» social media

Consumers’ increasing appetite for mobile applications is driving online retailers to speed up their mobile marketing initiatives. According to a Forrester Research, Inc. (Nasdaq: FORR) study produced in partnership with Shop.org, the National Retail Federation’s digital division, nearly three-quarters (74 percent) of online retailers either already have or are developing a mobile strategy. One in five boasts having a fully implemented mobile strategy in place already. The survey of 109 companies is part of The State of Retailing Onlineresearch series, which provides eBusiness professionals with an annual industry benchmark for marketing and business investment and activities.

“It’s imperative for online retailers to stay on top of what their customers want, and these days it’s all mobile all the time,” said Scott Silverman, executive director, Shop.org. “Mobile commerce has tremendous potential and will no doubt grow to become a significant part of overall sales volume in years to come. Whether to increase customer satisfaction, grow their brand, or drive traffic and sales, online retailers are in this game to stay.”

“Mobile investment is modest now, but we see that it will pick up in the future, especially among the biggest brands that have already invested significant amounts in their mobile operations,” said Sucharita Mulpuru, vice president, principal analyst, Forrester Research, and lead author of the report.

Earlier this year, Forrester forecast US online retail sales to total $173 billion in 2010. According to “The State Of Retailing Online: Marketing, Social Commerce and Mobile Report,” Web retailers with mobile strategies:

• Are investing in features that support the cross-channel experience. Product and price information, store information, and coupons to support the in-store experience are among the most popular features that retailers are offering consumers.
• Have varied levels of investment. On average, respondents anticipated spending $170,000 on their mobile sites this year, large multichannel retailers are spending several times that amount, while smaller online pure plays on average are investing much less.
• Are experiencing modest gains. Retailers reported that their mobile browsers at this juncture are generating a little less than 3 percent of overall site traffic and just 2 percent of revenue.

Marketing And Social Media

Tried and true marketing tactics such as paid search, email, and affiliate marketing command the biggest percentage of an online retailers’ marketing budget. According to the report, retailers are spending nearly 40 percent of their marketing budget on paid search.

Retailers are finding value in social media marketing, but the ROI for driving online sales remains murky. Listening to customers is the most significant objective for social tools according to respondents, with 80 percent of retailers reporting that they are pursuing social strategies to experiment and learn. And while 28 percent noted that social marketing has helped grow their business, direct sales from social tactics are not widely measured.

“The State of Retailing Online: Marketing, Social Commerce and Mobile Report” is available to Shop.org members and can also be purchased directly at www.shop.org/soro. Forrester clients will be able to access the report as part of their subscription service one month from publication.

That my friends is the million dollar question. Actually the funny thing about the question is there is NO answer! Yet companies are already spending millions to get into the game. Recently I did my talk about how “Social Media For Business Sucks” and put up the video for the entire talk. The key to this whole industry was laid out from my perspective as a social media ‘evangelist’

Now available for FREE download is the all new 2010 Social Media Marketing Industry Report from Michael Stelzner. In this report there are details about how marketers are using social media to grow leads and business. This study set out to understand how marketers are using social media to grow and promote their businesses.

• The top 10 social media questions marketers want answered: We analyzed
  nearly 1356 open-ended responses and summarized all the major questions that
  marketing pros want answered.
• The time commitment: We examined the weekly hours marketers invest in their
  social media efforts. This analysis will be helpful for marketers just getting
  started or seeking support staff.
• The benefits of social media marketing: This rather beefy section reveals all
  the major advantages marketers are achieving with their social media efforts. We
  also look at how time invested and experience enhances the benefits.
• Commonly used social media tools: Wondering which social media tools
  marketers are using the most? Those questions are answered, along with an
  examination of which tools experienced folks are using.
• Social media tools people want to learn more about: In this section, we
  examine the up-and-coming tools that marketers are most interested in learning
  about.
• Other analysis: We also examine social media outsourcing and smartphone
  marketing. In addition, we take a look at how B2B (business to business)
  companies vary from B2C (business to consumer) companies and whether the
  size of a business has any bearing on results. We also highlight significant
  changes since our 2009 study.

