Collecting data is one thing, using it intelligently is another. Having increased the qualified subscribers to The Plaza’s regular monthly e-newsletter by 75% through a series of campaigns on Facebook, we overhauled the Mailchimp process, an integration into The Plaza website as well as revamped the design and content of the e-newsletter.

Bounce rates fell by 65%, while Open Rates and Click Throughs increased by 15% and 11% respectively in the first broadcast to subscribers. In a successive broadcast one week later, Open Rates and Click Throughs further increased by 5% and 4%, indicating a healthy and growing community of interest for The Plaza.

The challenge now is to grow the subscriber base and increase engagement through an integrated marketing programme, comprising events, social media, PR and advertising. With a new Underground campaign by our sister agency Grappa (pictured) breaking at the end of this month, The Plaza is gearing up to engage the extra domestic and international footfall in the West End driven by the Olympic Games over the summer.

Price comparison retailing is being launched by Land Securities, the UK’s leading owners of shopping centres. The developer is adding Google Product search to the websites of its malls, following a successful trial at its White Rose centre in Leeds.

With the centre hosting a Fashion Week over Easter, I searched for ‘chinos’. The search returned 1581 items, with the first 1-20 results showing a variety of pastel and sand-coloured chinos for men and women available from stores at White Rose. A click on a £35 pair from Duffer of St George took me to the Debenhams page, providing opening hours and store location in the mall.

Shopping centre owners have resisted this type of ease and convenience shopping for years, as though paralysed by internet shopping. It has taken the tough economic conditions that have made shoppers more choosy, more demanding and canny to serve up a wake-up call. That Land Securities has accepted that it’s better to embrace the technologies that are already in the hands of shoppers is significant. As the landlord owning large fashion-led schemes in the capital, England, Wales and Scotland, it has deep relationships with Britain’s leading retailers. Sir Stuart Rose is a non-executive Director. Land Securities’ retail clients will have no doubt urged it to extend the Leeds trial across the portfolio if it proved a hit. Read more >>

Chris White, 45, set up a Facebook campaign calling on people to boycott Braehead after claiming he was approached by a security guard at the mall in Renfrew for taking images on his mobile phone of his four-year-old daughter Hazel eating ice-cream.

His campaign lasted four days and attracted 25,000 supporters on Facebook. Mr White brought it to a close after he received an apology from the Capital Shopping Centres, the scheme’s owner, and the pledge that they would change their no photography policy not only at Braehead, but also at its other 11 directly owned centres.

In an interview with BBC, Mr White said that the incident highlighted issues “around the policies and procedures that have been put in place”, and that his objective now was to “open a fuller dialogue with shopping centres, family groups, photography organisations, and organisations that specialise in the range of protection issues.”

One suspects he put the brakes on his activities and shut down his Facebook page because it has escalated beyond his control. Sentiment – initially positive and supportive to Mr White and occasionally vitriolic towards Braehead – started to shift after three days (a lifetime in social media time during a crisis) towards scepticism towards his motives and, in the odd post, expressions of downright hostility to Mr White.

More than anything else however, the episode revealed a dearth of social media skills at Braehead. During the crisis, it failed to respond quickly. When it did, the responses were clumsy – and worse, it was even outed for deleting negative posts from fans on its own Facebook page. And unlike Mr White, it seemed to have no grasp of Twitter and the speed by which information is shared; a glacial slowness left Braehead always playing catch up.

The irony is that risk management is firmly integrated into the operations of a shopping centre, particularly in areas such as health and safety, environment and security. Yet at Braehead risk management did not extend adequately into communications.

However, we can’t help but feel sorry for the mall. We suspect that many would have fared little better because they are not geared up to respond to a crisis. There is often no budget for listening and monitoring online conversations across Facebook, Twitter, blogs and forums, which means centres fail to detect problems until they have become larger ones. The retail brands that are tenants of schemes like Braehead would be appalled by this lack of social media intelligence and planning.

But it’s not just about monitoring. Within the shopping centre industry there seems to be a failure to recognise that social media makes a problem accelerate faster and spread more rapidly. A blind hope that a problem may simply go away can win arguments against preparing appropriate responses, which can be activated as further developments arise with an issue.

Knowing when, where and how to respond can be made less challenging for malls by looking at the social media profile of the individual (or individuals/groups) that are creating a problem. Determining their influence – how far and where else – a problem can be shared is instructive and can be terrifying! It will help shake any sense of inertia or communications’ paralysis that might exist within the mall’s management, and moreover, it will yield insights into preparing right type of response – the message, the tone, etc.

We could go on, but the essential point to the industry is to learn from Braehead. Many mall owners would have been thinking, ‘there but for the grace of…’ but that will only get the lucky ones so far. The sensible strategy is to de-risk by creating a social media crisis communications plan.