The wait is finally over. After years of anticipation and weeks of headlines, the world's largest social network is a publicly-traded company. FB shares, which priced at $38 yesterday, became available to the general public in the past hour on the NASDAQ. After a delay, the stock hit the market at a opening price of $42.05. It is currently trading at around $40.Facebook's IPO is a huge milestone for a company that is arguably unlike any other to come before it. Launched in 2004 from a university dorm room, Facebook has risen to become more than just a multi-billion dollar consumer internet star -- it's a cultural phenomenon used by close to a billion people. But the company's public debut is hardly the end of the story Mark Zuckerberg wrote. Instead, it's just the beginning of what could prove to be either one of the greatest tech investment opportunities ever or a passing fad that brought irrational exuberance back to internet stocks. Which one will it be? Naturally, it depends on who you ask. On one hand, Facebook is a force to be reckoned with. It has nearly a billion users, billions in revenue, one of the best-recognized brands in the world and some of the best engineering talent in Silicon Valley. Facebook boosters thus argue that the company is just getting started and its best days are ahead of it. On the other hand, Facebook's current valuation is based on its potential more than its relatively modest earnings and faces significant challenges in realizing all of its potential, including mobile. Skeptics will point out that the company is no spring chicken, saw a quarter-over-quarter revenue decline last quarter and that key insiders are selling in the IPO, hinting that they may believe Facebook's valuation has peaked (or is close to peaking). One thing is for sure: the initial movement in FB shares (up or down) in the next hours, days and weeks will make for great entertainment, but it's what happens in the coming months and perhaps even years that will determine whether Facebook is the next Google, or the next Groupon.

More than a third of consumers (36%) read marketing emails on mobile, according to new research . According to digital agency Steel, this rises to 55% among 18-34 year olds, highlighting the fact that brands need to optimise their email marketing for mobile devices. The stats are supported by a Knotice study we reported in April which found that 27% of emails are opened on mobile devices. Steel’s report found that almost 40% of those who read emails on mobile said they did so if the subject line sounded interesting.The basic rules of email marketing still apply on mobile, “but we need to be smart in how this translates to a mobile version of an email - fewer characters on a far more personal device”. A third of respondents (33%) said that they use their mobile to screen emails, before reading them later on a desktop, though this does contradict the Knotice stats, which found that in 95% of the cases,  the email open is occurring on only one type of device, which removes one excuse not to optimise for mobile. Data included in an infographic from Return Path shows that 41% of Europeans would either close or delete an email not optimised for mobile. However, stats from our Email Marketing Census 2012 found that with 39% of companies said their mobile email strategy was “non-existent”, and 37% said their strategy was “basic”. Therefore it seems a huge number of brands are wasting a lot of effort and missing out on conversions simply because they haven’t optimised their emails for mobile. The importance of an effective mobile email campaign is further underlined by engagement statistics form Steel’s report. Among those who open emails on a mobile, 42% of respondents have clicked through to a website and 30% claim to have made a purchase from a mobile email. In reality 30% seems quite high, but it does suggest that a significant proportion of consumers are encouraged to make purchase decisions from mobile marketing. Steel recommends the following five steps to improve your mobile email messages: Simplify your emails: reduce the number of categories, sub-headings, links and images. Limit your calls to action and make them obvious: use a small number of obvious call-to-actions, ensuring clickable areas are no bigger than a fingertip (44x44 pixels). Use a clear, methodical hierarchy and keep it short: create a clear headline followed by secondary messaging, and keep it as brief as possible. Use capitals in titles to distinguish text and content areas. Stick to one or two columns of content: if using more than one column, centre the text in each column to maximise the visual space between them and improve legibility. The data in Steel’s report came from a nationally representative survey of 500 respondents.

Thanks to Facebook’s filings with the SEC, we now have access to a treasure trove of Facebook data.  And one metric everyone seems to be keeping their collective eyes on is mobile-social growth.   It’s going up…fast. According to comScore, US Facebook users are now for the first time accessing the network from mobile devices more than from desktops or laptops.  Average U.S. users spent 441 minutes accessing Facebook from mobile devices in March compared to 391 minutes for desktop/laptop use. Facebook now says it has 488m mobile active monthly users, a 14% increase from December.Driving the mobile usage surge is the proliferation of smartphone growth. IDC recently revealed that 59% of all mobile phone owners possess a smartphone as opposed to a basic mobile device, with that percentage expected to rise sharply over the next five years as smartphones continue to replace traditional handhelds. Mobile-social growth impacts everyone, from consumers to brands to investors, though for slightly different yet similar reasons. Facebook needs to monetise that growing number of mobile users without disrupting the user experience.  Too many ads, users cringe. Too few ads, revenue decreases and the markets notices. Today’s social marketer needs to stay on top of these trends as consumers are increasingly interacting with content via smartphones. Marketers must understand the demand that puts on their social content strategy.  As social matures, led by Facebook, brands will need to develop a more integrated POEM (Paid, Owned & Earned) strategy. Facebook underscored this with the introduction of Sponsored Stories and Reach Generator. Consumers are increasingly making the social web the center of their digital world. Yesterday’s brand website is becoming today’s Facebook Page. But this presents incredible opportunities. Below are just a few key ideas for marketers to consider as they strive to better reach today’s mobile-social consumer:  Mobile optimisation now includes social  With more people accessing Facebook via mobile Web, Facebook announced at Mobile World Congress that the company is focusing on building out more effective mobile solutions to aid in app discovery, payments and mobile browser fragmentation.  Marketers should be eager to execute on the bevy of new opportunities this presents to optimise content for mobile and achieve maximum engagement and effectiveness. If you don’t, then you are missing almost 50% your audience, with 488m monthly mobile users (and growing) on Facebook. Bridge the digital & physical worlds Effectively engaging your social consumer while on the go provides many added benefits. Think commerce, location-based apps, and real-time targeting. Mobile marketing allows brands to reach and engage with a consumer when they are closest to activities such as shopping and eating. Delivering consumers real-time deals and coupons by location and activity can achieve tremendous results.  It’s about delivering relevant content at the opportune time.  It’s the blending together of the digital and physical worlds, giving brands a chance to expand and enhance the consumer relationship.  Understand behavior and usage differences As consumers continue to upgrade from traditional cellphones to smartphones, mobile behavior will further evolve, and marketers must stay abreast of the latest mobile consumer behavior data. If you understand the behavior and usage differences, you can deliver more relevant and engaging content.  In our white paper, Social Mobile User Engagement, we explored performance metrics via mobile including: image and text posts perform better; Thursdays – Sundays are more effective posting days; shorter posts are more effective; and post with links receive higher engagements, to name a few.  Further, as smartphone usage expands and speed and download times increase, look for video and rich media content engagement to also increase. Facebook recently unveiled new App Insights metrics, offering mobile referral data from their dashboard to help “understand the traffic your app receives from Facebook mobile sources” and “continue optimising distribution via mobile social channels”. Ensuring that a Facebook app is Flash-free and optimised for whichever screen users are using is vital. Facebook’s new App Insights metrics is a great tool for helping marketers understand where broken experiences may be occurring and helping them hone in on behavior and usage differences between mobile and non-mobile devices.  In the mobile kingdom, content remains king Facebook had never talked so much about mobile than it did at its Facebook Marketing Conference (fMC) earlier this year. It has continued that focus leading up to its IPO.  Revealing Timeline for brand pages, unveiling ads for mobile devices along with several other features and functions, Facebook showed it understands how the location of premium ads needs to be different in a mobile environment vs. desktop web.  All of this followed Twitter’s announcement they it is expanding its mobile advertising strategy, “making promoted tweets visible in its apps for iPhone and Android devices”. All of these upgrades are about content – promoting and highlighting premium content in feeds is just one piece of the puzzle. To garner attention, the content still has to be engaging, feel personal to the consumer, and exhibit relevance. In conclusion The industry is still in the very early stages of the mobile-social revolution, but we know this space will move forward rapidly, bringing changes, developments and opportunities daily.  From our own data, we see that mobile engagement on Facebook more than doubled in just six months for the brands we manage. The percentage of Likes from mobile across our client base went from around 15% in the middle of last year to 40% of all Likes by December. We expect that to hit 60% by the end of the year. By staying focused and having the right partners, marketers can achieve success with today’s new mobile-social consumer.

Once again we compile the most senior, surprising and influential job moves in the UK. This time we cover appointments at Kraft Foods, OgilvyOne, The Rubicon Project and Scout Media. --Kraft Foods has hired former Kerry Foods chief marketing officer Phil Chapman. He will head up Kraft’s central and eastern Europe chocolate division. Rocket Fuel has appointed Oliver Hülse, formerly managing director at Adconion Media Group, as managing director DACH. David Pattison, former president of the IPA and founding partner of PHD, has joined content startup Gravity Road as its chairman. The Rubicon Project has hired Brian Pike as CTO and Victoria von Szeliski as general counsel. Both join form similar roles at Ticketmaster. OgilvyOne has promoted its chief executive, Annette King to UK chairman and chief executive of EMEA.  Carat has appointed Matthew Hook as its chief strategy officer. Hook joins from Vizeum US as part of a management restructure that also includes the appointment of former Stella Artois marketer Jo Allan as the chief client officer. Scout Media has hired former Radio Times ad director Andrew Mercer. Mercer will be tasked with developing tailored print ad packages for advertisers and bolstering Scout London’s integrated advertising proposition. -- Itchy feet? Why not head over to our jobs board to check out the latest roles. Hiring? Free posts on the jobs board are included with gold, platinum and diamond membership plans.

I've rounded up some of the most interesting digital marketing stats I've seen this week.  Stats include multi-screen usage, mobile email, online returns, buying patterns of tablet users, social media customer service and Twitter's mobile user numbers.Multi-screen usage  Stats from our Multi-Screen Marketer report, produced in association with the IAB, show that 65% of the respondents with a tablet in our study said they were likely to be using a second device while watching television. Even most people with only two screens (TV + computer) are more likely to be online while watching than not (52%). Multi-screening can be positive for publishers and advertisers. Those with tablets are significantly more likely (47%) to take an action (voting, purchasing, etc.) in response to what they’re watching than their peers with three screens (37%).  47% of tablet owners have used a mobile device to respond to something on the screen and 28% have downloaded an application that’s related to a show they watch. Chance of using a mobile device to take action from television prompt: Mobile web usage Almost two-thirds of UK smartphone owners (59%) access the mobile internet everyday, according to stats from Google.  85% of UK mobile users seek local information on their smartphone, and 81% take action using the local content. Mobile search has grown 500% in the past two years. Online research and in-store purchases More than a third of Homebase customers research online before going in-store, according to the retailer's Head of Multichannel Andy McWilliams. Reducing online returns rates By using the Shoefitr tool, which helps shoppers to find the best fit for them, US retailer Running Warehouse has reduced fit-related returns by 23%.  The app has enabled Running Warehouse to increase its profit margins by 2.5%.  Previously, around 65% of the retailer returns were due to size related issues, but now 20% of orders come in from customers that have used the app.  Social media and customer service More than a third of UK consumers (36%) have engaged with brands through social media, according to a survey from Fishburn Hedges. 68% of those who have engaged with brands through social media believe that it “allowed them to find their voice”. More than two-thirds (65%) also believe that it is a better way to communicate with companies than call centres. Twitter's mobile users Twitter now has 10m UK users, of which 80% access the site using mobile. This makes the UK Twitter's fourth largest audience behind the US, Brazil and Japan. It has 140m users worldwide.  Tablets One tablet generates as many website visits as four smartphones, according to data from Adobe's Digital Index Report. By the end of Q1 2012 smartphones accounted for 6.1% of site visits compared to 4.3% on tablet (mainly iPad). Within a year of its launch in Q2 2010 the iPad accounted for 1% of total website visits, reaching 4.3% of total visits by the end of 2011. Facebook and customer acquisition More than a third of UK businesses (36%) now use Facebook to attract new customers, according to data from Basekit. This makes it more popular as an advertising tool than local business directories such as Yellow Pages and Thomson, which are used by 27% of the 500 small businesses surveyed. The use of online advertising is now almost as common as print advertising (20% vs. 21%), and Twitter is also quickly gaining popularity (17%). Marketing emails and mobile Research by STEEL finds that 36% of all consumers are already reading marketing emails on a mobile device. This figure rises to 55% for 18-34s.  However, one in four find marketing emails too difficult to read on their mobiles.  The top area of dissatisfaction is too much scrolling (42%), while 29% state that the layout of emails isn't right for their mobile device and 27% feel there is too much content.  Reasons for opening emails on mobile: Shazam and TV ads According to ITV and Shazam, around 50,000 viewers used the Shazam app to tag the Pepsi MAX and Cadbury ads shown during ad breaks in Saturday’s Britain’s Got Talent final. Shazam recently announced a partnership with ITV to provide interactive TV ads. 

We know that Google uses hundreds of ranking factors to determine where it places web pages in its index. We also know that social media sites are becoming increasingly influential on search placements. Charles Duncombe explored the topic on this blog a few days ago, focusing mainly on volume-based signals. I think there’s probably a bit more to it than that, or at least there should be.  This is a think-out-loud ‘Friday’ post, rather than a definitive guide to the things Googlebot is sniffing out (for I know not what it looks for). It considers the possibilities, to explore what Google might be able to make sense of. I invite you to share your own ideas in the comments section below. So then, what kind of social signals might it take notice of on Twitter?Volume The sheer number of tweets is likely to be a major influence, not least because it’s one of the easiest things for Google to figure out.  Research from Branded3 showed some strong correlations between rankings and retweet volume. It found that the more (re)tweets, the higher the rankings. If you can muster a whopping 7,500+ retweets then you might find yourself on the first page of Google, according to this study.  Average retweet volume Let’s say Google has figured out that I average 200 retweets for every new blog post that I publish. If I write a post that generates 2,000 retweets then that might wave a big flag in its face. Context and comment Last year I wrote about how to extract meaning from retweets. Some people will retweet others verbatim, without appending their own comments or views. I much prefer to see the tweets that say “great post” or “rubbish post”. Google might take notice of these nano reviews, just as I do.  The ‘65 character rule’ for headlines should be adhered to if you want to encourage people to add comments to retweets. Bio information What keywords are in your bio? Do they match the content and focus of your Twitter feed? What about your followers, and the people you are following? If Google make sense of your interests, expertise and influence then it stands to reason that it might use this knowledge when calculating search placements. Human-powered accounts vs feeds It is really easy for a human to spot a Twitter account that is purely automated. Google should be able to take notice of this too, to discount accounts that have no conversational tweets or only ever share links to one source. Reach Your own network of followers will be responsible for driving the majority of retweets, at least initially. But sometimes one or more tipping points are reached and many people from outside your network will share your content. I think of this as ‘the Kevin Bacon effect’, and it’s potentially something Google could consider when sniffing around social platforms for information. Frequency How often do you share content on Twitter? Low volume accounts with a high velocity of retweets suggest authority, for example @ThisIsSethsBlog (although points may be deducted for automation and a thorough absence of conversation). Retweeter authority Who is doing the tweeting? How much of an authority are they on the subject that they are tweeting about? If Avinash Kaushik retweets one of our analytics-themed blog posts then will Google give us a little extra love? That stands to reason, from where I’m sitting. Conversational vs link-based tweets Google will take particular care over tweets containing links, since links continue to make Google’s world spin. But to what degree might conversation-based tweets impact rankings, if at all? Will Google only take notice of tweets with links in them, or is there a bigger picture to look at? Remember that we all talk about brands on Twitter without necessarily linking to them. Follower vs following ratios If you’re lucky enough to have 100,000 followers but only follow 100 people then Google may well assign VIP status to you and your tweets. Retweets from celebrities will be even more sought after. Spam followers There are tools that you can use to remove spammers who are following you. This is a good idea, even if it does reduce your follower numbers (artificially inflated by morons, so don’t worry about it). If Google starts to take notice of the proportion of spammers following Twitter accounts then it will become the hygienic thing to do. Verified accounts Presumably this is at the very least an indicator of credibility.  What do you think? What social signals do you think are the most important for Google?

Here's a round up of some of the best infographics we've seen this week.  We have infographics on Facebook's IPO, bounce rates, keeping users engaged with your emails, tag management, and some great mobile stats. If you can't quite read the text, click on the images to see a larger version...The Potential Of Facebook’s Newsfeed Ads vs. IPO valuation (Webtrends) Why do users become disengaged with your email? (Litmus) The ultimate mobile web infographic (Bootstrapper's Guide) Bounce rate demystified (KISSmetrics) This is actually an old one, but a) I haven't seen it before and b) it's good...  Facebook vs Google Display Network (Wordstream) The ROI of tag management (Tealium) (From Econsultancy's The ROI of Tag Management report.)

