Category: Managed Services

Two summers ago I rode a bicycle across America (Martin’s Ride to Cure Cancer). As you might imagine, there were times when life was at risk. But the most dangerous moment wasn’t on a bicycle. To add another irony, earlier in our most dangerous day, we (I had hired a team of two to help Martin’s Ride make it to the Santa Monica Pier after leaving from the Duke Cancer Institute) were wondering what it would be like to drive on one of these steep mountain roads during a driving rainstorm.

We weren’t RV pros. It had been a long day. We didn’t notice when all the RV pros pulled off the road. Suddenly and quietly, all the cutouts were full. We did notice a quickly darkening sky as we climbed up to 6,000 and then 7,000 feet.

One moment we could see, and the next we couldn’t . Rain came down so hard it laughed at the RV’s wipers even on the highest speed. Conversation died. Lightning struck on our right. My head jerked to look outside at the sound and flash. Turning back, I saw our driver Jeremy’s eyes hadn’t left the road. His concentration was immense. We weren’t going very fast, but it felt more precarious than 100 mph in our thirty foot long rented RV. The mountain was one lane over to our left. It became alive with water. Little rivers formed. Water washed rocks into the road. No one spoke. There was no choice now. We had to drive on.

Later I would think about the irony of riding several thousand miles on a bicycle, risking life and limb coming down mountains at over 60 mph, to possibly die in an RV rolling down God’s Grand Staircase. But in that moment irony was in the future. All we could do was hope and concentrate. After twenty tense minutes, the rain lessened. Jeremy said, “Will someone please say SOMETHING?” We laughed the BIG LAUGH of people glad to be alive driving down to the world’s most beautiful basement.

Expion’s Journey Toward “Social Business” – Summit Day 2

The second day of Expion’s Social Business Summit reminded me of Martin’s Ride’s perilous drive into God’s basement. Every Internet marketing team knows the feeling of fear and dislocation the web creates. Some smart Internet marketers have pulled into the RV cutouts to wait out our current storm, while others must drive on. Any marketing takes courage, focus and concentration. Driving in a lightning storm above 7,000 feet on a tiny road with a sheer drop takes the courage of persistence, a student’s humble approach, and great teachers.

Yesterday’s summary of Expion’s Summit Day One planted the need to create awesome “holy smokes” content into concrete, into the foundation of a new kind of marketing. Few can doubt days of making money from average anything are gone. Day two exposed two other important pillars for creating social business platforms: Storytelling and Mobile.

Peter Heffring, Expion CEO, Demonstrates Expion’s New UI

Before discussing Storytelling and Mobile, a quick note about Expion. Every now and again you meet a new genius, a genius you weren’t aware of prior to that moment. I don’t generally sling the “g” word around. I’ve had the chance to work with a few, like now with Atlantic BT’s founder, so I recognize the kind of intelligence worthy of the word. Peter Heffring (@pheffring), Expion’s CEO, is a genius. Jason Falls (@JasonFalls) tweeted, “Few know how smart this guy really is,” as Peter showed us his new baby – Expion’s new User Interface and Business Intelligence (BI) dashboards.

Enterprise social media seems like an oxymoron. Q: Social media is so hyper-local, how can it also be “enterprise”? A: It can’t. Social media, to be effectively used by a large multi-location company, has to have the right mix of command and control. Too much command from a Big Brother source, and an enterprise just looks stupid and solipsistic on social media. Too little control, and an enterprise’s social media volatility index goes through the roof.

I’ve worked for Fortune 100 companies. One thing they don’t tolerate is volatility beyond their ability to hedge. The truth of most large companies is THEY ARE ALREADY RICH. My father, a “pension plan manager” for wealthy individuals, made a good living hedging natural forces that tear wealth apart (taxes, bad investments, death, divorce).

My father’s clients were already RICH. Their goal was to never be POOR. The slow adoption of social media by larger companies was strange to me until I thought about my father’s career. My former employers P&G and M&M/Mars must hedge. Until Expion created the concept of “enterprise social media”, social media looked like a wild tumble down the Grand Staircase in an RV from the perspective of a large businesse.

Even the most risk adverse BIG COMPANY can understand how to use a tool to hedge, to move forward with “enterprise social media”. When I worked at M&M/Mars, there were years when the commodity trading desk made more money than the rest of the company by trading cocoa futures. Big companies understand how to hedge. Hedging is one of the things that made them big in the first place. Now you see why I KNOW Peter Heffring is a genius. Peter and a very talented team have created a new trading desk – an enterprise social media trading desk. Large, multi-location enterprises use Expion to hedge social media risk. Well done and brilliant.

Storytelling and Mobile

Expion’s Social Business Summit helps us start to see the three-legged stool of the new marketing: awesome content, shared as stories, across any device at any time. This is not to say traditional business values and practices don’t apply. Valuing customers in new and innovative ways, providing outstanding customer service, being relevant and creative aren’t LESS important, nor is social media marketing MORE important. Traditional marketing and sales are table stakes to play the new social storytelling mobile poker.

