Half-Geek | Ecommerce marketing downunder

Be sure your sins will be facebooked

My father always told me, "Be sure that your sins will find you out". A saying passed on to him by my grandmother, it urges the recipient to consider a sinful action carefully before it is taken. Enter the new communities of the web 2.0 and in particular facebook....

Today I found what seemed to be a fairly standard piece of information in my facebook profile newsfeed, a photo album in which one of my good mates had been tagged. So with far to much real work to do and no time to be on facebook, I naturally decide to follow the link.

What I find as the page refreshes is not a picture of my friend, but a desperate cry for help from a poor girl who has been the victim of what seems to be a nasty piece of inter-flatmate theft. This girl is owed money, and she wants it back!

What has happened here is a very smart use of the facebook photo tagging feature. By tagging nearly all of her friends in a photo of the accused, Emma has effectively opened up her plea for help to all the friends of her friends. Auckland is not that large of a place and I expect that she may have luck in successfully locating the thief.

ads in pageflakes

I was very interested to note a unusual 'feed' in my pageflakes start page recently - a piece of sponsored content in pageflakes. I suppose it should not really come as that much of a surprise. Live Universe purchased pageflakes earlier this year and it seems that this Los Angeles based company wants to see some return on their investment.

I am not sure how this new tactic will perform for pageflakes. We all know that Googles dominance of the online advertising industry has been built on the back of an ad serving system that is un-surpassed in the area of relevancy. The ad that was served in my interface didn't seem relevant at all......

So many web 2.0 style start-ups over the past couple of years. Many that have been successful in generating a large community, not many that have shown a new way of making money outside of selling advertisements. Advertising continues to be the obvious business model for the revenue hungry online entrepreneur.

Earlier this year I talked about facebooks monetization strategy and the fact that local web 2.0 start-ups in New Zealand had a hard road given the relatively low population we have. It is interesting to note that almost a year on it is still not absolutely clear as to how facebook intent to really cash in on the huge community they have generated.

Finally Some Calendar & Gmail Integration

Unlike many of my family and friends who prefer Microsoft's Outlook for their home or work email, I use Gmail and have for some time now. I love Gmail and the features it provides, the search is powered by Google and I can find any email in a matter of seconds, which makes Outlook look like rubbish (which it is, sorry Microsoft).

One thing however, which I always felt Gmail lacked in was a sufficient Calendar module, similar to what Outlook offers. Now I know there is a Calendar provided in your Google account, and you can get to it from Gmail, but there was never seamless integration between the two, and it always to me felt like they were separate. You are able to get email reminders sent to you, as well as a bunch of other things, but again it never really felt like it was a complete package.

That is why I was reasonably enough impressed (impressed enough to blog about it) to hear of a new calendar gadget in Gmail Labs, which provides a way to see your upcoming events and get alerts of meetings etc. I installed the gadget and was happy about the way it worked and looked. It acts similar to your label or chat box, and displays your most recent events and also allows you to do a quick add right from Gmail. To add the gadget you simply click on the Labs tab inside your gmail settings window, and enable the Google calendar Gadget.

While I still think there is much room for improvement it's a good start, and hope to see the gadget improved over time.

bacon for link bait

At Tribal DDB we have a number of FMCG clients and we are often presented with the challenge of creating a high level of online engagement for quite basic consumer products such as mayonnaise.

With mayo on the mind, one of our talented developers picked up on an interesting website from the States, its all about a product called baconnaise. The link was sent round to our team as a sort of joke. I mean bacon flavoured mayonnaise? Only in America.....

But as I surfed the website of baconnaise inventors J & D, I began to realise that these two bacon loving yanks had something that we all strive for when launching new products - a real point of difference. One of my early online marketing mentors introduced me to Seth Godins Purple Cow, and I soon realised that the internet and e-commerce as a lone combination would not be the source of my fortune, I needed a remarkable offering. You don't get a lot more remarkable than bacon flavoured mayonnaise, well in the FMCG world at least.

This power of a unique offering was only re-enforced to a greater extent when I put a link to the site in my Instant Messenger status. My network of friends picked up on the link and proceeded to engage in chats with me asking me how I found out about this bacon flavoured product.

This whole experience led to me thinking about how much more powerful a unique offering really is. I mean bacon flavoured mayonnaise really is more link worthy than plain old mayonnaise. Is there a lesson in how to market FMCG products online here.........?

Where did Web Design Go Wrong?

Being an internet marketer and web designer, everyday I visit quite a few web sites on the net. The one thing that I found quite a lot of these sites to have in common, surprisingly, is a bad design. I ask myself who on earth designed this thing? The design is inconsistent across pages, some text you can harldy read because of the background color, and when I want to find something I can't because the navigation is so poorly designed. What the hell is going on here?

What I can't really understand is why this type of thing is so common. Web sites should be simple, text should be easy to read and the information should be sorted in a manner which is easy to find. Honestly how hard can this be? Being a web designer I know it's not hard, and so if it's not hard then again why is it so common? My answer to this is too many web designers out there try and do way to much. They are trying so hard to design a great website they are missing the whole point.

Take a look at this really bad website, now I'm sure you will agree this site has also missed the point yeah? This site is most likely overkill for my example, however what I am trying to say is keep your web site simple. It does not matter how cool your graphics are, how many people tell you how good your website looks, if users cannot find what they are looking for and pages take for ever to load, they will leave and I guarantee you they wont be back.

Here are a few key points I believe are needed for a good design and good usability:

• Simple, consistent design across all pages
• Well designed navigation that links to all the main pages of your web site, that exists on all pages of your web site.
• Good search feature if you have a lot of content
• Easy colors that make the text easy to read
• Consistent fonts across the site
• Fast loading pages

If you follow just a few of these you should be on the right track. Remember most people don't care how good a web site looks, for example I would much rather visit the worst looking site in the world that used my design principles above, then a state of the art flash site that followed none of them. Keep it simple.

telecom gold