Ecommerce Blog

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Original post by Robert Scoble

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Original post by Robert Scoble

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Original post by Muhammad Saleem

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Original post by Robert Scoble

Choosing a profile picture is a self-branding exercise. There’s no right or wrong way to present yourself online but many avatars are boring, forgettable. Here’s a gallery of 99 remarkable, creative, funny and memorable social media avatars. Why did we pick these pics? Check out how to choose an avatar to find out.

 

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Original post by Linda Bustos

Are you in a mono-”logo”s relationship, or play the field when it comes to social network avatars?

Many of us take a number of images for a spin before we settle on “the one.” Some have joined themselves to one and will never look back. While others seem to have a new photo every week.

If you’re tired of the avatar-scene and are looking for a long-term commitment, perhaps it’s time to settle down with a single avatar. Or if you feel your avatar is going nowhere - maybe it’s time to break up.

Decisions, decisions. There are a few questions you must ask yourself:

• Is this just a relationship of convenience? Maybe you selected your profile from the social network’s default. You really gotta believe there is a better avatar out there, even for you.

• Is it purely sentimental? Have you had the same avatar since 2001? Familiarity is comfortable, but you may have outgrown your avatar. I mean, I’ve had many lovely walks along the beach with my Discman, but come on.

• Is your avatar a cheat? It seemed all fine and dandy when you turned yourself into a South Park character, but now you see your picture in other places, wearing other clothes, and with slightly different hairstyles…and you’re beginning to get suspicious.

• Does your avatar share your interests and future goals? An avatar is a personal brand, don’t waste your time if you’re not compatible. Eventually there will come a time when you will inevitably move on.

• Do your friends like your avatar? In a way, your avatar is a reflection of you - your avatar shouldn’t be boring or rude. In fact, if you have an outgoing avatar, it can introduce you to a LOT of new people.

• Can you bring your avatar home to mother? I think this is self-explanatory.

• Is your avatar high-maintenance? Does your picture need constant fussing and resizing for it to look good every time you take it somewhere new?

If you answered yes or no to one or more of the above questions, you may or may not need to break up with your avatar. But if you’ve read this far, please read on for some tips on what makes attractive, long-term avatars:

Logos

Logos are a great way to brand your blog or business, for obvious reasons. If you’re familiar with a blog or company, you’ll recognize the logo as a representative of that brand right off the bat. The risk here is there’s always a possibility you change jobs / careers and your avatar or user handle becomes outdated.

Examples

SEMvironment and Ecogeek’s logos communicate the green focus of their businesses. If your avatar somehow ties into what you do, that can be even more effective.

Another downside of using your logo is if your company has multiple people, it’s confusing if more than one person uses the logo. Who gets to use the logo? How will others in the company brand themselves?

I have yet to see this, but think it would be a neat idea if a company that gets its team to take similar avatar photos. Perhaps all wearing funny hats, tuxedos, team jerseys, doctor’s uniforms or even bobbleheads…

Characterize Yourself

I don’t mean Simpsonize yourself. I mean create a persona like The Mad Hat, Fantomaster, Slightly Shady SEO, Google Tutor, Incredible Help, OnReact or John Cow:

Caricaturize Yourself

Chris Hooley, Rohit Bhargava, Joost de Valk, Barry Schwartz, Andy Sernovitz, Shawn Collins and Jeffrey Zeldman are a few examples of personal caricatures.

Brand Yourself as a Celebrity Character

If you’re lucky enough to share a name with a popular cartoon character like Sebastian or Duff Man, you can go this route.

If you don’t have a name-connection, it’s less effective just to borrow a character. Chances are there are six or seven or eight others who had the same bright idea.

Use an Unusual Headshot

Black and white headshots can stand out because they’re less common, but stand out more with any interesting angle of your head. Examples from Bill Slawski, Muhammad Saleem and Shana Albert.

Bright colored backgrounds work, too. Examples from Ciaran Norris and Lyndon Antcliff:

Lyndoman also uses a half-head, a great technique shared by Wiep Knol and Matt McGee:

Or turn your head, touch your face, rotate your photo, paint your face…or use a prop!

Combine Logo with Photo

Best of both worlds. Robert Raught and Stefan Juhl do this well. Their choice of white background also makes it easier to see. In Robert’s case, you also know his occupation without clicking through to his profile page.

Adopt a Pet

Advertising execs know you can’t go wrong with baby animals. In social media, monkeys are particularly effective (perhaps because they’re almost people?) The pros are that animals are memorable and often funny. The downside is an animal doesn’t say anything about you or your business, unless it ties in with your name (maybe your name is Cat or your nickname is Bart the Bear).

Use an Inanimate Object

Attention-grabbing, stands out amongst the sea of faces and easy for people to remember, a single object can be a good avatar choice. Robert Gorell goes retro with a cassette tape (although this will alienate anyone born after 1985), Wendy Piersall has her red stillettos (would be neat to where those to the conference!) and “Wingnut” has his…wingnut.

Want more inspiration? Check out more amazing avatars.

The Key to PPC for Online Retailers
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Guest Panelist: Ryan Gibson, Director of Marketing, The Rimm-Kaufman Group
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Original post by Linda Bustos

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Original post by Robert Scoble

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.

Original post by Linda Bustos

File this one under “why didn’t I think of that?”

Shoes.com enables customers to ask and answer each others’ questions right on product pages using the Ask & Answer tool from Bazaarvoice.

Considering the popularity of both online forums and product reviews, it makes sense that customers ask and answer questions of each other about a product right on the product page. Shoes.com provides Q&A for every product it carries.

