Part 2 highlights

• People don’t click on display ads anymore…
• The way around this is to put ads within the content…
• Interactive, in-content image ads are very effective in producing revenue for publishers!

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So, what exactly is social commerce?

According to Wikipedia:

Social commerce^[1] is a subset of electronic commerce that involves using social media, online media that supports social interaction and user contributions, to assist in the online buying and selling of products and services.

Social commerce (in modern terms) really started when sites like Amazon and Yahoo added user reviews and other tools that allowed customers to communicate with each other to shopping sites.

Who’s Using Social Commerce?

Most of the big e-commerce sites are using some sort of social commerce, and even many smaller sites with at least user reviews and comments. But some sites, like Threadless, even use social commerce to come up with the products they are going to sell. The Altimeter group presented a webinar recently with some good examples:

How can you use social commerce?

In some ways you’re probably already using social commerce if you’re using social media tools to connect with your customers. If you provide customer support or get feedback or even just answer questions, you’re getting information about what customers want from your company. Figuring out how to make the process of including customers in your product processes can make social commerce even more effective for your company.

Do you use social commerce with your company? Or have you used social commerce in a buying process? Please share your experiences…

(photo by malias, on Flickr)

Improving Products

Once you’ve found your customers and potential customers online, you can listen to what they’re saying about your products and your competitors products. You can listen to what they complain about what they’d like to have, where their pain points are, and what their needs are so you can design and create products to meet their needs. The better match there is between your product and your customer’s needs, the more successful they’re likely to be.

Improving Marketing

Customers are pretty good about tuning out advertisements, but they are more likely to take action on marketing and advertising that talks specifically to them about a need or problem they have. Social media allows you to understand the needs of your customers so your marketing can specifically speak to those needs and how your product solves them. Social media also allows you to more narrowly target and engage with people who are more likely to be interested in your product to begin with.

Improving Content

When people are first starting the purchasing process, they often are looking for information. Social media can help you understand what information people are looking for so that you can provide it when they’re ready to receive it. Social media also allows you to provide information before the sale to establish your reputation as an expert. By listening to the questions people have, you’ll be better able to create content that meets the needs of your audience.

Improving Sales

Sales are more effective when the process is about the customer and their needs. With the research you’ve done on social media, you can not only understand the needs of your customers as a group, but often the needs of specific customers. That way, when you go into a sales call, you are armed with information specific to their needs and will be more likely to give them the information they want to hear.

Improving Customer Service

Customers will have problems or questions after the sale. Many times it’s easier or faster to turn to your own social network than to ask the company. People are asking questions and talking about problems all the time on social media — possibly about your own products or those of your competitors. By being engaged on social media, you can help solve those problems and answer those questions so that your customers have a better overall experience. Then they’ll be more likely to purchase from you again and recommend you to their network.

How do you use social media to understand your customers?

(image by Lali Masriera)

Search Engines

Many search engines use RSS feeds in order to be able to keep track of when your site (or blog) updates. Post a blog entry and it probably shows up within a couple of hours. While Google does have crawlers out there looking for new content, it’s the RSS feed sent out by your website which makes it easier for Google (and other search engines) to pick up your content more quickly.

RSS feeds for eCommerce sites are especially crucial for having your products show up in product-specific searches and search engines.

Social Networks

Do you have your blog automatically post to Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter? You’re using your RSS feed to update those sites so they know when to post (and what to post).  RSS feeds are an important way to distribute your content and make it available to a much wider audience automatically.

Monitoring

Have any Google Alerts setup for monitoring mentions of your product, company or name? (If not, you should.) Yup, RSS feeds.  Even if you’re having alerts sent to your email, in the background there’s probably an RSS feed kicking off the process.

Customers & Readers

Even your customers and readers may use RSS feeds and not realize it if they subscribe to your blog or website and get updates by email or in a reader program (they may not realize its a RSS reader). If you have an email signature that sends out a link to your latest post, that’s using RSS. If you’re using a widget to show your latest blog posts on your company website, you may also be using RSS.

