Marketing 2.0

You'll find my blog now on "Achieve Your Vision"

emmanuel@eobadia.com (Emmanuel Obadia) — Thu, 13 Nov 2014 11:35:00 +0000

The world is changing fast, blogs as well ;-)
I have the pleasure to invite you to follow me from now on, on my new blog: Achieve Your Vision focusing on topics I'm passionated about as Internet of Things #IoT #Cloud #Mobile and digital business transformation #BusinessTransformation

www.emmanuelobadia.com

Emmanuel
________________________________________________

Les temps changent, les blogs aussi ;-)
J'ai le plaisir de vous inviter à me suivre sur mon nouveau blog désormais: Achieve Your Vision dédié à tous les sujets qui me passionnent comme l'internet des objets #IoT le #cloud le monde #mobile et la transformation digitale des entreprises #businesstransformation

www.emmanuelobadia.com

Emmanuel

Happy New Year, health and energy to live your dreams

emmanuel@eobadia.com (Emmanuel Obadia) — Fri, 10 Jan 2014 11:38:00 +0000

Happy New Year to you all, may it bring you the health and energy to live your dreams

Emmanuel

What a pivotal year in our industry! Mobile, Cloud and Social making new leaders

emmanuel@eobadia.com (Emmanuel Obadia) — Sun, 15 Sep 2013 12:18:00 +0000

What a pivotal year in our industry! Let's face it, IT has been attesting more evidences that its tectonic forces at work did let emerge new leaders and previous ones fade.

Mobile: now at the core of IT, Apple and Samsung getting much of the coverage and dominating the smartphone market - surpassing now regular phones - pushing Nokia to be acquired by Microsoft and RIM Blackberry to look for a shelter. For software vendors and CIOs, applications have to be designed for smartphone devices first, tablet second and desktop third. As evidences, PC sales are declining, Dell to become private again, Steve Ballmer retiring, Intel also changed CEO to deal with innovator's dilemma. Wintel once dominating this industry is fading.
Cloud: depicted as a consumer or anecdotal phenomenon once, Cloud Computing is now center stage for the Enterprise and a key topic for CIOs strategic plans. CRM is paving the way with Salesforce.com becoming #1 CRM vendor all flavors combined (on premise, cloud), customer service and Marketing quickly following. Microsoft bending its Office model with Office 365 is trying to resist Google surge in cloud based productivity suites is another evidence of cloud computing importance.
Social: with Twitter preparing its IPO, Facebook stock ticker finally getting traction thanks to its successful mobile strategy, Google acquiring Waze for $1B+, Yahoo acquiring Tumblr for $1.1B, Rondee for video conferencing and Xobni for Social Contact Management, Salesforce.com acquiring Buddy Media on top of previous Radian6, Social is another tectonic force at stake making or breaking new leaders.

Combining this to Big Data and associated analytics to get a modern business insight, let's attest we're already in a new world. Get ready if you're not already! CIO, CMO, CDO or CEOs, don't let your competition harness these revolutions before you get a chance to compete or lead: initiate change now.

Happy New Year | About Change

emmanuel@eobadia.com (Emmanuel Obadia) — Sun, 30 Dec 2012 16:47:00 +0000

One year since Steve passed away, why do I care

emmanuel@eobadia.com (Emmanuel Obadia) — Sun, 07 Oct 2012 10:55:00 +0000

It's been already one year, lightning fast, since the late Steve Jobs passed away. I remember vividly the very day this was announced in our part of the world, I was in Paris that day.

Like I think most of us, there a great times and troubled times in our life. This is part of what life is about and why we grow and learn more than usual in these tough moments. Human nature is lazy and we sometimes wait for adversity to kick in to really unleash our full potential. This day was a day like this to me, I wanted to fully be part of the social revolution and walk the talk.

Since quite a while, when I felt a bit down, I went back to Steve commencement speech to recharge my motivation and inspiration batteries -- listening to it while I write this btw. It's there, in your face, what you really must focus on to get rid of that grey weather on your mind. "Stay hungry, Stay foolish" coins it pretty well to me.

