A popular e-commerce trend right now is to put customer reviews directly on the company Website so that potential customers have the opportunity to review one’s products before making any purchase decisions.  A recent Forrester report showed that 36% of consumers have more trust in Websites that offer consumer-generated product reviews.  Many e-retailers have taken this to heart and have put it into action. 

One particularly successful case is that of John Lazarchic, Vice President of e-commerce at Petco.  He recently discussed his company’s decision to hop on the customer-review bandwagon, a practice that numerous retailers have begun to pursue.  Lazarchic explained that his primary motivation in doing so was to “enhance customer trust and the Website experience” saying that “ROI was not the main objective.”  How novel:  Putting customer service before ROI metrics.

This may not work for every type of business, but if you know in your gut that it will probably work for your’s, then just go for it, if only temporarily.  Lazarchic had the insight to recognize the true nature of his business; there are few social phenomena more democratizing than pet ownership.  Lazarchic knows that pet owners talk to each other, and if you can give a home to that dialogue, you have instant access to an insanely varied demographic that comes down to the single common denominator of loving their ball of fur.

Lazarchic’s way of thinking is quite a concept: putting customer service and gut instinct first and figuring out ROI later.  Many CEOs and marketers cringe at the thought of trying something that can’t effectively be measured, but when you have confidence that your brand is one that can genuinely create communities of like-minded individuals, and you know that tools exist that have been shown to do that, then marketers should be permitted to go with their gut, at least for a limited time, to prove that if you build a compelling program ROI is sure to follow. 

Social networking developed partly outside of the commercial realm, but there are now retailers who know that if you can build it into the existing e-commerce model, you’re offering a lot more reasons for consumers to spend time on your site.  I’m not saying that you should try to compete with “old school” social networking sites like MySpace or Facebook.  But if you can provide a one-stop shop for both the emotional (“look at how fat and happy Mr. Biggles is”) and the purely pragmatic (“I need to buy a 25 pound bag of kitty litter”), it’s your brand that’s ultimately going to stick. 

This has absolutely nothing to do with wholesale, marketing or even the internet, but I feel that it must be said: When you end up playing phone-tag with someone (namely, me) and you are merely returning a missed call, don’t leave a voicemail saying that you’re calling me back. I already know that you’re calling me back from the little message on my phone that says “1 missed call.” Not only is it ridiculous and redundant to leave such voicemails, it’s a waste of my anytime minutes, not to mention my precious time. I know I can’t possibly be alone on this one. It’s like walking into a public restroom and announcing your intention to tinkle. It’s asinine! Don’t do it! Thank you.

Last week I wrote on this blog regarding a situation were Amazon.com and McAfee.com were both bidding on Top Ten Wholesale’s domain name and trademarks. We were appalled both by the fact that huge companies, such as those two, can drive up the costs of doing business for a smaller company, such as, well us and how little in the way of cooperation we received from them in correcting this violation of Google Adwords terms of service.

As I said before we contacted Google and got seeming encouraging activity from them but were also told to attempt to fix the problem with McAfee and Amazon ourself. Not surprisingly, they were of little help. They returned neither phone calls or emails.

However, in all fairness, we wish to report that Google has taken action and made tremendous steps towards rectifying the situation. We received an email from them saying that they agreed that McAfee’s “ad text was unclear” and that McAfee’s ad would no longer contain our trademarks and domain name. We greatly appreciate their speedy action.

Although Google didn’t mention it in their email we they seem to have removed Amazon’s ad from our trademark as well. They also promised that we would here from their trademark department as well once they had fully reviewed the situation.

We inquired if there were further punishments other than simply removing the offending ad and they said that “I can assure you that repeat violators are suspended from our advertising program. We do not tolerate repeat malicious violations of our policies.”

We do not expect much to come from this but I must say I fail to understand how a trademark violation can be anything but malicious. It simply isn’t possible for this to have been a mistake. Putting a bid on some ones domain name is a conscious act and requires planning and forethought. It doesn’t happen by accident, it happens because a company wants to crowd a competitor and harm their business.

In one sense I suppose we should be proud, having some of the biggest names on the Internet begin tramping on our domain name may be a sign that our little company has arrived. About a week ago while performing a regular check of the Adwords PPC advertising that we pay a goodly amount for each month we discovered that both Amazon.com and McAfee.com were appearing as sponsored links on searches for www.toptenwholesale.com.

This is a violation of Google’s policy of on purchasing key word advertising on registered trade marks or domain names. Obviously these two big hitters have placed deposits on our trademark. The flattery of this gesture however doesn’t match up with the downside that comes with it; namely that we have to pay more to get the same result positions on our own domain names then we would if Amazon and McAfee were not bidding on it.

After Google’s recent legal dust up with Gieco you’d think they would be anxious to avoid these sort of problems. We followed the procedure to rectify this situation as outlined in Google’s term of use. We called them and found Google reasonably helpful. A friendly and seemingly dedicated customer service rep walked us through the grievance filing but then encouraged us to reach out to the violators ourself to get their assistance in fixing the problem.

Here things got a little trickier. All attempts to contact McAfee have met with an ear splitting silence. They responded to neither our emails or phone calls. Amazon at least answered their phone but beyond that were of no help what so ever. The customer service rep, know to us only as Representative #8, offered no assistance and refuse to allow us to speak with someone further up the ladder at the Internet giant.

We will continue to pursue this violation of our intellectual property rights and sincerely hope for a speedy resolution but at this point it is unclear what exactly can to be done. If Google insists that some kind of friendly talk with Amazon and McAfee will straighten everything out and the two companies continue to refuse to discuss the matter it leaves us in a untenable situation.

First off, I hate to do this, but in order to protect the little guys out there ( like us!) , I must fore warn all of you of my worse public relations experience ever.

Do not ever consult Visibility Bookings or Carrol Van Stone. She is rude, obnoxious, “salesey”, pretentious individual who will promise you the world and deliver you nothing but heart ache and wasted time. When I have some more time ( she’s already cost me enough) I will inform all of you how Carol Van Stone “stole” $4500 of our budget and did absolutely NADA! 0! Zilch.

More to come. Much, much more.
Carrol: You are welcome to respond. Please do so. We can’t wait.
Jason
TopTenWholesale
JPC LLC

I’ve been reading a book called “Search Engine Advertising” written by Catherine Seda. I recommend this book to anyone who is trying to run a successful marketing campaign online: because a lot of us are too busy, or too lazy to pick up a book, I thought it would be nice to share with all of you what I am reading. Here is what I have learned so far:

There are millions of prospects online. Advertisers pay millions of dollars to reach these millions of prospects. Unfortunately, all of these millions of prospects are not interested in your product. Because search engines let the buyer tell them exactly what they want, you need to know your customer. By knowing your customer, you’ll have a better idea of what they are looking for online and where you should be spending your money.

Optimization v. Advertising

Companies spend a lot of money on optimizing their sites for the major search engines like google and yahoo. In short, optimization focuses on designing your pages within to attract spiders. To organically optimize your site, it is necessary to pay an inclusion fee to a majority of top search engines if you want specific pages indexed. While paying this fee, you are not guaranteed of what pages will be indexed by these search engines and you are not guaranteed high rankings on the results pages. If anyone guarantees you placement, run!!!!

When you decide to advertise on a search engine, you are in complete control of everything. You have control of where your company is found on the results pages. You have control of the landing page the prospects find. This means that you have instant visibility of what you want the buyers to see.
You, as an advertiser, have 24/7 control of your campaign. As we all know, you know your business best and you have 24/7 access to change any ad and experiment what is working best for you before you go out and spend the thousands of dollars on trying to optimize your site for the major search engines.

The key ingredient to any successful company is to have a marketing strategy. In you marketing strategy, you should identify the message you want your prospects to know. You should know who your target audience is. You should always define your goals.

More to come in the upcoming weeks:
Jonathan Prescott

It just does not happen. There are so many websites I run into that say “make a million dollars by sitting at home.” Has anyone ever had any success using one of those programs? If so, please let me know because I would really like to make a million dollars over night.

What I have seen that works for the multi million dollar companies is having a strategic marketing plan. Most of these plans consist of running advertising campaigns over a long period of time. It appears that the most successful companies are those that find a market place that generates revenue and they stick to it. They are not there for a week and gone by tommorrow.

For those of you that think you can “bark like a big dog” for a week and all of a sudden you’re making millions of dollars, think again.

Jonathan

There are two things that fascinate me in just about equal proportions, politics and horrible web sites. I have always found that they both provide cheap laughs and plenty of things to legitimately fear. So when I came across this collection of “The Worst Political Web Sites” on CNET I was intrigued.

I would have thought given the absolute professionalism and high dollar stakes of modern political elections that all campaign websites would likely be drab but excruciatingly professional. I was very, very wrong. CNET’s collection contains websites as woefully incomplete or amateurishly painful to look at as anything I’ve ever seen.

In a way it’s refreshing that there is still room in the American political landscape for a blogging dog. Shawn O’Donnell’s pet, Josie assures us of her owner’s many terrific qualities and urges the voters of Virginia’s 1st congressional district to vote for the Democrat. While reading Josie the dog’s blog I learned the disturbing fact that Senator Edward Kennedy had a dog named Splash.

