Kathleen Wiersch

I'd just like to tip my hat to our customer TheKnot.com Wedding Shop for winning an Interactive Media Award in eCommerce.  Their Outstanding Acheivement Award was based on excellence in Design, Content, Feature Functionality, Useability and Standards Compliance.  In other words, a kick-ass customer experience.
The Interactive Media Awards competition is open to individuals and organizations involved in designing, developing, managing, supporting and promoting websites.  One of the things we like best about these awards is that have diverse categories which means that all types of websites and organizations can win. 
And since Baynote has innovative customers in all kinds of industries there is probably a category for you too.  Please let us know if you would like to work with us and submit yourself for an IMA.

Gartner analyst Mick MacComaschaigh recently added a blog post titled Collecting our thoughts and thoughts on the collective.  Like we at Baynote frequently do, he uses the analogy of how much ants can accomplish when they act collectively.  Many other thinkers have also used this story to illustrate collective intelligence including Brian Solis and Steven Johnson.

In his blog Mick says, "It can be argued that social software facilitates in some ways the next evolution of interaction between individuals, among groups and within a collective. Such social networks can be built upon our desires to be regarded in a context greater than our immediate surrounds."

As individuals, we frequently want to protect our individual voice and yet at the same time we desire to reach out to those most like us.  These opposing forces are constantly in play.  In this sense we are not like ants, who are all or nothing about the "collective."

By limiting the "collective" to those who are currently seeking the same thing, i.e. sharing a similar context, we can balance our need for individuality with the benefits of drawing on the strengths and wisdom of those who are the same path.

Mick concludes with the statement, "It is incumbent upon us to regard collective intelligence as the “killer application” for our social platform and establish an exciting base for the next phase of our cultural evolution."

We agree wholeheartedly.  The era of the lone and lonely web surfer is behind us.  It is now an increasingly social experience. Smart companies will realize their customers expect a social experience.  And for that social experience to work, you need to rely on others to show you the way.

As Mick said "If ants can do it, we can too."

We've been saying this pretty much forever.  Bizreport just wrote "If your e-commerce site doesn't already feature site search then perhaps a recent survey, conducted by comScore, will convince you to implement it ready for the holiday season."  More on the overall results of the survey are in a Search Engine Land article.

And the number of people using site search is climbing!  The survey found 40% of shoppers use search, whereas only 20% were browser.  This underpins the importance of adapting your customers online experience, no matter how they get to you, or how they find things on your site.  Search, Navigation, Recommendations - they are all important.  User generated content, catalog content, supporting editorial content - all important, all potentially deal clinchers for your shoppers.  And another nugget about how important relevant search results is, after using the site search box 94% click on between one and 10 product listings according to the study.

And fixing site search in time for the holiday shopping is still possible with no heavy lifting from your stressed out, "don't ask me to change the site before January" IT guys.  If you have search, let the crowd help you offer more relevant results.  Again, no tuning, no heavy lifting.  If you don't have site search at all, we offer a hosted site search option as well.  It is easier than you think.

I'm a Facebook user.  And I've clicked the "like" button.  But I don't think I have ever done it for an ecommerce site, not even the ones who are trying to lure me with freebies.  According to a recent eMarketer article online merchants love Facebook's like button.  I think they may be distracted by the latest shiny object.  As social tech guru Brian Solis wrote in Business Week yesterday, "too many companies are diving into social media without thinking a project through."

In Brian Solis's new book "Engage" he states that likes "facilitate the sharing of 'the love' in byte-sized actions that reverberate through social networks, resulting in a formidable network effect of movement or diversion.  It is the digital curation of relevant content that binds us contextually." 

True, all true.  And for the things that I happen to be passionate about personally, I'm a big liker and I love getting turned onto other things that my network likes.

But for me, these have yet to be online merchants.  Online merchants are not going to make themselves relevant to me or know what I want if they rely solely on my liking them. 