We're nearly halfway through 2012 and there are some clear content trends emerging. Here are the top six hot issues we’re discussing with content owners…1.  Can you COPE? COPE, as in Create Once Publish Everywhere. Originally this phrase was simply a sell for clever publishing software. It’s now become shorthand for planning and creating content that can be published and re-used across many platforms, ideally cutting the cost of creation, production and (especially) translation and localisation. Lately we’ve heard it bandied about a lot in editorial meetings. Obviously if you are going to publish the same content (or elements of the same content) across many platforms, you’ll need to indulge in some pretty sophisticated content planning work first. If your company operates in a series of content silos, with one team ‘doing email’ and another responsible for ‘social’, you’ll struggle to get this off the ground. But if you can join your internal content owners up to develop a truly inclusive content strategy, then COPE may well prove efficient for you. On a practical level, for written content, this will usually mean coming up with highly adaptive modular copy formats that everyone signs off on and subscribes to. Cue stakeholder pistols at dawn…  2. Post-Panda SEO for peanuts? You can’t stuff your content with keywords any more. So what now? Those whose businesses stand or fall on their search results are out there trying to source content that will both keep customers engaged and satisfy a Google algorithm that rewards content quality. But how much are they willing to invest in it really? As far as we can see, the SEO copywriting market has polarised. While we can report a recent large influx of clients prepared to invest in quality copywriting, along with the editorial planning, format work and quality control that requires, we also notice a proliferation of extremely low-cost content providers. There will always be people prepared to churn out repurposed gobbledegook for buttons (£6.50 for 700 words, anyone?) and also those who insist that software could “seriously, like, replace Shakespeare”. But the truth is that anyone who is prepared to write you an on-brand, optimised, customer-facing, usable piece of content, mapped to your business objectives, legally compliant, sub-edited and proofread for a fiver, is either living in a country where that’s a day’s wages, living off a trust fund or has repurposed it from someone else’s work. Really good content costs. Sorry. 3. Micro-content fixes The rise of the copy nudge. The double-dip has forced companies to focus even more on the bottom line. So what content gives the greatest return on investment? Last year we started suggesting that budget-strapped content owners identified quick copy fixes with high ROI. After all, if your conversions increase as a result of your emails, then why not focus on a more compelling email sign-up, or on messages which dissuade customers from unsubscribing? Re-working a key call to action, a button, or split-testing the benefits on a product page is quick to do, requires minimal design input and can produce instant results. The king of all quick copy fixes is the online form. We have case studies showing up to a 35% increase in conversions from fixing the reassurance and instructional text in transactional areas. So maybe instead of that big ambitious content migration, you should simply ‘sweat the small stuff’ instead? 4.  Mobile, tablet and yet more mobile Making content mobile and tablet friendly is definitely what’s keeping content owners up at night. Last year, Jakob Nielsen revealed that content is twice as hard to understand on a mobile device. "When reading from an iPhone-sized screen, comprehension scores for complex web content were 48% of desktop monitor scores," he reported. So what is the answer? In short: write short, clear sentences. What’s the problem? This is very hard to do well, especially when summarising the terms and conditions of a home contents insurance policy. And what about tablet? While we’re still in learning mode as to what works best, certain content issues are already pretty clear. Overly-long lists and menus, information ‘too small to tap’ and serving up splash screens are all out. It appears you do need a distinct content approach for tablet after all… 5. Govern or be damned "Quality is doing it right when no one is looking," said Henry Ford. Unfortunately, all the best editorial set-ups rely on lots of people looking. Looking, editing, checking, and then looking again in fact. While most content teams weren’t initially set up with anything like this kind of QA process in place, we are seeing a rise in demand for content training and guidelines which support governance and help benchmark content quality. For many clients this is ensuring that (a) best-practice samples and execution guidelines exist for each content typeand (b) someone is making sure they actually get followed. For others, this means regular content auditing followed up by training and mentoring. It’s fantastic to finally see the old-school rigour of print publishing being embraced by the digital world. Better content should come of it. 6. Content ideas brainstorm boom The trend to embrace content marketing as a discipline in itself continues apace. But this is primarily an editorial endeavour. And great editorial depends on an ongoing flow of high-quality ideas. When the ideas run out, it’s all over. As original ideas can be hard to find (especially for the more complex B2B brands), the ability to brainstorm clever content ideas, formats and executions has become powerful content-marketing currency. What marketers are after is ‘ideas with legs’, workable series of content that can be replicated week after week without flagging. Content mapped to customer needs and interests that is truly useful, usable and builds long-tail relationships. In his post-Panda blog post  Google fellow Amit Singhal advises content owners to avoid ‘mass produced’ content that is ‘shallow in nature’, and to strive for high-quality ‘original content’. He urges us to produce articles full of ‘interesting information that is beyond obvious’ and remove low-quality content from our websites. And this is the biggest content trend of all: the culling of poor-quality content is finally beginning to happen. And we can’t wait to see the results...  

Marketing giant MediaCom has been sharing some valuable lessons it learned from running mobile marketing campaigns. During a speech at IAB Mobile Engage, MediaCom’s managing partner for mobile and innovation Stefan Bardega said that 18% of the company’s digital ads were now viewed on mobile screens. This has increased from 4% in just over a year. Here are Bardega's tips on how businesses should approach the mobile channel...1. Get the foundations right Bardega said that the fundamentals of a mobile strategy are an optimised website, plus mobile focused search and advertising campaigns. These key elements need to work on mobile – get them right before you move on to anything else. Noting that 60% of UK businesses don’t have a mobile optimised site, he said marketers should also be aware that Google only displays the top two paid search results on mobile compared to three on desktop. Also you get different spelling mistakes on mobile, so your keywords need to be aligned differently. Looking at advertising, it is also important for marketers to ensure that their digital creative works on mobile. A year ago 5% of ads were showing a backup GIF on mobile, but that has increased to 15% due to the number of people viewing ads on devices that don’t support flash. Bardega said that MediaCom has seen a 20% improvement in mobile conversions for businesses that ensure their site, search and advertising are optimised. 2. Accept diversity While media agencies will profess to be able to segment and identify a target audience on mobile, Bardega said that in truth it is difficult to predict behaviour using traditional demographics. Agencies have loads of tools for understanding customers, but the reality is that there’s diversity among demographic groups in the way they interact with mobile. 3. Harness device attributes Mobile is a personal space and offers excellent opportunities for engaging with consumers. Bardega highlighted research that looked at the relationship between how long users engage with a digital ad and the propensity to buy. It found that after 30 seconds of interaction the likelihood to purchase increases by 6%, however it increases by 20% for users who engaged with an ad for 90 seconds. Advertisers therefore need to find ways of delivering engaging adverts through the use of mobile technologies, such as augmented reality. However, it is important to only use the ad formats that are right for your audience. 4. Integrate everything Bardega suggested that businesses should integrate mobile into everything they do. He highlighted a campaign by Alton Towers that saw 5,500 customers attend the theme park for free using a check-in offer run through Facebook. Similarly, Skoda used mobile AR app Aurasma to embed digital content in print ads, achieving 6,000 scans across four publications.  The same campaign achieved an 18% response rate from pre-roll ads and 4.3% from display ads. Overall mobile helped drive a response rate that was 230% higher than average. 5. Be brave Bardega admitted that often with new technologies brands need to be willing to try new ideas. He said NFC marketing campaigns will be the norm in a few years, but for now advertisers need to be brave and trial the technology even if the results are unimpressive. We need to test these methods with consumers. Don’t worry if it’s a success, but think about what learnings can you take forward. 6. Make new friends Mobile is a rapidly changing environment, so brands and agencies should be looking for new partners to work with to help drive innovation in their campaigns. New technologies create new opportunities, so look at who you can be working with alongside your traditional partners.

Finally, it’s the end of the week. But what have we been reading and sharing around the office? Here’s a quick round up of the content that grabbed our attention. Pop back later to see what our UK and US offices have being checking out as well. -     Online giants mow down Aussie department stores After a year in which online retail grew almost 29%, around 10 times the speed of offline retail, Australia’s highest selling online operators have reached a cumulative size where their sales are now on par, or greater than, the top five Australian department stores. Originally published 14-May-2012 Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg: Does it matter that he wears a hoodie? Mark Zuckerberg has been criticised for wearing a hoodie to a major business presentation. But should this be a problem? Originally published 11-May-2012 India tipped to overtake the US to become the world’s biggest Facebook market by 2015 It has just seen Brazil overtake it to become Facebook’s largest overseas market, but India is being tipped to overtake the US and the Latin American country to become the planet’s largest collection of Facebook users by 2015. Originally published 17-May-2012 5 futuristic technologies invented in the wrong century We're all familiar with the idea that science fiction often predicts science fact. But every once in a while the universe gets its wires so crossed that something we tend to think of as the far-fetched brainchild of some science fiction writer actually happened in the real world well before we ever saw it on a movie or TV screen. Originally published 24-April-2012 The state of social business in Australia 2012 Who is achieving strategic results in Australia by design? Originally published 16-May-2012 Chinese daily social network use increased 15.9% to 82m+ Social networking sites in China saw the number of active users achieve a steady growth, compared to the same period year on year.  Originally published 15-May-2012 Interest vs. Social in Japan Japan still doesn’t have a truly dominant player when it comes to social media, the fragmentation and splintering of social and interest based communities is key to understanding the market...  Originally published 16-May-2012 Bing launches first Australian marketing campaign The centrepiece of the campaign is a series of mini documentaries and TVCs which tell stories of inspirational young Australians who get things done.  Originally published 17-May-2012 Understanding social media in China No Facebook. No Twitter. No YouTube. Listing the companies that don’t have access to China’s exploding social-media space underscores just how different it is from those of many Western markets.   Originally published 30-April-2012 This week in bots: Robo-crime and robo-punishment Tiny desktop real-transformer bots? Pah. This is Vaudeville, a 13-foot-high, Gundam-style combat robot.  Originally published 17-May-2012

The Wall Street Journal revealed some interesting data about readership trends by device and time today at the Business Development Institute's social and mobile conference for Financial Services.While a live Twitter feed streamed the thoughts of the audience, Michal Shapira, Associate Vice President of Digital Marketing noted that the organization is not just a traditional media company anymore and claimed that, compared to a jury of its peers, the company is number one in terms of mobile access. Supplementing print readership, the WSJ's desktop, tablet, and phone applications extend the company's product consumption levels far beyond its traditional reading hours.The news organization's tablet usage (mostly iPad) begins first, at five in the morning, with print following shortly thereafter. As people transit to and arrive at work those consumption methods fall precipitously. Subsequently, mobile phone and desktop access rise, then hold steady throughout the remainder of the working day. Tablet usage begins to pick up again in the evening, and usage of WSJ Live, the company's streaming video app, peaks in the evening at 10pm. Shapira said that this is evidence of either digital video consumption replacing television, or, additive second-screen viewing.  In either case, this level of advanced penetration of owned properties throughout an array of devices and content-formats is an impressive success for the 123 year old brand.  In part, the success of these products is no doubt attributable to the company's aggressive participation in numerous public-ish social media channels. According to a shared slideshow from March, the company maintains over 100 Twitter accounts, with over 2m followers. Social sharing within Facebook is the largest source of traffic referral, and the company maintains 14 brand pages with 600k likes. The company has additionally embraced Pinterest, and is active on Instagram, where it has over 15k followers. As brands consider implementing content strategies, they would be wise to pay attention to publications like this. At one point, the Wall Street Journal was just a newspaper. Now, it has the potential to poach eyeballs away from TV advertisers. It isn't that every brand should desire to become a full-fledged news service, it's that the opportunity to deeply penetrate into the lives of consumers is there, for those who can figure out how to do it.

Econsultancy has just finished a new report, The Multi-Screen Marketer, written on behalf of the Interactive Advertising Bureau and based on a survey to over 1,800 consumers. The goal was to find out how they use a second screen while watching television and to help us understand the impact of these behaviors on advertising and marketing. There's no shortage of research on the topic, so we focused on areas that believe to be the least examined (and most useful), including how different types of content correlate with multi-tasking, how the distraction of the second screen affects advertiser awareness and what consumers expect from their TV experience in the future.There has been a great deal of attention and research directed at the multi-screen recently, and with good reason. 65% of the respondents with a tablet in our study said they were likely to be using a second device while watching television...and that number goes up for those 18-44 years old. Even most people with only two screens (TV + computer) are more likely to be online while watching than not (52%). The Multi-Screen Marketer explores some of the effects of these behaviors, and tries to lay out an approach for publishers and advertisers. How does the distraction of the second screen affect attention?  When someone has another device at the ready, their attention can shift from the screen the moment they lose interest. Whether it's a commercial break or just a break in the action, they're off and mentally running. Studies have already shown that commercial blocks invite the heaviest multi-screen behavior. We wanted to measure how this could impact advertiser recall. Respondents were asked to identify their favorite television program, and then asked if they could identify specific advertisers associated with it. We expected that the less people fit the mold of the multi-tasker, the more they would recall, but that's not what we found. Overall, 46% of survey takers were able to identify between one and three advertisers. Surprisingly, four screened respondents (TV, computer, smartphone and tablet) were more likely (53%) than those with only two screens (42%). Again, younger tablet owners did even better...61% could recall at least one advertiser. Of course, this doesn't capture some very important pieces of information; we don't know anything about messaging recall or sentiment. You can be sure that studies will fill in these gaps. Does the type of content (TV program) correlate with multi-screen behaviors? Television programs aren't all the same, even if it feels that way when you've got a remote in your hand. Respondents were asked to identify their preferred program types (procedurals, sports, reality, etc.) and given three randomly chosen questions about their behaviors from a total of six possible questions (to avoid overload). Three of the behaviors were "commercial" - related to online shopping, product searches, etc., while the others related to general online surfing and searching for media-related information. Findings are broken down in detail within the report but one of the highlights was discovering that independent drama (Mad Men, Breaking Bad, etc.) is a hotbed for both commerce and non-commerce related second screen behaviors. People are somewhat more likely to shop for products they've seen during the program (show + commercials) and to do things like connect on social networks, than during any other program type. At the other end of the spectrum are procedural dramas. Where are we headed? Connected TV is already here, but few people have bought them so far, and those that have often aren't using them to their full potential. We asked respondents to describe television of the future and the televisions of the future, and to gauge the impact of these expected changes. At the top of the list is the ability to watch anything, anywhere, anywhen. Not surprising and unlikely to be fulfilled any time soon, because of the basic business models of the primary players. The second highest priority is for a television that listens and more importantly, does what we tell it. Voice recognition scored well, as people acknowledge that between multiple remotes, hundreds of channels and piles of accessories, it can be complicated to find or record the content we want.  Other top priorities center around the multi-screen experience. People expect to be able to watch programming on any device, and then move it simply from one device to another as they travel. Naturally, we gravitate to the best available device, but often that is the most available device. Watching a film on a smartphone is sub-optimal, unless you're on a subway, in which case it's sublime. Other Findings The Multi-Screen Marketer looks at a number of other topics including how social is really a private activity, how multi-screeners use online information during the purchase process and how TV viewing is shared among devices. Thanks to the sponsorship of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, the report is available to all Econsultancy members, bronze and higher.

Before Ron Johnson joined department store giant J.C. Penney as CEO in 2011, he was the SVP of Retail Operations at Apple Inc., where he was responsible for developing the Apple Store and its Genius Bar. Apple's retail strategy was a major contributor to Appl'e's mind-bending success over the past decade, and for his seven-plus years of work, Johnson was handsomly rewarded. Needless to say, given Johnson's accomplishments at Apple, J.C. Penney shareholders had high hopes for what he might do for the century-old retailer. Earlier this year, Johnson unveiled his bold vision: radically alter J.C. Penney's pricing strategy. Instead of using coupons and discounts, something the department store had done extensively for years, J.C. Penney would offer "Every Day", "Monthly Value" and "Best Price" prices on its merchandise. And instead of selling items for $x.99, it would use round numbers.At the time, it was clear that Johnson was taking some cues from Apple. Make things simple, and the market will reward you. What wasn't clear was whether or not Johnson's strategy would work. Some liked it, while others suggested it could be disastrous. Unfortunately for J.C Penney and its shareholders, the new approach isn't producing the expected result. Last Wednesday, the company reported its earnings for Q1 2012 and the numbers were ugly. Same-store sales dropped nearly 19%. Online sales plummeted 28%. All told, J.C. Penney reported a net loss of $163 million, or 75 cents per share; analysts had expected a net loss of just 8 cents per share. Not surprisingly, the results have sent J.C. Penney shares reeling. They're down more than 20% in the past week, and the company has suspended its dividend to save cash. And it appears things might get worse as reports say that the retailer is looking to wholesalers for steep discounts. The cause of J.C. Penney's disastrous quarter isn't hard to identify: shoppers aren't liking its new pricing. As C. Britt Beemer, chairman of consumer research firm America's Research Group, told the AP, "Consumers want deals, and they're willing to wait for them...When you train customers to shop at big discounts, that customer is not going to change". In other words, J.C. Penney might be offering merchandise to customers at great prices, but they simply won't recognize that they're getting a good deal because, for better or worse, there's no, well, "deal." The result: they don't buy. For his part, Johnson believes he made the right move, and is confident that in time, J.C. Penney customers (or, more accurately, former customers) will come to their senses. Clearly, Wall Street's reaction to the early results indicate that investors aren't so sure about that. There's a timely lesson here for companies using the internet to acquire new customers or reward existing customers. Whether you're promoting a daily deal on Groupon or offering a coupon for a Facebook 'Like', discounts usually carry a cost. When customers come to expect those discounts, the cost is easy to significantly underestimate. This, of course, doesn't mean that all discounting is bad. Coupons and deals are valuable tools when applied appropriately. But when a brand becomes known for its discounts, as was the case with J.C. Penney, it can be very, very painful to separate The Brand from The Deal.

