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.

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.

According to sources, more than three per cent of visitors to White Rose’s website were using Google Product search within the first week of the app going live. Shoppers will not be restricted to browsing ‘off mall’ either. In tandem with the Google Product search rollout, Land Securities will be making Wi-Fi freely available in all of its centres. Visitors will be able to price surf on the hoof.

Having broken down the barriers that exist between traditional bricks and mortar retailing and internet shopping, Land Secs has ceded more power to the shopper. And not all mall owners will share the same enthusiasm. One centre manager from another large landlord likened the move to ‘letting Pandora out of the box.’ But this seems to miss the point: if shoppers already have the technology, landlords and retailers should find better ways to use it to build meaningful relationships with visitors. Therefore, if one follows the Land Secs’ strategy, the next move has to be social.

Through the tracking of social media activities among shopping centres in our last study, we can see that Facebook and Twitter (to take the two prevalent platforms as examples) are deployed in largely tactical rather than strategic ways by many. For large malls, especially fashion-led centres like White Rose, the approach must be a strategic alignment between website and social media platforms. In making a bold move to provide price comparison retailing through its website, what are shoppers’ expectations of their Facebook experience? If some routinely ‘check-in’ with Facebook Places and FourSquare will they expect to receive special treatment from the centre? And if so, what rewards should they be? When, how and where should they be provided to shoppers? What content should be cross-posted from web to Facebook, and vice-versa? What roles should be assigned to other elements of the social mix, like Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, FourSquare…? Where does mobile fit in?

Land Secs no doubt has asked itself some of these questions – and may hope to have some of the answers from what it’s achieved at other centres in the portfolio. Those at the helm of the company will be satisfied to have achieved first mover advantage in bringing bricks and clicks together through free Wi-Fi and price comparison retailing, but they will be mindful that shoppers and retailers will expect more. Having opened the door to more convenience and ease of shopping, it will need to keep carrying this through its centres and maximising its social media assets should be a priority.

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.

It enables any scheme to determine its optimal number of Fans based on a metric of 1 sq ft to 0.2% Fans. Therefore, a 100,000 sq feet scheme should expect to have 200 Fans.

We devised the metric by tracking the acquisition and retention levels of Fans across the Facebook sites of more than 50 retail and leisure schemes since 1 March 2011. The on-going Facebook Fifty survey includes a representative sample of large, medium and small schemes in England, Wales and Scotland including some of the country’s most well known shopping locations, such as Westfield London, Bicester Village and The Trafford Centre as well as popular regional and community malls.

The survey provides a snapshot of the social media landscape schemes by showing which schemes are currently under-performing and over-performing against the national benchmark.

In addition to providing schemes with a measurement metric, the survey also identifies four critical success factors that drive Facebook Fan numbers and increase interaction on the Facebook pages. These are: Brand Equity; Sticky Content; Integration (of Facebook and other social media) into traditional marketing; and sustained audience Engagement. The Facebook pages of schemes that ranked highly in the survey (by out-performing the benchmark for their size) successfully made use of all, or a combination of the four factors.

Over the next few weeks, we will be profiling examples of best practice from the survey on our website. For fast-track insight and to find out where your scheme ranks you can also email michael@grappa.co.uk