What he is missing is he’s looking at the wrong field.

Google is playing a different game. Google Chrome OS is NOT about killing Microsoft or Apple.

What is it about? Developers, developers, developers, developers, developers.

See, what happens if the world goes to Microsoft’s Silverlight, the way that Seesmic did this week? Google is locked out of such a world.

Google is in a war over developers with Microsoft. Google wants developers to build for the open web. Microsoft wants developers to build for Silverlight. Those messages are VERY clear coming out of both camps now.

But that’s not really the game either, although if it were Google Chrome OS would already be a winner because it reinforces to developers that they better keep developing for the Web using HTML5, even if you follow Loic Le Meur into Microsoft’s camp and build for Silverlight too.

So, what is the game?

Well, it’s a new field altogether. I’m hearing a raft of new, low-cost, devices are coming that you will only need to have on the Web. For instance, I want a cookbook on my kitchen counter that just brings me cool recipes. Right now I use my big Windows 7 computer for that, or my big MacBookPro.

But what if there were a new device that costs less than $100 that JUST does cookbooks and other things I need in the kitchen? I would buy one. A Chrome OS is all that’s needed for such a specialized device.

Where else would I use a low-cost computer? How about the bathroom? Just leave it there. Put a bunch of news sources and magazines on it.

Or, what about my son who is in high school. By the time Chrome OS comes along in big numbers he’ll be in college. Why take a $1,000 computer to class? Couldn’t he do everything he needs to do on a low-cost computer that’s lightweight, replaceable, uses low power, and just uses the web? Absolutely!

See, InfoWorld is making assumptions that the world is going to stay the same. That simply is NOT true.

Now, what will run on these new devices? A heavyweight OS like Windows 7 that takes me 40 seconds to boot up and does a ton of stuff I really don’t need, or a new OS that just has Google Chrome as its centerpiece?

Hey, I just wrote this post on Google Chrome while sitting listening to Marc Benioff at the TechCrunch Real Time Crunchup. I have not seen a single thing demonstrated on stage yet that won’t run on Google Chrome OS.

This is a winner, but on a new field.

Original post by Robert Scoble

This is a huge shift in what Twitter is saying publicly.

But advertising isn’t something many people love. So, how will Twitter make advertising you love?

By building a SuperTweet!

How can they do that?

Well, yesterday, I talked with Likaholix co-founder Bindu Reddy about just that. You can watch our video we recorded about how Twitter could make new advertising, which I say is a piece of building a SuperTweet.

So, what is a SuperTweet?

Well, first, some rules.

1. You can’t mess with the Tweet. That’s sacrosanct. So, we’re stuck with the 140 character rules, along with the rules of @replies and hashtags and all that.
2. You may NOT introduce new ad models inside the Tweet. You may NOT put ads inside Tweets.
3. You may NOT introduce new ads that look like Tweets.

So, what is a SuperTweet?

It is a Tweet with a metadata payload.

Think about all the metadata that exist OUTSIDE of the Tweet. How about you mouse-over a Tweet to see a new slide-down UI that shows you all the metadata.

What kinds of metadata do we already have?

1. How many times has the tweet been retweeted.
2. Where was the Tweet produced (geolocation).
3. What’s the tag cloud associated with the Tweet (get that from list names).
4. What tool produced the Tweet?
5. What are associated Tweets?
6. What are tweets in reply to this tweet?

But what else could we automatically generate?

Well, let’s say I wrote a Tweet saying “I’m going to see 2012 tonight.”

Couldn’t we tag that Tweet with the word “movie?” Like you can tag a photo on Flickr? Absolutely!

Couldn’t we have a bot that sees that 2012 and movie came through the system and then link to the IMDB database for the movie 2012, like this? Couldn’t you link to Fandango for movie reviews and movie times for 2012, like this?

So, add that all onto the tile that slides underneath this new “SuperTweet.”

But what else?

If CocaCola wants to target movie goers, couldn’t they put an ad into this SuperTweet? Something like “Drink Coke at the movies, show this tweet at the movie theater and get $1 off off a Coke.”

NOW you are getting how advertising could be something you love!

How about a Tweet that talks about a book. Someone could write “Loved Trust Agents by Brogan.” That could link to Amazon so you could put it on your Kindle.

There is ton of things that Twitter could do here to bring ads that people love, thanks to a SuperTweet infrastructure, and yes, I will love it.

By the way, two companies already are showing me advertising I love: Foursquare, which shows me offers from businesses nearby where I check in, and Yelp, who also shows me offers from businesses nearby. These are HUGE value ads for both consumers and businesses and if Twitter ads this new kind of advertising to a SuperTweet they will make billions of dollars.