At OMMA’s one-day summit for mobile marketing, Sarah Liang Kress, director of interactive marketing for L’Oreal USA, had the chutzpah to tell the crowd: Technology, for us, comes very much last. It’s not about the shiny object. We look at the audience, and we look at our objectives and then come up with the right solution and the right execution. She said this as a keynote speaker for the event, which took place on Monday as part of Internet Week NY, and anyone doubting Kress’s claim had only to follow the tidy case study she presented to know she meant business.   So, if L’Oreal is downplaying technology, what’s fueling the global company’s mobile marketing?The purchaser reigns supreme For Redken, a hair-care brand and L’Oreal subsidiary, the purchaser rules the day. The company demonstrated its commitment by funneling funds toward a third-party research effort last May before it embarked on a large mobile initiative. It was a key decision that helped the company better understand its industry; for instance, Redken learned that 16% of the hair-care sector uses iPads and tablets, with the former predominating. Of that percentage, 44% skewed towards a younger age bracket.  The company also learned that 63% of hair-care professionals owned smartphones, a finding that had Kress skeptical. Hairstylists have “always been late adopters,” she said. “They don’t sit at a computer. They’re never online.” Not so the modern stylist. The findings prompted the company to design mobile strategies unique to its three target groups: Cosmetology students, Hairdressers. Consumers. However, this still allowed it to apply an overall strategy to make the most of Redken’s existing network and existing purchaser behaviors. Next the company identified business objectives for each group because, like its mobile strategies, no one objective unified all. Approach to students For its student target group, education was Redken’s goal. The company used its nationwide network of franchise schools, and because it had learned that iPads predominated among that group, created an educational site designed especially for that device. Emphasizing responsive design in its approach and understanding that visual learners compose its audience, Redken produced 100+ videos for the site and partnered with YouTube to stream the videos in a cost-effective manner.  The results? The company has saved on textbooks it formerly published for its schools. Redken has also saved on time and labor because it finds it easier to update the site than to revise textbooks. Plus, applications to its schools are up, and the company can now capture student data in a way not available to it in the past. Approach to stylists Although stylists are now online more often, they’re still on their feet during most of the workday. That understanding pushed Redken to focus their attention on apps informed by stylists’ habits and what actually takes place in a salon. Following the customer journey, for example, a stylist’s client would first decide on a color shade. Hair swatches are typically used during this step, but Redken created an app that displays different hair colors: Most people follow routine and gravitate toward the same 10-15 shades, but Redken wanted to expand that selection to include its underperforming products so it began integrating those products into the formulas for the dyes that stylists would have to mix. Finally, its app incorporated a look-book feature that allows stylists to capture cuts and dyes they’ve done in the past to not only show off their work, but also to give clients options. Throughout the mobile push, the company was focused on frequency or how many times their app was used, not how many times it was downloaded. “We didn’t want to just have a download party,” said Kress.   The results? Redken saw a 13% increase in the usage of its underperforming products, as well as an 18% jump in the sales of new products. (The app gave the company another forum in which it could showcase new products, Kress said.) It also saved costs because the company no longer had to print books that featured its hair-color formulas. Approach to consumers Here Kress was adamant about Redken’s attitude toward the wide swath of consumers it targets (women age 18 and older): “We are not ecommerce,” she said. “We believe in the hair stylist and the hair professional, so it’s really about driving consumers to the salons and services to buy our product”. To that end, the company had to make a choice: Did it want to focus its attention on a mobile website or an app to get consumers to salons? Redken chose the former, with Kress supporting Redken’s decision by leaning heavily on the recent finding that more Facebook traffic arrives via the mobile site than through the company’s app. She explained how Redken partnered with Google for paid search and SEO, which yielded the perhaps unsurprising finding that Saturday is the most popular day for mobile traffic seeking salons. Other results? The company learned that 18% of traffic to Redken.com is via a mobile device. There’s also been a 22% rise in visitors using the company’s salon-locator feature. Conclusion 1. Know your audience. Conduct thorough research, said Kress. While ComScore data is valuable, you shouldn’t rely on it alone. 2. Understand the technology but don’t get caught up in it. The hype around Pinterest is exciting and important to follow, she said, but marketers should be more cautious in their approaches. 3. Evolve. Of all the platforms, Kress believes mobile changes the fastest, and marketers should be flexible about their strategies and workflow.

The resignation/termination of now-formerly new Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson amid a resume scandal was an embarrassing moment for the once-great internet giant. For most companies, such a collosal blunder would represent a faux pas of the highest order, but that's not the case for Yahoo, it's just one more in a long line of mistakes.  Here are the ten biggest mistakes the company has made...Not buying or licensing Google's technology in 1998 In 1998, Google's two young co-founders approached Yahoo when they were making the rounds for backing in Silicon Valley. According to a book written by John Battelle, that opened the door to an investment, licensing deal or an outright acquisition of the duo's technology. But Yahoo (and other major players) weren't interested. Turning to Google for search results in 2000 Two years later, at the height of the first .com boom, Yahoo saw that search was becoming far more important than it had anticipated and it looked to third parties for search technology while it worked on its own. One of those third parties was upstart Google, which it struck a deal with to power search on yahoo.com. That deal, of course, was far more favorable to Google than any deal would have been in 1998. Paying billions for Broadcast.com in 1999 While Yahoo's 1999 acquisition of Broadcast.com for $5.7bn didn't kill Yahoo, it is arguably one of the worst-timed acquisitions in tech M&A history, and one has to wonder how the ill-fated acquisition impacted Yahoo in subsequent years. Not buying Google in 2002. According to reports, Yahoo had the opportunity to purchase Google for $5bn in 2002. Although that price was high for Yahoo in relation to its own value at the time, it would prove to be the last chance Yahoo would have to acquire Google. It didn't, and the rest is history. Failing to take full advantage of its Overture acquisition Google AdWords may be the king of pay-per-click advertising, but the model was pioneered by Overture, a company Yahoo acquired in 2003 for $1.4bn. As part of a patent lawsuit settlement, Google obtained a perpetual license to a key Overture patent that would spell trouble for AdWords. The price: 2.2m shares of Google stock. While there were questions about the legitimacy of Overture's patent, and some suggested it would be found to be invalid, in retrospect, Google got a bargain of a settlement. Hiring Terry Semel as CEO Some consider Yahoo's second CEO, Terry Semel, the worst tech CEO in history. While that may not be entirely fair, one thing is hard to dispute about Semel's reign at Yahoo: with his total compensation pegged at some $500m or more over his tenure, he has done far better than the company he ran. Botching the Flickr and Delicious acquisitions While there's no denying that Web 2.0 upstarts Flickr and Delicious wouldn't have saved Yahoo, the company's failure to manage the assets it purchased, particularly given its built-in audience, represented another huge missed opportunity that could have helped Yahoo find its way on the modern internet. This excellent article from gizmodo looks more deeply into this. The restrictions on Flickr's mobile development is a particular missed opportunity, opening the door for the likes of Instagram.  Not buying Facebook If watching as its Flickr and del.icio.us acquisitions stagnated or went south wasn't bad enough, Yahoo's failed attempt at acquiring the social networking behemoth adds insult to injury.   As the story goes, Yahoo was nearly able to acquire the popular social network in 2006 for $1bn but due to a faltering stock price, Yahoo lowered its offer to $850m, allowing Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to walk away from the deal. This Friday, Zuckerberg and company will take 900m-plus user strong Facebook public at a valuation exceeding $100bn. Rejecting Microsoft's buyout offer Yahoo has made plenty of bad moves in acquiring (or not acquiring) other companies, but its crowning failure was its handling of its own potential sale. In 2008, the Redmond software giant, eager to compete with Google, was willing to pay $44bn for Yahoo, but thanks to what many considered gross incompetence, Yahoo's board rejected the offer. Today, Yahoo's market cap sits at just below $19bn. Partnering with Microsoft Months after having failed to make it to the altar with Microsoft, the worst financial crisis in decades hit. Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's CEO, must have breathed a sigh of relief and he capitalized on his luck by inking a partnership that gave him most of what he wanted without having to buy Yahoo.   While this deal may have been a convenient way to turn back the hands of time for Yahoo, at least partially, it was a far better deal for Microsoft, and didn't help Yahoo answer any of the fundamental questions crucial to its future.

Mobile services need to get better at “filling the gaps” in our daily lives, Twitter’s Bruce Daisley said at an IAB conference today. In a talk about “Mobile and Social”, Daisley said that in order to succeed businesses need to follow three rules.They must be: Authentically mobile. Simple to understand. Easy to action. By adhering to these rules, services cater to the consumer need for mobile activities that fill the “interstices” in our days. Some of the businesses doing best in mobile are those that started off filling the gaps – YouTube, Facebook, Path and also Twitter. Daisley said businesses need to seize the opportunity in the interstices and “think about how you can harness the gap”. He highlighted Angry Birds - which recently achieved 1bn downloads - as a service that succeeded by being inherently mobile. Twitter also published impressive mobile stats this week – 80% of its 10m active UK users access their account through mobile. The focus on 140 characters also fits the second rule of being simple to understand. Daisley said the average email takes two days to be opened, whereas SMS messages are opened in four minutes. While email used to be much quicker than old ‘snail mail’, you’re now better off posting a letter than sending someone an email. Marketers need to take this into account with mobile marketing, as short interactions are more effective. People look at their phones 150 times a day - once every 6.5 minutes. It’s about fast, easy interactions. Daisley said this focus on short engagement had inspired Twitter’s ad strategy. Promoted Tweets achieve engagement levels of 1%-3%, compared to an industry average 0.05% CTR for display ads. He highlighted a Promoted Tweet campaign run by Lynx, which achieved engagement levels of 6%. However it should be noted that an engagement on Twitter refers to when someone “retweets, replies to, clicks or favourites your Promoted Tweet.” Therefore, there are more opportunities for engagement than on a simple CTR measurement.

Returns are an issue for every retailer, and some sectors more than others. They could be viewed as bothersome, but the returns process does offer an opportunity to showcase your excellent customer service and can have a positive impact of future retention rates, if done well.  There is much you can do to reduce returns rates, providing better imagery and information on product pages, but even the best site will experience returns.  So then it comes down to how you handle the returns process, and the better you handle this, the better your retention rates.  Here are 14 tips to help you to avoid annoying your customers...Make your returns policy easy to understand Whether they are checking before purchase, or finding out how to return an item they've just received, the policy should be clear and easy to understand.  Compare and contrast these two returns pages. The first, from Sports Direct, seems designed to deter returns and contains lots of scary language about legal obligations: Lovehoney, on the other hand, explains its policy clearly: Make your returns policy easy to see The returns policy is often a link in the footer, which is fine to a certain extent as people will expect to see it there.  However, the returns policy can influence a purchase decision, particularly in cases where customers aren't 100% certain about a product.  Therefore, a prominent link to the returns policy on product pages can offer customers reassurance that they can return an item easily if they find it's not right for them, and push them towards the purchase.    Don't charge for returns Of course, there are costs involved if you allow free returns, but these costs need to be weighed against the extra conversions it brings, and the potential boost to retention rates.  I bought a £40 lampshade from one retailer a year ago, and had to pay a hefty £10 return fee when I found it didn't fit. I appreciate the retailer has costs to cover, but this charge put me off looking for another on that site, and would make me think twice about ordering from them again.  Also, as Zappos has found, people who regularly return items can be some of your best customers. It says that clients buying its most expensive shoes have a 50% return rate.  According to Craig Adkins of Zappos: Our best customers have the highest returns rates,but they are also the ones that spend the most money with us and are our most profitable customers. Zappos' modus operandi is not to give its purchasers the cheapest footwear on the block, but to give them the best service: hence, a 365-day returns policy, and free two-way shipping. Include clear returns instructions in packaging This is about not annoying customers too much. I get the sense with some retailers that they think making returns harder will reduce overall rates, and help increase profits.  If this is the case, it's short-sighted thinking. It simply means that customers will get so annoyed that they are unlikely to shop with you again. Even worse, they may tell their friends about it, online and offline.  Make it easy for customers. Provide clear instructions and even include a returns envelope to make sure no mistakes are made with the address.  If you offer free returns, shout about it Offering free returns is great, but you should, as with free delivery, shout about it so that customers know about this when they buy: Help shoppers with great product images and video One reason for returned goods is that customers haven't been able to get a decent idea of the product before they place the order. Thus, when it arrives, and isn't as expected, it has to go back.  Retailers can address this issue on product pages, by ensuring that customers get as much visual information as possible.  Simply Group found that using 360 views and instructional videos of its ski products not only increased conversions, but also reduced returns rates, as customers were able to see exactly how each product worked.  Provide detailed product information As above, if customers are armed with all the information they need, they are less likely to return items. So, for items like computers, sites should be clear about the specs, as well as the accessories and leads which are required.  Combining this detail with excellent imagery and video can reduce the need for returns.  User reviews Of course, user reviews are great for boosting sales, but they can also help to reduce returns rates.  They can allow customers to avoid potential issues with products, or to find the product that is best suited to its intended use.  Kiddicare is a great example of this. It gets plenty of detail from it user reviews, such as pros and cons, the type of person using it, and best uses.  Here, in a search for car seats for babies, customers can use feedback to find the best car seat for newborns, for everyday use, for grandparents, and so on:  Fitting tools and virtual wardrobes  This is something that has been adopted by fashion sites, as they attempt to get around the fact that customers cannot try before they buy.  One such example, the Shoefitr app, helped an online footwear retailer to reduce fit-related returns by 23%. Others are variable in quality, but anything which can help customers to find the right fit, or to find outfits that match has the potential to reduce returns.  It's not just fashion either, MyDeco's 3D room planner tool helps shoppers to try out room looks before buying furniture:  Offer free home trials Glasses Direct offers shoppers the option of a free home trial. Customers can select up to four pairs of glasses and try them on at home before making a selection.  This neatly gets around one of the major problems of buying glasses online, and the fact that Glasses Direct trusts the customer enough to send frames out creates a great first impression.  Don't quibble over returns Customers will return items for spurious reasons, or will call something a fault when in fact they have broken it.  If a particular customer does this again and again, this can be dealt with on an individual basis, but it's best not to be too strict when customers are returning items.  If retailers do drag their heels on returns, it can be infuriating. I once returned a stairgate which didn't fit to Toys R Us. The member of staff initially refused to accept the return since the box had been opened, and then begrudgingly offered a refund of one third of its value.  As a result, none of my kids' Christmas and birthday presents are bought in that store, and the company has lost sales far greater than the value of that item.  Again, Lovehoney is a great example of this. All manner of returned items, which may or may not have been used, are refunded without question. Many have to be thrown away, for obvious reasons.  It takes the view, that for long term customer retention, it's better not to argue with customers over this.  Ask for feedback when customers return products This is simple, but makes sense. A quick question or two on the return slip can help retailers to uncover problems or trends in returns and enable them to address these issues.   Provide multichannel returns If you're a multichannel retailer, allowing people to return items bought online to local stores is a must.  This is often due to the separation of web and offline channels, and there are organisational issues which many brands are now dealing with.  I've had this experience in the past with Orange, as my father was unable to return a faulty phone ordered online to his local store.  It seems that, while competitors like O2 allow multichannel returns, Orange has yet to change this policy, instead insisting that returns requests are routed through its telesales team. This is a mistake in my book.  For the brand refusing the return, it's a missed opportunity to educate customers about a complex product, or to upsell or cross-sell while the customer is in the store.  Snow Valley's 2011 Online Returns Report found that just half of the mulitchannel retailers it studied allowed in store returns for online purchases.  Customers appreciate the flexibility and convenience of multichannel returns, and will be far more likely to shop with such a retailer in future.  Keep customers informed Let them know when you've received the returned item, and when the refund is being processed.  This will save customers from chasing this information through your customer services team, and they will appreciate the effort. 

Almost two-thirds of UK smartphone owners (59%) access the mobile internet everyday, according to stats published on Google’s 'Our Mobile Planet' site. With smartphone penetration now at 51%, this equates to more than a third of the total UK population using the mobile web on a daily basis. Google’s industry leader for technology and hardware Simon Morgan used a speech at IAB Mobile Engage to highlight statistics that show the growing importance of mobile for marketing.He said that: Mobile search has grown 500% in the past two years. 28% of smartphone owners check their phone before they get out of bed. YouTube mobile traffic tripled in 2011 and it now gets 600m views on mobile a day – equating to 10% of overall traffic. 75% of these users say that mobile is their principle way of accessing YouTube, and three hours of video is uploaded to the site using mobile every minute. 85% of UK mobile users seek local information on their smartphone, and 81% take action using the local content. Morgan said that the rise of mobile was inevitably having an effect on retailers, with 17% of UK shoppers changing a purchase decision in-store after using a mobile. He highlighted Oasis and Debenhams as two retailers who had embraced mobile to improve the customer experience. Realising that people hate queuing, Oasis installed iPads in their stores to allow customers to order products without waiting in line for the checkout. As a result they now see 20% of orders coming through the devices. Similarly, Debenhams used an AR mobile app to allow customers to try on clothes virtually before they buy. Morgan said that Google was trying to become a “mobile first” company and said that marketers needed to adopt different marketing stategies for desktop and mobile. He also urged the audience to consider how their organisations can adapt to mobile: Find someone in your organisation to pull together a cross-functional team that can work together to produce a mobile strategy. You can find more fact and figures about mobile commerce in Econsultancy’s UK Mobile Statistics report.

