Inspiration Index – MyDeco takes the top spot in the “Customer Engagement” dimension – Internet Retailing

So – it’s not official: MyDeco.com has grabbed the top spot.

You can read the full results and analysis of the second ‘dimension’ of the Internet Retailing Inspiration Index (IRII) at the post above.

The next dimension is open for voting NOW and for a week, just a week, until 8 June…

Vote here:

https://ecustomeropinions.com/survey/survey.php?sid=349531418

Vote now. Tell your friends.

This time, it’s “Operations and IT”: who do you envy? admire? copy? Tell all – the gloves are off!

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I agreed (very pleased to have been asked) and then immediately regretted it (a combination of _hating_ being filmed and a bit of a panic attack that I’d have nothing to say in such august company).

Both of these concerns were well founded and the first attempt was utterly awful. Google kindly allowed me to hit the virtual ‘delete’ button and re-shoot. I (and all viewers) owe them a debt of gratitude

The format was a difficult one: a straight-to-camera piece on a topic. This requires more skill and preparation that I had understood. I generally prefer a ‘Q&A’ approach – being interviewed by someone else makes it easier to keep on topic and respond to a lead.

That said, I’m really pleased that I’ve had this experience. At InternetRetailing we’re starting our video podcasting programme in June and going through this experience has been a timely shock that I hope will improve our approach.

In the meantime you can find me burbling and only loosely in charge of a Welsh accent here:

In fact, this piece was a ‘version’ of my ‘profit per pixel second‘ metric provocation that I’ve been covering in print. It’s an area in which I’m interested, but I think it suffers here from being too long (maybe I’m too used to giving this as part of a presentation?).

All of this goes to prove Mark Twain’s (well, Blaise Pascal) thought: “I have only made this [letter] longer, because I have not had the time to make it shorter”. The same seems true of videos

You’ll see in the linked videos some very impressive (and more succinct!) contributions from a great range of people – from Boris Johnson, Mayor of London and Martin Sorrell of WPP to numerous leading academics and practitioners.

I’m pleased to be in illustrious company (even if as the slight splotch on the otherwise immaculate canvas) and I’ve learned some good lessons about video presentation.

You can see the whole channel here:

http://www.youtube.com/user/survivalofthefastest

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The Post-Graduate Diploma in Internet Retailing (which I created along with Econsultancy.com) has just been accredited by Manchester Metropolitan University as the UK’s first Masters programme in Internet Retailing…

We’re about to change the marketing blurb and website to proclaim ‘MSc in Internet Retailing’, but for now I’m just enjoying the glow of pleasure after over 3 hours of grillings!

Thanks to @cragster and @groovegenerator for their hard work.

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To recap for those who missed the IRII announcement, the InternetRetailing Inspiration Index focuses upon:

those moments of admiration, enjoyment and – frankly – envy: when we look at another retailer’s activities and wish we’d thought of that first, had implemented as well, or have an open regard for a difficult problem elegantly overcome

You can see the full article from InternetRetailing Magazine here:

IRII Article (pdf) – download

The next dimension – Customer Experience – is now available and awaiting your comments. Please follow this link to the eDigital Research survey page:

https://ecustomeropinions.com/survey/survey.php?sid=473664927

Results and the site review will be published in the May issue of InternetRetailing Magazine.

Other links

• You can subscribe to InternetRetailing magazine  and our email newsletter on our publisher’s subscriptions page.
• You can grab the RSS feed or follow us on Twitter.

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Last Tuesday I wandered over to Social Media Influence 2009, organised rather well indeed by Matthew Yeomans (about) and Bernhard Warner (about) (once of CustomCommunications, and now the newly-formed RadarDDB). The event promoter was none other than Mark Pigou of InternetRetailing fame.

The venue was great – the Cavendish Conference Centre – tucked away in a mews entrance off Portland Place, then underground. It was bright, modern and had a good seating area and presentation capabilities. It was let down (painfully!) though by its utterly crap broadband and totaly lack of mobile signal. I know that it’s lucrative for conference venues to have hived off broadband supply so that they can gouge conference organisers to ‘provision’ broadband but PLEASE! You can get 20Mb at 20:1 contention for £20 per month in London… That’s 4 years’ worth of connectivity for the £1000 a time you charge conference organisers…

Anyone interested in a venues “name and shame” website? Interestingly (as I ranted) I found out that one’s not even allowed to install one’s own connection – closed shop, restraint of service, cartel…  I suggested to Mark that at our next conference we print in large letters across the programme that “We apologise for the crap internet connection here: it’s due to the profit-gouging, neo-luddite, short-termism of [manager's name] of [venue]“. Grrr.

