Around the same time that the United States fell into recession and once-extravagant consumers no longer shopped for extravagant luxury items, several new ecommerce companies launched, selling…luxury items. While this might seem counterintuitive, these businesses stepped into the market at the right time, with just the right selling strategy.

With a flash sale business model, companies like Gilt Groupe, Rue La La, and Hautelook began offering designer fashion and luxury goods at deeply discounted prices, for a limited time. Would-be shoppers can only access the products if they’ve first become “members” of the site. They then receive daily emails alerting them when a new sale is beginning. Members rush to the website, eager to steal a deal before the products are all sold out.

Discounted designer clothing, jewelry, and luxury home goods proved to be something of a hit with cost-conscious consumers, and many copycat businesses quickly followed suite. Sales at these sites happen daily, and while shoppers are informed of which designers will have sales going on any given day, they don’t know what items will be sold or what the prices will be. This piques consumer interest. Combine that interest with both the promise of savings and a tinge of cutthroat desire to buy the best products before anyone else, and you end up with fashion junkie visitors who come to your website every single day.

I recently came across an article by Joshua Porter on building everyday apps. According to Joshua:

“An everyday app is one that is used every day (or most days) by its users. This means that each and every day they do something with the app.”

Few apps are actually used every day, and few sites are visited every day. As much as we’d love to think that online shoppers are so intrigued with our products and services that they keep coming back to our online storefront day after day, the reality is that for many verticals, few customers even return once a month. The sites that do manage to bring in repeat visitors on a daily, weekly, or even monthly basis usually have business plans or product lines that play into this frequency. They may offer daily new products, weekly sales or discounts, or subscription services on items you might need on a monthly basis. Even if your business isn’t destined to be an everyday site, you might be able to incorporate some features to make it a “more-often” ecommerce site.

Grow Community

Create a community for your visitors and people will have a reason to return to your site, even when they’re not going to buy. Diehard Wooters might not think twice about visiting Woot at least once a day or once every few days, but they didn’t become diehard fans purely from a love of random gadgets. Woot, the “One Day, One Deal” site does just that, they only sell one product each day (unless you count the fact that there are actually several Woot variations, like Shirt Woot and Wine Woot).

While innate curiosity might get a visitor coming back several times, it’s the social community that hooks fans in and keeps them active with the site, even if today’s product isn’t something that interests them. Woot products come with humorous descriptions, and they show the stats on how the product is selling – including how long before someone first completed a purchase, what quantities people are buying the item in, and how many other Woot purchases the various buyers have made. The first person to buy the daily deal is announced to the world, with a link to that member’s profile. Woot members can also join in a daily discussion surrounding the item, and like other forums, many members are longtime staples. There’s nothing like peer pressure to get someone buying.

Show Something New Every Day

It’s easy to get people checking in with your brand on a regular basis if what you’re selling happens to change every day. A bit like Woot, daily deal sites like Groupon and Living Social offer special coupons and discounts for local products and services, but customers have to act fast because most deals disappear after only one day. Potential customers won’t find every deal of interest to them, but if they want to catch the good ones they need to come back day after day. Because Groupon and Living Social offer daily emails and mobile phone apps, many customers might be checking in with the brand on a daily basis even when they don’t return to make a purchase.

Fresh merchandise is a good way to entice many shoppers back to your site, but not everyone has something new to announce each day. Delight bridged the gap by offering daily “delights” for one item on their site each day. The merchandise isn’t necessarily new, but every day Delight features a special or discount for one specific item. Customers can choose to opt-in to the Daily Delight emails to receive updates every day about the featured product. If the item is something that truly tickles their fancy, they have until midnight to make the purchase.

Have Lots of Browse-Worthy Information

Dominate with content and visitors have something else to seek out besides your products. A lot of people visit Amazon. Most people probably don’t visit on a daily basis, though some do. Many of us probably find ourselves on Amazon’s site because Amazon has managed to own a corner of just about every market. From baby food to blow torches, Amazon’s got it.

Large product catalog aside, Amazon has amassed a large amount of interesting content unique to its site. Have you ever gotten lost in Listmania madness? You find one book that looks interesting, and then you check out a list to see if anyone has mentioned something else that might interest you. You see several new books, read a bit about them, and then before you know it, you’re off looking at another list. What about the “So You’d Like To…” feature where Amazon citizens can put together their own guides, complete with product recommendations and advice.

And did you know that there are communities on Amazon? People from all over can get together to discuss topics related to their work or interests. Amazon also has lots of customer reviews. The product reviews alone have made Amazon the first stop for product research for many consumers. With all the unique user-generated content, it’s easy to see why many people turn to Amazon when they’re starting some research or looking for new information. Even if Amazon’s product catalog was only half the size, Amazon and its users create enough new and interesting content each day to keep many people coming back to visit on a regular basis.

Play with Emotions: Incite Lust, Greed, or Competitiveness

Not all purchases are rational and sane. If they were, the number of product returns would surely dip. In fact, very few of our collective purchases are actually for items we absolutely need. While I wouldn’t recommend making the Seven Deadly Sins your marketing playbook, creating an addictive desire for your products and your brand will bring some visitors back to your site on a regular basis.

Companies like Gilt, Rue La La, and Hautelook have capitalized on our addictive tendencies and keep some visitors returning every single day. These flash sale stores, and the others that emerged following their success, typically offer deep discounts on designer goods: things that we want but usually can’t have. Sales are short, often only lasting a day or two. This adds a greater level of urgency to any purchasing decision, and suddenly, would-be browsers are turning into buyers. On top of this, quantities are limited for many products. If you’re not one of the first to get to the site when a sale begins, there’s a very good chance that the gorgeous dress you never knew you wanted is already sold out. Customers return, in part, because they’re out to beat the masses in the purchase of something lust-worthy and crave-inducing.

When it comes down to it, you don’t have to be an everyday ecommerce site. Very few businesses will see success if this is where their ambitions lie. However, do try to incorporate some of these features into your site, and you may start to see visitors return on a more frequent basis.

Photo from Flickr user Andyhay.

The Wall Street Journal recently posted an interactive infographic on tracking methods of top websites as part of their “What They Know” series. The infographic is very interesting and contains a lot of information about the number and types of cookies and beacons used on websites to track information about visitors. Unfortunately, the article doesn’t go into enough detail about what information is captured and what this information is used for. With statements like, “Marketers are spying on Internet users,” misunderstandings are being perpetuated as to what marketers actually do and what personal information is tracked via online interactions. With all the information on cookies and beacons, even I was starting to feel like the work I do might be akin to tracking someone’s every move via an alien implant. But this isn’t true.

I am a marketer, and I am not spying on you. Since I believe that more people should become familiar with internet technologies and with web analytics, allow me to continue the Wall Street Journal’s discussion and fill in a few more details.

Are You Being Profiled by Web Analytics Tools?

More often than not, the “you” that is being tracked online is an anonymous number, not a name. While there may be some instances where the data I have is tied to a personally-identifying piece of information like a name or an email address, most often, you are about as anthropomorthic as SNFD17438DJ89.