The new e-Privacy Directive which came into force last May has spurred some exciting dialogue in the online marketing world. The Directive has been called many things (some not so polite) but one of the few certainties about it, is its confusing and unclear language.  The ICO, in an attempt to turn it into something people can work with, has produced a number of guidance documents to help online marketers. This has mostly (and unsurprisingly) been written with websites in mind, although it has become clear that the Directive could affect other types of online activity as well. Email marketing is one of those “other types” and plays a key part in the marketing efforts of most online marketers and e-commerce businesses. The questions most online marketers are now asking; how will email be affected and how can we work towards complying with the regulations?  The e-Privacy Directive Before I go any further, I must point out that the Directive covers more tracking than just cookies. In fact, it includes most types of tracking that track the individual at a personal level. The regulations (and the need for them) show marketers that there is a perceived lack of transparency and trust surrounding tracking used on the internet and what data is used for. It is this lack of transparency that needs to be addressed, regardless of the technology used to track the individual.  Modern internet marketing can be a sophisticated beast, focused on delivering the most relevant content and best experience for the user. The problem is, the majority of the general public may not realise this, in fact some might view marketing tracking as some sort of dangerous spy software, poised to sell you something, when you are least expecting it. And even if they don’t see the way they are tracked as particularly intrusive, do they understand how tracking is benefiting them and helping to improve their experience on the web? Information is the key. The clearer you are about how you plan to use data and the more accessible you make this information; the easier it will be to educate the internet user, and the more “informed consent” could be implied. What about email? For almost as long as email marketing has been around, marketers have been tracking the opens and clicks of the campaign recipients. They have also more recently been using post click tracking to inform the success of the campaign, either using third party solutions such as Google Analytics or solutions served directly from the website domain. Because of this, some of the tracking used in email marketing may be affected by the directive.     That said, email is different from web visits, as the recipient has requested the email communication from the marketer. However, this “difference” does not exclude email tracking from the regulations, and give the marketer “carte blanche” to use the data for all forms of use. It’s fairly safe to say that most people, who sign up for marketing emails, will have some expectation that what they open or click will be tracked by the organisation sending them. It would also be safe to say that they would expect you to be doing this to track campaign performance, as well as to ensure the campaign delivery.  This can all be taken as a given, as long as the information required by the recipient, is readily accessible from the data collection point, and written in a clear manner. It also follows that if the use to which the tracking and data is being put goes beyond that which the recipient is likely to expect or understand, a higher level of information and consent would be required. This is not quite as onerous as it sounds. As email marketers we always obtain consent before we send marketing emails anyway. The initial sign up process is an ideal place to engage with the potential recipient and offer information on data use and tracking. The DMA, in conjunction with the IAB, have recently issued guidance that sets out a number of opportunities to comply with the regulations. Various studies recently indicated a clear link to the privacy policy and transparent disclosure actually makes people feel better about signing up for marketing emails. So, for the email marketer, the new regulations should be seen as another opportunity to build trust with customers, not a barrier to business. For consumers there has always been a love/hate relationship with direct marketing. When we get it right, and deliver relevant and timely material, they love us; when we spam, they don’t. It’s up to the marketers now to inform their customers about the efforts they go to deliver more of what the customer wants, and less of what they don’t.

A million dollars isn't cool. You know what's cool? A billion dollars. The words made famous by the movie that dramatized Facebook's beginnings may soon be passé in Silicon Valley, as investors clamouring to get in on funding rounds for the hottest tech startups seem increasingly willing to put their cash in at billion-dollar valuations. Crazy? Perhaps, but Facebook's $1bn Instagram acquisition shows that big valuations don't exclude companies from the startup lottery, at least for the time being. The latest entrant to the billion dollar club will be Pinterest, thanks to a $100m funding round led by Rakuten. The funding round puts a $1.5bn valuation on Pinterest. Rakuten Ichiba is the largest e-commerce site in Japan and among the world's largest by sales. The compaby has recently acquired Buy.com in the US, Priceminister in France, as well as Play.com. According to Raukten CEO, Hiroshi Mikitani: While some may see e-commerce as a straightforward vending machine-like experience, we believe it is a living process where both retailers and consumers can communicate, discover, and curate to make the experience more entertaining. We see tremendous synergies between Pinterest’s vision and Rakuten’s model for e-commerce. Rakuten looks forward to introducing Pinterest to the Japanese market as well as other markets around the world. Although Pinterest is one of the hottest new social media players to emerge in recent years, and is, according to Experian, the third largest social network in the United States, some will naturally point to a $1bn valuation for Pinterest as further evidence that we're in the midst of a huge bubble. Yes, such a valuation would appear to be frothy, but if there's one hot startup that everyone agrees has the potential to develop a solid revenue model, it just might be Pinterest. Many of the images that Pinterest's users are pinterested in are products, and the company has built an audience with a very appealing demographic. For online retailers, that's apparently translating into more than just potential. According to a recent report, Pinterest revenue per first click beats Facebook and Twitter by 27% and 400%, respectively, making Pinterest a potential game-changer for social commerce. The big question for Pinterest is how well it can execute a monetization strategy. The company must take care in adding commercial aspects to the service, lest it upset users. And the social media darling will want to ensure that the backing doesn't limit its potential to work directly with all retailers. If it can do all this, the future would appear to be bright for Pinterest. Whether the company's possible trajectory justifies a $1bn-plus valuation is another matter altogether but for the Pinterest team, taking advantage of the current market conditions to obtain such a valuation is probably pretty cool.

On Tuesday night, the sixth annual Performance Marketing Awards was held in London, attended by more than 800 people and judged by Econsultancy Research Director Linus Gregoriadis, among others.  The event was previously known as the a4u Awards, but the name was changed to broaden the remit of the awards, allowing entrants from the various sub-channels of performance marketing, including social, mobile, email, search and display, not just just the affiliate sector.One of the new categories was Best Consumer Targeting, which was won by Criteo for the way it advertised relevant vacancies for jobseekers once they’d left Totaljobs. Surprise of the night went to TradeDoubler, which forced Affiliate Window to relinquish its grip on the Publishers' Choice of Network award. Until this year's awards, Affiliate Window had won in this category for five years in a row.  According to the awards' founder Matthew Wood:  Stepping up from last year, the winners demonstrated a significant focus on greater collaboration, multi-channel exposure and data utilisation. Enabling all parties to contribute towards effective and smart consumer influence and loyalty. You can view the full list of winners and commended entries here. 

Every so often a simple Google search reveals a hint at a new Google initiative. In recent months we've seen various different types of ad extension formats and it seems that selling leads rather than clicks could be the next big push in Google's continuing search for revenue streams away from the simple click. Peter Bell from Fuse Lead Marketing (@fuselead) recently alerted me to an interesting discovery which seems to have appeared over the last few weeks in the UK. If you are signed into one of Google’s services (LeadPoint uses Google for email) you might stumble across a new type of ad extension in the top ranked ads – namely a way for the advertiser to capture your contact information and permission to contact you without clicking through. A search for “voucher codes” presents a paid ad for a well known UK voucher code company and below the ad the consumer is presented with a pre-filled email data capture field with an accompanying “Get Offers” button. Yes, that’s right the email field is pre-filled so no extra heavy lifting for the casual browser that can’t quite manage to find the energy to click through onto the site to look for any specific offers! Once you hit the “Get offers” button you then see a simple confirmation appear in the same place on the ad.   For anybody that might be concerned about privacy and how your data might be used by an advertiser or Google themselves then don’t worry because Google of course has this covered off with a handy “privacy link” in the ad. When clicked a pop up box appears helpfully informing the cautious form filler that “When you submit this form, your email address will be sent to the advertiser”. Phew, thanks Google! If this is something that is going to be rolled out across the UK it raises some very interesting questions. Is Google really planning to charge per lead for these enquiries? If so, is it really sacrificing clicks for leads? How much are leads likely to cost? Will more data fields be captured in the future? How do these site extensions affect click through rates? Is the consumer contact opt-in for the advertiser only or for Google as well? There are also more prosaic lead gen specific questions such as is there any validation on the leads? Do lead buyers pay for all leads or just valid ones? Are the leads time-stamped and sent to the advertiser in real-time (as recommended by IAB best practice) or are they batched up and sent sporadically? Whatever the answers to these questions, it seems like yet more evidence that Google are getting very serious about online lead generation. As they increasingly go head-to-head with Facebook for precious advertising dollars, moving down the funnel from clicks to leads might help to consolidate their place as the real online advertising super power.

In the early days of e-commerce people assumed that consumers wouldn't want to buy clothes online. Along with big ticket items like beds and furniture it was thought that customers wanted to be able to go into a store and see the products first hand. That assumption, while understandable, has proven to be totally incorrect and online fashion retailers are flourishing - but it is still a difficult business model to get right. Boohoo.com has achieved success by selling affordable women's fashion while also providing customers with style and fashion content. I sat down with COO Chris Bale at the E-commerce Futures Conference to find out what digital marketing tactics Boohoo uses to promote the brand and set itself apart from the competition...What is different about your business model that has allowed you to succeed where others have failed? It’s a combination of three things really. Boohoo.com was established on an existing wholesale business, so we had a solid supply chain in place.  Part of the success has been down to the fact that we are still able to buy in relatively low volumes with very short lead times of about four to six weeks from source to live on the site. The second factor has been the way in which we bought media to promote the brand. We were founded when traditional above the line media was struggling to get billboards filled, so we were able to grab some good opportunities to buy ad space above the line. And I think the third aspect is a focus on styling and trend information. Because we sell our own brand, we can’t use the collateral of a better-known brand to do some of that work for us so we’ve had to design the product in and around trends. We spend a huge amount of time creating editorial and engaging pieces on the site to get that across. Which digital marketing channels do you see as being most important for your particular industry? For us, I think PPC still plays an important part and affiliates is still a huge part of the business, but the nature of the relationship with affiliates has changed. When you want to establish yourself within a market, the types of affiliates who are very fashionable within a market are hugely important. However, your dependence on them wains over time as your own brand gains recognition. Do you run blogger outreach or community management programmes? We probably hold three or four blogging events each year. We bring them in and give sneak peaks and previews of where we’re going with the ranges. So, where we might be doing a complete change for our seasonal collections we’ll always engage with the blogging community. The original content you have on your site must be good for search rankings. How much is the content about improving the brand versus the SEO benefits? To be honest, we concentrate on the content being right first and then we build the SEO strategy around it. There are obviously other parts to the SEO strategy, such as link building, etc. It’s more about being customer-centric, and we would never sacrifice customer experience to improve rankings. In terms of customer experience, what tactics do you use to engage shoppers on the landing page and make sure they don’t bounce off? Perhaps unlike our competitors, we do spend an awful lot of time and space on splash images. Because again, I think when you’re not a clothing brand with instant recognition, like a Levis for example, we rely very heavily on selling desire, and we do that by using emotive splash images. So, rather than being seduced by including hero products or offers that naturally create journeys through the site, we prefer to have a really strong image, but also we make it easy for people to locate and browse the editorial content. Shopping online these days is as much about entertainment as it is something that’s practical and required. It’s something that people do in their downtime. We’re not worried about the site being almost magazine-like in its structure. If people do bounce off the site, how much re-targeting do you do to encourage people to come back and complete the purchase? We do it, but it’s not our favourite form of marketing. Display re-targeting has a place, because there’s so many websites you can go to today that you can easily lose track of which ones you have seen, so a gentle reminder is ok.  I think when it starts to chase you round the internet and gets a little bit spooky, that’s where we draw the line. I would say we use it sparingly, and we’re always careful that we don’t re-target ads for a product that has then gone out of stock in the customer’s size. We spend a great deal of time making sure that doesn’t happen as it just creates disappointment. Abandoned basket re-targeting is another area we are sceptical about, such as begging the question: “Are you sure?”, because I’m pretty sure that there is always a valid reason for abandoning the basket in the first place. Do you require customers to register or create an account before they can checkout? Up until last week we didn’t, we allowed guest registration instead, but the problem with guest registration is that you don’t have an identity if you decide to return a product. That means you can’t do an online return, and the great thing about online returns is that it expedites the whole process. So, when it arrives back in the warehouse we already know there’s an inbound product and can speed the whole thing through and turn the refund around quicker. Guest registration means there’s a lot more investigation to do to process a refund so when we looked at it, we had to decide what we were gaining by giving our customers anonymity and allowing them to shop without feeling we were tracking them. When you look at it, most of our competitors don’t offer guest registration and the whole returns process was upsetting customers so it was something we had to address. So we decided to make everyone register. How important are customer reviews and do you have any ways of encouraging them on your site? Absolutely. We have probably spent about 18 months building up a good customer review database. Now we want to take it a few steps further, as we like our customers to tell their friends about us because the most influential people are your peers. Every email we send out requesting a customer review offers a discount if they complete the feedback form, and every so often we select one review and offer that customer a credit to go shopping on the site. We also want to move towards video reviews, which we’ll place halfway between the haulers you see on YouTube and a simple straightforward textual review. So it improves engagement as people get to appear on the site, but it also validates the whole process as you can see the customer endorsing the product. At the moment you don’t have a mobile site. Is that something you’re looking to address? We’ve actually decided to split our mobile strategy into three pieces, but we’ve been holding back to make sure we get it right and at the moment our mobile site is the main priority. We didn’t want to go down the scraper site, which is the nice easy way to get your site converted, but it causes issues with the product catalogue and merchandising, which is hugely important to us. The second part of our strategy will be our app. It won’t be about buying products, it is a magazine app that offers style and fashion information. We don’t see any value in simply creating a shopping app when you can cater to that need with your mobile site. And the third solution will be to put a new app out there every few months that is just for fun. So it could be that you go to a festival and download a boohoo app that allows you to win a pair of wellies at the event. It’s a bit of fun for a few weeks, but it’s also a simple marketing device that keeps the brand alive and hopefully should drive traffic to the magazine app and the mobile site.

The digital world is complicated and website tags sit at the heart of online businesses and marketing. In fact, effectively managing website tags, or tracking pixels, is fundamental to digital marketing.  In the ROI of Tag Management, a new report released today in partnership with Tealium, we explore the role, challenges and opportunities for technology in handling vendor website tags.The tracking pixel enables communication between vendors and websites and is key to most digital marketing technologies. Site analytics, optimization and personalization all depend on them, and while these technologies provide valuable data and capabilities, they also create complexity and work for the marketing department. The ROI of Tag Management Report looks at one of the rare opportunities to increase ROI and simultaneously simplify life for the marketer, while giving them greater control over digital assets. Tag management systems (TMS) were developed to counter a number of challenges, especially those brought about by the reliance on technology department resources. Survey respondents cited the top issues with manual tagging, including: Delays in implementation as the tech department is overworked Product and site development is slowed Tag implementation is often incomplete Tags slow down the website What are the benefits of managed tag implementation? The complexity of the digital world is increasing as data-driven tools infiltrate most levels of digital marketing. Tag management gives marketers greater control over the chaos. The respondents to the Tag Management ROI Survey highlighted the benefits of moving from manual to managed implementation: Tag management saves money as marketers can swiftly make changes to vital assets without enlisting the help of the IT department. Less people and less time means less cost.  Time to market is dramatically reduced. 70% of tag management system (TMS) users create and modify tags in less than a work day with almost half of them reporting it takes them less than an hour. Compare that to the industry standard of over a week for manual implementation, and you can see how significant a managed system can be.  The marketing department can be more agile which releases the IT/ Tech department for higher level tasks.  Website speed is increased as multiple tags are replaced with the single universal tag of the tag management system.  Privacy tool are easily enabled site-wide which will be key as privacy concerns begin to force marketing technologies to offer "do-not-track" options. To find out how tag management can benefit the work that you do, download our ROI of Tag Management report, created in association with Tealium. This comprehensive survey will help you better gauge the industry's attitudes around perceived value, critical challenges, important vendor considerations and more.   Some of the top findings from the report have been captured in this infographic:      

More than a third of Homebase customers research online before going to a bricks-and-mortar store, according to the retailer’s head of multichannel. During a speech at the E-Commerce Futures Conference this morning, Andy McWilliams said it highlights the need for a joined up approach in-store and online. Even if you think you’re a multichannel retailer, online and offline often act almost independently. You get different offers online vs. offline. They have to be the same, and communication has to be the same. One of Homebase’s key multichannel tools is reserve and collect, which allows customers to buy online and pick up in-store. McWilliams said this was essential for destination stores, as consumers expect to know if their chosen product is in stock otherwise they will look for a more convenient place to shop. It also allows multichannel retailers to stay ahead of pure play e-tailers like Amazon. The challenge for Amazon is that they don’t have a store network. People often aren’t at home, so home delivery is ok for small things like books but for bigger purchases I want in-store pick up. McWilliams’ approach to multichannel retailing stems from his experience as a founder of Ocado. When we built Ocado, one of the key ideas was that every touch point counted – so whether that was with the vans or the call centre or online. He said that retailers needed to be aware that the old days of simply “shouting at customers” through TV ads and direct mail are gone. Digital has changed the landscape as consumers are now exposed to marketing messages from a number of different touch points, and they expect a consistent experience.  Supermarkets used to be all about driving customers to the store, then they could ignore us and take our money.We probably still do a bit of shouting at our customers, but we now also have conversations with them using social media.” He said that while social media can be a retailer’s friend, it also leaves brands exposed and can come back to haunt them. Customers can get quite noisy and angry. They know where you are and they can find you, so you have to be ready to engage with them in the right way.