On that specific day, one year ago, I felt the urgent need for a change. It became obvious and explicit when I heard on the radio, going to work, "Steve Jobs is dead". Passion didn't seem to be my day to day and I wanted to embark onto new heights. I enjoyed very much the revolutions we've been through in the last 30 years and each time I tried to grab a piece of it to fuel my path. Started with the PC revolution in the early eighties -- I founded my software company, then came the Internet revolution -- I was preaching fortune 500 top execs with the IBM logo in the back then switched to Sun Micro to live the Silicon Valley excitement about it, and now is the era of the Cloud, Mobile and Social Networks -- brought me to Salesforce.com. Steve inspires many of us, since long. When leading a team of developers back at the software company I founded years ago, I'd share with them "The journey is the reward" and the story of the Macintosh. I wanted to inspire them to achieve "insanely" great things.

So this is why I care. I'd really like to meet with more youngsters willing to change the world. The conventional wisdom surrounding us tends to mitigate this, wrongly. Let's remember more often individuals like Steve and the ones he chose to have in the Think Different campaign, the crazy ones, the misfits, to change the world and make it a better place for all of us.

Working in a social enterprise: On boarding @salesforce experience

emmanuel@eobadia.com (Emmanuel Obadia) — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 15:25:00 +0000

I've just completed my third week at salesforce.com and I wanted to share with you the light and colors of this amazing on-boarding.

My first day already had a special flavor. What would a geek like me do when arriving in the lobby? Foursquare it! And as I've included the @salesforce handle in my message that of course got spanned on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook among others - I'm becoming lazy and all my accounts are chained- the salesforce team back in the Bay Area using Radian 6 spotted me within minutes as a new hire. What a surprise when I got a response message on Twitter from the official @salesforce feed stating "Welcome to the family". I felt it as a social hug if you will, a good first impression of a social enterprise.

This very first day I could feel the energy, passion, commitment and team spirit of this fast growing company individuals. If you were not aware, Salesforce has been to date the B2B software vendor to reach the $2B mark the fastest. It was not Microsoft, Oracle nor SAP. Combined with the think different kind of attitude and this desire to show the world that cloud computing is a must for all enterprises, Salesforce employees seem all to be part of a burning quest: Born Cloud, Reborn Social.

Another clue that I have been joining a cloud company, I could finally behave at work just as I had been in my day to day life: everything on the cloud - my music, my videos, my books, my address book, my email, my calendar, my files from multiple devices, my bank accounts... The ultimate mobility lies in this, just give me a connected device and I can operate within minutes just from everywhere. Computing has truly become a utility, plug and live! Salesforce.com is walking the talk. Good to feel.

As a matter of fact I was totally able to operate with the corporate environment at the end of the very first day, using a Mac at work, my personal iPhone certified and even a request for me to buy an iPad for work. What a difference from any other company I was given to work for before.

I've been meeting a lot of people at salesforce since this first day and I can attest there is a true company's culture by which we all live by. Someone summarized one aspect of it with this quote "Type A people environment where A.H. cannot survive".

I believe such a company is due to succeed big time because of the people. I've been given to compete against very large companies before and I know it: a small gang of passionate and committed individuals with strong beliefs and a quest at heart can make a huge difference.

To be continued...

Mobile computing is taking IT by storm: mobile world congress - iPad 3 announcement - Ray Ozzie interview

emmanuel@eobadia.com (Emmanuel Obadia) — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 10:08:00 +0000

Without surprise it was the mobility week recently. With Mobile World 2012 just closing, this has been a week of announcements and research publications. As eWeek tries to summarize it, here are 10 hot mobile Trends to watch at Mobile World Congress 2011:

Bigger is better: it seems larger display are more desirable this year
Android Galore: without Apple around, Android was everywhere leaving Windows on the side for next year
Microsoft needs Nokia—desperately
Dual- and quad-core processors are everything
Fresh new designs aren't needed? No revolutionary designs introduced.
The "converged" device matters: smartphone bridging the gap with tablets
There's no changing carriers: disappointed if you wanted to hear some breaking news from Carriers though customer relations are in pain.
Companies think there's room for other operating systems: Mozilla announced its own mobile OS, Samsung did the same with Bada, running after Android and iOS.
iPad 3 fear reigns supreme: anticipated announcement on March 7, even Google had to admit via Andy Rubin that they're behind iOS.
The enterprise is an afterthought: Mobile World Congress is all about consumers. To be analyzed with CIO client strategy in the enterprise.

