The Office Max social media marketing machine is back with a new viral Youtube campaign - penny pranks! This ties perfectly to Office Max’s back-to-school penny sale and is getting a lot of 5 star ratings and views on Youtube.

Boasting 4,285 subscribers, pennypranks’ channel is #2 on all of Youtube for new subscribers this month. Great job Office Max!

Here are 3 examples:

HILARIOUS HIDDEN CAMERA PENNY PRANK IN RESTAURANT

HILARIOUS HIDDEN CAMERA PENNY PRANK IN JEWELRY STORE

HILARIOUS HIDDEN CAMERA PENNY PRANK AT USED CAR LOT

Here’s what we can learn from this effort:

• A memorable star. The curly-redhead is funny and has that Will-it-Blend-host-character.

• Very short introductions. The shorter and sweeter you can keep your introductions, the better - especially for a series of videos. Office Max gets right to the point so no matter which of the series a viewer watches first - he or she will get the “gist” of the series’ theme, but it’s short enough to not be repetitive and annoying in future installments.
• Relevant humor. The content is funny, entertaining and related to an actual sales promotion that is happening.
• Call to action. The campaign includes products and a URL to buy products after every video. Again, this is short and sweet.

Anyone can do something like this, even on half a shoestring budget.

Luxury retailer Cartier recently launched a MySpace presence for its Love by Cartier campaign. But it faces an interesting reputation management issue: since MySpace already has hundreds of profiles that use the name Cartier (it is a surname, after all).

If you type in “Cartier MySpace” in Google, this is what you get:

If someone really wants to find the page, they may head over to MySpace and use it’s site search box, and still not find the official page:

You have to type “Love By Cartier” in Google or MySpace to get the link to the Cartier MySpace page (at time of posting, algorithm changes or incoming links to Cartier’s page may change that).

Yahoo’s algorithm does select the right page for “Cartier MySpace”:

Though you can’t control how Google matches pages to the search term (duplicate content filter in action), you can build links to the page you want to rank well to help boost its “Page Rank” which may cause it to beat out other pages in the search engine’s index. (If the search engine indexed 500+ pages from MySpace relevant to the term “Cartier”, it only picks 1 to show in search results, 2 if it uses an indented second result).

Cartier could also nag MySpace to tweak its internal search to rank its page tops for “Cartier” searches, especially since this is an advertising partnership between the two.

This is also an example of why brands should really claim their social network profile names / domains / Facebook Pages and Groups proactively, even if they just sit on them. It’s easy for net citizens to beat you to the punch which makes it harder for you to be found in search engines and social network searches.

Earlier this week we discussed why enlarged images, alternate product views and showing products in context can help conversion.

But what about “user generated images” (or the friendlier term “customer submitted photos”)? Are they just social media / Web 2.0 hype or do they really improve customer experience?

Customer images may be used to help sell product (like customer reviews complement product descriptions) or just build community (if the retailer has a community section). Either way, customer submitted photos have their challenges:

• Image quality can vary from submission to submission. Dark or fuzzy images really don’t add value and can hurt the consistency and professionalism of your site.

• Attracting images can be a challenge - only a small percentage of customers will take the time to create a picture and send it to you.
• Moderating images for appropriateness and relevance takes extra time.

Let’s look at some examples of how online retailers are using customer submitted photos:

Product Pages

You may have noticed that Amazon shows customer images along with its own product images:

You can roll over the thumbnails to view larger versions and even read notes that users have left on them:

This is helpful as a customer review - the color on the web is not the color in the box.

Customer Reviews

Power Reviews allows photo attachments to reviews, as spotted on Uncommon Goods:

(Sometimes customers pick useless tags…)

What I like about this approach is it’s seamless. Good review content is not separated into text vs. image reviews. On Amazon, a very helpful tip like the color is actually more mint than neon green could be missed unless you read reviews AND view pictures. Plus, it’s less programming work when your reviews product has image upload already available.

Customer Testimonials

Modern Line Furniture has a testimonials page with customer images linked to from the home page (though the call-to-action gets a bit lost in the home page clutter).

The testimonials page links through to the product pages for items featured in the room. Yay! There’s hope for a transaction!

Community / Resource Section

Some retailers actually have a community component to their e-stores, like David’s Bridal. Customers can upload pictures from their weddings, and brides-to-be can surf them to get inspiration for dress styles and color schemes.

While this is a good idea, the community section is kind of a dead end — there is no link back to products or tools that facilitate a purchase decision like shop-by-color.

