eCommerce and

• By now most of us have heard the news of Michael Jackson’s death, what really surprised me was the way in which many of us found out about it…. Twitter.  Twitter may be having a far greater impact than we may even know.


• This title speaks for itself: Amazon: “A Search Engine With A Warehouse”.


• We know that load times affect user behavior, but would you say that fractions of a second could have a billion dollar price tag?


• Are you ignoring important landing pages?


• Apparently there is controversy over personalized ads, but are we really surprised that people don’t want to share their social security numbers?

Kohler is arguably one of the most innovative brands in the home improvement industry. The new Karbon faucet has completely transformed the kitchen and more specifically revolutionized the kitchen faucet. Meanwhile Kohler seems to effortlessly create bathroom fixtures that are not only sleek but save water, like the Escale toilet.

I finally get to say it, “The Lakers are NBA Champions!”  I did so much smack talking last year that I ended up losing my bet and the Lakers lost in the finals, so this year I decided to not say anything until it was all over.  So, Father’s Day is this weekend, and other than that it’s time to move on to the week in eCommerce.

• Google changes public stance on PageRank Sculpting with nofollow, Matt Cutts gives a detailed analysis here and Marketing Pilgrim gives a synopsis here.  Changes to be aware of: Distribution of link juice is either passed on or it vanishes, SEO’s no longer have the ability to allocate PageRank value using nofollow.


• Has Bing raised public interest?  Yes.  Does Google fear Bing, like the New York Post reports?  I doubt it.  I tend to lean more towards Clint Boulton’s opinion that Google’s respect for Bing was revealed when they launched “Explore Search”, a page that features many of Google’s functions in an easy to read format.



• Online shoppers plan to spend more on dear old Dad this Father’s Day than offline shoppers.


• Social media can be used by marketers to engage and acquire focus groups. 


• Writing headlines sounds so simple, but getting started can be the difficult part for the writer; Copyblogger offers nine proven formulas for these troublesome times.
  

The possibilities are endless with a bathroom remodel. Discover your classic side with a clawfoot tub, experiment with fresh bathroom vanities and coordinate it all with matching faucets. Shop PlumberSurplus.com 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for all of your bathroom needs.

You too can be just like me with my 12 week program!

The possibilities are endless with a bathroom remodel. Discover your classic side with a clawfoot tub, experiment with fresh bathroom vanities and coordinate it all with matching faucets. Shop PlumberSurplus.com 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for all of your bathroom needs.

• Jeremy Schoemaker seems to be getting somewhere with his trademark infringement case against a Google employee.  Search Engine Land has embedded the documents which show the Judge has ordered Schoemaker be given access to the AdWords account in question.


• Understanding shopper motivations can help retailers customize promotions to fit their target audience according to recent studies.


• When Google goes down it takes others with it.


• New data shows that 2009 is seeing a large decrease in paid search traffic from search engine visits.


• 10 Reasons Craigslist Is in Legal Jeopardy. 

The possibilities are endless with a bathroom remodel. Discover your classic side with a clawfoot tub, experiment with fresh bathroom vanities and coordinate it all with matching faucets. Shop PlumberSurplus.com 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for all of your bathroom needs.

Don’t forget Mother’s Day on Sunday!  For now let's review the week in eCommerce:

• Speaking of Mom… Search Engine Guide recommends using the “Mom Test” if usability is a concern.


• Copyblogger is strategically helping others fight the blogging war for attention, and I do mean “strategically”.


• SEOBook challenges “What do your non customers have in common?”


• Andy is scratching his head over Google’s Chrome commercial that is scheduled to run this weekend.


• I actually haven’t read the Bruce Clay's blog in a while but this post by Virginia caught my eye.   She makes a few really good points about how annoying it can be when someone blatantly steals your content, but she also points out that you don’t have to stoop to their level.  I guess it hit close to home this week, considering when I checked out one of our competitors websites I found that they were using nearly our exact ad copy on one of their banners:

Little Giant has been hard at work engineering pumps that their most loyal customers have been waiting for. PlumberSurplus.com is your destination for the new Little Giant TSW Sump Pump System and their NXTGen Condensate Pumps.

I was struck recently by a video I watched on Fora.tv, Google's Vic Gundotra: Mobile Phones as Answer Machines. In the video, Vic Gundotra describes how he was having lunch with a friend and his four year old daughter. His friend asked him a question and he replied, "I don't know." His daughter piped in, "Daddy, where's your phone?!" At first he thought nothing of it, but then he and his friend realized that his four year old had surmised that when information was needed, one could simply pull out a phone to obtain it. Remarkable! I have a two year old, and even he has displayed what I perceive as a shift in thinking about information retrieval from my generation to his. We were recently watching "Mickey Mouse Clubhouse" on TV and I said to him, "You and I are going to go to the store." He got in the car, climbed into his car seat, and asked me for my iPhone. He turned it on, unlocked it, and started the YouTube app so that he could continue to watch "Mickey Mouse Clubhouse" clips in the car. Naturally I had to search for the clip, but I am amazed that he is aware of this resource portability.