RSS is Behind the Scenes

While many people may not know what RSS is, they’re probably using it in some way even if it’s hidden in the background.  RSS is vital for your business to distribute content to a wider audience (automatically!).  And since RSS is included in many blogging and content management systems, you may already have RSS on your site and not even know.

How do you use RSS for your business? (or how do you think you may?)

(photo by Hot Flashes)

Defining Exit Rate

Exit Rate shows you what percentage of people who were on a particular page exited the site from that page.  It doesn’t show you how many pages they looked at before they got to that page.  They could have entered the site from anywhere. They may have even accomplished what they set out to do.  You don’t know.  You only know they exited your site from this particular page.

When Exit Rate is Useful

If you have a site where people have to go to more than one page to complete a task — say on an eCommerce site — Exit Rate can be very helpful for understanding where people are getting lost in the process.  Knowing where people get lost in the conversion process can help you fix those pages to increase conversion and decrease the exit rate on those pages.  Exit rate in this context is often called abandonment rate — or how often someone started the purchase process and then left.

When Exit Rate Isn’t Useful

When you’re looking at the exit rates for specific pages (other than those involved in a conversion or sale), exit rate just tells you what percentage of people left the site from that page — meaning that was the last page they looked at.  Those people could have entered the site from anywhere, looked at a bunch of pages and just decided to leave from this particular page.

Outside of the conversion/eCommerce example, what if someone came to your site looking for specific information, found it on that page and then left.  They found what they were looking for, which is what you want.  Again, you may be able to entice them to stay longer by providing links to additional pages on your site, but your goal of satisfying their need was completed.  What can you do with the exit rate?  Not really anything.  It doesn’t give you enough information to know what to improve.

An Alternative Metric — Bounce Rate

An alternative metric that’s more useful for the purpose of improving specific pages is Bounce Rate — or how many people who enter your site on that page never click anywhere else and leave without looking at any other pages.  Unless they happened to find exactly what they’re were looking for on the first page (you have really good SEO), a high bounce rate is an indicator of a problem on a specific page.

Use Bounce Rate to Improve Conversions

Even in the case of good SEO, you probably want people to go to more than one page on your site.  You want them to convert, which usually means more than one page.  Take a look at your top content report and top entry pages in your analytics package and look at the bounce rate for each page. Focus on improving the pages with high bounce rates to increase conversions.

Thoughts? How do you use exit rate and bounce rate?

(photo by Cellular Immunity)

Requesting Feedback

While customers may already be talking about you online (via Twitter, Facebook, etc.), you can also request feedback just by asking or by implementing systems which allow customers to provide their opinions.  Systems such as comments, reviews and forums are fairly easy to implement for business websites and can be especially useful for eCommerce sites.

Expect the Negative

Unless you specifically ask people with positive experiences to leave their feedback, you may receive mostly negative comments.  People who have a negative experience are more likely to feel compelled to complain or leave their opinions than people who are satisfied (they’re usually hoping for some sort of resolution). If you’re asking for feedback or provide ways for people to leave it, be prepared for the negative and ask for the positive.

Be Ready to Respond

When you ask for feedback or provide ways for people to leave it, you need to be prepared to respond when it happens — for either positive or negative feedback.  Nothing is worse than a company that requests feedback and then doesn’t respond when it’s given.  This means someone needs to be responsible for monitoring feedback and responding to people.

What’s your experience been when you’ve given feedback? Do you have any examples of good response by a company?  How about bad?

(photo by Anna Majkowska)

Show notes. Here are the links we discussed in the podcast:

• Adrenaline Commerce
• SpeedInlineSkateWheels.com
• Yooper Steez
• Pro Lighting
• Zappos

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Notes from the event can be found here (thanks Nikki!). Special thanks to Portage Media Jeremiah Staes for recording and production of the video. And a thank you to the Social Media Club Detroit for putting on the event and the Detroit Public Library for hosting. If you get a chance to go downtown to the library, I highly recommend it. The building is absolutely beautiful inside and would be a great place to host an event, meeting or group.