To download a FREE copy of this insightful study, simply click HERE and download the PDF. Get an 5-minute overview of the report from the author by watching the video below…

This explains it all, I simply am not able to communicate it better. I said it too that social media relevancy must come with some defects. These are all areas for improvement in our use of these tools. I love the freedoms that social media has made common to us all as a vehicle. But this is too damn funny not to post here on ColderICE.com

Social networking has been growing exponentially and throughout that speedy process newer and newer platforms have been evolving and making a name for themselves in small niches. Marketers have realized there is money in this evolution and they are targeting it more than ever. As eCommerce merchants we need to embrace the growing change and the need to be “informed” and target our audience through the free spaces that exist like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. The only investment needed is time and resources as you continue to grow.

Social Commerce is defined as the relationship and fusion of eCommerce and social media together to help buyers and sellers make better purchasing decisions online. This combination is the next generation of interaction between buyers and sellers.

Take a look at these studies and see for yourself what respondents had to say.  And then ask yourself if you feel the same way.

According to Bazaarvoice:

“81 percent of respondents said they’d received advice from friends and followers relating to a product purchase through a social site; 74 percent of those who received such advice found it to be influential in their decision. 90% of consumers online trust recommendations from people they know…

Friends still play an important role in influencing consumers; 83 percent of online shoppers said they are interested in sharing information about their purchases with people they know, while 74 percent are influenced by the opinions of others in their decision to buy the product in the first place…

Users put great trust in their social networks…respondents said they considered information shared on their networks when making a decision…

Facebook, blogs, Twitter and customer reviews are considered the most effective tactics for mobilizing consumers to talk up products online…

Recommendations from family and friends trump all other consumer touch points when it comes to influencing purchases …Consumers trust friends above experts when it comes to product recommendation”

Users are finding the value in sharing online. They feel safer and they can trust that their friends can help them make better buying decisions. Helping a friend and/or follower make a purchase online is one of the best ways to build advocacy online and throughout your social networks. Try sharing one of your listings with your Facebook friends or Twitter followers and watch the interactions that happen. People are interested in what you are buying and selling and if they need it they are going to feel more comfortable buying it from you. What’s even more powerful is sharing a purchase you made with friends, pointing them in the right direction for the next purchase they may make online.

People love to share themselves and share their experiences with those who care to listen. It is human nature. In the eCommerce space buyers want to feel comfortable buying from sellers and sellers want to feel confident that they are targeting qualified buyers who want what they have to sell. Being uncomfortable has been one of the most important inhibitors that have existed over the last 10 years in the e-commerce space.

TEST: Ask a friend online or follower for some advice on a purchase or a product and see how they respond. Check and see who else responds too.

Just take a look at the graph depiction below on advertising. An overwhelming amount of the respondents trust recommendations from people they know.

About the author: Fredrick Nijm is the co-founder of Addoway, a free social marketplace that helps you buy and sell with your   friends and the people they know.

Addoway helps online merchants utilize social commerce to grow their online business, while providing shoppers with great deals from people they trust. Addoway accomplishes this by providing merchants with a unique web store builder and social marketplace where shoppers can utilize their social graph to identify trustworthy merchants to buy from.

I am so all over the recent push of new tools from Facebook. The boy faced billionaire CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg outlined a series of simplified and more seamless experiences for users with the Facebook Open Graph platform during Facebook’s F8 developers conference in San Francisco.

These social plug-ins, which are dropped into sites and allow the user to see which of your friends like content around the Web, will make Facebook applications a lot more social, said Zuckerberg, without sharing any unnecessary data.

