eCommerce Analytics

Let’s just admit it: small retailers are the biggest abusers of Twitter. For every @KidBean there are 1000 merchants who spam their followers every day with one offer after another. But engaging in social media is different than direct email. Social media takes time and resources, both of which are in short supply at small and mid-sized etailers. So instead of engaging in conversations, the temptation is to use scalable shortcuts — shortcuts which happen to drive followers away.

Which of these Twitter shortcuts do the most damage to your budding online community? To find out let’s take a look at what a popular Twitter anti-spam tool, The Twit Cleaner, classifies as bad Twitter behavior:

1. Posting nothing but links. Posting link after link can be ok under some circumstances, but it may also be a signal that your account is nothing but an advertising tool. If you’re going to post a lot of links make sure they’re going to varied content: pictures, blogs, and other sites besides your own.
2. Tweeting the same links all the time. We get it. We should really check out your fantastic offer. Maybe we missed the first time you posted it, or the second, but certainly not the 12th. Conventional wisdom says you should limit purely promotional tweets to one in 10. One in 20 is better.
3. Few re-tweets and no @replies. Is Twitter is a one-way channel only for you? Using Twitter for eCommerce is as much about listening to your customers as getting your message out to them. If your followers don’t feel that they are being heard they may decide to unfollow you and drop the conversation all together. Or worse, they may take their conversation elsewhere.
4. Not following your followers (?). I hesitate to call this a shortcut even if The Twit Cleaner does. On the one hand, it’s important to be listening to what your customers are saying and, to listent, it helps to follow. On the other hand, Twitter users who have lots of followers but themselves follow few people are considered highly credible and authoritative. Given a choice, I’d rather be authoritative. But there is a middle ground that lets you follow your most vocal, valuable, and/or influential customers. (Fun fact: @Zappos follows 390,000 people and is widely considered the creme de la creme of retail Twitterers. @GapOffical, which pumps out nothing but promotional spam, follows 7.)

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’ve been rocking HootSuite now for my Twitter posts for some time so that I can get the “enterprise” bells and whistles that it adds (e.g., a still-needs-work user admin piece). But I do see HootSuite as a useful first step in the evolution of Twitter for retailers. Once Twitter can be better tracked, more marketers will come. Today, I want to specifically talk about 3 Twitter analytics that retailers will need to get excited about Twitter (apart, of course, from more total users on the system and some belief that this is more than just a fad).

Read Just Give Me These 3 Twitter Analytics and I’ll Go Away »

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 »

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 »

Today one of our twitter peers asked us how she could find people of influence for a given region. As I researched the question and solution I found that there is actually a name for what is probably the end-game for this exercise:

Influencer marketing- is a form of marketing that has emerged from a variety of recent practices and studies, in which focus is placed on specific key individuals (or types of individual) rather than the target market as a whole. It identifies the individuals that have influence over potential buyers, and orients marketing activities around these influencers.

As I will demonstrate it is possible, using some freely available analytics tools, to narrow the list of influencers. However, as our own Social Network sage Matt Thomson pointed out, the analytics tools fall short in becoming truly useful and further click-based research is really needed to establish credible, influencers who may become evangelists. Read Find your ideal customer evangelists »

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 »