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.
I’m giving Bestbuy.com a C+ for their holiday widget strategy this holiday season. They provided two widgets, one in the form of Yahoo Widgets for your desktop and the second for igoogle. Both are identical in look and functionality. The visual design was well done, although the functionality came up short IMO. Details below.
This is the first view of the widget which allows you to add holidays that you are planning for. I added Christmas and Valentines day. It then also allows you to take notes for each of the holidays you have added to your list.
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I’m not sure I can think of a worse story to come out at Christmas time for a retailer. Right in the middle of the peak of the holiday shopping season, a store manager at Dillards in Texas decided to eject a disabled Marine Iraq war veteran out of the store because he had a service dog with him to help keep his balance.
What was that manager thinking? It’s been in the news and all over the blogosphere. I did some searching to see how many blog posts were out there, but unfortunately couldn’t get an accurate number due to spam in the Google blog index. From a cursory glance, it was quite a bit. Obviously these posts also generated quite a few comments. A post at the Consumerist had 114 comments and 602 Diggs since posting their message and has been viewed more than 18,000 times in less than 3 days.
Word of mouth marketing is working over time on this one.
Along with Walmart putting their secret sales online early this year, other retailers are deciding to release their ads earlier than Thanksgiving. According to an article on ToledoBlade.com, Best Buy will release their ad on Wednesday before Thanksgiving and Meijer has already released their ad including a 37 inch LCD TV for $500. After a quick look at the Meijer site, I couldn’t find the ads. A few links found on black friday sites resulted in a page not found. It looks like they changed their mind after publishing the ad.
I think getting the ads out earlier is an interesting way for smaller retailers to compete with the big box stores. If the retailer isn’t going to be able to get the ad coverage, they might as well get their ads out now, build community mindshare and traffic to their site. They can always leave some exclusives for later in the week.
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.
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.
RedPrairie, an ISV providing supply chain software, releases a viral video on their website and youtube. The premise is pretty good except I kept waiting for the punchline that never seemed to materialize. Clocking in at over 7 minutes it was about 4 minutes too long. Judge for yourself…
I saw this over on Web-Strategist.com back from February and had to add it. It’s a viral video made by Push On an online marketing and SEO company.
The video is at 4,251 views so far on Youtube after 6 months. I would be curious to know how much they spent on making it and the leads that were generated. Regardless, it was fun to watch.
This is Juggernaut traffic! This is not regular Internet traffic!
