Save Items and Looks To Rately Lists

When you’re shopping, it’s usually pretty handy to make a list to keep track of what you’re after.  Also, sometimes you come across questions on Rately or just individual items that you would like to find later. 

And finally, you may want to direct your friend to check out your lists so they can join the conversation. 

This is why we’ve added the ability to create lists on Rately.  

Whether you’re trying to put together a few great looks for your vacation or maybe figuring out that perfect outfit to give as a gift - you’ll find lists to be a great way to keep your questions and rate ups organized. 

You can create lists and add either questions or items to lists wherever you see the “save to list” callout. We get you started with a few standard lists, but you should feel free to create your own lists and start saving with wild abandon. 

Simply hover over or touch the save to list callout. Create a new list if you like. Select the list that you would prefer to use. That’s it. You’re done.

To find your lists, just visit your profile page (click on your name or the down arrow in the top right corner - or just click on any avatar image) - and you’ll see lists as an optional view. 

Visit Rately lists to see some of the lists that we’ve started - and let us know what you think. 

Rately Social Merchandising Platform - Wins 2012 Emerging Mega Trend Impact Award

We’re delighted to have won the Impact Award for Emerging Mega Trend! You can read all about it in this press release that we’ve also included below:
 

Rately wins award as “game changing” social merchandising platform for brands and retailers - lets merchants create and merchandise visually compelling product assortments in social media and on site to drive sales.

Atlanta, GA (PRWEB) September 21, 2012

On September 12, 2012, the Technology Association of Georgia (TAG) and the Southeastern Software Association (SSA) announced Rately as the winner of the Emerging Mega Trend Impact Award. Chosen from companies across Georgia, the award recognizes a software company or product that “has the potential to change the world.”
 

“Rately exemplifies all the best qualities and criteria of business impact, creativity and complexity we were looking for with its game changing approach to amplifying visual social media with online shopping”, said Greg McGraw, TAG/Southeast Software Association board member. “We’re very proud of the exciting contributions that Rately continues to make to the software industry in Georgia.”
 

Rately is a social merchandising platform that enables retailers to increase site traffic and drive sales from social media. The platform lets retailers quickly create visual product assortments and post them on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. The product assortments are also shown on the retailer’s website thereby improving onsite engagement and conversion. Retailers can easily capitalize on consumer trends as they happen.

“What’s revolutionary about Rately is its ability to unleash the power of social media and pure visual creativity to make shopping more engaging and more profitable,” said company CEO Tom Klein.
 

Klein, former Executive Director of Strategy for Chanel and digital innovation / analytics consultant (clients include Tory Burch, Office Depot, and other ecommerce retailers), added, “Rately gives retailers what they’ve been looking for - the ability to connect the engagement of social media to real sales conversion.”
 

Rately is free to use for consumers and offered to retailers as either a managed service or on an enterprise license. The company is currently engaged with several national brands and retailers as part of a pilot program and anticipates a broader launch in early 2013.
 

About Southeastern Software Association (SSA)
 

The Southeastern Software Association (SSA) is one of the country’s premier networking and professional development organizations for high-tech and software professionals. SSA is one of the South’s oldest technology organizations and was the largest of the Technology Association of Georgia’s three founding organizations in 1998. The SSA Board of Directors is a who’s who of Atlanta technology companies and executives, and membership encompasses the dynamic diversity of software companies doing business in Georgia.
 

About Rately
 

Rately is a social merchandising software company that helps brands and retailers drive sales both in social media and on their site. The Rately platform helps clients quickly create product assortments or looks, using content from their site or anywhere on the web. These unique and engaging product assortments are published both in social media - Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr - and on an ecommerce site to drive traffic and improve sales conversion. Based in Alpharetta, Georgia, Rately lives on the web at Rately.com, blogs at blog.rately.com, tweets at twitter.com/ratelylately, pins at pinterest.com/rately, and friends at facebook.com/rately.
 

What is Social Merchandising?

Rately is a Social Merchandising Platform, so we often get the question - What is Social Merchandising? 
 

When two terms like Social (Media) and Merchandising come together, they communicate something that’s both familiar and new.
 

Merchandising refers to the things you do, usually in your store, be it online or in the physical world, to stimulate interest in your products and drive sales.  
 

Trusty Wikipedia defines Social Media as: 
 

Interactive web platforms via which individuals and communities share, co-create, discuss, and modify user-generated content

Rately brings together these two concepts - stimulating interest in products and driving sales, while also letting individuals (shoppers) and communities share, co-create, discuss, and modify user-generated content. 
 

