Archive for the ‘eCommerce’ Category

3 tips for small business social media success

Jul 2nd, 2010
Posted by kent in Social Media, eCommerce

eCommerce TImes is running a useful series of social media tips for small businesses. Among the tips:

Social media are growing increasingly intertwined. Twitter and LinkedIn can be tied together so that your tweets automatically show up on your LinkedIn news feed. YouTube — and just about all other sites with content — have links accompanying every article, video or photo to share across multiple platforms. So if you have a decent video camera and the wherewithal to create a series of instructional videos, you can post them on YouTube and share them on your Facebook page and your LinkedIn profile to drive viewers’ attention to the videos.

The piece hits the basics adequately enough, but falls short in some key areas. You’ll want to do more, for instance, than just monitor what people are saying about your business in social media circles; you’ll want to engage with people who are talking about your business via social media.

via E-Commerce News: SMB: Socializing the Storefront, Part 2: Navigating the Scene.

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Mobile Online shopping starts to take off

Jun 2nd, 2010
Posted by kent in Mobile, eCommerce

Our friends at Usability Sciences have been doing a lot of research on Mobile eCommerce (that’s shopping on your iPhone or Blackberry or what have you). What they’re finding should give eCommerce companies that haven’t optimized their sites for mobile pause — lot’s of people in key demographics are shopping online using their phones:

Looking at age, here is the breakdown of those who purchased through their phone in the last 6 months:

Mobile purchase categories by age

Clearly, if your target demographic is in the 25-44 age range you want to have your site mobile optimized.

Now, methodologically, there is some room for doubt here — the sample group is self-selected and that group  may skew towards people who are more likely than average to do stuff like shop with their phones.

via Volume 40 – Shopping Online Mobile – Alive and Very Well Part II – May 2010 | Usability Sciences.

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Passion, meaning and user experience

May 25th, 2010
Posted by kent in User Experience, eCommerce

I caught Simon Sineck’s How great leaders inspire action TED Talk recently. I think Simon’s on to something, and he’s definitely tapped into something important in the zeitgeist. But I think he’s only got part of the picture.

Read More…

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Mobile Banking Set to Soar – eMarketer

May 13th, 2010
Posted by kent in Mobile, eCommerce

According to eMarketer’s latest report,  “Mobile Banking: Financial Services Firms Look to Cash In.”

Several forecasts predict that by 2015, 50% or more of US mobile users will be conducting transactions from their mobile devices.

You’d have to assume that Canadian adoption numbers would be even higher than in the US, which traditionally lags us in consumer banking technologies.

The full report, “Mobile Banking: Financial Services Firms Look to Cash In,” also answers these key questions:

  • How many consumers already use mobile banking? How many are interested in trying it?
  • How many financial institutions are using the mobile channel? What is the extent of their mobile offerings?
  • What are the opportunities and challenges in mobile banking?

via Mobile Banking Set to Soar – eMarketer.

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Is the Click Still King?

May 10th, 2010
Posted by kent in Branding, Metrics and Measurement, Online Advertising, eCommerce

eMarketer asks. “is the click still King?” noting:

Despite widespread recognition that the click-through does not measure the full effect of an online ad [...] and calls for better branding metrics, many marketers still rely on the easy-to-track click as their top performance metric.

What’s really interesting is that when you ask marketers what they think they should be measuring, they say “ROI” — they’re just not actually measuring it.

I think the issue is that a lot of businesses don’t know how to measure or track online ROI — so they default to measuring the top-line thing their analytics reports give them: clicks and visits.

I know that’s definitely true for our clients (before they start working with us, that is) and one of the biggest aha moments we have with most clients is when we help them determine a set of Key Performance Indicators for measuring Return on Investment and put in place analytics software to track them.

via Is the Click Still King? – eMarketer.

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Small businesses are using social networks to become bigger

Jan 29th, 2010
Posted by kent in Social Media, eCommerce

The Economist has a sweet little primer on social networking for small business this week. The piece has a couple of great case studies and identifies this critical success factor:

A survey of 1,000 heavy users of social networks and other digital media conducted in August 2009 by Razorfish, an advertising agency, found that 44% of those following brands on Twitter said they did so because of the exclusive deals the firms offered to users.

A special report on social networking: A peach of an opportunity | The Economist.

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