Pod1 Blog

Thanks to everyone who has confirmed their attendance at our Social Media Seminar on Tuesday 23rd March.

Some information about the day:
Pod1’s Mark Blenkinsop will begin with an introduction about the many different definitions of social media. Anthony Lukom and Hakan Thyr will follow this up by addressing the question of its relevance, particularly in E-commerce.

Fergal O’Mullane and Emma Griffin’s talks will focus on the nuts and bolts of the issue: the use of tools to deliver content and monitor social media strategies. We’ll round this off with a question and answer session via Twitter (#Pod1SocialSeminar) with all our speakers.

A little about our speakers:

Mark Blenkinsop, Senior Search Marketing Manager, Pod1

As the job titles suggests Mark is responsible for all things relating to Search Marketing within the agency with a particular focus on SEO and Social Media. He joined Pod1 in April 2006 with a view to integrating SEO into the agency’s’ offering and the result nearly 4 years later is a healthy client list and an expanding department. An avid interest in digital marketing with a decidedly ecommerce bias has definitely been a plus.

Anthony Lukom, Director, 33 Seconds

Anthony is currently heading 33 Seconds, a media consultancy business which specialises in Social Media. Clients include ATC Management (who work with artists such as Radiohead, Kate Nash) and BD, a creative agency, where they act as Social Media Strategists (clients include Mars, Coke, Nintendo and Cineworld).

Previously he was MD for MySpace UK for two and half years as well as European Head of Business Development. Before that he was at AOL Europe for over 7 years as Head of European Business Development, Head of Search and ran a company wide product innovation project based on Kim and Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean Strategy.

Hakan Thyr, International Partnerships Director, Bazaarvoice

Håkan has 13 years international business development experience from the IT industry with companies ranging from high-growth start-ups to established industry leaders. He has a special passion for companies that succeed by rewriting the rules of the industry. Håkan holds an MSc in Civil Engineering from Chalmers University of Technology.

Fergal O’Mullane, Director and Co-founder, 10CMS

Fergal is a director and co-founder of 10CMS and is primarily responsible for strategic business development. Fergal has worked in the digital media space since 1999 with a particular focus on retail and consumer brands and he helped form 10CMS in 2006.

10CMS is a leading provider of rich interactive merchandising for retailers in the UK and US, client experience includes LK Bennett, Anthropologie, Heal’s, Jimmy Choo and Clothing at Tesco among others.

Emma Griffin, Meltwater

Emma was part of the initial set-up of Meltwater’s Social Media monitoring arm, MBuzz early 2009. In less than a year, MBuzz has now grown to consist of 13 offices spread from California to Hong Kong with over 50 employees and from start-up to one of the most recognised Social Media monitoring providers globally.

Starting as a Sales Consultant in Meltwater News’ Dublin office in March 2007, within a year Emma moved to South Africa to help grow the operations in Cape Town. Within two years of being with the company, Emma led the set-up of our Meltwater News operations in Accra, Ghana.

Emma carries her competitive nature through to her pastimes and has competed for her country in Football, Basketball, Swimming and Lifesaving surfing! She also enjoys Yoga and is an eager cook! Emma holds a 1st Class Master Degree in International Business.

See you on the 23rd!

We are holding a seminar on social media strategies for our clients and potential clients:

If you are interested in attending please contact:  flora.malein@pod1.com

Pod1 have teamed up with Westfield London to design a microsite that promotes Westfield’s Spring/Summer 10 Fashion campaign.

“The Greatest Fashion Show on Earth” campaign, run in conjunction with the Sunday Times, is a series of fashion events held at the centre throughout March. The site provides a portal for event information, ticket booking and email sign up. The site also provides value-added content such as key trends for the season, goody bag giveaway’s and styling tips.

As the fashion events occur, rich media content and event imagery will be added to the site for users to browse.

The main catwalk shows will be held on the 19th and 20th of March 2010, and will feature over 700 luxury and high street fashion brands.

Check out the site here http://londonfashion.westfield.com/

This article at Internet Retailing reports research that suggests millions of online purchases were abandoned last year, due to poor website performance.

It’s previously been reported that a 1 second dip in page load times can lead to a 7% dip in on site conversion rates, and it’s clear that a subjectively fast website makes more money than a subjectively slow one. The problem is that infrastructure can be expensive, especially if it needs to be maintained all year for the occasional seasonal / promotional spike.

There are solutions to this problem, though. We are working with content delivery networks to deliver the high volume, large files containing images, Javascript, style sheets and such like very cost-effectively, meaning that the load on the core web-server isn’t so heavy. Our smaller clients pool their hosting resources, so they all benefit from load-balancing, multiple servers, and the performance and fault tolerance that comes with that. This year more retailers will be able to benefit from a technology called ‘private clouds’ which will enable companies like Pod1 to offer scaleable hosting on demand, on their own farms of web-servers.

