Disruption Tour --- Run To Survive

Are Social Media Users Just Technologically Advanced Coupon Clippers?

via Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim by Frank Reed on 11/9/09

Ok, let’s get everything out on the table before we really get going here. Social media helps brand build a following of people who believe in the brand. It creates little armies of brand zealots that do all the promotion for you on a grassroots level. It is the next level of the evolution of the online commerce experience because Internet users are so savvy that they will understand that to experience a brand is to live the brand is to make the Earth safe for the rest of us mere mortals! Oooops. Sorry. I got a little caught up in the hype of social media.

Now for the reality check? Social media users like deals. Sure they may ‘engage’ with a brand a little more but they are really just looking for a deal. A coupon. A discount. Not brand nirvana.

At least that’s what a study from Razorfish as reported by MediaPost is telling us.

Much has been made of the ability of social media to help brands connect with consumers in new and deeper ways — to establish a “dialogue” with users through various interactive tools that blend seamlessly into their online activities.

But a new study suggests the key to engagement on social properties comes down to old-fashioned direct marketing techniques like offering discounts and special promotions. “Based on our research, it’s not so much about some type of ’shared passion’ for a brand’s values. Largely, it’s about deals — pure and simple,” states the 2009 FEED report from Razorfish examining consumers’ digital habits and attitudes.

What the ……?! Are you trying to tell me that when I put my head down on my pillow at night I really am not smiling about how much Dell, Zappos and Rackspace care for me on a deeper than e-commerce level? You mean it’s because I am just using them for their discounts? I feel so cheap.

Makes sense though. Maybe we need to take a step back on this whole social media deal and understand what is really going on. Sure there are levels of engagement that could not be experienced by brands or their users until the Facebook’s and Twitter’s of the world came along. What we need to be careful of is forgetting that human behavior doesn’t just change on a dime. In fact, I would posit that this is going to be how the VAST majority of people embrace social media for the foreseeable future. Not because they want to engage with a brand but because they want the brand they like for less cash.

Some other quick findings included

Of those who follow a brand on Twitter, for example, 44% said access to exclusive deals is the main reason. And on Facebook and MySpace, 37% cited special deals as the main reason they have “friended” a brand. The report points to companies such as Starbucks, which has amassed nearly 5 million fans and soared to the top of Facebook brand pages by offering coupons for free pastries and ice cream.

Razorfish identified customer service as the other key driver of consumer interaction in social media, with 33% friending a brand on Facebook and MySpace for that purpose, and 24% on Twitter. Companies such as Comcast, Zappos and Virgin have all gotten high marks for using the latter as a customer relations management (CRM) tool.

Now, this is where you create the brand zealots. When you solve their problems using social media then you are on to something. To think, though, that social media is selling more product because of the buying experience is a bit much when you are talking about the masses.

So for all of you who are seething at my position that the ‘feel good’ side of branding with social media is over-hyped please make your case with your comments. Meanwhile I am off to Dunkin’ Donuts for a discounted dozen beauties followed up by a dollar off cup of something from somewhere.

The Social Media Clutter Problem

Posted: 04 Nov 2009 06:38 AM PST Seekingalpha.com

There is an interesting dynamic that I wanted to highlight – the value of social media sites plateaus for individual users once the individual reaches a critical mass of content.

Have a lot of friends? Good luck trying to follow all of their twitter streams or their postings on Facebook. The overflow of content produced by the masses has diminishing marginal returns. The next tweet a friend makes will either be lost or push another tweet off of the first page of the queue. There is no way to consume all of the content presented to us, leaving the value of these services to plateau in their current form. Scouring the postings on Craigslist is a pain and so is trying to find a contact in LinkedIn whose name I can’t remember.

Consumer driven websites often need to rapidly scale their businesses to create network effects and grab market share. Getting big quickly was key for old-timers like eBay and Craigslist, and has been critical for new comers like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Network effects play an important role for all of these companies, as they scaled it became increasingly difficult for other players to challenge them.

While the amount of nodes (users) in the network gives the company the benefit of barriers, the amount of content that these users create can give the company the burden of clutter. Internet users are creating an astounding amount of content and for some of these Internet darlings this can create a big problem.

To be clear, this isn’t a knock on these services. They generally create a huge amount of value for an individual before they plateau. They do plateau, however, and that’s unfortunate.

