LetsBuyIt Blog

After having talked about branded communities there are also the Social Shopping Communities that are widely discussed now. What we found most interesting was that the German Social Shopping Community Yiieha is up for sale on Ebay. It has given all the necessary information that you need to know when buying a shopping community portal on Ebay Alexa Ranking, Page Impressions, Adranks, and much more. Check it out and we will follow it very closely what is happening with it. The bidding is finished on 03.07.08, 14:45:25 German Standard Time.

Jupiter Research published a study saying that branded communities are a failure and don’t reach their consumers. As stated in Internetworld and Acquisa the average number of members of branded communities in Europe are 6,494 members with more than have half of the communities only counting 1,000 members in comparison to the investments sometimes going far beyond EUR 100,000. Viral marketing is also out of date and is not lucrative anymore for those branded communities in most instances because most companies don’t understand the modern internet users. They try to just give information to the members instead of making the effort of understanding their consumers and providing them with interaction possibilities or even reasons to communicate. According to a report by David Eicher, CEO of the internet agency Robert & Horst, one just needs to merely be smart and integrate the users at the beginning of the development of the community instead of creating an expensive “community platform” and then looking for members. That sounds easy! What do you think?

Fleishman-Hillard Inc. and Harris Interactive have published an excellent study about the influence the internet has on modern consumers. Their “Digital Life Index Study” highlights the main aspect of the modern shopping behaviours and compares the different impacts between the UK, Germany and France. The four key findings of the report are worth reading up on:

You should read the article, which you can find here.

Two news have drawn our attention today, which we think should be noted:

Winner of the day

We had previously mentioned the Download World Record attempt for the Mozilla Firefox Version 3.0. According to Mozilla and the BBC, Firefox has been downloaded 8.3 million times within 24 hours, which is quite noteworthy. There have been server problems, who could not cope with the amount of simultaneous downloads and apparently some security flaws have already been discovered but the number of downloads is still very impressive. Congratulations and you can count us in for those 8.3 million.

Loser of the day

Another news, which needs mentioning is the fact that the Swedish government has passed a law, despite the civil uproar, that permits the state to check everybody’s emails, sms, phonecalls and any other telecommunication without any court order. Isn’t this disrespectful against the privacy of the individual? Besides the common argument that “you don’t need to be worried if you got nothing to hide” we consider this as an incredibly distrust against its people. Let’s say that we were less than positively surprised to put it that way!

The whole team is very pleased to introduce Billy, our antastic mascot, to you!

You can contact him at billy@letsbuyit.com!

The recently published article “This Ad Stinks: Let Readers Vote” by Business Week gives some great information about the result that viewers’ feedback on ads have for the advertiser. We have already previously taken note of StumbleUpon.com, a rating website for websites, people and videos, but we think it is worthwhile mentioning now in this context. The notion that advertisers ask for a review or rating of their ads before the roll-out of a large campaign can save tremendous amounts of money but also generate huge traffic in case you are voted positively. The only questions is whether advertisers like the idea of being criticised or rated?

It seems that they are currently more company acquisitions happening than dealipedia could hold but we were wondering what are the latest Key Performance Indicators (KPI) besides the known ones:

What else comes to your mind when you think about analysing the performance of your online retail site?

Oh yes, our new Letsbuyit mascot was born yesterday!!!
It weighs around 200mg, which admittedly is not very big, but it’s healthy and sound! It was also baptised yesterday and we will present it to you very shortly.
Thank you everybody who made it possible for our famous mascot to reascend from the ashes!

This is a viral marketing campaign as it happens: Mozilla Firefox is promoting its Firefox Version 3 by attempting to break the download world record, which is the amount of times the browser is being downloaded within 24 hours. There is currently no world record and this first attempt will be the world record but the goal is to beat the download record of Firefox 2, which was downloaded 1.6 million times on its launch day.

If you wanna be part of this World Record Attempt then go to the Spread Firefox Download Day 2008 website and register. We are part of it!