Chris Brogan takes a look at grocery shelf products and their presence on Twitter and has some great advice.

Help! My Groceries Are Tweeting And They’re TERRIBLE!

1. Don’t let your account die. Delete it, if you’ve abandoned the project.
2. Make it about your audience.
3. Engagement is not the same as bragging about yourself.
4. The brands that act like humans get the most engagement.
5. Spam people at your peril (the non-meat kind, Hormel. Simmer down).

There’s no reason to just throw up a Twitter account if you’re not going to make it about connecting on a different level than an ad campaign. There can’t possibly be enough clicks and activity to justify doing the job poorly. Perhaps it’s a matter of the advice you’ve been given. Maybe it’s just some checkbox on the systematized approach you’ve been told equals social engagement. That’s not how most folks will see it on the receiving end.

Change in E-Commerce Strategy for Wal-Mart??

Wal-Mart Loses Two Top Executives

Two top executives announced today that they are leaving Walmart (WMT).

Eduardo Castro-Wright, the CEO of Global E-Commerce and Global Sourcing and the former CEO of Walmart Mexico, said he is retiring on July 1, 2012. Wan Ling Martello, EVP of Global E-Commerce for Emerging Markets, he will also be leaving on April 1, 2012.

Retailers are hiring college students to represent brands on campuses across the nation.

On Campus, It’s One Big Commercial

IT’S move-in day here at the University of North Carolina, and Leila Ismail, stuffed animals in tow, is feeling some freshman angst.

A few friendly upperclassmen spring into action.

But wait: there is something odd, or at least oddly corporate, about this welcome wagon. These U.N.C. students are all wearing identical T-shirts from American Eagle Outfitters.

Turns out three of them are working for that youth clothing chain on this late August morning, as what are known in the trade as “brand ambassadors” or “campus evangelists” — and they have recruited several dozen friends as a volunteer move-in crew. Even before Ms. Ismail can find her dorm or meet her roommate, they cheerily unload her family’s car. Then they lug her belongings to her dorm. Along the way, they dole out American Eagle coupons, American Eagle water canisters and American Eagle pens.

Lowes equips workers with 42000 iPhones which will be enabled for mobile calling, e-emailing and text-messaging as well as processing credit and debit card purchases. In the current fiscal Lowes will be spending $1.6 billion on technology which is 20 percent more than last year.

Lowe’s Upgrades Website, Adds 42,000 IPhones to Spur Sales

Lowe’s will spend a record amount on technology in the fiscal year through January, Brown said, while declining to say how much. The company has said it will boost overall capital spending 20 percent to $1.6 billion this year.

The retailer is replacing 72,000 computer screens with flat panels in more than 1,700 stores, increasing bandwidth for transmitting data and adding Wifi for shoppers’ smartphones, Brown said. It’s adding thousands of items for sale online and last month introduced a Spanish-language version of lowes.com and an app for the iPhone and the iPod Touch.

“Forget about the competition, we are playing catch-up with the customer psyche,” Brown, 48, said in an interview last week at a store in Mooresville, North Carolina, where Lowe’s tested the iPhone.

Consumers are more and more researching and comparing products online and buying from physical stores by carefully evaluating the same.

Online Conversion Rates Drop by 55% in 5 Years as Purchasers Become Shoppers

Online conversion rates in the UK have fallen by 55% over the past five years as consumers have taken to browsing, researching and comparing products on more engaging retailer sites, rather than just viewing the internet as another purchasing channel.

In 2006, the average online conversion rate for retailers in the IMRG Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index was 8.4%, but that figure has steadily declined and the latest results reveal the rate to be 3.8% now.

Retailer Guess tailors business intelligence applications for the mobile devices they run on and the employees who use them.

Taking the Guesswork Out of Mobile BI

The clothing maker and retailer has three categories of enterprise mobile applications: marketing and branding apps aimed at consumers; productivity tools for the operations staff; and applications that help managers make decisions faster. This last group, mobile business intelligence (BI), is where Guess has focused most, Relich says, “because that is what will make you money.” Guess revenues were up 16 percent for fiscal 2011, to $2.5 billion, while profits increased 13 percent.