Social media means you are only as strong as your weakest social link, and your systems, your defenses, are probed 24/7/365. Welcome to the new marketing.

Expion Social Business Summit Summary

The link above is to an excellent summary of every Expion Social Business Summit presentation on Expion’s blog. Matt Wurst (@MWurst), Director Brand Strategy and Emerging Media at 360i, made a great presentation. Matt’s career started in sports marketing, and you can tell he is having fun. Q: How do you get mega sports stars to listen to your marketing ideas? A: Be very good, and have a coach’s enthusiasm.

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I kidded Matt on a tweet that his presentation included many “Tweetable Moments”.  Here are some of those “Tweetable
Moments”:

• Content is currency.
• Content’s purpose is the creation of a tribe of fans, supporters and advocates.
• Understand your audience by listening at least as carefully as you are speaking.
• Content marketing is the convergence of creative, community and promotion.
• If you are not combining earned and paid media, you can’t win.
• Be a good storyteller.
• Connect O2O (online to offline and vice versa).
• Live in Real Time, and realize marketing is 24/7/365 and “always on” now.
• Content and content marketing are evolving.

I could write a thousand words (our current word count if you are stalwart enough to still be reading this post) on each of these ideas. My favorite idea is the combination of earned and paid media. Matt’s forcefully stated idea plays to one of my favorite themes – Marketing is a tapestry weaving seemingly disparate elements into a beautiful quilt. The new marketing is rarely an “either/or” decision.

Just before the summit, an Atlantic BT customer asked me if he should be using Twitter OR Facebook. There is no OR anymore, as Matt’s presentation artfully implied. Tapestries need every warp and weft to make cohesive sense, to be strong and beautiful. I understand the locus of the question. The desire behind the question was to lighten the load, to do one thing less instead of one more thing.  Sorry, I had to explain, Facebook does different things than Twitter. Facebook AND Twitter are more powerful than Facebook alone. The marketing tapestry we weave depends on “awesomeness”, as various speakers explained, and that need only grows.

Regular readers of my posts here and on ScentTrail Marketing will recognize my Internet marketing secret: More and more, faster and faster, better and better. Matt’s presentation reinforced yet another favorite theme – the need to become a great content creator, a great tapestry weaver. Matt’s focus is on being a great marketer, NOT on being a power Facebook or Twitter user. It is easy to get lost. It is easy to focus on the wrong thing, such as becoming a power “X tool” user. Becoming a power user of Facebook, Twitter or Scoop.it doesn’t HURT, unless attaining such expertise distracts from becoming a better marketer. There is an old cliché that if you have a hammer everything looks like a nail.

This kind of “hammer/nail” prejudice can be expensive in the storytelling, mobile and content-is-king, evolving environment Matt described. Any prejudice is expensive, but seeing the world as full of nails when it is in fact full of zebras, elephants, screws and drills creates the kind of blindside risk prejudice-free competitors love to exploit. Writing that last sentence, I realize why I love tools such as Expion.

The right tool, used at the right time, wipes away ego and prejudice. Once data is visualized, many manifest truths become clear. I’ve only ever “created” one website, FoundObjects.com, in 1999 (now RIP). People’s desires expressed via data told me and the teams I’ve managed what to do from there on, across the hundreds of sites we’ve created. That statement is only a little hyperbolic. In this brave new awesome storytelling delivered to a mobile device to a constant demand audience marketing world, the thing that keeps us from tumbling down God’s Grand Staircase is courage and faith, faith and courage. Both faith and courage were on display in abundance at the first, and what I hope will be annual, Expion Social Business Summit.

Thanks to Peter and the Expion team.

Further Reading

My notes from Expion Social Business Summit Day One.

Expion’s blog has several excellent summaries of the summit including:

Master Summary: http://www.expion.com/2012/09/racing-ahead-2012-thank-you-for-an-amazing-social-business-summit/

Jeremiah Owyang’s Keynote Summary

Highly Recommended – Content is the Currency in Social Business (Content: The Social Atom) by Owyang

Following social media thought leader Jeremiah Owyang, also highly recommend: @jowyang 

Big Brand Strategies from Coca Cola and H&R Block

Highly Recommended: Coca-Cola: Expressions Are More Valuable than Impressions, presented by Laura Ruff.

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I apologize for being a day late on this post. My Twitter analysis is sitting in my brain, not on paper yet too. My first cuts at the Expion Social Summit tweet data from TweetReach are interesting, so stay tuned over the weekend as I attempt to catch up. Thanks again to the Expion team for a great event and including their web developers (us). – Marty

Expion’s first Social Business Summit was a hit. The summit came at you as fast as social media does, so very fast. Expion, an enterprise social media platform that helps manage the unique social media challenges of brands with multiple social location faces, pulled off a large and challenging event. As the conference wrapped on the second day, Peter Heffring, Expion’s brilliant CEO, admitted to having misgivings before the conference but none afterwards as he thanked a great team including Zena Weist, VP Strategy and Erica McClenny, VP Client Services. We are proud that Expion is an Atlantic BT web development partner. We helped create their website.