I’m actually happy that Twitter is getting off of its “no advertising” stance and thinking about SuperTweets.

How about you?

Original post by Robert Scoble

Original post by Kate Pierce

One of the questions Shawna asked was What should retailers be doing during the holiday season now that it’s too late to be working on the site or strategy? This post is a recap of what I believe retailers should be doing now to really be “in the game” rather than a benchwarmer this season.

Monitor and Optimize Performance

Even the largest, most famous online stores have gone down on Black Friday and other peak traffic days, or at least slowed down significantly. We know that page load speed affects whether a person is going to stick around on your site. It is the “first impressions” that count, because if your first page loads slow, the customer expects the rest of the experience to be painful. This affects your bounce and abandonment rates and ultimately your conversion rates.

If you’ve seen Forrester Research and Akamai’s latest report, almost half of broadband shoppers expect your pages to load in 2 seconds or less, and top retailers are setting the bar at sub-second loads.

While your site may not crash, other performance problems like slower page loads often fly under the radar because you’re still making more sales than the rest of the year. But when these performance problems happen, you have no way to quantify the sales you could have made if your site was tip-top.

You need to be aware that performance typically suffers most in the checkout. Your payment gateway may be very slow, or your tax and shipping tables live on other servers or on another website. So it’s really important that you know what to monitor. And don’t give yourself a false sense of security by testing only your home page.

Sometimes your performance takes a hit because IT and marketing haven’t been communicating. So marketing deploys a major midnight madness sale by email – and the site isn’t prepared. Did you know our next webinar is on IT-marketing relations in January? (/End shameless plug for upcoming webinar).

There are lots of services that can help you with performance monitoring like Akamai, Gomez and Keynote. Our site performance webinar recap is full of tips you can do to reduce your load.

Use Your Web Analytics

How ridiculous would it be for a football team to only bring in a coach at the end of the season, and all the coach does is drop off a video tape of all the playoff games and says: “Here you go.” That would be insane but it’s how a lot of online retailers are doing web analytics. They wait until the season is over to see what happened, rather than using that data to make better decisions while the games are on. (This is especially sad when the web analyst does nothing but send reports without any analysis or actionable insights).

Perhaps it’s because web analytics tools spit out so much data – ecommerce managers are not sure what to care about. I have 3 suggestions to get you thinking:

1. Use your site overlay reports. These can show you where people are clicking, right now, this season, every day. Which offers and calls to action are working? Which navigation categories are clicked most? Gifts? Sale? Top rated? New arrivals? Brands? These are all clues to what your customers are interested in, and this can give you ideas of what to promote more heavily on your home page.

2. Look for high bounce rate pages. Bounce rate refers to the percentage of visitors that abandon your site in under 5 or 10 seconds (depending on your analytics tool). Are the top bounce pages different than the rest of the year? Is there a problem you were unaware of? For example, you may discover that a paid search ad for Tickle Me Elmo uses the wrong destination URL and is sending traffic to Tickle Me Cookie Monster and it’s bleeding money ten times faster than it did during the rest of the year.

3. Segment your traffic sources. Your site conversion rate may be 4%, but look under the hood you may discover your pay-per-click campaign converts at 0.5%, your email at 20% and your affiliates at 10%. You may take that money from your PPC campaign and turn off underperforming ad groups, and instead reach out to your top performing affiliates and offer higher commissions to promote you more heavily.

4. Boost your intelligence. Google Analytics has a new feature called Intelligence (rolling out in Beta and not available to all markets yet). Intelligence has a feature that sends you an alert when there’s a sudden statistically significant increase or dropoff in traffic, conversion or any metric you’re tracking. Avinash Kaushik has a nice explanation of Google Analytics’ new intelligent features.

Keep Testing

You may be in a code freeze, but this winter’s no time for a testing freeze. Shopping behavior is different during the holidays. The shopper’s purchase role is geared to others, and there’s more at stake. Customers may be more interested in customer reviews when buying for someone of the opposite gender or a different age group. Or, they might be on tight budgets and are more persuaded by your sales promotions than at other times. You really can’t rely on headline and offer tests you did in May.

You can also take advantage of the high traffic volume which means shorter test durations.

We discussed a lot more in the 35 minute interview, please check it out if you haven’t had the chance. There are a few other ecommerce episodes you can listen to, and watch out for more ecommerce tips from Shawna and her ecommerce expert guests.