There are now more than 400 million people on Facebook, four times as many as there were the last time Facebook held an F8 event. It took Facebook only a year for Facebook Connect to have 100 million users on both mobile devices and Web sites.

"These connections aren’t just happening on Facebook, they’re happening all over the Web, and today with the Open Graph we’re bringing all these things together," Zuckerberg said.

This is something that will go far beyond the "news feed" structure that Facebook pioneered several years ago. "The stream is ephemeral. You post something to the stream and people see it for a few hours and then it mostly floats away," Zuckerberg said of the current craze in real-time streaming information–a possible dig at Twitter, the company that ignited it all and has been encroaching upon Facebook territory with its own "@Anywhere" product.

"We’re going to make it possible to make those connections," Zuckerberg said. For example, a "news feed" item about a Yelp review of a restaurant could bring up more information about the restaurant and which of a user’s Facebook friends have been there.

"We’re going to connect all of those different graphs together to form the Open Graph, and when we connect all of those graphs together, the Web is going to get a whole lot better," Zuckerberg said.

 

  

So of course I had to see what the hell the dude what talking about and WOW! Look above. I am loving these new plug ins that work so easily. Above are two of the Facebook social plugins you can add called Activity Feed and the Recommendations one…also at the bottom of the post you will see the NEW Like button which is a huge improvement over the old Fan buttons. If you want to see this in action here is what you can do…

1) Press the like button below to ad your "like" to this post

2) Refresh the page and look at the Recent Activity and you should see your action IN REAL TIME

This is so freakin sweet isn’t it? Facebook will NOT be left behind in social media and it is quickly becoming my favorite social platform of choice…this week, LMAO. Next week I am sure I will change again.

?I’m writing this immediately after spending about 2 hours playing around with wibiya, so please excuse my excitement—but greatest thing since sliced bread definitely comes to mind!

I’d seen the bar around on other websites (including this one, look down) but wasn’t sold on it because I was convinced it’d slow down my site.  Well, the other night I watched to my buddy John Lawson (that ColderICE dude) do his Social Media for Business SUCKS presentation at the eCommerce Summit conference in Las Vegas, and his praise planted wibiya back in my mind.  I figured I’d give a look when I had some down time.

Down time came earlier tonight when around 11 pm EST I created an account at wibiya to fully check out the service.  Now my site, things-and-other-stuff.com, is a bit of a monster–shoot there are pages where dinosaur might be more accurate–with 8-plus years of pages created first through FrontPage, then hand coded html, then I figured out CSS and retinkered many key pages, then I added a WordPress blog, etc., etc.  Okay, I knew wibiya would work with WordPress, but what about those html pages?

I created a dummy page, grabbed a one-line snippet of javascript, and just like that I sat back and said, “Ahhh…” I matched the color scheme to my site and the effect was even stronger.  SOLD!!!* Time to customize.

* Actually, it’s free … for now at least.

I’d been dying to spruce up all those old html pages and since I was able to eventually insert the code in a separate file I created containing just my footer it was as simple as paste once and publish, presto chango, all my key old-school pages are social media ready—share me on Twitter, Like me on Facebook, it takes an extra click but you can Stumble me, e-mail me, all that fun stuff now; basically all the things I had moved towards WordPress in order to gain easy access.

But there’s a lot more behind my wibiya love affair than simple social media tools. I already have a monetized Google Search Bar throughout my site at the top right of the page, so my initial thought was to eliminate the wibiya Search Bar as redundant.  But my favicon disappeared when I did that, and I really liked having that show up in the bottom left corner.  Just when I was about to settle for the double-search I had what I’m pretty sure was an awesome idea: you could add multiple searches to the wibiya toolbar, so what if I eliminated my default site search and instead—yes, it works; I now have a search bar for my eBay Store at the bottom left of all my pages!  If you know my site, you’ll know that’s extremely relevant.

