How HP Tackles Content Research [Video]

It’s important to do your research on consumer personas and their digital habits before putting your content out into the world. Hear more content research and promotion advice from Michael Procopio, a Hewlett-Packard social media strategist, who stopped to talk to us at Content Marketing World.
A big thanks to Eric Leslie from OnScene Productions for producing this and all of our event videos.

The power of social data

from influx insights:

Interesting move by Walmart

September 14, 2011

Yesterday, Wal-Mart made an acquisition of a company One Riot.
It’s a purchase that could easily escape most people’s radar, since the company is tiny and focused in a very specialized area.

On paper, the company is in the mobile space and provides ad targeting technology, but if you dig deeper by simply reading their blog posts- you get a good idea of why Wal-Mart purchased the company.
Here’s an extract from one of the company’s blog posts.

“Based on publicaly available social data that we license via our friends at Gnip, we’ve generated user interest maps for just north of 75MM active Twitter users. This number gets bigger every day as we suck in more Tweets from the licensed hose. Meanwhile, our demographic coverage is 80% accurate for about 80% of the Twitter population. These stats improve with every new release (approx every 3 weeks).


How to do we determine this information? We start at two points. The first is to create language models that breakdown how users tweet. The second is to study follow-graphs that reveal who users are influenced by. By fusing these two approaches, we can find discriminating characteristics that identify a specific user as belonging to a certain demographic group or a certain interest-category group.


For example, it turns out that Hispanic 25yr old males tend to tweet “#LMAOOOO” (emphasizing the “O”) more predominantly than other groups. Meanwhile 40-something females tend to follow soppy singer @joshgroban at a statistically significant higher rate than males of any age. Niche influencers such as@CrankyOvary provide very strong signals for the interests and demographics of their followers. Meanwhile, broader-based influencers such as @barackobama offer few discriminatory clues about their followers – as many users in many demographic groups follow the US President, to the point where any signal is drowned out by noise. Our system spots literally tens of millions of similar subtle patterns. These patterns then “compete” inside an artificial intelligence system that results in an accurate rendering of “who you are” according to your Twitter activity. It’s good stuff – lots of large scale Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Statistical Analysis and Classification Techniques worthy of subsequent blog posts, all sat on top of a humming Hadoop cluster.”


Wal-Mart isn’t buying a team and a sophisticated database of consumer behavior that will help them to understand the dynamics of the social geography that surrounds their stores. This could help enable them to do obvious hings like reach out to local influencers, but perhaps more relevant would be re-configuring their store merchandise around local needs.
It also reminds us all what a rich source of information social media data can be- if you have the talent and bandwidth to analyze, it’s incredibly powerful source in to help us who consumers are and what they think and do.
This is an example of the big data that will fundamentally change and disrupt not just the media business, but marketing as we know it.

From controversial opinions on QR codes to Facebook, Bill Bass offers plenty of food for thought

By ELLEN DAVIS, VP, NRF | Published: SEPTEMBER 13, 2011

Be the first to comment | This entry was posted in Events, Marketing, Mobile, Retail Companies, Social Media

I just love a good debate.

During his career, Bill Bass has undoubtedly done many things that people can agree with. He’s seen tremendous success from tenures at Lands’ End, Sears, Fair Indigo and now Charming Shoppes.

But the most refreshing part of his keynote during the Shop.org Annual Summit today was perhaps the unapologetic comments that Bass made about QR codes (doesn’t see the point), Facebook (can’t completely buy into the hype) and company organizational structure (he had a few choice words about some recent retailers’ changes). Regardless of whether attendees agreed with him, all likely walked away with a few topics to debate at this afternoon’s roundtables or this evening’s networking event.

At the crux of Bass’s presentation was five lessons he has learned in 15 years of selling online. The lessons themselves are fairly straightforward, but the food for thought he offered as a part of his keynote surely got the conversation started.

Lesson #1: Ecommerce is not just another store, nor is it just a cheaper marketing channel.

In order to fully utilize your website, Bass said, you cannot treat it like one of your stores. Why? Because the rhythms and dynamics on the web are totally different.