Brian Solis also mentions in his book that we are "faced with an increasingly thinning state of continuous partial attention (CPA)." What this means for me is that I am already pretty saturated regarding where I am willing to actively participate, even something as small as a like.  I've Yelped, I've posted reviews on Amazon, but I am increasingly less motivated to do so.  So what does this mean for online merchandizers?  Namely one thing-- while engaging with people on Social Media and offering opportunities like reviews and ratings is a wonderful thing to do,  don't leave out the lurkers and the window shoppers. 

Measure engagement with everyone. Adapt your online experience to suit the current needs of everyone, likers and non-likers alike.

We are looking forward to our June 22nd webcast featuring Forrester Analyst and customer experience guru, Ron Rogowski, and CA Technologies' VP of Online Experience, Larry Walker.

Many of you probably read the February 2010 report by Forrester that says websites that don't support customer goals will waste millions, in particular because frustrated site visitors choose more expensive channels or give up entirely.  Seems pretty obvious to us but Forrester has hard numbers to back it up: 75% of consumers surveyed seeking customer service online will turn to another channel when a firm's website lets them down.  ouch.  Complementing that report's findings, Ron's recent report on emotional experience design advocates going beyond a site visitor's immediate needs to address a user's context for coming to the site.

In our live webcast, Ron will talk about how engaging online experiences drive measurable profitability. Ron and Larry will also discuss  site optimization tips to improve sales conversions, reduce support costs, and turn customers into fans.  Best practices they'll discuss include how to:
1.    Help users quickly find the content needed to achieve their goals;
2.    Choose the right channel or medium for the audience; and
3.    Turn user insights into action.

You may have noticed that CA Technologies has recently revamped its entire online experience in conjunction with changing its name from CA, Inc., something they announced at their recent CA World user conference.

Larry will also discuss CA Technologies' strategy around engaging their diverse customers, creating an emotionally and functionally satisfying experience and, of course, how Baynote fits in.  In case you miss the live broadcast, don't worry, we'll send registrants a link to the recording.

The Bikes not Binkies reference is something I thought of as I was monitoring the great Twitter conversation during yesterday's very successful AMA webcast on Personalization featuring our head of marketing, Carlos Carvajal. 

First generation personalization systems relied very heavily on a user's past behavior or tried to box them into a particular category.  For me, this box, is always whatever I was last buying my kids.  So while my 3 and 4 year old are ready for bikes, some sites, which will go un-named, are still trying to sell me binkies, in otherwords baby stuff.

Personalization is really a strategy, not a technology.  It's a component of a broader customer experience optimization strategy.  A personalized site is a site that works for the person who visits, i.e. different for me in my context of "mom of toddlers" than for my context "daughter needing to buy mother's day present."

There were so many nuggets that people pulled from the webcast and posted on Twitter, frankly some of these were so cogent, you might see them pop up in other Baynote material.  Sometimes being limited to 140 characters is a really good thing.  Ok, here is what some people tweeted:

"Personalized landing pages are a simple & effective way to get started with online personalization based on context & intent" 

In case you don’t know Bluefly, it is one of the hottest places to shop online for designer fashion. Bluefly was featured last week in the National Retail Federation’s magazine STORES. The article was titled “Power of the People: Collective intelligence translates into increased sales for Bluefly.com.”

The article described having Baynote Recommendations on your site as like having a “retail floor teeming with hundreds of associates.” You know, the helpful and knowledgeable kind, the ones who can show you exactly what you are looking for.

Marty Keane, the company’s senior vice president of e-commerce, talks about how they achieved 300% lift in sales by harnessing the wisdom of all Bluefly visitors. One cool angle on the Bluefly story is that, as a customer with a rapidly changing inventory, it was imperative that their recommendation system have no lag. Because Baynote recommendations are based on the preferences of all site visitors, not just purchasers, Bluefly’s “most wanted” recommendations on new arrival product pages keep pace with the changing inventory.

This week, Forrester CEO George Colony introduced an idea that resonated with me and that idea was Social Sigma. I’ve never really understood 6 Sigma- it just made me want to get a 7 Sigma, but this idea made sense.  In a nutshell, Colony said that he frequently hears other CEOs asking “How can we use social to make money?”   There are three elements to his Social Sigma concept:

Listening: More and more companies are adopting the “@ComcastCares” approach to using social technologies as a means of listening to customers and resolving complaints.  The problem is that these interactions  don’t translate to actionable information and “valuable Social Sigma data ends up on the cutting room floor before it ever reaches product managers or R&D staff that could use it.”

