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25th
MAR

Twitter – Can Twitter help boost your sales?

Posted by Michael under Online Retail, Social Media

According to Dell, 13,000 Dell outlet Twitter followers have helped the company grow $1m in revenue.

Technology company Dell is one of a number of leading retail brands that has latched on to social networking as a way of presenting a more friendly face to customers.

Named employees have Dell Twitter accounts that give the company a personality online and the company even plans to offer special deals to followers via tweet alerts.

In the UK, many big brands don’t have a Twitter presence even though many of them have embraced e-commerce as a sales channel. Internet business may be big business, but so far, retailers seem to just be dipping their toes in to what could be a huge ocean of internet business opportunity.

Not only are UK businesses slow to embrace Twitter, but they seem to lack the understanding of how to embrace this new market and the ability to target content.

Patricio Robles on his blog at econsultancy  has researched the UK retailers at the cutting edge.

It’s not the names on the list but rather the brands that are missing that make the interesting reading. For instance Tesco, Marks and Spencer and Vodafone are conspicuous by their absence even though they dominate our shopping centres and rack up sales via their web sites.

Here’s a list of the leading UK brands and their followings on Twitter as of today:

ASOS: http://twitter.com/ASOS 1,860

ASDA: http://twitter.com/asda 112

CarphoneWarehouse: http://twitter.com/carphoneware 126

Debenhams: http://twitter.com/DebenhamsRetail 132

Dixons: http://twitter.com/dixonsonline 143

eBayUK: http://twitter.com/eBayUK 1127

Expedia: http://twitter.com/expediatravel 279

Figleaves: http://twitter.com/figleaveshome 1052

Ocado: http://twitter.com/ocadouk 117

TalkTalk: http://twitter.com/TalkTalkTips 417

Totting up the total, that’s just 6,650 followers for a dozen brands, or an average of 546. Compared to Dell ‘s twitter followers of 221,959, that is not a great deal of engagment.

Web 2.0 is taking the web more up close and personal for social networkers and presents an opportunity for businesses to interact with their customers more dynamically than ever before.
The customers obviously don’t mind, because they opt to follow on Twitter, so it makes sense for a business to open up the channel and communicate with someone who actually wants to listen to what they say.

According to the latest Neilson survey, Facebook is still the daddy of social networking with more than 65 million accounts – 228% up on last year. Twitter is second with more than 7 million accounts – almost a 1400% year-on-year increase.

Micro blogging on these networks is exploding in popularity and companies have to learn how to exploit these niche markets.

Dell’s $1 million from Twitter may not be a great deal of revenue compared to the rest raised by the company’s other sales channels, but think back – it wasn’t so long ago that few companies were making any money out of the internet, and look how that has changed.

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8th
MAR

How to Grow a Business from $2 million to $105 million in 5 Years

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Leadership

I was lucky enough to see Cameron Herold speak at a presentation organised by the Entrepreneurs Organisation. “Leadership At 100mph: Hyper-Growth Strategies the Work. Cameron Herold built 1-800-Got- Junk from a $2 million company to $105 million in the space of 5 years.

It was an interesting presentation from a highly knowledgeable, articulate and approachable business thinker.

His presentation focused on the tips and tricks he used to grow his businesses.

He jokingly referred to his appetite for R&D (rip off and duplicate rather than research and development), but you can’t argue with the idea of taking what has proven to work in one successful business and transferring it to another.

1.    Paint the picture

Here he spoke about visualising what the business would like in a few years time. The picture should be as detailed as possible and should cover areas such Brand Presence, Culture, Leadership, Profitability, Service and Image. The picture should be shared with everyone in the company so that there is common understanding of the leaders/company’s direction.

2.    Prioritise, Prioritise, Prioritise

He recounted the story of Ivy Lee who was a management consultant who was trying to sell his services to Charles Schwab of the Bethlehem Steel Company in the 1930’s. Lee outlined his services ending with the statement. “With our service you’ll know how to manage better.” To which Schwab responded “What we need around here is not more “knowing” but more doing, not knowledge but action”

What Lee suggested was to spend the last 5 minutes of every working day making out a “Must Do” list for the following day. The list should consist of 5 tasks starting with the most important to the least important.  The task should be completed starting with the top of the list and working down without moving on to the next task until the previous one is complete. “Don’t be concerned if you finish two or even one task as you will always be working on the most important one”.

Here Cameron Herold emphasised how not to get sucked into the “crackberry” culture of constantly checking and immediately responding to emails.

3.    The huddle

The huddle is a high energy seven minute daily company meeting.

The agenda for the meeting is as follows:

  • Good news (corporate and personal)
  • Numbers (achievement against goals)
  • What does it all mean? (financial achievement)
  • In the news. (what’s happening in each department, recruitment, what are you looking forward to )
  • Challenges/Frustrations/Systems/opportunities.
  • Cheer.

