This was my first for-ray into live blogging. As such, forgive me in advance for typos, grammar errors or otherwise discombobulated sentences. The text below details Jason Billingsley presentation for the International Internet Marketing Association, covering the topic: 42 ways to sell more online.
Jason Billingsley is the founder of Flip Retail, co-founder of Elastic Path and the blog Get Elastic. He co-founded Elastic Path Software in November 2000 and held the position of VP Marketing where he helped the company attract over 200 customers. Global brands such as Google, Aeroplan, Nike, Time Inc., Avis, Samsonite, United Health Group, Telus, Garmin, and Sony. Most impressively, this was done with no outside equity financing.
Flip Retail’s mandate is to consult with online retailers on how to execute e-commerce best practices.
Ean Jackson is introducing Jason.
Don’t miss the events coming up in February, March and April. For more information, visit the IIMA website.
Jason got into e-commerce when he was 17 years, and his girlfriend asked him to developed a web page. From then on, he started Elastic Path. Right now, 140 people work at Elastic Path – one of the biggest success stories in the tech field in Vancouver. After 9 years, he retired from Elastic Path and is now a professional speaker and e-commerce coach.
Jason loves to travel and decided with his wife to go to a half-year cruise.
Jason is now talking and about to start presenting his presentation deck and the Elastic Path story.
Some of the clients in the Elastic Path roster right now are Virgin, Google, etc. For now, he’ll talk about e-Commerce.
LeWeb is taking place as we speak, and they have opened up many of their presentations to UStream. Today is the last day of the conference, and it’s been definitely worth staying up to watch some of it (remember – they’re in Central European Time).
For your viewing pleasure, here’s the embedded video stream. Obviously, this will not be up and running after the conference is finished.
So far, I’ve watched a roundtable discussion with Twitter, Facebook, Ning and MySpace, led by TechCrunch, a presentation by Twitter, a very funny presentation spoof by Yossi Vardi. And, right at this very moment, a presentation by Danah Boyd.
If you’re not familiar with UStream, it’s a great channel that allows you to stream live video while also enabling chat next to the video player. If you’re planning on live-streaming a conference or special event, it’s definitely a channel to consider.
One of the appealing things that LeWeb is doing is broadcasting many of its mainstage discussions. Some people may argue that a conference such as this should not be open through live streaming, and that if you want to catch any of the action, you should pony up and pay for it. My take on this is that, if the content is good enough (which it’s been, in this case), people will watch the live online videos, and the content will serve as a magnet to:
Raise awareness of the conference
Through the numbers of recorded viewers, help prove to future sponsors that it’s worth for them to invest in the event
Some of the things that they’re doing right is integrating Facebook and Twitter stream on their homepage. For many, this may seem like an obvious thing to do, but it’s great to see that they haven’t forgotten about something so fundamental.
It’d be even better if their UStream video was available through their Facebook Page.
Another thing I’d to contemplate, if I were LeWeb, would be capturing people’s email address before they can view some (or all) of the live-streaming content. Then, I’d send updates on future conferences to those who have provided their emails. I know I’d consider this… an Internet conference in PARIS? Count me in! I’d work it into my vacation!
So here I am, playing with Google Wave. I’m still getting the hang of it, but it seems to open a lot of possibilities.
One of the most attractive features is the ability to incorporate a Wave into a blog. Of course, this will be even better once more people get access to Wave.
I’ve found it very easy to do so by, first, installing the Wavr WordPress plugin. Then, you will need to enter a code, akin to wave id=”yourwaveid here” into the post where you’d like the Wave to be integrated. This is the only part where I had a bit of hiccup, but the solution is simple:
- Login to Google Wave using your username.
- Select a Wave, then look at the address bar in your browser. You’ll probably find something that starts with
https://wave.google.com/wave/?….
To identify your wave id, just locate everything that includes and follows the exclamation mark, minus the period and the number towards the end of the line.
You will also need to replace %252B with +. In this example, we’d end up with: googlewave.com!w+XXXXXX.
Then, embed the wave id code as per the instructions provided by Wavr.
Once the embedding is done, whoever has access to Google Wave will probably see one ugly green rectangle in the blog post. As it turns out, those colours can be reset through the plugin’s settings in your WordPress admin panel.
Local Internet celebrity John Chow has been in the news quite a bit in the last few days, thanks to his introduction of ads to his Twitter updates (Here are the original articles in The New York Times and in The Gawker).
I have posted a couple of comments on other sites about this, which pretty much express my thoughts on this one – at least up until this point in time. I’d be a fool to think that my opinion might not evolve as I hear more on both sides of the equation.
