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June 16th, 2008 |
A little online market research can go a long way when you need to track moving trends: Latest fashions, must-have lifestyle gear, best-priced jewelry, designer and knockoff shoe brands. Here are some look-out posts, social media lurking sites, and top deals listings.
Look Out Post #1: Search Trends by Keyword, Brand Name, Category.
Go to http://www.toptenwholesaletrends.com, select a time period from the drop-down box, then enter words for the merchandise you are stalking: womens handbags … mens leather … plus size denim jeans … urban and hip hop clothing … fashion watches … backpacks for adults. Alternatively, plug in search terms for the brand name of your choosing.
A click of the search button gives you a graphic line chart showing how popular – or not – your searched merchandise is. This Trends charting from TopTenWholesale dips a toe into a wholesale search database that draws from over 20,000 buy/sell search actions a week. You are pulling popularity stats – totaled search results — from manufacturers seeking resellers, power auction resellers searching for product sources, and wholesalers stalking the best off-price and returned merchandise lots.
Lurking Post #2: Hang Out in Social Media to do Buzz Checks.
Surveyors of online user behavior — Pew Internet and American Life Project – recently published results of the Internet’s influence on politics and social participation, especially among youth. Key was the UNFILTERED and NO-SPIN nature of information exchanged at social media sites; sharing the latest and greatest without going through middlemen like newscasters, publisher’s editors, advertisers or other folks with an agenda. Unfiltered and uncensored opinion.
The Pew Project simply supports what we already know: Lurking and listening at the right social media and social networking web sites can provide up-to-the-minute trend and marketing info.
· Youth Hangouts (Ages 18 to 29): Facebook, MySpace and Most-Viewed Videos at You Tube.
· Boomer Lifestyle Sites (Ages 45 to 60+): Second Life, Gather.com.
Daily Deals Lists #3: Check Top Deals Lists to Learn What Moves.
Go to main category pages at eBay, such as Fashion & Apparel or Electronics. You’ll often find a list of most active products at auction, by product or brand name, for a quick merchandise pulse check.
TopTenWholesale offers a Top Ten Daily Deals list that draws from patterns of buyer and seller search activities in over 20,000 wholesale searches on our industry network. (TopTenWholesale, OffPriceNetwork, WholesaleU, Wholezilla) See http://www.toptenwholesale.com/daily-deals.html for lists and links to the day’s hottest merchandise. Sample Top Ten Daily Deals include the latest fashion watch that tells time and holds a portable Flash drive, the most text-friendly cell phones, backpacks for grown ups from makers of the Swiss Army knife, and Lifestyle Gear (the latest healthy food dehydrators; right-priced adjustable training weights).
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Tags: eBay, marketing intelligence, popularity, search engine, SEM, social media, Wholesale Clothing, wholesale jewelry, wholesale merchandise |
May 25th, 2008 |
Talk about being herded onto the reservation!!
John Federman (CEO of Guidester, an e-commerce ad network for “major brand manufacturers”) recently warned online marketers in E-Commerce Times about Google’s Search-Within-a-Site feature launched this past March.
In brief, Google’s search-within-a-site is supposed to help users who want more drilled-down info from their first search attempt. A searcher types a company name – maybe yours – into the search field, which pulls their selected vendor – you again – into top results. Sounds terrific on the Brand Awareness Meter, doesn’t it?
Then, it gets kinky: a SECOND search bar appears under Google’s site descriptions to help the user narrow a search query to specific types of products. (We know how lazy searchers are. So anything that minimizes clicks, refines queries or pushes lots of related results is presumed Good.)
But, what’s good for the user is “dangerous” for the e-tailer, according to Federman. While that user is getting narrowed search results and abundantly helpful similar offerings, he or she has yet to get into YOUR web site. Even after typing YOUR company name in the search box.
