E-Mail: jason.billingsley@elasticpath.com
Web Page: http://www.elasticpath.com
Bio: Jason Billingsley is a Co-founder & VP Innovation at Elastic Path Software where he is responsible for exploring new ecommerce technologies and methods for online retail. As principal ecommerce analyst, he consults with some of the largest and most successful online retailers in the world – most recently managing online strategy for the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Winter Games online store. Jason has authored industry research such as "The Ecommerce Checkout Report", hosts a monthly ecommerce webinar series, and oversees the most subscribed ecommerce blog on the internet - Get Elastic. He is a regular speaker at retail industry events such as Shop.org, Online Market World, and eTail. An online marketer for well over a decade, Jason has been quoted in such publications as the Wall Street Journal, The National Post, Internet Retailer, BtoB Magazine, Apparel magazine, and Multi-Channel Merchant. In 2005, he was a co-recipient of the Canadian Youth Business Foundation's National Best Business award, and helped land Elastic Path Software on Profit Magazine's Hot 50. Jason is a recipient of the Terry Fox Humanitarian Award and holds a BBA in Entrepreneurial Leadership. He resides in Vancouver with his wife Amy.
What do two billionaire Google guys get up to for Halloween? It’s only appropriate that Larry and Sergey dress up as ‘Ghoul’gle.
Best Caption in the comments wins a $100 gift certificate for Amazon.com
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The problem with blogging is too often the reader and the writer never meet face-to-face. Besides some back and forth via email or comment thread, it is highly detached. Last week I got a chance to talk to some Get Elastic readers at Shop.org after our session on Social Media Marketing - that was a treat. This week I want to meet more of you at Online Market World in San Francisco! San Fran is quite similar to my hometown of Vancouver - it is probably my favorite US city (Chicago in the summer is a close second). I have been there about 8 times in the past three years and have yet to make it to Alcatraz despite booking tours on separate occasions.
If you want to say hello at Online Market World you can catch me after my sessions…
We usually don’t use our blog to do any promotion of company products or commercial events (and we constantly hear how unusual and great that is for a vendor - thank you for recognizing). But, since so many of you are trying to get ahead with your online retail stores, or have clients in the space, we figured you might be interested in a sneak peek of the next version of our ecommerce software.
New Features Help You Sell More, Work Less.
Date: Thursday, September 27th, 2007
Time: 9 am Pacific / 12pm Eastern
Register to Attend the Webinar
Elastic Path Software is preparing to release the highly anticipated ecommerce platform Elastic Path 6, featuring new capabilities like:
Be among the first - join our product manager and lead developer for a SNEAK PREVIEW of the new features and architecture.
Click Here to Attend…
(Space is Limited)
Webinar Agenda
09:00 - 09:15 am PT: Brief Overview of Elastic Path 6
09:15 - 10:00 am PT: In-Depth Look at New Features
10:00 - 10:15 am PT: Questions & Answers on New Features
10:15 - 10:45 am PT: Architecture & Design with Lead Developer
10:45 - 11:00 am PT: Questions & Answers on Architecture
Bring all your questions for the live Question & Answer period.
## End promotional message - Continue with good, useful online retail focused content ##
This post is part four our Social Media Guide, a companion post to our presentation “Self-evolving eCommerce: Using Consumer Generated Content for Fun and Profit” at the Shop.org Annual Summit in Las Vegas.
The referee indicates whether your play was a success or not. Sometimes it is a touchdown, sometimes just a field goal. Other times you will have dropped the ball.
This post is part three our Social Media Guide, a companion post to our presentation “Self-evolving eCommerce: Using Consumer Generated Content for Fun and Profit” at the Shop.org Annual Summit in Las Vegas.
The offense is running the play that was called and looking for a few key blocks.
This post is part two our Social Media Guide, a companion post to our presentation “Self-evolving eCommerce: Using Consumer Generated Content for Fun and Profit” at the Shop.org Annual Summit in Las Vegas.
The Offense is on the field lining up, getting everyone in place to snap the ball.
TIP
Spend time on titles: Copyblogger Guide to Effective Headline Writing
Get Inspired
110 Ways Retailers are Using Social Media Marketing
This post is part one of four from our Social Media Guide, a companion post to our presentation “Self-evolving eCommerce: Using Consumer Generated Content for Fun and Profit” at the Shop.org Annual Summit in Las Vegas.
Planning is the coach of a social media campaign. You must understand the field and generate a strategy for scoring.
Ask A Ninja shares his views on social media in What is Podcasting?
Social media describes the online technologies and practices that people use to share content, opinions, insights, experiences, perspectives, and media themselves.
Social media can take many different forms, including text, images, audio, and video. The social media sites typically use tools like message boards, forums, podcasts, bookmarks, communities, wikis, weblogs etc. (source: Wikipedia - Social Media)
The entire blogging community has jumped on the BlogRush bandwagon, and we are no different here at Get Elastic. A-list bloggers are adding this new blog traffic widget to try and generate additional exposure for their blog content. How does it work?
Simply add the BlogRush widget to your blog and for each visitor your blog recieves, you will earn a credit to display one of your posts headlines on a related blog in the network. It reminds me of the old Webring days.
The treat is, there is a MLM component to it, and you will also receive credits for people who sign up for the service - up to 10 levels deep. That is some serious velocity. At first I was hesitant as the posts did not seem that related to the topics we cover here on Get Elastic, but over the past 24 hours it has actually gotten better. I have started to discover some excellent blogs from post titles appearing in the widget. I have actively clicked through and found the content engaging enough to subscribe to the feed.
As more blogs are added to the network, I believe it will get even more accurate and this widget will become a mainstay like the MyBlogLog widget has become.
So, take a look at BlogRush to generate blog traffic in a very easy and passive way. If it doesn’t pan out, it is easy enough to remove it right? Sign up to get started.
* Note: links to BlogRush contain a referral ID - if you sign up, you become part of our extended network and we get extra credit. If we can pull reports on who signs up under us, we will blog about our network and you will get a high quality link from us.
Vegas is a couple days away now and I am gearing up for what looks to be a great conference - Shop.org Annual Summit 2007. This is the first time I am speaking at a Shop.org event and the session will hopefully have some great audience input. We are doing something a bit out of the norm for a retail event and not using PowerPoint *gasp*. Instead, we will be presenting in a blog format and live surfing. Since the topic is social media, we figured what better way to demonstrate the topic, than to actually use it to deliver the content.
Now, most retail or ecommerce conferences do not come equipped with WiFi enabled breakout rooms - but we have successfully procured a wireless ready room for our session. The only challenge now is to have attendees actually have laptops or wireless devices with them to participate.
Instead of presenting content, then taking questions at the end - we are going to have a running blog post that people can participate in as we are on stage. We will adjust the discussion appropriately. If that fails - and I suspect it may - we will revert to the old talk show format we are all so used to, but we will proxy the live questions onto the blog anyways. Anything to get a discussion going.
We are super happy to have Elastic Path customer, Garmin sharing their experiences with social media like blogging, YouTube, Flickr, MySpace, etc.
So, if you are in Vegas for Shop.org, make sure to check out our social media clinic on Wednesday at 1:15. I am also moderating a table on Tuesday on social media measurement. Bring your questions and experience with you. Or, if you want to chat ecommerce, hunt me down.
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