Given the  long agenda of great speakers and the amount of information, it was impossible to adequately liveblog Expion’s Social Business Summit. Great information fast and furious, so I gave up my love of the liveblog. There was so much great information, I broke it up into:

• My Impressions and Thoughts on Day 1.
• Impressions and Thoughts on Expion Social Summit Day 2.
• An analysis of the summit’s tweets (post by Friday).

Expion’s Social Business Summit Day 1: Marty’s Thoughts

Amber Naslund (@AmberCadabra) and Matt Ridings (@techguerilla) opened Expion’s Social Summit with a challenge. Isn’t it time time to move beyond social media? The facts are in, and they point to something new, they point to “social business”.

Amber and Matt were ambitious. Most social marketing presentations, they noted, discuss adoption vs. reality, where we are vs. where we want to go. Where we want to go is usually a series of incremental steps taken from where we are now. But Amber and Matt pointed out that we can’t get to a radically new “social business” platform unless we understand and adopt a new framework. They refused to “dumb down” their presentation to match the usual conventions. I applaud them for tackling the right issue in the right way, and I had a chance to share that feedback with them before they left on Day 2.

Thinking “Social Business Platform” and working backwards, instead of looking at where we are and climbing an incremental ladder. Wow, the idea of working backwards from the ideal destination, social business, is a great and important idea. Just because something is on this side of NEW doesn’t mean those doing it know what they are doing well enough to justify copying them. Incremental improvement of HERE rarely gets your marketing to THERE.

Here is an interesting chart Matt and Amber used. This chart from eMarketer surveyed marketers worldwide asking how they are using social media marketing:

Matt and Amber pointed out the 41% of marketers who indicate social media can help reduce costs.

At AtlanticBT, we see confirmation of every bar in this chart. We see a group of larger customers beginning to tap social media for internal communication and so reducing costs even as communications speed up. I like using the cost reduction data. Cost reduction speaks to creating a “social business”.  When social media does the heavy lifting of cost reduction, a social business framework is closer.

Creating A “Social Business” Framework
What is social business? Here are Matt and Amber’s notes explaining a new platform called “social business”:

First, we reach toward tools we love in order to understand where we should focus our efforts. We establish social media “maturity models” based on certain social table stakes: being on Facebook, having a listening platform, responding to customer inquiries on social sites.

We love maturity models for the same reason we love case studies: they help us take the shortcut that other organizations have learned the hard way. Maturity models give us a nice neat picture to use as reference, as a starting point and gut-check for what we’re doing or about to do.

Long term maturity models are extremely limiting. They’re based on averages, on businesses in the middle of the bell curve, on an amalgam of companies that don’t share your quirks, challenges, goals, uniqueness, or anything.
[emphasis mine, from Social Media To Social Business slides on SlideShare]

After managing a team that generated over $30M in online sales, I’ve learned the core truth of Amber and Matt’s idea. Internet marketing and social media marketing are in a constant roil where revision follows revision. Stand out, create awesomeness, find Seth Godin’s elusive “Purple Cow” content and discuss it in novel ways with a commitment to “social business”, or you won’t make money. Do what everyone else is doing, how everyone else is doing it, and your marketing will lose before you start.

I won’t deep dive Amber and Matt’s “social business framework” since they cover it well in their SlideShare.  I add my endorsement of the need for a larger idea, the idea of a social business platform with all the novel ideas, unique creative and collaborative impulses such an idea implies. Flip “Be Amazing” over, and “Be Creative” is on the other side. Adapt and adopt Matt and Amber’s framework or create your own, but write, “Become a Social Business” on your strategy and planning calendar for 2013.

Jason Falls: No BS Social Media

Jason Falls (@JasonFalls) does not disappoint. As Matt Wurst (@MWurst) noted on Twitter, “Jason Falls is about to start yelling at me, I think”.  Jason was about to yell at all of us (lol). He is the new Tom Peters, a passionate advocate for truth, justice and American marketing way. Jason’s ability to be funny and perfectly on point at 9 o’clock at night after an open bar that started at 6pm is testimony to his superhero social skills. That Jason has the ability to call BS only intensifies his punch.

The audience of over a hundred people were social media believers, but Jason’s presentation asked an implied question. You talk the social media marketing talk, but do you understand how to walk the new walk? Taco Bell knows how. Jason discussed a recent dust up on Twitter between Taco Bell and Old Spice.