For more information on creating a social media strategy and on social media measurement, please consider attending our upcoming online webinars (just need a web browser and an internet connection):

• Crafting a Successful Social Media Strategy – Wed, Apr. 14th – 12pm – Register Now!
• Measuring Social Media Success Webinar – Wed, Apr. 21st – 12pm – Register Now!

You’re afraid of spam email or solicitor phone calls, so you don’t put either your email or your phone number on your website, just a contact form.  While this probably does cut down on spam, how many potential customers are you turning away as well?  Is it worth it to turn away even one potential customer?

Most email programs are pretty good at filtering out spam.  And while you should answer the phone as much as possible, voicemail also does a pretty good job (most people are understanding on that front).  But, if someone can’t use either method and has to fill out a contact form (most of which tend to ask for a bunch of unrelated information), there’s a possibility that they won’t bother.

Contact forms do their have their place and use.  Sometimes you have a specific type of contact (for media or advertising or whatever) that you do need additional information for.  Or you’re using a contact form on a landing page for your marketing or advertising.  There are many good uses for contact forms, but they should never be the only way someone can get ahold of you.  Even in the cases mentioned here, there still should be a way to contact you directly.

How do your customers contact you?

(photo by ellievanhoutte @ Flickr CC)

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Technorati tags: customer service, brand, customer experience, business, marketing strategy, marketing

A website visitor may play around with your ‘build a car’ feature but not do anything else online.  Are visitors who ‘build a car’ online more or less likely to eventually buy a car from you?  How many people that do buy a car from you use the ‘build a car’ feature on your website?  Obviously there’s an offline component that needs to be tied to the online action.  The only way to really know how the online action ties to the offline action is to do a little market research.  This could be as simple as asking your customers or a more in-depth market survey.  Once you know how the ‘build a car’ function on the website is tied to actually buying a car, you can assign it a value.

Sometimes both the actions are online, but may not be directly connected.  For example, a website visitor clicks on your clearance ad in an email, but doesn’t purchase anything that day.  So what’s the percentage of people that click on the clearance ad vs. the number that buy?  This conversion is a bit easier to calculate, but it still may make sense to assign a value to clicking the clearance ad.

Why assign a value to a particular action?  Because it can help you understand how certain online actions influence the sales funnel.  More importantly, it can help you figure out how to organize your site, what actions should be emphasized, and what actions should have marketing or advertising campaigns.

Do you assign value to actions online?  How do you figure out what’s important on your website?

(photo by kennymatic @ FlickrCC)

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Technorati tags: analytics, statistics, marketing, strategy, business

But the real power is in what Facebook inherently offers – the ability to socialize and communicate directly with your customers Once customers become a fan, or join your group, you can send them messages, updates and news. Most importantly, you can see exactly who they are and can reach out to them to gather information about why they like your products and what can be improved. – Selling (and Socializing) on Facebook – Practical eCommerce

You can see the other articles I’ve written for Practical eCommerce here.

He talked with the Web 2.0 expo crowd about how HTTP refreshing isn’t the right protocol for applications that use messaging, such as Twitter. His take is that the best messaging service out there, one that is open, free, web ready, standards based, easy to use, all these thing in one is the Jabber protocol

Jabber’s event driven messaging means that a service like twitter doesn’t have to constantly poll on status of customers when usually the result is ‘nothing new’ Event driven messaging like Jabber allows the service to ‘ping’ the Twitter service to say ‘hey, Im back’ or ‘Hey, I have a message’ Following this on, this means that the Twitter service to then send on that message to you, the subscriber once and only once when its fresh. Jabber is Client-Server not p2p, which is applicable here.