This begs the question – what can these companies do to ensure that their services don’t plateau (or at least plateau less)? Ultimately it comes down to sorting data as granularly as possible (e.g., by person, by topic or by group).

Interestingly, ecommerce platforms do not appear as affected by the clutter issue as they can easily use directories and other sorting mechanisms to help users navigate the excessive amounts of data. Ecommerce sites can leverage the objective nature of the product characteristics or descriptions ot create these hierarchies. Social media sites, however, often have more difficulty structuring the data as categorizing user generated content is often based upon subjective characteristics.

So, what should these companies do to solve the clutter problem? For now, they’ll use sorting features to Band-Aid the problem. In the future, I suspect that more intelligent engines will help prioritize content in these streams for the users. The problem is growing and as always, I suspect hundreds of tech wiz-kids will emerge with new ways to solve the problem.

Retailers Get Ready for Social Shopping Experience

EMarkerter.com

OCTOBER 26, 2009

Online shopping is more than just transactional

People have long shared product opinions with friends and family through word-of-mouth. Today, social media tools enable consumers to extend their connections and conduct commerce in powerful new ways.

As people spend more time on social networks, retailers feel pressure to be there as well. Twitter is a hotbed of experimentation for retailers that see it as a channel for customer service, promoting the deal of the day and more. Facebook and its third-party developers are creating e-commerce applications on the site. Meanwhile, retail Websites are bolstering their social commerce features.

“While user ratings and reviews are a mature form of social commerce with proven benefits, e-commerce on social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, is in an early stage,” said Jeffrey Grau, eMarketer senior analyst and author of the new report, “Social Commerce on Facebook, Twitter and Retail Sites.” “People are spending more time on social networks and are able to conduct more of their regular activities on these platforms. E-commerce on social networks has barely tapped that potential.”

But forward-thinking retailers want to bring their Web stores to the environments where their customers like to spend time. As a result, almost three-quarters of the merchants in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide have a presence on at least one of the major social networks or social shopping sites.

Social network users are a highly coveted group of consumers. Across all age brackets, they were more likely than average to make an online purchase, according to a May 2009 survey by Anderson Analytics.

What’s more, social network users are sharing recommendations with greater frequency than generally expected. A Q1 2009 Razorfish survey of social network users found that some 29% reported sharing their views online at least every few weeks, while 10% said they made such contributions at least every few days.

“Leading companies know they cannot afford to wait for customers to visit their sites,” added Mr. Grau. “They need to place their virtual storefronts where their customers congregate. This implies the nature of e-commerce is shifting from a transactional experience to a social one.”

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The full report, “Social Commerce on Facebook, Twitter and Retail Sites” also answers these key questions:

• What is the outlook for social commerce?
• How are marketers engaging customers on social media sites?
• What social shopping features are retailers adding to their sites?
• Which retailers are paving the way in social commerce?

Dear Catalog CEOs: Six Catalog Trends

from Kevin Hilstrom minethedata.com

Hello there, my catalog friends!

These are interesting times, aren't they?

We are truly caught between two eras. The past 100 years were very good to catalog brands. And in five or ten years, there will be a road map for the catalog brand looking to enter the future.

Between the past and the future, that's where we are stuck. We're stuck in a period where, as one business leader recently told me, "nothing works".

We know that's not true. Plenty of things work. But nothing works at a scale necessary to cause optimism.

So let's discuss six important catalog trends that help the catalog brand bridge the past and the future.

Trend #1 = Micro-Targeting: This has been talked about for decades, but we're getting closer to seeing it happen. There simply isn't a need to send a 96 page catalog that has a lot of the merchandise you love to sell when there is this thing out there called the "internet" that also has a lot of the merchandise you love to sell. We're likely to see a 96 page catalog become three or four different 56 page catalogs, with the customer receiving just one of the 56 page offerings. People are using this strategy to generate 95% of the demand on about 60% of the pages --- mathematically, folks, it works! And instead of sending remails, you can send a different 56 page version to a customer a few weeks later. I cannot predict where micro-targeting is going to take us. I can predict that catalogs will get smaller and smaller and smaller, since the website is the store and we don't need to advertise everything anymore. E-mail will continue to progress down the micro-targeting path, with more an more versions that are sent on a triggered basis. Long-term, we'll see the slow death of the "campaign" ... sure, campaigns will be here twenty years from now, but we're headed down a path that cannot be reversed anymore.

