Everybody wins!

First, we have to ask the question, how do you take the seemingly limitless social media conversations and turn them into actionable insights?  Also, how can you understand what is being said and the context of those conversations?

Social media in any context offers incredibly good (and free) feedback on a variety of goods and services.  Online Retailers need to use this information to their advantage.  Using it to your advantage means using both the good and bad comments.  Here are some practical tips we can take a look at.  Most importantly, keep the conversation going and make sure your social media content is relevant and current.  Do remember that the end goal is product sales and customer connections.  Also, rekindle the passion for your brand consistently using social media methods.  For example, if you a leading e-commerce website and you are involved in a social media forum, why not hold weekly or bi-weekly chat sessions about the experiences with ordering product via your site?  You will get invaluable responses from doing something like this.

It is also very important to constantly think about the audience you are trying to go after, consider your age demographics, race, and gender as well.  Who are the most likely people to purchase your products and who do you want to expand to?  These are key points to remember when considering your marketplace.

It is really no surprise that online e-commerce businesses were one of the first groups to use social media to make their brand more social.  They enabled customers to find out what their peers were thinking and provided valuable insight that could be viewed in “real time”.

Building a truly interactive social media community within an e-commerce platform is important as it creates a more efficient retail environment where customer opinions, relevant content and product information are freely distributed. It is only then that “social commerce” can happen.

To accomplish this, retailers must be able to integrate social media elements, such as social networking features and user generated platforms directly into their commerce environments.
As a result of this, online retailers can create and own a unique social experience that would encompass the entire customer lifecycle.  Customers can than enjoy a more integrated shopping experience and retailers will see an increase in unique visitors to their online store that are “predisposed” to their marketing messages.  This will streamline marketing efforts and lead to increased profits and decreased costs.
Social media allows empowering customers by enabling them to establish user profiles that pull in data and relationships to online stores.  At this point customers can interact and provide you (the online retailer) invaluable customer feedback, and bring in potential new customers.

By building and maintaining vibrant communities that address the passion of the retailer’s core audience, and then spreading that passion to the larger social web, retailers will attract loyal and engaged customers, and will achieve better business results.

Social media is absolutely crucial to an online retailer’s success today.  Social media allows you to engage a customer, get new business, and most importantly elicit invaluable customer feedback that will turn into increased sales.

Google faces an entrenched adversary. Last year, Skype became the leading carrier of international voice calls. In the year to June 30, Skype’s registered users rose from 397m to 560m. Gmail has just over 200m users.

But just 8.1m of Skype’s users pay for the service, and the company relies on these direct payments from these users for most of its revenues.

Google plans to undercut Skype’s prices. In a promotion designed to attract new users, calls to the US and Canada will be free for at least the rest of the year. Calls to other countries will be as low as 2 cents per minute, and will not include a connection fee. The service will become available to US Gmail users in the coming days.

Google already offered Gmail users free voice and video calls to other Gmail users, and the company rolled out Google Voice, a call management programme, earlier this year.

In unveiling the feature, Google emphasised the ongoing convergence of traditional telecommunications and the web. “Given that most of us don’t spend all day in front of our computers, we thought, ‘wouldn’t it be nice if you could call people directly on their phones

Analysts said it was too early to tell if low prices and the convenience of the inbox would allow Google to lure users away from Skype. Skype users are tremendously loyal; so it will be interesting to see how this pans out.

With its Places feature, which it launched on Wednesday, users can broadcast their location to the web, track their friends’ movements and see who else has checked-in to a specific location.

Using Facebook’s website via smartphone, users can check-in to locations from offices to bars to parks. The optional service, available initially in the US, will also allow users to tag their friends in posts, flagging their whereabouts as well.

Places might eventually open new financial opportunities for Facebook through partnerships with retailers and restaurants, and location-specific advertising. But the launch will be scrutinised by privacy advocates concerned that the social networking company is increasingly reckless with user data.

“The prospect of it is pretty interesting from a marketer’s perspective, and pretty scary from a consumer’s perspective,” said Ken Johns, digital strategist at advertising agency Brunner.

Places is hardly a breakthrough. Start-ups, including Foursquare and Gowalla, have made location-based social services among the hottest categories of business development on the web this year.

Users, however, have not signed up to these services en masse, and they remain niche offerings, catering to a few million early adopters. With Places, a large chunk of web users will instantly have the opportunity to share their location online.

“This could be the tipping point for location-based services,” said Dave Marsey, senior vice-president of media at Digitas, the advertising agency. “The real question is what value the consumer is going to get from this.”

