In the age of the omnichannel, screen-obsessed, highly demanding consumer (embrace it, we all know it’s true), the customer experience has become more important than ever before. Consumers expect to be able to engage and receive the same level of service across all the different platforms they use.

As a very active, cross-channel consumer with high expectations, Etail Show USA producer Camille Stuppard thought she’d try engaging with 10 of the biggest retailers to experience their levels of customer service. She used 4 mediums: phone, online, mobile/tablet application and finally twitter.

Download your copy now

Our Customer Service eBook is a product of tests of the phone, online, mobile, and social media response of leading retailers like:

• Bloomingdales
• Dillard’s
• J.C. Penney
• Kohl’s
• Macy’s
• Neiman Marcus

Find out who failed the test

The Etail Show USA is the number one event exploring the use of technologies to retail goods to customers online. It helps brands build, enhance, and deliver on their eCommerce strategies. Join us in 2015 to learn more about cross-channel, social media, omnichannel and digital strategy from a number of the industry leaders.

Register now for your free visitor pass

We hope to see you there!

[Image: Phil Dowsing Creative - Flickr]

As the world of ecommerce continues to expand and evolve, retailers seek to get ahead of the competition and come up with new and innovative solutions.

As Conference Producer Camille Stuppard conducted her research, she found 20 common relevant trends that pertain to marketing, customer engagement, security, digital experience and other areas that effectively impact the industry.

Do you want to be ahead of these trends and understand the benefits these innovations can bring to your company?

Download the eBook here

Take a look at these top 20 growing trends and the companies that have already mastered these topics. Learn from industry leaders and evolve a strategy that works for your company.

For each trend, you can find out:

• More information on the trend
• Its importance to the ecommerce industry
• Fast facts
• Who’s doing it right

Get your copy here

Join us at Etail 2015 to learn from some of the industry’s trendsetters

This event will bring together some of the most successful and knowledgeable individuals who are already experts on at least one of these 20 trends. What better way to learn than from the masters themselves?

The Etail Show USA is the number one event exploring the use of technologies to retail goods to customers online. This event gathers leading eTailers to tackle new innovation across online and multi-channel retail.

If you have a solution to offer to the giants of US retail, you need to join us in Atlanta this April. We hope to see you there!

[Image: Daniel Foster - Flickr]

When Twitter first acquired and rolled out Vine, an app that showcased six-second looping videos early in 2013; Instagram was quick to step up their game, introducing video functionality to their active user base of 200 million users. Micro-videos are videos with durations ranging between 6-15 seconds; these videos are commonly filmed with smart phones and loaded onto social sharing platforms.

An infographic by The 7^th Chamber revealed that 5 tweets per second contain a vine link and a branded vine is four times more likely to be viewed over a branded video. Engaging the modern consumer is a tricky thing, don’t capture their attention in the first few seconds and they’re out door. It’s no wonder micro-videos are turning out to be the perfect platform for marketers to get their marketing content across in a short, sweet and visually appealing manner.

Just a couple of weeks ago at The Internet & Mobile Show 2014, Bonsey Jayden’s CEO, Daniel Posavac graced the stage to talk about the ‘Latest and most innovative social media initiatives to benchmark your social media strategies’ in which he mentioned that:

· 75% of users visit the marketers website after watching a video

· 2/3 of the worlds mobile data traffic will be video by 2016

· Enjoyment of video increases purchase intent by 97%

Daniel also showed us some wicked examples of some successful brands currently using vines for content marketing; but he isn’t the first to talk about micro-video’s increasing importance as a marketing tool. In fact, Forbes Contributor Jayson Demers, actually recognized Micro-Video as one of the seven marketing trends to gain serious traction in 2014.

Videos are a powerful way to effectively reach a global audience and grab their attention. With the 6 and up to 15 second time constraint for vine and Instagram video respectively; making content worthy micro-videos require a lot of creativity.

Check out this article by Econsultancy on the ’14 best branded vines of January 2014’; and see how Oreo, Volkswagen, Samsung, Dunkin’ Donut and other big brands pack serious content into their micro-videos.

Speaker presentations for The Internet Mobile Show 2014 are now available for download!

[Image – Android Central]

[Article by Kimberly Wong]

Oscar Wilde might have thought that “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about”, but we beg to differ. Let’s first start by defining a social media mishap. A mishap is commonly described as an unfortunate incident or mistake. When placed in the context of social media marketing, the following definition pretty much sums it up.

