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.

I love real books, and although some people have speculated that the age of the paperbound book has come to an end, I don’t believe physical books will become extinct anytime soon. However, I’m excited and optimistic about all the ereaders that could be hitting the market soon. Amazon’s Kindle surprised me when it was released, but it appeared too expensive and clunky for me to rush out and buy one. What got my attention was the growing collection of Amazon ebooks.

With shelves now stocked with thousands of popular books in digitalized form, suddenly with just one click I can get instant access to most of the books I browse through. The creation of Kindle ereader software for iPod Touches and iPhones means that I can start reading the book on my screen in a matter of seconds. I now constantly struggle to not buy a version of each book I add to my wishlist.

That’s why I can’t wait for the development of a quality ebook library or subscription service. One of the problems with owning so many books is that they’re extremely difficult (heavy) to move. Books take up space. They also cost money. Sometimes a lot of money. I’m sure that’s why libraries were invented. However, where I live the library is rarely open during the hours when I could get to it, and many times they don’t have the books I’m looking for. I also just find it incredibly convenient to push a button and get what I want instantly. (Others must also find instant access convenient as well, or services like Hulu and streaming Netflix wouldn’t have done so well).

I am convinced that having instant access to thousands (hundreds of thousands) of digital books would be beneficial to my life. I would happily pay a (reasonable) fee to become an ebook library member or to join an ebook subscription service. Over the summer, I tried a Netflix-style book rental service, but nothing beats a two-week wait like an instant download (and the book rental subsequently went out of business).

Ebook Libraries Now

Libraries like the New York City public library, the Chicago public library, and many others across the nation already offer ebook lending services, but you have to be a card holder. This typically isn’t possible unless you live in that state or county. There are several global ebook lending services out there, but they’re not at all what I’d consider an “ideal” alternative. At this point in time, the companies who are best equipped to start a lending service are the companies who have already have relationships with publishers and who have already amassed catalogs of digital material – the likes of Amazon, Barnes & Nobles, and Google.

The influx of ereaders and tablets set to hit the market this year will be nothing without content. Amazon and Barnes & Noble have stocked their virtual shelves with the digital version of the latest top sellers, and they’re adding new ebooks each week to satisfy Kindle and Nook users. Initially, I believe things will be shaky as tablets and ereaders quickly become more common and users, retailers, and publishers alike struggle to deal with issues like digital rights and cross-compatibility.

Simple and Functional

Ultimately, in order to remain competitive and to truly reach the masses, retailers will have to deliver their digital media in a format that works on all devices. Trying to determine the differences between mobi and epub and pdf is too confusing for the mass population. Either the digital book will work with your device, or it won’t. If it won’t, the distributor is losing out on market share.

Along with the greater adoption of ereaders will come a uptick in digital media sales, some of which might help floundering old media publications, but only if they embrace the technology creatively and with open arms.

A good ebook library or lending service would need to function like a cross between Netflix and Amazon. With ebook revenue projected to top $500 million in 2010, now is an excellent time to get such a service going. The current services leave a lot of room to improve the usefullness and functionality of ebook lending.

An Open Market for Ebook Lending

Ebook readers want access to anything, anywhere. Project Gutenberg won’t ever fill the desire for current popular fiction and nonfiction. The service should offer a see-inside-the-book option, much like Amazon currently allows you to download a sample to read from your Kindle or Kindle-device. This is a great way to get someone hooked, or to convince him that this isn’t the book he was looking for. Readers also want simple and easy access; they locate a book, click download, and in seconds they can begin to read. The best services will allow users to read books on any of their devices: smart phones, ereaders, and computer. A bonus service would also allow readers to synchronize their places and bookmarks across devices, similar to the Kindle Whisper.

What would really distinguish a library or lending service is a strong set of community features. Users should be able to create Amazon-style wishlists and recommendation lists, there should be a robust community of users writing reviews, and they should be encouraged to share in book clubs or discussion groups. The library should show smart reading recommendations based on the user’s favorites and rental history, à la Netflix. Without these services in place, many will abandon for another site like Amazon.

Navigation could be a potential issue. As the Apple App store has shown, you can still be a successful company and do a terrible job of making your products known. With potentially hundreds of thousands of books, catalog navigation and search need to be topnotch.

Students Could Be The Earliest Adopters

Students could make the ereader market, but currently they can’t get what they need to read. Right now in the etextbook market, publishers are tentative. While ebooks could mean that authors and publishers end up with a higher percentage of the textbook revenue, no mass wave of publishers have begun digitalizing their material. Coursesmart offers a textbook subscription service to students, but it’s only available for iPhones. I have used my phone to read small amounts of material, I can’t imagine ploughing through an entire semester’s courseload on such a tiny screen. The proprietary format and DRM currently used in etexts makes them incompatible with textbook-optimized ereaders.

I think the final service that could heighten the usefullness of an ebook library or lending service, is the ability to take notes. While Kindle owners can currently highlight passages, bookmark pages, lookup words, and take notes, it seems likely that features such as these wouldn’t survive a lending service. But they should. Ideally, users would be able to take notes, export the notes from their device, maintain whatever they’ve notated even after they’ve “returned” the lent book, and synchronize the notes with text if they were to check it out again at a later date. These features would truly put a world of information at the fingertips of many.

Illustration by kandinski.

True story.  More or less.

Of course it’s usually not quite that simple either.  You probably have to consider a few other things like overhead, the cost of customer service, and the cost of putting together and managing each campaign (you might be able to assume those are constants, but you might not).  The average lifetime value of the customer could be a factor, and you might want to do a little bit of ROI predicting as well: how do things look two months from now if everything stays the same versus if your conversion rate increases?  Or decreases?

Calculating monthly costs might be more hairy at times as well too;  say, a fixed monthly cost plus an additional cost that’s a percentage of sales, and then every few months there’s a “one time” fee.

But really, who’s paying attention to any of that stuff?