The dongle-carrying, macbook-waving twitterati at the conference were not to be defeated, however, and it was quite a surreal experience to look behind the speakers and see a live ‘twitterfeed’ of the conference proceedings projected large, while looking at the screens of the assembled folk watching and writing tweets on their laptops. So meta it was hardly being there!

The conference brought together a good group of people and there was lots of time to chat, catch up with people and exchange ideas.

In addition to the tweet tag (#SMI09) you can also see a collection of assorted web coverage and feeds on the SMI Netvibes page.

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On Wednesday 25th I gave a version of my Epiphenomena and Magic presentation to the folk at the Sense Network. Great venue (loft floor on Wardour Street) and a fun, engaging crowd. Slides from this presentation are the same as for Digital Shorts: see them on Slideshare.

On Thursday evening, 26th, I spoke at the London College of Fashion for the BA in Fashion Management students, as well as some postgrad and faculty folk.  Leaving aside the rather peculiar feeling that ‘being in a classroom’ can engender, we had a fun and interactive evening discussing the commercial implications and opportunities for fashion given the UK’s sophisticated online customer.

The slides are available as ever on Slideshare, or below:

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It was lovely to have an excuse to visit Brighton again, and a quick, chilly wander along the seafront with my new-old Minolta CLE and tack-sharp 28mm Elmarit-M and a roll of Fuji 1600 ASA (golfball-grain)… results shared in due course if acceptable – although do see the results from Paris last month…).

The venue was cosy and there was an interesting group – many digital agencies, a sprinkling of retailers and some software vendors.

The fun began (ahem) when we realised that there was neither a projector nor a screen available. A couple of frantic calls later and we realised that they were ‘lost’. Hmm. In the Hove lanes we could see into people’s Home Offices and so was tempting to have Craig push in a door and ‘borrow’ a 40″ plasma, however in the end the cafe downstairs lent us their menu blackboard and – drumroll – a piece of chalk!

So – with the support and chuckles of the assembled, alcohol-fuelled crowd, I cracked on with a presentation with the power of waving hands and – yes – chalk

It was a laugh and the questions from the audience were tough, robustly-put and really engaging. I had a great night.

Indeed, I _knew_ it was a cunning group by the way they took my demonstration of Google History to heart. I’d mentioned how APML and attention tracking were alive and with us, witness Google’s history (and showed mine, noting how one should be careful sharing this in case of compromising past activity!).

Anyway, after the presentation I left my laptop at the front for people to see some of the demos and realised that a couple of people were looking a little _too_ sneakily pleased with themselves (yes, you know who!).

Turns out that they’d indulged in a little guerilla history frigging, gently porn surfing (along with the kindergarden ‘reset home page’ routine) in order for this to appear in my history: excellent!

I know that an audience has taken my points to heart when we see this sort of behaviour I can teach them no more than this

During the evening we took a journey that looked at the phenomena that occur when ever-better structured data, metadata, behavioural data meets open, free exchange over increasing numbers of nodes. We then considered further possibilities – ‘epiphenomena’, if you will – and how these in short order would become indistinguishable from ‘magic’.

It was a great opportunity to think a bit beyond the pressing commercial exigencies of 2009 and envision the services we’d be engaging with in a couple of years.

If you’re interested in seeing the slides they’re online at Slideshare:

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I’m pleased therefore to have come across Kieron O’Shea’s rather lovely Calendar Plug-in for Wordpress.

You can see this up and running at my ‘business’ site’s Speaking and Events page.

There’s also an RSS feed of my upcoming activities available. This is not part of the standard install but an email to Kieran earlier this evening resulted in a ‘by return’ php script posted on the support site.

Wonderful.

Let me know what you think of it, and of course check out the plugin for yourselves.

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Dave “Dr Dave” Chaffey, esteemed author and guru and author of the Managing Digital Channel report (well, book nearly) , has posted a list of his recommended twitter feeds to follow.