Alternative Energy Store has a similar community gallery, but without links to products or buying guides, it’s not very helpful.

With links to products, the gallery could be a social tool for product discovery. I just haven’t come across a retailer who’s doing that well (community gallery that aids shopping). Have you? Please share your find in the comments.

Ed Whiting from Travel Remark put together this eye-opening video about Facebook travel applications. Just for fun, take a guess how many travel-related Facebook applications there are before you click play (the grand total will be revealed at the end).

And this is just one category of commercial applications, folks.

When Facebook applications were launched last year, first movers in ecommerce included Blue Nile’s Wish List and Backcountry’s Steep and Cheap. I give credit to these retailers for giving it a shot. Unfortunately, almost a year later you can count the number of daily users for these apps on one hand.

Other social shopping applications like StyleFeeder and Polyvore get a few thousand daily users - not bad, but they are definitely the exception.

Challenges in Social Shopping Facebook Application Marketing

1. Application Aggro - Requests to add applications from friends are no longer trusted. Much worse, in fact - it has turned friends into perceived spammers and prompted many Facebook statuses along the lines of “stop sending me [radio edit] applications!

2. Saturation - At this stage in the game, there are so many applications that to get popular, you have to be remarkable. You have to provide so much value that people will add your application and risk losing friends to evangelize your app with invites.

3. Commercialization - Judging by daily average users, it’s clear that Facebookers would rather buy and sell each other than buy real products.

4. App ADD - Even if someone adds your application, that person has to be really motivated to use it on a regular basis. Otherwise it will inevitably be removed.

5. Co-dependency - Many apps depend on a sufficient number of your friends’ participation for there to be any practical value (Facebook being a social network, after all). If a user doesn’t have mutual friends with the application, he can get no utility out of it.

Given these conditions, I don’t think there’s a future for e-tailers to win at this game. What do you think?

It was only one year ago my first Get Elastic post went live, how quickly the year has gone! The post was the Social Shopping Roundup and it showcased many social shopping start-ups from social bookmarking or “wishlisting,” to deals and coupon sharing communities and social comparison engines.

According to Hitwise analyst, Heather Dougherty “The Social Shopping category is still small, receiving less than 1% of the total market share of US visits, but there has been significant growth.” (Source)

Scott Hurff of CSE Strategies puts it into perspective - MySpace receives about 2% of Internet traffic. So for every 2 hits on MySpace (or Facebook), someone’s checking out a social shopping site. Of the social shopping sites, Kaboodle appears to be the Google in terms of market share:

• Kaboodle 68%

• Buzzillions 8.23% (Ratings and Reviews, Comparison Shopping)
• ThisNext 7.23%
• ShopWiki 6.89%
• Stylehive 5.18%

With the exception of Buzzillions, the top 5 are “social bookmarking” sites. There are no doubt countless other sites where consumers can bookmark and share products, deals and coupons, read ratings and reviews and find deals - and perhaps as many Facebook applications. We don’t need a comprehensive list of players in this space. Rather, this year’s roundup focuses on social shopping sites that address key trends in ecommerce like video / widget marketing, live chat, email / RSS, user-generated merchandising or offer a twist on traditional comparison shopping.

Video / Widget Marketing

Qoof.com

Qoof provides product video widgets for etailers and content publishers (affiliates) to bring an interactive experience to product descriptions. The Flash-based widget can be embedded on the etailer’s website or on the affiliate site. Transactions can actually be completed through the widget which eliminates the need for a shopping cart, or the customer can be directed to the online store to purchase. You can check out the Widget Showcase with examples from Ice.com, Drugstore.com and more.

What early adopters of this product may enjoy is the ability to stand out from other affiliate offers. Product video is growing in popularity, and it won’t be long before most sites offer some kind of video complement to product images. You may also be more attractive to affiliates who are looking for multi-media content to boost their own conversions.

Whether customers like it or not is a different story. To be honest, there are not a lot of ecommerce widgets out there so I have my fingers crossed that there will be more interesting things being done with portable video content by this time next year, with more data on its effectiveness.

How to get involved: See Qoof.com’s Etailer Page.

Continue Reading:
Social Shopping Reviews Roundup: 2008 Update »

Greetings from the Rocky Mountains! I’m away this week in beautiful Banff National Park in Alberta, Canada for the CWC/Corus Digital Media Career Accelerator workshop.

