Ninety-eight percent of mid-sized merchants said segmentation and targeting are important to their overall Web and cross-channel merchandising strategy, yet the majority are not satisfied with the business tools they use. Below are some of the specific areas of concern:

• 62% said they would like to improve their ability to offer, control, and manage cross-sells and up-sells to encourage more sales
• 60% said they would like to improve their site search functionalities
• 55% said they would like to improve their ability to offer, control and manage promotions
• 37% said they would like to improve the “help” and customer service features on the site

In regards to current merchandising and promotions tools:

• 66% said they are too manual, not automated enough
• 38% said they are difficult to use
• 30% said they do not have enough control over site content
• 23% said they do not have enough control over the product catalog

When it came to how merchants plan to improve customer experience and their site’s performance to drive additional growth in the near future:

• 53% plan to improve by experimenting with emerging sales channels, such as mobile and social commerce
• 42% plan to improve by investing in add-on services, widgets and tools they can implement on their existing sites
• 33% plan to improve by completely replacing their existing commerce platform and re-launching their web store

Continue reading at: Website Magazine

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Our guide for the day was Jay Vance, Director of Research, who accompanied us on a bus ride about an hour away from downtown Salt Lake City to their Clive Facility. On the way, he talked to us about the place of energy in our daily lives. Matt Merkel, one of the bloggers on the tour, raised some questions about the deeper problems we’re facing about the food and energy industries and how avoiding a monocracy is the safest way for us to create a sustainable world.

Jay replied with info on Energy Solutions’ focus on diverse energy sources, but how the waste from these products need to be disposed of in a way that is environmentally safe.

When we arrived at the Clive facility, Jay explained that Energy Solutions has cleaned up plutonium dumping grounds and turned them into wildlife refuges. Sustainability and environmental issues really seem to be top of the list for the company. Even the choice of their Clive Facility site seems well thought-out and chosen because of it’s isolated location, unsuitability for humans (because of the high alkaline content in the soil and very high salt content of the water) — so they weren’t moving communities out so they could dispose of low-level radioactive waste.

We took the tour around the plant, met some of the workers there, asked hard questions, and Ben Winslow from Fox 13 news joined us and asked even tougher questions — and I left there feeling like they’re doing a useful service for the country. Years of nuclear and radioactive industry waste gets safely disposed of here. And yet, there’s a lot of fear-mongers who make it seem like Energy Solutions are making Utah a dumping ground for the US. Having toured the plant and spending hours looking into those claims, I don’t see any hard evidence to support it.

Actually, if this is of concern to you — and as far as I’m concerned it should be — our children’s futures depend on the good decisions we make for the environment today — you should take a look yourself at what Energy Solutions is doing. They offer a virtual tour on their website http://www.energysolutions.com, and you can get a tour of their facility by contacting them on the website.

Fox 13 has a video about the Energy Solutions Clive Facility.  

You can follow Energy Solutions of twitter — @EnergySolutions

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Register here: http://ht.ly/1WODf, & use the code UTAHLOCALS for your special Utah Locals rate.

Even though the EVO Conference theme is about women in social media, I’m personally also inviting male and young entrepreneurs or business managers from the area to join us. Liz Strauss, Carol Roth, and myself will be presenting specifically about how business has been impacted by social media, and we’ll be giving specific strategies to leverage the groundswell. Here’s an description of our workshop:

EVO Workshop: Doing Business in a Social Media World
Ready to have your mind blown? Good. We’ve got just the trio of savvy businesswomen to walk you through this three-part session. Carol Roth (carolroth.com) will discuss what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur,  Liz Strauss (successful-blog.com) will explore the importance of being irresistible and creating the irresistible offer that will keep customers coming back, and Ghennipher Weeks http://www.ghennipher.net/ will help you identify the social tools that will make the biggest impact on your business.  Bring your ideas and your best questions.

Find out more about the EVO Conference here or register now and get your Local Love here.

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The first presenter was Tom Vander Ark, former executive director of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, who is working on a new idea for “blended learning”, his interpretation of the next generation in learning — with big impact for the many children in lower socioeconomic environments who would normally drop out of school. Find out more about this project at http://edreformer.com/.