To reach that tipping point, Facebook will have to convince users to utilise the service. “They’re going to have to convince users this is something that they want to participate in,” said Josh Martin, analyst at Strategy Analytics. “They will need some kind of incentive programme for this to take hold.”

At launch, Facebook did not include any incentives to users. Places does not involve reward programmes with retailers, “mayorships” or “badges” – all common ways that location-based start-ups have attracted users. Instead, Facebook seems to be betting its users will find inherent social value in sharing their real-time location with one another.

That might be the case. However, Facebook will have to tread carefully as it rolls out Places.  Adding delicate information such as a user’s location to the mix will add a new layer of complexity to the social network’s already dense privacy settings.

“There are definitely going to be privacy concerns,” said Mr Martin. “There [are] hundreds of millions of people that don’t want to share their location, whether it’s because of privacy concerns or because they are of a different generation and don’t care.”

Simon Davies of Privacy International, a campaign group, said that even sharing location data with approved friends created problems, as the site encourages people to create large networks. “Friends are friends on Facebook and that’s the problem,” he said. “I have 600 Facebook friends but there are only 10 people who I would want to know my comings and goings.”

Facebook has looked to head off the debate by stressing that Places was geared towards existing networks of friends. “Places is not about broadcasting your location to the world but about sharing your location with your friends,” said Michael Sharon, Facebook product manager.

“We have a comprehensive set of safeguards and controls to really let users control their privacy on Places,” said Mr Sharon. The product is launching with granular privacy controls similar to those Facebook launched earlier this year, and the default setting will share a user’s location only with their friends.

Marketers are salivating at the prospect of knowing the real-time location of even a fraction of Facebook’s 500m users.

“From a marketer’s perspective, the Holy Grail is to talk to people on an individual basis,” said Mr Johns. “This gives us another piece of information to connect with people in real time.”

Online sales grew by 18% in the month compared with a year earlier, the biggest jump since 2007, IMRG said.

UK shoppers spent £5bn online in July, more than in any other month this year, it added.

Figures published on Thursday showed total UK retail sales rising much faster than expected in July.

Sales volumes jumped 1.1% compared with June, the Office for National Statistics said, with almost all non-food sectors showing strong growth.

World Cup dip

The average UK shopper spent £81 online in July, with promotions and discounts also boosting spending.

Travel sales rose by a third compared with a year earlier, as people looked to escape the rain and head for sunnier climes, said IMRG, the industry body for global internet retailing.

This more than offset a fall in alcohol sales, caused perhaps by England’s disappointing performance in the football World Cup, the group said.

“Although online retail sales survived the recession more convincingly than High Street sales, the last two years or so have no doubt been shaky at times,” said Chris Webster, head of retail consulting and technology at Capgemini, which publishes the online sales index with IMRG.

“It is really encouraging to see growth levels returning to those seen pre-2007 and before consumer confidence was knocked by the financial crisis and the recession.”

The IMRG Capgemini Index tracks online sales at more than 100 retailers across the UK.

The picture is not at all bad for traditional newspapers, which are managing to stay afloat despite heavy declines in their standard circulations, but the research results do provide the latest illustration of how the worlds of new and old media continue to collide.

Social Network Use Shoots Up

Based on results from the 1,000-person survey, conducted exclusively in the United Kingdom, 50.4 percent of consumers still favor the BBC website as their primary breaking-news platform, but social media tops all other contenders, coming in at a strong second with 18.4 percent.

As more and more people log on to social networks (Facebook recently eclipsed 500 million users) for more and more time each day (jumping from roughly 3 to 5.5 hours a month during 2009, the Nielsen Co. reported earlier this year via Marketing Charts), it should not be surprising that their news-consumption habits should migrate to social media networks as well.

Dead-Tree Media Still Standing, But On Uneven Footing

The report dovetails with increasing fears over the fate of the traditional “dead-tree” publications. Newspaper circulation in the developed world dropped precipitously between 2007 and 2009 (by 30 percent in the U.S. and 25 percent in the U.K., respectively, according to one estimate). News websites have been seen as the next logical means for those outlets to hang onto readers, and this year started out better than any in a long time for newspapers in that sense, with properties attracting record traffic to their websites in the first quarter of the year.

Of course, social media continues to change the game: In the iCD study, not a single British newspaper website topped the social media category, with the pay-walled Times of London website receiving a paltry 5.4 percent in support.

The Great Tumblr Rush

Interestingly, while many traditional media organizations are attempting to use Facebook and Twitter to redirect traffic to their main sites (with less-than-stellar results, at best), there is one, lesser-known, less-trafficked social media platform that has lately become something of a magnet for news websites, despite its novelty and unfamiliarity: Tumblr — the weird microblog platform that fills a niche somewhere between Facebook and Twitter and eschews the now-standard comment threads in favor of a “reblog” option.