Dave’s criteria (signal to noise ratio) is a good one – I’m struggling with this, but less ruthless than Dave at present. Dave also mentions that he’s moving his attention from his RSS reader to twitter, which is something I’ve also found.

We, at Internet Retailing (www.twitter.com/etail) are super-pleased to have been included in Dave’s list. Blush.

We took a decision a while ago to use it as a living RSS/comments feed (hence meeting Dave’s signal:noise requirement). We’ll also use it for occasional event coverage.

I’ve taken to having a group on Tweetdeck just for RSS-twittering and find it’s turning into my ‘radar’.

Dave’s other suggestions (eg @lakey, @ashelyf1 and @mbites) already have pride of place in our monitoring.

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Nectar email

And so it came to pass, yea in the fourth hour of our confinement, that Nectar manage to get into their office and fire off an ‘if you’re snowed in you can still shop online’ email.

Impressive – and with a Valentine’s touch too.

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For the last couple of years I’ve presented at the “Digital Shorts” events in Manchester and sometimes Leeds (but this year ‘and Brighton’).

The events – organised by Econsultancy and regional partners – are an opportunity for digital marketers and ecommerce folk to meet for drinks and discussion based around a review of the Christmas/2008 trading and predictions of emerging trends.

2 years ago I said we were in denial about a recession; last year we covered social media platforms and rich media; while this year we’re going on a data journey where data + social + behaviour + exchange leads towards epiphenomena. Or ‘magic’ (since, as Arthur C Clarke said in 1961: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”).

If you’re going to be in Manchester let me know since I think we’ll ‘do dinner’ afterwards, while in Brighton it’ll just be beers and the late night train home!

Details of the events are on the Econsultancy shiny new website:

Manchester Digital Shorts, 4 February 2009

Brighton Digital Shorts, 11 February 2009.

Updates and echo-locating via Brightkite.

Digital Shorts – Retail, Christmas, Recession and Emerging Trends for 2009 | Econsultancy

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While pondering over an upgrade to the Canon G10 (for its 28mm wider-angle lens and more rangefinder-like control layout on the top plate) I realised that what I actually wanted was that very rangefinder body.

Despite dropping many hints for the last two years no-one has opted to buy me a Leica M8 as a bribe/inducement and since I’d never manage to justify one of these rather than, ahem, feeding my children my mind’s been turning to smaller rangefinders.

Enter, therefore, a chat with Andy at TheClassicCamera.co.uk in Pied Bull Yard who offered to swap my Hasselblad Xpan (panoramic/dual format 35mm rangefinder) for a pretty Leica/Minolta CLE, complete with 70s Man of Mystery burgundy leather ‘outfit’ briefcase. The deal was done in seconds and so I headed off to Paris with the CLE, some knackered batteries and the cracking, punchy 40mm f2 Rokkor.

I’d luckily got a pocketful of two of my favourite films – the Fujicolor Professional 800Z (even, attractive grain and high speed) and the Fuji Neopan 1600 (the wildest B&W film currently available – extreme speed with the sort of grain that you had on HP5 a few years ago).

I was in ‘Cartier Bresson’ mode: wanting to walk the streets, using available light and a cool-temperature, punchy film to lift the flat, rainy light without going all warm and ‘kodacolour’ on me.

The determinant to shoot film was discovering anew the folk at Panther Professional who’ll develop and scan a 35mm C41 film for (drum-roll) £8. Awesome. No pesky prints, just the negs (archive and print purposes) and a CD of scans at about 1840×1232 pixels (coming in at about 1~1.5Mb each). Ideal for the web.

Panther also supply a neat CD insert with a ‘digital contact sheet’ (just like the old APS films).

This means that I can enjoy photography and playing with films, the discipline of not blatting off a gabillion images, a vast reduction in time spent in front of the computer and a more inconspicuous street shooting time. In all, I’m in heaven.

Oh, and the images are just de-lovely: look at that grain! The contrast! The colour temperature and balance! The tonality! Sigh.

Of course, I’m still ready to accept the bribe/inducement of an M8 at any time, but I’m looking forward to some more film shooting in the coming months – especially since I picked up a rather wonderful 3rd generation Leica Summicron-M 28mm f2.8… That’s now living on the front of the CLE and I’ll update with how it performs on the 800Z stock in the coming weeks (I think it’ll accompany me to Manchester in a week or so and hopefully we’ll have a bit of an urban/industrial wander).

