Pod1 Blog

Google recently announced it would allow limited use of trademarks in the text of some search ads in the US, even if the trademark owner objects.

While previously brand owners could specify which retailers or affiliates were able to reference their trademarked brand name, any advertiser who sells a brand on its website can now use that brand name in the text of their Google ads.

Google’s Trademark policy change in the US is likely to impact a wide range of advertisers, brand owners, competitors, and affiliates. However, it is the brand owners who should be particularly vigilant of the new ramifications.

Google claims the reason for the change is, “this will help both our users and advertisers by reducing the number of overly generic ads”, but doesn’t mention the fact that this change will push up the Cost Per Click (CPC) of terms for the brand owner through increased competition.

For more information see the Econsultancy article & Google’s Blog Inside Adwords.

Let’s do Web 2.0. Ahh the whiff of CEO speak still coming strong off this one but what can Web 2.0 actually do for you. Well it’s certainly not the funky Ajax Interfaces usually associated with Web 2.0 but the actual content that comes with it. As Christmas is looming I would like to talk about Point No.4 of my Top Ten tips for Christmas.

User generated content and specifically Emotionally Connecting Stories and User Ratings & Reviews will help in appealing to the right audiences and increase customer satisfaction.

Attracting the right customers onto your website is crucial in delivering against your KPIs. Vast amounts of traffic on the website which yields no conversion is not helpful in achieving these goals. One of the most effective marketing methods is to help users to make the right decision and letting other users tell them why your services are the best.

Offering users the chance to read stories and ratings & reviews you cater for all 4 personality types your users come in onto your website in all stages of the purchasing cycle (See: Further Reading Section below). The Spontaneous will buy there and then, the competitive type will be catered for through being assured to be getting the best rated product, the humanistic users will love the fact they can read what others experienced and the Methodical will happily read every review.

81% of shoppers use consumer reviews in their purchase decisions [Source: Nielsen Online via BizReport, February 2009]

Purchase Cycle

To generate the necessary buzz you need to tie any activity around user generated content into a marketing campaign that is tailored to the audience you would like to attract.

Social Media content is usually presumed as something for the under 20ties. However, a recent study by Jupiter Research (NDP Individual User Survey 6/08) uncovered that once you move away from social networking sites the consumer landscape becomes much more equivalent.

The age groups 35-44, 45-54 and 55+ make a staggering 60% of users who read comments posted on mainstream media websites about products or services they are interested in. Instead of these websites your business can profit from having the voice of the customer on your own site.

By allowing users to post stories on your website, this content will directly connect to your prospects as it was written by actual customers. It will use the same language they speak, it will have the same emotions they have and will eventually lead to a positive experience as your business will be seen as the solution to their problem (What watch to buy, What trip to book etc.)

This follows the marketing principle of AIDAS:

• Attention
• Interest
• Desire
• Action
• Satisfaction

User generated content, and specifically customer experience stories, answers the first three of these steps of the users Purchasing Cycle. They appeal to the right half of the brain which controls emotions. Appealing to the emotional side of your customer is important as most purchases are emotional. Action is a rational action and relies on a well thought out user journey more than on a nice story told by your customers.

Users who enter the “Action” stage need more stimulation of the left half of their brain, the rational side. If you want to cater for the left half of the brain, ratings and reviews are your friend. Ratings give a clear indication of why the rated products are good or bad, it reduces returns. (Shoeonline’s return-o-meter for example: http://www.getelastic.com/webinar-recap-ecommerce-innovations/) and increases customer satisfaction. Reviews, even negative ones, help and make customers trust you (http://www.grokdotcom.com/2009/05/06/you-can%E2%80%99t-edit-your-way-out-of-negative-reviews/) and will ultimately take action and convert.

More than half of consumers said they spent 10 minutes or more reading reviews before deciding whether to purchase. [Source: The e-tailing Group, Feb 2008]

Satisfaction is triggered by an emotional stimulus (having bought the product) but out of control with User Generated content. Your business needs to deliver this through the way you speak and treat your customers. Interestingly you can give them satisfaction without converting by publishing their content swiftly.

User generated content needs to be moderated and evaluated. Having the content on your site is not only helpful for your customers but for your business as well. Listening to what your users have to say has proven remarkable powerful to drive change and improvements.