But it’s been determined that anonymous data really isn’t anonymous…sort of. Researchers have determined that patterns and behaviors are unique enough that individuals can be picked out of anonymous data, in general. However, while I may be able to isolate profiles for individual visitors to my website, you’re still a number. I can’t miraculously conjure up names and personal details for everyone who visits my site.

Finally, there’s a lot of information that exists online about who you are, what you like, and what your browsing habits are. If I have access to any of this information about you, chances are good that it’s divided up amongst several tools. There is no secret profile about you that includes your name, age, email address, every website you’ve ever visited, and every action you’ve ever taken on my site. If I wanted to create a comprehensive profile of you, I would need to ask you.

This is what I do know about you.

Your Personal Details

There are several ways I can get personally identifying details about you through my website. If you create an account on the site, submit a form, or in some way send in your information, it will be stored in a database. This is how the website remembers your username, password, and any details specific to your account. The tools that I’m using and their level of sophistication determine whether or not I can match your personal details up with other information about you, like when you came to my site and what pages you visited.

Your Name: If you’ve created an account, submitted a form, made a purchase, or left a comment, I probably have a record of your name or username.

Your Email: Just like your name, if you’ve submitted your email address somewhere on my website, I probably have a record of it.

Your Phone Number: I really don’t care about your phone number unless it’s needed for customer service purposes or it’s related to the product or service I’m offering.

Your Birthday or Your Age: By knowing your age, I can start to make more accurate assumptions about the types of people visiting my website. However, I recognize that if I ask for details like your birthday or your age, there’s a good chance that many people won’t complete my form or sign up for an account on my site. I probably won’t ask you for these because I’d rather get more people to sign up than to know the ages of a few people. However, some sites will ask for a birth date and send out coupons or gifts on their customers’ birthdays. Depending on what you’re signing up for, some sites will require this info to accurately give quotes for things like insurance.

Your Social Security Number: There’s really no reason I need your SSN and no reason you should provide it unless you’re completing information for something that may require a credit check or proof of identity, like signing up for a phone contract or buying insurance.

Your Browsing Behaviors On My Website

I have cookies and tracking pixels installed on my site that give me information on how people use my site. I can see information like which pages you visited, how long you spent on each page, and what links you clicked on. However, at this point “you” is probably an anonymous ID number. I’m more interested in looking at trends and segments of visitors with shared similarities than trying to spy on you personally. However, if I know that Bob Smith from Nevada uses a Windows PC and reported a problem on the About page at 9:30 Monday morning, I might be able to dig into the information and isolate a browsing profile that is likely his. The more I know about Bob, the greater the chance that I can then determine that he visited my site three times that morning, uses Internet Explorer 7 on a PC running Windows XP, and lives in Reno.

Your Geographic Details

When you visit my site, information about your IP address and your internet service provider is recorded. Many times, this will pinpoint you to the Country, State, and City that you live in, although it’s not always 100% accurate.

Your Computer Device Details

Are you visiting my site from a PC or Mac? An iPhone or an Xbox? Whatever device you’re using is recorded, along with information like what operating system it’s running, what browser you’re visiting from, and how big your monitor screen is. This is how we adjust the design of the website to make sure it looks good for as many of our visitors as possible. If we see we’re getting a lot of visitors from mobile devices like Blackberries, iPhones, and Androids, we ‘ll use this information when deciding whether we should make a mobile version of the website.

Your Social Media Profiles

If I already have your name and email address, there are services I can use to gather information about what social networks you belong to. Do you have an account on MySpace, Facebook, and Flickr? I might be able to determine this if your accounts on these sites are listed under the same email address I have for you. In addition, I can gather information from your profiles that you’ve marked as viewable by the public.

I may be able to use information from your social profiles to determine your age, gender, and interests. However, I’m less concerned about you as an individual and more concerned with general segments that define my customers. I use this information to determine what kind of marketing campaigns might be successful, what types of products or services would be best for my customers, and which social networks my company should invest the most time on.

Your Purchases

If you bought something from my site, I can access all the details of your order. I can also access the details of your behavior on my site that surrounded that purchase, like what other products you looked at, what items you added to your cart but didn’t buy, and how many times you came to my site before you made a purchase.

With this information about you, I’ll try to make sure that the emails you get are related to topics or products that are more personally relevant to you. The next time you visit my site, you might see products recommended to you that are items you’ve looked at but didn’t buy, accessories for things you did buy, or interesting products purchased by people with actions similar to yours. I don’t have enough time to personally pick out these recommendations for you; algorithms make the choices here.

The Products or Articles You May Prefer on My Site

I can make inferences about what your interests are based on what categories and subcategories you visit on my site, how long you spend on different pages, and what products or articles you look at, purchase, or share with friends. The only way for me to actually know what you like and dislike is to ask you. However, the closer I get to figuring out what interests and motivates visitors to my site, the better I can make the site experience for them.

The Products or Articles You May Prefer on Other Sites

I probably don’t know this about you. While there are companies out there who could potentially provide me with this information for my customers or website visitors, it’s not something I’m tracking.

Your Demographic Details

It’s pretty difficult for me to gather other specific details about you as a person relying just on what’s gathered by my website.

Your Gender: I probably don’t know this, although I might be able to make a guess based on your name, your purchasing behavior, or by looking at your social media profiles.
Your Income: I also probably don’t know your income unless I specifically requested the information on a form. However, I might be able to access research that says my products or services appeal more to people with a certain income level.
Your Occupation: Again, I can make guesses about your occupation based on the type of website I have, but unless you’ve specifically told me your occupation, I probably don’t know it.
How Many Kids, Cats, and Guppies Live in Your Household: I have no idea.

Does that all seem like a lot of information? It is. If I have this information about one person, I also probably have the same amount of information for all the other people who visit the website. That’s a lot of data to go through, so rather than focusing on the actions and details of one specific person, I’ll spend more time breaking down the information I have about everyone into groups and segments. I might look at data from people from the same state or data from people who all bought the same product, but very rarely do I put together a comprehensive profile of just you.

If that’s not enough information, here are some other details I might access:

If I send you an email, I can probably tell where you were located, and I can track your specific actions, like if you opened it, what you clicked on, and what you later purchased after reading the email.

I can tell how you came to my site. If you searched for a specific phrase in Google, I can see that, and if you clicked on a link on another website to get here, I know which site you were on.

If you clicked on a link on my site that then took you to another site, I know which link you clicked on and what outbound site you went to.

If you clicked on one of my ads to come to the site, I know which ad you clicked on and where the ad was.

Before you lash out at the tracking used on websites, think about this:

In many cases, if you call a company or business, your phone call is tracked and recorded. Your number is saved and your location is identified. The length of the call is noted, and the sentiment of your voice might be recorded. If a phone tracking system is in place, there’s a good chance that while you’re waiting on hold, all the irate comments you make are also being recorded. This information can be used to ensure that the business has enough staff on-hand to answer calls during peak times, to make sure they don’t put people on hold too often, and to monitor that the staff are correctly answering your questions.