Soliciting feedback: This is taking the concept one step further and actually explicitly asking for input through social channels.

Marketing:  Closing the loop and making sure everyone knows the company is listening to feedback and adapting accordingly.

Colony  goes on to say that since you’re initiating a continuous, real-time, rapid exchange with hundreds or perhaps thousands of customers, CEOs need to have the guts guts to pursue this social strategy and stick to it.

George’s Social Sigma concept aligns nicely with Sucharita Mulpuru’s recent report on Social Commerce where she calls out social recommendations as one of the top social marketing strategies being pursued.  Why?  Because it is easy to draw a straight line to the bottom line.

Back to SocialSigma and some of the underlying drivers.  We’ve heard from several analysts, customers and prospects that “going social” is largely driven by expectations created by their personal interactions with social media, even for B2B.  Scary!  Without adding teams of communicators, there have to be other ways that companies can innovate and become more adaptive.  We think that Baynote’s technology is one of those ways.  It turns your website into a real-time “listening” device.  And because it adapts the search, navigation and recommendation experience in real time, it also accomplishes some degrees of feedback solicitation.  It can create the specific website or email experience that people want to experience.

Why do you care?  Because this social technology makes you money by selling more. It makes you money instead of your competitors because they find good stuff on your site or save you money because they find answers on your site and don’t tie up your call center.

There is a wealth of content available online, and as we know all too well, it can get overwhelming to try to keep up. The Baynote team regularly reads the following industry blogs and media sites that are tackling the hot issues and trends that touch our business and our customers. Please let us know what you think of our shortlist and if you have recommendations for other sites that we have overlooked.

Collective Intelligence

1)      Tom Austin, Gartner – Tom is a group vice president and Gartner fellow who covers how IT can enhance the performance of individuals, teams and organizations.  His blog includes insightful analysis on the impact that various forms of technology have on productivity. He has been placing a lot of focus on Pattern-Based Strategy, which enables business leaders to actively seek, amplify, examine and exploit new or novel business patterns.

2)      Forrester’s Customer Intelligence Blog – Authored by Forrester analysts Dave Frankland, Julie Katz, and Suresh Vittal, this blog provides details on the latest research and trends affecting marketers that are focused on mining customer data from online behaviors.

3)      MediaPost Behavioral Insider – Steve Smith’s blog takes a fresh look at behavioral marketing, analyzing the latest strategies for marketers to better understand their customers and make strategic decisions that are based on proven approaches.

4)      Destination CRM – This online daily edition of CRM Magazine reports on the latest information on customer relationship management.

Real-Time Web

5)      Steve Gillmor, TechCrunchIT —  Recognized as the leading journalist on the real-time Web, Gillmor has reported on every key player in real-time, either through written blog posts, or in online video episodes with The Gillmor Gang. The Gillmor Gang is a technical show that interviews IT industry executives at major companies that have deep knowledge in the technology that they focus on.

6)      Pete Cashmore, Mashable – The founder and CEO of Mashable, one of the most popular blogs worldwide, Cashmore writes a weekly column for CNN.com as well as regular posts on Mashable. He has been following real-time Web closely lately in his CNN column.

7)      John Borthwick – Currently the CEO of Betaworks, Borthwick’s blog posts study the development of the real-time Web. As an entrepreneur, Borthwick is involved in various companies that touch on the real time Web, and in his own words, is interested in understanding “how media evolves as it collides with real time conversations.”

e-Commerce

8)      Jeffery Roster, Gartner – Jeffery is a research vice president at Gartner as part of the Industry Market Strategies Worldwide unit covering the retail and wholesale industries. His blog posts provide insight into research he is working on, as well as his reflections on industry events including NRF.

9)      Forrester eBusiness & Channel Strategy Professionals Blog – Forrester analyst, Sucharita Mulpuru contributes to this blog every once in a while, and we always find her posts to be very relevant to Baynote. Sucharita publishes the annual Holiday Retail Forecast, and is a recognized authority on technology developments that affect the online commerce industry and vendors that facilitate online marketing and merchandising.

