Archive: December 2008

While corporate blogs are often viewed with a hefty does of skepticism (kind of like state-sponsored media in North Korea), companies can create a trusted and thriving social network. Like all blogs, the corporate kind need to serve up a steady flow of good content to particular a niche and encourage readers to talk back. But their content needs to be free of any commercial influence. A fine example is Children with Diabetes, a Johnson & Johnson-owned social network for families who have children with diabetes. Parents can find recipes, chat rooms, and more. Have any examples of strong corporate social networks?

Dell recently claimed it made almost $1 million in sales based purely on alerts delivered on the micro-blogging platform Twitter, internetnews.com reports. That not a bad chunk of change for text-based post of only 140 characters. From the source:

Dell says Twitter has produced $1 million in revenue over the past year and a half through sale alerts. People who sign up to follow Dell on Twitter receive messages when discounted products are available the company’s Home Outlet Store. They can click over to purchase the product or forward the information to others.

Dell started experimenting with Twitter in March of 2007 after the South by Southwest conference, an annual tech/music festival in Austin, Texas. Conference attendees could keep tabs on each other via a stream of Twitter messages on 60-inch plasma screens set up in the conference hallways. There are now 65 Twitter groups on Dell.com, with 2,475 followers for the Dell Home Outlet Store.

With results like these, others may be quick to follow. But this ripening channel might spoil if “tweets” start turning into spam. Oh, and if you’re still not sure what exactly Twitter is, check out our post Twitter in plain English.

Recently, a developer sent me the following link pointing out gleefully the downward trend in IE 6.0 usage. http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=3. Though I do not think anyone will be sorry to see the end of IE 6.0, as developers we need to understand the end use of our code.

The following link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers compares many different sources for getting a good handle of what is being used in the market (and trends).

Though these stats vary greatly, IE is still generally 70%- 80% in most of the stats I see. Firefox is around 15-30%+ depending on which source you look at. For example, http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp is much more FF friendly in it’s stats, but I suspect they are based on their traffic, not overall web traffic. Their traffic is more web developer oriented.

What can we learn from this? Developers like Fire Fox more than the general public does. No surprise here. We like the add ons, the stricter adherence to standards, etc. BUT the client is not generally a developer. Neither are the people looking at sites.

To sum it all up. As a developer at SolutionSet or elsewhere feel free to use whatever tools you like. But the most important browser to look at your work in is still IE. It is the “standard” out there that all your code should conform too. Too often, developers deliver great work in Firefox, that is untested in IE. I encourage all developers to regularly review all work in IE and actually use is at the primary way to “view” the work currently being worked on.

Maybe it is the shortened “shopping season” this year (fewer days between Thanksgiving and Christmas), or maybe people are holding out for the best deals…whatever the reason, consumers are behind in their shopping.

According to this CNNmoney.com article, consumers have historically completed 53% of their shopping by this time. But this year? Only 47%. When you’re talking about the millions of dollars that are spent during the holiday season, that’s a lot of candy canes still on the table.

Who’s lagging the most? Men aged 35-44. Come on fellas, get online.

Given the fact that people are shopping from work, we say ramp up that at-work marketing to claim your fair share of the holiday wallet. There’s (barely) still time!

• Take me out to the ballgame, forever and ever

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• Fire meets desire—a new cologne for burger lovers

• “Not-So-Great Expectations” Do movies spoil love life?

If you still have some holiday shopping to do, then you’re going to love freeshipping.org. We learned about this from the Consumer Reports blog, where they reported that December 18 has been declared “Free Shipping Day”. Many well-known retailers are participating in this event, including: Dell, Nordstrom, Crate and Barrel and Victoria’s Secret.

We think this could catch on in a big way. It’s smart of these merchants to get the word out that it isn’t too late to shop and at the same time prop up online sales at a time when they traditionally start to slow down.

It will be interesting to see how the merchants tie this event into their advertising this week. Will they combine the messaging with some at-work marketing?

We saw this TV spot over the weekend for a company called Coupon Cabin. We’ve always been curious about this thrifty niche of online shopping—this subculture of people who know how to use the affiliate sites to get the very best deals.

Why doesn’t EVERYONE who shops online use them? Is awareness of these sites the issue? Given the current economy, we think that shoppers are going to be looking for every advantage. And it is pretty smart of Coupon Cabin to raise awareness of their offering with broad reach media.

We’ll be watching this category and answering some business questions along the way. Stay tuned.

We know, we know. Work is supposed to be for, well, working. But the fact is consumers spent $846 million online last week on Cyber Monday alone. Over half of people say they plan to shop online at work during this holiday season. And there are a few big online shopping days left before Christmas. So how can marketers tap into the at-work shopper?

We mused about ways to market to people while they’re at work in our previous post, and this article from ecommerce-guide.com dishes up a few more.

David Armano of Logic + Emotion has an impressive handle on what’s actually important in the lawless boomtown that is social media. In an article published on AdAge, Armano looks beyond the get-hits-quick schemes of “viral marketing” and instead focuses on community building. Here’s a condensed version of his four “C’s” of community:

Content
When considering community initiatives, there are three questions to ask: Where will the content come from? Does it provide indisputable value? Can a regular flow of quality content be maintained?

Context
Context means understanding how to meet people where they are and serving them the right experience at the right time. Well-designed applications and functionality have great opportunities to deliver on context. For example, Facebook’s recently updated iPhone app is perfectly designed for contextual usage on the go.

Connectivity
Communities thrive on squishy, hard-to-measure activities that are relationship-based at the root. It’s not about mass communications but more about the micro-interactions which I’ve talked about at great length. Designing experiences that support thousands of micro-interactions means you are making a commitment vs. trying to produce a one-hit wonder.

Continuity
We launched our Pampers Village which includes a baby name finder, parent blogs, forums and a non-traditional navigation design that tags topics and references relevant products. Communities such as this and others need to be flexible to evolve while still providing a valuable and consistent user experience which can be sustained.

Aside from Facebook and LinkedIn, are you active in any online communities? What keeps you there? Or do you subscribe to the Groucho Marx school of thought: “I would never belong to a group that would accept someone like me as a member.”

MRI released some data from their word-of-mouth segmentation research indicating that 11.5% of the US adult population influences 90% of the population when it comes to personal finance. MRI calls these people the “Big Circle Influentials” because of their significant pull in this category.

This dynamic is true not only for personal finance, but in any category where expertise is required to clear any uncertainty and make a confident decision. Everyone is a just few degrees of separation away from an expert in retirement plans, auto repair, divorce procedure, etc. When people have a problem, they seek out the best advice possible.

This makes “Big Circle Influentials” a powerful group that marketers need to develop a strategy around. One that recognizes their role in the purchase dynamic of others, as well as their undoubtedly finely-tuned marketing B.S. detector.

Are you marketing in a product category that could be helped by spending on the influencers?