Shop.org Blog

You may be surprised to hear this, but MySpace drives more traffic to online retail sites than the third largest search engine, Live Search (formerly MSN Search).
 
Actually, it makes a lot of sense that MySpace would be such a major traffic generator. It is, after all, the most popular website having exceeded Yahoo! in all of its properties, according to recent Hitwise data. It is bound to happen that MySpace users are going to comment about and mention in their profiles various online retailers, their products and their services. But we as online retailers are only scratching the surface of what is possible because we have not yet truly seized the marketing opportunity that MySpace represents.
 

A savvy retailer will have created a profile for themselves in MySpace, developed a large network of friends, developed bulletins to send out to those friends, posted comments on some of the more influential friends’ profiles and encouraged comment posting on their own profile. They would have incorporated links to top selling products but in a soft sell sort of way. They would have made their profile stand out from the crowd with a custom layout –yet not varying it too much to cause the MySpace visitors to become disoriented and unable to navigate.
 

If you think that MySpace is just a hangout for kids you would be wrong. More than half of MySpace users are over 35. The infiltration by adults has gotten “so bad” that all the kids are leaving MySpace in droves — switching to Bebo where the adults are few and far between. Yes, the income-earning, money-wielding adults have staged a coup and taken over MySpace! And that is great news for us online retailers!
 

In my recent MarketingProfs article I shared some examples of retailers who are marketing effectively in MySpace. This includes a client of my company Netconcepts — namely Pugster.com, an online jewelry retailer. Their MySpace profile boasts a network of over 8000 “Friends”! They use their mascot, Pinky the pug dog, as the profile owner. They spend time daily reaching out to build relationships with their friends on MySpace. They make sure that when they make contact, it is personal and not salesy. They give their visitors something interesting to read, do and listen to on their profile. It is not about over-the-top selling.
 

There are definitely tricks to this MySpace thing. For example, how do you get to 8000 friends? The answer, once you know it, is surprisingly simple… You start with bands! There are tons of bands on MySpace and what band would refuse a friend request? After all, you might be a rabid fan, despite what your profile says about you. It is very easy to have friend requests granted with bands.  Once you have the numbers (e.g. a thousand or more), it makes it a lot easier to develop friends with more desirable MySpace users — i.e those who are more in your target market.
 

Just remember, as in the real world, having no friends in MySpace makes you look like a loser.

The NRF’s 96^th (yes, 96^th!) Annual Convention and Expo took place at the Javits Center in New York this week.  Congratulations to NRF for a great event and record-breaking attendance. 

The NRF Big Show brings together C-level executives from major retailers.  The themes at the event reflect the current or soon-to-be strategic priorities of big retail. Therefore, it’s worth thinking about the type of strategies and trends being discussed at this event and how your online or multichannel initiatives can support them.

There were a number of themes swirling around the 15,000+ retail professionals who gathered for this annual event.  Retail technology is always at the center of this show, however, this year, one of the most interesting technology themes and the one that I believe is most relevant to multichannel retailing was the emphasis on in-store technology – Web-based and otherwise – focused on the store shopping experienced.  It’s a huge, multi-faceted show and it’s impossible to see everything, but, below are some relevant highlights.

• While Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer’s keynote address on Monday morning lacked the sweating, screaming and jumping that I was hoping for, he did paint a vivid picture of a future shopping experience in which customers’ wireless devices are used to give them a route through the store based on their shopping list.  He referenced a number of other in-store technologies to provide selling assistance and simplified payment.
• Circuit City CEO Philip Schoonover showed how his company is making the most of their best store associates.  Populating stores with well-trained associates with deep product knowledge is an ongoing challenge for retailers.  In his example, kiosks in the store connect customers to store associates with specialized product expertise via videoconference.  He gave another example of a store associate using Web-based parametric search on a tablet PC to help a customer select the flat screen TV that best meets their needs (as well as all of the related high-margin installation and warranty options).  The tablet PC interface was clearly inspired by Circuit City’s online site search, which makes you wonder what other online innovations could be repurposed for other parts of retail.
• My favorite demonstration, however, was something called “social retailing” featured in the X07 Store of the Future area of the exhibit hall.  The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinal did a nice story on this complete with the necessary photographs.  The demonstration, developed by digital agency IconNicholson, is described as a mash up of “social computing and near-field communications technologies with youth shopping habits.”  Imagine a teenager trying on a new outfit, coming out of the fitting room and then standing in a area where a Web cam sends streaming video to a social networking site where people vote a “thumbs-up” or “thumbs-down” on the outfit and use IM and text messages to send comments such as “makes you look like rock star!”  This reminds me of an online scenario depicted by Kelly Mooney in her Digital Millenials keynote address at the Shop.org Annual Summit last October.  Interestingly, the person giving the demo described the application as bringing the online retail experience to the store!  If only such sophisticated online shopping experiences were widespread today.

