Bloggers Digest – 12/07/07
Naw, you’ve got plenty of time to do your Christmas shopping. Stay in this weekend, curl up with your notebook computer and a cup of ‘nog and enjoy some good ecommerce and marketing reading!
Here’s this week’s Bloggers Digest:
Ecommerce News
- Big announcement for enterprise ecommerce software vendors Elastic Path (aka us) this week – we’ve launched the online store for the 2010 Winter Olympic Games which are being hosted right here in Vancouver. You can check out the mascots and find great gift ideas for that someone on your list who has everything — because I bet you $1,000,000 Linden dollars they don’t have this Canadian Olympic Hockey Jersey.
Reputation Management
- Thanks again to our special guest blogger Ayat Shukairy for sharing her wisdom of conversion rates with us. I bet you think I took the day off to watch every single episode of Ask A Ninja, but you’re wrong. I was busy blogging about reputation management – what to do when your brand is trashed on forums and blogs, and some tips and tricks for nudging those search engine results off the first few pages. (I did ask a ninja about it, but he couldn’t offer even one solution that didn’t end up with someone dying).
Social Media
- In You’ve Made Digg, Now What, Chris Winfield shares some excellent tips for optimizing your link bait pages after you hit a homepage home run including adding calls to action and tweaking keywords for SEO improvement. (Hey if any of you have hit the Digg homepage and would like to share your success with the Get Elastic readership, please fire me an email and let’s milk this thing for all it’s worth).
- Lisa Barone over at Bruce Clay was liveblogging a similar topic from PubCon which went down in Las Vegas last week: “Monetizing Social Media Traffic”.
- Chris Brogan warns us that like in SEO, there can be Snake Oil in Social Media. What’s the difference between an “expert” and an “advisor”? Is “social media” just a buzzword? Does the term “user generated content” degrade us all? Go on, check it out.
Blogging
- Khalid over at Invesp Consulting discusses ghost blogging – its reality, its pros and cons.
- Can WalMart rise like the phoenix after a slew of social media marketing mishaps? The Wally Mart is givin’ ‘er another go, this time using real employees, not unlike their weekly flyers. Jeremiah Owyang catches up with one of the employee-bloggers in an interview.
This means it’s time for an update of our list of eCommerce blogs.
Jeremiah did a really innovative thing. He asked his 1000+ Twitter-stalkers what they thought of WalMart’s social media strategy, or lack thereof. Published in the article are some responses. (Chalk that up as one more reason to use Twitter).
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The Olympics Store looks really good in my opinion. I am sure you will continue to improve it since now to 2010 is plenty of time. Couple things…
Some of the pastel colors make a few of the links hard to see, depending on screen resolution and how good the surfers vision is. Many of these gifts may appeal to an older audience, many of which might not have the greatest vision still.
Also, you should consider stripping out the index.html from the logo graphic link, might cause some canonicalization issues in the future.
I like the green “X’s” next to the breadcrumbs, sweet feature.
The rest looks good, I plan on digging more into it later this week or weekend, but so far so good. Nice work Jason and the Elastic path team!!
We missed a lot of SEO staples in the rush to launch. It will all be looked at as the holiday rush subsides. Colors are tricky when working with a strict brand standard. Things get approved/disapproved and eventually there are diminishing returns. “Do we want the checkout process to work… or fix colors”. Quite an eye opening experience – something that will most definitely benefit our product and customers in the future.
Certainly understandable, something I don’t run into often as I don’t deal with many Fortune 100 pluses.
I do however understand the need to get a product/site launched in a hurry and having to “look the other way,” so to speak when it comes to less prioritized features, sections, on-page stuff etc.
Typically, I get all the on-page stuff, coding and core functions up and ready before and during launch/testing phases. I have done it the other way, it really depends on several factors for me, like domain age, brand, the store owners knowledge, etc. If it’s an older site with knowledgeable staff I get all the SEO done right away. If it’s a newer site with less experienced founders, I typically get the core features and processes done first.
Either way, it’s looking good so far Jason, can’t wait to see some numbers and stats (if you are able to share).