Thegies: For the first time Merchants can digitally merchandise product offers and promotions to consumers by category and subcategory communities of interest when they work with the ShoppeSimple Loyalty and Customer Acquisition Tools.

Trend #2 = Filtering: We will see a dramatic change in how a catalog brand views customers. In many of my Multichannel Forensics projects, customers fall into four buckets.

1. Catalog shoppers who order via the telephone.
2. Catalog shoppers who order via the internet.
3. Online shoppers who order because of online marketing.
4. Brand buyers who like the merchandise.

It will take every ounce of energy possible to not mail catalogs to online shoppers and brand buyers. But this will be essential for the catalog brand to survive the transition that is coming/happening. Honestly, if I had to communicate one thing for a cataloger to do right now, it would be to start filtering, immediately. I've been able to generate a half-million to a million dollars of profit achieved for businesses between $30,000,000 and $100,000,000 in size just by doing a reasonable job of filtering. Quite honestly, filtering may be the difference between profit and loss for many catalogers. And psychologically, it isn't easy for a cataloger to transition the mindset from a customer buying because a catalog was sent to her and a customer buying because she loves the product. This transition has to happen, and filtering is a great place to start --- especially from a profit and loss standpoint.

Thegies: Imagine if you can take the above point from Kevin and deliver product messaging (whether it is new arrivals or promotional products) several times a day, 365 days a year without opt-out. At ShoppeSimple YOU Can!. Our client has seen substantial increases in site traffic, a 5X increase in conversion over email and an increase in Average Order Value. To estimate a mature TransactionalRSS (TRSS) program from ShoppeSimple an email program is estimated to be 10% of online revenue. A mature TRSS program is estimated to a 1/3 of email revenue. And if you take 25% of this number and only pay a Pay Per Transaction fee to get the sale, we haven’t had anyone say pass. Check out shoppesimple.com for more information.

Trend #3 = Dynamic Landing Pages: Folks are doing this as well (just hit refresh when you visit Amazon.com). Merchants will submit the items they want to feature, while the rules-based system that feeds e-mail campaigns to customers will fill in the holes with customer preferences. Catalogers will not pursue the algorithmic approaches of their online brethren, and that could be acceptable as long as there is a warm story being told to the customer. Again, this isn't a new idea, but it is one that catalogers will embrace, because catalogers will understand that the merchandising of landing pages is very similar to the merchandising of spreads. In fact, any online strategy that can be made to look, from a process standpoint like, old-time cataloging will be embraced by catalogers.

Thegies: Through the ShoppeSimple Loyalty and Customer Acquisition Tools we build dynamic landing pages for every TransactionalRSS Feed we publish.

Trend #4 = Co-Op Evolution: We're going to see between one and three companies emerge (could be existing catalog co-ops, could be online co-ops, could be the big data providers, could be one of the web analytics companies), companies that focus on evaluating real-time customer behavior. This is a very different strategy than what we see today. Today's catalog co-ops are very good at massaging past purchase history across brands. Tomorrow's co-op leaders will combine web analytics data with offline data and web surfing behavior. You won't pay $0.06 for one-time access to a name. Instead, you'll pay $0.03, and you'll get to pick the contact you wish to employ --- catalog, e-mail, personalized online landing page, etc., or you'll pay $0.15 to employ a multiple micro-channel campaign (catalog + e-mail + online display ads + search optimization + ads on social media platforms). Of course, catalogers will pay about anything for the multiple micro-channel campaign. This will be transformative, especially among catalog brands targeting lapsed buyers.

Trend #5 = Frenemies And Pods: As catalog productivity continues to decline (not yours, but industry-wide), you'll see new and unusual partnerships. Expect to see contact center and distribution center consolidation --- a company in one industry (automotive parts) and a company in another industry (gifts) will share contact center and distribution center resources, human resources, information technology departments, database marketing teams, circulation teams, all in an effort to conserve back-of-the-office expenses. Customer lists and resources will be freely shared across what I call "pods", a half-dozen or dozen frenemies who leverage what each other are good at. Catalogers already share all of their customer data with each other, and private equity firms already consolidate lists and back-of-the-office operations. It's only a matter of time before frenemies form pods.

Thegies: In ShoppeSimple Feeds there are opportunities for merchants to place your ads on the iGoogle/My Yahoo Home pages, on Facebook, Twitter and on Smartphones.