If you use a site’s live chat feature, your chat is recorded for tracking purposes. The person that you’re chatting with might also be able to see which webpage you’re currently on, what your IP address is, and what other pages on the site you browsed before chatting.

If you stay away from the web entirely and place an order through a catalog, all of your contact information and your purchase history can be matched with demographic information about your neighborhood, and shared with other companies who are targeting customers with similar profiles. Ever wonder why you started getting random catalogs in the mail?

This type of “spying” doesn’t only exist online. Tracking, measuring, and monitoring information is crucial to many industries. It’s how organizations make informed decisions about what to manufacturer and sell, what to air on TV and radio stations, and what civic pursuits will benefit the most people.

Who else out there is tracking things like your movements, actions, and purchases? Potentially, the US Census, your credit card company, your car, your phone, the cameras at street intersections, grocery stores with rewards cards, retail stores with video surveillance, and many others all are “spying” in some form as well.

What kind of tracking tools am I using on Flat Frog Blog? Installed on this site I have Google Analytics, Clicky, ClickTale, and Userfly. Google Analytics and Clicky are web analytics programs that tell me who visited the site, where they came from, and what pages they viewed. ClickTale generates heat maps of users’ clicks and mouse hovers, and it generates videos of your mouse actions and page movements. Userfly also shows videos of your on-page actions. All of these are free.

Images from Google Analytics Dashboard, Flowtown Dashboard, and Flickr User Ocularinvasion.

Although I regularly skim through news and updates about startup companies, a recent story grabbed my attention because it involved ecommerce, robots, and the quest to get the perfect fitting outfit to online shoppers.

While online retail and the technology that powers this field have matured considerably, one complication that apparel retailers still tussle with is fit.  It’s not easy to buy clothes that fit right if you can’t try them on first.

The fit conundrum isn’t new to online retailers (and it’s something that catalogers face as well), but – unlike other aspects of shopping online – it isn’t a problem that’s been widely fixed with more advanced technology.

Cyber Mannequins and My Virtual Model

Some of the My Virtual Mannequins from 2001

The virtual Erin sports a BCBG blouse and Mavi jeans.

A lot of companies have tried, and failed, to use technology to help shoppers determine if that pair of jeans or sexy top they’re contemplating will indeed fit.  Land’s End was one of the first companies to dabble with virtual model technology on their website.  As early as 2000, Land’s End had added a feature using My Virtual Model technology that created cyber mannequins to help customers truly size up clothing.  The virtual modeling technology advanced, and Sears, Lane Bryant, and others followed suit.

Ten years later, My Virtual Model still exists and variations of its offerings have been put to use on many sites.  However, in a basic search I wasn’t able to track down any sites that are currently using the customizable virtual models to let shoppers demo different apparel items. The MVM site itself does let you customize a model of yourself and play around a bit with some clothing items in their community site.  Even so, I didn’t find the experience very compelling and the technology felt a little clunky.

Few clothing choices exist in the MVM community site for trying on, which I think is indicative of the expensive nature of the program – for clothing manufacturers and retailers to take advantage of the virtual models and cyber fits, every single garment has to be scanned by MVM technology.  In a world where new styles come seasonly and designers often do limited cuts of products, the cost and time involved is incredibly prohibitive.

Augmented Reality and Fashionista

Tobi's Fashionista augmented reality.

About a year ago, ecommerce apparel companies started to look at another emerging technology: augmented reality.  In the fall of 2009, clothing etailer Tobi launched Fashionista, a program that capitalizes on shoppers with webcams to allow them to virtually try out clothes.  Fashionista required customers have a web camera, Flash, and the desire to move around in their living room until they hit the perfect spot where their full body image could be overlayed with outfits.

While perhaps amusing (I never tried it), Fashionista did little to help shoppers determine fit.  Like MVM, Fashionista (a product of interactive marketing company Zugara) is an expensive feature to add.  In addition to the cost of licensing an augmented reality technology, all product imagery has to be shot or appropriately edited for layering on top of a webcam image.  The technology itself is also resource intensive.  Interestingly enough, as I browsed through Tobi’s site, I no longer see reference to the Fashionista feature anywhere within their product pages.

Robots and Fits.Me

The Fits.Me Robotic Mannequin

The news that caught my attention last week was about Fits.me.  The young company, currently in beta and based in Estonia, has developed robotic mannequins that can be customized by the shopper to match certain body measurements.  Shoppers can then use the mannequin to “try on” various sizes of products, looking for the one that fits best.  Fits.me is capitalizing on the fact that online apparel sales represent something like a $26billion market in the United States alone this year.

While it sounds interesting, I fail to see the point of the roboticized mannequins.  Can’t the same thing be accomplished with an adjustable 3-D rendering?  In order to use the technology, Fits.me requires samples of each clothing item (in each size).  They then take up to 2,000 photos of each product.  They digitalize the whole thing, set up a virtual fitting room, and charge retailers on a CPC basis.  The whole thing takes 2-3 weeks of work.

The High Cost of Virtual Fitting Rooms

My take: The product won’t make it big. In order to justify the cost of virtualizing physical garments, you pretty much have to be a big company and be the manufacturer as well as the retailer.  You have to have complete control of the timing and production process.  Land’s End fits the bill here.

The thing is, many companies like this have already adopted fairly consistent, standardized sizing.  And a lot of these companies have retail stores where you can just go and try the clothes on in person.

Still the Best Bet for Virtual Fitting

Some companies have tried to combat the problem of unknown fit by offering the stats of the model under the clothes.  This is great – if you happen to be 5′10 with a 34B chest, 24 inch waist, and wear a size small and 26 in jeans.  In my opinion, clear product imagery, detailed descriptions (that include fit notes), and a lenient return/exchange policy are still the most cost-effective ways for ecommerce apparel companies to help customers find the best fit.

If any non-manufacturing online apparel retailer had room to play with virtual sizing technology like Fits.me, I would point my finger at ShopBop.  As a powerhouse of designer fashion and an arm of Amazon, the company might have the leveraging power to play around with expensive virtual fitting.  With a free shipping and free returns policy, I’m sure any money saved on returns and exchanges would also be a boon.

Virtualized sizing and fit help is most needed by retailers who sell clothing from a variety of designers, many of whom often take liberties with size and offer limited runs of styles.  Unfortunately, the more exclusive the clothing is, the fewer the number of cuts done and the more quickly retailers work to get the products out into the online world.  This is why it’s tricky for many apparel etailers to get successful product review programs going – by the time people come to review the item, it’s already sold out.

As much fun as I think it would be to have a robot or virtualized avatar scour the web and return with a plentitude of products that fit me perfectly, I don’t see it happening in the near future.  For now, determining online fit will remain a complication that ecommerce clothing companies must face.