10)   Get Elastic – An e-commerce blog maintained by Elastic Path’s Emerging Media Analyst and eCommerce consultant, Linda Bustos.

11)   Shop.org – An open forum for shop.org members to post their knowledge and experiences with e-commerce.

Search

12)   Gilbane Search Blog – Linda Moulton of analyst and consulting firm, Gilbane Group, blogs regularly about trends and technologies in enterprise search.

13)   Search Engine Watch Blog – This blog by Nathania Johnson provides tips and information about searching the Web, analysis of the search engine industry and help to site owners trying to improve their ability to be found in search engines.

Technology & Innovation

14)   Sramana Mitra on Strategy – An entrepreneur and a strategy consultant in Silicon Valley for over 15 years, Sramana  also writes a weekly column for Forbes and is currently authoring Entrepreneur Journeys, a series of books focused on demystifying entrepreneurship. Her blog posts profile various entrepreneurs, and provides a comprehensive look at the innovation that is happening in Silicon Valley today.

15)   Read/Write Web – One of the world’s top 20 blogs, Richard MacManus, Marshall Kirkpatrick, and their team do an excellent job of analyzing all products that relate to the Internet, and the top trends that impact changes in Internet-related technology. RRW is a great place to remain updated on the latest and greatest Internet innovations.

Customer Service

16)   Ragsdale’s Eye on Service – John Ragsdale is the Vice President of Technology Research for the Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA). He shares the latest in technology innovation, industry events, and his expert commentary on the latest issues effecting customer service executives on his blog.

Edelman Digital wrote a really great white paper with a rather dull title of five digital trends to watch for 2009 As a PR person turned marketing generalist, one thing I found particularly interesting was the idea that our our boxed-in titles and roles may be obsolete.  The line between marketing and customer care are blurring and our jobs in 2009 will be as much about customer retention as customer acquisition.

Some miscellaneous nuggets:
Consumer opinions online (61%) are nearly twice as trusted as search engine advertising (34%) and banner ads (26%), according to the 2007 Nielsen Online Global Consumer Study.

Less is the New More – overload is taking its toll. Content we care about will find us through clever combinations of friends and algorithms.

When I first learned PR it was a job filled with control.  We sent out highly crafted material to select audience of influencers and it was all about push, it was not a conversation.  Now just as PR becomes a role that multiple people in a company play, it is also a role that is blurring with customer service and customer care.  As many PR luminaries like Brian Solis keep saying, it’s a conversation. Sometimes letting go of that control has been hard but it has been well worth it.

The same shift, and the same release of control is happening to online marketers.  It is not about what you think is important, it is about what your site users think is important.  Turning site search and navigation over to the crowds might put you out of your comfort zone.  But our roles are changing.  If customer care really is part of our job, then it’s time we faciliate a conversation rather than make a speech.

It’s pretty hot right now to start corporate Twitter accounts and Facebook pages as a way be more “social” and in touch with the crowd.   But they are no substitute for a website where you can find what you need. 

My mom had an issue with Comcast recently.  I suggested she contact them through Twitter. Their Comcast Cares persona has become pretty legendary.  But my mom isn’t on Twitter and unlikely to join so I tweeted for her and she got amazing service as a result.  It was great!  I felt social!  I felt powerful!  But really I was one squeeky wheel who happened to know about how to leverage a particular channel, Twitter.

What about the more invisible, average visitor to Comcast or anyone else’s website?  What about the person who leaves disatisfied with their experience without leaving any sort of explict feedback?  What do you learn from that person and how can you leverage this to make the experience better for the next customer?   Without my tweet, my mom would have just been an upset unknown customer, searching but not finding. 

Don’t get me wrong.  I love Twitter.  My friend’s love Facebook.  But my mom and the big silent majority are still out there, searching on traditional marketing, eCommerce and support sites for answers.  Let them help each other find what they need.   Harness their successes and their failures without making them have to actively participate in anything.   By including everyone, you really are tapping and sharing the broadest possible “social” community, both active participants and average browsers like my mom.

Check out our two minute trailer from last week’s “Mob Commerce” webcast featuring Forrester Analyst Sucharita Mulpuru.

In this webcast, Sucharita ties the Forrester Consumer Forum’s uber-theme of the universal needs of consumers (Connection, Uniqueness, Comfort and Variety) to what we do at Baynote.  She made us realize that product recommendations can tap into all four needs.  Sometimes recommendations provide an online shopper the reassurance that a particular product is “mom-tested” or “peer-validated”, meeting our need for connection and comfort.   In other contexts,  recommendations might allow someone to explore their need for variety and uniqueness by exposing long-tail niches like “third-person shooter” games.

For another angle on how human needs and desires affect how and why we buy, you might want to check out Martin Lindstrom’s recent book buy.ology -truth and lies abut why we buy.  Of particular interest and the direct tie to the Forrester material and our webcast is Chapter 3 I’ll Have What She’s Having — Mirror Neurons at Work.  It talks about how our need for connection is wired into our brain structure.  Mirror neurons drive us to imitate and, interestingly, work in conjunction with dopamine to make that imitation feel good.  It’s no wonder then that people who use recommendations buy more and feel good doing it.

Another interesting point of the book is the difference between what people say they want to buy, as uncovered through market research, surveys, or focus groups and what they actually buy.

Amazon’s recommendations frequently make me giggle.  I love to demo my “personal recommendations” at tradeshows to illustrate the point that we aren’t what we were yesterday.  We say this in all our presentations, we talk about the importance of context but sometimes a good example is worth a thousand words.

When I was pregnant,  Amazon kept recommending me books on exotic locations my husband and I had planned to travel like Cambodia or Patagonia.  Oh cruel Amazon and you won’t even fetch me ice cream!

I haven’t done a lot of shopping this year on Amazon.  If I had it would start showing me crazy recommendations based on some esoteric book I bought my physicist stepfather.  That was his wierd niche, not mine, not mine!  Let it go!

So this morning, I log on and what do I see but an Amazon recommendation for a book on losing weight while breastfeeding.  Not only is my youngest now a year and a half and I am waaaay past that phase but it seems, again, eerily cruel that Amazon finds a way to remind me that during the holidays I am eating more than I burn.  Now that’s just cruel.

Jack Jia will be one of several speakers on Richard McManus’s ReadWriteWeb Live podcast today at 3:30pst.  RWW Live is hosted as always by Sean Ammirati and ReadWriteWeb editor Richard MacManus.

From their blog – “ReadWriteWeb talks to a group of leaders in the online shopping market. We have executives from Retrevo, ModCloth, Baynote, ThisNext and Cartfly on the call, and we’ll be discussing what’s next in online shopping in this timely holiday podcast….  We will post the audio from the show at the end, but we hope you join us LIVE on Calliflower or Facebook.”

Our latest 90 second  webcast “trailer” as created by our Creative Czar Brian, is now available.  This is about the quickest way to “get” what Baynote means by Social Search and why it’s different.  And if you don’t believe us, listen to our customer Bill Skeet from Juniper Networks tell it like it is from his perspective.

One of the interesting things that happened at Juniper after overlaying Baynote on top of their existing search engine  (you all know this right, no rip and replace, we’re SAAS, we’re very nice that way) is that the mix of search results shifted significantly in two main ways:

First of all, the Mob of Juniper site users found documents relevant to queries that the search engine couldn’t.  Humans just get things, make connections that machines can’t.  Period.

Second, the items that percolated to the top were more often the more technical documents that the majority of the site viewers were interested in, not necessarily all the various product pages that marketing felt they needed to create.  The Mob, of course, knew what it needed and put these items on top.  Simple.  Voilà.

So sometimes what the Mob, via Baynote, delivers is more results (i.e. stuff an algorithm can’t find like pdfs) or sometimes fewer results (just the stuff people want) either way, the Mob delivers better results.

Hats off to Brian for producing this cool trailer to our webinar Mob Marketing:  Manual Website Optimization FUGETABOUTIT!  If you’ve only got a minute, you’ll get the gist of the whole thesis of the webinar.

