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 EbayAlexa 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 Viral marketing is also out of date and is not lucrative anymore for those branded communities in most instances because most companies don’t understand the modern internet users.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:
Digital Influence: The Internet is by far the most important medium in the lives of European consumers — but companies are underinvesting in that influence.
Behavioural Framework: Consumer use of the Internet falls into five distinct classes of behaviours. Smart marketers will clearly understand the mix of behaviours that is most critical to their business — and formulate integrated campaigns to address that mix.
Consumers use the Internet in different ways to make different decisions. The differences are driven by the impact of the decision on their lives and the range of available choices.
Consumers see the clear benefits of the Internet to their lives, but they still have strong concerns that need to be addressed.
You should read the article, which you can find here.
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:
Page Impressions
Unique Visitors
Pages Viewed
Demographics
Acquisition cost per user
Adspend per user
Conversion Rate
Click-Through Rate
Page Rank
What else comes to your mind when you think about analysing the performance of your online retail site?
We have previously mentioned viral marketing however we were wondering whether anybody has examples for the monetary value of viral ad campaigns?
We read that the campaign “Will It Blend”from Blendtec generated $50,000 in ad revenue with 100 million views in total.
Apparently “Ask a Ninja” generates an unbelievable $100,000 a month in ad revenue and income from merchandising and licensing for creators Kent Nichols and Doug Sarine.
According to Wiki.media-culture the BMW viral ad campaign in 2001 generated BMW a sales increased by 12.5% compared to 2000 with peak times even crashing the servers.
What examples do you have for viral marketing campaigns where the benefit can be expressed in monetary value?
Youtube has come up with a white label YouTube called Startyourtube. Now you can just create your own YouTube with the look, feel, name, URL, content, etc. that you want such as Snowboarderstube as you can see below. To increase the capacities, number of possible views, blogs, etc. one needs to pay but it still means that you have your own Videoportal!
Another little GPS or “Google Penetrating System”, as one person commented quite correctly on the Google System Blog. Google is showing traffic conditions on Google Maps with the data based on historic data and statistics, which works similar to the weather forecast. This data is still insufficient for the entire world but some U.S. cities already have the system up and running as you can see in this map for San Francisco.
In the last two weeks we have received some interesting statistics about social networks and webpages in Europe, namely Germany, that might interest you:
First of all it needs mentioning that there are currently around 149 social networks in Germany according to the ranking - list of zweinull.cc.
The Forsa-Survey, which was initiated by Sevenone Interactive, concluded that the average German only visits eight sites per month. Such a high loyalty makes it very difficult for new websites to become popular, because the average man checks out 21 new sites and the women check out 13 new sites on an average per month. To see what these main websites are and which age group is loyal to which site, see the statistics.
Another interesting fact is that according to PriceWaterhouseCoopers, 85% of the German internet users are in some sort of social network. What makes it interesting is that these people are willing to rather receive targeted advertising instead of having to pay for the service however don’t like to be monitored/tracked while surfing the internet. In correlation to the previously mentioned loyalty of internet users, German are interested in staying the same social network for the entire life instead of joining too many new networks. To read the entire analysis of this interesting PWC study click here.
According to BloombergMySpace wants to enter the sphere of online retail now after having already strung a nice deal with Vivendi SA’s Universal Music Group, Sony BMG Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group Corp. for selling music online in order to compensate for the dwindling numbers of members and decreasing advertising revenue! They are even considering their own online check-out system. Either this is a desperate try to turn the destiny around or a brilliant move. Let’s see what the Murdoch’s are coming up with.
We had previously reported about the Opensocial Initiative and that MySpace would like to open up an API for outside developers to develop applications for MySpace, similar to the applications of Facebook. Well, they are online now and some applications are already available. MySpace also provides the opportunity to create social shopping widgets! Check out the MySpace application center here.
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.