Most ecommerce sites are tied to platforms that simply can’t evolve quickly.  They are big platforms that are built to not be nimble, to be PCI compliant, and to serve all sorts of company constituents. There’s a lot more that goes on behind the scenes of an ecommerce store than the content a consumer sees - there’s an alphabet soup of systems ranging from OMS to DOM to WMS (and I’m still leaving out plenty of others). 
 

Because the ecommerce system is really an enterprise software system, it acts like it. In other words, it can’t change very often, usually with upgrades that happen every 2 years or so. That’s if you’re lucky. 
 

That said, when new consumer-driven technologies appear, ecommerce systems are not well equipped to support them - or integrate with them.  Here is a simple example - how many ecommerce content platforms have the standard pinch and swipe of images that you would like to see on an iPad?  
 

The iPad is the hottest thing going for shoppers, essentially replacing the mountain of catalogs and lookbooks that usually appear at this time of year.  It was launched in April of 2010. Two and a half years later, after selling millions, and finding a special place with consumers - most ecommerce sites haven’t changed.  It’s because redesigning and changing the front end of a large ecommerce site is like moving out of your house. Something you would often like to do, but you dread the actual process.  It’s expensive, time-consuming, and usually a hair-pulling group grope kind of exercise. 
 

Enter Rately. With a Rately Social Merchandising System, an ecommerce retailer can bridge the gap between consumer social media and their own ecommerce platforms. Not to mention, they can focus their own social media efforts on creating assets that stimulate real product interest - both online and in-store. Here are the key things that the Rately Social Merchandising System can do:

• Merchandise new, exciting visual content throughout an ecommerce site (product pages, category pages - wherever) to help drive on-site conversion. This content can appear on ecommerce sites that are on desktops, tablets, mobile sites - or even on kiosks in-store. 
   
• Publish new, exciting visual content in social media - in turn, driving traffic back to the ecommerce site 
  
  
• Let shoppers create and combine brand / product content as they see fit and share it, interact with it, and shop with it- both in social media and on the ecommerce site. 
   

A social merchandising system evolves in tune with consumer technologies, letting retailers merchandise their products using up to date consumer technologies and tools, and letting consumers interact with products and brand content in a way that’s relevant and accessible. 

See How Rately Works For Shoppers

Rately named a Finalist as Emerging Mega Trend for 2012 TAG / SSA Impact Awards

We’re delighted to have been selected as a Finalist for the Impact Awards from TAG and the Southeastern Software Association.
 

Here’s an overview of the criteria for selection:
 

Each year the Impact Awards recognize companies and their teams who have demonstrated outstanding leadership in bringing new technology solutions to the market. The winners have built outstanding software solutions that make a significant impact for their customers and their businesses.

Aw shucks. We’re blushing.  


The winners will be named on September 12th - hope to see you there! 
 

Learn more in the Press Release. 

Rately rocks Tumblr with fast and easy collection posts

Have you ever wanted to created a cool post on Tumblr that features MORE than one image? 
 

That’s what we would call a collection post. Maybe it’s a cool outfit that you’d like to talk about, or pairs of shoes that you might buy, or heck, it could just be cute pictures of puppies or kitties. 
 

Sometimes, you just want to include more than one image in a Tumblr post and you don’t want to corral a graphic designer to do so. 
 

Now you don’t have to. 
 

All you have to do is create a Rately question from the images that you would like to use - and then you can post that collection image directly to your Tumblr blog. 
 

Here’s how it all works. 
 

First, find the collection of stuff (in image form) that you would like to use to create a really cool “collection post” on Tumblr. 
 

Here’s an easy example - a page of cool stuff on a store.  Say you’re looking to create a post with some beautiful rings - and you would like to pull items from the selection at Neiman Marcus. 
 

So, here’s a page of turquoise rings on Neiman Marcus.
 

Now that you’ve found a great selection of rings, launch the Rately bookmarklet (that you read about at http://rately.com/about). 

You’ll see a screen that looks like this, where you can choose up to 9 rings and then ask a question. 
 

Now, all you have to do is click through to your newly created question (click on the  link that says - Your question has been posted). 
 

You’ll see your new question in all of its glory.  It will look like this:
 

Just choose the Tumblr button on your question, follow the usual directions for posting to Tumblr. 
 

