Timberline Interactive

Today I got a morning wakeup call from Erica Napoletano (aka Redhead Writing, @readheadwriting on Twitter) who posted her first video blog entry -- great coverage of an Xbox Kinect "sneak peek" demo hosted in Denver by Edelman PR.

I'm not a gamer. Nor is Erica (although she has some serious Frogger and Ms. Pacman creds from the late Seventies and early Eighties). But her vlog on the Xbox Kinect demonstrates that games without controllers -- optically tracking hundreds of motion-points on the bodies of their players -- have taken a quantum leap. Wii may have revolutionized the game industry, but Kinect is now miles ahead.

While Wii has a motion-sensing controller, with Kinect there is no controller at all. It's your body -- the most intuitive input device possible. As Erica puts it, "Wii is dead."

Why is this important to non-gamers, to ecommerce execs, for instance?

We are moving beyond typing and mouse-clicking. We are moving to a world of effortlessly organic, gestural computing, courtesy of touch-screens, ultra-sensitive gyroscopes, and optical sensors.

If we're not at the forefront of developing more intuitively-navigated, fun, game-like ecommerce experiences, somebody will eat our lunch.

That wakeup call was soon followed by a similar riff from Seth Priebatsch, in a video of his TEDxBoston presentation called "Building the Game Layer on top of the World." Seth argues compellingly that today's web and mobile users expect and demand game mechanics built into everything they do online (and in large measure, offline as well). Facebook defines and dominates the current game, thanks to its half-billion members and its social graph API. Seth points out that to make a successful application today that is driven by gaming motivations, you simply have to do it within the structure established by Facebook, period.

Off Facebook, though, there's a bewildering array of competing "games" -- credit card cashback deals, airline frequent flier plans, bar happy hours, Farmville. To the degree that these programs capture their user's attention and their passions, and ignite a spark of competitiveness and dangle the prospect of a reward, they can be successful. But in the near future, Priebatsch sees a more unified and consistent "game layer" evolving as a web standard.

As Priebatsch implicitly warns, those online stores, websites, promotions, and mobile apps that ignore game theory, that are not inherently fun and addictive, will be passed by.

It reminds me of the mantra of Ben & Jerry's ice cream. I can hear future consumers asking, "If it's not fun, why do it?"

eBay pioneered game-ecommerce with its auction model, but the times, they are a' changin'. Today, a crowd of new ecommerce players has emerged that employ game-mechanics in more innovative and social ways. Groupon, Etsy, Woot, Swoopon, Blippy, Swipely, GoTryItOn, and others will blow your mind when you consider 1) How much fun and social reinforcement is built into these models, and 2) How far behind your online store (and mine!) is.

On that subject, in July, VC Josh Goldman gave a terrific and insightful keynote at Sydney, Australia's Online Retailer conference, entitled Extreme Retail, Disruptive Models from the Bleeding Edge

Between these three, the message is clear: For ecommerce, web, and mobile, it's game on!

Gap's 50%-discount offered on the collective-buying site Groupon last week rang up a reported $11 million in sales, says ClickZ, and in the process demonstrated some best practices for ecommerce in this new, more social Web 2.0 era.

According to Groupon spokesperson Julie Mossler, the Gap offer was the most successful Groupon promotion to date, ringing up as many as 532 transactions per minute during its busiest periods Thursday morning. Traffic was so intense that Groupon had to manage the load by directing visitors to alternate landing pages in order to avert a server crash.

What I find impressive about the Gap campaign is the sheer number of coordinated moving parts cross-promoting a single offer:

• 15 million Gap and Groupon email subscribers receive the offer, starting at midnight and in staggered fashion throughout the day
• The offer is tweeted to the 180,000+ followers of Twitter's @earlybird promoted tweet stream
• Gap tweets the offer to its 30,000+ followers
• Groupon manually tweets and Facebook posts on its pages dedicated to each of the 85 geographical markets where Gap's offer is valid
• Gap posts the offer to its 606,000 fans on Facebook
• Groupon's 1,500 affiliate partners post Gap's offer on their websites
• A sponsored post appears above the fold on Digg

All in all, it sounds like a big win for Gap, and impressive evidence of how online promotion and social shopping, courtesy of Groupon, can drive sales to brick and mortar stores.

"Our customers had been asking us to feature a national retailer, and the Gap deal was a perfect fit for Back-To-School and even pre-holiday shopping," Mossler explained. "Gap even has stores where Groupon hasn’t launched yet; so, it’s a perfect way to reach new and existing Groupon fans with a deal they won’t find anywhere else."

According to a new poll, a whopping 72% of brand managers say that while Social Media offers great potential to reach existing customers and prospects, they lack tools and information to conduct a successful Social Media program.

The poll, conducted by Harris Interactive for the agency Buddy Media, reported tracking or measuring ROI to be the number one thorn in marketers' sides.