Traditional media heavy hitters such as The New York Times and The Atlantic are reportedly having “a field day” on Tumblr. But the definition of a “field day” in this case may be a bit overstated. So far, many of the websites have simply staked out domains on the service (ironically, the financially strapped Newsweek was one of the first, and so far few, to actually carve out a decent Tumblr-exclusive content presence), so it remains to be seen just how they will employ it and how effective it will be at drawing readers to their main websites.

Tablet Gamble

Add to that today’s revelation that News Corp. publisher Rupert Murdoch will launch an all-digital U.S. “national newspaper” specifically formatted for mobile and tablet devices such as the iPad, and what you have is … well, an unprecedented new/old-media collision, in which a sustainable 21st century business model remains as elusive as ever.

Of course, there are diehard holdouts to all of this newfangled social-media mumbo-jumbo. Among the respondents to the British study, 276 indicated that they straight up “do not get their news from the Internet.” Maybe they are waiting for someone to get it right?

You need to either be trained in this ability yourself or at least be aware of the tools you can use to help manage the reputation of your business. Online reputation management is a key aspect of running a business in today’s environment and it will probably become more and more important as more people use the internet to help them decide on products and services.

Of course it could be that your business or organization currently has an excellent reputation. Perhaps your support team, your sales group, and other customer-facing pieces of your business do a wonderful job and their efforts are reflected as such on the internet. While this may be true, you have to know for certain this is the case. Guessing is not wise.

If, on the other hand, you have a bad online reputation, deserved or not, you need to know. Perhaps there was an incident that caused a pain for one of your customers, or maybe your competition is being malicious. Either way you must be up to speed on what is being said, where they are saying it, and what your options might be.

If you are going to run a successful business in today’s internet environment you will need to be aware of both the good and the bad things that people are saying about your products and services. You will need to recognize the way these comments can help to determine your company’s bottom line at the end of every month.

With the popularity of the internet all it takes is one bad apple, so to speak, perhaps even something typed as a joke on a social networking site, to bring your reputation down considerably. News travels fast on the internet, and bad news travels even faster, and consumers will stick together if they believe a company has taken advantage of a customer.

Managing your reputation online is not a single action but rather a process. This includes maintaining high visibility, positive publicity, and the right kind of marketing. They move beyond the negative you need to do everything within your power to gain high web site rankings from search engines. This can help to keep the negative comments off the first page of search results.

You will find it necessary to keep a close eye on the opinion of the public. Watching social networks and blogs are essential. You will have to take a long look at the comments being made and you must make every effort to protect and defend your company’s trademark and logo.

As you research online reputation management you will find there are a number of companies available to help you keep your reputation clean or help you cleanse one that has been tarnished. Find out what each company offers and consider using one to help you manage your business image and reputation. Remember that information on the web travels fast and you need to be one step ahead of those who might seek to affect your bottom line in a negative way.

From the Facebook storefront, Old Spice aficionados – yes they now exist – can buy branded merchandise from the Super-Bowl-to-Real-Time-Social-Media ‘Old Spice Man’ campaign featuring shirtless baritone and ex-NFL player Isaiah Mustafa, replete with washboard ads and comedic timing.

As with the UK store, P&G has outsourced all the heavy lifting with the Old Spice Man Campaign Store – the Facebook store is simply a storefront linking through to an external e-store managed by a e-commerce partner in Massachusetts that looks after fulfillment and customer service.

So one of our predictions we make when speaking about the future of social commerce is no longer a prediction – the emergence of Facebook campaign stores to support and monetize marketing campaigns – pop-up f-stores – engage with the promotion; buy the merchandise.  The P&G Campaign store is elementary, and no doubt could be improved, but all the elements are there.  And it’s there. Welcome to the world of Facebook Campaign Stores.

Why do we think pop-up (temporary) Facebook Campaign Stores are the future of f-commerce?  They’re quick, cheap and easy to set up, they help monetize campaigns, and ultimately, because they may help solve the century-plus old problem encapsulated in the famous quote of disputed origin) origin “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half”.

Whilst much advertising, including the digital variety, is and should be focused on building lifetime customer value (AKA ‘Brand building) rather than producing sales bumps, any integrated campaign that creates a digital trace between advertising and buyer behavior can only be a good thing.

So if you manage a brand, why not take a leaf from the book of the biggest advertisers in the world, and throw up a Facebook store for your next campaign?  And if you are an agency, why not consider teaming up with the burgeoning number of f-commerce solution providers out there and start proposing campaigns with real ROI?