This morning I will be presenting to a select group of women in the broadcasting industry a session on blog promotion through new media. I thought I’d give you a peek at the slide deck anyhow as the ideas can apply to ecommerce blogs also. (You may also download it from Slide Share)

They’re not the sexiest slides but I made them a bit more textual so the deck is somewhat understandable on its own.

| View | Upload your own

Blog Promo and Social Media For Ecommerce

I’d like to go into a bit more detail here on Get Elastic with an ecommerce focus:

Why Blog?

• Open up for conversation with your customers, gather feedback and attend to reputation management concerns

• Establish a personality for your company, employees or brands
• Attract long-tail search traffic and pre-sell your company or products
• Build backlinks to boost your overall link profile (if the blog is a sub-folder or sub-domain)
• Landing page for contests and promotions
• Information resource for customers, employees, partners, investors and affiliates

Blog Traffic Sources

• Offline awareness (your brick-and-mortar stores, print or TV/radio advertising, word-of-mouth)

• Link from your estore
• Links from other websites and blogs
• Search engines
• Blog search engines
• Social networks
• Email campaigns with blog call-outs

Basic Search Engine Optimization

• Keywords in the right places

• Links from relevant sites
• Blog plug-ins
• Good content / more content

Where to Place Keywords

• Title tag

• Page title
• Body text
• Link text (on your site and when others link to you)
• Post tags
• Alt attributes (images, video)
• Headings / bolded text
• URLs (keyword relevance in search engine and when people link to you)

Why Links Matter

• Search engines need a measure of authority or popularity

• Blogs are more “linkable” than static business sites
• Deep links look more “natural” to search engines (don’t look purchased or bartered for)
• Links send traffic and help branding

Examples of Link-Baity Content

• Humor: Jockey Stop Squirming
• Controversy: Dove Evolution campaign
• Contest: Target dormroom contest in Facebook
• Amazing: Ray-ban sunglasses
• Emotional: 1-800-Flowers mother’s day
• Informative: Sephora makeup how-to’s
• Timely: Ice.com - Mr. Cupid
• Ongoing: Blogs (Ecommerce Blogs of the Top Online Retailers)

SEO Plugins

• SEO Plugins for Wordpress from Michael Gray

• Best SEO Plugins for Wordpress from The Blog Joint

Other “Search Engines”

• Video sharing: YouTube, Google Video etc.

• Google / Yahoo News (Tips for getting into Google News from Search Engine Roundtable and Search Engine Guide)
• Blog search: Google / Technorati / Ice Rocket & more

Why StumbleUpon Rules

Because this is a fairly short session (45 minutes) and there are so many things I could say about the subject, I only had time to address one social network - StumbleUpon. In my opinion, if you do no other social media sharing, you should at least be on StumbleUpon. It’s a good entry-level social network for a number of reasons:

• Drives a ton of traffic (often more than Google)

• Don’t have to be a “power user” to get results (according to Dosh Dosh)
• Drives traffic long-term (as opposed to Digg-style sites where stories are hot for a day)
• General site but you can get very targeted (specific tags, groups etc)
• Toolbar makes submission easy
• Tech-savvy users often have their own blogs (link opportunity)
• You can discover things to blog about

StumbleUpon is a social network where members can surf tags related to their interests to discover sites, photos, videos and articles relevant to them. Rather than using a search engine and letting a machine decide what’s good content, StumbleUpon shows you sites others thought were cool. You can also follow members interested in your topic/industry and when you log in, you see a feed of relevant recently “thumbed” content that you can start checking out yourself. If you like it you thumb up, if you don’t like it you thumb down or hit the “Stumble” button again. Simple.

You can also share items with your network. This can be powerful when you have a network of like minded people who will thumb up content you share with them. Their recent thumbs may appear in Facebook profiles and newsfeeds as well as their StumbleUpon profile page and friends’ feeds. Here’s a StumbleUpon Networking Guide with screenshots for further reading.

You can friend a maximum of 200 people on StumbleUpon (but more than that can subscribe to your Stumble feed). Neil Patel gave us a tip back in October when he joined us for a webinar on social media marketing strategies: friend as many people as you can initially, and if they don’t friend back within a week, move on and friend some more.

I suggest looking for a group on a niche topic and adding friends from within that group or looking for people who have indicated their interest in a certain topic by tag. You can find niche groups by browsing http://group.stumbleupon.com or typing a tag keyword in the search box.

StumbleUpon users are techsavvy and are often bloggers themselves. They may be using their SU account to discover blog fodder and your content can reach more people (the blog’s RSS subscribers and search engine traffic). The back links also benefit you.

