Last Thursday and Friday 30 people from 18 of our client companies joined us for networking and deep conversation about online marketing.

The main event on Friday included my take on Search Marketing in 2008 and some great tips from Larry Becker on website effectiveness strategies.

We then branched out to discuss:

• Setting efficiency targets for marketing programs and how the incremental view plays into that,
• How clients addressed Multichannel Credit Allocation and where they see that going,
• Catalog circulation strategies and prospecting in 2008,
• Social Media. From video and blogging to Facebook, Twitter, etc. What was worth doing, what seemed to be a waste of time at this point.
• Email frequency, open-rate benchmarks and strategy,
• SEO strategies and the merits of outsourcing some or all of those efforts,
• Affiliates and strategies for controlling the bad actors without dismantling the program entirely,
• The power of purls — personal urls — as a marketing tool,
• and much much more.

The Summit showed that many folks were wrestling with the same complex issues, and that most retailers were struggling to meet “plan” this year, particularly since July.

The event also confirmed for all attendees what we had always known: RKG has really smart clients. Many great insights shared both in the public forum and in more private networking contexts throughout the event.

As we plan for future events, clients: please let us know what you’d like to see in terms of content, format and locations so we can make what was a great event even better! And, if you’re not currently a client, but would like to be… :-)

Thanks again to all who participated!

In world where everything is transparent, what is going to happen is that people who are good, who come from the heart, are going to win.

And people who are bad, who have horrible intentions, are going to lose.

Understand this: anything you do is going to be known.

– Gary Varynerchuk of WineLibraryTV

Here’s the video:

video link

Here’s the page of links mentioned in the video: rimmkaufman.com/nemoa2008

This talk does not have any grand unifying theme. Rather, it is a random grab-bag of Marketing 2.0 ideas related to online retailing that I find cool. The intended audience was catalogers, so some of the topics or suggestions may be less novel to folks hanging out on the cutting edge of the blogosphere.

I recorded the talk and optimized the Camtasia recordings for Youtube. Boof — some sections were just a smidgen longer than YouTube’s 10 minute rule. So instead I put them on Yahoo’s JumpCut. That’s why the video looks like five sections spliced, and why the image quality isn’t great — it seems optimizing production for YouTube is less optimal for JumpCut.

Mike Ullman, III
Chief Executive Officer
J.C. Penney, Inc.
6501 Legacy Drive
Plano, TX 54024

February 28, 2008

Hello Mike –

Me again.

You’ve probably not yet had time to respond to my previous letter, but I wanted to follow up, as we’ve received more customer service mail intended for you.

Jerome is seeking some help with his hutch — his comment is here.

A nice woman in Illinois sent you, via postal mail to our PO box, a two page hand-written apology. It seems she shoplifted a shirt from one of your stores as a teenager and now regrets that. She apologizes and enclosed a $22 check made out to J. C. Penney. I’m forwarding her letter and her check to you in today’s mail.

I’m still uncertain as to why your customers are choosing to reach out to you via our blog…..

In my prior note, I asked your opinion of how blogging is changing the relationship between customer and corporation.

I’d enjoy hearing your views on that. Would you be up for a phone interview?

Cheers –

[signature]

Alan Rimm-Kaufman
President, Rimm-Kaufman Group

PS. A similar customer service issue was posted to our blog comments about a TitleNine order; their CEO Missy Park jumped in and responded.

Because purple cauliflower (orange, too) is a purple cow.

What aspect of your product is so notable that people are compelled to blog it?

Hattip: Seth Godin’s blog (the real Seth!)

But we live in a TIVO society. Businesses are being built around the desire of many to avoid advertisements. How do we get consumers to voluntarily watch a commercial?

Involvement is the critical piece.

One mechanism: Make it so funny that people pass it around to their friends, a la the Bud Light “Real Men of Genius” series, which have translated into hundreds of thousands of “free” impressions. However, this is a branding play, and as much as I enjoy the spot, I’m not sure it makes me any more likely to buy Bud Light.

1-800 Flowers is trying another approach. The idea? Have people send in their own “How we fell in love, story” for Valentines Day, the winning entries get a prize. The notion of creating an involvement mechanism is great, and I’m hoping that someone will be kind enough to share some insights as to how well this “worked” for them and what they learned from the experience.

We also believe that instructional videos will be a powerful medium for getting the message out to potential customers. Our friends at Crutchfield have put out shopping guides for HDTVs and Car Stereo installation guides. We think Zales could put out video guides for selecting the perfect engagement ring.

The potential for extracting value from this new medium is there. It will be fascinating to watch it evolve as we all try to figure out how to make it work for us.

Ideas welcomed!