The next speaker was a brilliant 15-year old student, Strom Clark. His presentation was on his 1st place CUSEF and Intel International Science & Engineering Fair project titled “Classification of Nicotinic-Acetylcholine receptors in the Hippocampus through Ion current Analysis”.  His presentation was peppered with multiple 6-syllable words in succession, so don’t expect me to deconstruct his talk very easily. The most  important and impressive part of this presentation was his passion for the research into finding a cure for memory loss and Alzheimer’s — AND the fact that he’s also a concert pianist. WOW! I want someone with his passion to be my doctor! He’s really an inspiration!

The 3rd speaker was Bard Geesaman MD PhD. His topic focused on how to finance innovations in biotechnology and the life sciences more effectively. His basic premise is that the current model is broken, and outlined a new funding model for the industry.

Finally, Alistair Cockburn PhD gave a riveting presentation about Designing in Teams — The Cooperative Game. He showed how design is a cooperative game with 3 moves: inventing, communicating, and deciding. Design is also a goal-directed game, along with things like Journalism, Engineering, Software Development, Business initiatives, etc.  You can read a full discussion on this presentation here: http://alistair.cockburn.us/Alistair+at+TEDxUoU+2010

The event was rounded off by an impressive performance by Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company (on a tiny stage), and networking afterward, sponsored by The Summit Group.

I’d like to thank TEDx and the event hosts for bringing TED to Utah. It’s been a dream of mine to attend a TED conference for at least 10 years now. The TEDx events are such a great resource to communities, and give us a taste of some of the big thinking that is shared at larger TED events. Thanks for bringing it to the rest of us, TED!

More links: http://www.deseretnews.com/article/700037819/Big-ideas-aired-at-Utah-TEDx-event.html

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A while ago, I wrote a blog post on 5 ways to measure success with social media marketing. Today I ran across a great real-world example of the difficulties marketers have when setting up and measuring meaningful metrics in social marketing from Aliza Sherman at Web Worker Daily.

I agree wholeheartedly with Aliza Sherman’s point that we are “using antiquated ways of measuring online activity and interactions. We are also hamstrung by how each site, network and tool defines and dictates measurement in their own proprietary terms.”  Don’t I know it! In my consultancy, we’ve created and re-created custom dashboards to measure the specific interactions that are important to clients. We’re reinventing the wheel all the time in this regard because of the limitations of proprietary tools.

“Here are some key points I’d like to make about the problems with social media marketing measurement. I’d love to hear your thoughts on these, and any others that may come to mind as you read this:

1. Social media is nebulous. The term “social media” can encompass many tools from the Web 2.0 era, depending on who is using the term and what they are trying to communicate. There is no definitive, well-understood, totally agreed upon definition of social media, Wikipedia be damned. Lacking clearly defined and agreed-upon terms is a big barrier to measuring anything.
2. It’s not social media, stupid. I don’t think any of us are actually trying to “measure social media,” per se. We’re looking to measure the reach or”…read the rest of the blog post on the problems with measuring social marketing here.

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This has far-reaching implications for social marketers as we develop integrated new media marketing strategies and campaigns. Considering the ubiquity of PayPal, marketers would be wise to partner with developers who are part of the PayPalX Developer Network.

“Imagine being able to load up a shopping cart full of groceries at a supermarket then simply bypassing the cash register and walking right out the door. Instead of taking out your wallet to pay for the groceries, microchips embedded in the packaging of the food tells sensors at the door how much food you’re taking. The total cost of the food is then automatically deducted from your bank account, which is connected to the smartphone or mobile device you’re carrying.

PayPal sees these kind of smart transactions as the future of payments. The company wants to be the “world’s favourite way to pay and be paid,” Mr. Thompson said.”

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Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that everyone is buzzing, blogging, tweeting, and talking about geolocation. Research firm Borrel forecasts that location-based mobile spending will hit $4 billion in 2015, an increase of nearly 12,000% from the $34 million spent in 2009. With highly anticipated location-centric announcements looming from both Facebook and Apple, the buzz over geolocation is not expected to diminish any time soon. Leveraging location will drive the next wave of consumer marketing, but based on the current pace of services and apps going to market, we’re setting ourselves up for geolocation apocalypse.

