22. February 2012 by admin.

Last April, Gamestop Corp. opened a store on Facebook to generate sales among the 3.5 million-plus customers who’d declared themselves “fans” of the video game retailer. Six months later, the store was quietly shuttered.

Gamestop has company. Over the past year, Gap Inc., J.C. Penney Co. and Nordstrom Inc. have all opened and closed storefronts on Facebook Inc.’s social networking site.

Facebook, which this month filed for an initial public offering, has sought to be a top shopping destination for its 845 million members. The stores’ quick failure shows that the Menlo Park, California-based social network doesn’t drive commerce and casts doubt on its value for retailers, said Sucharita Mulpuru, an analyst at Forrester Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

“There was a lot of anticipation that Facebook would turn into a new destination, a store, a place where people would shop,” Mulpuru said in a telephone interview. “But it was like trying to sell stuff to people while they’re hanging out with their friends at the bar.”

A year ago, investors hailed so-called F-commerce as the next big thing, speculating that the company had potential to threaten Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) and PayPal Inc. Facebook is the most- visited website in the world. Some people thought that persuading visitors to shop would be easy, Mulpuru said.

David Fisch, Facebook’s director of business development, said in June that the site would make shopping online, previously a solitary experience, more social.

Even as some businesses shut storefronts, many companies continue to devote advertising dollars to the social network. Facebook’s sales surged 55 percent to $1.13 billion in the fourth quarter. The company aims to use e-commerce more as a way of getting users to stay longer than as a way to boost revenue

Customers had no incentive to shop at Gamestop (GEM)’s Facebook store rather than the company’s regular website because purchasing online is already convenient, said Ashley Sheetz, who is the Grapevine, Texas-based company’s vice president of marketing and strategy.

Shut Quickly

“We just didn’t get the return on investment we needed from the Facebook market, so we shut it down pretty quickly,” Sheetz said in a telephone interview. “For us, it’s been a way we communicate with customers on deals, not a place to sell.”

Gap, which has 5.6 million Facebook fans from its namesake, Banana Republic and Old Navy pages, opened and discontinued a storefront last year, said Liz Nunan, a company spokeswoman. The San Francisco-based company also discovered customers preferred shopping on its own sites, she said.

“We will continue to evaluate if this is something we want to bring back in the future,” Nunan said in an emailed statement.

Nordstrom tested ways to make shopping “seamless through Facebook” and decided on a broader social media focus, Colin Johnson, a spokesman, said.

J.C. Penney featured assortments in a Facebook “shop” tab beginning in 2010, and took it down in December 2011, Kate Coultas, a spokeswoman said in an emailed statement.

Cracks in Model

Wade Gerten, chief executive officer of social media developer 8thBridge, previously known as Alvenda, opened a Facebook store for the florist 1-800-FLOWERS. Minneapolis-based Gerten went on to develop commerce strategies for Delta Air Lines Inc. (DAL), Diane Von Furstenberg Studio LP and denim-maker Seven for all Mankind.

Cracks in the model showed quickly, Gerten said in a telephone interview. Clients “have taken a different approach,” shutting stores or scaling back their offerings.

“It was basically just another place to shop for all the stuff already available on the retailer websites,” Gerten said. “I give so-called F-commerce an ‘F.’”

Posted in Social Network, Facebook code hints, Marketing, Managing Business | Print | No Comments »

21. February 2012 by admin.

 especially if your brand/product/website is visual in nature.

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14. February 2012 by admin.

Many websites already exhibit what I’d define as high proxority in that they take great care to use techniques that account for both priority (bringing attention to certain elements) and proximity (making reactions happen directly next to or above the objects being interacted with).

Proxority: Origami for the Web

The proxority principle posits that everything you find on a web page can be assigned a value and a place in sequence, in relation to the objects that surround it. This idea has existed since the early days of the Web, but too few designers pay enough attention to it. Think through what is actually needed, where it is needed and when it should appear (as opposed to simply putting all of the content on the screen, in its entirety, in an order that “looks pretty”). The need for such techniques is increasing, especially given the proliferation of handheld devices and the idea of designing with a “mobile-first” philosophy.

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14. February 2012 by admin.

• Social Proof - Follow the Crowd
• Authority - Follow a Leader
• Liking - Follow Friends and Colleagues
• Reciprocity- Return Favors
• Scarcity- Increase Value
• Consistency- Make Consistent Decisions

We know that social activities like sharing and recommendations drive sales.

90% of all purchases are subject to social influence

90% of consumers trust recommendations from people they know

67% spend more online after seeing recommendations

Sharing and recommendation behavior is growing.

75% of Facebook users have “Liked” a brand

53% of Twitter users have recommended companies or products

Research has shown that the likelihood of purchase increases when people have a social connection with a brand or product.

Fans of brands are 51% more likely to buy

Adding sharing features to a product can increase the spread of awareness 246% with “Likes” and 98% with “Send to a friend.”

