This year, branded content was the only trend that took the fashion, more specifically the retail industry by storm. For the past five years, it seems that once dowdy television retailers such as HSN, QVC and ShopNBC, have attempted to raise their brand profiles and establish themselves as retailer portals who cater to a wider audience than just to dowdy, conservative women over the age of 40 with 1980s infomercial style product showcases.

The way these retailers are leveraging their multichannel retail approaches is nothing to sneeze at, fashion designers and cosmetics companies can sell more product (by volume) via these retailers’ online, television and mobile channels in one hour than they can in one year in a department store. Now, the cross selling of apparel and beauty products is bleeding into consumer electronics, with consumers now buying technology in conjunction with their apparel and other product purchases.

Leading this new multi-channel approach is HSN. HSN is changing, if not completely redefining, the meaning of home shopping as it’s the three networks to create new online product distribution channels through social technologies and platforms.

Analyzing HSN’s social marketing initiatives, I discovered impressive uses of the iPad and YouTube as customer social marketing and educational tools. The company is the largest video content contributors to YouTube (their channels hosts over 60,000 videos) and is the first of the home shopping networks to be release an interactive iPad application that acts as a companion to the television and mobile shopping experiences it creates for it’s customers.

The new HSN iPad application is the first to offer live and on-demand video and enables users to create their own channel to ensure they are only ever seeing their favorite programs. The most unique aspects of HSN’s iPad application include:

• The app distributes both their live programming and video on demand.
• The app offers up to 15 product category-oriented channels and 5 completely user customizable channels – with hundreds of products, the possibilities are endless for your personalized and self-created content.
• App users can drag the screen splitter to enable them complete control over whether they would like to see more programming or more content on their screens depending on    where the user is and what they want at that time

Intrigued by how HSN is leveraging the iPad for mobile experiences and social technologies and curious about the profitability of their efforts, I spoke with HSN Vice President of Advanced Serviced, John McDevitt, on how the retailer is setting the bar for online retailers embracing mobile and social channels to tell the stories the products they sell by creating cross platforms for customers to shop and buy products relevant to their lives.

“HSN started to evolve it’s marketing strategy four years ago, when our current CEO Mindy Grossman felt it was more important for HSN to become a multichannel retailer that creates a curated shopping experience for its customers across multiple platforms, “said McDevitt. “HSN had to have quality brands and designer with great stories; moreover, we had to have great storytellers to covey those stories to our customers. We don’t just hire hosts, we bring in experts or the designers themselves to tell the stories.”

HSN has also recently launched a partnership with Quirky, an online, social product development company. Quirky is a site that uses a crowdsourcing model to bring new products to life. Each week, Quirky engages its online community to collaborate in all aspects of product design and development – from ideation all the way to packaging. Quirky brings two brand new consumer products to market every week and shares the revenue with all of the individuals who were influential in bringing these products to life. Starting this week, HSN has partnered with Quirky sell the tech gadgets crowdsourced into creation by Quirky’s community. HSN is taking the partnership a step further by offering all would-be entrepreneurs the opportunity to submit their product ideas for consideration on HSN’s product submission page.

The Quirky partnership was born after Bill Brand, Executive Vice President Programming, Marketing and Business Development for HSN, met Quirky founder Ben Kaufman. Brand, was so enthralled and impressed by this “technology whiz kid’s passion” that it created a personal connection between the two that lead to the partnership. “Ben is an amazing storytellers,” says Brand, “HSN’s marketing strategy is based on pairing great storytellers with great products, becoming an incubator for entrepreneurs with great stories was natural for us.”

If you carefully analyze this partnership, HSN just created an alternative to venture capital funding for emerging entrepreneurs creating and designing product for consumers. This also marks the evolution of crowdsourcing used as mainstream marketing tactic for offline audiences. When asked how Quirky felt about the partnership, said Jon Liebman, CEO of Brillstein Entertainment Partners and representative for Quirky sad, “Our vision is to marry Quirky’s unique online social product development network with the incredible reach of HSN’s interactive shopping experience. We’re all excited about this partnership because it’s a great example of what happens when Internet and television meld.” 

Launching brands on a multichannel platform that focuses on access, personalization, experience (the very things younger online audience want) rather than focusing only on transactions has been successful for HSN, allowing them to develop an impressive customer base with web generation women ages 24-35 that come back and purchase over and over.

Is this social incubation of entrepreneurs and crowdsourcing product production through mainstream channels a smart way to use multi-channel retailing? Are using tablets and smart phones as companions to websites and television outlets a smart marketing strategy? What do you think?

P.S. We are all ordering that cool ipad things above, please commit to buy it, it’s only $52.50!