The searcher is being held in Google second-search-box limbo. Just to rub salt in your search marketing wounds, at the same time, the user is bombarded with many vendors or products that compete with you. Thanks to AdWords.
So much for establishing brand awareness for your company and its products. Your reward for snagging potential customers – who even typed your company name into the search box – is having your carefully architected web site firewalled from your brand aware customer. Your branding efforts helped launch the AdWords fleet of competitor search advertising ships. And, you get to watch traffic, sales and page views sink from your own optimized web site. Such a deal??
Just Say No, says brand manager Federman. (Meaning: Give Google the Opt Out.) Even Bob Tedeschi, who has covered online issues since Internet Bubble 1.0 in the late 1990s for The New York Times, declared the bottom line results of Google’s NEW IMPROVED site search to be “egalitarian” in spirit, but “messy at best.”
What do you think?
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May 10th, 2008 |
Okay. That DNA stuff was an exaggeration, but not by much.
Rather than customer DNA triggering an ad serve, it will be a wireless frequency radio transmitter (RFID) woven into their turtleneck sweater. Or an infrared-readable label sewn into off-price jeans, read at the knee as they pass a counter. That’s the new future world of mobile ad serving.
Available right now. Although it has not tech-leaped yet to ad serving, cell phones in Japan already function as electronic wallets that use built-in radio frequency devices for data exchanges and payments. This current usage points to next-step features in Smart Phones, employing RFID, cameras, scanners and recognition software.
Such nifty mobile features allow bar code scanning, comparing prices at different stores, capturing a web address/URL and storing it on a Smart Phone camera image for entry later into a web browser.
Next step. Next challenge is to not simply collect URLs that snag attention from an advertising medium (poster, soup can, billboard, cereal box, side of a bus), but drive the attentive someone to a web site. This use of mobile devices pushes past simple lists of web site URLs, but hits a few snags:
· The Smart Phone must have something to “read” with its smart new recognition technology;
· That means the billboard or cereal box must be transmitting information via radio frequencies, 2-D or matrix bar codes (which, in turn, demand in-phone scanners). Some suggest voice – speaking “Find me that bison burger from the bus card” into a Smart Phone. But voice is less promising as an info transmitter (no context, opposite-meaning sound-alike mistakes, etc.);
· Last snag: Those almost-ready info transmitters (cited above) can’t read an ad billboard unless it’s standardized. That means everything must be coded or marked for phone scans – every store window display, every product package that displays ads — with EVERYONE using the same encoding scheme. As Jim Ready of MontaVista Software told E-Commerce Times: “Google has to do it before everyone else will do it.”
Future Push Ads with Near Field Communications. This is the step that leaps to Future World. It’s the mobile advertising leap that is most exciting and demands nothing – not even a mouse click – from the target customer. To me, it’s also the quantum ad leap that’s most like futuristic film Minority Report … so, it gives me the e-creeps. But I’ll save my paranoia for last. 
Auto pushing ads to users requires location-based ad serving: People pass a physical site from which ads beam to a receiver, such as their Smart Phone. Such push ads use near field technologies – WiFi, RFID, embedded short-range, Bluetooth-type low-frequency devices that “talk to” billboards. The passive ad receiver (actually a transceiver, since it also sends data to the ad-beaming billboard) need not be a mobile phone device. Those radio frequency ID labels I cited at the beginning that are sewn into clothing would do, and they do exist now in prototypes for apparel fabric manufacturers.
Look, Ma, No Mouse. Pretend you’re Tom Cruise in the film Minority Report, a former top gun in the police PreCrime Unit (PreCrime ID’s future killers and prevents murder in a time-travel way) in a futuristic Washington, D.C. Except you’re running for your life; a villain tagged you for a future murder.
You escape android enforcers by slipping into a mega mall, where you hear constant ad pitches as you run past the 22nd Century GAP store: “Welcome back, Tom. How are those Dockers pants you bought six weeks ago? We have crew neck sweaters, Tom, that will match all your ….” Fade Out as Tom Cruise passes one blabby mall board, and another starts up.