Posted in nonprofit, Social Network, Facebook code hints, Marketing, Managing Business, Probably a RANT | Print | No Comments »

14. February 2012 by admin.

Social websites are catering to the “in” crowd.

The idea is good, but Apple fanboys with a secret club that has (as its first steps) pages full of firmware for jailbreaking just about anything.

Wondering how I found this? I am creating Lion (OSX 10.7.3) in a virtual machine to test the code that I write in RAD Studio.

Old vm’s with SLES encouraged the VMware route, but XEN or Virtual box might get dusted off later…Cheer you Apple socialites!

http://idevsocial.com/index.php?do=/gettingstarted/

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10. February 2012 by admin.

Quick tip from an Awareness Webinar.

http://www.nonprofitfacebookguy.com/

John will show you how to create tabs on facebook.

http://www.nonprofitfacebookguy.com/what-does-facebooks-frictionless-sharing-mean/

Nice find of the day

Posted in nonprofit, Social Network, Marketing, Programming Code Help, Managing Business, Probably a RANT | Print | No Comments »

31. January 2012 by admin.

Did you know that in order to become an affiliate for Apple Itunes you need to create an account at LinkShare (run by the same company that hosts Buy.com)

Here is the link to get started earning affiliate income when you use the JSON api

LinkShare Referral Program

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23. January 2012 by admin.

Bought the RAD-XE suite today:

Offer extended to January 31, 2012! - Delphi XE2, C++Builder XE2 and RAD Studio XE2 are here with new capabilities you’ve been waiting for like 64-bit Delphi and the ability to target both Windows and Mac from a single source code base. For a limited time, all earlier version users qualify for upgrade pricing. You can save up to 45% off the regular, new user price if you upgrade by January 31st!

Embarcadero has a killer suite here.

Bonus: Buy One Tool, Get a Second Tool Free! - Combine two offers for the very best deal. Purchase by January 31 to get the upgrade price. Then when you register your new XE2 product, choose a second Embarcadero developer tool or database tool of equal or lesser value free. See the BOGO information page for complete details.

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16. January 2012 by admin.

http://www.dtic.mil/ndia/2007systems/Thursday/AM/Track8/UnderstandingSocialNetworks_BriefingFINAL.pdf

It is possible to correlate the product of the social interaction of

the individuals involved, with the properties of wicked problems.

• Relevant correlations:  Requirement articulation

– Property 1:  There is no definitive formulation of a wicked problem.

– Property 7: Every wicked problem is essentially unique

– Property 6:  Wicked problems do not have an enumerable (or an exhaustively

describable) set of potential solutions, nor is there a well-described set of

permissible operations that may be incorporated into the plan

“Social network analysis is based on an assumption of the importance of relationships

among interacting units.  The social network perspective encompasses theories,

models, and applications that are expressed in terms of relational concepts or

processes.”

[1]

• Social network analysis should not be outside the capability of a systems engineer,

but rather its benefits would fold nicely into mission engineering—a core component

of systems engineering.

– Mission engineering is that often overlooked aspect in which the system

developers ask the ‘big picture’ question: “why is this system being

developed?”

[2]

– Social network analysis makes the question more fundamental: “Why is this

system being developed and who is important to its sustained success?”

• “The purpose of social network analysis is to provide insightful information and

inferences on the organization and structural properties of a network, given its nodes

and relations.

– Property 8: Every wicked problem can be considered to be a symptom of another

problem

– Property 5: Every solution to a wicked problem is a “one-shot operation”;

because there is no opportunity to learn by trial-and-error, every attempt counts

significantly

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9. January 2012 by admin.

Frigyes Karinthy, in his 1929 short story “L\’aancszemek” (”Chains”) suggested that any two persons are distanced by at most six friendship links. (The exact wording of the story is slightly ambiguous: “He bet us that, using no more than five individuals, one of whom is a personal acquaintance, he could contact the selected individual […]”. It is not completely clear whether the selected individual is part of the five, so this could actually allude to distance five or six in the language of graph theory, but the “six degrees of separation” phrase stuck after John Guare’s 1990 eponymous play. Following Milgram’s definition and Guare’s interpretation, we will assume that “degrees of separation” is the same as “distance minus one”, where “distance” is the usual path length-the number of arcs in the path.) Stanley Milgram in his famous experiment challenged people to route postcards to a fixed recipient by passing them only through direct acquaintances. The average number of intermediaries on the path of the postcards lay between 4.4 and 5.7, depending on the sample of people chosen. 
We report the results of the first world-scale social-network graph-distance computations, using the entire Facebook network of active users (\approx721 million users, \approx69 billion friendship links). The average distance we observe is 4.74, corresponding to 3.74 intermediaries or “degrees of separation”, showing that the world is even smaller than we expected, and prompting the title of this paper. More generally, we study the distance distribution of Facebook and of some interesting geographic subgraphs, looking also at their evolution over time. 
The networks we are able to explore are almost two orders of magnitude larger than those analysed in the previous literature. We report detailed statistical metadata showing that our measurements (which rely on probabilistic algorithms) are very accurate.

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