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Many companies have chosen to abandon or limit efforts on their own community sites in favor of using Twitter and Facebook; this is not the case with Sears Holding Companies. Not only is Sears using popular sites like Facebook and Twitter to support their marketing and customer feedback efforts, they are dedicated to growing their own community sites.

An early adopter of social communities, Sears Holding Company launched their first community site in June of 2008 under the web site sk-YOU.com. Fueled by its success, they launched more feature rich mysears.com and mykmart.com sites earlier this year.

According to Rob Harles, Sears’ vice president of community, the driving force behind development of the sites was to get to know their customers better and to create a place where they could get people talking so they could better understand their motivations. The new sites contain customer reviews, discussion boards, consumer guides, polls and coupons. An “Ideas” area was recently added and allows users to share ideas, vote on ideas and even see what ideas Sears has taken to heart and implemented.

A community site is nothing without regular involvement from its members. Sears rewards their community members for participation. The Recognition Rewards Program recognizes members for their contributions to the community. Members earn points by participating in various activities such as uploading a profile picture, writing a review, or gaining Fans in the community. All the earned points then contribute to an overall point total. The points have no monetary value but are used to show others their level of commitment and contribution to the community. Harles believes community members want to be seen as experts and helping each other.

In July, Sears implemented OpenID. The OpenID universal login standard enables visitors to consolidate their Internet identity by providing them a single login for all of their online interactions. This is the first step toward enabling customers to log in to Sears communities using their social IDs rather than set up new accounts. This covers the most popular, familiar web sites such as Google, Facebook, MySpace, Yahoo! and Twitter.
“We’re constantly looking for ways to stay innovative in our online initiatives by identifying and implementing technologies that help our users navigate our communities with ease,” says Rob Harles.

So while others chase the crowds on Facebook and Twitter, Sears is quietly building loyalty with their customers by keeping them close to home. With 330,000 registered members and 1.3 million visitors a month, the combination seems to be working well.