Retailing in a Digital world.
September 14th, 2009More sales are happening online.
The behaviour of consumers double checking prices and hunting down options has been documented well enough to convince Target to offer terminals in store to shorten the cycle time between desire, search and purchase. I’d love to see their figures and see what people will spend to buy now, as opposed to leaving and going to another store, or waiting for a delivery online. I’d bet people would pay a little more to walk out the door with purchase in hand.
What about selling online outright? Traditional airlines are approaching 40% of sales direct on their sites online, budget carriers attracting even higher rates. Fashion lags the service sectors even more, with online revenues matching a single flagship stores turnover seen by most as a indicator of success.
It seems there is a correlation here to me; functional/rational items do well online, with price and comparison being the key elements most are looking for, sites like amazon or targets site seem to fit this bill admirably. personal/emotional items have struggled to get the impact online that was heralded in the go go nineties, but things are slowly changing, sites like Polyvore, which allows time rich users to collate style boards for wealthier, time poor ones and Uniqlo’s new launch site for their collection break new ground for fashion online. Creating destinations online that offer something different and attractive to users is surely the way forward and with costs being 8-12% lower for e-tailers, this trend seems to be one we’ll see more of.
Using what you’ve got
August 19th, 2009Purists in the social media world have been talking about the democratising effect that access to publication has in a world that has traditionally seperated those who have, with those who haven’t. The internet still has a number of silo’s; the chinese language web sits mostly seperate, both in content and understanding from the english web, and while Nigerian identity scams are always on the increase, much of Africa remains outside the global conversation.
I love the video from nicholifavs that’s embedded at the start of this post. Faced with at least a modicum of talent, but no access to a recording studio, he’s hit the Apple store, Kanye shades in hand, and recorded himself and broadcast it to the web.
He’s uploaded 77 vids, attracted 439 friends, 2695 subscribers, 544 comments and he’s getting close to 450,000 impressions.
On top of that, he’s just made boing boing, and that should push his numbers still further.
There was a time, not too long ago, where to get that sort of attention you had to sink enormous investment into a broadcast infrastructure, create content in an expensive studio, edit it and promote it using still other channels. There was a reward, of course, you could force people to watch advertising, and you could sell the space to brands wanting to break inside people’s heads. Now it can be achieved by a kid who doesn’t even own a part of the infrastructure.
Still think media hasn’t fundamentally changed?
Blogging still on the rise.
August 11th, 2009Wordpress.com has released their July stats and its great to see that while microblogging and the social networks are growing, fixed content, insight and narrative are on the rise as well.
Here are July’s stats:
- 394,609 blogs were created.
- 5,666,839 posts were published.
- 418,946 new users joined.
- 6,594,795 file uploads.
- 3,762 gigabytes of new files.
- 839 terabytes of content transferred from our datacenters.
- 7,890,707 comments.
- 6,681,646 logins.
- 1,253,217,900 pageviews on WordPress.com, and another 1,289,187,116 on self-hosted blogs (2,542,405,016
total across all WordPress blogs we track). - 2,146,576 active blogs where “active” means they got a human visitor.
- 1,419,364,230 words.
No word on how many of these are blogs about blogging and blogs about cats…
And now, in living audio…
June 22nd, 2009I did a podcast last week with David Campbell from Love Digital.
We chatted about the Dunbar number, which I think I was meant to defend. There are a couple of parts where the narrative gets lost, but it was an enjoyable and wide ranging discussion on how the landscape is being changed by the advent of digital social netowrks and newer social media streams.
You can chack it out for your listening pleasure here, courtesy of the Australian Marketing Mag.
It looks as though the content producer at Marketing Mag uses flickr. Don at Barefoot Portraits really should have negotiated a per use on that one, it just keeps on cropping up everywhere.
I’ve been doing lots of brain study in the last couple of weeks both before and after recording the podcast. Dunbar’s number is an extrapolation of primatological studies (studies done on monkeys) and based on the differential in size of the human neocortex (the wrinkly outside layer that makes up our brain, and is supposed to give a working memory, in addition to our advanced speech, recognition and social skills.)
Dunbars number suggests that 150 is the upper limit for workable social groups where grooming interactions occur (like monkeys eating parasites.) It crops up over and over again through human history. Roman army maniples were 150 men, Neolithic villages seem to have been optimal at around this number, the factories at Gore, and also on Facebook.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say this is only temporary for Facebook. We are in generation one of having this wonderful ability to store a social context. This activity was the domain of the neocortex, it has now been augmented by a computer. We will see significant change as a result. I hold up the complexity of physics before and after the dawn of the computer as an informing example.
Living Tribal Lives.
May 14th, 2009Nice riff from Seth Godin at TED. Go on, watch it.
http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/538
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It’s really nothing new.
April 22nd, 2009Much has been written about the new consumer behaviour being exhibited around social media. I’d like to put forward that its really nothing new.
Since we came down from the trees, or emerged instantly and prescient, depending on whose facts you’re willing to believe as true; human’s have been drawn into groups. Granted, the first groups were about catching, cooking and eating wooly mammoths but for a long time now, there has been value in being a part of a group.