The Blur Building and the Next Application of Mobile Computing

In 2002, the centerpiece pavilion of the sixth Swiss National Expo was less an actual building and more a man-made atmospheric presence.  The Blur Building, as designed by American architects Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, was a suspended platform in the middle of Lake Neuchatel in Switzerland.  The metal structure of the building used high-pressure spraying technology to blast little water droplets from the frame, essentially shrouding the pavilion in what looked like a cloud of mist.  The spray, temperature, wind, humidity, and other atmospheric conditions necessary to maintain the cloud of fog were all computer controlled.

As visitors left the clear of the shore and headed out on a walkway to the Blur Building, they donned the second feature of the installation, braincoats.  In addition to guarding against the moisture, these waterproof ponchos also were a form of wearable computing.  While on the shore, visitors to the pavilion were asked to complete a personal preferences questionnaire that was uploaded into an online social networking profile housed in a central Blur Building computer and wirelessly accessible throughout the structure.  As visitors were given their braincoats, their preferences profiles were downloaded into their ponchos.  While people slowly wandered through the fog within the Blur Building, LEDs within the braincoats would begin to glow red or green as they came in close proximity of another person whose personal preference questionnaire was a match to their own.  A sonic pulse within the coats also changed frequencies to indicate shared affinities as they neared other visitors.

Diller and Scofidio, in collaboration with Ben Rubin for the creation of the braincoat, were able to able to create a cultural-technological experience that combined nature with man-made structure, as well as human psyche with smart computers, to both bring people closer together and hide them from each other.  In an interview, Elizabeth Diller said of the smart raincoats with their changing red and green lights, “Ben collaborated on the ‘Braincoat,’ working with us on the desire to invest technology with complex communications skills — some involuntary, such as blushing.”

Smart raincoats may seem like novelty items in 2010, but we already carry with us a foundation for creating and recognizing personal affinity networks.  As more consumers make smartphones and mobile devices essential components of their daily wanderings, a population of geo-networked individuals is emerging.  We are being conditioned to reference our phones for location-specific information, thanks in part to apps like Foursquare and Gowalla, Yelp, and mobile maps.  But what if our phones started referencing us?

We currently have the technology to make accurate guesses about consumers’ preferences in music, movies, books, and more.  Both social networks and personalized product recommendation engines look at individuals’ actions and behaviors, and then use this information to show trends, make preference-based predictions, and to match up individuals with shared tastes or behaviors.  The next evolution of Pandora could be a mobile app that vibrated in your pocket or played an auditory chime whenever the person sitting next to you on the bus shared a similar taste in music.  Conference goers could meet other conference goers if their phones began to glow or vibrate whenever they passed someone who had a similar profile and session schedule.  Plancast users could upload a taste or event preference questionnaire to their profile and begin discovering new events or venues that might interest them via people outside their social network, merely by coming in close proximity to someone with shared interests.

The technology infrastructure isn’t fully ready to support a network of mobile people whose personal computing devices must be always on the prowl for other individuals with similar or compatible preferences.  However, as mobile technology continues to focus on location-specific and transitory actions, we will start to see the rise of affinity-based networks and preference-led encounters.

Through adherence to strict usability principles and continuous optimization testing, many online merchants have arrived at a set of standard features that keep their ecommerce stores easy to use and simple to buy from.  Even small design and functionality changes can have large effects on conversion rate and order value.  Here are 21 usability principles that I recommend all ecommerce websites consider.

1 – Use Visual Navigation Cues

Show your customer where he or she is within the site by using a breadcrumb trail.  Breadcrumbs should provide a quick visual reference so your customer can easily determine where product pages and subcategories lie within the overall structure of your site.  Use headers and subheaders on your page to break-up text and product information into easy-to-digest and quick to find morsels.

Breadcrumb Navigation on Bluefly

2 – Offer Lots of Sort Options

If you have product categories and subcategories that include more than just a handful of products, be sure and offer multiple ways to quickly sort the product listings.  Pertinent sort options for your site might include High Price to Low Price, Low Price to High Price, Top Rated to Lowest Rated, Lowest Rated to Highest Rated, Bestselling, Popularity, Name A to Z, Name Z to A, Most Reviews, Least Reviews, Newest, Featured, and others.

3 – Let Customers Choose The Number of Items They See

Nothing is more frustrating than wanting to quickly visually skim the products within a category, only to be limited to seeing just a few items on a category page.  Let your shopper choose how many products she wants to see on a category page.  You can have options that range from 9 to 99 to best suite your shoppers’ preferences.  Make one option a “View All” so that customers can quickly see every product in a particular category and make fast decisions about whether to dig deeper into that particular product style.

Revolve Clothing Lets You Select the Number of Items That Appear On A Page

4 – Offer Browsing Refinements

Let your customer control the shopping process and easily filter through your large product categories by offering plenty of refinements on your category, subcategory, and search pages.  Include filters appropriate to your product lines that will make it easy for the shopper to compare products and quickly generate pages of items that include attributes he’s searching for.  If you sell shoes, you may want to allow attribute refinements by color, heel height, shoe style, shoe size, price, and brand.  If you sell TVs, you may consider options like type (LCD, Plasma, OLED), screen size, resolution, price, brand, and aspect ratio.

At Endless, You Can Add or Remove Product Attributes to Refine Your Search

5 – Make Narrowing Refinements Removable

Just like you should include lots of options for your shoppers to drill down into the product attributes, make sure that narrowing refinements can be remove.  That way, if you land someone on a customized page, the shopper can choose to de-select some of the options he’s less interested in.  Active shoppers may also prefer to delete product attributes from their selections rather than hitting the back button and retracing their steps when in the middle of searching for product options.

6 – Make The Search Bar Obvious

Put your search bar above the fold, preferably somewhere up in the header or top nav portion of your page.  Make the search bar big enough to find without trying, and don’t let customers second-guess it by including similarly-styled email sign-ups or other form fields within close proximity of the search bar.

7 – Help Your Customer Search

Searches are rarely perfect.  Help your shoppers along the search process by including auto-corrections or suggestions for any misspellings that get typed into your search.  Include a “Did You Mean?” recommendation when searches return no results.  If your search platform returns categories and products, give the searcher some reference by listing how many product results are within each of the categories returned.  Begin showing popularly searched for terms and results in a search box dropdown as your customer begins typing.

8 – Put Contact Info in Plain Sight

Put your customer service contact phone number above the fold on all your pages.  If you don’t do customer service via phone, or if you really don’t want your phone number in the header space of your pages, at least include a link to your contact email, live chat, or customer service page in the header where it will be easy to locate.

ABT Electronics Prominently Displays a Phone Number and Live Chat in the Header

9 – Use A Persistent Shopping Cart

Keep your shopping cart link and/or icon above the fold on every page.  Keep it in the same place on each page, and make sure it’s on every page within the ecommerce site.  When a shopper adds an item to the cart, represent the action by showing a visual change in the total number of items added to the cart.  If you can’t create a dynamic item tally within your ecommerce platform, at least show a state change of some sort (change the color, change the iconography) when an item has been added to the cart.