To encourage participation, Shoes.com requests it in a post-purchase email. The questions in the email are specific to the product and based on what would be most helpful to a shoe-buyer: “Do they run wide or small?” or “Are these heels formal enough for the prom?”

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Original post by Linda Bustos

Many of us wonder what the Elf Yourself campaign could have been if it were a bit more focused on sales. Maybe it would have looked a bit more like Irish Spring’s Get Irish Now campaign?

(Due to annoyingness of sound, I have posted a screen shot in lieu of video. You can see the video here).

Yep, that’s me. I’ve Irishified myself - even down to an Irish accent. (Now, if only it could talk like an Irish pirate…)

Do consumers still get a kick out of this kinda thing? Or is this just another “me too” campaign? Irish Spring did do things a bit differently, which might give this a better shot at success:

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Effective Online Merchandising: What Sells?
Free webinar: March 13th, 2008, 9am PT/12pm ET
Guest Panelist: Mike Svatek, Director, Marketing & Product Management, Baynote
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Original post by Linda Bustos

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:

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Effective Online Merchandising: What Sells?
Free webinar: March 13th, 2008, 9am PT/12pm ET
Guest Panelist: Mike Svatek, Director, Marketing &amp Product Management, Baynote
Register to Attend

Original post by Linda Bustos

We social media marketing types toss around buzzwords like “user generated content” all the time. But Etsy is a unique ecommerce-slash-social-shopping-network that has truly made “user generated products” its hallmark. Selling only handmade items from different crafters around the world, Etsy is like eBay minus the auction.

In this electronic press release, Etsy sellers talk about the site, and how they enjoy connecting personally with their customers through the community, and with other sellers.

The site itself has a number of amazing Web 2.0 features like shop by color and a home page that shows you a live feed of new items as they are added - a bit like YouTube’s home page that shows currently viewed videos.

The Treasury is like Polyvore, where users create “sets” that others can browse and buy from - or user-generated cross-selling.

And the community can participate in forums, live chat, “Teams” (special interest groups) and even Virtual Labs where you can join live workshops and classes or get tips on setting up and marketing your Etsy shop.

If you sell handmade items through your own website, you may consider tapping into this marketplace if you haven’t already.

PS, the electronic press release is a great way to make you stand out. When someone’s getting barraged by pitches daily, giving them a video to look at and post gives you a nice advantage.

Effective Online Merchandising: What Sells?
Free webinar: March 13th, 2008, 9am PT/12pm ET
Guest Panelist: Mike Svatek, Director, Marketing & Product Management, Baynote
Register to Attend

Original post by Linda Bustos

Yesterday we talked about Karmaloop’s SEO success. Today we’re going to talk about its innovative affiliate marketing widget. Most of Karmaloop’s customers and Facebook group members have no clue about what affiliate marketing is. But many are masters of their MySpace domain, or Facebook profile, or maybe even a blog. So they’re qualified to evangelize Karmaloop through these profiles with the widget, while earning “Rep Points” to reward them for their participation.

GET YOUR CUSTOM WIDGET HERE!
Now you can promote your favorite Karmaloop products and EARN REP POINTS on your Myspace page or facebook or website with the Karmaloop Widget. Just fill out the form then copy and paste the code on your Myspace page or facebook or website.

Example:

See the widget in action on Facebook.

Effective Online Merchandising: What Sells?
Free webinar: March 13th, 2008, 9am PT/12pm ET
Guest Panelist: Mike Svatek, Director, Marketing & Product Management, Baynote
Register to Attend

Original post by Linda Bustos

Picking up where we left off in discussing Office Max’s “Elf Yourself” campaign (our post Can Dancing Elves Move Product Off Shelves? and Robert Gorell’s How To Elf Yourself Out of Millions), I noticed another nail in Office Max’s coffin in my feed reader today.

Office Max drew much criticism from the marketing world, despite the phenomenal success of its Elf Yourself viral campaign, because it had nothing to do with office supplies. But driving sales wasn’t even the intention, rather it was an effort to bring a human face to Office Max’s brand. If at #2, Avis has to “try harder,” I suppose Office Max - #3 behind Staples and Office Depot - decided to compete on personality rather than price or customer service.

But that’s all for naught if everyone loves your campaign, but attributes it to your competitors - or completely different industries. Robert Gorell noted in his post:

Ask anyone who’s aware of Elf Yourself — and pronounce it carefully when you do — whether they can recall who sponsored the campaign.

Most of the answers I’ve gotten thus far (”Starbucks?”; “Barnes & Noble?”; “Wasn’t that Staples?”) have been guesses.

But this is the kicker: Not even Adweek can recall the sponsor correctly:

Burger King’s online Subservient Chicken from 2004, in which typed-in words triggered the responses of a man in a chicken suit, and Office Depot’s Elf Yourself microsite for the 2006 and 2007 holiday seasons, where people were turned into dancing elves, as well as other unique campaigns are proof that interesting tech tools can create marketing that is fun, engaging and certain to go viral.

D’OH!

Effective Online Merchandising: What Sells?
Free webinar: March 13th, 2008, 9am PT/12pm ET
Guest Panelist: Mike Svatek, Director, Marketing & Product Management, Baynote
Register to Attend

Original post by Linda Bustos

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?

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Effective Online Merchandising: What Sells?
Free webinar: March 13th, 2008, 9am PT/12pm ET
Guest Panelist: Mike Svatek, Director, Marketing & Product Management, Baynote
Register to Attend

Original post by Linda Bustos