With the 2009 holiday shopping season upon us, more retailers -- both large and small -- are investing in social technologies to mimic digitally the Mom-and-Pop feel consumers experience when they walk into their local privately owned hardware store or clothing boutique. Here are five rules that savvy online retailers already have in place heading into Nov. 30, aka Cyber Monday, the day Internet holiday shopping traditionally kicks into high gear. For those of you not yet incorporating these practices, fear not. They're easy to implement and each can help your business year-round.

Step 1: Let like-minded customers merchandise your products for you.

Since the beginning of time, the societal norm has been to trust experts -- our teachers, doctors, lawyers, etc. It was the best strategy available when we could interface with only a few people at a time. The increasingly social nature of the Web has changed this dynamic. James Surowiecki reveals in his best-selling book, The Wisdom of Crowds, something that scientists have known for years: Random groups of informed people can predict outcomes far more accurately than any individual expert. Since that time, companies such as Netflix and Amazon have popularized the use of recommendation engines to identify new patterns in behavior as customers browse and purchase online.

Leveraging crowd wisdom is especially important in content -- and product-rich "long tail" sites where manual merchandising and editorializing is neither cost- nor time-effective. Long tail is the concept of selling fewer units of many different special-interest products, as opposed to selling large quantities of fewer popular products, such as the iPhone. Instead of asking a merchandiser to define the thousands of niche segments along the long tail, why not let the crowd of site visitors self-define those segments? By tapping into the wisdom of these like-minded shoppers, your customers can...