Trend #6 = Organizational Transformation: A generation of catalog marketers, age 50 - 65, are getting ready to retire. Quite simply, this generation will not be replaced by individuals who have the same passion for catalog marketing that the generation of catalogers raised in the 1970 - 1995 timeframe had. During the next ten years, we will see a considerable number of business failures, because a generation of individuals used to communicating with customers age 50+ will be replaced by a generation of leaders ready to market to customers in their 30s and 40s. The disconnect (strategies for young customers, marketed to older customers) will drive down productivity, and result in organizational transformation. Leading catalog companies will recognize this well ahead of time, and will cope by developing new brands that are targeted to a younger audience, led by a younger generation of leaders. Think of a business like, say, Cuddledown of Maine, building a new online brand for a younger demographic, training younger employees to manage this business, so that when a generation of leaders and customers move on to retirement there is an infrastructure ready to replace the core business.

Thegies: We ask our clients what is the strategic and tactical direction regarding Social Media and Mobile and it is surprising how few merchants can share the strategically vision in these areas. But today Shoppesimple can help you monetize both your Social Media and Mobile strategies. Simple checkout RSSCheck.com for answers and contact information. Email info@rsscheck.com

Latest Data on Facebook

Latest Data on Facebook’s US Growth by Age and Gender – October 1, 2009

http://www.insidefacebook.com/2009/10/01/latest-data-on-facebooks-us-growth-by-age-and-gender-october-1-2009/

October 1st, 2009

We’ve been keeping track of Facebook’s self-reported demographic statistics on the US market for a while now, and here’s the latest update for October 1, 2009. While Facebook says these stats, provided to advertisers, are not necessarily real time, they do give us a sense of how Facebook is growing.

On the whole, Facebook’s US audience grew by 8.6% in September to 88.3 million uniques (compare to latest data from Quantcast, Compete, and comScore). Here’s how Facebook’s gender and sex numbers break down as of today:

The Internet Is Finally, Primarily A Content Platform

From siliconalleyinsider.com

It used to be the Web's only real killer app was communications -- email. But these days people use the Internet for content consumption more than anything else.

Users spend 88% more time consuming content on the Internet each month in 2009 (7 hours) than they did in 2003 (3 hours, 42 minutes), according to a study conducted by the Online Publishers Association's Internet Activity Index.

Whereas people used to spend 46% of their Internet time communicating in 2003, in 2009, that number is now down to 27%. As indicated in the chart above, content consumption is up to a 42% share from 34%

ShoppeSimple annoucing new enhancements to TransactionalRSS Feed Analytics Tools

What separates ShoppeSimple? Feeed Analytics. TransactionalRSS's platform enables a merchant to use tools that manage/grow the TRSS channel.

Jump starting your catalog sales with TransactionalRSS -- TRSS

Have you considered using TransactionalRSS (TRSS) starting the week before the drop of the latest catalog drop  through the first few weeks of the catalog mailing to announce your catalog is on the way. The TRSS feeds should focus on on key items from the catalog.  Announcing the catalog mailing and introduction of new collection or products items from the catalog will help jumpstart the book sales.  To learn more check out RSSCheck.com contact us at info@rsscheck.com

iDEAS to BUILD your brand in a continued downturn

Check out this video from http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/24361.asp and then contact ShoppeSimple who can put your New Arrival and New Seasonal Offerings in front of your consumers every day 365 days.

Worried about being to promotional and as a result loosing contribution margin? Then ShoppeSimple can give you a cost affordable way to let your customers know about merchandise you want to show them.

Through ShoppeSimple's TransactionalRSS (TRSS) Content Management System (TCMS) you can now digital merchandise your product line to consumers who have requested to see you merchandise every day

To learn more check out RSSCheck.com and also ShoppeSimple.net for more information email info@RSSCheck.com or phone 612.349.2740

Take a peek at our new online customer acquisition portal at shoppesimple.net

From Federated Media

Boing Boing

Boing Boing attracts more than 5 million unique visitors to its site each month, and has over 600,000 RSS subscribers. This mirrors my experience of email to RSS. The power of TransactionalRSS or TRSS like RSS is not in the collection or growing a massive TRSS subscriber file but in its ability to provide a consumer with promotional or product offerings everyday or multiple product offerings every day 365 days a year.

This is a very different strategic approach then what you tend to do with email subscriber files. thegies