Moderating the content is laborious so an outsourced solution is best for ROI as the content is monitored 24/7. Not only profanities are filtered but your own business rules can be applied (No talk of competitors etc.). Having an expert tag your content for SEO, link to products if need be is key to the success of implanting a solution to drive user generated content.

As most Clicks&Mortar business’ you have an online and an offline channel. These are not isolated but work in conjunction. Users see your business as one despite potential separation inside your business. Your customer doesn’t know about this and, frankly, doesn’t care either. Through various customer surveys Pod1 produced evidence that users are cross checking these channels and decide where and when they want to convert depending on the information available in each channel.

Do you want to take action and achieve your KPI’s? Not sure how to combine offline and online? Let’s talk about it.

Further Reading
AIDAS, Marketing principles :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIDA_(marketing)
Personality types (Spontaneous, Competitive, Humanistic and Methodical) who come to your site:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_types
E-Consultancy Internet Statistics Compendium May 2009 Section 6.3:
http://econsultancy.com/reports/internet-statistics-compendium

An online exhibition showcasing designers’ view of Europe.

Design Week’s annual Top 100 Consultancy Survey was released recently and Pod1 (London/NYC) was ranked 8th out of all the digital agencies that featured. Not bad for an independent agency i reckon..

We’re not ashamed to admit it, but we’d rather be no.1, but it’s nice to be mentioned. Collectively, the digital agencies mentioned earned £63.14m last year compared with £48.31m in 2007, a massive hike of 29%.

Out of all the disciplines (Interiors, Exhibitions, Branding, Print, Corporate Identity, product, Digital and ‘other’), we were ranked 35 out of 100.

Congratulations to Imagination who topped the list for the 2nd year running and all the other hard working, blood sweating, creatively led agencies that featured.

Onwards and upwards.

The latest viral for Phones4u promoting the website let’s you find out… how much of a loser are you… Yes, that’s right. This brilliant ‘non-offensive’ website let’s you upload a photo of someone’s face, then choose the type of insult you want to use and… vuala! You can watch the video of the guy insulting the chosen one and then you can send it to anyone you like.

Be to sure to check it out and find out how much of a loser are you.. just read the small print.*

*The content is for entertainment purposes and should not be used to cause distress or offence.

http://www.areyoupopular.co.uk

We had an audit this week of our compliance to the PCI-DSS standard for handling of payment card details. This is an important subject for serious eCommerce companies, and we’re aiming to be accredited within the next few months.

The handling of payment card details online has come under close scrutiny this year. There have been several high profile breaches of data security, and even some of the payment service providers have been in trouble. Visa has already introduced fines for larger retailers who don’t meet the standards. In the eCommerce world, the most important standards relate to how card data is handled by a business (PCI-DSS) and how a software application handles them (PA-DSS). Most businesses need to comply with PCI-DSS, but if you built an application that handles card data you might need to comply with PA-DSS as well.

The standards apply to a whole business, so Pod1 becoming compliant won’t be sufficient for its clients to say that they are as well. Companies need to look at their whole business from end to end. For example, there might be a call centre that takes orders over the phone. If they ever take credit card details from customers, they’ll need to get their processes and controls straight. Lots of clients have logins to payment service provider terminals (where you can manage your payments and refunds) and things like password security, logging who did what when and so on will all need to be considered.

We’ve recognised this is an important issue for our clients. We’re working with our PCI Auditor, Evolution Security Systems, and our other partners to make sure we’re doing our bit. To help our clients to address the issue we’ll be organising a seminar about it very soon. If you’re a client who’s interested in attending, you should let your account manager know.

Social media is everywhere at the moment, you can’t pick up a paper or browse a news site online without finding a mention of it somewhere, and probably 90% of this is focused on Twitter.

With all the noise around it, brand owners are starting to sit up and take notice, and ask how social media can be used as a commercial tool.

While many retail and e-commerce brands have been slow to jump on the bandwagon, there are some that are starting to reap the rewards of joining the Twitterati.