$GOOG Google Play replaces #Android Market, new source for apps, books, movies and music (funny video 1'30)engt.co/zYiIaf

The New Era of Computing bit.ly/xjxIfO

The announcement of the iPad HD, capturing all the buzz, is showing once again how much Apple is running the show. It looks like the entire industry is positioning itself regarding Apple and the impact of "The Barber Of Infinite Loop" on once the center of all attention Microsoft could be serious. Thus I encourage you to take a look at this Ray Ozzie interview video, the once Bill Gates visionary successor at Microsoft, who is starting a new venture and tells it very directly PC doesn't mean desktop PC anymore but Personal Computing in a variety of form factor. What a thrilling industry!

Apple's new iPad announcement: The numbers to know | ZDNet zd.net/ACGsNH

Video Q&A: Ray Ozzie, Bill Gates successor as $MSFT visionary on startups, Microsoft, ... states world is over the PC bit.ly/y4WY1s

The Barber Of Infinite Loop: How The #iPad Could Give Microsoft A Serious Revenue Haircut - $MSFT productivity apps tcrn.ch/wrrKC7

Week in review: Big Data's impact on the world - Enterprise Apps gold rush to the cloud

emmanuel@eobadia.com (Emmanuel Obadia) — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 15:26:00 +0000

Big Data is pursuing to bubble up as the topic of choice for the beginning of 2012, even during Davos. Not surprising when one can attest that the cloud computing model is making significant progress all over the planet and even in my home country, France, where skepticism used to be the attitude regarding it. In turn, leveraging the cloud leads to Big Data, in a business context as well, to try to extract from all sorts of data streams meaningful business insights.

Big Data’s Impact in the World
Steve Lohr, in the New York Times, develops some examples in various areas and highlights some interesting numbers.

Big Data, Big Impact: New Possibilities for International Development - World Economic Report
Cloud Computing to reach $270B in 2020 CAGR 30%: Kleiner Perkins said to eye “cloud” fund
Big data: The next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity - McKinsey Global Institute Report

I won't come back on Facebook IPO as the entire planet just twitted and blogged about it. But let's step back 5 years ago and remember how people where viewing Facebook back then. It changed big time, Facebook is no longer a youngster phenomena but a business eye opener. Amazing 180° view of the world for a company supposedly going to be valued more than $100B now. Don't you think? We're already in a new world. Social Media is now a reality to most businesses, Marketing cannot ignore it anymore and mobile devices are becoming rapidly the #1 entry point to it. By the way, what is the revenue Facebook is making on mobiles ;-)? (None for now, but stay tuned).

The Web vs. Mobile Apps: How iOS and Android Are Disrupting The Open Internet
Google testing 'next-gen personal communication device'
Interesting stats: Content Marketing Tactics Now Critical to All Businesses [INFOGRAPHIC]
$267B enterprise technology market: The 3 secrets behind the enterprise tech gold rush

By the way, recently SAP acquired Successfactors for $3.4B, Salesforce.com did the same with Rypple and Oracle with Taleo for $1.9B and RightNow, check this out. The enterprise apps gold rush seems to be on the cloud.

As Larry Ellison said about cloud computing in 2008: "What is it? It's complete gibberish. It's insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?" Not there yet apparently ;-)

So are you ready for Big Data, cloud computing, social networks and mobile internet?

Week in review: Social Networking Bubble - Value of User Experience - Winston Churchill leadership lessons

emmanuel@eobadia.com (Emmanuel Obadia) — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 18:30:00 +0000

Are We in a Social Networking Bubble?
Coming back from the Bay Area, I can attest IT is on a roll again. The front stage vendors have changed and the topics making a lot of buzz are Big Data with Hadoop, Cloud Computing and PaaS with a heating battle accelerating, Mobility with a head to head competition between Apple and Google Android and of course social networking with a search for talents and executives move (100k+ job posts in the Bay Area).

