Help Me Pay Bills by Online Shopping
CJU Keynote: So what drives customer engagement, anyway?
2011’s keynote speaker was the very informative Dr. Jeffrey F. Rayport, Ph.D. Jeffrey coined the term “viral marketing” and brings an incredible knowledge of the online commerce space. He advises businesses in rethinking how they interact with their customers. His keynote focused on how the networked world requires new approaches to drive customer engagement, which in turn is changing the face of online and multi-channel commerce.
Last year’s keynote was informative, but dry. This year’s keynote was awesome. Dr. Rayport was informative as all get out while being funny and engaging all at the same time. I’d love to see him speak again, and I definitely ended the keynote feeling jazzed to keep learning more and energized for my meetings!
Bullet Point Review!
- Consumers have changed over the decades
- Consumer 1.0: Demand was greater than supply
- Consumer 2.0: Demand was equal to supply
- Consumer 3.0: Supply is greater than demand
- We’re all in the business of demand generation.
- Engaging and captivating consumers is key.
- Toyota’s Scion is a great cast study of how to do it right.
- Scion never spent money on TV advertising: 60% allocation of their marketing budget to events and 40% to online advertising.
- Made a lot of after market peripherals and accessories for the car.
- It’s changing the way car buying works. Most owners customize their Scions online.
- Integrate social networks, read dynamic comments, follow Twitter streams.
- 2/3 of the 100 million streams of videos happen on exterior sites, not YouTube.com
- StumbleUpon now accounts for over 50% of all the referral traffic from the topographic social media sites. There are 12 million SU users vs. 750 million Facebook users and yet SU just surpassed Facebook.
- Best Buy extends multiple-channel retail experience into many useful OUTGOING points of presence, such as Facebook, online magazines, mobile apps, Twitter-based customer service, and crowd sourced ideas.
- A single social graph can become a vast constellation of thousands of INCOMING points of presence.
- With the proliferation of local deals and offers, mobile couponing is growing rapidly in appeal.
- It’s expected that 16.5% of adult mobile phone users will be using mobile coupons by 2013.
- iPhone and iPad apps enable mobile access to flash sales with “call to action” offers for people on the go.
- To boost mobile sales, companies have provided a “virtual shop window” for the retail experience without the inventory. Ocado in the UK has a store front, you can scan the barcodes on the window with your mobile phone and order items.
- Mobile smart phone apps provide branded city guides to deepen brand engagement and drive sales.
- Hulu’s move beyond online video streaming is fueling growth for it’s business and content owners, too. It went from a website to having multiple platforms to provide premium content.
- The highest productivity retailer in the world as measured by retail sales per square foot is the Apple Store.
- Publishers and advertisers will win consumers not through Customer Relationship Management, but Customer Managed Relationships.
- Forget segments and niches in the traditional sense.
Dr. Rayport’s 5 Main Takeways:
- Target your diehard fans: put them in the driver’s seat
- Social the brand: make rewards matter
- Work the web: let the outside in and the inside out
- Experience is everything: form factors rule
- Integrate the touch points: be savvy and seamless
Thanks, Pro-California Merchants
Seriously, thank you to all the merchants who are based in California that are reaching out to affiliates dropped from other programs to offer their services to get affiliates up & running with their programs. And especially thanks to out-of-state affiliate merchants who are working WITH California affiliates to get through this law and not make the affiliates suffer.
Since I’m keeping a list of merchants dropping California affiliates, I thought it only fair to keep complimentary lists of merchants KEEPING California affiliates. Some of these merchants already have traditional sales tax nexus in California due to physical retail stores. Others have warehouses or corporate offices located within the state. Some, it’s important to note, are services which are not subject to sales tax at all. And still others – in the hardest situations – are choosing to make adjustments internally that will allow them to continue working with their California-based affiliate partners. If you’re a member of these programs, shoot the affiliate manager a hearty thank you for going to bat for their affiliates!
Please let me know if I’m missing any deserving merchants who have reached out to affiliates in California to support them. This list was last updated at 4:25 PM PDT on 8/1/11.
