Variable Markup

As Groucho Marx once said, “I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member”

I recently set myself up with an account on Facebook, having previously restricted my activities to work-orientated sites, such as LinkedIn.  I had followed social networking from the sidelines until this point.  However, I have been very aware of how social networking has profoundly changed the way that we interact on the web.  I decided it was time to try it out for myself.

I have watched Facebook’s meteoric rise over recent years. During that time it has seen off competitors such as Bebo, MySpace and FriendsReunited and managed to find its own distinct niche alongside Twitter.  The speed at which Facebook  has achieved market dominance in social networking is even faster than Google managed to dominate internet search.

Having joined the social networking movement quite late, I decided on a “total immersion” approach and visited several other social websites to experience the breadth of options available.  I was also keen to get a sense of what might be coming next.

New social websites are constantly springing up based upon interesting ideas.  I have seen specialists, such as the location-based, FourSquare, the questionnaire-based Hunch and even open-source rivals such as Diaspora.  It will be interesting to see if any of these can these seriously challenge Facebook.  However, perhaps the biggest enemy of Facebook – is itself.

Facebook could begin suffer as it travels through the adoption curve, moving from being a new idea to part of the Establishment.  In time-honoured fashion, the young people tend to leave when their parents (and grandparents) are joining the same website.  There is evidence that young people are leaving Facebook and their fastest growing demographic is now the over 55s.  There is a serious problem that Facebook could become ‘un-cool’ for the new generation over the next few years.

Even if this does not happen, we are likely to see a gradual splintering of social networking.  This happens in many new markets as they mature and develop new business models.  It is difficult for Facebook to remain “all things, to all people” under such pressure.  We could see the generalists rivals take back market share, while other members defect to niche players with specific communities.  Perhaps the biggest indicator that Facebook is on the wane is that ‘late-adopters’ like myself are now joining.

When talking to retailers about their online strategy, the topics lately have been about rich Internet application interfaces like AJAX, Flash or Silverlight and social functionality like consumer product reviews.    Despite personally enjoying these topics,  I often try to bring the conversation around to the basics to make sure the retailer has done the basic things like implement accurate real time inventory visibility and accurate tracking through an order management system and set of processes.    Nothing creates a sub par customer experience more than messing up the basic fundamentals of what consumers have come to expect when shopping, tracking, and receiving their order.  The experience I had with Barnes and Noble last week illustrates this pretty well.

My wife was speaking with our daughter’s 4th grade teacher and she told my wife that she wanted to have the class read The Westing Game before school was released for the summer.  Unfortunately, the school library only had a few copies so my wife and I decided to purchase the needed books and donate them to the school.  We spent the following weekend visiting a few book stores and bought all of the copies they had, but we were still short about 10 copies.  (continue reading…)

There’s a good article over at Advertising Age describing profiles of consumers who use Social Media.  Here are a couple of the profiles, for the rest, check out the article.

 ”SOCIALLY ISOLATED
These people are generally unhappy with their lives and feel alone. Not surprisingly, they fall at average or below average for e-mailing. But that doesn’t mean they eschew social media. In fact, they’re 12% more likely than the average person to use blogs, message boards or social-networking sites. They also post comments on blogs at least twice a month; personal, music, consumer-product and video-game blogs are most visited. ”

 ”BRAND-LOYAL
This group shies away from buying unknown brands just for a bargain and prefers to buy brand-name goods. They’re very average social-media users, but some subjects of interest drive them to social media more than the average person: They’re 21% more likely to read environmental blogs and 22% more likely to use professional-networking sites to make new contacts. ”

There are 9 profiles in all.

Sorry, I haven’t been posting much the last couple weeks.  Between travel and moving my blog from my old host to a new one because of service issues, my time has been sparse.   I came across this presentation “The future of advertising” and it talks about old marketing vs. new marketing and has some great quotes from leaders in the space.  Definitely worth checking out. 

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I haven’t been writing much over the past couple weeks because I’ve been focused on developing a new mashup app that will track the top 500+ ecommerce sites on the web.    Trying to keep up with what the top companies are doing is always a difficult and time consuming task so I decided to pull information together in one place.   I’ve written a few spiders as well as some mashup code with Compete, ZoomInfo, and Google API’s to build a dossier on each of the best sites. 

Please check out The Top Ecommerce Sites and let me know what you think. 

Currently I’m tracking on each site:

• Snapshots of the home page
• Google Page Rank
• Backlinks from major search engines
• Traffic via Compete
• Company data from ZoomInfo
• Types of technology used and sizes (i.e. html, images, flash, javascript)
• User submitted comments and reviews
• 1-5 Star ratings submitted by users
• References in the Blogosphere
• Google News

(continue reading…)

The first content oriented keynote at shop.org was given by Kelly Mooney, President and Chief Experience Officer of Resource Interactive, a leading interactive marketing services firm.  Kelly’s talk centered around the idea of OPEN brands which stands for O – On demand, P – Personal, E – Engaging, N – Networked.   She pointed out that marketing strategy around brands is changing in which the consumer is affecting your brand through blogs, reviews, and social linking.  Brand owners need to determine if they are going to remain closed or embrace the consumer forces.  Kelly and other folks from Resource Interactive have written a book on the subject called the OPEN Brandwhich is due out in October in ebook form and print in December.  I’m definitely going to pick it up when it’s available.

(continue reading…)

shop.org in underway and it’s grown 10x in the last 6 years.  6 Years ago, shop.org had about 200 attendees and for 2007 the unofficial attendee number is about 2000 consisting of about 500 retail organizations with a 70% larger exhibit hall than last year.  The show is focusing on 4 main areas that were requested by its membership. 

1.  Analytics
2. Merchandising for conversions
3. Search & SEO
4. Web 2.0

I’ve got to get back to the show, but later tonight I’ll cover the main points from the keynotes and what I’ve heard and learned.  Looks like it’s going to be a great event.

Walmart launched a Facebook group to capitalize on the college crowd using social networking technologies.  Walmart’s group includes a javascript app that allows Facebook users who visit the Wal-Mart group to take a quiz to determine their decorating style and get a list of “recommended products” they can buy at Wal-Mart to combine their style with their roommate’s.  The quiz works like a simplistic Myers-Briggs personality test and from that it determines products that fit that style. 

A study conducted last year by the National Retail Federation shows the average first-year college student spent $1,112.62, mainly on electronics and home furnishings.  Walmart hopes to capitalize on this and it’s new “Site to Store” offering which allows consumers to order on the web and pick up in the store.  (continue reading…)