You may also like these similar posts:

• The Importance of Site Performance
• Do Hacker Safe / McAfee Secure Badges Increase Sales?
• Take the Load Off Slow Page Loads
• Displaying Search Results: Grid View or List View?
• Last Chance to Win a Copy of Always Be Testing

Original post by Linda Bustos

Original post by Yahoo! News Search Results for Ecommerce

Original post by Kate Pierce

Original post by Yahoo! News Search Results for Ecommerce

Original post by Yahoo! News Search Results for Ecommerce

Original post by default@goarticles.com (Russell Owen)

Original post by default@goarticles.com (Nataliya Begidzhanova)

Original post by Yahoo! News Search Results for Ecommerce

Original post by Kate Pierce

Original post by Yahoo! News Search Results for Ecommerce

Key Trends in B2B eCommerce: From Fulfilling Demand To Creating Demand

If you missed it, you can catch the replay at the above link. The replay includes all Brian’s screenshots of real B2B examples (which didn’t look right when resized to fit the blog specs) so I recommend you check it out to get the full effect.

Agenda

• Growth Drivers in B2B eCommerce
• The Range of Models in B2B eCommerce
• The Evolving B2B Site

Growth in B2B eCommerce

Business to business eCommerce has been evolving quickly.

It’s harder to observe B2B trends than it is for B2C because there is no leading site you can explore – most of B2B’s features and functionality lies behind a veil. Much of the user interfaces, features, levels of integration, workflow and business processes are proprietary.

Key Growth Drivers For ʖB

• Improve operational efficiency
• Customer self-service and process automation
• Improvement in order capture and processing
• Fueled by the downturn and changes in the workforce
• Build stronger direct relationships
• Make it easier to do business
• Develop the brand
• Improve availability, responsiveness, and service
• Need to develop a direct relationships with customers
• Grow the business
• Acquire new customers in their preferred channel
• Grow through increased channel touch-points
• Retain existing customers switching channels
• Prevent customers leaving with sales rep changes
• Keeping up
• Prevent competitors from capturing market share
• ʖB customer expectations are driven by ʖC
• Evolving online B2B models are pushing the experiences forward – B2b, B2B2C, B2B2B

Many B2B transactions still take place through fax, phone, inside and field sales reps. The B2B ecommerce site offers the chance to improve quality, timeliness of order capture and efficiency of process. It also allows for a stronger relationship, making it easier to do business 24/7. This is especially useful for a branded manufacturer selling to boutiques, where the order may be placed by the boutique owner at 10pm after the kids have gone to bed, for example. The manufacturer would not find it cost efficient to keep the call center open at all hours, but B2B customers may want to transact on their own schedule.

The website also strengthens the relationship between the company and the end customer, rather than relying on a sales reps who own accounts, and may take business with them if they ever leave the company.

B2C retailers have learned that multichannel customers increase the value of that customer to the business, and it works the same for B2B.

Often, B2B ecommerce projects are inspired by what the competition is doing. Innovation and competitive pressure is driving much of the growth in the ecommerce channel.

What’s Unique About B2B Sites?

What Makes B2B Different than B2C?

• Authentication and initiating orders
• Custom catalogs, prices and offers
• Orders and lists created over time
• Order workflow, incl. quotation, punchout
• Scheduled delivery and fulfillment options
• Off-line sales integration, marketing support
• Multiple product and bulk order entry
• Product configuration and customization
• Complex promotions unique to B2B
• Invoicing, Remittance and Reporting

Business to business eCommerce is not simple.

Authentication – Required registration – When you think about direct-to-consumer, you want to minimize the need for authentication / log in. Many B2C sites have learned they need to offer guest checkout for better conversion. Certainly there are marketing and service advantages to customer login for the B2C, but it’s markedly different in B2B where it’s far more important to show proper content, catalog, pricing etc. as part of your negotiations with them or their user type/role.

Unique promotions in B2B – Promotions can get very complex in B2B, with geography, terms offered, order minimums, book-by and ship-by dates determining who is eligible for what promotion. There may be new promotions daily to move product as quickly as possible. What is typically too complicated for a consumer to evaluate is very common in B2B.

Multiple and Bulk Ordering – For this you must enable businesses to order across all the variants of the product (example given is shoes – choose your assortment of size/width/color). You must also show availability dates in same interface, which may vary as you replenish stock. Typically you wouldn’t see this in ʖC.

Quick Order Capability – This is when the client can order entire an “end cap” which is pre-merchandised and ready to go with back stock for a retail store.

Product Configuration – The ability to bundle and configure a product to order may involve custom manufacturing and other processes you wouldn’t find in B2C.

Unique Reporting Needs – A B2C site typically wouldn’t allow a customer to run reports on purchase history, but this is common in B2B. A procurement manager needs to find who in the organization has ordered what, and a retail chain with different geographic divisions wants want to keep tabs on what’s being ordered where.