Until I owned a "cloud-enabled" phone, I was skeptical of the mobile revolution. Sure, I have recognized Generation Y as the text message generation, but until recently I hadn't seen the utility in being connected to cloud applications via a sensory-based platform. My 49 year old father-in-law once proclaimed to me that online shopping would never overtake physical retail shopping in overall revenues. Though I am sure people will still want to go to the grocery store to make sure their melons feel ripe, I'm not sure I believe that the shopping experience or buying decision process will look anything like it does today in 20 10 5 years. More and more, I use the cloud to make buying decisions. What's more, I find myself diving ever-deeper into my phone while I'm shopping in physical retail stores. Whether I'm doing price comparisons, or reading product reviews, or searching for similar products or services, I find that I'm more inclined to trust information found from reliable sources in the cloud than I am information found at a retailer's store. 

I wonder… how will cloud-connected customers affect eCommerce and vice-versa? More specifically, how will this affect PlumberSurplus.com, OutdoorPros.com, and any other venture we decide to undertake? Well, in order for us to be able to make an impact in mobile, we have to know what success looks like in order to understand whether or not we can execute in an easy and scalable way. With this type of marketing in its infancy, how can we really measure this? 

I came across this article today, Search Giants Encounter Challenges in Mobile Ad Market.  In the article, Frank Reed discusses a company that starts off with mobile ad campaigns running on five mobile Internet networks. After only one day, the company pulled Google and Yahoo campaigns because they were not effective. Frank cites two reasons as the primary hurdles for behemoths like Google and Yahoo in the mobile ad market: "First, the ads that are run on their traditional platform don’t often translate or fit well in the mobile environment... Secondly, the position of the ads on a mobile device will not correspond to the ‘top of the page’ and ‘right hand column’ look that is now ingrained in everyone’s way of seeing and reacting to the ads." These seem like relatively easy problems for resource heavy organizations like Google and Yahoo to overcome over time. However, it's a good indicator to me that mobile advertising isn't mature (certainly not mature enough for a small business like ours to throw money at).

In order for us to be able to be effective in mobile, I think three things need to happen. First, testability. We need to be able to stare at an anticipated baseline of performance and easily test and measure performance. Second, match ad campaigns to targets. Mobile advertising seems like a moving target at this point. This seems pretty tough to do. Finally, figure out how to take advantage of the sensory aspect of today's mobility. Phones have eyes, ears, skin, they know where you are, they know where you've been, they know who your friends are... how do we leverage these to create an experience that leads a customer to buy?

No matter what happens, at this point, I'm pretty convinced that the way my son finds information and shops when he's my age will be very different than the way I do those things now. I can't wait to see what happens next.

For the best prices, on the largest selection of faucets, from your favorite brands like Kohler, Danze, and American Standard shop PlumberSurplus.com 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

• eBay is scheduled to make quite a few changes this Spring.  Scot Wingo of ChannelAdvisor has prepared a White Paper on the changes for those of you still selling on eBay.


• Chris Barr highlights the importance of consumer trust.


• Rachel Hirsch reviews a recent eMarketer report and explains why men and women aren’t created equal, especially when marketing to each gender.


• SKTool, Google’s new search based keyword tool, was reviewed by Practical eCommerce and the assessment looks positive.
  


• Search Engine Land’s Just Behave column reminds us merchants that consumers are “more than skin and bones with credit cards”.
  

Kohler is arguably one of the most innovative brands in the home improvement industry. The new Karbon faucet has completely transformed the kitchen and more specifically revolutionized the kitchen faucet. Meanwhile Kohler seems to effortlessly create bathroom fixtures that are not only sleek but save water, like the Escale toilet.

• Google announced YouTube deals with a host of entertainment companies this week.  According to CNET deals were struck with MGM, CBS, Sony, Lionsgate, Starz and the BBC.  YouTube is planning on changing the layout of the website as well as offering professional video content.  Along with these changes users can expect YouTube to start charging subscription fees and showcasing online TV ads.  Some of the more surprising concessions were those that were made by YouTube to Sony.  YouTube has agreed that Sony features be displayed via Crackle, Sony’s video website, as well as control advertisements for the films and allocate all related traffic to Crackle.

• Twitter has grown by leaps and bounds in the first quarter of this year and it doesn’t look like the trend will slow anytime soon.  If you are newer to Twitter you may want to review PCMAG’s list of Twitter don’ts prior to tweeting away.  Some of my favorite don’ts are:
  • 9. Don't retweet something and leave off the original Twitter poster. Always give credit to those who wrote it first.
  • 11. Don't #hashtag every topic. After a while, your topics will be ignored.  