The use of jabber in Twitter makes perfect sense. What you can learn from Blaine’s experience is still a bit muddy, however. Twitter has known scalability issues, but how much of those were HTTP/Jabber problems? We just don’t know. The reality is that for the B2B business, you will likely never face their kind of subscription traffic issues. That means that Jabber should be looked at for the right projects that needs Presence, Subscription, and Messaging. It is XML and looks very much like email in its design. Look at Jabber as a choice for your Web Messaging needs.

Oh, he also laid the gauntlet by saying RSS is good for basic content subscription, but APIs should use ATOM due to parsing being cleaner. Evangelists are still liking RSS, so this was an interesting reveal.

Technorati Tags: web2expo, real time web, B2B

Usability is a term used to denote the ease with which people can employ a particular tool or other human-made object in order to achieve a particular goal.

In the non-Internet world, we expect certain things to be in a certain place and to act in a certain way. In the US, traffic lights have red (stop) at the top, yellow in the middle, and green (go) at the bottom. Even someone who is colorblind can read the traffic light due to the consistency in the position of the lights and what they mean. If every state had different colors and positions of lights, we would see a lot more accidents.

Design on the web is the same way, people expect certain things to be in a certain place on a website. If they are not there or are in a different place, they have to waste time trying to find them. Often people won’t bother with searching for things. They will just visit another site that is designed in a manner that they expect. Designing for usability is extremely important for eCommerce sites where one misstep leads visitors out of a buying process. While not quite as obvious as when a visitor has an item in a shopping cart, design missteps on corporate websites can be just as damaging, but not as easy to measure.

Designing for usability is not particularly difficult. You just need to be patient, know what to look for, do some testing, and be prepared to make constant improvements to your site. Redesigning your site can certainly help, but you will get the best results out of constant refinement.

We’ll examine what data to look at when redesigning your site in Website Usability Basics – Part 1 – Research.

Technorati Tags: customer-centric sites, usability, design, B2B, internet consulting, B2B internet consulting

More importantly, what good are RSS feeds to a B2B Website? Having RSS feeds for the content on your website allows your readers to subscribe to the feed and be alerted through their feed reader when you update content on your site. You can set the feed up to send out the entirety of your content or just snippets to entice visitors to read the rest on your site. Most mainstream sites send out their entire content, relying on visitors to come to their sites based upon their good information and functionality. RSS feeds also allow search engines and other web crawlers another way to access and index the content on your site which can increase your search engine optimization (SEO).

Many mainstream content management systems and blogging software already have RSS feed functionality, including the ability to customize how the feed looks and what content it sends out. There are also plugins, scripts and software available to create feeds from your web content. The more adventurous can also attempt to code their own feeds.

RSS feeds can also be used to take content from other sites and display them on your own (please make sure you are aware of any copyright restrictions). This requires software to turn the feed into code (HTML) which is displayable as part of your webpage. Many content websites already have this built in to widgets, badges and plugins they offer on their site (ex. Flickr, Twitter). For these sites, it is as simple as copying the code they give you into your own website code.

Once you have RSS feeds setup on your website, you can use RSS tracking sites, such as FeedBurner (just acquired by Google) to track how many people are subscribed to your feed, reading your feed content, and coming to your website from the feed. Without this type of specialized tracking, you can get ballpark statistics from looking at the visitors on your site. Many of the feed crawlers will announce themselves as such in their browser information (usually in the visitor information of analytics software). Google Analytics displays how many readers are subscribed and using the Google Reader. You will also be able to see visitors who come from web-based feed readers in the referral section of your analytics program.

RSS feeds for B2B websites allow your visitors to be constantly updated when you post new content on your website. SEO is improved by giving search engines and web crawlers a way to be updated when content is updated on your site. And you can improve the content on your own site by looking for badges, widgets and plugins that allow content from other sites to be displayed on your site (through RSS feeds).

Technorati Tags: RSS, web analytics, SEO, B2B, internet consulting, B2B internet consulting