The Office Max Shopping Cart Updates Once An Item Had Been Added

10 – Show Products On Your Category Pages

Don’t make your customer click through one or more layers of product categories before seeing actual products.  Put all of your products within a category on that category page.  If you’re using category pages as a way to show subcategories and refinements, that’s fine (see numbers  4 and 5).  But be sure and show at least a first page of products within that category without making the customer navigate to a subcategory page first. (Tip: Make category overview pages that display a representative assortment of products accessible with just one click from the homepage.)

This Site Fails to Show Any Products on the First Brand Category Page

11 – Include a Detailed Product Description

In a brick-and-mortar retail store, the shopper has a greater opportunity to touch a product, try it on, shake it, smell it, and maybe even peek inside the box.  In an online environment, all you’ve got to sell your products are product copy and imagery.  Good copy sells.  Make your product description as detailed as possible, but don’t think you can’t have fun with it.  Enticing, humorous, or vividly visual descriptions can convince customers to buy purely with words.  Include as many specifics as possible about use, size, fit, fabric or materials, weight, compatibility, and anything else that might be important to the decision-making processes for your specific product line.

12 – Use Quality Imagery

That single small manufacturer-supplied photo isn’t going to cut it.  Get high-quality photos of each of your products.  Include shots from multiple angles.  Provide photos with the different color combinations.  Show the clothing on a model.  Show the furniture in a room.  Let your customer zoom in or open an enlarged image.  If you’ve got the resources, include product demonstration videos with someone explaining how the item works, how it’s assembled, or how it looks when it’s worn.

13 – Make the Add to Cart Button Visible

Surprisingly, product pages still exist where it looks like the Add to Cart button was an afterthought.  If your intent is for website visitors to purchase your products online, then be sure and make your buy button stand out.  Keep it above the fold of the product page, and put it near the top of the product information.  Choose a color or design that stands out and contrasts with your other page elements.  Don’t hide it within a cluttered mess of product information.

Toys R Us Makes Their Price and Buy Button Stand Out By Using a Contrasting Color for Both

14 – Make the Price Easy to Find

It is much more difficult to convince a shopper to buy something if she can’t figure out how much it will cost.  Make your product price bigger and bolder than your other on-page text, and surround it by whitespace so that it stands out.  Keep it within proximity of the buy button, don’t bury it down on the page.  If your customer is about to save money, highlight that by showing the sale price or the discount off the MSRP.  Make it clear how much money your customer is saving, but don’t include so many numbers that it becomes difficult to tell which is the actual product price.

15 – State Your Lead Time or Product Availability

Use phrases like “Out of stock but coming soon,” “Almost sold out,” “In stock and ready to ship,” or “Pre-order only” to indicate the availability of the item.  Don’t be afraid to indicate lead time.  If you’re upfront with your lead time and your lead time is accurate, (include phrases like “Ships Today,” “Ships in 2-3 Business Days,” or “Ships in 10 Business Days”), then your buyers will be less likely to become irritated by longer wait times.  Don’t ever make a shopper add an item to her cart (or worse yet, make it all the way to the checkout) before indicating that the item is out of stock or unavailable.

This Product Description from National Business Furniture Says When the Product is Expected to Ship

16 – Show Cross-Sells and Related Products

Offer browsers other product options from the category or product pages.  You can include fields for cross-sells or up-sells for the current product type, related accessories, popular products, or best sellers. Your customer will have more options for browsing through the depth of your product catalog, and you’ll increase your opportunities for making a sale.

17 – Offer Multiple Shipping Options

You don’t need to provide the full gamut of shipping services from the likes of UPS, FedEx, DHL, and the postal service.  But if your ecommerce site offers several shipping options, then your store will be better positioned to capture sales from customers with different needs and urgency timeframes.  By including shipping from more than one carrier, your customers will be able to choose one that they are familiar with.  Make sure your delivery options are all clearly stated.

18 – Allow Checkout as a Guest

Don’t force your customer to create any kind of account.  Offer checkout as a guest, checkout as a returning customer, and the option to sign-up with a new account.  However don’t require that shoppers have an account before they add items to their carts or make modifications to the items in their carts, and don’t insist that they sign-up as a user in order to make a purchase.

19 – Show Recognizable Security Measures

Convice your shoppers that they are making a purchase from a trusted and safe site by presenting recognizable security badges or trust certificates on site pages and by using an SSL certificate at checkout.  Trust and security certificates should reassure would-be buyers that their sensitive credit card and personal data is safe from hackers.  Imagery badges from sites like Verisafe, McAfee, and Thawte indicate that the site is being monitored for security breaches and that private data will be kept safe.

National Business Furniture Suggests Safe Shopping by Showing their McAfee, VeriSign, and BBB Badges

20 – Let Customers Confirm Their Order Details

In the last step of the checkout process, present your shoppers with a chance to confirm every aspect of their purchase – before they hit the submit button.  They should have one last opportunity to double check the products they’ve set to order, their shipping and billing addresses, their chosen shipping method, and their payment details.  During the checkout process, reassure customers that they will have a chance to check their order before they submit it for purchase.  If customers can double-check their order details one last time, your rate of cancellations or calls to change incorrect order details may go down.

21 – Send a Follow Up Confirmation Email

Once an order has been placed, have a confirmation email ready to go that is automatically generated and will be immediately sent to the customer.  Show as many of the order details as possible, including a line item list of products ordered, a reiteration of the bill-to and ship-to addresses, the payment account that the purchase was charged to, and a notice on when shipment tracking will be available.  There should be a link back to the website where the customer can login to his account to view order history online.  For customers who checked out as a guest, offer a link for creating an account.  You can also use space in the confirmation email for sharing discounts good for future purchases, highlighting popular items, or making upsell or related product suggestions that the buyer might be interested in based on his recent purchase.  Did he just purchase a new computer?  This could be a good time to include a reminder that it’s not too late to purchase an extended warranty for new electronics.

The Order Confirmation Email From Rue La La Presents All The Order Details

Final Thoughts

The implementation of these best practices can play a great role in changing how long shoppers stay on your ecommerce website and how many eventually make a purchase.  While the field of ecommerce has matured, many retailers – both large and small – are still guilty of site features and functionalities that ultimately make it more difficult or less desirable for a customer to shop online.  While these 21 tips do not represent the ultimate list of usability standards for ecommerce sites, their implementation and use may increase the order value, conversion rate, or engagement level of your online shoppers.

Summary: Flowtown is a new service that allows internet marketers to upload a list of emails and get back comprehensive information on their customers’ social media presence.

Segmentation and personalization make most email campaigns – and marketing campaigns in general – more effective. If you’re engaging in email marketing, you’re probably already explored options like different send times, content variations, and splitting your list up into different groups of people. Often, email marketers have some kind of tool or database for building out customer segments based on customer attributes, past behavior, and any other relevant information they’ve been able to access.