I bet those 22nd Century D.C. residents aren’t merely sporting transceivers in their clothing labels or future mobile phones. With mere RFID and near field tech, you would not hear endless and instant behavior- and individual-tracking billboards that know your every purchase … nor would the dynamically generated newspapers that gave Tom away on the subway (stories and headlines that continuously change on thin-film interactive newspapers) flip instantly to a Most Wanted Criminal photo of Cruise as he tried to hide in a train car.
Look, Ma, No Privacy. Such powerful near-field communications would have to be advanced nanotech – microscopic chip implants or nano-devices in IDs that the state tattoos on everyone. (Spoiler Alert: What dogs Tom Cruise in Minority Report is nanotech retinal eye scans. Yuck.)
Talk about irritating! I’m not the only one who gets e-creeps from this futurist scenario for mobile ad serving. It might also cause a backlash. Jim McGregor, research director at In-Stat, put it:
“How many consumers would want to walk into a shopping mall and be blasted with ads? You’d get into this whole problem with consumer privacy. Is it feasible? Yes. Would it bring up privacy concerns? You’d better believe it.”
Back to the present: The next steps in mobile, remote and near-field communications ad serving technology are getting ready for prime time today. And, they don’t rely on consumer action or clicks.
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November 30th, 2007 |
Are there still any search marketers and online commerce entrepreneurs out there who haven’t seen the light on Web 2.0 – developing social media site tools for user input and user-generated content? This should be a tipping point: Even politicians do Web 2.0 now. Politicians! Is nothing sacred?
I just got an email from California Senator Barbara Boxer, even though I’m thousands of miles away. (I opted in.) Senator Boxer invited me to see just how big the BarbaraBoxer.com community is by interactively plotting myself onto her Supporter Map. I can add a message and photo, if I like, to tell other BB.com members why I joined her community. And the senator will give me Supporter Map code to embed on my own web site, blog or MySpace page to get my friends to “plot on” too.
I was most impressed when Senator Boxer said this supporter map is “just the first of many other new Web 2.0 tools that she will be introducing to get me involved and connected with other Boxer supporters.” The senator called them Web 2.0 tools. (Okay, she IS from California.)
You might recall from this blog several weeks ago a post titled Video: The Next Killer App.
It noted a user-directed video mash up tool offered by a collaboration of political web site Huffington Post, online magazine Slate and Yahoo! Video. Salon and Huffington Post deployed user-submitted debate questions and videotaped Democratic Presidential candidates’ lengthy answers. The scannable video clips were stored at Yahoo! Video, which offered its web-based Jumpcut editing tool. Site visitors were invited to select and digitally edit their own personalized debate video mashups. (Blabby pundits, irritating moderators and windbag, rambling replies hit the digital video trashcan.)
Now that is user-generated media writ large.
If even politicos and political activists use social media user-friendly tools to connect their communities, what savvy search marketer would not go Web 2.0?
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October 10th, 2007 |
As an online marketing specialist, I’m PO’d. I like to be surprised from time to time and wish I could slap my palm to my forehead and yell, “I still don’t agree with this clown, but that’s a new wrinkle in this dirty street fight. It even makes a tiny bit of sense.”
Instead I get snores and zzzzzzzzz. On the subject of net neutrality, which affects Internet fairness and the ability of all but the hugest eCommerce businesses to operate profitably online, the elites who want to kill off the Internet Golden Goose have zero imagination. They don’t come up with surprising or logical or reasonable or even moderately interesting objections to a free, open, fair and NEUTRAL Internet. Zip. Bupkiss. Nada.
It’s S.O.S. – Same Old “Stuff.”
Who are these S.O.S. elites who want to take away the “superhighway” lanes of the “Information Superhighway?” Who are these boring macaws, who simply repeat the same old opposition to Net Neutrality, over and over, without defending their point of view? Bad Polly; No Cracker.