All of this could make one think that we are living through a new bubble, thus I found this analysis pretty thoughtful and interesting.
Additionally, here are some recent data about VC's investment in the US: Venture capital investing hits 10-year peak, sparking bubble talk.

Volume is not enough, User Experience is key: Android's Market Share Collapses As Apple Surges Thanks To The iPhone 4S
I am a big believer in the importance of UI for user adoption and as the main User Experience differentiator. User Experience, as I did state many times, is nowadays critical to stand out in crowded world. Any business not giving some thoughts on this is exposing itself to tough competition. Apple vs. Android is a very good example of how User Experience makes a difference in a very competitive market that saw key leaders like RIM Blackberry and Nokia decline, attesting to it.

Winston Churchill's Leadership Lessons
Let's close with some lessons learned from Winston Churchill leadership, though this ebook is not that great ;-)

Seize the day,
Never hesitate to occupy the limelight
Do the necessary
Learn to be eloquent - but don’t get carried away by your own words
Stick to your guns - but know when to compromise

Have a great week.

Happy New Year, Heart and Intuition

emmanuel@eobadia.com (Emmanuel Obadia) — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 07:30:00 +0000

Happy New Year to you all, may it bring you courage to follow your heart and intuition
Emmanuel

Best Internet Trends Presentation - Web 2.0 Summit

emmanuel@eobadia.com (Emmanuel Obadia) — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 11:00:00 +0000

KPCB Internet Trends 2011

View more presentations from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers

As usual, Mary Meeker delivered this presentation during Web 2.0 summit and summarizes important trends in our industry with a lot of meaningful data.

Internet Trends

Globality – We Aren’t In Kansas Anymore…
Mobile – Early Innings Growth, Still…
User Interface – Text -> Graphical -> Touch / Sound / Move
Commerce – Fast / Easy / Fun / Savings = More Important Than Ever…
Advertising – Lookin’ Good…
Content Creation – Changed Forever
Technology / Mobile Leadership – Americans Should Be Proud
Mega-Trend of 21st Century = Empowerment of People via Connected Mobile Devices
Authentic Identity – The Good / Bad / Ugly. But Mostly Good?
Economy – Lots of Uncertainty
USA Inc. – Pay Attention!

Productivity Future Vision: do you like this future world?

emmanuel@eobadia.com (Emmanuel Obadia) — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 10:31:00 +0000

You should take the time to review this video -- produced by Microsoft -- and immerse you in this future world we are presented here. In the beginning I was attracted but after a while I felt a bit oppressed and I guess the absence of true emotions is the reason why. You never hear anyone speak truly and the visuals are very clean, so cold.

Some ideas are very interesting but companies putting together such tentatively inspirational videos should pay attention to emotions as this is fully part of the customer experience... more, it is center stage.

Reactions?

You can see more of videos I've noticed about the future ergonomics in my future playlist on youtube.

Managing Customer Experience: the next big thing?

emmanuel@eobadia.com (Emmanuel Obadia) — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 16:00:00 +0000

I am a big believer in management guru Peter Drucker saying "What gets measured gets managed". When it gets down to tracking a company's success, too many businesses tend to rely on market share, profitability, EPS growth or repeat purchases only. Don't take me wrong, you still need to track these down, but as one brilliant Berkeley Marketing guru asked: "Do you think your partner is loyal only because he's having diner every night at home? So, does the number of repeat sales indicates that your customer is loyal?" At least for the first one you must admit he's got a point.

Nowadays, customer experience is one if not the main ingredient of customer loyalty which translates into market share -- as loyal customers are the best brand advocates, profitability and EPS growth i.e. the way most businesses would define success. Then what are you doing about it?

If you're still in doubt, take the coffee business as an example. Who has been insanely successful in this business? Starbucks and Nespresso success stories -- follow the links for more -- can attest about it.

As Shaun Smith, author of Managing Customer Experience, details in his post, there are 10 best practices to create real business value:

Successful deployment requires the active and continuing involvement of leadership
Ensuring cross-functional ownership is vital
Focusing on your most strategically important customers
Finding out what these customers truly value
Being clear about what you stand for
Delivering the promise at every touch point
Providing branded training to ensure that employees understand the brand story
Designing CEM before installing CRM systems
Measuring the customer experience
Aligning KPIs with the customer experience

This is heavy duty, but social media -- as you can see in the Starbucks video in the link above -- is becoming instrumental in that regard.