Depending on the email campaign, you may be looking at:

* Gender
* Age
* Geographic Location
* Engagement Level
* Past Purchase $$ Amount
* Time Since Most Recent Purchase
* Previously Purchased (or Favored) Product Categories
* Self-Selected Hobbies or Interests
* Customer Industry
* And Others

As social media gains a stronger footing alongside email as another customer communication channel, where does social media fit within the push marketing mix? Flowtown wants to help you integrate social media and email marketing, and insure that you gain insightful information in the process.

A Social Media Profile Data Mining Service

Flowtown is a relatively new service that gathers together information on the social profiles of your email list. The service is integrated with MailChimp, if that’s your ESP of choice, but you can also upload your list via a spreadsheet or paste in the emails. Flowtown then goes to work putting together profiles based on the email addresses. Does it violate your customers’ privacy? Not technically, since the information pulled is all publicly available on profiles if you dig enough. Flowtown cuts out the legwork by performing the data mining and compilation for you. Does it seem a little voyeuristic at first? It can. It’s surprising to realize how many profiles are being scanned to compile the information, but other online applications have also started pulling in this social profile data as well (email tools like Xobni and Threadsy come to mind).

Flowtown automatically compiles info from MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, Amazon, and StumbleUpon. It also adds in a Klout ranking so that you can sort by your potentially more socially engaged Twitter customers. Other networks that I’ve seen pop up within profiles include Tagged, New York Times, LA Times, Washington Times, Costco, Hi5, Pandora, Classmates.com, Care2, and Plaxo. And there are likely many more that I haven’t come across yet.

How is this helpful? You get quick stats plus detailed profile information on anyone in your email list with a public social media account.  You can use the newly-created profiles to start segmenting your users by social network, engagement level, or interests. You also gain a better understanding of your customer base. Not all of the information is accurate, as some users have a propensity to lie about things like their age on MySpace, but it will give you a starting guesstimate for your user base.

Isn’t There a Cheaper Way to Gather Data?

Flowtown is a paid service, but the plans are reasonable and are based on the size of your email list. If you’re a bare bones marketer, you could take a DIY approach and setup a new Gmail or Hotmail account, add everyone from your email list as contacts, use a service like Twitter with your new Gmail account, and choose the “Scan My Contacts” option to find friends who also have accounts. But then you’re left to make your own pretty graphs. Flowtown does offer info on your first 50 email addresses for free, so it might be more time efficient to get your profile mining fix that way instead.

What I’d Like to See in the Future

As a new company, Flowtown has made a great start at putting together a useful tool for marketers. I’d like to see the service grow to include more niche-specific networks as well. These could be incredibly useful for retailers or companies operating within certain verticals. I don’t know if they have APIs available, but I’d love to see sites like Kaboodle, ThisNext, and Stylehive added to help retailers, and sites such as Yelp and Epicurious would aid restaurants or dining establishments. I’d also like the service to include integration with location-based networks like Foursquare, Gowalla, Brightkite, and Loopt to fill out people’s profiles.

Possible Use-Case Scenarios

The Neighborhood Cafe

A restaurant or cafe may collect comment cards or customer feedback cards as part of their efforts to insure that they are providing quality service, great food, and an inviting atmosphere. Customers can fill these out anonymously, but they can also include their email if they’d like to be entered in monthly drawings for free meals. The restaurant keeps this list of customer email addresses and also collects emails through their website from people interested in receiving monthly menus and notices on special events.

If Flowtown ever integrates with Yelp or a similar service, this will become an amazing resource for restaurants and cafes. They would be able to determine which of their customers were active Yelp reviewers and send an occasional message out to the Yelpers asking for reviews or highlighting reviews from the past month. They might also be able to dedicate a little manpower to sifting through their patrons’ Yelp profiles to see what types of restaurants they liked best and what price ranges their customers gravitate towards.

Even without a Yelp integration, the restaurant could probably make some inferences about a subset of their patrons by looking at the info gathered by Flowtown. (Note, this is only a subset. The customer who willing gives up an email address on a comment card or who signs up to receive menus via email isn’t necessary a representation of all your customers – unless, perhaps, you are a cyber cafe). From the geographic data, it may become clear that many customers are locals but a sizable chunk are tourists who visited on vacation. You may choose to send fewer emails to the out-of-towners or change your marketing message when sending to them; “Hey, next time you’re in town, we thought you’d like to know…”

Do you have a cozy cafe that encourages lingering over a good book? Do you have a segment of customers with Amazon and New York Times profiles? Maybe these are the people you want to notify first about the new sofas you’re getting or the extra magazine subscriptions you’ve just picked up. Do you have a popular lunchtime cafe in the city center or the business district? Is there are a group of your customers who appear to be locals, professionals with LinkedIn profiles, and are in their 30s – 50s? You might target this group first with announcements about lunchtime rush specials and offer them exclusive discounts on your newly formed corporate catering service.

The Niche Community Site

So you have a community site with an actively growing user base. You haven’t really put a lot of time or consideration into formal email marketing, but you do have email addresses from all your registered users. You’ve been considering adding a second login option to encourage more new users to join who might not want to create yet another account on another website. You’d like to use either an Oauth Twitter login or a Facebook Connect login as your second choice, but you’re not sure which is best.

You’ve considered sending out a rare email to your users asking which they’d prefer, but they already technically have accounts with your site. You’ve also considered just picking the choice that’s easiest to implement. With Flowtown, you can see which social networking sites your current users already have accounts with. It turns out that 70% of your current users also have Facebook accounts, but only 20% have Twitter profiles. Based on those numbers, you decide the Twitter login isn’t the best idea, and you’re more motivated to set up that Facebook fanpage for your site.

The Fun & Games Ecommerce Store

You’ve got a small ecommerce site, and you recently dove headfirst into social media. In fact, you set up sites on every social media platform you could find. Now you’re realizing that it takes time to maintain all those profiles, and you’re having a hard time connecting with cool people or potential customers in some of the social spaces. You want to do a really awesome social media scavenger hunt, and you’re setting up clues that you’ll post on all the different sites so that users can track down product prizes.

Well it turns out that organizing clues and scavenger hunts for all the social sites is also a lot of work. You decide to pare back to just a few social platforms, but you haven’t decided if you want your clues to encourage users to be active on all the networks, or if you want to offer separate clues and prizes for scavengers on each of the networks.

You take your list of orders from the last three months and upload the emails into Flowtown to find out where your most recent customers have been hanging out. You pay special attention to the habits of your biggest spenders. Do they have things in common? Could you profile them and direct some focus into acquiring more like them? You notice that your biggest spenders don’t have a lot of social media klout, but there are some customers with high klout in the next tier of spenders. Maybe they’d be more likely to spread the word about your scavenger hunt?

Based on the breakdown you get from Flowtown, it seems like your shoppers are a mixed bunch divided between MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter. You start following some of your customers on Twitter that you weren’t already following. Then you sit down to start brainstorming clues for your social media scavenger hunt, all the while going through ideas about how to best contact your customers to let them know about the clues and the game.

