The Istobe eCommerce Analytics Blog

Since I’ve begun talking about twitter analytics, I’ll just keep on keeping on. After all, it’s the most greenfield thing out there right now and it’s interesting to speculate on which metrics will come to rule the roost. In Despite Recession, More Than 50% of Marketers Increase Spending on Social Media, Sarah Perez from ReadWriteWeb notes that social media spending is on the rise. Of course it is; that’s about keeping up with the Joneses. But in paraphrasing the shiny, happy report from our Forrester friend and prolific tweeter @jowyang, Perez drops a bomb in the third-to-last paragraph.

Read The State of Twitter Metrics: Social Media Stumbling Block? »

We’ve done our fair share of blogging about using Twitter and Facebook as marketing media.  We have little doubt that social media as a marketing platform will only grow in importance but occasionally even we suffer a bit of Twitter fatigue.

Read Some Twitter Marketing Perspective »

I often feel that email is the neglected step child of retail marketing. We’ve all seen the news articles and blog posts that tout sexier marketing trends like Twitter and mobile marketing. Many retailers have already jumped on the social media and company blog bandwagon and will spend months planning and implementing these changes on their website. Yet, I so often run into marketers that are willing to throw together a weekly sales email in an hour and blast the same message to their entire customer list.  Why? Well, my guess is they are underestimating the “response” they get from email. Catalogers are quick to argue that offline communications drive online purchases, but how is online communication driving offline sales?

Read Why Getting Email Marketing Right is so Important »

Not sure if you’ve used any of HubSpot’s Graders. Right now the Graders come in three flavors (Website, Press Release, and Twitter) and one in-progress flavor (Facebook Profile). Whether or not the latter two offer anything but ego-validation for single, consumer adherents - as opposed to true metrics by which businesses can assess their efficacy - is still TBD. But one thing is obviously true, the Graders tap into an innate need to contextualize ourselves, to rank ourselves. They also tell us how just a few metrics tell us a lot about how good we are. It’s this aim to simplify the complex, and to do so in a way that still portrays the full story, that moved us to build the Customer Scorecard.
Read Fans of Twitter Grader Should Check Customer Scorecard »

Not sure how many of you followed the online discussion this weekend about how Kmart (and therefore parent company Sears) used paid incentives to get bloggers to write about and tweet about their shopping excursions to the store. While we’ve talked quite a bit on our blog about using Twitter as a tool for getting messages out about products or services, in most instances, we were referring to company sponsored tweets or blogs. In this instance, well-known bloggers with an established follower network were given a $500 shopping spree to Kmart and were also supplied with a $500 give-away card that they could then give away to one of their readers – the catch was they had to post about their experiences in the store. So how did the experiment work?

Read A Brave New World: Kmart Uses Paid Twitter Posts in Its New Campaign »