The most common problem shared among the bad campaign sites is simply not really having a website. The idea that any candidate in a modern political election could at this late date have place holding sites or sites “under construction” is incredible. But not nearly as incredible as the Independent candidate for congress in Nevada whose web site’s meta-tags include the keywords, Brittany Spears, car rental, scholarships, and baby names.

The list is a fair mix from both ends of the political spectrum and miserable web design knows no party affiliation. However, I did notice that awful Republican sites tended to offend the eye by their design, garish contrasting colors, sappy patriotic symbols, and lots of underlining and exclamation points. The Democrats, on the other hand, tended to have more irritating flash animation.

This month I will turn forty years old. All in all, not so bad a thing considering the alternative. I once read a quote from Studs Terkle, the author of Working and the Good War. (If you have not read his books, do so.) He said, “People ask me who the hell wants to live to be 84, and I say anybody who’s 83.”

I any case, the looming day has put me in a reflective mood. I’ve been contemplating those four decades and asking my self is the world a better place than it was when I first put in an appearance. Being the glass half empty type I find largely that it isn’t. But that’s just a matter of opinion.

What is not a matter of conjecture are a collection of statistics published this weekend in the New York Times comparing data from 1967 and 2006. Let’s take a look at some of these and see what they tell us about the changes to the United States during my lifetime.

First off, the population of the U.S. reached 200 million people and this year it will reach 300 million. Our population is booming, every day 11,000 babies are born and 3,000 new immigrants arrive. This rate far outstrips the death rate and the emigration rate.

Here is some good news for me, and every person reading this. We are living longer than we did in 1967. Back then the average life span was 70.5 years. It has risen steadily to an average life span of 77.8 years. I wonder how much the fact that despite more than twice as many vehicles being on the roads the number of road related deaths has plummeted since 1967. With a total of 98.9 million registered vehicles there were 51,559 deaths in 1967, in 2006 there were only 42,643 road deaths despite 237 million registered vehicles.

Given that it is not surprising that we are getting older. In 1967 9.5% of the population was over 65 in 2006 that percent reached 12.3.

We talk a lot about the price of gas these days but consider this. When adjusted for the current strength of the dollar gas cost the equivalent of $2 a gallon. The average price this year has been right about $3 per gallon. So while gas is expensive it isn’t quite the monster we’ve come to believe.

Now for one the more unpleasant of the stats. New home prices have gotten so high it’s a wonder anyone but the wealthiest Americans own their own home. In 1967 the average price of a new home, when adjusted to 2006 dollars, was just under $150,000, today the average price is just over $290,000. This stunning increase goes along way towards explaining why in 1967 63.6% of the population owned their own home and that percent has only increased to 68.9%.

Draw from these stats we learn that in my life time living has become a lengthier proposition but but costlier. Not a huge surprise really.

1. What it is doing to grammar and spelling. - While I fully understand the practicality of using abbreviations such as brb, WYSIWYG, and the like. Valuable seconds are saved, no doubt adding to the productivity of the nation and the quality of personal life. I also think turning the language into a series of sentence fragments and smiley faces can’t be good. I have heard people respond to a joke by saying “lol” instead of laughing out loud.

2. Web sites and online advertising that make noise. -When I am online the last thing I want is someone else’s music blasted at me. This applies to everyone, from the tiniest personal interest site misguidedly thinking we share tastes all the way to major search engine’s encouragements to watch “Lost”. I know I am not alone, studies have shown that nothing drives visitors from a web site like noise.

3. Frauds.- I mean frauds of all kinds. The anonymity of the Internet has made it extremely easy for people to pretend to be things they are not. This opportunity for deception is played out on all levels of the online community. Never mind the simple deceptions of the chat rooms. They are to a degree, when not criminal, expected and accepted. However, I hear from small business people all time decrying that they have been ripped off, in one fashion or another, by wholesalers and customers. Every time a retailer loses money on a fraudulent wholesale purchase they lose some faith in online wholesale generally. Also, the industry might lose their business literally if that retailer’s business depended on that order.

You might notice that contrary to traditional curmudgeonly takes on the Internet I have left spam off the list. At one time I would have included it but spam filters have changed that. Now spammers have to show a little creativity to reach my mail box. My favorites are the ones with little pieces of text meant to trip up the filters. Often this paragraph or so long bit of prose is taken from a classic novel. I enjoy trying to identify them, last week I spotted The Three Musketeers and War and Peace. I also get a kick out of the permeations of the Nigerian Banking or overseas lottery scam. I’ve been asked several times to dispense millions of dollars in charity, after taking a cut, for repentant scoundrels allegedly under going a death bed conversion. I would like to think the three marriage proposals from various princesses were for real.