The survey also found surprisingly few big companies have stepped up to the plate with Facebook programs. Facebook has now surpassed 500 million users worldwide, making it the largest and fastest-growing communication platform in the world. Yet only one-third of large companies (revenues above $100M) are currently using Facebook.

Here are the leading social media stumbling blocks reported by marketers:

I just received a call for speakers that might be of interest to any marketers, merchants, consultants and techies with Web 2.0 or social media chops. It's the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, which was created by the coiners of the term "web 2.0" themselves, John Battelle and Tim O'Reilly.

Battelle and O'Reilly's are also behind the exclusive, invitation-only Web 2.0 Summit, which is held at the Palace Hotel and San Francisco and serves a much smaller and more elite crowd than the Expo. So you want to hobnob with celebrity geeks like Sergey Brin, Tim Berners Lee, and Marc Zuckerberg? I don't blame you. But you'll have to request an invitation.

Meanwhile, if the Web 2.0 Expo is more your style, it will be held March 28 - 31, 2011 at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco. And if you want to be a speaker, brace yourself for a highly competitive process. They're looking for original, buzzword-free topics, and they require a video example of your presentation style. The Web 2.0 Expo selects only about one presentation proposal for every ten they receive, making them about as selective as the U.S. Naval Academy or Brown University.

We've been doing a lot of Google Analytics audits, debugging and configuration. It's a crucial time for ecommerce merchants to be thinking about the state of their web analytics, and the correctness of the data. Weak though the ecomony may be, the dog days are summer are quickly giving way to fall/holiday (or should we say "Fall-iday?").

Of course, back-to-school merchandising has been in full swing for a couple months. This weekend when I popped into the supermarket for some milk, I was blown away to see full displays of Halloween candy. Consumers may not have to fall and winter months in mind yet, but hopeful merchants are all over it.

If your analytics are configured incorrectly, you'll be without a proper roadmap for assessing what your current baseline looks like, and what aspects of your Holiday season campaigns and merchandising are successful and which are not. Even worse, bad data may make you draw completely wrong conclusions -- taking credit for internally-placed test orders, say, or classifying paid search traffic and sales as organic. If you can't properly tie online revenues to their source, you're bound to terminate some successful campaigns and perpetuate some dogs.

So here's our list of the most frequently seen Google Analytics configuration errors -- and how to fix them:

1.) Failing to tag paid search campaigns. Google can let you employ "autotagging" to effortlessly track whether your Google search traffic (and sales) is paid or organic. But paid campaigns at Bing, Yahoo, and third-tier search engines will look like free, organic traffic unless you use campaign tracking links to tell GA otherwise.

2.) Failing to track email. The house email is the biggest-yielding channel for most ecommerce merchants. If you don't use campaign-tracking codes, you'll have no easy way to track the total revenue contribution of your house email, or its effect on your total conversion rate. It's also imperative to track your Abandoned Cart email and other transactional emails as a separate class of email campaign. We use utm_medium = email to tag all emails, and utm_source to discriminate which list is being sent, and whether it is from our transactional or promotional email programs.

3.) Failing to filter internal traffic and test orders. Everything from conversion rate to raw revenue numbers can be rendered meaningless if your web team or IT department places a lot of test orders without setting up an exclude filter. You can still maintain an "all traffic" profile -- so that you can SEE the results of tests you need to place, for instance! -- but set up at least one profile filtering out internal IP addresses. That way you'll know what the REAL top and bottom lines are.

4.) Failing to track on-site search. Not all web platforms are engineered to display the search term in the URL of the results page, but most are. GA provides a basic reporting of top search terms, and the overall share of users who use on-site search, and how much business they do (almost always well above your site average). There's no native reporting of no-results-found, but it's a start -- and a vital insight into one of the most important merchandising tools on your site. Plus, without baselining your site's current on-site search metrics, you'll have no way to gauge whether an advanced third-party search like SLI is worth the money.

5.) Overreporting on-site search. Some website owners like to configure internal links on their site, or landing pages from paid search or email, as search results pages, rather than having to build special category pages or static landing pages. That can be smart merchandising, but if you do it, also set up an additional profile or "advanced segment" to exclude visitors by medium. Otherwise you'll be overstating your on-site search usage, and probably understating conversion rate.

6.) Overusing profiles. Now, virtually all of the functions of separate analytics profiles can be played by Advanced Segments. Setting up advanced segments is pretty easy, they're convenient to apply or unapply to any report you're working with, and they save you the hassle of setting up the same goals and other settings across a ton of different profiles.