Over the past few years I must have heard the phrase ‘everyone is a publisher nowadays’ a thousand times or more. It’s largely accurate, due to the rise of social media, but I think we are mainly ‘curators’, as opposed to ‘publishers’. Content curation is something that many of us will be familiar with, even if we don’t think of ourselves as curators. We instinctively find and share interesting content with our personal and professional networks. We follow others who share the kind of links that engage and entertain. Yesterday the clearly charming Adam Vincenzini described my Twitter feed as "all killer and no filler". I know perfectly well that a bunch of my tweets can be filed under ‘utter rubbish’, but I must be doing something right. As such here are my 17 tips to help you become even better at content curation, with one eye on Twitter, my platform of choice for sharing. Set up some feeds It is a good idea to automate content discovery by plugging feeds into your dashboard of choice, be it Google Reader or some other tool. All blogs and news sites offer feeds (either full or partial text), but you can be a bit more specific than that as search queries on the likes of Google News and Twitter can also be turned into RSS feeds, for example: ‘content marketing’. Make the most of email alerts If you are a heavy user of email then the likes of Google Alerts should come in very handy. Results can be filtered by type, e.g. ‘news’, ‘blogs’, ‘video’, or ‘everything’. For example, here’s a Google News search for ‘content marketing’. Get to grips with Twitter Search Twitter Search is remarkably useful for unearthing great content (and great content curators, for that matter). I use it every day.  You should also save your regular search queries, using Twitter’s ‘saved searches’ feature.  Use advanced search queries When searching it is a good idea to make the most of Twitter’s advanced operators, which allow you to filter out the rubbish. For example, here’s one of my saved searches for the exact match phrase "love this" and ‘marketing’.  Note that I have included ‘http’ to only return tweets that include links.  I have also used the minus operator twice, ‘-youtube’ and ‘-RT’, to remove any tweets pointing at YouTube, as well as any retweets. See if you can spot which other minus operator we need to add to that query, based on the screenshot below...    Follow the 70/30 rule There is more to life than talking about yourself. Promotion is not curation. For this reason I don't share all new Econsultancy blog posts on Twitter.  Todd Defren says it best: “70% of content [should be] curated, 30% branded. Why? Because the rest-of-the-world is at least 70% more interesting than your brand; and, promoting external content builds social capital, makes grateful fans of influencers.” Smashing Magazine does this brilliantly on Twitter, by pointing to third party content rather than directing all links at its own (excellent) website. Find the right tools for the job One of the best tools I’ve discovered recently is Buffer, which allows you to pre-populate your Twitter feed. You can determine your publishing schedule, and there’s a neat bookmarklet for Chrome. It means that you don’t need to share interesting content the very second you’ve finished reading / consuming it. There’s another fantastic tool out there called ifttt.com, which is well worth checking out if you’re interested in creating a rules-based content curation ‘dashboard’. Here are a bunch of other Twitter tools which many prove useful.  Own a niche Craig Sullivan is a master of this. He shares lots of wonderful posts that will be of interest to e-commerce / user experience professionals. Don’t be afraid of exploring subjects beyond your niche – a little personality can go a long way. Read, read, read! My mantra to all new recruits is that “reading is 20% of the job”. Our own blog and the reports we produce are crammed with the kind of insight and tips that should appeal to anybody interested in digital marketing and e-commerce. There are many thousands of other sources out there too. Expand your mind! I use the Byline app on my iPhone as a mobile RSS reader. Once synced it can be read offline - perfect for the London Underground.  Write, write, write! In school I was absolutely terrible at revision. Teachers would tell me to write things down in order to remember them, sage advice that I totally ignored. However, as somebody who has been a blogger / writer for the past decade, I can confirm that this works! You can really explore a subject by writing about it. You will discover lots of new sources, tips, techniques, insight and tools along the way. As such I recommend writing to everybody interested in content curation.  Timing is crucial This is about the distribution and digestibility of your tweets, and the content you share.  It is really important to understand that what works at 10.30 on Monday might not be appropriate for 4.30pm on Friday. Also, with regards to timing, it is essential that you do not overcrowd yourself. Avoid sharing three tweets in quick succession.  A good curator will leave plenty of space between tweets, and will share the right kind of content at the right times. Aggregate the good stuff  Since you have gone to the trouble of finding all of that hooky content, why not create a special home for it? We’ve talked about the importance of feeds. Consider plugging your own Twitter feed into something like paper.li, or setting up some rules on ifttt.com to populate your very own Tumblr blog.  Tune in to the right people You can do this via the RSS feeds I’ve mentioned above, if these folks are blogging, but I’ve found that many experts don’t have the time to blog. But many do have the time to tweet, and the links they share have definitely helped me to wise up in certain areas. Use your network as a filter. Twitter lists can come in handy for sorting experts by topic or sector. Mix up your tweets Let’s keep in mind that Twitter is inherently personal in nature (or at least it should be). If I think I’m following an automated feed then I’ll slowly start to tune out, or maybe unfollow the ‘person’ in question. One of my best friends, who shall remain nameless, barely uses Twitter other than to push out his own blog posts using Twitterfeed or similar. There’s no real communication or conversation beyond that. I frequently tell him to mix things up with his own brand of observational comedy, and to chip in to discussions. Otherwise he risks losing followers.  Don't be afraid of the detail We’ve written about button optimisation on this blog before, but we haven’t written about the psychology of rounded corners vs right angles! I researched this topic and there are a surprising number of in-depth blog posts out there. I’ll be sharing them in a forthcoming blog post (which is another way of curating content). Dig into the detail. Consider repeating yourself  I used to think that posting the same tweet twice was akin to spamming your network, but my views have changed. I think it is acceptable to share content at different times of the day to appeal to people in different territories.  Try to avoid the obvious I don’t tend to share Mashable links because so many other people do. There’s not much point in sounding like a broken record. Instead, I try to find eye-opening posts on niche blogs. Mine the gold. Also, beware dragons. I don’t care how good that Mail Online article is, I’m not sharing it. Ditto Fox and Business Insider. I think ever so slightly less of people who point me at these sources. Use a notebook I thought up this blog post last night at about 2am (that’s the kind of saddo I am). On the train into the office this morning I spent a good five minutes trying to remember what it was. Word to the wise: it is important to take notes.  Invest in a Moleskine and keep it close at all times. Mine is full of notes from events, headline ideas, wireframes for the 50 web apps I want to build, URLs to check out and topics to explore. So there you have it, 17 tips that I hope you find helpful. What else have I missed? What's working for you?

An app which allows customers to find more accurate information about the shoe size they need to order has managed to reduce fit-related returns rates by 23% US retailer Running Warehouse has been using the Shoefitr app on its product pages since 2010, and the tool has been very popular with consumers.  By reducing fit-related returns, the app has enabled Running Warehouse to increase its profit margins by 2.5%. Previously, around 65% of the retailer returns were due to size related issues, but now 20% of orders come in from customers that have used the app.  According to Running Warehouse CEO Joe Rubio:  Anything that improves the shopping experience for the customer is a huge bonus. Shoefitr increases the confidence customers have in ordering a product correctly, thus making the buying decision easier. It also has helped decrease our return rate which positively affects our bottom line. The Shoefitr app uses a database of internal shoe measurements, acquired using 3D imaging technology, which allow it to compare the size and shape of a shoe a shopper is currently wearing, to one she wants to buy. The app is embedded into Running Warehouse's product pages:  It then asks shoppers to enter details about their current running shoe, so the app can compare the fit: The results the recommend the best size, and the customer can then see more detail about the fit, and compare it with other sizes: Buying shoes and clothes online can never quite match the in-store experience, and one of the main issues with this is that it can be hard to gauge the fit and feel of products.  According to stats, the average returns rate for online fashion retailers ranges from 17% to 25%. For Zappos, with an easy returns policy it's 25%. One of the major factors is sizing.  There is plenty retailers can do to minimise the problem, such as offering detailed images, videos and information which allow shoppers to form a better picture of the fit.  Online 'fitting room' tools are one way to do this, such as the one used by sojeans, though they aren't always successful. 

More than a third of UK consumers (36%) have engaged with brands through social media, according to a survey from Fishburn Hedges. This has doubled from 19% since August 2011 and equates to around 18m people. The increased interaction appears to be driven by the widespread belief among respondents (40%) that social media improves customer service, compared to only 7% who feared it would harm service. In fact 68% of those who have engaged with brands through social media believe that it “allowed them to find their voice.”More than two-thirds (65%) also believe that it is a better way to communicate with companies than call centres. And it isn’t a trend that is limited to younger generations. More than a quarter of the 55+ age group had dealt with a brand on social media, rising to 49% of 18-24 year olds. But while consumers may increasingly expect customer service through social media channels, it is difficult for brands to respond in the correct way. For example, should brands respond to all tweets and Facebook posts, and how much resource should be committed to it? In March we put together a social customer service best practice checklist, and blogged eight things to consider before you start. Fishburn Hedges’ report also includes six basic guidelines for social media customer service: Don’t be paralysed by uncertainty: where call centres arguably erect barriers between brands and customers, social media can remove them and bring proximity. It shouldn’t be a psychological straitjacket, so dive in – but clearly define your strategy first. Don’t let social media define you: your brand must define it. It must be a continuation of a brand using the appropriate channels and not a knee-jerk reaction to following how others are using it. Make more of the emotional insight you have: customer data offers insight into behaviour, but social media takes that to a different level, enabling brands to tap into emotions. Pick your battles – but enter them fast: speed is critical in the real-time world of social media, but brands should not feel the pressure to answer every query put to them. Address structural barriers in the business, not headcount: there are many ways to resource social, and new hires are not always necessary. Try sharing expertise and removing structural barriers first. Fear not the #fail: No one is perfect and sometimes, just sometimes, it is simply a flash in the pan.

Content marketing requires many things to be successful; luckily a Zoo isn’t one of them. That said, you can definitely learn a thing or two from “We bought a Zoo” author Benjamin Mee. I won’t bore you with all the details of who Benjamin is, but if you’re interested you should visit the Dartmoor Zoological Park website or watch this short video. Benjamin’s book was published in 2008. Since then it has become a film and the Zoo has enjoyed a significant amount of interest from the world’s media. This isn’t a typical content marketing story and it’s true to say Benjamin had a huge advantage having been a professional writer, however you can learn a number of things from his success.Get your content out there It’s all too easy to talk about content, but very few businesses actually get it written and published. If you want content success you need to have a plan and complete it. List what you want to write and when, and then stick to that plan. Even the simplest editorial calendar will help you achieve more. If Benjamin hadn’t finished the book, there wouldn’t have been a movie and his Zoo wouldn’t have had the publicity. Be honest, have you been failing to see your content through to completion? Tell a story with your content A story is often more interesting than a technical piece of writing. Yes, even if you’re in a tech industry. Great content is easy to follow, has a clear start, middle and end and most importantly takes the reader on a journey. The desired destination is a place that’s helpful, inspiring or interesting for the reader. Enjoy what you’re writing You need to have a passion for what you’re writing. There’s no point tasking an agency or a member of staff to write your content if they’re not passionate about it. You can always get your work edited after you’ve written it; I couldn’t survive without our editors. Just focus on sharing your passion and let someone else worry about dotting the i’s and crossing t’s. Make the most of your successes If you’re lucky enough to get a few bites, just like Benjamin Mee did — no pun intended — you’ll need to make the most of them. Sometimes your content can get you PR and you may even set out with that intention. If you get success, make the most of it. Dartmoor Zoo have the book featured on their homepage, they have additional web pages explaining their story, it’s available to purchase in the shop and Benjamin does as many interviews as he can. He was even smart enough to get pictures of movie star Matt Damon wearing a DZP (Dartmoor Zoological Park) t-shirt. Make your content work harder Writing the content is just the start. The key to success is getting it in front of your target audience. Share your content on your website, emails, social media, at events and anything else you can think of. You need to make it work hard. You should also think about how your content helps your SEO. Wherever possible optimise your content even if you’re just adding a few keyword rich links to other pages on your site. When you find something that works don’t be scared to do it again. Everyone loves a sequel right? Following up on interesting content can be very successful. Focus on your business but be creative There’s no point writing content about subjects that are completely unrelated to your business. Benjamin wrote about a Zoo, that makes sense right? However, you should also think about what interests your audience. A great example of this is the Skull Candy App. Skull Candy make headphones, so what kind of content do they have in their app? It’s not about headphones, it’s snow, surf and skate-related content. This is the content that interests their customers and more importantly their potential customers. Your business should provide content that helps your customers and prospects and encourages them to reach out and share it with other like-minded people. That’s successful content.

The deadline for the e-Privacy Directive is fast approaching. While the subject has generated significant attention across Europe, the word 'cookie' continues to dominate the headlines. In fact, the part of the Directive that applies to cookies is written more broadly and requires consent for non-essential tracking, regardless of whether a cookie is involved. In this article, I'll review the facts behind the 'cookie law' and lift the lid on what consent really means for UK businesses.The cookie misnomer Everyone is talking about the run-up to May 26, when the ePrivacy Directive will begin being enforced by the Information Commissioner in the UK. The attention paid has been impressive, and we know that significant companies are taking critical steps behind the scenes. But we need to flag a problem.   Somehow, the term ‘cookie’ has crept into the conversation like an insidious little worm, eating its way into headlines, distracting the market and potentially sending well-intended companies sprinting in the wrong direction during this critical last stretch.  To be clear, we’re talking about compliance with the amended e-Privacy Directive. The portion of the Directive that applies to cookies is in fact written much more broadly and requires consent for non-essential tracking, regardless of whether or not a cookie is involved. Yet we hear the Directive referred to as the ‘Cookie Directive,’ and the ‘Cookie Law.’ Companies have sprung up selling ‘Cookie Solutions,’ and providing ‘Cookie Audits.’ We have fantastic new ‘Cookie Policies’ and detailed breakdowns of the functions of each cookie.   All of this is helpful in as much as it moves the ball incrementally forward. The danger is that our choice of words can end up putting horse blinders on our approach to compliance.  Cookies, tags and trackers As a lens through which to view tracking activity on your own site, a focus on cookies, to the exclusion of other technologies, is both incomplete and exhausting.   Tags are the central tracking element, not cookies. Many companies track the consumer using an alternative technology, like a flash object. In addition, an emerging class of trackers are beginning to use technologies like device fingerprinting.   These companies use tags, but do not leave behind any tracking object on the computer and as a result are typically invisible to web scanning technologies. Because of these gaps, a ‘Cookie Audit’ will frequently miss as much as 40% of tracking activity, a clearly unsustainable result for companies that wish to comply with the law. A complete dump of all cookies set on a site can also quickly become overwhelming. One company can set one cookie or 12, there is no pattern. And a large organisation with a portfolio of domains, or any company with an ad supported site, can easily have 100 or more trackers, each setting one to 12 cookies.   500 or more cookies are not at all uncommon. Further, it is often impossible to distinguish the specific purpose of individual cookies, with their cryptic names and randomised values. We’re talking about a massive undertaking, and for what benefit? You need to understand who is on your site, and what they are doing with data. Not the particular differences between these two cookies (and yes, they are real): a)name: __utmc, value: 46026228 b)name: __utmb, value: 46026228.1.10.1330142291 It can be very helpful to know which cookies are being set, but the cookies should not be the focal point of your analysis, or you will spend hundreds of hours diving down rat holes with questionable returns.   Instead, you need to up level your assessment to the companies that are tracking the user. Each company has distinct attributes relevant to your assessment, including: The categories of information they collect. Their business model. Data retention policy. Whether or not they have a properly functioning opt-out. Whether or not they engage in online behavioural advertising. The types of tracking technologies they are using, including tags, cookies, and flash objects. Whether or not ALL of their tracking activities can be considered ‘strictly necessary’ under the Directive. All of this information should be rolled together into a clear position on whether or not each company requires consent. You can do this yourself, or you can work with a company like Evidon, but whoever you use, be sure you don’t find yourself lost in a maze of cookies.  Tracking activity and the consumer When it comes to the consumer, again, cookies should not be the focus.  It makes no sense to inform them of just the tracking activity that uses cookies.   Disclosures that leap directly into a breakdown of each cookie are replacing a problem created by legal geeks (privacy policies) with a problem created by real geeks (technical explanations of hundreds of cookies).   The inability of most people to comprehend the dense legal language in a privacy policy is one of top reasons we’re in this mess today, but at least privacy policies are written in English. You must engage the consumer in a dialogue about tracking that is happening on your site to comply with the law and that dialogue must be specific, but there is no reason to leap directly to the logical extreme. Again, they need to know who is tracking them on your site and what they are doing with data. Your priority should be experimenting with interfaces that simplify the presentation of this information as much as possible, rather than running a microscope over the particulars of each cookie.   When discussing cookies, be sure to provide context. Include the company behind each cookie, with links to more information about that company’s practices. In the EU, our clients will be deploying consent solutions that make it clear to the consumer that tracking is taking place, using visual tools like the orange bar and Cookie Consent button on the bottom of the page below. Step 1: Consumer visits site and reads about the tracking taking place as well as their options. Step 2: If the consumer clicks on the Cookie Consent button, they will have access to a breakdown of the categories of tracking activity, including Essential, Analytics and Customisation, and Advertising.   They can withdraw consent for the latter two categories of tracking, as they are subject to the Directive, or they can click an arrow to read more about the tracking in each category. Step 3: If they click an arrow, they will see a list of the companies tracking them in each category along with the purpose of their tracking and can withdraw consent from individual companies. When taken together, these tools allow a company to have comfort that they have acquired the implied consent of the consumer. With all of this said, I want to be clear about the importance that cookies play as a part of your compliance game plan for the ePrivacy Directive. But do yourself a favour and strike any reference to the ‘Cookie Law.’  I still haven’t seen a copy of that law.

There’s been much excitement in the world of mobile payments around Square, a credit card reader that allows merchants to take payments using an iPad or iPhone. More than 1m businesses have signed up to use the device in the US, but it still isn't available in the UK. However, as of this morning UK retailers can apply to join the beta phase for iZettle, a mobile card reader backed by Carphone Warehouse founder Charles Dunstone. It already has 50,000 users in the Nordic market since launching in its native Sweden last September, increasing the number of point of sales terminals on the region by 10%.CEO Jacob de Geer said he initially began working on the design in 2010 to help his wife’s business take card payments. The problem with chip and PIN is that you can’t target a large part of the retail industry as the sign up fees are too expensive. Then you also have subscription and transaction fees. Instead iZettle only charges transaction fees: 2.75% for MasterCard and Diner’s Club, or 2.95% for American Express. The company is also talking to Visa about enabling its cards to work with the device. De Geer said there are 20m companies across Europe that only take cash or invoices, accounting for around 20-30% of the economy. In the UK there are 1m point-of-sale machines but more than 10m iPhones. It would therefore appear that there is a gap in the market for a mobile card reader, but that doesn’t mean iZettle’s UK launch is without its challenges. The device uses signature confirmation rather than a PIN, and de Geer says that chip and PIN payments are more ingrained with UK consumers than they are in the rest of Europe. We have to educate consumers so they know it is a safe process. No information is stored on the device, it simply acts as a modem and the payment is processed in the back end. Furthermore, much of the focus in mobile payments has been on NFC, but de Geer says iZettle is a totally different solution.  If you look at the number of NFC cards in the UK there’s still a long way to go until we see a consumer shift towards contactless payments. He said iZettle isn’t designed to change consumer behaviour, but instead enables the 500m Europeans who currently have a bankcard to pay for goods in a different way.  The success enjoyed by Square in the US certainly suggests that iZettle should catch on with consumers in the UK but that also means it probably won’t be long before it faces competition from other mobile card readers. We are the first to launch here, but due to the size of the opportunity we expect there to be other products on the market soon. But that’s not something we are worried about. To participate in iZettle’s beta programme you can download the app from the Apple App Store and request an invitation or sign-up via iZettle’s UK website. It has 3,000 mini chip-card readers to give away.