Please feel free to share your ideas for how the online or multichannel retail initiatives can support efforts to improve the in-store shopping experience.

I’m curious to know if Shop.org retailers were pleased or disappointed with their search campaigns over the holidays.

Some folks weren’t: Ice.com, for example, publicly shared their disappointment with their PPC conversion (see “Ice.com CEO Disses Google, Yahoo; Suggests Cut In Online Ad Spend“).

“They [Google and Yahoo] both proved to be extremely poor marketing tools for ICE.com and many of our retail friends. This was most evident during this most crucial time of the year, the holiday shopping season. Traffic from these portals were up cpc’s (cost per ad click) were up but conversions were way down.” — Shmuel Gniwisch

Hearing this, we analyzed our client’s holiday results as a group several different ways.

At least for our clients, search typically performed extremely well over the 2006 holiday period.

We found 86% of our clients enjoyed strong conversion increases, averaging 40% positive bumps in sales per click. (Data on our blog: “Was Holiday 2006 Good To Pay-Per-Click Advertisers?“) We looked across our clients another way, and found they typically enjoyed strong increases in click volume, click cost, click conversion, and (most important) click profitability. (See “Holiday 2006 PPC Clicks: High Traffic, High Conversion, High Profitability“).

Feels almost too obvious to blog that online conversion soared at the holidays — like blogging that the sky is blue.

So, let me toss it out to the shop.org blog readers:

How were your search results over the holiday?

With or without sharing numbers, did the search channel over- or under-perform for you?

– Alan

This week, Second Life open-sourced their client browser.  I agree with them that this move was inevitable (and smart), and I think it will lead to accelerating adoption as well as linkages of Second Life to 2D Web, “real-life” experiences (like MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Yelp, Google Checkout, and the many others).  We are already seeing many linkages to social networking profiles via ProfileLinker and others.

Again, Second Life may not be the 3D Web to survive - it is very early in the adoption curve and it all depends on their execution (the good, old basics of business).  But this move should be the spark needed to fuel further interest in the 3D Web as the next-generation medium for shopping, browsing, and socially connecting.  Just look at what happened with FireFox, based on the open-source Mozilla Project.  It now represents over 4.5% of all Web browsers in use.  That may seem like a small number, but remember how many people are online now (over 1 billion).  And don’t count the market-share leader, Microsoft, out in adopting the 3D Web.

At last year’s Shop.org Multichannel Executive Symposium, Tony Lenk said that today’s 2D Web is like shopping in a store one square foot at a time.  I think that is a little extreme (site search from Endeca and Mercado, to name just one example, help you instantenously find what you are looking for as opposed to hunting for it in a store).  But he makes a good point, and his recent DHTML enhancements to Gap were designed to make online shopping more tactile (and it paid off).  Second Life and its 3D Web successors will definitely improve online shopping in a major way.  Remember that scene in The Matrix where Neo says, “guns, lots of guns”, and the endless row of guns comes streaming by in real-time?  Kind of like that… but smarter.  The key is adoption (wide availability and easy installation), speed (Second Life needs a heavy-duty machine and bandwidth to run well), and a relentless focus on serving their users well (Mark Cuban says it well).

If you missed my in-depth Word-of-Mouth Wisdom interview with Giff Constable, who builds a 3D, virtual presence for businesses in Second Life, you can read that here.