Social Media Mishap [soh-shuh l | mee-dee-uh | mis-hap]

1. When social media marketing content is offensive and inappropriate, resulting in a horrific public backlash

2. When customer feedback is handled in poor and rude fashion, also resulting in catastrophic consequences

Social media is an incredible tool for marketers; an incredibly dangerous tool. A social media blunder can cause serious and sometimes irreversible damage to a brand. In a previous blog post, tips on how to avoid a social media faux-pas were given; but we are all human and we all make mistakes, corporations big or small, are no exception.

I’m sure most of you either cringed or had a good laugh reading articles like “The top 16 social media fails of 2013”; but if you’re not careful, it could happen to you.

So what do you do when a light-hearted marketing campaign spirals out of control?

1. Nip it in the bud – With the way things spread like wildfire on social media platforms, the faster you act, the more damage you contain.

2. Take responsibility for the mistake – Destroy the evidence, but don’t act as if the mistake never existed. Apologize for being insensitive or offensive, and always be humble and genuine about it.

3. A tasteful amount of humour may help – When used in the right context, a little humour can help to ease the tension and save the day. Look at this example of how Red Cross glamorously recovered from their social media blunder.

4. Always Listen and Be Responsive – Listening to your customers, understand the root cause of their dissatisfaction and amend the failure in your service delivery pronto.

5. Compensate affected parties – Nobody wants to pay for poor service, compensate your disgruntled customers accordingly to make up for your mistake.

6. Be very careful with the word ‘Goodwill’ – A lot of companies like to use the line ‘As a gesture of goodwill’ when doling out compensations, but this may cause the company to come across as ignorant. According to the Oxford Dictionary, the term ‘Goodwill’ is associated with being friendly or having a cooperative attitude. France giving America the Statue of Liberty was an act of good will; compensating customers where your service delivery failed doesn’t really cut it.

[Article & Image by Kimberly Wong]

We’ve talked a great deal about social media marketing, its acclaimed benefits, and relatively low costs; but being good at it is much harder than it looks. Standing in the kitchen in an apron doesn’t make you a good cook, what you produce in that kitchen does. In the same way, making your brand visible on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Vine; doesn’t instantly make you a good social media marketer, good content does.

How much of your current social media marketing content is push marketing?

An interesting blog post by Jeffrey Cohen, Managing Editor of SocialMediaB2B.com, sought the opinions of nine distinguished professionals to better understand the terms “Content Marketing” and “Social Media”. Social media is the channel of distribution; content marketing, on the other hand, as so accurately described by René Power, Author of Brilliant B2B Digital Marketing and Business Development Director at Barret Dixon Bell; is the ‘fuel for social media marketing’.

Content marketing is the production of relevant and valuable content that educates and brings your customer to you. In fact, Neil Patel of Quick Sprout likes to think of it a “relationship building tool”. So why not use the gargantuan reach of social media to optimize this?

In The Beginners Guide to Online Marketing, Authors Neil and Ritika Puri, tell us that content marketing doesn’t just constitute of writing and blogging. Good content is one that captivates, motivates, and converts interest into action.

Two interesting and effective ways to do so are through the use of:

· Videos – Tell a story, add music, humour, and basically anything you want. Videos give your imagination the green light to run free. Be creative and interesting, and you’ll be racking up site traffic in no time.

· Infographics – Information presented simply and precisely with the use of graphics, colours and fancy fonts don’t hurt either. Infographics cut clutter and get straight to the heart of the message, and are, not to mention easy on the eyes.

For more methods to spice up your content, check out the full list on Quick Sprout here!

As social media becomes an integral portion of daily lives, businesses are starting to understand the importance of their presence on social media sites as critical platforms for interacting with customers and collecting feedback. An infographic by Search Engine Journal revealed that as of May 2013, the total percentage of internet users stood at an outstanding 72%; up from 29% in 2008. The same infographic also showed that 93% of existing marketers utilize social media platforms with the purpose of marketing. The real question is how many of these marketers are doing it right?

Sprinklr is not a new concept; in fact, the social media analytics/management company based in New York City has actually established quite a name for themselves with Samsung, Microsoft, Dell, Cisco, Target and Nike as some of their secured clientele. The two-year old company recently received a generous amount of $40 million in funding from Iconiq Capital; and now provides its partners (clients) with the option of paid ad campaigns.