Facebook apparently hasn't experienced any problems convincing investors to put their money into its IPO, but while the social network focuses its attention on Wall Street, it might do well to pay more attention to a nearby street: Madison Avenue.That's because, according to a Wall Street Journal report, GM, the world's largest car maker, apparently isn't hot on Facebook's paid ads.In fact, it's so unimpressed that the Wall Street Journal's sources say that the once-troubled automaker "plans to stop advertising on Facebook after the company's marketing executives determined their paid ads had little impact on consumers". Ouch.The timing is intriguing, and many believe it isn't coincidental. But the news isn't all bad for the world's largest social network: the Wall Street Journal's sources say that GM will continue to invest in its Facebook Pages, which Facebook doesn't charge for -- yet. at least. That investment, pegged at some $30m, is triple the amount GM is said to have been paying to Facebook directly for advertising ($10m).While GM's move is a blow to Facebook on the eve of its IPO, and it highlights some of the risks Facebook investors will have to grapple with as the company seeks to live up to its exorbitant $100bn-plus valuation, the real lesson here is that companies need to be vigilant about all of their digital spending, particularly as it relates to new channels like social.In an effort to be more innovative and catch new trends early on, Madison Avenue is arguably more willing than ever to try new things and get involved with young services developing new ad models. That's certainly a good thing. But at the same time, there's an argument to be made that exuberance (and perhaps fear) has pushed some marketers to treat what should be experimental campaigns as standard digital media buys.That might work if those campaigns produce an ROI, but as GM apparently discovered, the latest and greatest doesn't always deliver. In the case of Facebook, Forrester analyst Nate Elliott writes, "Companies in industries from consumer electronics to financial services tell us they're no longer sure Facebook is the best place to dedicate their social marketing budget—a shocking fact given the site's dominance among users."In reality, the shocker isn't that advertisers are questioning their Facebook investments despite its dominance, but rather that they haven't questioned some of their social spend sooner. There have been plenty of reasons to be skeptical about the efficacy of many social ad offerings, and the fact that most users are ignoring often well-targeted but still-annoying social ads is not front-page news.While GM will continue to invest in Facebook even though it won't be paying the social network directly, it's likely that brands will eventually start to review their 'free' social media efforts too given that the costs of building, growing and managing Facebook Pages, Twitter accounts, and the like isn't cheap either, as evidenced by the fact that GM spends 8-figures doing just this.So where does this leave Facebook and other social giants as they look to prove their worth as advertising platforms?Obviously, it's easy to accept that the consumer internet's hottest services are too big to ignore, but when the ROI they deliver is too small to move the needle, throwing good money after bad doesn't a great marketing strategy make.

Facebook may be the subject of all of the headlines with its public debut looming this Friday, but another major player in the social networking space is reminding the world that it's still growing too. Twitter, which has built a company that one day might go public too on the back of 140 character messages, has waived its hands in the air by announcing that it has surpassed 140m users worldwide.As reported by The Guardian, 10m of those users are in the UK. That's good enough to make the UK Twitter's fourth largest audience behind the US, Brazil and Japan, and explains why the company has a 30 person strong office in London. Although Twitter's userbase can't compete with Facebook's, the service's impact on society has arguably been nearly as significant, and in some areas, perhaps even more significant. As The Guardian's Charles Arthur notes, "over the past year [Twitter] has been blamed for inciting riots – a charge that was disproved – and of undermining superinjunctions involving, among others, Ryan Giggs and Jeremy Clarkson." And, as Arthur points out, Twitter has become a key platform for prominent figures, celebrities and brands to interact with the public. Like Facebook, Twitter has a front-row seat to the mobile revolution. According to the company, some 80% of British users who used Twitter in the past month did so using a mobile phone. Obviously, Twitter's service, which was inspired in part by SMS, is more easily adapted to a mobile experience than, say, Facebook's, but in terms of monetization, which Twitter has taken slowly, the dramatic rise of mobile usage is clearly going to present challenges for Twitter too. One challenge Twitter is facing that Facebook isn't (yet) is user attrition. The Guardian's Arthur observes that one research firm had pegged the number of Twitter profiles created at around 383m at the beginning of the year, so the 140m figure Twitter is touting hints that the company's service isn't for everybody. Even with all the question marks, Twitter's growth, coupled with its age and the amount of funding it has received, raises the question: will we see a Twitter IPO in the next year or two? If Facebook's IPO is a success and its share price doesn't sink dramatically in its first six months, it wouldn't be all that surprising to see some of Twitter's investors pushing for a TWIT listing.

In what may be the most anticipated IPO ever, Facebook, will go public this Friday. Mark Zuckerberg, the hoodie-wearing 28 year-old CEO of the world's largest social network won't be in New York to ring the NASDAQ opening bell. Instead, he'll be at his company's Menlo Park headquarters ringing it in virtually.When Facebook goes public on Friday, it will be selling 50.6m shares more than it originally planned to, and at $34 to $38 per share, the company's stock will debut in a higher-than-anticipated price range. All told, Facebook could raise nearly $15bn in its offering and hit the much-talked-about $100bn IPO valuation it looked as if it might not achieve. So much for a lack of demand for the company's shares, which will trade under the ticker symbol FB. Facebook's IPO will be the richest ever, and it could even be the most interesting ever. Why? Because for all of the apparent investor demand Facebook and its army of bankers have been able to drum up, there's a general skepticism about the company's future. Take Bloomberg's investor poll last week, which asked more than 1,200 investors, analysts and traders who subscribe to Bloomberg what they thought of Facebook's valuation. 79% of them thought the company would be overvalued at $96bn. Just 7% believed it was valued correctly at that figure, and a paltry 3% suggested it was undervalued. An AP-CNBC poll found similar numbers, with half of respondents, which include Facebook users and investors, saying the company would be overvalued at $100bn. Active investors were even more skeptical, with 62% believing the $100bn figure to represent an excessive valuation. As in the Bloomberg poll, just 3% of those surveyed thought Facebook would be undervalued at $100bn. There may be good reason for this. Over half of the Facebook users in the AP-CNBC poll indicated that they never click on ads or sponsored stories, and another 26% said they "hardly ever" do so. As for the company's potential to turn its vast social network into a commerce juggernaut, over half of those surveyed said they wouldn't trust Facebook for financial transactions (as compared to some 8% who would). Facebook's future, of course, may rely on mobile, and area it admittedly hasn't yet cracked but where it is focusing a lot of attention. Given the demand for Facebook's stock, it would appear that investors and speculators who have ponied up for shares in the IPO aren't too concerned about mobile being a drag on the company, at least in the short-term. But the company's mobile problems may not just be related to monetization. Facebook has a reputation as being home to some of Silicon Valley's top engineers, but a post looking at how Facebook's iOS app has been built raises questions about the social network's mobile chops. Interestingly, it's not the first time techies have criticized the social networking giant on technical grounds. Put all this together and you have what could be better-than-television drama. Right now, there are enough investors are willing to hand Facebook and shareholders billions at a $100bn valuation, but their apparent exuberance is tempered by the fact that so many people are also skeptical about the company's valuation and prospects. Which group is right? It's worth noting that those putting their money into the IPO may have a wide range of motivations, from short-term speculation to a desire to be involved in one of the most historic IPOs ever, and some of these motivations won't necessarily lend themselves to long-term shareholder loyalty. At the same time, Facebook has -- thus far at least -- managed to overcome its greatest obstacles, which include more than a few high-profile user backlashes. Which hints at why the Facebook IPO may be so compelling even to those who aren't buying shares: for all of Facebook's undeniable, astonishing success, it appears remarkably -- perhaps almost unbelievably -- vulnerable.

One tablet generates as many website visits as four smartphones, according to data from Adobe's Digital Index Report. By the end of Q1 2012 smartphones accounted for 6.1% of site visits compared to 4.3% on tablet. However, smartphones only maintain a greater share of website visits due to the lower penetration rate of tablets. The report highlights that from 2010 through to 2011 there were 5.3 times more smartphones shipped across North America and Western Europe compared to tablets. Adobe predicts that at its current rate of growth tablet traffic will surpass smartphone traffic within 12 months. Within a year of its launch in Q2 2010 the iPad accounted for 1% of total website visits, reaching 4.3% of total visits by the end of 2011. In contrast, within the first two years of the iPhone market entry, smartphones accounted for 0.4% of total website visits, taking nearly three years to reach 1% of total visits. If this trend continues then tablets will account for more than 10% of website visits in 2014. But Adobe’s report isn’t the first piece of research to highlight the growing popularity of tablets. A recent survey by InMobi and Mobext found that 69% of tablet owners make a purchase on their device every month. This highlights the fact that e-tailers need to have a tablet strategy in place. Our comprehensive blog post, 'tablets: the opportunity for marketers', has a number of tips for how advertisers should seek to target tablet users. However, we should also be careful not to overstate the importance of tablets, as despite similar levels of engagement PCs drive disproportionately more website visits than tablets. Adobe’s report shows across North America and Western Europe there were six times more PCs shipped than tablets in between 2009 and 2011. Yet in Q1 2012 PCs accounted for 19 times more website visits. The reasons for this are fairly obvious – people use PCs all day at work, and most tablet owners will also use a PC for browsing at home. Adobe report also appears to fail to take into account the millions of PCs in existence before 2009. Finally, the data shows that tablet users are more likely to use their device to visit certain types of websites. For example, consumers consider tablets and PCs to be nearly interchangeable for media consumption and for repeated interactions with financial service providers. “This suggests that consumers consider tablets to be similar to PCs for visits that are repeated, routine, involve passive consumption of content, and so on.” However, PC conversion rates are much higher than tablet for retail and travel sites, “suggesting that consumers prefer PCs for visits involving research, comparison of alternatives, and online purchasing.” Adobe's Digital Index Report presents findings from an analysis of 23bn visits made to more than 325 mobile and traditional brand websites from January to March of 2010, 2011 and 2012.

NFC smartphone payments are slowly making their way into the mainstream, but there is still a long way to go before we see widespread consumer adoption. Visa plans to use the London Olympics as a showcase for mobile NFC, although the trial will only involve a limited number of athletes. And the infrastructure for consumer adoption appears to be in place with more than 140,000 contactless terminals around the UK. So what is holding smartphone payments back? To find out more about NFC payments and the opportunity for retailers, I spoke to The Logic Group's marketing director Mark Kusionowicz.How can retailers be making better use of mobile in-store? You need to look at how mobile can be included in the entire customer journey, as there’s more to making a purchase than just handing over the cash. If you look at the whole decision process from the initial research, through to browsing products and finally making the purchase, mobile is the perfect medium for retailers to engage with their customers through the whole journey. They can also have more of an influence on the customer's experience and behaviour. For example, prior to buying something retailers can target consumers with specific offers to encourage the purchase. So rather than just sending out blanket offers through a deals site, you can reach the people you want to target because you know they are in-store at the time. NFC comes into this, as consumers could tap their phone on a reader to access more product information or find out what’s in stock. But then the store also finds out that you are there and can offer 10% off if you buy it today. So do you see NFC as more than just a payment tool? If you offer a one-tap system at the point of purchase you can offer users much more than just payment options. That one chip can manage the shop’s loyalty scheme, include any vouchers the customer has downloaded, or even notify the shopper of any other offers or products they might be interested in. It can also be used to help understand consumer behaviour between offline and online channels.  Most consumers will go online and also visit a store at some point during the purchase journey, and mobile can help to marry up those contact points. It’s still a difficult process, but mobile makes it slightly easier if we get to the point where people are searching for product information and making payments using the same device. A recent survey found that 60% of British consumers would avoid making a payment using a mobile. How can retailers overcome consumer opposition to the technology? It’s really all about education. Once you know the facts, you realise that a mobile is safer than a plastic card but consumers aren’t generally aware of that. I still read about concerns around contactless cards in press articles, which underlines the point that we need more education around the subject. People need to realise that they are not liable if they fall victim to fraud, it’s down to the banks, but we also need to demonstrate how safe it is. Credit card providers, such as Visa, have been pushing for the adoption of NFC recently. What are the motivations behind this drive to get rid of bankcards? Data is one of the key benefits. The more you know about your customers, the better they can be targeted with adverts and offers, so the merchants and advertisers get a better ROI. Take vouchers sites for example. All these sites that offer coupons and money back, it’s difficult to tie that back to the customer who redeems it, but something done through a mobile is unique to that handset, so you know who is using the voucher, their location and the time of day. By accessing this sort of data it gives the retailer much better control over the marketing budget. But it’s not simply the data they collect on consumers – it’s also the data they can provide to their customers. NFC has the potential to benefit customers as much as merchants. Mobile clearly has benefits to retailers, so why don’t more offer free Wi-Fi in-stores? I think there was an initial knee-jerk reaction early on where retailers were worried that consumers would go into their stores to try the clothes on then buy the online. So for a while there was a certain fear around providing Wi-Fi, but now they realise that Wi-Fi and 3G are a fact of life. Retailers will do better to offer their customers a more enjoyable experience, which has a knock on effect on their brand and on sales. It’s interesting to note that consumer demand is driving the change, so retailers like John Lewis have reacted to that to offer free Wi-Fi. There are a number of different mobile payment options on the market currently. Who do you think will be the eventual winner? I think the industry will mature with a number of providers, but then we will see some standardisation occur. There will always be space for multiple payment models - cash isn’t going away anytime soon. And most of them realise that they will have to be fairly open and able to work with other providers. MasterCard’s new e-wallet works with other cards – you can’t silo the product, as people will always have more than one card in their wallet Who does responsibility for moving the industry forward sit with? Is it handset manufacturers or payment suppliers? It’s an interesting debate, but there’s probably no one area within the eco-system where overall responsibility sits. Innovation is needed from all parties, whether it be the handset technology itself or the financial products behind them. It’s going to take a collective effort, and we will probably see innovation from areas we don’t even know about at the moment. After all, who saw Square coming a few years ago?

Achoo is a social network which allows its users to brag about their achievements and build up a profile which will help attract future employers.  The site was launched by Andrus Purde, and I've been asking him about Achoo, its business model, the challenges of launching, and his future plans. In one sentence, what is Achoo? A professional social network where marketers and other professionals can build their network, share their accomplishments and find new opportunities. What problems does Achoo solve? The traditional résumé and services built around it, including LinkedIn, have stopped being as effective as they used to be. Today more than 20% of US workforce are consultants, contractors and freelancers and this figure is similar in the UK. But how do you show on your résumé that during the last two years you've worked with seven different projects, as a member of four different teams? Even for non-freelancers, what matters in networking is what you have achieved and who you have worked with, not fancy job titles and company names.  Achoo lets you share your bigger and smaller achievements, and show who you've worked with. Each achievement, or 'achoo' as we call them, can be tagged with people, companies, skills and Quora-like discussions. And collectively these add up a really useful profile. When and why did you launch it? I first started to work on social professional profiles in 2010 after I had quit my marketing job at Skype. Our first attempt failed but helped me better understand the market and needs. We regrouped as a team and launched a prototype of Achoo in September 2011. Over the following months we made many improvements, and launched publicly about a month ago. Who is your target audience? We think Achoo works best for freelancers, consultants and creatives in the marketing and communication field, but the concept makes sense for almost all professionals from entrepreneurs to interior designers.  What are your immediate goals? We've gotten lots of positive feedback but we've also identified many areas where we need to improve the product. One key area is integrations with other networks ie. people should be able to post to their Achoo profile via Twitter, and show it on their blog or LinkedIn profile. What were the biggest challenges involved in building Achoo? We've seen our fair share of usual startup challenges, I believe. We've had people telling us that LinkedIn owns professional networking and it's silly to even try to challenge that (which I don't believe should stop anyone, ever), we've had some annoying bugs in the system, communications issues in the team and, like many startups, some days where traffic and user growth seems ridiculously small.  So far, so good, and though I'm sure there are more challenges in store for us, we seem to have gotten quite good at learning and problem solving.  How will the company make money? The site is free to use for all users at the moment. In the future we'll be adding premium services, for example featured listings and advanced customisation for people with skills, and advanced search and contacting capabilities for recruiters.  Where would you like to be in one, three and five years? In a year’s time we will have added all the features and improvements we're envisioning, and hopefully validated that these were indeed the most important things to our users. So using startup terminology, we're currently focused on confirming "product-market fit".  Scaling the idea and business globally is on our three-year horizon and in five years we'd like to be busy carrying out our wider vision for how professional networking can be better. 