• If you find yourself struggling to decipher what these actually mean you will likely find the help you need on Twictionary, a Twitter Dictionary Wiki.

• Thanks to Seth’s blog I was able to view this experiment on the do’s and don’ts of job interviews, and I can’t help but love the time that was put into this.
  

Little Giant has been hard at work engineering pumps that their most loyal customers have been waiting for. PlumberSurplus.com is your destination for the new Little Giant TSW Sump Pump System and their NXTGen Condensate Pumps.

We will be observing Good Friday tomorrow so this week’s Variety is a day early.

• There has been so much talk about job losses, the unemployment rate, and company after company filing for bankruptcy that the job market has become a terrifying topic.  This article by the editors of HR World not only shines a ray of light on the topic but may just inspire those currently out of work to become entrepreneurs or seek opportunities in fields as abstract as tattooing. I listed my personal favorites to give you a taste of the article:
  • Journalist: Low pay and minimal creative freedom (at least in your early days) often deter great writers from pursuing careers in journalism, and many instead opt for law school or graduate programs. The life of an experienced journalist, however, is not so bad: Travel opportunities are just around the corner, whether you report on the weather, politics or style trends. Getting to see your name in print is not only rewarding, it's the optimum branding mechanism for when you want to develop your career and explore other avenues later in life. Journalists are also some of the most informed members of society, as their job requires them to be the first to know about economic changes, the law and even community scandals.  Do bloggers count?
    
  • Spy: A sexy spy might make a great Halloween costume, but unless you're seriously ready to dodge real (not plastic) bullets and are willing to sacrifice your identity for a mission no one will ever hear about, enlisting in the CIA to get your kicks isn't a good idea. Officers take a pledge of confidentiality that goes way beyond sharing trade secrets with competitors: Your entire identity is fake, and even if you manage to pull off a blockbuster-worthy performance on your next mission, you won't receive any recognition for it. In addition to jetting off to other parts of the world and keeping your life a secret from friends and family, spies can find themselves in extremely dangerous situations involving prison time, assassins or worse.  Another childhood dream smashed by reality…
    

• Seasoned bloggers have been gracious enough to write about their successes and failures in regards to the growth of their blogs and this article is no different.  Don’t get me wrong it’s a great article, but it actually provides a great segue for my next point.   This post, like many others, references the importance of starting a discussion rather than just presenting information.  Rand writes “Interesting is great, but controversial content - that which demands a response and interaction - can often achieve even greater success.”

• This article from the Silicon Alley Insider has sparked a great conversation and interaction from the community.  Joe Weisenthal questions “What has Eric really done for Google that wouldn't have happened with any moderately competent executive at the helm?  Or, put another way, is Eric really that good...or was he mostly in the right place at the right time?”  I love the comments that pieces like this receive!  I was going to pick a favorite but there were too many to share. 

• I would like to say “Thanks” to Aaron Wall for encountering the “Blue Screen of Death” and recuperating from the incident with a boatload of information on the recovery process.

• Sales goals aren’t easy to reach, especially in our current financial system, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good reason for not reaching your targets.  Geoffrey James lists reasons sales representatives give for not making their quotas, but what you will find is that the majority of so called “reasons” are actually excuses.

• The Boston Globe reports that retailers need to be prepared for a somewhat new and increasingly more frequent trend, customer haggling.  It’s understandable that with the economic decline those who are shopping are shopping for the best deal, but not many retailers are working with the margins that they used to.  If you haven’t done so yet this is a good time to train your representatives the proper way to interact with price negotiations.
• Whether you have an SEO campaign, are thinking about starting one, or questioning if you should keep it in house or outsource, Stoney deGeyter of Search Engine Guide has put together a list of “61 Pre-SEO Campaign Questions You Need to Answer to”.  What’s great is that he has included questions that relate to both in-house campaigns as well as outsourcing.
• Sage Lewis of Search Engine Watch experimented with promotions.  He based the experiment on two different types of promotions: one included user feedback on the best ideas for the future of his column, and the other was based on getting users to link to the column.  He provides his thoughts on the outcomes of the two here.
• Branding can be difficult, especially for the little guy.  Entrepreneur magazine points out five common mistakes that brand marketers may be engaging in.
• Seth Godin is great at pointing out the obvious.  This statement is not meant to belittle his writings but to point out the fact that a lot of the things he writes about are issues that have been on many marketers’ minds, he just finds an eloquent way of relaying the information.  In a post written early this morning he puts into perspective the reasons that good intentioned marketers are finding it harder and harder to get the word out to potential consumers.