You can read more about the social wrestling match between two power brands in Adweek. I received a more direct example.  A social media angel visited @ScentTrail:

As if summoned by Jason, @TacoBell picked up my 9:05 PM tweet with the Adweek link and responded, “Good Times” within 30 minutes. Note there was NO “@TacoBell” in my tweet. Taco Bell is just awesome, as Jason pointed out. They live and work in the REAL TIME that is social media marketing. I bet Taco Bell has an advanced ORM (Online Reputation Management) system such as Radian6 AND someone at the wheel who knows what they are doing. The need for having someone OTHER than an intern managing your social media is becoming apparent (read my post calling for a “Social Media Flow Manager” on ScentTrail Marketing).

Jason didn’t disappoint. His, Amber and Matt’s admonition to, “Be Amazing, Create HOLY SMOKES Content,”  set one of the three pillars of the Expion Social Summit in cement. Learn about the other pillars tomorrow when I attempt to do justice to a day so full of social media gold it will be hard to mine.

Our thanks to the Expion team for including us and selecting Atlantic BT to create a web presence for a very cool company. If you need an enterprise social media management platform, have someone run your team through an Expion demo. Once you stop gasping AWESOME, you will see how social media’s ROI is easy to discover, and even easier to create with the right tools. More on Peter Heffring’s demo of the new and improved Expion tomorrow.

Social Marketing is going to play a bigger role during this holiday selling season than ever before. E-commerce merchants need to know how to use social media to create engagement, buzz and return-on-investment. This article shares 8 social media marketing tips designed to increase your website’s sales during this holiday selling season.

If we forgot your favorite social marketing holiday sales tip, please leave a comment or send a Tweet to @Atlanticbt. 

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Social Marketing Holiday Tip #1: Balance Your Social Media Diet

Argyle Social posted an excellent study showing that the best approach to social media is to balance links out with links in. You will always convert more with links directed in to your owned websites, since immediate conversion is possible there. Links out to curated content can help reinforce your authority and brand image and so may increase conversions– eventually. Links in to your owned content can convert NOW. The Argyle study suggests an optimal 50% to 50% mix of curation to promotion. If you have a B2C e-commerce website, we suggest moving links to owned content up to 75% as you get closer to your holiday shipping shutoff.

Make sure you increase your promotional links in an engaging way. Don’t just say, “HUGE SALE,” all the time, as that gets boring. Curate reviews into your tweets, use interesting facts about a particular product, inject some controversy and/or quote an influential person:

Example Tweet 1: 
.@Oprah called Widget Y a “Very Cool Thing”; Widget Y is part of Our Early Bird Holiday Sale. Buy Widget Y: <link to Holiday sale page with Widget Y in prominent position on the first row or featured>

Note the period in front of @Oprah. That period stops the Tweet from only going to @Oprah.

Example Tweet 2:
Buzz Team Member @ScentTrail Calls Widget Y Coolest Thing Since Sliced Bread. Read his and other Widget Y Power Reviews: <link to Widget Y product page>

Note this tweet should drive to a product page OR a Holiday Review page. I prefer driving to pages with more than one option during the holidays. If you do drive to a single product page, make sure you have plenty of Cross- and Up-Sells on that page. If not, create new pages for the holidays to focus reviews on popular products collected in a group.

Social Marketing Holiday Tip #2: Use Scoop.it as Real Time Feedback Loop

I’m a big Scoop.it fan. Take a look at our 12 Digital Revolution Scoop.it Feeds. Scoop.it earned our
loyalty by sharing their SEO juice, providing an easy way to spider the social web using keywords, being an easy to use hub, and providing a near real time read on content acceptance.

Scoop.it Shares Link Juice
Most social network platforms hoard their Search Engine Optimization power (link juice) with 90% or more of the benefits being accrued by the platform (Facebook comes immediately to mind). Your content is key to any social network’s position, but they usually share the minimum. Scoop.it takes a different approach. We have owned the #1 SEO position (absolute as determined by a tool) on “Curation Revolution” since weeks within launching the feed. We have never been able to make something similar happen on any other social network.

Scoop.it Spiders the Social Web
When you set up a Scoop.it account, and the first 5 feeds are free, you provide the keywords you want Scoop.it’s engine to spider. The stream is updated constantly throughout the day and can provide a great “first alert” early warning system for key products or competitive actions during the holidays.

Scoop.it is Easy to Use & Helps with Other Social Nets
Scoop.it has an easy to use interface. Setting up an account is a breeze, and you can get the hang of curating and posting in no time thanks to link hints and a good FAQ area with examples. Scoop.it also makes a great hub for other social networks, such as Facebook, Pinterest and Google Plus. It is easy to post to all of those networks from Scoop.it. The only tricky part is to keep in mind that links inside of Scoop.it drive back to your Scoop.it feed. If you have a blog post, you should link to it from Pinterest, Google Plus and other social networks directly, IN ADDITION to driving links from those networks to your Scoop.it summary. No need to add an extra click when there is no value added from the extra step.