Here’re some higlights from the photoset Paris 2009:

Kitchen at Yves Camdeborde’s Comptoir

Entering St Sulpice Metro at night.

View from Dave's flat in the garment district

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Originally uploaded by Emma and Lorenzo Wood

Hot on the heels of MySociety’s iPhone app for their wonderful FixMyStreet service, Lorenzo spotted this in the wilds of Shoreditch…

Numbered CCTV is one thing (a la Westminster’s unique parking location references (UPLs?)) but texting incidents is a step further.

The cynic in me wonders if this means that the cameras are not monitored until they get a text?

Thinking further forward, why even bother having a camera: just get people to send in photos by MMS with the reference number of the nearest lampost…

Stand by for a new wave of crime – stealing mobiles of people reporting incidents…

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eCommerce Manager, Austin Reed Group
Econsultancy | eCommerce Manager, Austin Reed Group

I’m looking for an eCommerce Manager to join Austin Reed Group (one of my clients) at a very exciting time of growth in their online channel.

The role’s been brought forward since the Group eCommerce Manager’s about to go on maternity leave so this is an opportunity both to establish this role and deputise for the duration of the maternity leave. It’s a very visible role in the group with strong Board and executive interest and support.

There’s a new, whizzy ecommerce platform being ‘enlivened’ in February so this role will have appropriate tools to support marketing and merchandising iniatives.

This is a career-defining opportunity for an ambitious ecommerce retail professional to make a mark in a time of growth and change.

The job advert has details on how to apply but if you’d like an informal chat please either call/mail if we already know each other or send me your details via LinkedIn.

AR will consider structuring the role as interim/contract – just let them know in your covering email.

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Originally uploaded by ikj

Inspired by a nice ‘we’ll be closed’ sign in Tossed on Baker Street just before Christmas I spent some wandering time looking at how shops signal their opening/closed times to customers over Christmas.

This photoset is a selection of snaps from time wandering in Shoreditch, Brick Lane, Spitalfields and Columbia Road.

This one from Nelly Duff is my favourite, but Square Pie comes a close second imho.

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Dilbert's 20th Anniversary hardback

Admittedly, our beleaguered and bowed Postie wasn’t happy, but I certainly was

The book’s a large format – more ‘fork lift’ than ‘coffee table’ – but the binding and slipcase are weighty and well constructed. Think ‘woodworking’ rather than ‘cardboard’. The structure is neat too: an essay from Scott on his earliest cartoons, lucky breaks, disappointments and the growth of Dilbert – as a character and a syndicated cartoon. The book then has pages of cartoons categorised into the various ‘phases’ of the last 20 years along with lots of inline commentary from Scott Adams on the jokes, the reader responses and background.

This is a real treat for longstanding Dilbert fans and newbie accolites alike. There’s an archive DVD of 6,500 cartoons too (if the web’s just too slow for you).

So – thanks Father Christmas. Great pressie!

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Appearing on SkyNews at 7pm

I was called this afternoon to ask if I’d be willing to appear and comment and of course the answer was ‘yes’. Then I started to feel nervous!

I don’t recall much about the interview itself – I was in a dark room, staring at a focus point and desperately listening to the question so that I didn’t burble. Intentionally, anyway.

Up earlier had been David Walmsley, Head of Direct at John Lewis, and as I’d arrived in the studio I’d thought how composed and fluid he was on TV. I decided to become more nervous immediately

The studio was intriguing: not quite a ‘radio car’, but certainly a compact and lean operation, mainly focused on political happenings at nearby Parliament.

The Millbank studio for Sky News

I’ve not been able to track down a ‘recording’ of what I said, but my intention was to cover off how the predictions for Mega Monday were tending toward the blindingly obvious, and how even a scrooge-like consumer was now running out of shopping days to Christmas. Behind the headline figures of revenues (predicted, btw, by IMRG to be £320m today, with Retail Decisions predicting that Mega Minute will be 1.31pm today, with an expected near £1m in transactions that minute), the real issue is that revenues this year will have been bought by discounting. In order to have a higher cash value of transactions than last year, therefore, retailers will need to ship proportionally more boxes – creating an additional strain on their logistics operations as well as reducing their margins even further.