7.) Setting up the shopping cart funnel one page too late. The shopping cart should be the first page of your conversion funnel, NOT the check-out page. When we say a 50% cart abandonment rate is about the industry average, we're talking about the opposite of funnel conversion rate, if you start at the shopping cart. The later you start your funnel, the more falsely inflated your numbers will be. The cart is a critical page to track in the funnel, because it also tells you your engagement rate (or the percent of site visitors who add anything to the cart). And it tracks the performance of the first page of the checkout -- which, along with the final step, when consumers have to actually part with their moolah -- is one of the hardest transitions in ecommerce.

8.) Failing to test. Web analytics are not just stale numbers -- they're calls to action to solve shoppers' problems, make the online experience easier, more compelling, faster, better. Anybody who has been doing ecommerce awhile knows that their best hunches and marketing instincts should be tested and quantified to see what (if any) lift they provide. So using analytics to baseline your performance, and then the Google Website Optimizer testing tool (or the A/B testing features in Adwords) enables you to prove your instincts right or wrong. We never stop learning at this game!

9.) The "Site Overlay" report. Don't worry, it's not your fault. Google Analytics' Site Overlay report just sucks. It doesn't work. I've never seen it work. It combines the stats of any duplicate links on the page, and the data is always screwy. If you want a better view of how web shoppers are actually responding to your navigational and merchandise offerings, you need to use a good, inexpensive third-party tool loke CrazyEgg or ClickTale.

Facebook just made a big play for the mobile and local markets with the launch of Facebook Places.

Like the Foursquare mobile app, Facebook Places let's you "check in" to retail establishments and other bricks-and-mortar locations, and broadcast it to your social network and the world at large. For businesses, the app gives "place" owners lots of tools to network, communicate, and promote to Facebook users.

The similarities to Foursquare are no surprise, since Facebook built Places in a partnership with Foursquare and rival localization company Gowalla.

PC World has a good article about how to use Facebook Places, how to claim your business or other location -- and how not to embarrass yourself in front of friends, colleagues, clients or your spouse (by, for instance, checking into a strip club when you're supposedly working late).

Exact Target just released results of their survey of 1,500 consumers to identify the main reasons they might follow a brand or company Twitter feed -- and what other online behaviors the most active Twitterers demonstrate, including brand mentions, ratings and reviews, and word-of-mouth (or word-of-mouse) product recommendations to friends.

Some of the findings are unremarkable. It comes as no surprise, say, that active Twitter users are also more likely to blog about a product or write an online review.

What I thought was interesting was the array of reasons Twitter users cited for following a brand or company:

The second-biggest player in organic search is now officially Binghoo (or is it Yahing?). Yahoo searchers in the US and Canada have today begun to see "Powered by Bing" appearing at the bottom of their results pages. Microsoft is supplying organic results to Yahoo via an API connection.

The two companies announced the launch yesterday. US and Canada are the first affected markets; Europe will follow suit.

Under the partnership deal announced last year, Microsoft is responsible for crawling, indexing and ranking organic search listings for web pages, videos and images. Yahoo remains responsible for how the content looks on the page, including, for instance, whether to sprinkle local listings, paid inclusion results, and other listings within the Bing-supplied organic results.

Mediapost reported that the organic search transition should take several weeks, according to Betty Stooksberry, senior director of the search alliance at Yahoo.

Looking to put a value on a Facebook fan? First, let's agree the value of social media, of creating strong and sincere connections with your best customers and evangelists, is NOT about a number.

That said, I can't resist the question. Thanks to the rapid growth of social media, and the low cost for businesses to get involved, most companies have waded into social media experimentally, without doing any return-on-investment forecasting.

But doing social correctly takes both time, effort, creativity, and some money -- whether it be investments in staff, technology, or advertising spend. eMarketer reported US companies will spend 24% more on advertising on social networks this year, for a total of $1.7 billion

The cost of an ambitious social media program is still miles below what we're accustomed to paying for paid search, professional SEO, or even email (traditionally the least expensive, highest-ROI online marketing channel). But as social-media budgets rise, so does the need, company-wide, to track the return on that investment.

How do we do it?

First, recognize that for most companies and organizations, your social media program is not primarily a customer acquisition channel. It is more of a loyalty/retention channel. Unless you're doing a viral campaign to attract fans and followers to an inherently entertaining or cause-driven social media group, I'll bet your online community is made up mostly of your hard-core, existing customers. They're people who learned about your fan page thanks to the Facebook icon in your emails or on your website, or by Facebook Connect functionality built into your site).

They're people who want to deepen their connection with you. Maybe they want to stay up to date with your latest news or deals, maybe they see your social site as an additional channel for customer service inquiries or even complaints.

Certainly there's value to cementing a stronger and more personal relationship with your best customers. But what is it?