Scoop.it’s Near Real-Time Feedback
Scoop.it provides a dashboard that shows your daily and all-time views. The Scoop.it community takes several hours to digest new content, but their “views” number is the closest thing we know of for consistent, near real-time feedback on your content. Watching your views, your Retweets and Facebook comments will create a near real-time feedback loop that can help you catch mistakes, know if you have winner offers or content, and generally inform your holiday social marketing better than if you weren’t using this magic wand of a social media tool.

Social Marketing Holiday Tip #3: Create Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

When something BIG or GOOD happens, SHARE IT on every social network you manage. Don’t share the exact same language, and don’t retweet your own Tweets very often if you manage multiple accounts since to do so is considered spamming, but be sure to share good news. If one of  your best sellers receives an award, create a badge (a little graphic), put the badge on the product’s image so it shows up all over your site, write content into the product page discussing the award, and share the good news several times in different ways over your social channels.

Calling attention to good things in social may make them bigger and better. Support your social notices with content on your core site. You want people to land somewhere and CONVERT, so add content to your site to take credit, announce or share good things. Giving your social media links a place to land inside a site you own is how you create social media marketing ROI.

Social Marketing Holiday Tip #4: How to Use Twitter – Tweet Frequency and When to Tweet

Twitter is a POWERFUL social media tool. We’ve had content reach close to a million people via power retweeters. Content that is cool, exclusive, funny, controversial and helpful will get shared. You should use Twitter to support every other social network you create and curate content into. Twitter + Scoop.it or Twitter + Pinterest is more powerful than either social network alone.

One common question is when and how often should you tweet. The half-life of a tweet, according to bit.ly research, is about 3 hours. In 3 hours, about half of all the shares your post will generate are known (this can vary by day of the week). If you were always SURE what link would create viral pickup, then Tweeting every 3 hours makes sense. If you knew ahead of time what would go viral, you should be on a beach somewhere sipping cold beverages since you can predict the future. In the real world, we play a “junk bond” content game. We tweet many links that will have average performance to find a few that will go viral. Once a link does go viral, be sure to call attention to it on your social networks, because most viral links have at least one second act.

If I were still managing an ecommerce site, I would tweet heavily early in the morning to feed people who retweet, heavily during the 11:00 to 2:00 lunch window, and then consistently from 4 to midnight. I would also have something fun and engaging happening on social media every weekend. You will need to queue some of your tweets. Be sure to be present and checking direct messages and comments during important times each day. Create an alert system and respond to compliments, complaints and news as soon as possible. The longer a brush fire burns in social media, the worse it gets.

Social Marketing Holiday Tip #5: Social Media Tools

There are several social media tools such as Scoop.it (see Tip 2), BufferApp and HootSuite that can help you manage and curate social media. Many tools use freemium business models, so you can use them at low levels for free. If you have a larger budget, WildFire and Expion make enterprise social media marketing tool suites that help manage campaigns across many networks. Our favorite social marketing reporting tool is Argyle Social. Our favorite unknown monitoring weapon is Spring Metrics. With Google hiding more and more data due to Secure Socket Layer encryption, Spring Metrics becomes a great supplement to Google Analytics.

Read TheNextWeb.com’s excellent “Best Free Social Media Tracking Tools You Should Know About” for more.

Creating An Alert System
If you don’t have the budget for Radian6, the premier ORM (Online Reputation Management) tool now owned by Salesforce.com, you can create a solid alert system with free tools such as Google Alerts and Topsy.

Topsy is our favorite, since it captures links all the way out to friends of friends, allowing you to know the whole story. Don’t just look at your link share tool. Many people who share your content will copy the link and not use your tool. And the only way to see those “friends of friends” shares is with a tool such as Topsy or Radian6 (if you have the budget).

Social Marketing Holiday Tip #6: Know What You Should Alert

You want your alert system to tell you about what hot products are doing out there in the competitive world. Putting product names as keywords into Google, Topsy or Scoop.it will bring back interesting information. If you see an important competitor using one of your best sellers as a loss leader, you may want to match their price in order to not lose sales.

I don’t like letting someone else drive my e-commerce sites. I prefer when competitors watch and copy my sites. One favorite tactic when we saw a competitor offering a loss leader price on a hot product is to create a new bundle. Bundle the hot product into a new unique idea that combines upsale items (things frequently purchased with the hot product). This unique merchandising marks and one-ups the competitor in a unique way that protects the “value positioning” of the site responding to the loss leader pricing.

Set up alerts for your best brands and your company’s name (all variations). If someone complains on Yelp or Google Reviews, BRING THE REVIEW into your site. Manage negative infomation on your turf, not theirs. Thank the person with the complaint and be appreciative of the feedback, but don’t agree unless they are just dead right and you’ve already changed the issue.

I wrote a 2-part series for SmallRivers, the Paper.li team, about how to handle negative social feedback:

5 Social Media Marketing Safety Tips: Part 1

5 Social Media Marketing Safety Tips: Part 2

Another related post is “Turn Negative Reviews Into Money”

Social Marketing Holiday Tip #7: Tell A Story

Since everyone is going to be shouting FREE SHIPPING and SALE, telling a story will make your social media marketing stand out in a noisy crowd. What is your theme for the holidays? If you are my friends at Moon-Audio are you using music to tell your promotion story? If you are Vestique, a women’s apparel store, and you are social media champions, are you sharing wish lists, creating unique bundles and and telling the story of this fall’s best fashions?

Find the umbrella theme, the theme that unites all your disparate holiday sales efforts, and you will make more money this year than last. You will make more money than those who scream SALE with no connection to anything their customers care about. We buy with emotion and justify with logic, so don’t forget to provide and share both emotion and logic this holiday selling season.

Find great storytelling tips on Karen Dietz’s “Just Story It” feed on Scoop.it

Social Marketing Holiday Tip #8: Connect to Something Bigger

Every company is changing the world in some meaningful way. The annual Holiday season is an important time to share how your company changes the world. If, like Atlantic BT, you do work that is similar to building homes and you have a family connection with Habitat for Humanity, then making sure something you are doing in 4Q reinforces the connection to Habitat is a good marketing idea.

We are NOT suggesting using the holidays to manipulate. Don’t do things you aren’t already doing, since doing so will be inauthentic and create the opposite of what you want. We are suggesting if you have a cause near and dear to your company’s heart, make sure to extend your social capital to that cause during the holiday season. Some nonprofits depend on 4Q and the holiday season for a large portion of their operating budget. Somehow and someway, your company is changing the world, is saving the world. Make sure your visitors know you are in this holiday selling season for something more than money, but don’t beat visitors over the head with your “save the world” cause either.

What about Pinterest and Google Plus?
Pinterest is going to be a MONSTER social network. If you aren’t pinning content on Pinterest yet, you should be. If you are and have tips for how to use Pinterest as a tool to help an ecommerce website generate ROI, please be sure to share what is working for you.

Google Plus deserves attention too. Google Plus lives next door to SEO, so creating an engaging presence inside of G+ is a good idea. If you are using G+ to support your ecommerce site, please share your tips and ideas.

I hope these 8 Social Marketing Holiday Sales Tips help your holiday sales be something everyone is talking about and even more are buying!

 

Best USA E-commerce Sites

September marks the beginning of a race that ends on 12.25. After 12 years as an Internet marketer, I look at e-commerce sites differently. I look at how hero images, the largest image on the page, balance offers, navigation and search. I look for how keyword-dense an e-commerce site’s navigation is and how intuitive the design. Do I know where to go? Does the site feel like a place its target audience would want to shop and join. Are there clear Calls-To-Action?

Here is my list of 6 favorite E-commerce sites for 2012:

1. REI
Consistently great, the Internet marketing team behind my favorite ecommerce website knows how to point their hero’s eyes at Calls To Action; they keep their palette clean but full of eye candy. The engagement and “like me” factor is high. REI’s images make you feel like joining that party in that place, now please. Great job!

2. Apple
I copy this clean Einstein-smart design all the time, and I am not alone. Apple.com is one of those rare sites that shouldn’t heed my “people not things sell” rule.  These products can be the hero. We project ourselves right into Apple’s product shots. We see ourselves using those cool superhero tools. Can’t ask for more from a website image.

3. Patagonia
Different feel than REI, even though they plow some of the same, “Life is an adventure,” terrain. If REI is about the magic of the tribe, Patagonia is about the magic of place. Patagonia’s magical website design is not designed to SELL, it breaks every e-commerce rule, but it really works. Patagonia is the exception that proves rules such as big Call-To-Action buttons in orange and offers you can SEE (lol). I love that in half the images they roll, their tiny “Free Shipping over $75” offer can’t even be seen. That is a huge rule break, and Patagonia can do it because of those magical images. I wouldn’t suggest hiding your Free Shipping offer!

4. DWR.com (Design Within Reach)
The furniture category has strong players and may be a six of one, half-dozen of the other between DWR, Crate and Barrel and others. This category can quickly all look alike. I like DWR.com’s clean lines. They keep it simple but are creative with social, campaigns and offers.

5. Vestique.com
Women’s apparel can start to all look alike, too. I like how Vestique’s site uses pictures of their target audience (young women) engaged in almost candid moments. The design is clean, social and engaging. The design points the way to social engagement, and Vestique’s owners live on Facebook,  Pinterest and Twitter. The website design makes visitors want to be part of the club, a very important idea for a fashion site. Eileen Allen and her design team at Atlantic BT did a great job on Vestique, and it was supported with some great behind-the-curtain e-commerce functionality in Magento by Chris Duffy and his team. Well Done, Guys!

6. Woot.com
Daily deal sites seem to be losing some luster, but Woot.com has some of the best copy online. The “wooters” are a very loyal tribe. They get up in the middle of the night and check Woot’s deals. This rabid loyalty is something you EARN by being great. Every Woot.com element works.