Keeping California Affiliates:
- 4Checks.com
- AC Lens
- AllPosters.com
- Art.com
- Barnes & Noble
- Baseball Rampage
- Best Buy
- Betty Mills
- Biggerbooks.com
- Blurb
- Business Checks
- Buy.com
- BuyCostumes.com
- CampSaver.com
- Carousel Checks
- CCBerries.com
- Checks Unlimited
- Cherry Moon Farms
- Christianbook
- ChristianGear.com
- Clickinks.com
- CPO Outlets
- DeepDiscount.com
- Deluxe
- DesignForYourWine.com
- Drugstore.com
- eBay
- eCampus.com
- eHealth Insurance
- EverythingFuriture.com
- EverythingOfficeFurniture.com
- Expand2Web Small Business WordPress Theme
- Extra Value Checks
- Fanatics
- GearForGoldens.com
- Girly Checks
- GreekGear.com
- GuidoGear.com
- Guitar Center
- Half.com
- Hancock Fabrics
- HappyBidDay
- Homestead
- Inkgrabber
- JoAnn Fabrics
- JustIrishStuff.com
- KelleyFurniture.com
- Kmart
- Knetbooks.com
- KnowEm
- Kodak Gallery
- Koyal Wholesale
- Layla Grayce
- Lot 26
- Loxly Gallery
- Makais.com
- MilitaryGearUSA.com
- MountainReservations.com
- NationalityShop.com
- Netflix
- NewEgg.com
- Office Depot
- Office Max
- Oneida
- PartyBeans
- Personal Creations
- Petco
- PetSmart
- Pets Warehouse
- ProFlowers
- PsPrint
- RavenTools
- RedEnvelope
- Ring Central
- Sears
- SellBackBooks.com
- Shari’s Berries
- Sheet Music Plus
- Shoe Shopping Spree
- Shopping.com
- Softball Rampage
- Spoonful of Comfort
- Surf Fanatics
- Target
- Tax Brain
- Tea Collection
- TheClymb.com
- TheFurnitureParadise.com
- Tiny Prints
- TShirtHub.com
- Viator
- Walmart
- Waxing Poetic
- WicksWorks
- WyzAnt
Social Media Marketing Summit: Brand Spotlight on Best Buy
This panel was done differently from the rest at the Social Media: The Marketing Summit conference at the beginning of this month. Instead of a self-moderated panel, event organizer Lisa Picarille moderated this by grilling the two panelists from Best Buy on Blue Shirt Nation (BSN), their internal social network. The panelists were:
- Steve Bendt, Sr. Manager Social Technology, Best Buy
- Gary Koelling, Sr. Manager Social Technology, Best Buy
These guys were hilarious AND on target – something that was supposed to help out the advertising guys with selling plasma screen televisions turned into such a great outlet for employees.
Bullet Point Review!
- Started out with a couple hundred users across the network of stores.
- For the first few months it was just a collection of jokes shared with fellow employees.
- Started in June 2006 – by October ’06 the execs liked it and threw money at them and said, “Grow it. Fast”.
- They actually gave some of the money back so they could take some pressure off and feel free to fail on the way to growing.
- Used the money to go to the stores around the country to get feedback from employees on what they wanted to use the BSN for.
- It no longer belonged to Steve & Gary; it belonged to the users.
- They needed to build trust – gave out t-shirts and stickers to woo the employees they talked to.
- Part of the success is relate-ability to Steve & Gary but not much. Gary said, “We can’t be interesting for that long”.
- Members became just as important, if not more, as admins.
- Early on they identified users who had admin potential and promoted some moderators.
- In 2 years they’ve only had to moderate 3-4 posts.
- Mostly users are moderating each other pretty well.
- The average employee age for Best Buy is 22, so these are the social media generation.
- A device/mobile version is coming so execs and higher up employees who rely on these devices more than the average sales clerk can access the BSN readily.
- Have there been any outside benefits? They hosted a video contest to help boost 401-K enrollment – something they thought for sure would fail when the HR department came to them with the idea. 401-K enrollment increased 30% with 40,000 more employees nationwide enrolling.
- Does it help control the “bad stuff” that gets out there? Not really; they do have about a 50% turnover rate, which is just the nature of retail.
- How do things get acted on? They pass on feedback to those who need to hear it. Example: the company was going to announce that they were going to be severely modifying the employee discount and that got leaked to the forums. Activity skyrocketed with concerned employees who put out there all the reasons why they needed the discount to stay as good as it was. Management listened and kept the discount unaltered because they not just saw people complaining but saw intelligent discourse on why people wanted it to stay the same, and they agreed.