When you’re done, you’ll see that you have a new Tumblr post that looks like this:
 

You’ll be the envy of all of tumblr-land.  

Ready to get started? Why don’t you read about Rately at http://rately.com/about and then follow the directions to get the Rately button  so you can get moving. 

Turn Single Image Pinterest Pins Into Rately Collection Pins In Seconds

We’re a fun loving group of shoppers and of course love Pinterest. 
 

Okay, so say you’ve spent a ton of time finding and pinning all sorts of great stuff - anything from wedding bouquets to living room furniture to shoes or a special cocktail (you get the idea). 
 

Now what? 
 

You can use Rately to reach out to your friends to help you choose.  Here’s how to make all that pinning effort go even further.  

1. Search for something of interest or go to any Pinterest board. For this example, I’ve just searched on Pinterest for an orange wedding bouquet.  Here is what those search results look like:
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
2. Next, while on this page, I will go ahead and launch the Rately bookmarklet  (find it here in Rately tools).  As you see, when you launch the Rately bookmarklet, you will see the items from the page / board on Pinterest.
   
   From here, you can go ahead and select up to 9 items and then add your text to create a Rately question.  
   
   Note that for this example I went ahead and checked that I wanted to post to both Facebook and Twitter, as I have logged into both (and I want to post a Rately collection tweet in addition to a Rately collection pin).  
   
   Here’s what this looks like (oh, and it takes maybe 5 seconds to do - lickety split):
   
   
   
   
   
   
3.  Once I click on ask friends, my question is created on Rately so when your friends click through from Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook, or an email - they can rate up their favorite and help you choose (and the question looks like this):
   
   
   
   
   
   
   Right after you’ve clicked on ask friends, you also can go ahead and create a pin on Pinterest - and maybe even pin it right back on the board that you’ve been using to save up those images of orange bouquets (or anything).  
   
   All you need to do is click on the Pinterest button and you can walk through the steps to create what we call a Rately collection pin and put it wherever you like. That pin will look like this:
   
   
4. Ta-da! You can use your Pinterest boards and all of those pins to reach out to your friends about anything.  Rately makes shopping for anything more fun - give it a try.
   
   Be sure to follow us on Pinterest at http://pinterest.com/rately for some wild Rately collection pinning action. 
    

Rately makes it easy to create collection tweets on Twitter

In addition to being able to create and share collection pins on Pinterest, you can also create and share collections of items on Twitter. 
 

Even better, every time you rate up an item on Rately, you can decide to post the item you’ve rated up directly to Twitter - where you’re friends can see what you’ve rated up.

Here’s how:

1. Launch the Rately bookmarket and choose the images to create your Rately question (see Rately tools to add the bookmarklet).
    
    
2. Make sure that you’ve logged into Twitter - and you’ll see a box letting you select post to Twitter as you ask your question
   
    
3. So, select the post to Twitter option, then select the Ask Friends button to create your Rately question
    

Your new question will show up as a tweet on your Twitter stream, and you’ll also see the images that make up the question you just asked. Here’s a delicious looking example:
 

Of course, your Rately question will look like a Rately question. However, whenever you rate up an item in Rately, you’ll have the chance to make a comment and at the same time to post your rate up to Twitter. 

Here’s how to do that:
 

1. First, go to any Rately question (and make sure you log into Twitter). 
    
2. Rate up an item in a question. 
    
3. Then, you’ll see an open text box with the option of selecting Twitter. Make a brief comment, select the Twitter option and choose the orange comment button.
   
    

Once you’ve completed making your comment, you’ll see it at the bottom of the page. And, simultaneously, you will post your rate up to Twitter, including the image of the item you selected. 
 

Now your tweets can be much more expressive, delighting your followers. Rately makes shopping tweeting more fun.  Tweet, tweet. 
 

Rately makes it easy to create collection pins on Pinterest

Now, you can can share any Rately question on Pinterest - creating a collection pin that features several items (shoes, cupcakes, even puppies!) together. 
 

Here’s how:
 

1. Create your own Rately question (see Rately Tools to get the bookmarklet) or just find a Rately question you like. 
    
2. Select the Pinterest button below the question images
   
    
    
3. Choose your Pinterest board and confirm your pin title (as you normally would)
    
    
4. Pin your cool Rately collection pin  (and if you want, rinse, repeat)
    

See, it’s really easy.  Rately makes shopping pinning more fun.  Be sure to check out our pins (and don’t forget to follow us) at http://pinterest.com/rately