The cloud base software specifically targets large scale organizations as the sheer size of such organizations creates greater difficulty in the management of social media operations. Sprinklr’s offering helps brands manage social experiences of their customers collectively across their multiple platforms. To date, Sprinklr remains as the only ‘integrated social relationship infrastructure’ in the market.

Ragy Thomas, CEO and Founder of Sprinklr mentions in his introductory speech, “The only way for businesses to grow in a social age is to manage experience”, he also goes on the describe the term as the “sum total in aggregation of every interaction” a consumer has with the brand. As the social media hype continues to grow, it is likely that we will continue to see more social media analytic/management companies popping up in the near future.

[Image by Sprinklr]

[Article by Kimberly Wong]

With banking and financial institutions taking their services online to keep up with the evolving needs of the consumer in this digital age, is the internet as safe as we presume it to be?

The month of April has seen not one, but two internet insecurities that have left both online providers and users in a state of agitation. In the first week of April, a trio of internet security engineers at Codenomicon and Neel Mehta of Google Security discovered a breach in online security in the OpenSSL software and named it the HeartBleed Bug.

Aptly named, the bug exploits vulnerabilities in the well-circulated data encryption software present in nearly all online websites; and works by intercepting heartbeats (pockets of information) before using stolen encryption keys to uncloak confidential information like passwords, emails, official documents, basically all things we thought secure.

Just when we thought we’d seen the worst, a statement released last Saturday (26^th April) described another online security breach as a result of a coding error, this time affecting the web browsing application Internet Explorer (IE). Deemed as a “Zero-Day Attack”, the identified error is said to implicate IE users who visit websites rigged with the malware that allows hackers to take control over your computer, install malware and steal personal information.

IE users globally have been warned to boycott the browser until a patch is developed, in order to minimize such attacks. In the meantime, another step users can take is to disable ‘live scripting’ and Adobe Flash to curb the automatic download of the malware.

With the current insurgence of internet insecurities, it is important or users to understand the importance of online security and for online providers to step up their security efforts to ensure a safer internet experience for all. Don’t forget to check out The Internet & Mobile Show Asia 2015 to find out what key issues in the mobile and digital sphere will be covered next year!

[Image – Credit]

[Article by Kimberly Wong]

From all of us here at Terrapinn, we want to extend a big THANK YOU to all our speakers, sponsors, exhibitors, and attendees for making The Internet & Mobile Show 2014 such a success. As it is with most things you anticipate, it’s hard for us to believe that the event is over. It has, however, left us with an immeasurable amount of new knowledge, not to mention new contacts.

The two day line-up that featured leading digital and mobile solutions from industry experts helped attendees more accurately understand and identify the trends and opportunities prevalent in the Asian market.

The exciting conference tracks of the standard on-floor conference also drew quite a crowd, with many attendees standing on the sidelines listening intently to our leading technology experts who provided them with tips and fool-proof solutions on how to improve their businesses.

As an event that focuses on the happenings in the digital and mobile industry, it was only natural that event highlights were documented fervently on twitter. As keynote speaker and panelist Parminder Singh, Managing Director of Twitter (Southeast Asia/India/MENA) mentions in his speech, “The hash tag is a common currency for shared experiences and conversations on a global scale”.

If you missed the event and want to pick up a couple of pointers brought up by our industry experts, feel free to follow us @theinternetshow, or share the experiences of our attendees and speakers at #internetshowsg and #mobileshowasia.

For those of you, who missed the event, fret not! The Internet & Mobile Show Asia will be taking place again next year with a more action-packed conference line-up. See you in 2015!

Calling all registered attendees of The Internet & Mobile Show Asia 2014, Bonsey Jaden has a challenge for you! The Lego Logo Challenge was created in efforts to portray the online and offline challenges marketers face in the process of developing brands in accelerated ‘internet time’.The main aim of the challenge is to prove that brand recognition actually occupies a sizeable amount of our memory.

How to participate in Lego Logo Challenge?

All you need to do is pop by the Bonsey Jaden’s booth (U04) this week, randomly pick a brand and recreate it with the classic toy blocks in the shortest possible time. The Bonsey crew will be there to film and document the whole construction process on the Lego Logo Challenge Site.

A vote will be cast to crown the ultimate builder, and a few lucky winners will stand a chance to walk away with awesome prizes in the form of Ipad minis, Macbook ‘Lego’ Keyboards, GoPro Cameras and a trip for 2 Phuket are amongst some of the prizes to be won!