The first comment I wrote was in response to Philip Novak’s link to The New York Times, posted in his Facebook page: It reads…
” I have mixed feelings on that one. On one hand, the original tweet about M&Ms did have “(Ad)” in its text. In addition, if people dislike John’s commercial tweets, they have a simple choice, which is to unfollow him.
As a marketer, I’d be very skeptic about recommending this ad platform to advertisers. It’d be interesting to see what kinds of conversions those ads receive, and how they affect not only the advertiser’s reputation, but also the reputation of the Twitter user who originally posts it.
As a Twitter user, I wouldn’t dare sending a Twitter ad to my followers. It decreases the intrinsic level of trust that brought Twitter to where it is now. And if someone I trust and follow began to post those ads, their reputation would take a quick plunge, leading me to unfollow them.”
Then, a little earlier today, I posted this second comment, on Patti Schom-Moffatt’s blog post:
“Hello,
As you probably know, John Chow made the news because he started incorporating ads in his Twitter stream.
I personally wouldn’t integrate ads in my Twitter updates, largely because I feel that it betrays the trust between myself and my followers.
Maybe John Chow’s followers may not have been surprised that he’d adopt this practice. In that case, whether or not he runs Twitter ads might not necessarily hurt his number of followers.
But what if an ad runs through a Twitter account where followers did not see it coming? In that case, it would be interesting to see the long-term effects on the reputations of both the advertiser and the Twitter account that published the ad.
I could see this ad model working for Twitter accounts that already include information about commercial offers, like coupons, discounts, local offers, etc, but not for others that have built their reputation based on the personal tone in their conversations.
Last but not least, if anyone is insulted by the ads, they always have a choice: unfollow whoever published them.”
So this sums up my thoughts on this… for now.
Would love to hear your opinion. Do you agree? Disagree? Why?
I read a few minutes ago that Biz Stone, Twitter’s co-founder, announced in London on Thursday that, at the end of the year, Twitter will offer premium accounts with features to help businesses capitalize even more on that social network.
These features will include access to analytics data, and according to MarketingVox, “the ability to geo-tag individual tweets” as well as “tools to recognize which users have higher reputations than others”.
So… that’s got me thinking. As we all know, recent events, such as Michael Jackson’s death, and several developments during the last elections in Iran (e.g. Neda’s death), were first reported on Twitter before being confirmed by many major news outlets, including CNN. Discussions abounded with respect to the fact that the Twitter population was largely accepting as truth what some Twitter users reported, before facts could be validated through standard journalism practices.
Here’s where I see a hypothetical opportunity for reputable news outlets to vindicate themselves on Twitter: take the soon-to-come geo-tagging feature, mix it with the ability to identify users that have higher reputation (partially through the number of followers), and just for hypothesis sake, add a touch of PageRank. What do you get? The ability to pinpoint Twitter accounts that are the most reputable at a specific location. (Post-edit: I know, I know. PageRank is a Google technology, but wouldn’t it be nice?)
Let me illustrate: the New York Times Twitter profile has a PageRank 7. For those unfamiliar with the concept, PageRank is a metric that Google uses to indicate the importance and reliability of a web page (not a web site). The higher that number, the more importance Google has assigned to that page. Not only that – NY Times’ Twitter account also had, at the time of this writing, 2,107,499 followers, which is a stratospheric number reflecting the importance that Twitter users have given to updates from that account.
Then, poor New York Post has, by comparison, a measly 19,983 followers, and a PageRank 6. What if you were looking on Twitter for an authoritative news source to read about what’s happening in New York, using the geo-tagging component?
Let’s imagine a map tool on Twitter, similar to Google’s own. You would then zoom into New York City, and the service would return a list showing accounts in that area, ordered from the most reputable to the least. It’s safe to assume that The New York Times would be, if not at the top, very close to it – while the New York Post would be ranked considerably lower.
In the event of a major news event, Twitter users would refer to that map to see which accounts could be trusted in that locality. What would they see? Surprise, surprise – NY Times’ account close to the top of the list, with others ranked lower.
When Michael Jackson passed away, this would have translated as LA Times deemed as a much more trustworthy Twitter account to follow than, for example, TMZ.
Now, this doesn’t mean that Twitter users would decide to follow what the LA Times has to say instead of TMZ – but at the very least, it would be a boost to “traditional” news sources’ visibility on Twitter.
Can’t wait to see what concoctions will be coming from the Twitter kitchen at the end of the year. What about you?