Across neolithic villages, the Roman army and Gore-Tex factories in the United States, the optimal number of people for a group has been around 150 people. This number was ‘found’ by an Oxford University Professor Robin Dunbar, interestingly the average number of friends on facebook sits around this number.
While the number of friends that can be managed by facebook and some of the add on apps for twitter is approaching the sublime, or even the ridiculous, Economist Magazine research suggests that the core of a person’s network is somewhere between seven and fifteen people.
Social media is as much incredible channel proliferation as it is a new paradigm.
Social media talking points
April 14th, 2009I’ve been asked to put together a position on Social Media in order to start the long and interesting process of ingratiating myself with the media in my newly adopted Australian home.
Anyway, I’ll try and get through what social media is, why its so important right now and why there will always be something else coming along the road.
Let’s get started.
I’m a big believer in putting things in historical perspective first. It’s gives everyone a bit of a reference point for the nerdy techie stuff that comes later. In that spirit, let’s unpack media and what it is.
Like fireworks, kites and leveraged bargaining, Media was invented by the Chinese. About 1300 years ago, during the Tang Dynasty, the Chinese began printing and distributing the Kaiyuan Za Bao or Bulletin of the Court. This was a huge step forward in communication and its ability to be distributed. Before this, you pretty much had cave paintings or latin carved into great hunks of stone for mass storytelling.
From there things progressed pretty quickly. Movable type made it possible, the printing press massively increased the volume, the modern newspaper made it cheap enough for everyone, the radio made it timely, the TV made it addictive and so on. Media produced by media providers (companies) for an audience inside the broadcast range.
Then along rolled social media.
What is social media?
Social media is produced by media providers (people), for an audience (people) in their social network (or the whole internet).
Ok, this probably raises a couple of questions. First, why not just say by people for people? that’s because despite technology, the internet and its democratizing effect on media, not everyone wants to, or can, become a media provider.
In the old days, media worked because if you made the investment in infrastructure, you got the audience. A social media audience requires investment too. You have to filter your output into a channel that is compelling and interesting enough for people to come back to, and increasingly, for them to pass along to their own audience.
Why is it important right now?
Social media represents the biggest proliferation of channels in all of human history. It’s akin to giving everyone in Europe a printing press at the same time, for free. I know most of the people are using this wondrous gift to post, talk or twitter about their cats but social media has already changed the way that traditional media outlets gather news and keep up with breaking stories.
Social media has linked hundreds of people together in a way that allows video, audio and text content to be shared across greater numbers than would have been considered possible without a dedicated satellite network. Plus it allows for individual feedback and discussion along the way.
Social media also has a long memory. Twits remain floating in the twitterverse until you go off and delete them, and even then they’ve probably been harvested by any number of buzz-monitors around the globe.
Social media is important because it attracts a group of people, willing and able to talk about brand experiences, both good and bad.
What brands can learn from social media.
- learn to listen: It’s never been easier to mine the world of consumer experience. Your customers expect it of you.
- learn to talk: If people are interested your audience will grow, and they’ll provide open and honest feedback when you screw up.
- learn to share: make your stories as easy as possible to share, expect it and build for it from the start.
Why there will always be something else.
The second that just ticked over as you read this is the most modern second in the world. There has globally never been as much technology or development as there is right now. The paradox of this concept is that people spend much of their time believing that we must almost be at the apogee of human existence, that at some point soon, my lycra body suit will be delivered and after one quick press of the communicator I’ll be whipped up and away to explore the cosmos.
The cold hard reality is that those modern seconds just keep ticking past, and when I am standing at the ready in my lycra suit, the beep of the communicator will simply be another LOL cat MMS.
Something to think about..
March 10th, 2009Coming from, first, Europe and, second, from a former communist country……. I almost don’t believe my eyes to see how much here you believe in government and how much you don’t believe in the market. This is for me a shocking experience and I have to say that very loudly…….
It seems to me that the fight for freedom — for free markets — is still the task of the day…..
I don’t think that the current problem in the world — in this country — is the example of a market failure. I think it is the example of government failure. I am absolutely sure that the current crisis is the “just” price we all of us have to pay for the attempts of politicians to “play” with the markets. I am not one to say: blame the markets. No. Blame the politicians.
~ Vaclav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic and former economics professor, at the Wall Street Journal’s Economics Conference.
A light at the end of the tunnel.
March 10th, 2009
I’m sure a lot of you, like me, are beginning to feel a little jaded as job losses, financial meltdowns and the looming global recession. It’s not that I don’t have empathy, but doesn’t the media help to make these things feel larger and more dramatic?
Rohit Talwar, from fast future, a global trend predictor and prognosticator wrote this slightly rosier piece in his latest newsletter.
Spending dam-burst ahead
The economic crisis is in large part caused by people uncertain of the future holding back their spending. In the UK, low interest rates mean we get a tiny return on savings. Mortgage costs have not fallen as far, so the gap between borrowing and savings rates has increased sharply. While this should incentivise spending, many are paying off some of their mortgages instead, as the effective return is higher. The trouble is, even those in work are nervous about spending - fearing tough times ahead. The business response is to cut spending and headcounts. With low confidence in government, economic decline is inevitable. So although most are still in work, on the same salary as before, sales are down and companies are going under. Read the rest of this entry »