In case you missed it: Back when MiniFeed was first launched, within 24 hours of its release, nearly 10% of Facebook’s users rejected Mini Feed (and petitioned against it). Jared points out that this type of user-behavior is unique to web-based applications- we don’t typically organize around our dissatisfaction with desktop apps.

Give Jared’s post a close read for some great insights, but here are the 5 challenges he cites, along with some quotes pulled to highlight a nagging question of my own:

Five Usability Challenges of Web-Based Applications

1. Scalability: “A contributor to Facebook’s mini-feed debacle was the scale of their design. Facebook, making any change to their site, instantly affects eight million people. If even one percent has issues with the change, that’s 80,000 affected users.”
2. Visual Design
3. Comprehension
4. Interactivity
5. Change Management: “The designers at Facebook learned the hard way that quick changes to the application, even if the team thinks it’s an improvement, can have serious negative results if done incorrectly…. We’re now seeing teams start to design the change process along with designing the changes themselves.”

So here’s what’s got me scratching my head:

Why doesn’t Facebook use their incredible scale as an asset when they introduce changes to their site? Why not test these changes with a statistically significant fraction of their traffic, and then optimize based on this sample’s behavior? (Think about the way the Amazon redesign trickled out, and the insights likely gathered along the way.)

With our own site testing work, we’ve been fortunate to see some strong results for our clients. We encourage folks to test big differences – shouts not whispers. Whenever you’re testing, some experiments produce the anticipated result, some don’t. But each time you test, you can introduce a big change, in a well-defined area of your site – to a deliberately limited portion of your visitors.

That means that while increased conversion is almost always the ultimate goal, every test lets you methodically introduce site changes in a way that respects your users and your brand.

Sean Lane’s purchase was supposed to be a surprise for his wife. Then it appeared as a news headline — “Sean Lane bought 14k White Gold 1/5 ct Diamond Eternity Flower Ring from Overstock.com — last week on the social networking Web site Facebook.

Without Lane’s knowledge, the headline was visible to everyone in his online network, including 500 classmates from Columbia University and 220 other friends, co-workers, and acquaintances.

And his wife.

Within two hours after he bought the ring on Overstock.com, he received an instant message from his wife, Shannon: Who is this ring for?

What ring, he messaged back from his laptop at work in Waltham, Massachusetts.

She said Facebook had just put an item on his page saying he bought a ring. It included a link to Overstock, which noted the ring was priced at a 51% discount.

“I was really disappointed because for me the whole fun of Christmas is surprise,” said Shannon Lane, 28, who married Sean a year ago in September. “I never want to know what I am getting.”

The Post reports that last night Facebook made the default Beacon opt-in more clear.

Google succinctly expounds on each of the numbered items below, but take this quick pass at the headlines:

1. Engage Quickly
2. Mimic Look and Feel
3. Enable Self Expression
4. Make it Dynamic
5. Expose Friend Activity
6. Browse the Graph
7. Drive Communication
8. Build Communities
9. Solve Real World Tasks

Over at Bokardo.com, Josh Porter points out that only two or three of these best practices are truly limited to the social network: most are relevant to many software applications, including basic e-commerce.

So that new page you’re about to release, if you expect people to use it, care about it and even tell their friends about it, maybe it’s an unassuming or aspiring example of social media.

Will people “get it” quickly—and care? (See #1 above). Does it solve your prospect’s problem? (#9). Is the design consistent with the rest of your site? (#2). Can your visitor comment on it, or pass it along? (#3, #7). And so on.

Social networking can bring user-centric design to the foreground: it keeps us tuned in to the notion that real people need to find value in the content we offer on our sites.

• Open Handset Alliance. Yesterday, Google announced they’ll be providing an open-source linux-based free OS to mobile phone makers. The software comes from Android, a startup Google bought in 2005 and has been improving since. Sprint, Motorola, Deutsche Telekom AG ( parent company of T-Mobile USA), and others are already on board. Noticeably absent: AT&T and Verizon, the 1st and 2nd largest domestic carriers. An open-source phone OS will let creativity flourish. From G’s perspective, it opens up a new ad platform: there many more phones than PCs globally.
• Open Social. Last Friday, a consortium of social networks, including Google, MySpace, LinkedIn, Salesforce.com, orkut, Plaxo, Friendster, Ning, Oracle others, announced OpenSocial, a cross-platform open API for social networks to allow data (and possibly apps) to move easily across the social web. Familiar tune: an open API will let new social networks (and mashups) flourish, and from G’s perspective, hopefully diminish the growing importance of FaceBook.
• Google Reader Share. On Sunday, Google Reader and iGoogle hiccuped in their data reporting, sending FeedBurner and other analytics counters plummeting. Not a big deal in itself, but this glitch reveals Google’s RSS tools are now responsible for something like half the RSS views domestically.