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I am a HUGE fan of the Discovery channel show called MythBusters. What they do is they take a myth and they put it to a test. When they do their tests, they set up some parameters and then report the results.
Based on the resulting data they come to a conclusion on if the myth was plausible or if it is BUSTED! Hence the name of the show "MythBusters"
Well there is a mythical story surrounding the "eBay alternative" site called Bonanzle that has been permeating for about a year and I decided to put it to an pretty un-scientific test for fun and profit.
vs.
Back in the latter part of 2008 and early in 2009 the buzz on Bonanzle (founded in 2008) was pretty HOT! During that same period of time (August 2008) eBay announced its NEW Fixed Priced 30 listings. But for me, 4th quarter is NOT the time for digging into new things, so I kind of ignored them both really.
Fast forward to February of 2009 and that is when I got a hankering to see what all the noise was about. So I got a wild idea of just putting up some stuff over there on Bonanzle and on eBay as a FP30 listing both at the same time and then track the results. This is a quick video that summarizes the results I got.
Disclaimer
: This study was NOT conducted by the New York Institute of Blah…blah…blah. The test results are NOT certified by Loopy, Duppy and Wow, LLc. esquire. The tester, John Lawson is NOT an expert at ANYTHING other than talking ‘ish (I have a certified degree in ‘ish talking from the School of Hard Knocks). The STATEMENT:
"I reject your reality and substitute my own" …Adam Savage (MythBusters)
The RESULTS:
- Is this a case of David vs. Goliath? Possibly, although the David in this story did not seem to possess a slingshot or a rock. Had eBay not even been in the test it really would NOT have made a bit of difference. The resulting sales on Bonanzle were a desert…dry, dry, dry.
- We only came up with 2 sales in six months? I was honestly SHOCKED and truly disappointed! I really wanted to make sales and see this platform as a viable secondary option.
- If you are going to spend time "self promoting" (Optimization, Adwords, Google Base, etc.) something, I honestly think a focus on trying ones hand at a web store first might actually yield greater results. I think 2 sales in 6 months could be beat with just about ANY ecommerce web store solution, even with one of those low cost turnkey cut and paste out the box solutions.
- Was my test "fair"? NOPE, it was a damn "pop quiz"! And just like it was in high school…if you fail a pop quiz, you can always tell your parents it was the teachers fault, LMAO.
The CHALLENGE:- If you have RESULTS that differ or are the same, PLEASE feel free to place them in the comments section. I welcome all results and it is good to have them from as many people as possible.
- Go out and try a test of your own and see if you get some results. I think a cool test would now be to set up your own web store versus a Bonanzle booth and see what happens?!? Can a fresh ecommerce store yield as many sales as a Bonanzle store?
The Bonanzle Myth:
Game on, baby! Let’s work.
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I do not think I could write this out if I had too. My ability to express myself in words and prose is limited to about 140 characters. So now you understand why I love Twitter so much
So here it is, my theory of the most perfect example of social marketing was revealed to me while watching a bee in the flowers. This is by far the MOST POWERFUL analogy of social marketing I have found. And low and behold I found it by watching a bee do its thang!
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Do you still like to visit and chat on the chat boards? I do, I love to participate in several of them. While all the bells and whistles of Web 2.0 do not really translate well to Forums due to the limitations of BB Code (see below), you can still get some cool things expressed using simple markup tags.
Please Rate My Video with 5-Stars DSR’sBulletin Board Code or BBCode is a lightweight markup language used to format posts in many message boards. The available tags are usually indicated by square brackets surrounding a keyword, and they are parsed by the message board system before being translated into a markup language that web browsers understand—usually HTML or XHTML.
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I want all of you to have a safe and HAPPY 4th of July weekend. If you got a quick minute, please check out the video. I got some Twitter Glitter that is suppose to be satisfaction guaranteed!
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I am digging this video from Richard Brewer-Hay who is the top corporate blogger for eBay.com. He is by far the coolest dude in the organization (I got video to back that up
) and he is very savvy when it comes to social media.Richard is trailblazing the trends for corporate blogging and he is doing things and going where NO ONE has gone before at eBay. His influence on the way information is being handled at eBay is SIGNIFICANT! He is helping a once "ivory tower" organizational policy for communication, transform to a more open and inviting place.
Sure, it will take time and he is defiantly fighting "old school" corporate communication mentality, but I think his shoulders are broad enough to handle the task.
Richard Brewer-Hay - Bio - Corporate Blogger
Richard has more than a decade of communications, marketing and production experience. In January, 2008, he joined eBay as Chief Blogger to direct its social media initiatives and launch "eBay Ink,” where he captures and shares his insights and perspective on the company and provides another conduit for corporate communications.
Richard launched the ebayinkblog Twitter feed in June, 2008 that allowed eBay to become the first Fortune 500 company to live-blog financial announcements and earnings’ calls via Twitter. In March, 2009 Richard introduced the first social media guidelines for corporate disclosure for both blogging and micro-blogging.