Read the article in full on Fresh Thinking Business

Welcome back to our weekly summary of news from InternetRetailing.net

Not everyone is Dell

As a little follow-up to last weeks announcement by Dell to be making money off twitter. It seems retailer Habitat has over done the keywords a bit on the tweets. They used unrelated hash tagssuch as #iPhone, #mms and even #Mousavi or #Iran to promote offers and such. Obviously tweeters weren’t too happy about this. Sky News Article

Consumer Rights online

The Department for Business, Innovation & Skills will launch a big media campaign focussing on Consumer Rights Online. It seems that only 56% consumers feel confident about returning goods or complaining about services provided.
We at Pod1 always feel that the less legal-ize you have in your T&C’s and your Delivery & Returns policies the happier your customers will be.

Security still a major concern for Shoppers

According to a WebCredible poll most users build on the retailers reputation more than on the price. Looks and ease of use feature on ranks 3 and 4. From our own research done using 4Q’s customer satisfaction survey we find the same and recommend to re-enforce that shopping on the retailers website is secure. A recent announcement by the office of fair trading uncovered the same issue. Full Webcredibles poll here:

http://www.webcredible.co.uk/user-friendly-resources/polls/

Sock Shop goes Viral

The formerly battered retailer Sock Shop is using Viral to build brand awareness. This in itself tells me that they understand what viral does. “Brand Awareness “and not Sales is what Virals do. Sure you hope to get some of the back of this but it will not deliver a magic uplift during the time it runs.

E-Commerce growing slower

According to the IMRG Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index e-commerce had its lowest growth ever at 8.2%. Health & Beauty are up due to the good weather and so is the electronics sector. Apparel has suffered quite a bit though.

Occado will be hosting in-house

We hear this questions time and time again, why does hosting cost £ such and such. Well if you want to look up the price list for what Occado has just bought you’d be amazed how cheap hosting has become. As a pure-play online retailer though, it does seem logical to build your own infrastructure after you are past a certain threshold. So “No”, a 1000 orders a month isn’t enough but 100.000 might be.

Who should own Social Media?

It seems that businesses are picking up on social media (see above) but are still struggling to fit it into their organisational structures. Does it belong to PR or to Direct marketing? Seeing what Habitat did I would say PR as the Marketing guys can sometimes get a bit too excited. Social Media for me doesn’t follow strict structures anymore. I would think that PR should provide the voice and Marketing the incentives, maybe it’s time for retailers to re-think their structures here.

http://www.internetretailing.net/news/ sends me an interesting newsletter every week. If you don’t have time to read it in full, come back here next week.

Pod1 NYC is proud to announce it’s latest client win – John Varvatos.  Pod1 New York will be redesigning the John Varvatos eCommerce site over the next month and releasing a series of brand experience pieces later in the year.

John Varvatos is a brand that occupies a major space in the landscape of American design. Launched in 2000 with a collection of tailored clothing and sportswear the brand now represents an entire lifestyle that includes belts, bags, footwear, eyewear, limited edition watches, luxury  skincare and fragrances, as well as the younger, edgier John Varvatos *USA collection. Varvatos has as well collaborated with Converse which gave rise to the  reinterpreted
Version of the classic Chuck Taylor All Start and Jack Purcell Sneakers..

Some of John Varvatos’ memorable ad campaigns feature legendary icons such as Iggy Pop, Alice Cooper and Velvet Revolver. Varvatos has been recognized by the CFDA with the Perry Ellis Award for the New Menswear Designer of the year in 2001 and 2005. In 2007 he was named GQ magazines Designer of the Year.

Chromium, the open source version of Google Chrome, now includes a more customizable new tab page. This allows you to pin, remove and reorder thumbnails without having to enter the edit mode. Pinned items are always displayed in the new tab page, which now only shows 8 thumbnails, even if they’re no longer visited frequently.

The list of search engines and the recent bookmarks have been removed and there’s a new section of recent activities that includes recently-closed tabs and recent downloads. Another new section is called “recommendations”, but is still a work in progress.

You can hide the thumbnails, hide the list of recent activities and the recommendations if you don’t find them useful.

The updated tab page is not yet ready to be released, but you can enable it if you have a recent Chromium build (Windows, Mac, Linux) by editing the desktop shortcut and adding the following flag in the target field:

–new-new-tab-page

Full Article on Google Operating System