I'll leave you with the five barriers to measuring customer experience, from mycustomer.com:

"Customer experience isn’t just about giving customers a good time. It’s about understanding just how good a time (or not) you are giving – and making adjustments"

We rely on magic numbers
We don’t really listen
Measuring word of mouth is hard
We have too much functional data – too little insight
We don’t look beyond the obvious and the superficial

Tribute to Steve Jobs

emmanuel@eobadia.com (Emmanuel Obadia) — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 08:23:00 +0000

With its latest achievements, this is a lesson for all of us that passion and determination are leading to achievement. We all will connect the dots later ....
Farewell Steve and thanks for everything.

Emmanuel Obadia in a podcast (French)

emmanuel@eobadia.com (Emmanuel Obadia) — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 13:35:00 +0000

BFM : L'innovation en Europe et le secteur des logiciels

09 juillet 2011

Actualité : baromètre BVA/Syntec pour 01Business&Technologies.

GAEL SLIMAN, Directeur Général adjoint de BVA opinion,
BRUNO VANRYB, PDG d'Avanquest Software et président du Collège des « éditeurs de logiciels » du Syntec Numérique,
EMMANUEL OBADIA, Senior Vice President Enterprise Products chez Sage.

Coup de pouce à une start up : Jérôme Valette, directeur général de aEnergis, une start up qui optimise la collecte des déchets grâce à un système de capteurs radio.

Ecoutez le podcast du 9 Juillet

Online leads: do you act timely to respond?

emmanuel@eobadia.com (Emmanuel Obadia) — Sun, 24 Apr 2011 15:51:00 +0000

Reading an interesting research summary in HBR that I wanted to share.

Whether you are a B2B or B2C company, the time taken to respond to prospects stimulus online can significantly change the ROI of your web presence. As this research shows, many firms are too slow to follow up on these leads. As HBR states:
- 37% responded within an hour
- 16% within one to 24 hours
- 24% took more than 24 hours
- and 23% never responded at all!

As companies are investing significantly to get prospects out of the web, they should have a much better turnaround, don't you think?

Reasons not to do so include retrieving leads from CRM daily rather than on the fly, sales forces focusing on their own generated leads and rules for leads dispatching not effective enough ("fairness" can be damageable).

Where are you with this? Better know where your marketing ROI is headed sooner than later.

Happy Easter.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Mobile megatrends 2011 (VisionMobile)

emmanuel@eobadia.com (Emmanuel Obadia) — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 23:01:00 +0000

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Mobile megatrends 2011 (VisionMobile)

View more presentations from VisionMobile.

How to measure your brand's online influence?

emmanuel@eobadia.com (Emmanuel Obadia) — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 10:00:00 +0000

Several tools are emerging to help you do this, and Inc. touched on this in an interesting post about it and even providing in their opinion the 11 best web analytics tools. They come back on how Web Analytics 2.0 is defined:

The analysis of qualitative and quantitative data from your website and the competition
To drive a continual improvement of the online experience of your customers and prospects
Which translates into your desired outcomes (online and offline)

Inc. concludes like this:

"Measuring online influence can be useful—and has potential to reinforce your social-media strategy (hey, it just feels cool when you get a high score)—particularly for growing brands looking to utilize technology to make their jobs easier and more effective. However, it's not for everyone." -- Dave Smith, Inc.

Another post on GigaOm from Georgina Laidla highlights the 5 Ways Brands Influence Social Media Strategy:

"It’s not just the way organizations engage through social media that matters: the portrayal of a business brand in this space is affected by a range of factors."

And the factors she lists

Network & Tools - the tools and network you use say something about your brand
Types of engagement
Who's making the update?
Degree of integration with other offerings
People your brand follows, friends and fans

preaching for an evolving approach.

At the end of the day, there is in my opinion no option for all of us to engage into measuring our brand's influence online. We better get starting ASAP and make our plans on how to do it. This is what I am doing already for the brand I work for which faces an interesting challenge to do it with one voice globally. Your feedback and experiences are more than welcome on this blog.

