NewEgg Took Some Chances...And So Should You!

According to today's article on Internet Retailer, computer electronics retailer NewEgg.com has come right out and said that they're not in the social media game just for the money.

Sales from a page on MySpace or a discussion forum on their Eggxpert community site are great, but really are just a means to an end: reaching their customers. Their core fan base (which is probably a better way to refer their customers in particular) are male gamer geeks who build their own machines. To cater to this audience, NewEgg has steadily added feature after feature and reaped the rewards of new customers (reporting that 50% of their new customers were from other customer referrals).

Is it working? Considering their sales rose 25% last year to just below $2 billion, it's fair to say that this pureplay online retailer has done well with their approach.

What does this mean for other companies?

Experiment.
Try some new ideas.
Give Twitter a chance.
Test out a blog, even if it's internal.
Consider what Facebook to mean to your customers.
Ask your customers what they want and then give it them in spades.

You don't have to do everything at once, but each feature you add strengthens your relationship with your customers that much more. Newegg was clear about this with their social media goal: Get close to the customer and give them a chance to provide feedback. The Internet Retailer article highlights some great technology features they've thrown at their site to accomplish this. But that's not the point. Layering on more features was done within a clear context (and not just doing it because the competitors are doing it).

Even if your competitors are doing things in this space, those without an overarching vision and blanket statement on why they're doing this and what they hope to achieve will fail when they hit bumps in the road.

Consider this caustic chain of events:

1) Company starts a new blog and customers love it.
2) Situation comes up for the company, one exec reads the post and gets worried about a possible lawsuit.
3) Exec brings the issue to Legal, then demands to know why the company is blogging and who authorized the project.
4) No one has a good answer and the blog gets shut down.

Sad ending to a venture that started successfully, but it could get worse:

5) Customers that were reading the blog are upset that it's been discontinued. They ask why it's been taken down, but there's no one around to answer their questions.
6) Customers get frustrated and walk away.
7) Some customers that are really upset get upset enough to blog about it themselves.
8) Other disgruntled customers start chiming in, and the ensuing groundswell threatens to damage the company's credibility.
9) Customers walk away, prospective customers avoid the company like the plague, and the company doesn't even know what's transpired.

Okay, so it's not all doom and gloom. All I'm saying is that you've got to have a good reason (and don't just copy the reason above because it may not truly be something that will help you) but once you've got that foundation in place you've got to go for it!

Experiment!
Play around and have some fun with it!
Make mistakes and learn along the way...if you're catering to your customers, if you ask for their opinion and you're prepared to take some action on some of it, then how can you go wrong?

Live a little. NewEgg took this approach, and it helped them add $500million to their earnings last year. So what do you think this will do for you?

Kodak Nominates First Chief Blogger

According to Internet Retailer earlier this week, Kodak recently announced they've just appointed their first chief blogger.

10-year veteran Jennifer Cisney was promoted from within Kodak's team of bloggers and is responsible for overseeing Kodak’s two official blogs, “A Thousand Words” and “A Thousand Nerds.” The first is about creative projects and life at Kodak, while the second is for about new developments from Kodak scientists and aimed at a much more technically-saavy audience.

A self-professed "nut" about photos, projects, and active blogger, Cisney will be able to build on Kodak's year and a half's worth of blog postings to help keep Kodak on top of the social media world. For a company that's been criticized in the past for not staying on top of the digital revolution, Kodak's put quite a lot of work into their blogging capabilities, and have clearly segmented their audience.

What Other Businesses Can Take Away From This:

1) Great blogging comes from (surprise!) avid bloggers. You're looking for someone who lives, breathes, and dreams in blogs, and is ready and willing to put finger to keyboard and fuse together content and creativity to engage your audience. It's not a race to the top but a slow, methodical journey in a single direction. When it comes to blogger, you're in it for the long haul. As you build up your audience, you've got to play to their expectations that you can provide something valuable to them on a regular basis. This takes love and dedication; Kodak's move to hire someone internally who's already in this space and loves what they do is clearly a smart way to go.

2) Blogs help give your customers a backstage pass to life at your company Through Kodak's A Thousand Words blog, I can see what it was to be backstage at Kodak events (this morning, Kodak's CEO annnouced it would be giving another $10 million to University of Rochester, keeping the vision of George Eastman alive. On a less serious topic, Cisney was at the Celebrity Apprentice afterparty, catching up with several celebrities. She's bringing us into her world, and, of course, providing some good photos to go along with her stories. Think about how blogs can provide you the opportunity to reach out with stories and images to help build your personality and brand online.