Your favorite Ecommerce site not on the list? If we missed your favorites, post a comment here,

Tweet to @Atlanticbt, or

share your list on our Facebook page.

I’m now working on ecomm websites NOT in the USA, so be sure to share your favorites.

– Marty

Holiday Ecomm Secret #1: Focus

Testing and experimentation help ecommerce teams understand what works and why. ABT stands for “Always Be Testing” and you should test, test and test more. We would never say don’t test, but testing during the holiday window, a window that may start with Back-To-School in September for some websites, should be limited to testing things that are immediately beneficial.

Testing button color, headline placement and copy length during the holiday selling season is not a good idea. Testing in the fall, especially the early fall, should focus on offers. If you find your Free Shipping trigger works better at $75 than $55, that is valuable information. Be sure you define “works better” clearly with multiple dimensions such as AOV (Average Order Value), Conversion Rate (for the site and key pages such as your sale page), Dollars Per Visitor, New To File (people who purchased for the first time), traffic source, Lifetime Value (LTV) and transactions over impressions (traffic). Don’t forget the most important metric – Dollars To The Bank.

You may also want to reduce your testing to 50% from your summer testing schedule.  You and your team have other fish to fry in 4Q. Continue to test, but test things that can make a difference THIS holiday season, such as offers and merchandising combinations. Leave global improvement UX (User Experience) testing until next year.

Holiday Ecomm Secret #2 – Segmented Sale Page

Don’t dump a hundred items in your sale page and ask your customers to figure it out. Create some organization that makes sense for your site. Examples of good sale page segmentation include:

• For Him, For Her, For kids.
• Buzz Team Recommends (your team of reviewers).
• Best or Top Sellers By Category (whatever categories you use).
• Best Selling Combinations (people who bought X also bought Y and Z).
• Highest Reviewed (if your Ecomm site doesn’t have reviews, GET THEM).
• Fastest Sellers or HOT products (trending cultural products are important to highlight).
• Most Press – If you have products in O Magazine or Redbook, promote that.
• Guest Curators’ Picks – Celebrities or category expert picks can work well and create PR.
• Staff Picks – Your staff are experts too, so create a sale section with their picks.
• Social Media Curation – Most Pinned, Most Retweeted, Most Mentioned.

Don’t do ALL of these segmentations at once! Segmenting your sale page is a good thing to test in the summer. We wouldn’t suggest testing your sale page during the holiday selling window, because there are too many moving parts. By September you should know what segmentations work best for your site and sale page.

If you DON’T know your site’s best sale page segmentations, then go with your categories, generic values like Best Sellers or Best Reviewed or For Him, Her and Kids. Put “test segmented sale page” on your testing calendar for next year. Testing will probably show that standard segments work best, but how your customers respond to different segments is a good thing to learn from testing.

REI’s Sale area is segmented by: Gear, Snow Sports, Clothing and Footwear and Outlet.

We found a cool new segmentation on CB2.com – “Most Pinned”. Most Pinned is great social marketing segmentation. You could also do Most Retweeted or Most Discussed.

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Holiday Ecomm Secret #3 – Seasonal Hero Images

The largest picture on a webpage is also known as “the hero”. The hero is an important touchstone for visitors. Hero images create a sense of style unique to the site, reinforce key value messages and create connection to the time of year. If your site is shopped by people from California to Maine, creating a single fall hero can be a challenge since fall is different in New England than it is on the west coast.

If your site can be programmed to read the incoming cookie and visitor location and then supply a related image, you can create different hero images for different areas of the country. If your site is not that sophisticated and you have an image roll, a hero that changes every few seconds, be sure to include different fall looks in your roll.

If you don’t have any of those options, find an image that communicates the values of fall without being too specific to place or time. REI does a great job of using hero images to communicate a sense of generic place and time. Their hero images show people in warm gear in the mountains. It isn’t clear if the mountains pictured are California, Colorado or Maine.

REI Seasonal Hero Example:

Holiday Ecomm Secret #4 – People in Hero

What do humans like to look at more than anything else? If you answered “other humans,” you win a cookie. Here is a quote from Perceptual Science and Technology at Rutgers:

As inherently social animals, humans most accurately perceive and
interpret the movements of other people.

Intuitively, we know the truth of our “people watching” obsession. Why then do we put THINGS, not people, into our website heroes? Heroes are the largest pictures on a web page, and they should include people.

A recent analysis of an Apple iPad ad  proved the point. Apple’s 32 second includes 30 people, or almost a person a second. Some people are in the background, but our brains register more than we “see”. Apple understands the importance of people watching in their ads.

Line of Sight
When people look at your website, their eyes go immediately to the upper right, then they follow the line of sight of people pictured in images on your site. Have people pictured in your hero look directly out at your visitors to increase engagement. Have people in your images look at Call-To-Actions (CTA) to increase conversion.

BassPro Example Of Line of Sight
Great example of the power of people in a hero from BassPro.com. We would prefer a larger Call-To-Action of a more contrasting color, but your eyes can’t help but look where the archer is aiming (right at the boot LOL).

Holiday Ecomm Secret #5 – Simple, Quiet and SALE

We can debate the Chinese finger puzzle e-commerce merchants find themselves in later. The “constant sale” syndrome is a pain, but it is the reality of 4Q Ecommerce. To NOT have a significant sale during the holiday season will drive traffic to your competitors. This is NOT to say that you can’t make a value argument, just make sure your value argument is in combination with an amazing sale. Here are a few ways to create an amazing sale:

• More items on sale than your competitors.
• More items on sale than last year (record number is a great claim).
• Cooler and hotter items on sale than competitors.
• Deeper discounts on popular items than competitors.
• Unique merchandising combinations your competitors don’t have

The last point is a favorite tactic. Combining items in unique ways creates a new SKU (Stock Keeping Unit) that will be uniquely yours until competitors catch up (and they may not care to chase your site). Customers visiting shopping comparison engines are unlikely to find any competitor exactly matching your unique merchandising. Give your unique combinations cool names and create them faster than your competitors can copy, and you will stay ahead in the SERPs (Seerch Engine Result Pages).

The fall is a great time for Occam’s Razor. If you KNOW what is going to work because you’ve tested all summer, reduce your offers. Since every ecommerce site is SCREAMING at this time of year, it is a great time to narrowcast. Create a story you can tell over 4 months, a story that gets faster and faster the more you tell it and the closer 12.25 becomes. We are taking our own advice. By making September Ecommerce Secrets Month, we are developing a timely idea that can go into our content bag for next year.

We could discuss social, shopping carts and email marketing, since that content would prove helpful, but the impact of great content without an umbrella to organize it can be overwhelming. If this weekend is one sale, and next weekend a different sale, and the following weekend a third, you will burn out your list, increase unsubscribes and lower conversion.

Here is a favorite ecommerce merchandising irony: Take exactly the approach described above as part of an articulated plan shared with your customers, and conversions increase and your list stays healthy. Sharing your merchandising WHYs with your customers is powerful magic. Your customers get it, they have a way to describe what is happening, and so they don’t feel spammed.

ANY STORY WORKS better than no story.  You can create  a sale based on:

• The 12 days of Christmas
• Customer requests
• Dr. Seuss.

The story behind your merchandising events is important, but not as important as HAVING A STORY, sharing the story and responding to feedback about the story. If someone says negative things about your use of the Cat in the Hat, be appreciative for the feedback and continue on. If an army of people (or lawyers) takes issue with your Cat in the Hat promotion, find a new story (lol).

The last line is important enough to comment further. NEVER get so married to your merchandising plan that you continue a bad one. The beautiful thing about Internet marketing is your team should be able to change directions if your first direction is losing money.

I rarely created a Plan B option, but there were 2 holiday selling seasons out of 7 during my tenure as Director of Ecommerce I wished we had. Junking a merchandising calendar after Halloween is stressful and risky, so it’s something you should only do if the early returns are poor beyond question (they rarely are, btw).  When you have millions riding on something, creating a Plan B you hope you will NEVER be used is a good idea.

Main Page Follow @Atlanticbt Like on Facebook Email Ecomm ?’s To: Martin.Smith(at)Atlanticbt.com	September is Ecommerce Tips Month Labor Day is the sound of the starter’s gun. Back-To-School marks the beginning of a new holiday selling season online. Ecommerce websites behave differently during the fall. As we draw closer to the world’s most popular deadline, 12.25, conversion rates go up, visits before purchase go down, and Average Order Values (AOV) increase. This holiday selling season is going to be different because: Mobile Marketing Mobile will be important, even if your customers aren’t buying from your site using their phones and iPads yet. Your customers are curating your emails and other communication with mobile devices. This year will be the first truly mobile holiday selling season. Social Media Marketing Social marketing is exerting a greater and greater influence on SEO and purchase intent. Combine mobile and social, sometimes called SoLoMo (Social, Local and Mobile), and you have the makings for a very different holiday selling season. Atlantic BT Ecommerce Experts Atlantic BT has e-commerce experts who’ve managed millions in holiday ecomm sales via every Internet marketing channel including: email marketing, PPC, organic SEO, traditional advertising, content and cause marketing, mobile commerce, and social media marketing. Here is a look at our September E-commerce Tips Calendar. As content goes live, we will Tweet on @Atlanticbt and add the link to this page. Ask Atlantic BT’s Ecomm Experts Have a burning ecommerce question? Email to Martin.Smith(at)Atlanticbt(dot)com with the subject “ECOMM Question”. Questions featured win a free T. Deadline for ecomm questions is Friday, 9.14.
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