Here is the story that my friend just shared with me. It’s a story that teaches us about web marketing & cross channel marketing 101 in a different way:

Friday morning (assuming Friday is a good and imprtant day for ecommerce), around 9am. She got an email from OldNavy saying that there is a big sale with promo code. Great- she went ahead and clidked on the link in the email. Here is what she saw from OldNavy:

So, I went further and found out the other two stores Gap & BananaRepublic are also down:

Wow! That’s great - a great story to learn about web marketing 101: your development effort really needs to understand customer buying behavior, especially ecommerce sites. Your site simply shouldn’t be unavailable during a popular shopping time, no matter it’s scheduled site maintenance or just crunching high traffic holiday time.

and a great lesson about cross channel marketing: your Email campaign efforts should match/coordinate with your web channel efforts. Otherwise, it’s a waste of money and no performance will be generated from any campaign.

Update: and OldNavy, Gap and BananaRepublic should check out all these angry VOC from some deal forum

Tags: cross channel marketing, web marketing

When business gets crazy and serious, don’t forget to have some fun when ever you can. StumbleUpon had this cute error message page. It turned my bad experience (error message page) to a smile and a good story to tell my friends. What a small cute idea!

Tags: design, web marketing

What can I say about Google? There are too many things we could argue about this giant Internet company. This week, two new features from them really made me happy

1. the Gmail theme - Isn’t it nice that I can choose different skins for my Gmail. Some themes are dynamic, meaning they might change based on your location. I’m using the tea hour theme now. I’ll see if the sun goes down when it’s afternoon. Also see TechCrunch. Takeaway: sometime, one product wins, not only because of all the functional features that they provide, but also the little cute and emotional features that they bring to life.
2. the Google Mobile applications - I wanted so bad to use Google map from cell phone. Here it comes! I can use Google map on my cell phone the way I use it online! It made my travel a lot easier when I need to find directions on the way, when I try to find a restaurant to meet friends, when I want to know the traffic sitting in the car…it is helpful! Check it out yourself. Takeaway: when something is helpful, it will be a great feature quickly no matter what it takes.

Tags: gmail, google, mobile, web in general, web marketing

Here I am - back from my crazy two weeks of working on one online application project. It feels so good to finally open a page and start writing

And the topic has to be LinkedIn again. They simply have a lot of news and interesting stuff to pay attention to. Now they plan to launch its own ad network. Here are my thoughts:

• It is almost like a “why not” thing. The tricky part is the timing of getting ad network into its portofolio. Other social networks seem to do this in their early stages (MySpace, FaceBook…). LinkedIn takes a step by step approach, as they always do for their other features. They don’t push too many or too big things all at once. In stead, they chunk them out and digest piece by piece. This gives them time & resource to focus on and reduces the risk of getting wrong into any unclear directions.
• Don’t worry about money. Money comes not because you open your wallet or you invite them to come. Money follows people, idea and real value. Adding advertising to monetize your product / site is important. But if you do that only for the sake of doing that, money usually doesn’t flow in. In stead, focus on the value you create and the people you serve, money usually flows in itself.

Here are two articles on LinkedIn’s ad network news: one is from TechCrunch; the other is from Hitwise.

Lastly, this slide shows the profile of LinkedIn users:

Tags: ad networks, linkedin, social media, web marketing

Online advertising is such a good industry to be in. Regardless the house market crisis, or the Internet bubble, online advertising is still showing strong growth rate year over year.

Jupiter’s forecast for 2008 US online display ad spending growth is 15% to 16%. Jupiter’s David Card, posted the Q2 scorecard:

- Google. Own sites up 42% to $3.5 billion. Network up 22% to $1.7 billion. International outgrew US and is over half of Google’s total for the first time.
- Yahoo. Own sites up 14% to $1 billion. Network down 4% to $570 million
- MSN. Up 18% to $618 million, but not all that growth is organic. Some of it’s from acquisitions. And it was Microsoft’s fiscal fourth quarter, so they had feet on the gas.
- AOL up 2% to $530 million (more detail after the earnings call). UPDATED AOL’s display ad sales on its own properties were down 14% to $191 million. Search was up 10% to $172 million and its third-party network up 15% to $167 million.
- Fox Interactive Media - which is mostly MySpace - up 23% to $225 million.

New York Times Digital was up 18%; Martha Stewart up 31%, Washington Post up 4% but display was up 11%. Disney and Viacom didn’t say much, so presumably they had some growth but not high double digits.

Cart’s original post

Tags: advertising, online advertising, recession, research, web marketing

A nice Italian restaurant that I just visited this week

I become more and more active on LinkedIn. The site’s functionality and navigation have been improved over time. This really unleashed the power and beauty of getting connected with others in the professional area. I started indicating my status, asking questions and answering other people questions. Below is one answer that I posted on online/offline topic:

Q: How can offline marketing support online marketing and vice versa
Asked by Ann Lacres | 9 days ago in Internet Marketing | Closed

A: (Shuai’s answer was selected as a Good Answer)
“If you step back a little bit, it is actually a cross-channel or multi-channel question that a lot of people are trying to address. There is no perfect answer to this.
The #1 key success factor is to design & plan all your marketing activities by following your customer’s cross-channel foot-prints. This requires the understanding of your customer’s cross-channel behavior & preference. Without knowing how your customers interact with all your online / offline channels, it is almost impossible to create a good customer cross-channel experience, which is your goal.
The #2 success factor is to make your marketing campaign viral enough to be shared both online and offline. Why you want your offline support online and online supports offline? You want to better optimize the two of them simultaneously, so both experiences can help your sales & conversion. To achieve your goal, you need to provide some tactical tools for your customers to spread the word simultaneously online & offline. Other people have given some specific examples below. For example, have link in offline campaign; online promo to be used offline…The general success rule is to make your marketing campaign viral enough for them to go online or offline easily.
#3, in terms of measurement, it’s better to plan your overall sales number in one combined bucket (online & offline). It’s good to know both numbers, but it doesn’t matter if you convert the customers online or offline, as long as you convert them :)”

Full conversation
Shuai’s LinkedIn Profile

Tags: linkedin, social media, social network, web marketing