Pressed on the reason for the success of the web I recall mentioning that the web was now a mature component within multichannel retail. The web is used by some 90% of people questioned in an IMRG survey to help decide on purchases made in-store. Interestingly, only 68% of those questioned said the reverse – that they needed to see goods in-store to inform their internet purchasing.

I was asked whether there was anything fundamental to the web that would make it an inherently ‘cheap’ channel, but of course there’s a need to have a capable infrastructure as well, ideally, as a traditional retail channel in order to maximise sales. I challenged the draw of the web as being “cheapness” alone, noting that customers now required service as much as price. In the US on CyberMonday, for example, nearly 11% of all shopping traffic went to Amazon.com – a combination of breadth of product, excellent pricing and exemplary, proven service.

In what seemed like an age or a second it was over and, with a polite ‘thank you’ from the producer, I was back on the scooter heading home.

The kids were pleased to see me on telly (ahh) and I’ve already had abusive texts about being fat/nervous/bearded etc – to which I just say “thanks”

This is a picture of me on the telly taken by Vicky with her iPhone - I'm just blinking, not falling into a trance. Honest.

It was an interesting experience and something out of the comfort zone. It was also a chance to get some key messages to a new audience and finally whet my appetite to enliven our plans for InternetRetailing TV. We did some experiments at our conference – see the embed below -  but I think that it’s time to be a bit more active on this front.

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With new events, supplements, v/pod-casts, goodness-knows-what-else, AND French and German editions of the newsletters and portals, it’s a manic and exciting time at IR Towers, and we now have three vacancies just waiting for the right people to join us.

We’re looking for:

• Sales Manager – based in London, excellent base, unlimited commission, at the heart of a fun and expert supplier community. We’re looking for someone used to B2B, reputation-based selling who’s great with clients and not a “sales tosser” (ie talks like an estate agent, always yakking on about “closing”, pretending to discount/’do a deal’, and generally leaving civilised people aghast at their poor manners, short-termism and ignorance).
• Country Editor, France and Country Editor, Germany – to launch the French/German-language portals and bi-weekly newsletters in, er, France and Germany respectively. You’ll be commercial, an analytical journalist, with sector experience (ie this isn’t just academic, you need to understand ecommerce and retailing) with a desire to make a name for yourself in the sector. You’ll be mother-tongue fluent, of course, and also speak excellent English so that we can chat. You’ll represent IR at the highest levels in-country, build on the basis of the European eCommerce Forum, and work as part of an unformal, slightly mad, collegiate team.

I have job descriptions, further info, a keen-ness to chat – let me know if you’re interested or push good people in this direction. Don’t be shy Mail me for further info.

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Google’s Mobile App is a step closer.

I won’t rehash the explanatory video – it’s, er, self-explanatory – but the really interesting part for me isn’t the voice recognition but rather the emerging “common sense” in the google results. Note that there’s now an interpretive layer that’s interception calculations, directory-type enquiries (eg film listings, nearby restaurants) and informational or evaluative requests.

This is a major step forward for something that we tend to think of as a text-indexing service.

I’m a great fan of knowledge systems like TrueKnowledge (that has an inference engine built upon structured facts, questions and relationships – wonderful) – but it seems that Google’s slowly but surely adding equivalent capabilities by stealth and in parts.

Let’s start counting the days until this is seen as “just normal”…

UPDATE: been playing this morning at a client’s (different voices, male/female, Northern, Welsh, Australian) and we’re getting a one in five success rate. Still, that it even works 20% of the time is amazing and I’m sure it’ll train me to get clearer

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The hall at the Banqueting House

So, then, to the sumptuous surroundings of the Banqueting House in Whitehall for the Walpole’s Awards for  Luxury.

It was a well-attended and extremely well-orchestrated event and the awards (of which there were seven, plus a special award for Dame Vivien Westwood whose, er, distinctive speech I really hope to be able to track down on YouTube and treasure forever!).

I was really pleased to see Bremont Watches get an award  (I’m a fan of their ALTI-Z, cream face) and Net A Porter picked up a deserved award for best online luxury site.

In all, a fun evening and good to catch up with so many people.

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