A man walks into the bar...That's the start of countless jokes, but it's not a joke for SceneTap. For the Chicago-based startup, a man walking into a bar is just another event that can be tracked and analyzed. Thus far, SceneTap has tracked 8.5m such events at more than 400 bars and nightclubs using cameras that allow it to determine how crowded a bar is, the approximate ages of patrons and male-to-female ratios.For SceneTap, the goal is to provide "a new look into nightlife through the eye of technology." For venue owners, the company's technology can provide greater insights into customers. For club-hoppers, SceneTap hopes that technology will turn it into an indispensible resource for finding the perfect spot to spend a night on the town.Currently, SceneTap is working with venues in seven US cities. One of those cities is San Francisco, a market the company entered last week through partnerships with 25 venues.Perhaps not surprisingly, SceneTap's expansion is putting it on the radar -- and in the center of controversy. VentureBeat's Jolie O'Dell had harsh words for the startup, suggesting it's no better than the now-shuttered Foursquare-based Girls Around Me app. Other commenters have referred to SceneTap as "creepy" and suggested that they'll avoid venues using it.According to SceneTap, all the data it collects is anonymous in nature and nothing it gathers is stored permanently. But some of the visceral reactions to SceneTap highlight an important fact: data collected passively and anonymously can still be problematic.That data is being collected isn't always problematic. And the nature of the data sometimes doesn't matter. What often matters most: the manner in which it's being collected. In the case of SceneTap, the idea that hidden cameras are silently scanning the bar keeping tabs on crowd sizes, male-to-female ratios and patron ages is, to some, bound to make a bar that was once a favorite hot spot into a not spot -- even if one trusts that SceneTap isn't doing anything that would expose personally identifiable information.Whether SceneTap will become an ubiquitous part of the nightlife scene remains to be seen, but one should expect more and more companies like it to emerge, potentially helping to create new opportunities for business owners and marketers while at the same time creating tensions between business owners and concerned customers.The lesson here for businesses considering technologies like this: there's a balance between trying to gain more intelligence about customers and making dumb moves that lead your customers to question whether they should be your customers. At the end of the day, the key is making sure that in the rush to learn more about customers, businesses don't go too far and turn them into former customers.

Majestic Wine has launched a new mobile site to allow its customers to browse and buy wines on the go. It has been developed by Usablenet, which also designed mobile sites for House of Fraser, Tesco and M&S. A wine merchant isn’t necessarily the type of business you would expect to have a mobile site, and it doesn’t seem to be a common feature among its competitors. So how does it measure up in terms of usability?Homepage Mobile sites need to be simple to navigate, and Majestic has initially done a good job of stripping out unnecessary options. The search function is prominently positioned at the top of the page, as is a store locator which offers both geo-location or postcode search. These are both useful options for mobile users and it makes sense to make them easy to find.                        Furthermore, while there are quite a few product categories, it doesn’t feel too cluttered, and the options match the desktop site so regular customers will be familiar with the navigation. Navigation Each category on the homepage has a dropdown menu that reveals further product options. The process is very smooth, although in some categories it does feel as if you are given too many choices. Mobile sites need to be simple and Majestic could probably have stripped a few options out. That said, it still feels quite slick and is relatively easy to find the products you are looking for. Product pages The product pages are well laid out with a large product image prominently displayed. It also includes pricing information, access to customer reviews and ratings, and social media buttons in case you are inclined to share your purchase with friends. There is also comprehensive information about the wine, such as its origin, taste, body and even whether it is cork or screw top.                        The one minor issue is that you need to navigate away from the page to access delivery information, which could have been provided in a dropdown menu on the product page. Checkout This is where the site loses points, as you are forced to register before you can order your goods. Typing in all your personal details is a fiddly process on a mobile and is likely to put some customers off completing a purchase. It is fine to offer the option of creating an account, but it shouldn’t be compulsory on mobile sites. Another issue is with the delivery method. If you choose home delivery then it tells you it will deliver it from your local store, which in my case is Clapham. However if you then select ‘Collect in store’ it doesn’t automatically assume I would want to pick it up from Clapham, and instead you have to scroll down a massive list of stores. This is only a minor point, but seems a fairly obvious way of making the process easier.                         Conclusion Majestic Wines has produced a decent mobile site that is easy to navigate, although there are a few points that let it down. There are a few too many options in the drop-down menus on the homepage, but it could be that these will be reduced after Majestic has evaluated user data. Furthermore, the checkout process is too long and may harm the conversion rate. But that said, it still provides a useful tool for Majestic’s customers and keeps them one step ahead of the competition.

Hiring online freelancers for marketing roles and projects is a trend that has experienced significant growth over the last year. We’ve seen a 106% increase in digital marketing jobs posted on Elance for the 12 months leading up to March 2012. And, the increase from UK businesses was even greater (124%). There has also been a 215% increase in marketing jobs completed and a 188% increase in client spend. In the first of a series of monthly posts, I'll look at more trends in digital marketing jobs...UK marketers are using digital marketing freelancers more than other countries. In March 2012, the UK became the second biggest hirer of digital marketing talent, up from fourth in March 2011, just behind the US. The UK is also the fifth biggest country when it comes to supplying digital marketing freelancers. Video is on the up When we drill down and look at the types of jobs that are increasingly being outsourced, it is interesting to note that video is the big mover year-on-year. Videography was the second fastest growing skill in the last year (272% increase), followed by Video Production (253%) and Video Editing (233%). Requirements for infographics spiralled in the last 12 months too with a monumental 552% increase. However that growth has slowed recently and there was no change in demand from February to March this year. The only skill to see a drop in demand over the last year was Newsletters (-12%). Though in the month from February to March we saw less demand for SEM (-39%), Newsletters (-15%), eBooks (-9%) and Affiliate Marketing (-9%).  Job Post Count by Skills MOM % change YOY% change Internet Marketing 17.2% 186.0% Blogs -4.1% 138.7% Social Media Marketing 15.9% 105.8% SEO 3.5% 105.7% SEM -39.0% 89.6% Video Production 6.1% 253.3% Video Editing 5.1% 232.5% Banner Ads -5.0% 231.3% Facebook 8.5% 31.5% Email Marketing 10.9% 57.4% eBooks -8.9% 62.8% Affiliate Marketing -8.8% 7.9% Videography 39.9% 272.3% Infographics 0.0% 552.0% Newsletters -14.5% -11.8% Twitter 18.5% 0.8% Google+ 17.7%   Three reasons for increased demand A common reaction to this growth in demand would be to question why this is happening. For me, when it comes to digital marketing, there are three key reasons: Economy. There is no doubt that the difficult economic conditions over the last few years has put strain on marketing budgets. Using freelancers is a good way to control costs, especially when there are freezes on hiring additional full time headcount.  Flexibility. Marketing disciplines and campaigns are far more varied in this digital age. It is often hard for marketing teams and agencies to predict what skills will be needed from one month to the next.  Specialisms. Following on from this last point, it is often necessary to have a specific specialist for a specific task. Hiring a freelancer who has the necessary skills that might be missing in the agency or in-house department is a much more effective way to manage this. We’ll continue to chart these trends, identify areas where there is significant change and will include these in future monthly posts.

As a discipline, content strategy isn't suited to rigidly standardised processes. Different businesses have radically different needs around content planning, creation and governance. This means that a successful content strategy will always be customised, using the best tools for the job at hand. This lack of a standard methodology can make beginning a content strategy a daunting proposition - whether you're creating the strategy internally or hiring an external content strategist. Fortunately, there's one step that almost all content strategists agree should come first: a content audit. Doing a content audit means putting together a complete picture of your existing content: what content you have, and what state it’s in. It’s an incredibly useful exercise for any business that has existing content. That is, any business that’s not brand new. What do I get from a content audit? To understand the benefits of a content audit, think back to the last time you cleared out your personal filing cabinet. (If you’ve never cleared out a filing cabinet, maybe content strategy isn’t your thing!) You probably came across the following: Documents that you could simply throw out (utility bills from ten years ago). Documents that needed to be updated (an expired passport). Useful documents that you assumed you’d lost because they were misfiled (an interesting set of conference notes, buried in your tax papers). Documents that gave you ideas (a set of old photos that you could put up on Facebook to entertain or embarrass your friends). You can expect similar results from a content audit. Just by looking at your existing content, you’ll realise that some of it can be deleted, some needs to be updated, some needs to be reorganised to make it more findable, and some of it sparks unexpected, useful ideas. Beyond this, a content audit is an invaluable document for demonstrating to the rest of your organisation that your online content needs work. It’s a way to get the ball rolling on a content strategy, even before you have official signoff. How do I do a content audit? The standard tool for a content audit is the humble spreadsheet. To make things simple, use Econsultancy's Content Audit Template. The first step of your audit is to list every page on your website alongside its URL. You can do this manually for a small site, or get the data from web crawling software for a larger site. (A content audit can and should examine non-website content as well, like Facebook Pages and printed collateral, but for simplicity’s sake I’ll stick with web content for now.) As this point, you have what’s called a “quantitative content audit” or “content inventory”. This bare listing of pages is useful in its own right, because it’s impossible to get a sense of a website’s scale at a glance, and because the chances are there are whole sections you’ve forgotten about. But the real magic happens when you start evaluating your content - turning a quantitive audit into a qualitative one. Just add spreadsheet columns for each of the criteria you want to use for evaluation. The criteria you use might include: Relevance (does your audience really need the content on this page? does it help fulfil a user need or business objective?). Currency (is the content up to date?). Quality (is it well written?). Style (is it consistent with your business’s branding and tone of voice?). Traffic (according to your analytics data, do many users actually visit the page?). Metadata (does this page have a relevant, keyword-rich title tag and meta description?). Opportunities (can this content be re-used somewhere else?). If you have a large site, you might want to evaluate a representative sample of pages rather than every single page on the site. Also, you might not be able to do all this evaluation at the same time: for instance, there’s not much point evaluating content for brand consistency if you don’t yet have a brand strategy worked out. The content audit is a living document that you’ll keep coming back to throughout the content strategy journey. What are the outcomes of a content audit? You find out what content you can throw away A list of content that can simply be deleted is probably the single most useful outcome of a content audit. Deleting content doesn’t just declutter your website - more important, it makes it easy for users to find content that’s relevant to them. It streamlines the browsing experience, and it prevents redundant or out-of-date content appearing in search results. Gerry McGovern relates that Microsoft once did a content audit and discovered that 3m of their 10m pages had never been visited! They went on a page deletion spree, and found that getting rid of unneeded content made relevant content much easier for customers to find. Most businesses don’t have quite as much redundant content as Microsoft, but almost all of them have pages they could productively delete. You find out what content needs to be updated or moved As part of your content audit, you’ll also find content that is still required, but needs updating. This can be a quick fix: if you run a restaurant and the menu on your website is from two months ago, a recurring reminder in your calendar might be all you need. But for larger-scale businesses, this can be a much bigger issue, with multiple types of content that need to be constantly reviewed in response to changes in the market, legislation, customer behaviour, and so on. That’s when you need to think about a web governance strategy. You’re also likely to find content that’s useful in its own right, but is buried in the current information architecture. A classic example of this is a large, disorganised FAQ section. As part of your content strategy, you might want to think about relocating answers to the context where they’ll be most relevant to users. Serendipity happens Here’s a less tangible but equally beneficial outcome of a content audit: good ideas get sparked simply by the act of looking over your old content. You might find a series of old blog posts that can be given a dust-off and turned into an email autoresponder sequence. You might find some old company photos that can help you start building a Facebook timeline. You might find long text instructions that could be better conveyed using video. Write down these things as you think of them, and you’ll come to your content strategy already armed with ideas for improving your content and extending its reach. Use a content audit to bring others along As we’ve seen, you get a lot of useful benefits from doing a content audit. But it’s just as important to share this work with others. A content audit is a document that you can use to advocate for content work within your organisation - one that goes beyond the general perception that “our web content is terrible”. Your content audit makes that perception quantifiable and actionable.   Econsultancy's renowned digital content strategy training course is now being delivered in Australia, across Sydney, Melbourne and Perth. Dates are available here. 

Chances are if you're an owner of a Mac, you don't worry too much about malware and viruses. At least you didn't before the Flashback trojan was found to have infected some 600,000 Macs that were part of a botnet. The Flashback botnet made headlines, but many were quick to point out that the infected machines became vulnerable through Java, not Apple's OS, suggesting that Apple wasn't to blame.That may not have been entirely true, however. Apple had apparently blocked Oracle from issuing a direct update for Java on Mac, leaving Macs vulnerable to infection far longer than they should have been. And that's just the beginning of the problem according to the CTO of antivirus vendor Kaspersky, Nikolai Grebennikov. He's on the record as stating "Mac OS is really vulnerable," and apparently Apple believed that enough to invite Kaspersky to help it assess just how vulnerable Macs are. The bad news: "Apple doesn't pay enough attention to security." In Grebennikov's mind, the Java exploit that was left open for hackers to exploit proves this. When Oracle patched Java, Apple took far too long to issue a patch. Perhaps more importantly, it raises the question as to whether Apple should have allowed Oracle to issue the patch directly. The even worse news: Grebennikov believes that malware targeting iOS, the operating system that powers the iPhone and iPad, could be right around the corner. While none has been identified yet, if past is prologue, it won't be too long before it hits the scene. And as Grebennikov sees it, there's no way Apple will be able to defeat iOS malware without help. Which brings us to the good news: Kaspersky's criticism of Apple's security model seems to have caused Apple to bring Kaspersky (and perhaps other third parties) into the fold as it looks to take security more seriously going forward. Locking down its OSes and maintaining their reputation as relatively "secure" could prove crucial to Apple staying on top. One of the main selling points of Apple devices is that they "just work." But if hackers and scammers have their way, Mac owners could be in for some headaches. The business risk to Apple is huge, and it's one that the company can't afford not to try to mitigate.

The marketing world is known for its love of hiring interns but with unemployment rates on the rise, are internships really going to lead to new jobs for graduates? And what are employers looking for? A new study by Millennial Branding and Experience reveal an employment gap between employers and students. Even though 91% of employers think students should have between one and two internships before graduation, 50% haven’t hired any interns in the last six months. In fact, over three quarters of employers have hired 30% fewer interns into full time positions of late.As for social media, currently only 16% of employers look to social media to recruit and 35% use those networks for background checks. The majority of them looking to LinkedIn and Facebook in the hiring process. Thankfully, for those twitter addicts out there, only 2% check Twitter…for now. What exactly are these employers looking for in entry-level talent? Jennifer Floren, Founder and CEO, Experience found the results rely less on education. Of all the things employers look for when hiring entry-level talent, it’s the so-called ‘soft skills’ that are valued most: communication, teamwork, flexibility and positive attitude are by far the most sought-after skills. Employers understand that everything else can be taught, so they look for the most promising raw material to work with. This study is interesting for those looking at how we are hiring in this digital age. Keeping these results in mind, employers need to look at evolving their hiring processes and graduates may need to be more targeted at how they approach the opportunities they take before joining the workforce. 

I've been taking a look at the Sears website from a user experience perspective to see what the retailer does well online, and where it can improve.  I've highlighted some excellent features on the site that other online retailers could learn from, some relatively minor irritations that would annoy users, and problems that may make users abandon the site. Overall, the site performs well and contains some excellent features, such as proactive use of live chat. However, even with the best sites, there is always room for improvement...  The good Nice big search box  One of the most prominent features on the Sears homepage is the large site search box, which is similar to that used by Amazon. Since Sears has a large stock range, including some technical products with long titles and model numbers, this makes perfect sense.  The trend is for customers to enter longer search queries of two or more words, and those that are looking for the model number of a specific TV or laptop will also tend to enter longer strings. Larger search boxes suit these users.  With a smaller search box, as customers type longer queries in, then the text will simply disappear from view. This is no disaster, but having a longer search box makes it easier for customers to edit their search terms in case of misspellings and allows them to be more precise with their product queries.  A minority of people may use site search, but by entering product names and model numbers, they are indicating greater purchase intent than the average user.  Targeted use of live chat on product pages Having looked at a product page for a dishwasher and clicked on the specifications link, I see this pop up box proactively offering live chat with an appliances expert: I'm not seeing this on every product page, which suggests that Sears has cleverly targeted the more complex products and offered users some one-to-one assistance.  I suspect the average person hasn't a clue how to distinguish one dishwasher from another, so it makes sense to offer live chat here. I've also noticed live chat appear if you hit the back button during checkout.  Also, stats have shown that, when live chat is used, this can produce conversion rates ten times the site average.  Surveys for checkout abandonment I bailed out of the checkout process while looking at the site, but before I could head for another webpage, I saw this message:  Some may find the pop up annoying, but if even a relatively small proportion of people complete the survey, then this could provide some valuable insight for Sears to reduce checkout abandonment in future.  Sending cart abandonment emails Cart abandonment emails are a great way to revive sales that may have otherwise been lost. After abandoning the checkout process, I received this email within a few hours: Offering emails for out of stock items I have my doubts about whether unavailable items should be shown, of which more later, but Sears does at least offer to email customers when the item is back in stock:  The bad Unavailable stock A retailer such as Sears, with a large product range, will always have a number of items that are currently unavailable for purchase.  There are a number of ways to handle out of stock items, such as offering to email customers, which Sears does, but displaying products which are out of stock can be annoying for customers.  Sears could add 'show only available items' to its filtered navigation options, which would avoid any frustration, while still allowing users to use the email option.  It could also show alternative, similar products which may suit the customer's needs, or perhaps advise them where they can find the item offline.  Poor usability when zooming in to images Zoom tools are great for seeing detail on products, things like the number of USB ports on a laptop, or in this case, the control panel on a dishwasher.  As you can see from the screenshot, the highlighted area on the left suggests I should be seeing a larger image of the control panel, but I'm not.    Cluttered product pages While many of the key points of information are clearly visible, (price, product name etc) there is much that is lost in the clutter of the page.  Of course, products like laptops require plenty of detail but I think the presentation of information could be better here.  Calls to action unclear This was the case on product pages and during the checkout process. The checkout pages are long, but this does mean that, once you have filled details in, you're looking for the continue link.  It is there, but since it's below the fold on most pages, this may cause confusion for some users.  Assuming in store collection  After adding this TV to my cart and heading for the checkout, it defaults to in store pick up: It's great that Sears offers this, but I may well be too lazy to head to the store or, since it's six miles away, I may prefer home delivery.  I'd rather it assumed delivery, then provided store pick up as an alternative option. After all, a 42" TV isn't the easiest thing to carry.  The ugly Unavailable pages I encountered this page on a number of occasions: Sears does at least handle this well, by apologising for the error and providing alternative such as site search and a range of contact options, but too many error pages reduce customer trust in a website.  If they see multiple error pages, they may wonder if there is a problem with the site and even whether it is secure.  An Econsultancy survey on reasons for abandoning online purchases found that technical problems would cause 54.5% of users to abandon the site.  Errors  Perhaps it's just me, but when trying to select categories from the left hand menu, I was instead shown recommendations based on my most recently browsed products.  On this particular session, I was unable to access the laptops category except by using the site search box. Errors like this could easily cause customers to abandon the site.  In conclusion... In general, Sears is a very usable site, and one which does well to make it easy to navigate and select from a wide product range.  There are more positives than negatives on the site. There are obvious plus points I haven't mentioned, such as a smooth enclosed checkout process, and excellent site search.  However, there are always potential areas for improvement with any e-commerce site, and some of the problems i mention here, if addressed, should help to boost Sears' conversion rates by removing barriers to purchase.  Of course, user testing, intelligent use of analytics and multivariate testing etc will help any e-commerce manager to improve sales more than a single site review, but the points I've mentioned here will hopefully provide some food for thought.    I'd love to see your thoughts on the review. Perhaps I'm wrong on some of these points, or maybe there are issues I've missed... 