It’s important to be proactive about this, if you’re to avoid revenue slipping away that could be caught. We would suggest something like the following:

• Assess what your maximum load might be on your website (this is a simple spreadsheet task that we do frequently)
• Load test your current infrastructure, capturing performance data and lots of log file data during the test
• Fix the performance issues, upgrade the hardware where necessary, but often simple application changes can help, as can cheap upgrades like content delivery networks
• Re-run the load test

Load tests should be run periodically: upgrades can cause performance issues sometimes, and other factors (like the performance of the company running your domain name services) can change over time without being immediately recognised.

Pod1 and Predictive Intent (http://www.predictiveintent.com/) have signed a partnership agreement this week, as we begin a collaboration. Predictive Intent have very clever software for automated product recommendation and merchandising, which can be easily controlled through an administrative interface. Their software is already integrated with the Magento eCommerce platform, so it will be very easy for us to roll it out to any Pod1 client who would like to take advantage of it.

Magento Enterprise has features to allow rule-based creation of product associations, with a range of input data usable. Predictive Intent can take a retailer a step further using powerful, self-improving statistical algorithms to predict which product a customer needs to see more than any other.

I demonstrate Magento Enterprise to clients quite often, and to do that effectively I’ve worked out how to install it on my MacBook. This was a complicated process the first time I did it, so I’ve documented it on my blog here.

We’re seeing a lot more Magento Enterprise enquiries and a lot fewer Community Edition enquiries of late. I think the additional functionality is proving attractive to serious retailers.

What could be better than landing at Pod1 HQ over in Westbourne Park, than arriving to a breakfast of delicious Kryspy Kreme heart-shaped doughnuts, with a huge jug of Starbucks’ finest coffee?

Well, some more pastries, namely almond-topped croissants and fresh pains au chocolat. And about a year’s worth of supplies of napkins (which will all be used – we care about the environment!) to wipe those sticky fingers and all the sumptuous raspberry jam off our chins.

I’m proud to be part of the team that organised this morning’s surprise – the look of delight from Podders as they came in made it all worth it. The office email server held up as sugar- & caffeine-rushing staff shared their feelings with tantalising photos and accounts of how they tucked into their first (and sometimes second!) meal of the day. The unfortunate ones who have been working remotely may still even smell the glazing on Monday morning…

Thank you Pod1 – we love you too!!

Read issue 3 here

For the latest and greatest, make sure you sign-up to the Pod1 newsletter here…

Published in Drapers, December 2009:

Pod1 / Varien breakfast forum at Shoreditch House

Shoreditch House was the venue for a meeting on January 12th between senior staff from Varien (the developers of Magento), Pod1 and a group of people who influence the eCommerce decisions of many of the UK’s leading retailers. The meeting was organised to help in the exchange of knowledge and ideas about what UK retailers are looking for from an eCommerce platform, how Magento might meet their needs, and the potential obstacles to Magento’s uptake. After brief introductions to Pod1 and Varien, an open discussion led us into many of the more interesting areas of the eCommerce world.

Discussion ranged from the need for simplicity and easy operation for the very small retailer to the challenge of getting an open source application accepted by a big corporate IT department. For many retailers, it’s clear that the eCommerce team is small and busy, with has high targets and high expectations set for it. Any eCommerce platform needs to help the team do complex, powerful things with ease. Merchandising is a critical task for any eCommerce team, and platforms need easy to use, powerful merchandising capabilities.

For the larger retailer the robustness of the platform, how well supported it is (24 hours per day, 365 days per year) and easy integration with corporate systems like the CRM database are more important. Vendors developing for any client need to make sure the latest whizzy front-end feature isn’t going to break the back-end administration system, and isn’t going to be a nightmare to operate.

Many retailers want to buy a turnkey solution that they just use, without the aggravation of having servers and IT teams of their own, and they increasingly ask for hosting that will get bigger and faster when it needs to (on Boxing Day, for example) and then gets smaller and cheaper when the website’s quieter.

Varien shared a great deal of information about the current and planned capabilities of Magento. They have a team dedicated to high availability enhancements and performance improvements, and regular improvements are being released to the community and enterprise editions. They hope to release a version of Magento for another database (other than MySQL) very soon. The new version of Magento Connect will be ’super easy’ to use and support charging for extensions as part of the download process. The Magento development team certainly sounds very busy.

As hosts, we hope everyone learned something from the encounter. We certainly came away with lots of ideas, information and determination to make our flavour of Magento even better than it already is.