Now that older portion of my site has been called things-and-other-stuff.com forever.  Well, at least since 2002 when the site launched.  Why so general?  That’s my original eBay handle created back in 2000 when I was much more of a generalist than I am today.  I’ve stuck by that name, it’s been good to me despite its lack of flash or keywords.  When I relaunched the even more despicably boringly named things-and-other-stuff.com Blog late in 2009 I knew I’d wind up calling it something different and sure enough it’s now labeled Immortal Ephemera.

Why the big personal history lesson?  Having things-and-other-stuff.com and Immortal Ephemera so intimately tied together, even sharing search, strikes me as potentially confusing and it’s really bugged me.  But the wibiya bar has a little space where you can imput some text and so I chose to use it to exploit the double branding, thus:

things-and-other-stuff.com | Immortal Ephemera

Why?  The same exact snippet of code put into the footer of my html pages is also tucked snugly inside the footer of my WordPress template.  More than any other feature, save Google Search, wibiya has drawn the two parts of my site together.

There’s other cool stuff too.  These features show up everywhere I have the bar, but I felt they’d help pull things together even more.  The Latest Posts app for example allows an RSS feed of my latest Immortal Ephemera posts to appear on any page of the main things-and-other-stuff.com site with the wibiya bar installed.  Likewise the Navigation Links app displays key menu items found on the old html section of the site to you even if you’re on the flashy newer WordPress part of the site.

I’m really loving this and frankly unless my overall traffic drops like a stone it’s staying.  My pages still load quick (I did shut down the Add to Any WordPress plugin, feeling it duplicated wibiya’s features, but that’s the only change I made to the existing sites) and I think even if it throws some users for an initial loop, well, I’m very sorry but my expectation is that the end result will be even more visitors.

wibiya has a lot of cool features I didn’t even activate: Photo Galleries, Live Chat, YouTube Galleries, Donation Boxes, even Games.  I might add some in the future, I might just stick with what I have, but the key is that you do all of your changes on the wibiya back-end and don’t need to touch the little piece of code inside your site.  Starting out I tried not to go overboard though, just wanted the basic utility I’d been looking for.

Tell you what, I’m just as happy now as I was when I started writing this post, I’m loving wibiya!

This was recorded LIVE in Las Vegas at the eCommerce Summit 2010

Every day, thousands of small businesses and entrepreneurs miss out on millions of dollars in revenue simply because they don’t know how to utilize the Internet for marketing and selling. This is NOT your same old ABC stuff, these are actual eCommerce practices for Social Media that will yield bottom line results and amp up your business.

 

 

You comments from the #ICENotes hash tag. You can use Twitter to add comments here by simply including the #ICENotes hash tag. Enter your comments, I would really like to hear them!

You can listen to the full presentation above, the slides are below and here is a little information for you…

In the meantime, let me share with you a few links to get you started:

1. HootSuite - You can track, analyze, and review your links. You can schedule tweets for another time. You can search, separate, and organize your friends. It takes 5 different tools I was using and puts them all into one place.
2. Free Ecommerce Icons – Nice set of Icons that will help you create some wonderful images on your website.
3. Rapportive - This neat little Firefox add-on is a MUST HAVE for Gmail users!! Instead of showing you worthless Google Ads that don’t mean a thing to you… you will now see the sender’s photo, social media links, and some of the last Tweets they wrote. WOW! Use this tool to get personal with your customers and keep that customer for life.
4. Wibiya - This little toolbar is perfect for blogs or websites. You can add translation tools, testimonials, search, twitter, facebook, and many other tools that will help keep your customers interactive with you and your website.
5. Survey Monkey – Do you know what your customers want? Do you know what your customers need? Why not ask them instead of assuming? With Survey Monkey you can now get input from your customers… for FREE
6. TubeMogul – Why upload your videos to just YouTube when you can upload your videos to several online websites with one click of a button? TubeMogul will help you save time and help your search engine rankings!
7. Kampyle - Get honest feedback from your customers that you can use to make your website better. This wonderful feedback form will help you learn what you are doing right… and wrong.