Customer Self Service – Change and view orders, create inquiries, create quotes, view returns etc. are all important to B2B. Customers may still like to call but there’s a benefit to the customer and organization to offer these capabilities online (convenience, cost savings).

What Is Similar Between B2B and B2C?

• Online Merchandising
• Search
• Categorization
• Cross-Sells / Up-Sells
• Online Marketing
• Segmentation / Targeting
• Recency / Frequency
• Similar management challenges
• Heavy product content burden
• Integrating with large enterprise systems
• Customer Self Service

Product content (images, information, user guides, reviews, videos) is still important, and even more important than it is on B2C sites when the buyer requires technical specs, how the product should be used and education on specific details of the product.

Similarly, site search is important, especially for industry terms that are frequently misspelled (Latin or brand names, think of the pharmaceutical industry). Autosuggestion is helpful.

Cross-sell/upsell, bundling, product configurators, comparison tools etc. are also very important in B2B.

The Range of Models in B2B Ecommerce

A Range of Models At times supported through a single solution

B2C – .com site
B2B – large wholesale account site -> dealer
B2B2b – dealer -> distributor portal -> small parts dealer
B2b2C – product extranet -> distributor portal -> dealer B2C shop -> consumer
B2E – sales support intranet -> support materials
ʖC / ʖB – call center
B2B2C – B2B2C platform -> .com retailer site

Example: Viking sells professional kitchen products and has a consumer site, distributor extranet, services extranet and culinary extranet.

An Example of ʖʖC or “White-Labeling”

Michelin tires runs the Costco tire store, servicing the tire needs online for the Costco customer, even down to the servicing inside the shop. Especially when products are expensive to stock, it may make sense to seek this kind of support from the manufacturer.

The Evolving B2B Site

The Evolving ʖB Site

• Extreme Personalization
• May deliver versions based on role, location, contract, buying history
• Customized catalogs, assortments or product exclusivity to different customers or regions
• Personalized alerts and reminders of promos, orders, quotes, etc.
• Searchandising, including guided navigation
• Improved ordering processes
• Robust self-service
• Multichannel integration
• Mobile UI, apps
• Content and offer targeting
• Based on role, segment, ordering history
• Integrated with marketing tools
• Merchandised landing pages
• Promotions and special pricing
• Visualization tools / Product configuration
• Managing & leveraging content across channels
• SEO

Brian showed screenshot examples of:

• Customized content
• Rich product content
• Search results refinement
• Templated order forms
• PO history & account details
• Quick order based on past purchases
• Product configuration
• Automated product recommendations
• Browser search bar for quick navigation
• Custom catalog development
• Product care and use instructions

Key Take-Aways

• Design your site for the customer, who is that end user who needs the product, the information, to self-service?
• Don’t design for the sales manager’s goals and expose your “corporate underpants.”
• Employ familiar UI principles from online retail.
• Focus on marketing and merchandising tactics like cross-sell/upsell, product comparison etc.
• Don’t let internal business processes, systems, and sacred cows drive the online experience.

Contact Brian

Brian K. Walker
bwalker @ forrester.com
twitter.com/bkwalker

Next Webinar

Bridging the technology and marketing divide for ecommerce success
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
9am PST / 12pm EST

Ecommerce has always created its share of internal strains within organizations. The tension between online vs. offline operations and between brand vs. direct marketing are two common examples. Even more persistent is the tension between marketers and technologists, with both groups accusing each other of an inability to “get it” and acting as an obstacle to an efficiently running business.

Learn about how bridging the technology vs. marketing divide has gotten easier as the technology landscape has changed—while such changes are helpful, they are not sufficient to completely close the gap. In this one hour webinar, Rob Schmults, CMO of Smart Destinations, and Matt Higgins, CTO of Smart Destinations, will share views on the way changes in enabling technology combined with better organizational collaboration can make your ecommerce business faster, better, and cheaper.

Webinar Takeaways:

· How web services, WYSIWUG, and GUI’s offer the allure of cutting IT out of the picture entirely
· Why marketers have to understand the importance of articulating solid requirements—and why change orders are beautiful things
· Why technologists cannot be passive order takers despite the safety such a pose offers—and how they can help marketers focus on what matters
· These lessons are applicable to SMB or enterprises with internal or external resources

Sign up today!

You may also like these similar posts:

• Webinar Recap: The Ecommerce Platform of the Future
• Key Trends in B2B Ecommerce: Complimentary Forrester Research Valued at $1749
• Study Finds 76% Want to Chat About Checkout Problems
• Bloggers Digest – 2/22/08
• Targeted Selling Webinar Recap

Original post by Linda Bustos

Original post by Yahoo! News Search Results for Ecommerce