eCommerce Analytics

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? »

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 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 »

With the news that Twitter is focusing on revenue in 2009, we shouldn’t be so surprised to hear CEO Evan Williams embracing the now-undeniable corporate presence on Twitter as a potential revenue stream. If you remember, Craig’s List followed a similar model years ago, charging for job postings and little else. One thing is certain. For businesses to wholly embrace Twitter, they will need robust analytics that they can rely on to track marketing effectiveness and ROI. Let’s talk about two ways that businesses can use the data generated by Twitter to help their marketing campaigns.

Read Have Businesses Embraced Twitter Analytics Yet? »

As you can tell from our blogs, we’ve been very social media focused this week. We’ve actually been watching the space for quite a while now, but recent events have really shown how the power of social media has changed the thinking of the mainstream marketing crowd. I’m sure many of you are aware of Motrin fiasco where women (and men) on Twitter expressed outrage at the portrayal of moms by the ibuprofen company (“Motrin moms,” a-Twitter over ad, take on Big Pharma–And win).  Additionally, many political pundits have credited Obama’s success with winning over 18-35 yr olds to his use of new and more cutting edge marketing mediums. The power of social media has certainly been proven out, but does your company need to worry about it and, if yes, how do we take advantage of it?

Read Twitter Me This: How Do Businesses Take Advantage of Social Marketing »

Continuing our research into how to navigate the social and micro-blogging networks, specifically twitter, I want to dicuss the various sites and tools which can be used to draw a map of the twitterverse.  The tools fall into categories of search and survey.

Search. Like every other internet based network there are several solutions for searching the twitter world.  Each search tool is oriented towards a specific goal.  For searching against keywords there are 2 good options: Twitter Scan and Monittor.

Read Twitter Analytics »