Thanks to Shawna Fennell for compiling the list of tool, check her full blog post HERE and here me on her show with a post presentation interview below…

Post Presentation Interview with Shawna Fennel

(press play button and be patient, it takes a minute to buffer)

OR Click to Download

 

You can listen to the full presentation above with the slides.

In the meantime, let me share with you a few links to get you started:

1. HootSuite - You can track, analyze, and review your links. You can schedule tweets for another time. You can search, separate, and organize your friends. It takes 5 different tools I was using and puts them all into one place.
2. Free Ecommerce Icons – Nice set of Icons that will help you create some wonderful images on your website.
3. Rapportive - This neat little Firefox add-on is a MUST HAVE for Gmail users!! Instead of showing you worthless Google Ads that don’t mean a thing to you… you will now see the sender’s photo, social media links, and some of the last Tweets they wrote. WOW! Use this tool to get personal with your customers and keep that customer for life.
4. Wibiya - This little toolbar is perfect for blogs or websites. You can add translation tools, testimonials, search, twitter, facebook, and many other tools that will help keep your customers interactive with you and your website.
5. Survey Monkey – Do you know what your customers want? Do you know what your customers need? Why not ask them instead of assuming? With Survey Monkey you can now get input from your customers… for FREE
6. TubeMogul – Why upload your videos to just YouTube when you can upload your videos to several online websites with one click of a button? TubeMogul will help you save time and help your search engine rankings!
7. Kampyle - Get honest feedback from your customers that you can use to make your website better. This wonderful feedback form will help you learn what you are doing right… and wrong.

Thanks to Shawna Fennell for compiling the list of tool, check her blog post HERE

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Ecommerce edutainment on demand  

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Hey guys, I know many of you have expressed how you will miss the old B.S. Walks podcast, but do not fret! I will make sure that we bring you engaging and informative information for 2010 like you NEVER could have expected from us. Just hang tight, cause 2010 is going to be a blast for the ColderICE family. If you want to be sure you do not miss a thing, do this…

1) Go to YouTube and press my yellow "Subscribe Button" – I will be posting a lot of education and ecommerce material in the coming weeks and this will be the FIRST place to see it.

2) Be sure to join the Facebook Fanpage because that is where I will be posting daily articles, news, and lessons for all the readers. This page has just about every Twitter link I have for ecommerce business readers on it. It is becoming my personal encyclopedia for ecommerce links…killer resources.

Now, on to the exiting decade…Just to keep your appetite wet and your holiday lively, check out this latest broadcast. A year end reflection on some of the technology and changes from 2000 to 2009 as it relates to marketing, social networking and data communication. Join a lively conversation on what was hot in the last decade and what could be hot in the upcoming decade.

ColderICE Presents: 2010 Best of the Decade

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Topics and Timeline for this program….

2:23 The Age of Blogging – Blog means "weblog"
4:14 The Technology Boom and Bust plus Y2K
6:03 The Invent of the "SmartPhone" mobile devices
7:32 Remembering Lap"ROCKS" (laptops)
8:09 What was our favorite TV show in 2000 and who really cares … LOL
8:47 High Speed Internet access
9:29 The rise of super bloggers (HuffingtonPost.com)
10:23 Marketer of the Decade (Steve Jobs)
11:15 The iPod
11:51 Product Placement (Marketing) of the Decade
13:36 Cable TV Channel of the Decade
14.24 Media Company of the Decade
15:00 Social Media Showdowns (MySpace vs Facebook)
10:17 Segmentated? What the hell JB?!? … LOL
18:49 Predictions for 2010
19:04 Mobile Marketing
19:33 SmartPhone as the new PC workspace
21:23 What’s old will become new again

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Ecommerce edutainment on demand  

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Press "Play" to listen now

Ecommerce edutainment on demand  

Be sure to subscribe so you do not miss an episode.