SU is also a social bookmarking tool. When people Stumble your content there’s a good chance they’ll come back later to view it again.

Other social media sites like Digg have algorithms that skew towards “power users” that submit topics that go popular. It takes a lot of work to build up your Digg history and friend following. StumbleUpon takes less effort – you can get traffic just for submitting stories to the StumbleUpon system. But you can get more mileage if you make use of the social features available to you: friending, joining groups, tagging and reviewing sites and members.

Public relations guru and author of Micro Persuasion, Steve Rubel, has taken a lot of heat this past week over his post SEO Shenanigans Pose a Clear and Present Danger to Social Media.

Rubel’s PR firm Edelman dipped into the dark-gray/black area of social media marketing (SMM) a while back - and the blogosphere hasn’t forgotten. Other intelligent comments on Rubel’s post come from SEO professionals defending their industry’s honor.

I don’t want to add to the debate here, but I will say that I agree with Steve that if you are “launching social media marketing programs solely for the purpose of influencing search engines, rather than with the intent of fostering collaboration and genuine communication” you fit the description of an unethical marketer.

But that doesn’t mean expecting an SEO benefit from social media marketing campaigns is evil. I don’t think that’s what Rubel was implying anyway (remember it’s the word solely that was empasized). But I wanted to throw in my 2 cents and clarify which social media marketing activities I believe really help SEO, which have minimal value and which are simply spam.

Social Media Marketing as a Link Building Strategy

The primary way social media or any other site can help your SEO is through attracting links. Social media can drive traffic that may convert, but search engines won’t factor that into their algorithms. So any dabbling in social networks for SEO purposes is essentially link building.

These links can be acquired directly or indirectly. This is what I mean:

Continue Reading:
Social Media With a Side of SEO - Hold the Spam »

Today, we all know how important customer reviews are to retailers and customers alike. They help convert buyers by building trust and confidence in the product, they reduce returns, draw long-tail search traffic and are a simple entry into on-site communities for ecommerce websites.

But there was a time when no one had them. It makes you wonder what we’re missing today that we don’t know we’re missing.

Let’s take another effective merchandising tool: cross-selling. Currently, ecommerce marketers are banking that their personal cross-sell suggestions or algorithmic-based recommendations will be relevant and attractive to shoppers. This *can* be really hit and miss. But what if we gave customers a crack at cross-selling?

Continue Reading:
User Generated Cross-Sells? Why Is Nobody Doing It? »

Our own VP of Innovation, Jason Billingsley shares his social media marketing wisdom with Internet Retailer today in “MySpace opens it doors, but retailers may walk on by.”

This article is timely as MySpace has recently opened its developer platform, similar to what Facebook did ages ago. We’ve had enough time to watch the attempts of Facebook applications by online retailers to determine whether MySpace application efforts are worth the time or not.

“… merchants have had little success so far selling products through Facebook,” says Jason Billingsley, co-founder and vice president of innovation at Elastic Path Software, whose company has studied the e-commerce applications created for Facebook.

Some merchants have created popular promotional applications for Facebook, such as a JanSport back-to-school contest last summer that offered JanSport products as prizes to Facebookers who posted the best pictures of the contents of their backpacks. “But they weren’t selling products,” Billingsley says. “They were giving away products through a fun contest.”

There is one aspect of MySpace’s offer that makes it more appealing than Facebook’s, says Billingsley. MySpace has adopted a Google standard called OpenSocial designed to allow an application created for one social networking site to run on others. While Facebook has yet to adopt OpenSocial, Billingsley says an application built for MySpace will run on other social networking sites using the Google standard, such as U.K. social networking leader Bebo.”

Check out the full article at Internet Retailer, and subscribe to GetElastic if you haven’t already to stay in the loop on social media marketing trends and tips for ecommerce marketers.

Retailers like Target, Walmart, Victoria’s Secret and American Eagle’s “aerie” brand have found a way to direct-market to “Millennials” through Facebook Sponsored Groups. Like opt-in email campaigns, these retailers are using its Sponsored Group member lists to send notifications on contests, sales and even new Facebook applications.

Everyone who has joined a Sponsored Group has opted in by default to receiving Facebook “email” messages:

Here’s the latest Valentine email from aerie, a clothing line from American Eagle aimed at 15-25 year old females. It was sent to almost 50,000 members of its Sponsored Group:

Continue Reading:
Sponsored Facebook Groups - The New Opt In Email Campaign? »