An interesting article in yesterday’s AdNews, quoting a Frost & Sullivan report that Australia’s eCommerce market is seriously underdeveloped, lagging both the US and UK markets by three years.

From our experience working with brands such as Tesco and British Airways in the UK, we’d agree with the report. From a digital agency perspective, this is reason to rejoice, as there is great growth potential in the eCommerce market both in Australia and New Zealand. From a retailer’s perspective, the great awakening has happened, and there is a lot of activity with big brands moving to eCommerce, although obviously most of this is behind closed doors.

Conferences such as the fantastic Online Retailer (which was held in Sydney two weeks ago) are doing a great job of educating retailers of the importance of eCommerce and practical tips for how to get started.


Read the full article on AdNews here: http://www.adnews.com.au/news/australian-e-commerce-remains-untapped

Yesterday Facebook announced a whole raft of significant changes to the way developers can integrate their own sites with Facebook tools.

To translate all the industry excitement into plain English, what Facebook are trying to do is become the glue that binds together a users Internet experience with all their friends.

The announcements from Facebook are hugely ambitious, but already some very interesting new features are appearing on a variety of high profile web sites.
Firstly, what Facebook have done is to make user behaviour on their site, such as ‘liking’ something, become a permanent reference in the users profile.

At the same time, they’ve changed the way users connect with brands from ‘Becoming a fan’ to ‘liking’ – just like users already do with their friends’ posts, or photos, or comments.

While this seems like a pretty innocuous change, it actually makes behavioural targeting of marketing messages much, much simpler for advertisers.

Now, if a user ‘likes’ your brand, you’re able to see all the profile details that user is prepared to share with you. And the more stuff they like and the more often they like it, the better your understanding of that loyal advocate of your brand becomes.

Which of course kicks up a whole lot of privacy concerns.

Unsophisticated users of Facebook still have a whole lot of personal and private information switched on for the world to see. And with the changes announced by Facebook yesterday, that will extend to automatically publicising some potentially private information. The fact that you ‘like’ a film, or a song may not be an issue for you to share, but what about political parties, social issues and sexuality?
Facebook have repeatedly changed their privacy policies over the past few years, often causing a big stink with privacy advocates when they do so. These announcements already have privacy advocates screaming ‘foul’. Over the next few weeks and months expect to see headlines related to individuals’ private lives being unwittingly revealed by Facebook.

This has very big implications for the web in general, as more and more sites are trying to get their customers to act as ambassadors for their products, and trying to make their products, services and brands more ‘social’.

The next big change that Facebook are offering web site owners is the ability to deeply integrate Facebook features into their own sites. So if you’re a retailer, Facebook have just made it much simpler to add ‘Like’ buttons to every product in your catalogue, every promotion or announcement and to your brand itself.
Why is that important? Because every time a customer clicks the ‘Like’ button, they’re telling all their friends on Facebook about it, and potentially driving traffic back to your site.

The opportunity to generate traffic, word-of-mouth and testimonial around your products is now immense using Facebook’s tools and reach.

For many years marketers have been talking about ‘behavioural targeting’ of customers to improve the accuracy and relevance of marketing messages and personalising offers to individuals. Until now, that has been a very difficult thing to achieve, simply because finding out enough about customers to achieve this was very, very difficult.

Yesterday, in one fell swoop, Facebook has opened up both the data and the technology to make this sort of marketing dream a reality.

So how can you take advantage of these changes?
There are a number of things that you could do right now to take advantage of these changes, and make your web site more social and useful for your customers on Facebook:

• Add ‘Like’ or ‘Recommend’ buttons to your products, articles or images


• Adding these buttons to your own web site allows your customers to tell their friends on Facebook that they like your stuff, and hopefully drive much more traffic to your web site


• Add Facebook Comments to your content or product listings and allow people to share their views with their friends


• Add Facebook activity feed from your Facebook page to your web site


• Let all your web site visitors see that your Facebook page is a vibrant community and encourage them to join


• Add a Facebook Livestream to your site


• Do you run live events? The allow your visitors to publish live updates to Facebook via your own web site.

If you’d like to implement any of these features on your web site, please contact Reactive to discuss how we can make your site more social.

Labels: Social media, Technology, Web marketing

I really like this; an interactive car race that is a 'video game' in the truest sense, using YouTube Annotations to create a pick-a-path adventure. Built to promote the new Hot Wheels range, which let kids (and rev-head mum & dads) customise their 'wheels ("15+ Interchangeable Parts! Easy Snap Assembly! ").

This is the best use of YouTube Annotations I've seen, thanks largely to extremely well produced stop-motion animation. And a great voice-over that would make Ricky Bobby proud.

It's interesting that by using YouTube as a platform, they're making normally private stats public. The public (and Mattels’ competitors) can see sources of traffic, geography, genders etc. We can also see the 'conversion funnel' between videos;

- The first video in the series has 410,000 views
- 100,000 views for the second video
- 60,000 views for the third video (the first race)
- 40,000 views for the fourth video (second race)
- 12,000 views for the fifth video (third and final race)

These stats are rounded, and are all from choosing the most popular option at each end-point.

But, if you think this shows a drastic drop-off, think again. At each level deeper in the video pyramid, there are three new videos to be chosen from. By the time you reach the first race there are actually six videos you could have ended up viewing. In fact there are over 25 videos produced as part of this game. There is actually very little drop-off between each video - most people are selecting and watching each in series - playing the game.

Whether Mattel see this as a successful campaign or not would be interesting. With production values like these, who says social media is cheap?

Share your thoughts on this campaign in the comments below.

Labels: Web marketing

Tim O'Neill this week gave a presentation at ad:tech Sydney on the Impact of Social Content on eCommerce, with General Pants as a case study. You can view the presentation below: