Meijer Twitter Marketing FTL
Apr 15, 02:19 PMYesterday I reported a surprisingly OK moment of being marketed to in Twitterland, and Laura Fisher talked about how we should maybe not overreact to what's emerging with marketers in Twitter (agree!) but at the same time ... man, this could get really sucky:
"At some point it will become tiresome, and then I’ll turn off notifications and I’ll miss following back some cool, innocent and interesting people. Which will be a shame, and will definitely diminish the delightfulness of Twitter."Today, I got a notification from Twitter saying that Meijer is following me on Twitter:
Based on what I was talking about yesterday in terms of Relevance and Value, I went ahead and clicked thru from the email:
See the offer there for $100 off a "funky" outdoor storage box thinger? I opened a different browser and went to the homepage of Meijer.com:
See how that same product is being offered to any old whoever might visit Meijer.com for the same discount? This is exactly the opposite of how you do marketing in a space like Twitter. I'm so not gonna follow you back if there's nothing relevant or valuable to me for having done so.
I Just Got Tweeted By A Marketer...
Apr 14, 07:44 AMI'm not sure how I feel about what happened to me just now. For some time now I've had this policy of following anybody who follows me on Twitter. Oftentimes I'll un-follow in short order, but my "default setting" for stuff like this is to embrace serendipity and give it a chance.
I think today is the day to change that policy. Moments ago, I clicked thru from the Twitter email that notifies you when somebody has signed up to follow you... and in the 2 seconds inbetween the time that the page finished loading and the time that I can move my mouse pointer to the "follow" button, I took pause. Noting that this user's Twitter handle was " fatresistance", I scanned the rest of the info on the profile page and it becomes clear that this user is selling a diet book. For the first time .. at least that I've noticed ... this thing that I enjoyed using to communicate with my friends and some random strangers is tainted by marketing, and what's weird and a little unsettling to me is that I'm mostly ok with it, and the reason why is relevance and value.
Looking at the tweetstream from this user named "fatresistance" ... what appears to be happening here is that the people who're hawking this book are trading valuable bits of their content in exchange for valuable bits of my attention. Check out this smattering of tweets - there's stuff in here that I find to be worth noticing:
Tea is loaded with powerful antioxidants that help to promote weight loss, and support overall health.
09:17 PM April 12, 2008
The powerful benefits of blueberries come from the dark blue color of the berries, which is high in flavonoids. Put a handful on your b ...
05:17 AM April 12, 2008
Arugula contains as much calcium as milk and the calcium in arugula is readily absorbed. It’s also a great source of bioflavonoids.
01:05 AM April 10, 2008
Apples contain vitamin C, fiber, and quercitin, which supports the body's detoxification.
05:40 PM April 09, 2008
This is stuff I'm glad to become aware of, and which might make a positive impact on what I order for lunch if I'm checking Twitter on my handheld before the waitperson arrives. Heck, the tweets are so compact and grockable ... I might even remember some of this stuff when I'm offline.
Unanswered question: did fatresistance start following me because they think I'm fat? And more ponderous than that: what's going to happen when some marketer who's not giving away value and being relevant starts following me on Twitter and I click thru to their page and find marketing junk? I predict Twitter will either become bigger than email in the next 12 months or it will cease to exist, the determining factor being how the swelling ranks of marketers will behave themselves in the Twittervers.
UPDATE: a person I know in Ann Arbor is blogging about this very issue, and doing it better than me :) Yay Mitten!
Video Merchandising for eCommerce
Apr 11, 12:35 PMWow. This looks pretty sweet:
Shopflick is a new social experience where you can connect with your favorite sellers and products at their online stores, share their videos with your friends and embed them in your social networks and blogs.Take note that they're describing this as a social experience... where some of us might call it shopping. But with everything we know from Paco Underhill about higher average order values and probabilities-for-purchasing being so strongly correlated with social activities during the shopping experience... this ShopFlick thing is looking smarter and smarter to me the more I poke around inside of the private beta.
You Know When People Say "Unbelievable?"
Mar 29, 10:30 AMLike me, you might know somebody who uses the word "unbelievable" as if it was interchangeable with the word "wow". I'm cool with that. Except that just now my Google Reader showed me something that I find to be truly unbelievable. This company for me is a Lovemark, and I refuse to give even tiny amounts of search engine visibility to this story about this company and a purported interaction it had with a customer. So instead of copying the text into this blog posting or linking to it, I'm using workarounds. Here's what's supposedly an email reply the customer got from the upper eschalon of the company in question's management:
What do you think? Is this credible? B.J. Fogg says that credibility can be used interchangeably with the word believable. BGR is saying that the email is "certainly a direct response from the ****.com domain, which is only available to employees of the company". How did BGR become so certain that this email is authentically from this company's domain? To me, having only seen this blog posting ... from a blog I enjoy and thought was fairly credible ... I just can't believe this. UNBELIEVABLE!
That's devotion beyond reason is what that is...
iTunes Video Rentals: From Poofware to Nagware?
Jan 29, 08:02 PMI did my first-ever iTunes video rental a day or two after the announcement at Macworld. My initial reaction to video rentals? The selection was crappy ( I ended up choosing War Games ), but the image quality and user experience was awesome. As promised in Steve Jobs' keynote speech, the rental went "poof" on at the stroke of 24-hours-plus-whenever-it-was-that-i-started-watching this movie. Poofware, as it were. Then a day or two later I read that some users were getting prompted by iTunes at the stroke of 24-hours-plus-whenever-it-was-that-they-started-watching this movie, but then the prompt provided an option to finish viewing right now. Nagware. I like the nagware and 2nd chance approach better, but there's actually no other movies for rent on iTunes that I wanna watch, else I'd test this again. Anybody else out there have the nagware experience instead of the poofware one? Email me if you have...(dan dot klyn at geemail dot com).
Facebook Beacon - Whoah
Nov 20, 11:57 AM
Let's say you're shopping at one of your favorite online retailers. You add an item to your cart, work your way thru checkout, and then as you're completing your transaction ... up comes a little javascript prompt from.... FACEBOOK? Since all your FB friends are already following every little thing you're doing in Facebookland, why not publish a story to your mini-feed about what you just bought at Good Vibrations your favorite online shopping destinations?
This is now possible, compliments of Facebook Beacon. Amazing. I'm not sure many retailers would take a chance on throwing this bit of whizbangery into their checkout process but I do believe I'mma do some testing of this hottness.
Borders eBlast Strategy: Go Long!
Oct 25, 08:39 AM
With such a tight and cunning subject line, there was no way I was going to leave yesterday's email blast from Borders unopened. Rather, I mentally flagged it as bacn, and when I finally got around to opening it I was amazed. While covering all or most of the email marketing best practices (html links to site sections at the very top, plus a link to a webpage version of the blast and clear unsubscribe actionables down below), Borders showed some bravado here by annihilating every received notion about users not liking to scroll and about how "good manners" in email requires brevity. I've created a PDF of the email as rendered by Gmail if you're curious to see just how long of a scroll Borders seems to be getting away with here. I think the seeminly simple design device of numbering the various sections of the layout works really well.
So... there you have it. A best-practices-ey email marketing piece from Borders that breaks some longstanding rules and to my mind, totally gets away with it.
BTW, Carl Collins is a generous and helpful person - he deserves a karmic reward, so if you see him give him a hi-five or a hug
New Detroit News Site - WTF URLs?
Oct 17, 08:48 AMMy friend Ed sent me a link to the newly re-launched Detroit News website, and maybe I'm just grumpy today but the first thing I noticed was the idiotic URL of the mainpage:
http://detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/frontpage
How is it possible in this so-called age of Web 2.0 that a major metropolitan area's newspaper does a total site overhaul and neglects to mind the form of their URLs? Sigh...
Immanent Relaunch: Meijer.com
Sep 18, 02:39 PM
Based on a former colleague at Fry's facebook status, I'm gonna speculate that the new Meijer website is about to go live, and that it was built on Fry's Open Commerce Platform. I'll have to do some more digging to see whether Meijer's agency of record Devito Verdi led the creative for the new site or whether that piece was also done by Fry. Exciting, especially since Sears Holdings recently re-launched the Kmart.com site in a manner which suggests they threw away their OCP infrastructure in favor of whatever it is they're running on top of now.
Tale Of Two Manufactu-retailers
Aug 7, 01:06 PMMy friend Timothy just landed a gig that's going to entail a LOT of travel, and he's serious about finding some luggage that won't let him down. There are a ton of options/form-factors/bag-types for what he needs to get done, but the one piece that will have to be in the mix is a carry-on sized bag. 
Coincidentally, Burton Snowboards just relaunched their sites in the past day or two, and because I've got several Burton and Gravis bags, I wanted to pass along a recommendation from the current product lines(s) to my friend who needs a bag.
Imagine my disappointment when comparing the product page for the Red Oxx carry-on bag that my friend is getting serious about with the product pages for similar products from Burton and Gravis.
Vastly different page-level information architecture and merchandising strategies here... why is Oxx so much better than Burton/Gravis?
- Uh... don't you need to see photos of the inside of a bag before you can decide if it's a good choice for what you intend to put inside of it?? Oxx has multiple views of their carry-on bag, both inside and out.
- This gets to merchandising strategy, and some will say that a zillion dollers worth of Crate & Barrel purchases from an antiseptic merchandising approach speaks for itself but geez... showing a travel bag without *any* sign of the items a typical user will be jamming up inside of there... Both Burton and Gravis sell apparel, you think there'd be a nice opportunity to show the apparel folded up in one of these bags but apparently not! Oxx shows its bag jammed full of clothes and accessories and I think that we're gonna sell more bags as a result of it.
- Talk about how sweet the bag is. Say more, sell more. Especially in a world where being easily found in search engines is tantamount to having a bricks-and-mortar property in the new mall by the main doors vs. selling out of a secret lab in an industrial park... Oxx has a beautifully long copy approach on its product page. And not only do they have more and better copy...
- Cross Sells! There are no cross-sells on the Burton and Gravis product pages. Which is an especially heinous crime when there are matching items that want to be purchased as an ensemble.
How do we account for the difference in pagelevel IA and merchandising strategy between these brands? They're both manufacturers. Both allow you to "add to cart" from the product page. Maybe it's because Burton and Gravis have a gazillion other retailers to tell their story and do their merchandising for them? If my blog weren't broken, I'd ask you to chime in with a comment. Email me (dan dot klyn at gmail dot com) if you have any thoughts about this tale of two manufactu-retailers...
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My name is Dan Klyn, and I'm an information architect.
I work with amazing people at a nonprofit company called Flannel in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
I also teach IA in the library science programs at the University of Michigan and at Wayne State University.
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