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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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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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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Twitter is yet another example of where brands have to accept a loss of control. In this case, it is not about putting the brand in the hands of the market but in the hands of the people for whom the brand is their livelihood. A certain amount of letting go is a necessity. We will undoubtedly see a few missteps in C-tweets, and we’ll learn and move on. Ultimately, the medium may change but basics of branding still apply — both for the brands themselves and for their executive stewards: Be true, be relevant, be transparent, respect your brand and your customers, don’t make a promise you can’t keep.

Check out the rest of the blog post about C-Level Tweeting at AdAge.

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Last week, Yahoo released a real-time Twitter monitoring tool called Sideline. I’ve been playing around with it for a few days, and though it’s no Radian6 monitoring tool, it does have some neat features your company may find useful.

Trending Topics on Twitter

Want to know what the cool kids on Twitter are tweeting about today? Check out Sideline’s Trending Topics screen. This is great for monitoring topic trending related to a conference, new product release, or any other much-talked-about situation that affects your brand name.

Engage Customers Better

You can also create and group custom queries by topics of interest. This allows you to create as many search groups as you’d like. Theres also a Favorites button, and you can reply directly from the Sideline interface to any tweet in your group.

Customer Attitudes Matter

My favorite feature on Sideline is the Advanced Search Builder. It allows you to build a Twitter Search based on Words, People, even Attitudes. Smart companies pay attention not only to mentions of their brand on Twitter, but how people feel about it. A huge credibility free-fall is when a company auto-follows any mention of their brand without taking the time to see if the tweet is bashing the product or praising it. Granted, for some companies, it’s a LOT of work to weed through mentions to ascertain the attitude of the person toward the brand — but this Sideline feature makes this very important job a little easier.

One more note about Sideline: It’s an open-source tool, so have your developers take a look at it.  It’s an Adobe Air app aimed at users looking for info from the Twitter public sideline. Definitely a tool worth taking a look at.

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