that conversation. With this
retailers can tailor the products they push and get a pulse of their fan base.
Their fan base increases by virality and now provides the retailers with a
means to target customers beyond their immediate fans.

Some small but visionary retailers agree with our vision and will be
working with us over the next few months. This is very exciting for us
and them and we will be at the forefront as this new model of marketing
for retailers takes hold.

Many more updates on this topic coming. Stay tuned ...