When Scott Thompson decided to leave his post as President of PayPal to join Yahoo as CEO, it reportedly came as a shock to eBay CEO John Donahoe. And it was a surprising move according to some industry observers. After all, Thompson was ditching Ebay's fastest growing division to join a company that has been in decline. It's a decision Thompson may regret for a long time.Following the revelation that Thompson did not receive a computer science degree, as he had claimed on his resume, Yahoo found itself in the spotlight. One member of the Yahoo board of directors, who was on the search committee that hired Thompson, resigned, and angry shareholders were threatening to take legal action. The situation came to a head yesterday when Thompson agreed to step down as CEO of Yahoo. According to one report, Yahoo will say that the resignation was part of a termination for "cause", allowing Yahoo to part ways with Thompson without paying him severance and delivering some $6.5m in restricted stock units. According to another report, Thompson agreed to resign after learning that he has been diagnosed with cancer. While there's more to this story to be written, the big questions now are how interim CEO Ross Levinsohn will manage Yahoo's affairs. Levinsohn, who has been at Yahoo since 2010, is best known for his role as President of Fox Interactive Media. Some to suggest that his background could lead him to pursue a more advertising-focused direction for Yahoo as opposed to the commerce-centric direction Thompson seemed to be taking. There are also questions as to whether Levinsohn could seek to reverse Thompson's aggressive patent strategy, which saw Yahoo sue Facebook in a lawsuit that has been a PR disaster for the once-great internet giant. It will probably take a while for everything to play out. Levinsohn is Yahoo's interim CEO, and while he's obviously a viable candidate to take over the position permanently, don't be surprised if Yahoo's board of directors, which itself will be changing quite a bit, takes the appointment of Yahoo's next CEO slowly, if for no reason other than to give the appearance that it's being more careful about who it hires as the company's chief. In the meantime, one thing is for sure: Yahoo may have solved the problem of a CEO with a bad resume, but it still hasn't solved the problems that Scott Thompson was hired to try to fix.

Streaming music online is a competitive business. Spotify is probably the most recognisable provider, but the likes of Deezer and Grooveshark are also posting strong user numbers. In order to keep attracting new users, one of the key challenges for streaming services is differentiating themselves from the competition. Last.fm seeks to do this by tracking user listening behaviour and recommending artists based on their musical tastes. Since launching in 2002 the London-based company has collected 65bn pieces of track data from its users, which is obviously a powerful tool for advertisers. To find out how Last.fm makes use of its data and sell its service to marketers, I spoke to commercial director Chris Wistow...What is your USP? We view ourselves as a music discovery service, and we do that by aggregating our user’s listening history. We are agnostic in terms of what platform or what player the user wants to listen to music on, and we integrate with all the different music services and platforms whether that is iTunes, or Spotify or whatever. That means we can create the user’s music home online and aggregate their music listening habits from a range of different services.  What we have found is that music listening habits have changed over the years, so a few years ago people would just be listening to iTunes, but now what we are finding is that users are consuming music across a range of different platforms. And there’s a desire from users to take the listening history that’s locked in silos on each platform and actually bring that together in one place. So that’s where we come in. So how are you integrated with iTunes? We have the Last.fm ‘Scrobbler’, which is a downloadable piece of software that sits on your desktop and syncs with iTunes and Windows Media Player to keep track of what you’re listening to. It basically aggregates all the track information and adds it to your profile so, over time, the more music you listen to the more in-depth your profile becomes and the smarter it becomes in understanding what you like. Do you use that data for anything else other than personal music recommendations? Absolutely. At the beginning of this year we relaunched our charts section to give users the ability to slice and dice the data and make more sense of it. Historically we could only provide a global view, but now you can go into the charts section and slice it by genre, country or city and see what’s trending almost in real time. Then we also have our hype chart, which registers if there’s a spike in a particular artist’s activity for a prolonged period of time and then they fall into this category. It specifically looks at what’s trending right now. We hear that a lot of labels use it for A&R, so to recognise what is up and coming and we also use it to identify what is new emerging music when putting on our live events. How important are live events in your business model? It has a growing importance. One of the things we have done in the past is our ‘Last.fm Presents’ monthly shows that work off the hype chart. The goal is to take the Last.fm experience and demonstrate it in the real world. When listening to the radio stations you don’t hear any adverts, even though it’s a free service. How else do you monetise it? We monetise through advertising and e-commerce, so selling tracks through various partner sites. The ads are banner ads and partnerships or sponsorships – we don’t do audio ads, we only do display. That’s because the radio is only one part of what we do, and it’s not a free service in every market. Music content and information is what we’re really all about, and we are one of the largest music content sites on the web, so we monetise mainly through visual advertising. That’s appears to be a very different business model to Spotify. Do you see them as a competitor? We see them more as a partner, as we have our Last.fm app integrated into their service, and scrobbling was one of the first third-party features integrated into Spotify. With iTunes, scrobbling works as a plug-in but with Spotify we actually sit within the platform. And what about social - we’ve seen The Guardian and Spotify boost sign up numbers by creating a Facebook app. Is that something you plan to do? We have a Facebook page at the moment and we plan to create an app. I think that a lot of businesses are building themselves on top of Facebook, which is potentially a dangerous thing. You lose a lot of control by doing that, and a lot of other players in the space have lost control of their customers by relying too much on Facebook. I think there are tremendous benefits of working with social networks and they in no way should be ignored, but they need to be weighed up quite seriously based on your own business goals and objectives. One of the key ways that other online services try to attract advertisers is by offering brand pages. Is this something that you plan to do? I find this quite an interesting area – marketers are very interested in doing something using a branded platform, but you need to ask them what their objectives really are. If they are going to do something on a partner site is has to be contextually relevant. There’s no point in creating a brand page for the sake of it. What you’re doing on the brand page needs to be intrinsically linked to the service offered by the partner site. How do you pitch your service to brands ahead of your competitors? There’s a couple of different ways: First and foremost is in terms of audience – we are a music discovery service so our users are intrinsically searching for something. Because they are in that mode, when they find something they like they often tell their friends about it.  That behaviour is very relevant for brands that want to work with us, as they want to reach the social informers and influencers, so we have a strong case, as a lot of it is about the type of user we are able to deliver. Secondly, we are pitching to clients around larger partnerships, where we can leverage the data we collect and create something unique for them. One good example of that was a brand page we created for Puma involving Deadmau5. Users could go in and type in their user name and then it would visualise how your listening habits track against the wider community of Deadmau5 fans. So it was targeted quite specifically at electronic music fans, but that’s still quite a large part of our community. And it was great for Puma because it was super relevant for them. They got the artist association with Deadmau5 and almost one-to-one brand messaging to those users. It was also engaging as users got information on the wider community of listeners with similar music tastes. How did you drive users to the Puma brand page? We do high impact advertising to raise general awareness, and more tactical advertising utilising our user data so we can target ads on the artist pages themselves, and also target users who we know to listen to Deadmua5. That sort of stuff is where we feel we have a strong USP against other services, as we have so much user data from around the world that we can do really interesting stuff with that. We really push our smart ads, which are ads targeted on what the user is listening to or that is relevant to the page content. Do you target specific industries, such a lifestyles or sports? We target sportswear, lifestyle, technology, mobile phones, and fashion brands – that sort of thing. We do a lot of work with Adidas – they are a great brand to work with as they align themselves around urban hip-hop so we have a lot of artists they can align with, which makes it more relevant to both the brand and the user. And because it’s seen as a natural fit the users don’t feel like it’s being forced down their throat. 

More than a third of UK businesses (36%) now use Facebook to attract new customers, according to data from Basekit. This makes it more popular as an advertising tool than local business directories such as Yellow Pages and Thomson, which are used by 27% of the 500 small businesses surveyed. The use of online advertising is now almost as common as print advertising (20% vs. 21%), and Twitter is also quickly gaining popularity (17%).Basekit co-founder Simon Best said the move to Facebook and Twitter is primarily driven by the lower cost of entry: Small businesses tell us that one-to-one marketing is their most efficient and most successful way of generating new business.                     The news that small businesses are increasingly turning to social networks for customer acquisition will come as good news to Facebook and Twitter as they have both been making efforts to lure SMEs to their ad platforms. In January Facebook announced that it would be giving away £4.2m of free advertising to SMEs across Europe as part of its Ad Boost programme. Then in March, Twitter launched a self-serve ad platform for SMEs in partnership with American Express. The aim for both networks is to convince SMEs to pay for advertising rather than relying on free brand pages. In other Facebook news, it has been announced that user data will be used to target ads while they are on sites outside of the social network. This comes as part of its revamped data use policy, which also provides clarifications on how it uses cookies and how long it retains user data. While Facebook does not currently show ads offsite, TechCrunch suggests that it may have plans to launch its own ad network. Facebook has taken several steps to boost its revenue streams in recent weeks, including launching a new app store and trialling paid-for status updates, so it wouldn’t be that surprising if it decided to further monetise its database by launching a new ad network. With 526m daily users to target, the earning potential is seemingly limitless...

So sales are down, the MD / CEO wants to know why web sales are down and you have an hour to prepare for the trading call or meeting.   We have all been in the position where we have sprung into the office on a Monday morning full of the joys of spring, compared like for like trading and found sales are down.   If this happens, you need some answers or at least to be armed with some basic information so you can identify where sales could have been lost.   Listed below are some 18 things that are always good to check on a Monday morning, or indeed any day when sales aren't as expected....These things are also a good check at any time as some things aren't always apparent and can inhibit sales. The list is not exhaustive but should provide you with some answers...  1. Was the site down during the weekend? Put in a call to your hosting company, agency or the person managing the site for you to find out if there were any problems.   Customer services is often a good source of information to advise if there were problems or downtime. Check your analytics suite also to see if there was a drop of traffic during a set time frame. 2. Was the payment portal working correctly? Check transaction logs over the period in question and see if there was a lack of orders and during what period.   Analytics should be compared also, if traffic was still being sent to the site yet your conversion rate dropped massively then there may have been a problem with payment methods.   Follow up with payment providers as this may well have been the case. If using a third party security company to vet transactions. Check whether they were over-cautious or if there was a system fail. 3. Was checkout working, postcodes, address, shipping, payment methods? Many sites use automatic postcode lookup, did you run out of credits so the postcodes were not delivering results? If so, make sure you set up automatic billing.   Were your customers able to access PayPal portal? Was the link to the secure cart working correctly? if it was broken over the weekend its likely to still be broken.   It is also worth checking that people can add shipping to the order, I have seen small changes made back-end that have stopped shipping being added to basket, which prevents checkout. A simple but drastic mistake people make. 4. Were categories published correctly? Did you set up a new "Special Offers" category? Did it actually get published? did it have any products assigned to it? Were images used and not products, were the clickthroughs from banners working, or did the code get missed out?   If so, the likelihood is that the category was created, but not actually set live with products. 5. Was search delivering results? Did your search function fail? This is maybe not so bad if you only have a few products on the site, but for sites with hundreds of products this may have stopped people finding the products.   The other consideration here is whether or not the search function was delivering intelligent results. For example, searches for 'shorts' which deliver results for 'shirts' will soon put people off. 6. Were products published as zero stock? It happens... There are two ways of checking this: Was all stock set to "0", especially if manual stock uploads are added to the site? If using manual uploads check the last upload file. If using a till system to upload directly to site then check with IT what was sent by the feed.    It's also worth checking whether individual products had all the sizes added to the database. If key sizes were missed when setting up a product shell then regardless of stock update they wont publish online. 7. Was there stock of key products / best sellers? This is slightly easier and quicker to check. Checking with merchandising or looking at the product history in the till system / CMS will soon make you aware of the shortfalls. 8. Did products have images? Products rarely sell online if they don't have images, as people will struggle to check what you are listing meets their needs without a picture.   It has been seen on many sites where the thumbnail image is missing and there is just a description. Generally, I find this occurs when the publishing team add the product and in a hurry forget to save the image to the CMS. On the other hand, they may have removed the image from the image bank meaning to replace it but forgetting to do so. If using affiliiate feeds, this may also have an impact on referrals from your affiliates. 9. Has something changed on the copy?  Bad reviews? If a product or service has had a bad review listed then this really could affect sales. Customers expect and deserve genuine reviews but if this is the only review of your product then this could cause problems.   If you do get a bad review it's worth checking out the product so you can amend descriptions or rectify faults. It's also worth ensuring reviews and queued before publishing. 10. Has a competitor changed pricing of key products? Competitor analysis of key products can often identify pricing issues online. For example, has Amazon now listed the product £10 cheaper than yours? Has a major retailer launched a sale? It can be hard to reduce prices dependant on business margins and pricing, especially if you're a multichannel retailer.  You may not be able to immediately reduce products due to policy, but you can let the buying and merchandisers know so they can act if they feel they should. 11. Have affililates stopped sending visitors? Have one of your key affiliates stopped sending you traffic? Check your affilate program dashboard to monitor sales and look for unexpected dips. If you can identify a drop in sales from an affiliate its worth just checking their site is still active or giving them a call to see what's happened.   You could find it's a simple feed issue to their site or that they are being offered better commission from competitors.  12. Do your landing pages have incorrect products or prices? Have they lost search engine position? Its worth checking key landing pages are still listed in the search engines. Also, when opening the landing page check whether the information is correct and showing relevant products.   I have often found that people assign incorrect products to the page.   13. Was traffic down or consistent on the site? By checking your analytics package you can easily identify if there was a massive drop in traffic to the site.   If there was then it's worth looking at the visitors and campaign sections to see where the shortfall was. Being a bit more technical, you could break down the analytics to see if it was device or browser specific.  14. Did a planned email send fail to deliver? Unfortunately, this does happen with the best planned campaigns.   15. Were last year's sales impacted due to a specific reason? So Alexander McQueen died in 2010, sales spiked in one day and we had almost sold out of every item of stock showing sales of 300% sales increase for the same week last year.   That looks good on the stats for that week and for the rest of this year but next year this will distort the figures, as the 300% increase will be budgeted into the forecast. Always record key events on the sales figures where spikes happen, things like Easter holidays, Black Friday, Mega Monday, etc all effect like for like week trading. 16. Have customer services received any logged issues about site performance? The best point of call for identifying many issues on the site. They are normally emailed or called about issues, whether it be pricing, postage, checkout, site down, stock outs or even bad publicity. A quick call can save a lot of time. 17. Has a social network group started an anti campaign? In our ever-changing social world negative publicity, like the United Airlines broke my guitar campaign, can hit sales. This is more likely to affect the larger retailer but can affect anyone. 18. Promotional codes Promotional codes make the world go around online, and everyone looks for a bargain, so check out your promo codes if sales are lower than expected.  If a new code has not worked then check whether it was case specific. Perhaps it was due to complex, confusing key characters, or published as live but with an expiry date in the past.     If an existing code has suddenly failed, it often comes down to either being unpublished, expired or deleted in error.   The key message here is that every member of the team can help to identify a problem...

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With many people thinking that social media will become an increasingly important SEO weapon, we examine its likely importance in the long term. When you speak with SEO experts, the hot topic is how social media signals are going to be used increasingly by Google to determine the authority of a website. It’s believed that the number of Facebook “likes”, Twitter followers, Google +1’s and even You Tube channel views you have, the more credence you could gain from Google.It has a ring of truth. After all, Google has for years taken more notice of how others regard you rather than how you regard yourself.  However, when you decide how much resource to put into this area you need to consider how much weight these signals are really going to carry with Google in the long term.  History has shown that the amount of weight Google gives an indicator is always inversely proportional to how easy it is to manipulate. As it became easy to stuff keywords, flood directory sites, get reciprocal links, spam discussion boards etc.. their power in Google's eyes has declined. And when you look at how easy it is to manipulate social media signals you also have to question their future long term relevance for SEO. Take Facebook “likes” and Twitter followers for example. Offer free cake for every “like” or “follower” you get and all but most the ardent calorie counter will flock to you. For You Tube channel views it’s even easier. Take an ear abusing song such as “Everything I do, I do it for you” by Bryan Adams, stick it on your channel and, hey presto, over 45m views follow. When it comes to artificial manipulation of link gaining (ie link buying) Google can impose penalties to reduce its abuse. However, it won’t be able to do the same for people who artificially try to increase their social media signals. Why? For the simple reason that companies will be able to point to a legitimate commercial, non SEO-related, reason for incentivising “likes” “views” “follows” and the suchlike. Companies can say that it’s to simply increase their subscriber base for future commercial gain and is unconnected to the manipulation of search engine results. Who is Google to say otherwise? As it will be easy to manipulate social media signals and as Google will have no powers to penalise this manipulation, surely the emphasis Google is going to place on it is not going to be as prominent as some people predict? Yes, social media can be used to gain other Google influencing factors such as links from people who see your social media campaigns. But when you are investing in social media for SEO I would treat it as a means to an end rather than the end in itself.