Recently, Syncapse published a case study entitled The Value of a Facebook Fan: An Empirical Review (PDF). Among the findings:

• People who become "fans" of a brand spend on average $71.84 more per year than non-fans
• Fans are 28% more likely to continue using the brand
• Fans are 41% more likely to recommend the brand to others

You probably see the logical flaw here. What came first, the chicken of the egg? Did the act of "friending" cause the buying behavior, or did preexisting strong brand loyalty inspire the friending? Or is there no causal link at all? As they say in statistics, "correlation does not imply causation." In other words, we cannot conclude that vacationing in the Hamptons boosts your 401-K, or wearing Lacoste makes you a good tennis player. These things may be associated with one another, without having a direct cause-and-effect relationship.

I believe Facebook fans have both a direct and an indirect value for your company. First, direct value:

1. You should already know an estimated lifetime value for a customer. Let's say it is $500.
2. You should also already know the average acquisition cost of a new customer. Call it $35.
3. Assuming your Facebook fanbase demonstrates a higher annual order value, you can calculate the lift in lifetime value.
4. Track new customers originating from Facebook and compare their acquisition cost, which will range from zero (for word-of-mouth referrals) to whatever you may be spending to attract customers via social media advertising. Ideally, your Facebook activities will be lowering your average customer-acquisition cost.
5. Using campaign tracking links, you can follow the total and per-fan reveneues driven from your fan page
6. If you establish a Facebook store, divide its total revenues by the fanbase

Now for the intangibles:

The social media platform company Vitrue performed a different analysis, calculating the "alternate media value" of all the positive brand mentions and buzz posted by fans on social media. Aggregated and divided by fans across its platform, Vitrue arrived (voila!) at the magic number of $3.60 per fan.

Another valuable but difficult to measure benefit of a social media presence is external links. The more people are talking about you and sharing links about you, the better. While Facebook is not a crawlable source of external links, the gool old blogosphere still is. And a strong presence in social media cannot be limited to Facebook and Twitter -- it must carry over into blogs, ratings and reviews sites, and other crawlable, people-powered, social sites.

So, to further calculate the value of a Facebook fan, benchmark your external links. If they are going up, year-over-year, and so is your Facebook fanbase and so is your SEO revenue, it's fair to attribute some of the increasing SEO revenues to your presence in social media. Divide the value across your fanbase.

But for now, the short answer? Let's just add Syncaps and Vitrue's numbers and call it a day:

A Facebook fan is worth $75.44. :)

"Must come up with fresh, relevant ecommerce and online marketing blog entries daily..."

"If only I could only... reach... my Utility Belt!"

Okay, maybe the challenge of daily blog-authoring isn't as dramatic as the struggles of TV Batman against Catwoman and his other foes, but hey, it ain't easy.

As you can see by Timberline Interactive's own blog-posting frequency, we're not setting a perfect example. You know how it is -- bubbling pots on the front-burner need your attention. Even when you're ready to write a timely and important post, doesn't it pay to perhaps spend a few days refining and polishing it?

But new evidence strongly demonstrates the SEO and traffic-building benefits of regular daily posting -- that's every day daily -- are very compelling. In fact, when social media blogger Justin Kownacki reasoned that fewer, longer, more carefully written posts might be a better strategy for him than shorter, daily posts, he kept careful track of the results.

It wasn't pretty. His page views declined 36% in a matter of four months. His Alexa traffic ranking, relative to other websites, slipped from about 162,000 to over 245,000.

What Kownacki's data doesn't show is whether the fall-off was related primarily to declines in organic search visits, but that's the conclusion drawn by Bruce Clay in a related post.

The lesson here: Google and the other search engines are on a constant, minute-by-minute scouring of the web for fresh, high-quality content. Google treats blog posts and news posts as a special type of content, often rewarding them with high rankings right out of the gate, then (unless external links argue otherwise) usually letting them sink in the rankings as they age.

Also, there's value in timely posts that match emerging topics newly on the minds of web searchers. For instance, when I blogged months ago about the new "Google would like access to your location" message, I was one of the first to address it in a blog post. The piece garnered tons of traffic from people trying to figure out the implications -- and I'm still number one for such searches.

So, fellow ecommerce geeks and social-media folks, I know it's a grind, but brew yourself a fresh pot of coffee and roll up your sleeves. If your blog is worth writing at all, it's worth writing daily.

My personal experiment? starting today, I'm going to start writing brief daily posts (well, five a week), instead of my current every-week-or-so schedule. After a few months, I'll share the results, with a special eye toward whether the daily posting schedule boosts search-engine traffic.

Read more:

• Bruce Clay: Blogging for SEO - Strong Evidence Suggests Daily Posts
• Justin Kownacki: What I Learned from Blogging Weekly Instead of Daily
  

By the way, Kownacki plans a follow-up experiment: Blogging three times a week, in hopes that it's the happy medium that improves his personal workflow, and also has a neutral to positive effect on traffic. We wish him the best of luck and thank him for sharing his experience!