[podcast]http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-24026/TS-294122.mp3[/podcast]

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Ecommerce edutainment on demand  

Be sure to subscribe so you do not miss an episode.

[podcast]http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-24026/TS-294122.mp3[/podcast]On today’s show I had a very special guest host. One of my mentors in social media came and co-hosted with me on the show. The result was POWER PACKED, it really was a show that I am proud to have been able to do. Brent is world renown as a leader in Social CRM and blogs over at BrentLeary.com.

He co-wrote “the” book on social media with David Bullock called Barack 2.0 Social Media Lessons for Business recognized by the Wharton School of Business.

Dude, this is a MUST listen show, just hit start and check the show notes below! If you liked it, PLEASE leave a comment below. I want to convince this dude to come back and do it again PLZ, it was fantastic!

B.S. Walks When Money Talks Show Notes (Wednesday114.com)

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1:43 www.StartupNation.com Rich & Jeff Sloan
2:33 Home-Based Business 100 – John from ColderICE.com voted #1 “Savviest in Social Media””
5:38 Twitter List Plug in
6:40 www.HubSpot.com Inbound Marketing by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah
7:01 Website Grader
7:16 Twitter Grader
11:06 Oprah Winfrey
14:00 The “Social Media Expert” SMACKDOWN
16:00 Some Real Experts David Meerman Scott (DavidMeermanScott.com) and Brian Clark (www.Copyblogger.com)
17:13 Breaking down “Social Linguistics”
18:10 LMAO: Dis-pen-sa-tion:  a general state or ordering of things
20:31 Chris Brogan (www.ChrisBrogan.com)
22:50 Twitter Tool Tips: www.HootSuite.com and www.PeopleBrowsr.com
23:47 www.Twubs.com
24:27 Social Mention (www.socialmention.com)
24:45 L.A.ST. – Listening As A Stratgy
26:30 Listen to the customers on Amazon reviews and Epinions.com

The organizers of a brand new event in Atlanta went all out to put on a high caliber show for the technology community around social media and social marketing. The New Media Atlanta event was billed as:

The New Media Atlanta conference is a high level, business dialog about how social media is changing marketing and messaging – and in fact, changing the nature of all communications.   We’ll talk about strategies to leverage its power to build your company, product, brand, service, etc.

You’ll have an opportunity to ask your burning questions of the speaker panel and get real answers.

The opening speech by the organizers detailed a vision to make New Media Atlanta a yearly event on caliber with South by Southwest (SXSW). That is one grand order for sure! That is really like wanting your garage band to be U2?!? Ambition is a good thing, but flash can not make over substance and there was not as much substance as SXSW. Personally, I would not ever compared this show to SXSW were it not for the mention of it by the organizers.

Having said that, the even staff was GREAT, the venue was superb and overall the day was well organized and the presentations kept on time for the most part. Chris Brogan was the highlight for the event and he did not miss a beat! Once Chris took the state the crowd settled in for some particular strategies and approaches for social media.

The highs were the keynote by Chris Brogan, the small business presentation by Jonathan Baker of Monday Night Brewing was outstanding and a panel session with executives from Rubbermaid, Turner TNT, and Coke was VERY informative on strategy, ROI and techniques for social media engagement.

The areas for improvement would be, NOT to listen to the noise going on from the detractors. The event planners were overly focused on negative comments being made anonymously in chat rooms. They would bring then get onstage and make comment and even ADJUST the program based on comments by a small minority. The acknowledgment of this Back Noise became VERY distracting to the entire event. So the majority of the audience was subject to comments made anonymously by a few silly attendees and that threw off the "spirit" of the room in my opinion. What was a little know chat room became the focus of the event by the end of the day and that sentiment was fueled by many presenters and the organizers. Note to self…when you have  99% positive comments, do NOT focus in on pleasing the 1%, keep the 99% happy!

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