Unhappy Customers Can Be Won Back via Social Media

emmanuel@eobadia.com (Emmanuel Obadia) — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 12:17:00 +0000

According to a report (pdf) sponsored by RightNow, Social Media is an effective way to bring back unhappy customers. Marketing Charts reports about it as well here. The research present a number of facts to support this:

- 68% of consumers who posted a complaint or negative review on a social networking after a negative holiday shopping experience got a response from a retailer.
- 18% of those turned into loyal customers, 33% turned around and posted a positive review and 34% deleted their original negative review

On top of it 50% of consumers say great customer service/experience influences their decision to buy from a specific online retailer and after a positive shopping experience 31% purchased more from this retailer.

Finally, 28% of consumers looking for information or support with online shopping researched what other customers said on social networking and reviews websites.
In many cases, the 32% of US consumers who posted a negative review of a holiday shopping experience in 2010 and were ignored by the retailer simply had a bad impression reinforced. Six in 10 (61%) of these consumers said they would have been shocked had the retailer contacted them.

So YES social media has a growing influence on your customers loyalty and you should be paying attention to it. Actually we all know that a happy customer is the most effective sales influencer when turned into an advocate.

According to the same research, for consumers who had a positive exeprience this holiday season online, 21% recommended the retailer to friends and13% posted a positive online review about the retailer.

2010: Resurgence for Digital Media in the Wake of the Recession

emmanuel@eobadia.com (Emmanuel Obadia) — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 12:13:00 +0000

I mentioned previously this interesting research from Comscore, and I wanted to highlight more general trends about digital media coming out of it.

Comscore outlines that the digital media industry responded with significant growth across various media platforms to the wake of the recession. As they say:

"Industry innovations brought an unprecedented number of options to consumers as digital media continued to weave itself even tighter into the fabric of Americans’ daily lives." -- comScore

Key findings about consumer trends, highlighted in the report, include:

Following 2 years of depressed consumer discretionary spending, the economy showed signs of improvement, leading to positive growth for the e-commerce market. Total U.S. e-commerce spending reached $227.6 billion in 2010, up 9 percent versus the previous year. Travel e-commerce spending grew 6 percent to $85.2 billion, while retail (non-travel) e-commerce spending jumped 10 percent to $142.5 billion for the year.
Social networking continued to gain momentum throughout 2010, with 9 out of every 10 U.S. Internet users now visiting a social networking site in a month, and the average Internet user spending more than 4 hours on these sites each month. Nearly 1 out of every 8 minutes online is spent on Facebook.
The U.S. core search market grew 12 percent overall in 2010, driven by a 4-percent increase in unique searchers and an 8-percent increase in the number of search queries per searcher.
U.S. Internet users received a total of 4.9 trillion display ads in 2010 with display ad impressions growing 23 percent in December 2010 versus December 2009. Social networking sites, which now account for more than one-third of all display ad impressions, were a significant driver of growth in the display ad market in 2010.
In December 2010, the average American spent more than 14 hours watching online video, a 12-percent increase from the prior year, and streamed a record 201 videos, an 8-percent increase.
Major milestones in mobile were crossed during the year as smartphones reached 1 in 4 mobile subscribers and 3G penetration crossed the 50 percent threshold. Approximately 47 percent of mobile subscribers are now connected Internet media users (via browsers, applications or downloaded content), up 8 percentage points from the previous year.

In short, businesses should consider these aspects of Digital Media in their strategies to be successful in the coming years:

e-commerce
Social Media Presence
Search
Advertising
Video on line as convergence with traditional TV continues to blur
Mobile media for both consumption and as an alternative e-commerce platform

Ecommerce spending jumped 9% to $227.9B in the US

emmanuel@eobadia.com (Emmanuel Obadia) — Sun, 20 Feb 2011 12:07:00 +0000

As I track the evolution of e-commerce, I found these results coming from Comscore pretty interesting.

e-commerce revenue reached $227.6B for the entire year, growing 9% compared to 2009, and varies per industry:

travel e-commerce up 6% to $85.2B
Retail (non travel) up 10% to $142.5B
Top growing category: Consumer Electronics +19% (flat panel TV and mobile devices are first)

This signals a recovery since the end of 2008, after a two years depressed situation due to the economic downturn. The 2010 holiday season was at a peak with a 12% growth, reinforced by some promotional activity - most notably free shipping. The Cyber Monday (Nov 29th) did peak at $1.028B surpassing for the first time the $1B mark. Groupon.com attracted 10.7M unique visitors in December, up 712% vs 2009.