3) Lastly, blogs can showcase your new development and innovation. I can go to the 1000 Nerds blog and read up on technology developments, plus find out how to build myself a pararamic pinhole camera. While you're certainly not giving trade secrets away, what better way to showcase new developments in your business or trends in your industry and inviting commentary from your audience?

Clinton, Obama, and McCain to the Rest of Us: We Want Your Email Address!

In a former life, I worked for a music company and we struggled with a difficult question on our websites: When creating an email signup form, how much can you ask for (i.e., is there a magic number of fields you can request before someone abandons)?

It's not difficult technically, because frankly you can load up your form with as many questions as you can find space.

It's more difficult philosophically because there's a strong aversion to asking for too much up front (to use an overly cliched analogy, you can't ask for a marriage proposal when you're only considering a first date), but still needing enough to run a segmentable marketing campaign.

We settled out with the basics: first name, last name, zip/postcode, and email address. We did ask for gender and mobile number for a few key sites as optional data, but our general rule was the less on the page, the better. To be honest, we never set up any A/B testing to validate the theory, but it's a safe bet that four fields looks much less intimidating than a full page you have to scroll through.

This approach gives you some very basic info that you can use to segment your message (if an artist will be on tour in NY, does anyone care who lives in Ohio?). Our segmentation needs were not tremendous, but the zip code was definitely key, and having a first name enabled us to do some basic personalization.

Quick aside: Never, never go the route I've seen some companies where they'll use your name in the subject line like "SETH, CHECK OUT THIS FABULOUS DEAL." I'd love to see the open rate results for a hideous campaign like this!

Recently Anne Holland over at MarketingSherpa posted a great story touching on the three email signups for the current candidates. Check out the images below and what subtle (or not so subtle) messages they're sending:

Please note, I had to use an earlier version of Obama's signup form; after viewing once every repeat visit to the site would skip this page and take me straight to the main website

Hillary: "I'm having a really good time with this."
Thoughts: Intentionally or not, her image is looking in the direction of the info, implying that she's interested and aware of the people that are signing up. Top marks for going for first name, last name, email, and zip. Design is clean, submit button stands out, and she's also provided a means to skip the form and go straight to the website.


Obama:"I'm a family guy, I love what I do, and I'm ready and willing to show you more."
Surrounded by family, he's showing that it takes more than a candidate to pull off change. The button for submission is not "Submit" but a softer "Learn More". He's only opting in for email and zip, presumably because his team will use this information to start building your profile and will build on that consumer record through the various community aspects of his site that BarakObama.com offers.


McCain:"In addition to running for President, I'm also starring in a remake of Citizen Kane!"
The black and white image screams newspaper mogul from the turn of the last century, not someone who's in touch with today's world. And the biggest thing that stands out on this page? One giant red "Donate Today" button. Doesn't look for zip code, so no presumed intelligence behind the scenes with this data, just give me your email so I can add it to our list of thousands.



MarketingSherpa declares Hillary the winner, but I have to disagree and say that Obama's sends a much stronger emotional message (given that he's surrounded by family and is not striking it out on his own). But what really clinched it for me was that this design has grown over time, presumably based on feedback from the public at large.

Today I came across a another blog post from Bivings Report where the author criticized an earlier Obama email signup form that did NOT offer a way to bypass the registration and go straight to the site.

This is not the case with today's form, so someone in Obama's camp was either listening to the blogosphere or testing their site and found break points like this, then took action to make the necessary changes.

And in my book, if you're listening to feedback out there and committed to taking action accordingly, you're in the winning camp.

What does this mean for other businesses?

1) There's a fine line between asking for too little and too much from an email registration form, but if you're really planning to do anything meaningful with the data, you're going to need to grab a zip code at the bare minimum.

2) When designing your registration form, you want to make it easy and to have certain actions stand out, but adding a giant red "Give Money" button on your site skews your message to be more about money and less about building a relationship with a prospective customer.

3) Make it look fun! So many forms out there on the web are mind-numbing (ever been to a health care site to set up a user profile?), so take the time and do something to make it look half-way exciting. At least you can say all three candidates are smiling!