In Summary

Flowtown looks like a great add-on tool for email marketing or social media marketing. But you will likely find it useful even if you never send a single email. If you have a list of any type that includes emails (orders, leads, users, people who’ve donated to your non-profit), you can gain insight into the online personalities of this group of people and collect useful information that may help you better target your product or service. The insights gained on the ages, genders, interests, and online haunts of your users could help direct the development of new features for your website. Or if you’re preparing to do some Facebook advertising, you may want to target people who match characteristics of your existing customers. If nothing else, you’ll gain a better idea of where to focus your social media marketing efforts. (Got a list with zero Twitter users? That might be why your “Tweet to Win” campaign didn’t go so well.)

Dear Marketers on Facebook,
You are doing a shitty job.  The Facebook ad platform has provided you with a lot of resources for sending out targeted relevant ads, and you’re making a mess of it.

Usually I’m pretty good about not paying attention to Facebook ads.  I don’t play Farmville, and I tend to ignore the “government money to go back to school” ads that pop up.  I also log into Facebook on a severely less frequent basis than I used to several years ago.  I can get Facebook updates on my phone or via Threadsy, so I don’t spend as much time actually navigating through the site.  However, over a month ago I was doodling around a little on Facebook, and I was struck by the ads that started popping up.  Not only did they get my attention, they were a little disconcerting.  Disconcerting because, as someone who has run Facebook ads for work, I know what segmenting and targeting options marketers have when setting up their ads, and I tend to assume they’ll make good use of their options.  I was surprised to see that the majority of the ads popping up on my pages related to babies and birth control.

What did I do to deserve ads hocking birth control pills and free baby bottle samples?  I’m pretty sure I didn’t list “promiscuous and pregnant” anywhere on my profile.  I used to get ads for new lesbian dating networks and t-shirts that said something like “Shane is my home girl.”  These ads never surprised me because I listed The L Word under my TV preferences.  It made sense.  Now that The L Word has wrapped, it seems I’ve been kicked over to the dark side, the land of babies and birth control.

I tweeted my surprise at the time, and then several days later I saw a story in The New York Times acknowledging the “off-key” ads that are appearing on Facebook now that businesses of all shapes and sizes have entered into the social advertising arena.

There have been numerous stories of small companies seeing great success when they started running a few highly tailored Facebook ads.  But I second the surprise of one woman referenced in the NYT article who was a bit shocked at being shown an ad for Plan B.  The article quotes Tim Hanlon, a principal at a consulting firm as saying, “When it works, it’s amazingly impactful, but when it doesn’t work, it’s not only creepy but off-putting.”

Facebook ads let the marketer select a much more specific audience than could ever be possible through a paid search platform like Google Adwords.  The marketer has the option of refining the viewers by a number of characteristics to ensure that the ad hits the best target audience; you can set an ad to be shown only to people of a specific gender and age, living in a certain area, and with stated interests.  Careful targeting and segmentation in any marketing campaign are usually good.  Highly relevant ads tend to do better and are more likely to be well-received by the viewer.  All that said, why do the ads I get suck so much?

I started taking screen shots of any ad that I thought obnoxious or irrelevant each time I logged into Facebook.  Many of the ads showed up multiple times.  Below is a random smattering of the Facebook ads I see:

Getting Married?

Ok, I’ll at least give this ad credit for taking a stab at location-targeting.  Unfortunately, while they got the right state, they didn’t get my city right.  And I’m not engaged or getting married?

Birth Control?

Planned Parenthood wants to give me free birth control.  Ok, fine.  But did I list something that makes them think I want birth control, or is every woman on Facebook over the age of 18 getting this ad?

So if I got Yaz from my free Planned Parenthood birth control, I might have needed to have my gallbladder removed.  Ugh.  I’m guessing this ad leads to something about a lawsuit.

Pregnant?

If I’m pregnant, there’s someone on Facebook who wants to talk options?

If talking to the people in the previous ad doesn’t help, I guess I can always give my baby up for adoption through this ad (if I were actually pregnant.)

Mommy to Be

I’m not a mom or a mom-to-be!  I don’t want to have fun with other moms.

Oh look, I can get free baby bottles in the mail!  Tons of free samples for babies, and tons of times I’ve seen these ads go by.

Already a Mom

Great, Gerber wants cute baby pictures.  They should probably tell that to someone with access to cute babies.

Pampers wants pictures of babies too.  If I had a baby, I would definitely send it’s picture in because the baby in this ad looks like a cross between an alien and a naked mole rat.

So if I have a kid, someone’s going to give me $10,000?  Maybe I should go find a kid…

Apparently home schooling can be overwhelming.  That’s probably why I wouldn’t home school my kids, if I had any.

A few problems here: I don’t have a kid. There’s a logo on the picture, but I can’t see what it says.  The ad copy is unclear; what exactly is this for? I don’t live in Lane County (although I know where it is).  You have to dial the area code in Oregon now, and they didn’t include it with the phone number.

Snotsucker Nosefrida nasal aspirator?  What did I possibly do wrong to deserve this ad?

If Birth Control Wasn’t Enough

Of course I get an ad for low sex drive too.

Just Bad Ads

My alma mater is Occidental College.  I’m in the Occidental network on Facebook.  I’ve been in the Occidental network since 2004.  By now, someone should know where I went to school.  I’ve never even heard of Chrichton.

Ok friend, first of all, good luck renting carpet fans over Facebook.  Second, “Wet Carpets” isn’t saying much.  And how about that period floating around?  No caps on the “we” and no period after “fans?”  Did you proof read your ad?  Also, I did a little checking for you, and if your business is really in the Boston area (I’m assuming from the phone number), you might have better results if you don’t show your ad to people who live in Oregon.

Actually, no.  I don’t need any refrigerator trucks.

Hi Spider Monkey Marketing, aside from the fact that I don’t have any reason to become your fan, your image is awfully hard to read.
Again with the bad image choices.  Does anyone look at their ads before setting them live?
I don’t even know what this is supposed to be for.
I get a ton of these “make your baby” ads.  These people might want to double check their spelling of “little.”
Not only do I NOT drive a Hummer, I think they are some of the dumbest vehicles ever unleashed on the consumer market.

What?  I don’t know what this is for or what message they’re trying to get across, but it looks like an old phone from the pre-mobile era – not exactly synonymous with independence.

Do a Better Job with Your Targeting

It isn’t that often that marketers have the opportunity to really refine their target audience and match it to their market.  So why are so many people doing a lousy job?  I have two hunches:  Perhaps Facebook is pulling a sneaky move, similar to Google, and showing ads they think might be relevant to people the marketer didn’t necessarily specify, all in the name of making more money.  If that’s the case, then they need to smarten up.

The other option is that a lot of the people out there making Facebook ads are just doing a really awful job.  Not all women in their twenties need samples of baby bottles.  Don’t suck at Facebook marketing.  Use the targeting controls to really refine your campaign audience to small select groups.  It will probably save you money and spare me some babies.