One example: web traffic tends to peak during the week while store traffic spikes on the weekends. (Meaning, the “in store” offers and doorbusters so popular on Saturdays and Sundays might perform best on Mondays or Wednesdays from an online standpoint.) Bass encouraged retailers to “shoot when the ducks are flying” – and the ducks are flying during the week online.

In addition, Bass said, metrics for success are completely different between the two channels. “If I go to any store person and ask about factors for success, no one is going to say easy search, speedy checkout. They’d say something totally different.”

Viewing your website as just another store is “the dumbest damn thing I’ve heard in my life,” Bass said. “If you treat it the same, you’re going to sub-optimize it.” And things just got more spicy from there.

Lesson 2: Org structure matters.

There are two ways the majority of retailers organize their company to account for ecommerce. In one structure, the ecommerce folks operate completely independently. The other model, which integrates ecommerce operations with the rest of the company, means that the marketing team handles both digital and traditional advertising, merchants and buyers work for both channels, etc.

According to Bass, neither of those arrangements works particularly well. “What you want to do is have it somewhere in the middle but skewed towards independence,” he said. In his view, the ecommerce group should be independent and report directly to the CEO.

In Bass’s view, the right structure is imperative to getting ecommerce the resources, and attention, it deserves. An ecommerce team reporting to marketing is only focusing on marketing, he said. An ecommerce team reporting to through stores is only focusing on – you guessed it – stores.

For better or worse, the web often forces change within companies, he said, “and the CEO is the only person that can give you the air cover to make those changes.” Besides, a CEO that doesn’t have the ecommerce team reporting directly to him or her may need a bit of a priority check, Bass said. “If a third of your sales are coming in from the internet, there is no more important strategic thing facing you. If you don’t understand that, you’re going to lose.”

Lesson #3: Focus, Focus, Focus. Don’t be distracted by shiny objects or bogus metrics.

There’s no doubt there have been plenty of “revolutionary” ideas in ecommerce that have made executives stop and take notice, but the challenge comes in cutting through the clutter and critically determining whether each new fad could improve your bottom line.

FourSquare was one example that Bass highlighted as a “shiny object” that may be more fad than function. “When you really look at what causes your website to win, it’s just a handful of things: search and fast checkout. These make customers’ lives easier,” he said. “FourSquare doesn’t make a customer’s life easier.”

According to Bass, all metrics should come down to search and fast checkout, and encouraged executives to be skeptical if other data is being highlighted. “You’ll start to see people throw out other metrics when they’re trying to sell you something that doesn’t work with those metrics.”

Lesson #4: Pay attention to Lesson #3. (But also take advantage of new capabilities. )

It all does come down to search and fast checkout, Bass said, but there are ways to do the basics well and focus on other elements of the shopping experience to increase sales. During his presentation, Bass walked through Charming Shoppes’ new site, www.FashionGenius.com. The site, which offers incredibly easy search functionality, uses an adaptive survey created from a million customer surveys and 10,000 in-person fittings to help women find clothes that will fit their body type and their personal style.

Bass called it “a Google for clothes” and said that, since yesterday, over 60,000 people have already taken a survey on the site. The success of the launch has defied the company’s expectations.

Lesson 5: Look at what lies ahead (and what shouldn’t)

One of the best lessons Bass has learned in ecommerce seems to be that looking forward may be even more important than looking back. And what’s coming down the pike? According to Bass, with an estimated 30% of store-based sales shifting online, store economics will “cataclysmically” change. And for stores, he said, “it’s going to get worse.” (In fact, Bass went so far as to recommend against long-term store leases – he is that confident that the web will impact physical locations.)

What else is coming down the pike that will revolutionize retail? Put your eyes on the iPad, Bass said. “You can’t play Angry Birds on your computer – it doesn’t work,” he said. “And the shopping experience on an iPad is empirically better than on a website. I’ve now come to believe that this is the single most important thing going forward.”

What is Bass not so hot on? Smartphones, he says. “If I’m a restaurant, or Fandango, I need to be doing the smartphone thing,” he said. “Smartphones matter depending upon your category” but aren’t applicable to everyone. (Discuss amongst yourselves.) Also on the “not so hot” radar: social media, which he thinks matters for service but not sales.