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UPDATE: As of approx. 2:11 pm et. Authorize.net has reported that processing is BACK ONLINE, while the website, is still experiencing some recovery.I and MANY other internet retailers use services for credit card processing. Today due to a MAJOR fire Authorize.net, our credit card processor, is completely offline.
Many sites hosted at Seattle’s Fisher Plaza are offline amid widespread reports of a “significant fire event” at the facility. The largest impact has been downtime at the payment portal Authorize.net, which has been offline for hours, meaning that its merchants have been unable to process credit card payments through their web sites.
I woke to the world of Twitter bursting with the news that Authorize.net was DOWN! After communication was disrupted on their servers, Authorize.net officials quickly created a Twitter ID for the company to communicate status. At this hour things are STILL DOWN for the processor and I am sure millions of $$$ are being lost for retailers.
The vice president of operations for Fisher Communications Inc., Rob Dunlop, says a fire at an electrical vault broke out around 11 p.m. Thursday, forcing the evacuation of the building.Elevators were running on generator power but everything else was candle-lit when an electrical fire at Fisher Plaza blew up the Belltown grid shortly before midnight last night. Power’s back on at Seattlest International Headquarters high atop Second Avenue, but not at the various websites hosted on servers at Fisher.
The fire at Fisher Plaza disrupted television and radio stations that broadcast from the building near the Seattle Center and affected a server farm that provides service to multiple Web sites.
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On of the great people I got a chance to meet and speak with during the PeSA Summit was Chuck Hester who is a master of communicating and using Linked-In. Chuck is the Communications Director with iContact and was really cool dude and knew his stuff.
I was honored to be able to host a Social Media panel discussion that included (from L to R) Brent Leary, Jay Berkowitz, Chuck Hester, and James Wong. All of these great minds in social media converged in Atlanta for the Ecommerce Summit and it was on the the highly rated and talked about session at that event.
Check out this great interview that Mr. Hester just did with the folks at Ragan.com. Listen to Chuck share his secrets on how to effectively use Linked-In to connect to any industry expert and leverage that connection to THEIR advantage, which in turn can lead to great things for yourself. This is what social media is about.
BRAVO Chuck! That’s some gooooood yummy stuff, LMAO
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I do this ALL the time to simply make my widget get that uniform look, so check it out, you might like it…
PLEASE Rate My Video with 5-Stars DSR!!!
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In today’s world there is a "hyper-network" taking place. We are all hyper networking thanks to social services, both on personal and business levels. By network I mean people who know you, like you and trust you.
The new issue with this hyper networking is that suddenly people are always trying to "keep track" of all of their networkers, for lack of a better term. What I mean is that suddenly people are now seeing if you re-tweet everything they say. Or did you post a back link to their blog post. How many times did you recognize them on a "Twitter follow Friday". That is NOT networking!
Let go and STOP taking score all the time. Stop looking to always come out ahead in a relationship. The concept of what we know as "win-win" is just a disguised way to keep track. Making constantly sure the we come out "even Steven" When you base your relationships in business or in life on "who owes who" or I scratched your back now you scratch mine. That is NOT being a friend, that is being a creditor.
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It looks like eBay may be taking steps in the right direction for search. No, these are NOT baby steps, it looks like a GIANT leap forward in direction could be underway.
According to Andy Beal on Seeking Alpha it seems Microsoft has lost Hugh Williams to eBay! Hugh was the Microsoft Bing product development manager and he quit to take a job at eBay. From LinkedIn:
I managed the development of all user-facing web search relevance features, including the left-rail explore pane (with its "table of contents"), navigational query treatments, query-biased summaries, "deeplinks", related searches, and whole page results relevance. Additionally, I managed the Powerset team in San Francisco.
I also managed the end-to-end development of Internet Explorer 8’s suggested sites feature, image search, video search, news search, xrank, and almost all instant answers (such as the encarta, news, images, and so on).
Hugh played a large part in the development of the new Bing search engine for Microsoft and he was very instrumental in the development of Internet Explorer 8. It seems that Mr. Williams has and EXTREMELY impressive resume as well…
Work
- I was a Partner at Microsoft and a Development Manager in the Bing search engine team from 2005 to 2009
- I was the Associate Professor in Information Retrieval at RMIT University from 1994 to 2004
- I wrote software for my own company from 1990 to 1997
- Download a short resume (in PDF format) or see my profile at LinkedIn
Research
- My areas of expertise are Search Engines, Information Retrieval, and Computational Biology
- I’ve published 3 books, 2 book chapters, 20 journal papers, 44 conference papers, and several other works. I have roughly 25 patents pending
- Here is a list of my publications. A partial list is also available at the DBLP
- At RMIT University, I advised twelve PhD graduates
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