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!

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

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.

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.

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.

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:

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:

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.

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.

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.