FORBES.COM — Threadless, a Chicago T-shirt company, sprang to life a decade ago with the idea that employees and customers don't have to be two distinct groups. The Internet-based company asks consumers to submit shirt designs they've created--it gets as many as 300 submissions a day--and allows its large fan base to vote on the ones they like best. It pays winners, more than 300 each year, $2,000 for their creations. The company picks the best of the most popular T-shirt designs, screens them for copyright violations and obscenities, and sells them on its site within three to eight weeks for $18. It aims to release seven new designs a week. The business model works beautifully for this 50-person company, which brought in close to $30 million in revenue in 2009...

FINANCIAL TIMES — A new wave of sophisticated e-commerce applications is appearing on Facebook, a sign that the world’s largest social network could rapidly emerge as a big destination for online shopping. 1-800-Flowers, the US floral gift retailer and distributor, last week opened its “Facebook storefront”, an application running on Facebook’s fast-growing platform where users can purchase and send flowers. At least 20 more such storefronts will appear on Facebook in the next two months, according to Wade Gerten, chief executive of Alvenda, the software developer that built the 1-800-Flowers storefront...

USA TODAY — Bartender Beau Dieda does more than mix and serve drinks every night at popular nightspot Baja Sharkeez: He is also instructed to sign up friends and fans for his company's Facebook page, as well as his own. Before he leaves the restaurant, he sends bulletins to his collective fan base inviting them back in for specials, discounts or events. "It's one of the best ways we can reach a vast audience," he says. "After my shift, I can blast it to 650 friends in 30 seconds. I don't have to go around to each person, or call them up"...

INSIDE FACEBOOK — When it comes to retail, brands launching social media campaigns must do so with increasing sensitivity to the privacy of their customers. Shopping, or “retail therapy” as people joke, is no doubt a social activity, but it’s clear that when you begin sharing shopping details at a more granular level (especially purchases), some users begin to balk. Facebook is now home to over 250 million users who are actively fanning their favorite retail brands on Facebook and showing ongoing participation later. So what are the leading brands doing right?...

Some small companies win instant fans, often because their products or services strike a nerve or generate buzz. But turning those followers into loyal customers can be a challenge. Take Threadless.com, an online T-shirt retailer in Chicago, which launched in 2000 and quickly built a following through a simple approach: allow anyone to design a T-shirt and upload it to the site, where people vote for favorites each week and get to buy them. Threadless, a unit of skinnyCorp LLC, has signed up a million registered users on its Web site, and now has about 860,000 Twitter followers and more than 70,000 Facebook fans...