Opponents of a fair and neutral Internet that gives everyone equal access and the same roads, without bribes (premium prices), now include the Bush Administration Department of Justice. Add the DoJ to the original Neutral-Net-Haters who lobby government regulators for favors, the National Cable & Telecommunications Association.
Yawn. I’m too bored by this unsurprising link between U.S. Regulators and the Mega-Bucks Industry Associations Who Lobby Them … against the interests of all the rest of us. In petroleum markets, that’s called a “cartel.” If you want to see a quick overview of the Net Neutrality issue – complete with impacts on marketers, plus links to the Pros (Save The Internet) and the Con Artists cited above – see Jason Prescott’s “The President’s Lounge” perspective at this page link:
When I’m done being bored by foxes guarding the hen house who co-opt the coop owners, I’m going to keep writing my Congressional reps and senators, asking them to support Net Neutrality and to oppose a TeleCom Industry-controlled Internet. Especially now that the issue of Net Neutrality is all mixed up with illegal wiretapping of Americans’ phones and email. (The same old solid citizens of the TeleCom Industry Association who oppose Net Neutrality also helped the Bush Administration illegally wiretap Americans without required FISA warrants … and without a peep about the laws they were breaking. Now they want a get-out-of-jail-free card: Immunity from prosecution for breaking U.S. law. See this activist social media site for details and links on that S.O.S.
It’s over, baby. The surprise and bubbles are gone from our relationship. I get no high from Monopoly TeleCom Champagne, Registered Origin: Greed-ville USA. Let’s tip a few to Net Neutrality.
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October 3rd, 2007 |
October is the month that online gift shoppers pull out their holiday shopping lists, at least according to Holiday eSpending reports from Nielsen/NetRatings, Harris Interactive and Goldman Sachs.
Online holiday shopping trends from 2005 and 2006 held steady for timing of shopper activities, though the hottest spending categories have shifted slightly.
The eSpending Report starts tracking online holiday gift buyers over a seven-week period, beginning the end of October. Its national holiday shopper survey polls 1,000 adult online consumers a week, and analyzes the spending attitudes and behaviors of a total 7,500+ online shoppers per season.
Past Findings: Over fifty percent of online shoppers have finished their holiday shopping within a week of Christmas … although only slightly over one-third said they were done two weeks before Christmas.
According to retail analysts at Nielsen//NetRatings, online shoppers are starting their shopping later and later in the season for holiday spending tracked in recent years. Online marketers can capture that 50-to-54 percent who are finished by mid-December by guaranteeing delivery right up through December 24, which falls on a Monday and the end of a three-day shopping weekend this year.
Nielsen//NetRatings’ holiday retail analyst also suggests offering additional discounts and shipping incentives early in the holiday shopping season … to capture online shoppers before they go “last minute” over the three-day weekend in bricks-and-mortar stores.
Topping eSpending Report online shopping lists the past two holiday seasons were Apparel/Clothing, Computer Hardware/Peripherals and Consumer Electronics … in that order. Online Retail Industry Analysts see some softening in overall spending projections for this season, due to larger economic, employment and mortgage market weaknesses.
However, consumer Electronics sales (particularly with release of the iPhone and iPod Nano) are expected to remain strong; Discount and Priced-to-Sell Apparel/Clothing are expected to move. Sales of toys imported from China and the Pacific Rim are a question mark, given CPSC product safety recalls (lead paint, hazardous small parts). Some retail analysts see revenue levels for lower volume but higher-priced toys sourced in North America and Europe as compensating for declines caused by the Chinese import toy recalls.
Start thinking Christmas and Holiday Shopping Cheer before putting the Halloween costumes and candy corn back into cyber-inventory. Smart online marketers might want to capture that persistent 10% of online shoppers who still, as of one week before Christmas, have not yet cracked their holiday lists.