 

As we worked with Suresh Vittal of Forrester Research to put together the content, Jack, Suresh and I frequently hearkened back to a similar “sea change” that happened in the early days of content management.  In 1998, we spent much of our time talking to journalist, analysts and customers about unlocking the so-called webmaster bottleneck.  If you could only put web publishing in the hands of the internal content experts, then you could eliminate this delay created by having a “webmaster.”  By 1999 when we went public, everyone got it.

But unlocking this bottleneck created a new bottleneck – people finding the information they needed.  Now we suffered from content overload — because organizations kept producing more and more content and there was no efficient means to make sure that the content you showed was the content people needed or the products people wanted.  Organizations tried to fix it by investing in complex search engines or analytics or profile-based personalization.  None of this fixed the fundamental problem.

It’s time to get rid of the expert bottleneck.  In this economy, the timing is perfect.  There are some task that will always be manual but there are others that can and should be automated.   Automate for a better user experience.  Automate for efficiency. Turn what people see on your site over to the Mob.  It might make you feel a little uncomfortble now, but so was the idea of eliminating the webmaster bottleneck in 1999.  I say FUGETABOUTIT.

Before going to eTail East which was this week in DC, we at Baynote were a little concerned that attendance would be down given the economy and the high cost of travel.  Attendance was only slightly down from last year and the enthusiasm was high for both pure-play eTailers as well as with the online people for brick and mortar retailers.

During the Advanced Search Forum, when asked if there were any activities they were doing in 2008 that they intended to scale back in 2009, there was silence.  It seemed that everyone there was still doing anything they could to improve the customer experience and get the right message to the right person. I canvased several people privately and asked them if their high level goals were changing – few described any sort of retrenching, some said efficiency and automation were becoming more important.  The idea of putting the collective intelligence of site visitors to work, as Jack Jia has described it “let the mob run the store”, seemed to make sense to everyone.  It appealed to those trying to do more with less as well as those trying to bring the right social technologies to play on their sites.

Interestingly blogs themselves are still up for grabs regarding how and when and why they should be used.  Barbara Mousigian of CDW commented in the session on Customer Experience, that people were frequently distracted by blogs as the latest shiny object to add to their site.

I asked our CEO Jack what his biggest take-away was from eTail.  He said that businesses still haven’t figured how to create a connection with customers the way business could when mom & pop stores dominated.  They put so-called experts in charge…marketers and merchandizers in the world of eCommerce.  But this isn’t the same and the gap is still great.  Shopping on the web is still, in its essence, a lonely experience.  But what was cool at eTail, was people acknowledged the gap and were actively looking to fill it….not haphazardly with the latest shiny object but with the best practices and technologies already proving themselves in the marketplace.

Were you just asking yourself about where you can find out about the most effective online merchandising techniques? Well what do you know? Mike was just talking about exactly that last week with Jason Billingsley, Co-founder and VP of Innovation at Elastic Path. Mike and Jason’s webinar is available here if you’d like to listen, but while you’re there you also might want to check out the EP Blog if you like keeping up on all the latest eCommerce technology and trends without all the work. They recently just posted an interesting discussion about how men shop online- which apparently isn’t much different than how they shop in stores: quickly and without trying anything on.

Have you ever wondered how an entire colony of ants can find their way to a food source? Or how internet marketers apply the same principle to make contextual recommendations? Or how merchants automatically promote certain products to super specific customer segments? If you haven’t already then I bet you do now! You can find out here at iMedia Connection’s featured article written by our very own Mike Svatek.

This week was a big first for us here at Baynote with the debut of our premier webinar, Bond vs. Barbie: The Dynamic Positioning Imperative with Stanford consulting professor, Tom Kosnik. In the webinar, Tom discusses the shift in branding strategy from the concept of durability and the never-changing “spy-chic” persona of James Bond to the dynamic positioning of Mattel’s multi-cultural, multi-profession Barbie. All in all, the webinar was a hands-down success and much thanks goes out to Tom for his time and expertise. If you might have missed the live broadcast but would still like to know how you can dynamically position your company brand, download the webinar in its entirety here.