The Retail Buzz

One Step Retail Solutions has embarked on an internal campaign with its employees to shift focus from economic doom and gloom to higher, positive energies.

What started with an executive order to the marketing department instructing them to start promoting “good news” to its staff, clients and public soon took on new dimensions at One Step. The initiative started with broadcasting regular and frequent emails about good news in the retail sector, expanding its reach using the Blogosphere and Twitter.

The Marketing Dept. searched and compiled good news relating to the retail industry from various resources on the Internet and distributed the news along its various channels. While most of the news resources were still mostly promoting gloom about retail, there was one source that provided the bulk of good news; and that was on Twitter.

Twitter led to many sources with messages of encouragement and success in retail, despite the recession. One source led One Step marketers to get a daily dose of inspirational stories from DarynKagan.com which also pumped positive fuel into good news pipeline.

It was one of those stories that sparked One Step’s next campaign: the Live to Give campaign, based on a story of a woman whose life turned around by putting her attention on outreaching to people and giving something each day.

Today, One Step launched its new campaign effort in an email inviting employees to participate by performing one act of caring each day for a one month period of time, stating it was strictly on a voluntary basis.

The campaign promotes that employees can do this by giving something to another person (a gift) or doing something for another (like a pay-it-forward act of kindness). They can do this on a fellow co-worker, a client, a stranger in the street, their friend, a family member, or anyone.

Each staff member participating in the campaign can keep their own log of what they did (doesn’t have to be to whom they did it to necessarily). They can choose to share their deeds daily, weekly, at end of campaign, or not at all. The idea is to enable them to look back at things they did, if they so desire.

The company believes that the Live to Give campaign will put the focus on where it should be: outward instead of inward.