At the end of the day, retail executives may have had mixed opinions on Bass’s viewpoints. But he did give people plenty to talk about. And at a conference like this, that is always a very good thing.

Experts offer tips on reducing cart abandonment

SEP13

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By JONATHAN CARDEN, COORDINATOR, NRF | Published: SEPTEMBER 13, 2011

1 Comment | This entry was posted in Events, Marketing, Retail Companies

Charles Nicholls

Shopping carts have plagued retailers and their customers for years.

There’s something inherent to their design — or perhaps it’s Murphy’s Law — that dictates that all four wheels may not, under any condition, be able to simultaneously roll in the same direction. More than once, the subsequent rattling and precarious instability, akin to driving without power steering, has forced me to abandon the cart altogether and fend for myself.

Then, there are virtual shopping carts.

According to SeeWhy Inc founder Charles Nicholls, over 70% of online customers will abandon their virtual shopping carts. Cart abandonment is a pressing problem for digital retailers across the board, and that’s why Nicholls, along with Saks.com Director Andrew Balazs and Build.com Marketing VP Brandon Proctor, came together at Shop.org’s 2011 Annual Summit for a session entitled, “The Science of Shopping Cart Optimization.”

Nicholls began the session by running down a litany of statistics detailing why customers abandon their carts and offering insights on how retailers can win them back. According to his research, customers abandon their carts either because it’s not the right time or because it’s not the right price. As all retailers know, timing and price are two of the most difficult factors to combat when trying to complete a sale, so recapturing those sales is certainly not an easy process.

Here’s a quick rundown of some of Nicholls’s other primary points:

• Design your remarketing campaigns to address timing and price objections. Although this seems intuitive, Nicholls said it was amazing how many retailers overlook this step in their remarketing process.
• Realize that not all abandonment is bad. For many purchases, abandonment is a natural part of the product-buying process. Shoppers research, price check and then finally purchase, often with one or more cart abandonment occurring between the initial “add to cart” and final purchase.
• Begin remarketing as soon as your customer abandons the cart. They say that within the first 12 hours is your greatest opportunity to recapture the sale — Nicholls says, however, that sometimes even 12 hours is too long. The quicker you are to remarket to the customer, and the more personalized the remarketing campaign is, the better your chances are of completing the sale.

Balazs gave attendees a look into the behind-the-scenes process that occurred in Saks’ virtual shopping cart redesign effort. Saks recognized the problems they were having with cart abandonment and decided to give its shopping cart system an honest review and makeover. Their objective was to improve the completion rate for customers who start the checkout process. The most common problems that Saks’ cart system had, according to Balazs, are: (1) customers entering checkout just to determine the final sales price; (2) customers leave in order to modify their cart; (3) a confusing user experience; (4) buggy checkout process.

So here are a few of the suggestions that Balazs made in light of Saks’ research and testing:

• Let your customers know what the final price is before they start checkout.
• Make it easy to make changes and see the subsequent impact on the cart.
• Ensure that key information is easy to see and edit.

Proctor wrapped up the session by offering what he believed to be the biggest takeaways for digital retailers. Convenience appears to have been a theme of the afternoon, with each presenter insisting that the easier the process the higher the conversion rate. For instance, Proctor noted that coupons are “bigger than Britney Spears” right now (before amending that to “bigger than Justin Bieber, because Britney isn’t that big anymore”). This means that retailers should attempt to make the use of online coupons as easy as possible, going as far as providing coupon codes during the checkout process.

Here are the rest of Proctor’s takeaways:

• Give the customers what they want. Proctor noted how shocked customers are when retailers actually provide them with the experience and products they wanted. The more retailers can do this, the better. He also added that it is “unforgivable to not give customers what they want, given how much information digital retailers are able to gather about their customers.”
• Listen to the customer. Another stalwart of the retail community that is too often forgotten when it comes to designing checkout processes.
  
• Create a thoughtless shopping experience. Convenience, convenience, convenience.