Sound simple enough? It’s almost too good to be true! If you haven’t registered for the event, don’t miss this exciting opportunity to test your brand knowledge and creativity. Come down to The Internet Mobile Show Asia 2014 taking place this Wednesday and Thursday at the Suntec Singapore International Exhibition & Convention Centre, Level 4, Hall 406.

Be sure to register for the free standard on-floor conference and we’ll see you this Wednesday, be there or be square!

More about Bonsey Jaden

Bonsey Jaden are Digital Brand Architects dedicated to building iconic brands in the online world. We create innovative solutions with a goal to increase your brand’s impact through integrated digital campaigns that add value and engage your customers.

Indonesia is the most highly populated country in Southeast Asia. Thus, it is no surprise that the country also holds the title for the highest number of internet users in the region. An article by Quartz described the Indonesian e-Commerce market as “fascinating but extremely difficult” and generally pointed out why the market is not as promising as it seems.

In a response article by Dailysocial; Andrias Ekoyuono, Vice President of Ideosource and CEO and Co-Founder of the Lazada Group stepped forward to address the misconceptions about the state of the Indonesian e-Commerce market.

Read the full article here.

The issues addressed are:

· The perceived success of e-Commerce in Indonesia due to its low internet penetration rates

· Higher number of online transactions made from mobile devices

· The preferred method of payment for online purchases in Indonesia

· More entrepreneurs preferring to set up shop on social media platforms and messaging services

Read the full article here.

The two also state that if anything, the biggest obstacle for venturing into e-Commerce is for businesses to be able to accurately understand the local market, the behaviour of its consumers and the legal restrictions involved. With the rise of e-Commerce start-ups and more international market leader like eBay, Rakuten and Sumitomo; we are certain that e-Commerce in Indonesia will continue to grow.

About DailySocial

DailySocial is the first start-up and tech update media for Industry, started in 2008, DailySocial has grown from a blog to a media with influential and tech savvy readers that keeps them updated with actual news from the IT and Tech Entrepreneurship Industry.

Daily social is a content partner of The Internet Mobile Show 2014. With just a couple of days to go, don’t miss the opportunity to learn from industry expert about enterprise mobility, E- & M-Commerce, start-up innovation and social media. Register here for the free visitor pass now and gain access to the exhibition and the standard on-floor conference.

[Image – Multichannel Order Management]

[Write-up by Kimberly Wong]

This guest blog post was kindly provided by Duncan Brown of Pierre Audoin Consultants</p.

In a previous blog, we suggested that cyber security is now too hard for CISOs. We outlined three tough challenges ahead for the cyber security industry. What impact are these having on the cyber security market? We think that there are three possible futures for cyber security.

1. In the near term, we think that there will be an increase in security services adoption. Currently, services are broadly limited to isolated managed security services, typically patch management and threat monitoring. We think in 2014 there will be a concerted increase in services adoption, including full service outsourcing to specialist security services providers. We are already seeing some security operations centre (SOC) outsourcing, and we expect this to increase in 2014 and beyond.

Importantly, this goes beyond security advisory services. KPMG, Deloitte, PwC and the other management consulting firms have done well in cornering the advisory space. It remains a healthy space, but the growing opportunity is in designing, building and running security operations, or at least implementing security capability subsequently run in-house.

In many ways, outsourcing of cyber security just shifts the problem to an external supplier. But there are some good economic reasons for doing so: much of the staff-based security monitoring and event analysis is, frankly, dull. And not every event detected requires deep analysis and intervention. Keeping this kind of function in-house is expensive and inefficient. Outsourcing to an external organisation provides both the required expertise on hand and the scale to make it economically viable to the service provider, and makes it cost-effective and efficient for enterprises.

(An important aspect of this trend towards security services is deploying cloud solutions with built-in security. Box is making a strong differentiated play here, but there are many others.)

2. One of the greatest inhibitors to manageability and efficiency of security solutions is the plethora of individual point solutions to cope with specific threats. Just a brief look at the leading vendors portfolios shows this to be true. HP, Symantec, Sophos, Trend Micro, McAfee and IBM all have extensive but fragmented portfolios. From a CISO point of view, managing this complex array of products is a nightmare. Something must change.