Interesting evolution since my post e-commerce revenue over $100B back in January 2007 i.e. it more than doubled since 2006 even with a major downturn in between.

So, how is your e-commerce strategy going? Maybe a good time to revisit if you have one and definitely start one if you haven't.

If you want to know more, you can download the comScore 2010 US digital year in review report.

Social Marketing: identify influencers for free

emmanuel@eobadia.com (Emmanuel Obadia) — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 18:45:00 +0000

source Elliott Lemenager

This is the question I get very often even from marketers already involved and active in Social Marketing: how to identify influencers? Yes, seems like 101 but actually not so easy to figure it out.

The notion of influencers came first to me with Regis McKenna back in the 80's -- wow already! Here is the quote:

« The infrastructure includes all individuals between a vendor and its customers that can influence the buying process. » -- Regis McKenna

Pretty wide isn't it? But for B2B marketers like me this is so true and so daunting. Today's Marketing 2.0 reinforces and stresses our imperative to identify them and reach out to them through social media because we need them to be involved in the conversation, hopefully positively.

To start with today, I wanted to share with you this blog post: Social Marketing: Hybrid Approach to Identifying Targeted Influencers. Dive in as Elliott's post has lots of tips and links to tools and present it in a very simple way. His Hybrid approach actually refers to a combination of manual operations and free services you can use if you're on a budget contraint and cannot hire an agency to help you. Enjoy!

source Elliott Lemenager

Social media marketing: build a lasting methodology

emmanuel@eobadia.com (Emmanuel Obadia) — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 17:58:00 +0000

Here is an interesting post about optimizing your social media marketing from David Kirkpatrick, Marketing Experiment.

Justin Bridegan, Marketing Manager MECLABS Primary Research said, “One of the most difficult parts of social media marketing is creating a lasting methodology that works. Time and resources continue to be two of the most difficult challenges social marketers face.”

Justin’s key takeaways:

Start small and test – “You don’t know what you don’t know”
Having a solid social marketing methodology in place will allow you to focus on real obtainable goals.
Determine the most effective offers for your campaigns including: Contests, incentives and promotions
Weigh Quality vs. Quantity with your offers, and remember the need for balance in your engagement
Successful campaigns don’t always equate to revenue, but can be one of many contributing components

Related resources on Marketing Sherpa

Free Inbound Marketing Newsletter – Case Studies and How To articles about social media, SEO, and content marketing

New Chart: Social Marketing Maturity and the Social Marketing ROAD Map

Social Media Marketing Research: Rolling up my sleeves and getting social

Maximizing Email List Growth: How the New York Public Library drove a 52.8% lift in newsletter subscriptions

Most-Tweeted Blog Posts of 2010: Facebook case study, social media marketing human factor, antisocial media, and more

How does your marketing compare to best in class?

emmanuel@eobadia.com (Emmanuel Obadia) — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 17:19:00 +0000

A recent research from Aberdeen about Marketing Asset Management gives an opportunity to compare to the best in class.
Aberdeen uses 3 key performance criteria to compare:

44% of the sales forecasted pipeline generated by marketing, as compared to 2% contribution for laggards organizations,
An average 9% reduction Year-over-year cost of market asset creation, as compared to a 6% increase among laggards,
15% average decrease in year-over-year time-to-market of content of all types and formats, as compared to an increase among laggards.

To achieve best in class performance, you need to

Allow all geographies and business units to customize marketing content with proper control
Centralize asset approval and distribution to expedite time to market and improve content

Happy New Year 2011

emmanuel@eobadia.com (Emmanuel Obadia) — Sat, 01 Jan 2011 15:42:00 +0000

Paris, Jardin Robert Cavalier de La Salle - 26 December 2010