This is what I’m looking for in augmented reality on the fly:

Applications need to be dead easy for laymen to compile and distribute.

I’m going to say that we’ve reached the point where most internet users with average technological intelligence and sufficient motivation can figure out how to start a blog, set up Tumblr or Posterous, create a Facebook profile, or start using Twitter if they desire. The truly intrepid may take it upon themselves to create resources for other people: organize lists of Twitter users, post reviews on Google or Yelp, or publish content to their social service of choice. Can they quickly create a highly customized iPhone app if they want? Not as easily. Mobile apps or mobile-optimized sites are enticing, but things like coding knowledge and app store approval are still hurdles. The mobile world hasn’t reached the level where anyone with a reason and some free time can easily pull together a new app and send it off to their friends and followers in 30 minutes or less.

I want quick and easy access to different resources, all in one place.

I’m at SXSW right now, and this is my first time in Austin. A lot of people have dedicated some time and energy to compile their knowledge into helpful guides and resources for people like me. I’ve come across a great array of survival guides, party lists, and maps or blogs on Austin top restaurants, vegetarian eating options, and best BBQ spots. These resources are split between posts, maps, and Twitter. If I want to check out restaurant reviews, I can call up Yelp, and if I’m standing around lost, I’m going to turn to Google maps. That’s a lot of information to cull through when I’m on a street corner wondering where to get lunch. I may have moved beyond carrying around a physical guide book and the weight of the printed page, but it would still be nice to have all my resources easily accessible in one place – one singular place within my phone.

Bring different layers of information together in one application, and let it be customizable.

What if the maps of food spots and blogs on top eats could be combined into one resource? When augmented reality and mobile technology mature, I hope they reach the point where users can quickly and easily combine information from different locations to create unique on-the-fly resources. I want an app where the guides and reviews I’ve been seeing can be collected altogether. There’s a map, so the restaurant and party locations are all charted. I can choose a point and get information on that spot from Yelp, or from the bloggers who’ve made their own recommendations. Pictures that people upload to their posts are all there too, if I want to check them out. The app knows where I am (if I want it to), so when I’m standing on a street corner, I’m only a few clicks away from figuring out where the nearest cafe is and getting directions. If the app wants to watch where I’m walking and offer me tips or reviews as I go, that’s fine too. Essentially, I want the information that bloggers and social media mavens put together all easily complied into a layered app on my phone or ipod. I imagine easily being able to flip back and forth between maps, reviews, pictures, and posts – each a different layer in an application that can be compiled by a creator and customized by the user. I never need to switch to a second app because I can see everything I’m looking for within one application. And I imagine the app being incredibly easy for people to put together.

Parts and pieces of this are already available and accessible. But I’m looking for a utility that is dead simple to create, intuitive to use, and easy to quickly make accessible to anyone. Blogs aren’t so hard for most people to create, even when someone is starting out new. When augmented reality tools and resources become as easy to put together as a blog post is to write, I think we’ll have reached an exciting level of mobile information creation.

Erin Richey is a Robot

Just for fun, I’ve been roboticized. While I doubt I’d end up looking like this if I were to become an android, it beats looking like an intelligent Shop-Vac hands down.  I thought the original picture for this robot portrait would be fun because with the hair it’s a bit like Rachael from Blade Runner.

Other computationally intelligent (or at least semi-talented) things I like include Roombas (I probably anthropomorphize this too much), Kismet, and HAL.

The robot making process.

There are a lot of discussions on businesses participating in social media and how they can appropriately measure their efforts and document their successes (or failures).  How do you measure social media ROI?  Does ROI even exist for social media?  Those just stepping into the social sphere have a lot to consider.

However, regardless of whether you’re tracking retweets, followers, or video views, successful online efforts can influence people who are essentially off your radar.  Businesses who engage online have the opportunity to influence an outer layer of individuals who may be unmeasurable by any social media metrics.

The Roger Smith Hotel is a boutique hotel in New York City that engages in social media.  However, I’m not one of their Twitter followers, I’ve never seen their Flickr photos, and I have no idea if they have a Facebook page.  I’ve also never visited their hotel, and I hadn’t heard of their brand until a few months ago.  It wouldn’t matter how they measured their online reach – I’ve had little to no interaction with their online channels and I don’t represent any clicks, tweets, links, or mentions (until now).

However, they’ve reached a point online where their branding has stretched beyond their immediate control and their hotel evangelists have begun doing their marketing for them.  I know about the Roger Smith Hotel, and I found out about them online.

The Wisdom of Word of Mouth

I follow a pretty small group of people on Twitter right now, but I read what they post.  I look at their TwitPics, and I click on their links.  Even though the group is small, I would guess that half of the knowledge and new information I acquire each day can be attributed to something that I saw on Twitter.

I’ve seen the Roger Smith Hotel mentioned a couple of times in the past few months – and I saw it mentioned by different people.  I’ve read their updates, and I’ve clicked their links to the Roger Smith Life blog.  None of this came directly from the Roger Smith team.

To be fair, the Roger Smith Hotel has very little reason to seek me out or know I exist.  I live on the West Coast, so I won’t be attending any of their events in the near future; I don’t have any immediate plans in New York, so I’m not searching for hotels in the city right now.  In fact, normally if I was hunting down hotels in NYC, the Roger Smith won’t make it onto my list.  The prices are probably beyond any budget-traveler limits I’d have set, and it’s not a national chain, so it’d be easy to not notice.

However, via the powers of the Roger Smith online community, their brand has found me.  I’ve seen pictures where I recognized the Roger Smith sign, and I’ve read posts where people have mentioned meeting up with friends at Roger Smith.  It sounds like fun.

A Human Face for a Business Brand

I visited their blog and was confused.  At first, I wondered if it was really a hotel.  Where were all the articles pimping room specials and announcing how great the service is?  They’re not there.  Instead they have real pictures and real video accompanying real stories about real people.  In short, they have useful and interesting content.    And it’s not there just to get high search engine rankings or to generate links back to their website.  It’s there to humanize their company and put a personal face on their brand.

Since I’m now intrigued by their content and their persona, I begin visiting other pages and looking at their website further.  The Roger Smith Hotel doesn’t know that because I’m a dancer and choreographer, I have an interest in performance art.  But I do, so their information on the installation art space, The Lab, immediately gets my interest.  As I browse the artists and performances featured on The Lab site, the Roger Smith Hotel has not only presented me with a possible place to stay the next time I’m in NYC, but now they’ve given me another reason to want to plan a trip.

If the Roger Smith marketing team does measure social media ROI, and if I do book a room at their hotel when I’m next in NYC, there’s a good chance they won’t be able to attribute that booking directly to a social media campaign.  Maybe sometime I’ll sign up for their email or maybe I’ll check visit them on Twitter and click on a few links.  But if I don’t, have their efforts been any less of a success?  Is their use of social media unjustified?

No.  They’ve created a persona strong enough to reach people beyond the immediate scope of their own online community.  Even when it’s unmeasurable, the influence is there.