The principle of huddle looks like a great way to communicate and motivate a team. However the whooping and cheering may be a bit alien to the UK.

4.    Recruitment

Having the “right people on the bus” is the way Cameron Herold referred to staffing. Essentially his views were the same as “Good to Great” author Jim Collins. It is essential to get the right people in the right roles and to get rid of people who don’t fit into the business.

Pretty standard so far but it got more interesting………

His view was that the most important qualities he looked for in people were leadership and cultural fit and rather than interview people individually he recommended interviewing people in groups. A key question he would ask is “who should get the job?”

Interview over and over again until you are absolutely sure the right person is recruited.

Never interview someone that arrives late.

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5th
MAR

Online Retail To Grow By 27.8% In 2009

Posted by Michael under Online Retail

According to Verdict Research online retail will grow by 27.8% in 2009 accounting for 8.5% of total retail sales. Further research from New Media Age shows that 89% of shoppers believe that they can find better prices online.

The new media age online shopping survey has revealed spending plans for 2009 In summary the report revealed cost-conscious users intend to shop more online this year, dealing a further blow to the recession ravaged high street.

More Plan to Shop Online.

The research found 36% of consumers plan to shop online more and spend less on the high street this year. On 18-24 year olds this rose to 45% with the lucrative 25-34 year old market this was 44%.

More People Looking for Online Bargains.

The recession has made online consumers more price conscious. 34% plan to use price-comparison sites more, while 22% will increase their use of value supermarket and auction sites.

Growth of Value Retailers.

Nielsen research revealed a 64% year-on-year increase in unique visits to the site of value supermarket Aldi. The cut-price supermarket chain is expanding its online presence with the planned launch of a travel and then flowers website.

Rival supermarket Asda is also seeing growth online. Asda Direct has seen sales grow by 70% growth year on year.

What consumers think about prices online?

  • 89% believed better prices can be found online.
  • 68% said shopping online is cheaper than visiting the high street due to the rising costs of parking, petrol and transport.
  • 81% believe the internet offers a wider range of products.
  • 84% believe the internet offers ease in finding items.
  • 95% believe the internet offers in comparing prices.

How Can Online Shopping Improve?

However there is still room for improvement for online retailers.

  • 70% of consumers preferred the high Street for customer service.
  • 74% of consumers preferred the high street for lack of waiting time.

The survey found that online shoppers believed CDs and DVDs were regarded the best online bargains, followed by video games, personal electronics, books and large electrical items.

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4th
MAR

SES London 2009 Review

Posted by Michael under Paid Search, SEO Conferences and Exhibitions

SES London is still the pre-eminent UK search marketing conference.  Overall SES London is still useful if you are involved in Search but the really useful “nuggets” seem to be fewer and further apart,

The good

The presentations I enjoyed were:

1. Rob Pierre, Managing Director, Jellyfish

Advanced Paid Search Techniques

This was a really interesting and rather technical presentation on advanced methodologies for paid search campaign management.

He showed by having each keyword in all 3 match types how to make the campaign as targeted as possible. The essence of his methodology was to ensure that each keyword was associated with the most targeted ad copy possible and the most relevant landing page on the website.

The interesting part for me was how he used negative matching of keywords to ensure the correct ad text and landing page were shown. For example he would negative match on a brand term such as Sony to ensure that a search for digital camera would display a more general ad text and landing page.

2. Nick Seckold Head of Search, MindShare

Advanced Paid Search Techniques

Nick Seckold in his presentation weighed up the Value of Automated Bid Management Tools. With the popularity of bid management tools and the huge claims being made by some of the vendors, it was useful to hear about the reality of using bid management tools to manage a PPC campaign.

3. Pete Wailes, Managing Director, Searchlight Digital

Advanced Paid Search Techniques

In his presentation Pete should how Taguchi Arrays can be used to improve PPC testing. Genichi Taguchi developed statistical methods originally to improve the quality of manufactured goods. The benefit of his method is that it allows multivariate tests to generate usable data, without having to run every possible combination.

This allows PPC copy, landing pages and other factors all to be tested in one go.

The Bad

1. Mike Chowney, Managing Director Kenshoo UK

Search Advertising Tools

Maybe he was badly briefed but the session was supposed to be about “a range of popular search engine advertising tools.“

In this session Mike Chowney banged on about how good Kenshoo is !

Maybe it’s just me but when a speaker gets up at conference and shamelessly plugs their own product it really gets my goat. I have paid up to £995 per person for my ecommerce team to be at the conference. Do I really want to pay to hear your sales spiel ? I think not.

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