We think the key driver in 2014 and beyond will be the emergence and adoption of integrated and holistic cyber security solutions. Symantec and Cisco can be leaders here, and have both announced intentions to provide a simpler and more integrated suite of products from its currently fragmented portfolio. We think other key vendors must follow this strategy, or be consigned to being point solution providers. Those specialist product vendors that have limited portfolios also have limited coverage of the wider threat landscape, and are most probably acquisition targets.

There is, of course, an opportunity for a product vendor to create a security management product, much in the same way that service management tools exist from BMC, for example. IBM’s Tivoli is the obvious candidate to fill this gap, but there’s little indication that this is on the horizon.

Services providers may also want to provide security product integration, either as a service or by utilising their own in-house IP. In fact, integrated cyber security solutions may well be first adopted, or even created, by services firms.

3. The third future for cyber security is beginning to appear in 2014, and we think there are signs that fundamental change is afoot. The current approach to creating point solutions for individual threats types is overly complex, difficult to manage and expensive. most solutions are concerned with protecting the perimeter.

In addition, the incoming Data Protection legislation in the EU (and separately in other territories) will drive increased sophistication of data classification, access rights and encryption (at row/record or level field level).

We think a new paradigm for security is required. Ultimately, the physical breach of a system is a means to an end. The end is always data. It is data, in its specific context, that needs to be protected against a variety of threats. We think that this context-based data is likely to be the key driver for security in the next decade. Data will be secured according to the required privacy, location, risk profile (impact) and other attributes. User of characteristics will also determine contacts, including typical behaviour patterns and reputation.

It is hard to achieve, however. IBM’s Guardium product promises much, but focuses (for now) on structured data in databases. Just getting to grips with an enterprise’s abundance of Excel spreadsheets represents a huge challenge for Data Protection and security practitioners.

Big data and analytics will play a key role in providing this sort of context-based security, as will data discovery and cryptography technologies, and the establishment of interchangeable and verifiable credentials, increasingly between M2M devices on the Internet.

Context-based data security is important, not only for its functional impact, but also because it gathers together many different technologies and disciplines. Because of this interacting technology and operational scope it will be difficult to deliver quickly. Vendors that can deliver on this vision will lead the next wave of cyber security into the latter half of this decade.

For more information on cyber security, check out the Cyber Security Briefing taking place in London on June 26th. Duncan will be chairing the day and speaking on the topic of how cyber security is for the boardroom, not the back room – building from the top. Click here for more information.

This guest blog post was kindly provided by Duncan Brown of Pierre Audoin Consultants.

In many ways, 2013 was a breakthrough year for cyber security. It achieved the degree of awareness – some may say notoriety – that it has been missing for decades. And security is now firmly at the top of the board agenda, due mainly to the Snowden revelations and current and incoming regulations from the EU. Importantly, the growing number of breaches seems to show no sign in declining, and the consequences for firms (and executive management) are increasing. A fine of 2% of global revenue (as proposed in the draft EU General Data Protection Regulation) should be sufficient to gain the attention of the most gung-ho CEO.

But cyber security is not easy. In fact, we at PAC think that it is getting harder, which is placing unprecedented challenges for the CIO and CISO. These challenges are:

1. Expanding threat landscape.

The increased complexity, number and sophistication of incoming threats are putting security provision under extreme stress. The majority of security regimes involved a plethora of individual point solutions which solve specific threat types. But the number of threats is ever increasing, and the threat types are also diversifying. This means that security provision is fragmented, with often large holes between product coverage. This piecemeal infrastructure approach is inefficient, risky and a nightmare to manage.

2. End-point consumerisation, the Internet of things and M2M explosion.

An increase in the number and variety of devices connected to the Internet increases the opportunity of security breaches by orders of magnitude. Most security infrastructures are completely unprepared for the escalation in event numbers and types, especially those created by M2M transactions.

3. Skills shortage.

The biggest challenge to many CISOs is the lack of availability of cyber security skills. Despite the professional associations that provide security accreditation, there is still a major shortfall of resource with the right blend of skills and experience to cope with the burgeoning cyber security market demand. Salaries of experienced security analysts are increasing substantially, and staff retention is proving elusive.

These three structural challenges make us pose the question: Is cyber security too hard for CISOs?

We think it may be, and we are predicting three possible ways that the market will respond to the cyber security challenges for 2014.

For more information on cyber security, check out the Cyber Security Briefing taking place in London on June 26th. Duncan will be chairing the day and speaking on the topic of how cyber security is for the boardroom, not the back room – building from the top. Click here for more information.