Leveraging location will drive the next wave of consumer marketing, but based on the current pace of services and apps going to market, we’re setting ourselves up for geolocation apocalypse. In this scenario consumers gorge themselves on a plethora of location-based services and spam, gut-busting data profusion and promotional push acid-reflux. If we’re not careful, the coming cataclysm could consume us with:

• Swarms of Geolocation Services. Already in full swing, new services are appearing with an alarming frequency. Ranging from the more popular/mainstream (Foursquare, Gowalla, Twitter, Yelp, MyTown, Whrrl and Loopt) to the more obscure (PlacePop, BlockChalk, Bump, FoodSpotting and Graffiti), services are being piled high. Gauging by the more than 25 companies that made location-based announcements at SXSW, consumers will soon be choking on an overabundance of geolocation services.
• Armies of Aimless Apps. Each service wants you to use their app, so can the marketplace sustain a massive rush of apps? Of course not. When I sit down for dinner at my favorite tapas place, how many apps can I “check-in” with before everyone else at the table starts throwing flatware at me? Most likely one, possibly two, if I snap a photo for upload when the entrees arrive. Check.in, by the team at Brightkite, is addressing this problem with their upcoming app (one checkin to rule them all). But how many apps (and features within each service) will they need to support to effectively fulfill consumer needs?
• Drowning in a Deluge of Data. If you’ve seen SimpleGeo’s Vicarious.ly, or the visualization video of geolocated data they collected during SXSW, you can see the potential for massive floods of personal geolocated information that may or may not be relevant to your consumers. Bing recently added Foursquare data results to their maps. Now imagine them adding results from a dozen other services, or maybe four dozen other services. As a user, I just wanted directions to the post office, now obscured by thousands of user notes, to pick up my bacon-of-the-month. Does it help to know that 600 of my closest friends also hate going to the post office?

Read the rest of the article at AdAge here –>

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Ever wonder about the value-chain of location-based services ? What are the successful business models and payment schemes for location-based services? What are the trends for the mobile location services market? I found a rather pricey, but very informative report on location-based services that I think all social media marketing firms should take a good look at. You can find it here.

As someone who has worked in internet marketing for over a decade, I’ve seen location-based marketing businesses come and go. With the huge growth of social media apps, these important services seem to have gotten a boost — not to mention the approval of a variety of patents in the location-based service space.

Consumers spend a lot more time on mobile devices than ever before, and social media marketing consultants need to understand this technology and its implications inside and out. It’s not only for large corporations and government anymore.

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I’ve got to admit that I’m not yet a big fan of Bing, but I really did enjoy these solid tips on video from Bing’s Scott Prevost.

The video topic is focused on search engine startups, but these basic principles can be applied in any software or website development project, (i.e. user experience testing, identify problems and make quick iterations, relevance, etc.). Very useful tips for your next project or startup:

Image via CrunchBase

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What does this mean for your business?

If you have an offline business, you stand to immediately benefit from location-based services. Here’s a few of the most popular mobile location-based apps you’ll want to leverage:

• Businesses using the mobile app foursquare engage in friendly competition to get locals back to their venue more often.
• Gowalla is a popular mobile app that allows customers to share their comings and goings with their friends, and every time they check in somewhere, their “passport” gets stamped, and they can win more prizes. Every city has featured Featured Spots and Recommended trips that your small business can become a part of.
• Every month, millions of customers turn to the mobile location-based app Yelp to share their experiences with local business. Small businesses can get a wealth of market information with the tools Yelp provides. The customer review power of this service is 26 million users strong.
• Another similar service is Loopt, which according to it’s website, “helps friends connect on the fly and navigate their social lives by orienting them to people, places and events.” You’d be smart to get your business and events listed on Loopt.
• Google Buzz is one of the newest mobile location-based apps to keep your eyes on. The site says that Buzz for mobile lets you “See what’s going on nearby, post a message tagged with your location, and follow your friends on the go.” Since it’s from Google, you can bet that Google maps is baked right in. Businesses promoting upcoming events have a huge opportunity for traffic with Buzz.

There are new mobile location-based services springing up all the time, but the most important thing you need to know to leverage these services is the power they have to fuel your business. Location-based apps increase traffic and sales to your business through the power of word-of-mouth. A customer is much more likely to come through your door if he knows her friends are there and love the place. A customer is more likely to impulse buy if the reviews about your business rock. An event venue is much more likely to be packed if people in a user’s geographic location are checking in with their mobile app. Businesses who ignore this inexpensive way to connect with their customers will leave millions of dollars of revenue on the table. Don’t be one of them.

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