- There have been a lot of smaller and medium sized issues that corporate has seen on the BSN and acted on.
- Now employees have a voice that matters.
- Has there been an impact on employee retention? This MAY be coincidental since they have no actual data to back it up, but they did notice that before the BSN, Best Buy had about a 60% turnover rate, and as of a couple of months ago it was down to below 50% for the first time ever.
- Has the venting been positive? What they see more often than angry venting is organic problem solving & collaboration. Example: person at store A says they have a fixture that doesn’t look right, person at store B chimes in to tell them it’s the wrong one and who they should call to get the right one.
- They can set up user names like any other social network, but they are traceable back to their employee ID if they break the rules.
- Videos are uploaded almost every day, original music; it’s interesting to watch how people group up, whether it’s by their personal interests, departments they work in, etc.
- BSN is all internal, but one step they took towards being external is BSN Bazaar. Vendors can set up a room & members can come look up product info.
- Also launched a universal gift registry, GifTag.com.
- Most companies aren’t built for co-creation like this; they’re built for command & control.
Points brought up during the Q&A
There’s no immediate plan to expand the BSN to consumers.- When an employee leaves the company, their account is blocked – it’s an HR thing. They’d love to keep them around; maybe it’s something they can work out in the future. If they rejoin Best Buy, their account can be reinstated.
- Has there been any correlated rise in sales? There might be, but they really haven’t been looking at that data or concerned with it.
- Sales aren’t the point.
- Used an open source platform called Drupal to set up the network; had to kill & resurrect it several times in the early days. Now they have a great relationship with the Drupal developers.
- There haven’t been any cases of management retribution that they know of. The closest they could remember was that someone complained (rather clearly and thoughtfully) about a particular product line the store carried and their negative opinion of it. Someone in purchasing, probably related to the decision to carry that line, saw it and asked them to remove all the posts. They refused because the employee hadn’t broken any rules and they were honoring the social contract.
- Any plans to sell this to other businesses? No, they’re not in that business.
Fascinating stuff; it’s great that the Blue Shirt Nation has stuck to the social contract of being for the employees and isn’t violating that with some evil corporate agenda. Sounds like something more retail chains might consider doing.
Read MoreSocial Media: The Marketing Summit Day 1
Day 1 has concluded with some great after hours discussion for the Social Media: The Marketing Summit at Moscone Center West in San Francisco, presented by mThink. A day full of good pannels on various aspects of social media, including the panel with myself, Brian Caldwell, and Celine Takatsuno on the affiliate channel and how social media applies.
Unfortunately due to some public transportation issues, I didn’t make it on time for the first half of today’s keynote by Charlene Li of Altimiter Group, co-author of Groundswell. What I did hear was some key insight, and I look forward to finding some notes on fellow attendee’s blogs!
Brian Solis delivered with some great words of wisdom that were highly sought after (the slides of them, anyway) after the session. He had some really good actionable items in terms of creating a social media plan and allocating time and efforts that the attendees were really intrigued by. I definitely want a copy to assist with my own understanding of social media planning!
I met with my co-panelists through the Ticketmaster brand highlight so unfortunately I missed that talk, then noshed, then came our panel. I thought we did pretty well, and for my first more traditional speaking engagement. I got some good feedback on the panel, including some nice tweets:
@shelisreal – @briancaldwell, Celine Takatsuno & Trisha Fawver are talking about SM & affiliate mktng. Not my fav topic, but these guys are pretty good.
@lornali – @briancaldwell with Trisha Fawver & Celine Takatsuno on social media & affiliate marketing
@TTaxChristine – @TrishaLyn enjoying your discussion of the tie between affiliates and social media. #SMMW08
After our panel were the fellows from Best Buy responsible for their internal social network Blue Shirt Nation, who were a blast to hear from. There was also a panel on segmentation that I didn’t actually think was that great, and finally a presentation by Karl Long from Nokia on making your customers work for you using social media – great stuff.
Of course, i’ll post my notes as always in coming posts, but I’m jazzed to attend tomorrow’s sessions and soak up the social media goodness like a sponge!
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