Coming off his talk at ChannelAdvisor Catalyst conference, I got a chance to talk with Bing’s Product Marketing Director. The launch of Bing has successfully revitalized the MSN search experience, with a goal of becoming “THE destination for all commerce-related searches,” what will that mean for retailers?
Raju Malhotra is Director of Product Marketing for Bing, Microsoft’s Decision Engine for consumers. He is responsible for the strategy to make Bing as the starting point for all shopping decisions. He manages the customer experience from finding the right product at Bing to buying it at one of Microsoft’s 1200+ participating merchants.
Raju Malhotra is Director of Product Marketing for Bing, Microsoft’s Decision Engine for consumers. He is responsible for the strategy to make Bing as the starting point for all shopping decisions. He manages the customer experience from finding the right product at Bing to buying it at one of Microsoft’s 1200+ participating merchants.
Today the rubber meets the road as sessions kick off at 8:45 am. I actually stayed out too late the night before, thanks to being sponsored by the CEO of TheFind.com, he keep buying the brewskies….Thanks Mr. Kumar
Got up a little late, and had to rush to get showered and dressed, but made it for today’s keynote from Crocks, yep the shoe company. Jay Custard, Global Online Marketing Director for Crocs, who refered to his shoes as “ugly clown shoes” began to detail the rollercoaster ride that has been this company.
After riding a wave up, once the darling shoe fad of a nation. Crocs is now having to fight the battle of being a “fad” and pull themselves out of a bad economy and a slump in sales. He charted the many challenges the company faced and ended with candor, of a company looking for new digital sales opportunities and how they are partnering with e-tail distributers and dabbling in social strategies.
One great takeaway for me was when he said “Crocs has no online ad “budget” Why stop spending if there is ROI? If I give you $1 and you give me $5, why stop?” That my friends, is always a good way to look at marketing opportunities. I hear so many sellers complain about how much it cost to market on sales channels, yet no acknoledment that for every dollar they spend, they STILL get huge retuns. Some days, I just wish they would STFU and move on, hey we all go issues with marketing spend but it is part of the game we signed up for.
The other big sessions were from the two search giants Google and Bing. I dunno, but just about everything they said, I could have found out by reading the help pages for Bing or Google, WTF?!? Although Google did give away 10 Nexus One phones to lucky people sitting in seats with a note taped to the bottom. But other than that, it was pretty uneventful for me, IMHO.
Of course I am a tough crowd, you need to deliver more than fluff to a guys like us who are nuts for conferences. Bing showed me how to use their search engine to plan my travel trips…BUT I am at an eCommerce conference?!? And Google talked about how cool their search looks for cameras…Zzzzzzz.
No mention about how they were going to make it easier for retailers, no talk about Google CheckouteBay Getting More Serious About Advertising | WebProNews and not a peep about retail analytics. But hey, in case you lived on Mars and have no kids, you may not be aware that many people use their cellphones to do searches, that was the “hot news” LMAO!
So remember this one guys, if you got nothing big to speak to ecommerce sellers, you can speak about how I can get more data to help us sell. That is a great topic for search guys to cover. But you also can giveaway free stuff and the crowd will love it.
After today’s activities, I need a drink! But that was not a problem, because they had the HOTTEST party on the patio last night sponsored by eBay (can you name the eBay exec pictured below?)
ChannelAdvisor threw a “Quatro” de Mayo (4th of May) because we would not be there on the 5th . They had killer margaritas an open bar and a mariachi band. Food was authentic mexican style and the fun was on. They even had a photo booth to take crazy shots of you. This was a primo time!
As the malls look like virtual ghost towns, ok not that bad, but really low traffic to be Christmas time. The real bright spot for retail seems to be online shopping. Yesterday, I was watching the bidding for customers heating up on Bing.com as retailers are giving HUGH discounts to customers buying from Bing.
So here are the secrets that I found, and with these techniques you can get up to 25% cash back with Bing.com and the following merchants.
The key is to do the following to get these crazy deals…
Walmart 20% off any purchase
Go to Bing.com
Search for "Walmart"
It should come up in the sponsored results
Now you can navigate anywhere in the Walmart site and qualify for the cash
I saw this move from 15% to 20% over the weekend!
eBay 20% off any purchase
Go to Bing.com
Search for "panasonic"
It should come up in the sponsored results
Once you are on eBay, you can shop anywhere else on the site and get the discount too.
Macy’s 25% off any purchase
Go to Bing.com
Search for "blenders"
It should come up in the sponsored results
Now you can navigate anywhere in the Macy’s site and qualify for the cash
One of the key SEO "myths" is normally the importance of good meta tags for search ranking. SEO companies still to this day will call my office and tell me they can rank our site high by "optimizing my meta keywords". Some days when I am bored, I will drill them like I do other so-called "experts" on the bulls**t nature of their selling points. Other days, I get my joys buy just hanging up on them…LMAO
At one point in time the keyword meta tags had an impact on a web site’s position within the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS). Now the keywords tag has little impact on where a site will appear in the search results.
Why? Well that answer is simply…Once upon a time, keyword meta was used to rank a site, then soon every webmaster began to OVERUSE them oftentimes. Therefore, the search engines began to place less importance on them. And now, at least for Google’s web search results currently (September 2009), the reality is that Google could care less. Google doesn’t use the "keywords" meta tag in their web search ranking.
Suppose you have two website owners, Alice and Bob. Alice runs a company called AliceCo and Bob runs BobCo. One day while looking at Bob’s site, Alice notices that Bob has copied some of the words that she uses in her "keywords" meta tag. Even more interesting, Bob has added the words "AliceCo" to his "keywords" meta tag. Should Alice be concerned?
Matt Cutt’s (Google Software Engineer) video explains more…
Well I had so MANY positive comments yesterday from all the Mythbuster fans, I figure I can wring one more use out of the reference, LMAO. I have been hearing all the rumors about how Bing jump to prominence in such a short time that it became bigger thank CNN, Digg and even Twitter in no time. Well, the folks at Go-Digital.net put the myth to the test.
According to Go-Digtal.net Microsoft actually redirected all of its traffic from Live.com and MSN.com to the Bing URL which accounts for all the hyper traffic.
Using another web site to prove this, this graph shows how MakeoverSolutions changed its name to DailyMakeover.com to show how this looks on a Compete.com charting. This is what it looks like when a site changes domain names and redirects all traffic from the old site. By next month Compete will show the same “X” formation graphing for Live.com vs Bing.com
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This current chart already shows the decline from Live.com’s traffic stats after being entirely redirected to Bing.
Coming off his talk at ChannelAdvisor Catalyst conference, I got a chance to talk with Bing’s Product Marketing Director. The launch of Bing has successfully revitalized the MSN search experience, with a goal of becoming “THE destination for all commerce-related searches,” what will that mean for retailers? 
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