order

Social Media Is Changing How Supply And Demand Works For Big Brands

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/social-media-manufacturing-2012-12

burberry milan fashion week menswear fall winter 2012 2013 collection runway Social Media Is Changing How Supply And Demand Works For Big Brands

Many companies see social media as just another marketing and communications tool. A particularly effective one maybe, but just another of many.

According to Erich Joachimsthaler, founder and CEO of Vivaldi Partners, they’re missing out on the biggest source of value from these platforms. In a recent report, he outlines how brands can use social media to change their entire business, not just their marketing.

“Where I see the biggest opportunity is to think about your entire business model. There’s so much of this social information that is unstructured information, and consumers make 75 percent of it,” Joachimsthaler says. ”If you want to think about your business, if you want to create value and competitive advantage, it’s about thinking about that information and penetrating it at every step of your value chain.”

One of the best examples of this, which Joachimsthaler has studied in depth, is Burberry.

The first thing that’s allowed them to change their business is the sheer size of their social reach. “Burberry has about 15 million — and that’s growing rapidly — Facebook likes. This is an astounding figure,” Joachimsthaler says. “This is astounding because even Nike is not as strong, and Nike is a $15-18 billion dollar company. Burberry is at about $3 billion. So it’s a massive difference, the two companies don’t compare.”

They built that following by offering something useful. People on Facebo! ok can s ee Burberry fashion shows before the celebrities who actually sit in front of the catwalk.

But what’s truly innovative is what they do with those likes. 

“What Burberry does is, it has made those videos shoppable. You can click on the particular garment and you can basically make an order on the spot. So Burberry can collate the orders from 15 million people. They haven’t manufactured the product yet in China, but they have taken the orders, they know exactly how many people have ordered what,” Joachimsthaler says. ”They already have my money in the bank. 15 million times $200; that’s a lot of money in the bank. When they have the orders, they can then send the order to China, manufacture it, and within two weeks they can either deliver it to your home, or you can have it delivered to a store and you can buy additional garments.”

For a taste-driven and occasionally fickle industry, this saves a tremendous amount of money. “This changes the entire value chain,” Joachimsthaler says. ”The fashion business is fraught with forecasting. You forecast what will be bought in the next year, you need to produce them, manufacture them in China, there are inventory problems, there are logistics problems, then you put it in the store, the thing doesn’t sell, if it doesn’t sell you have to send it to the outlet store and mark it down.

Burberry avoids a great deal of that.

There’s huge potential here that’s yet to be realized, and it could be a game-changer for the industry. We’ve only seen the beginning, Joachimsthaler argues. Someday, companies like Burberry could operate with a fraction of their inventory, and never have to mark anything down.

It’s a tremendous innovation in operations, and one that will have a large impact going forward, possibly even beyond the fashion industry.

NOW READ: These Social Currency Wheels Show Why Everyone Loves Samsung And Forgot About Sony

Please follow War Room on Twitter and Facebook.

Join the conversation about this story »

mf Social Media Is Changing How Supply And Demand Works For Big Brands

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Tuesday, December 4th, 2012 news No Comments

Guess What Percent Of Black Friday Online Sales Came From Twitter Referrals?

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/black-friday-online-sales-from-twitter-referrals-2012-11

new twitter logo Guess What Percent Of Black Friday Online Sales Came From Twitter Referrals?

What percent of online sales on Black Friday do you think came from Twitter referrals?

How about Facebook?

While you’re pondering those questions, here are some other factoids from a report on Black Friday online sales by IBM:

  • The average Black Friday online shopper bought 5.6 items per order. That’s down 13% from last year. It’s also down 40% from Friday, November 16th, a week earlier. Hard to know what to make of that.
  • The average shopping “session” length was 6 minutes and 39 seconds. That’s down about 10% from last year. Compare that to the average hellish shopping session in a physical store, and you’ll see why ecommerce is continuing to grow as a percent over overall retail sales.
  • The “conversion rate” of online shoppers–the percentage of those who visited the site who actually bought something–was 4.58%. That’s up 9% from last year.
  • Mobile devices (smartphones and tablets) accounted for 16% of sales. That’s up from 10% last year.
  • Mobile devices accounted for 24% of site traffic. That’s up from 14% last year.
  • iPads accounted for 10% of site traffic, up from 5% last year.
  • iPhones accounted for 9% of site traffic, up from 5% last year.
  • Android phones and tablets accounted for 5.5% of site traffic, up from 4% last year.

The key observations here would seem to be:

  • Mobile is ! continui ng to grow rapidly as a percentage of traffic and sales, but it’s not taking over by any means.  6 years into the smartphone era, with smartphones now accounting for more than 55% of U.S. handsets, traffic to mobile sites (including traffic from tablets) is still less than 25% of overall traffic.
  • Apple devices continue to crush Android devices in terms of commerce engagement. Android users just don’t seem to do all that much with their gadgets.

And now to social referrals…

It wasn’t long ago that many people were arguing that Facebook was eventually going to be bigger than Google. Word of mouth, after all, is the most powerful form of marketing known to man. And people lived on Facebook, so they would soon be shopping on Facebook. And so forth.

Well, so far, anyway, that ain’t happening.

  • Only 0.68% of Black Friday online sales came from Facebook referrals–two-thirds of one percent. That was a decline of 1% from last year.

And how about Twitter?

A couple of years ago, people were excited about Twitter’s potential as a commerce platform, too.

But Twitter’s impact on ecommerce, it seems, is zero.

Not “basically zero.”

Zero.

  • Commerce site traffic from Twitter accounted for exactly 0.00% of Black Friday traffic. That was down from 0.02% last year.

So much for the idea that Twitter or Facebook’s business models are going to have much to do with commerce.

SEE ALSO: Here’s Why You Will Instantly Dump Your Cable Company To Get Google Fiber

Please follow SAI on Twitter and Facebook.

Join the conversation about this story »

mf Guess What Percent Of Black Friday Online Sales Came From Twitter Referrals?

Amazon lockers are a great new idea, allowing people to pick up their parcels when it suits them. Now, Amazon has announced that it’s rolling out the scheme across the Staples chain, too.

Reuters reports that the office supply stores will be the latest string of locations to feature Amazon’s ultra-convenient pick-up system. When we tried them out last month, we were convinced:

The lockers are stupidly simple. You can even have your locker code texted to you when your order arrives. It doesn’t cost anything-standard, one-, and two-day shipping is available for free if you’re on Prime. If you have the need for a surrogate mailbox, using Lockers is pretty much a no-brainer.

Amazon has already partnered with other stores in the US— including 7-Eleven, Rite-Aid, Safeway, and Walgreen’s—but Staples is a biggy. Just don’t mention that Amazon is stealing custom from right under its nose, because that would be rude—and at any rate, you can be sure some serious cash is changing hands to set this scheme up. [Reuters]

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Tuesday, November 6th, 2012 news No Comments

Cleveland Clinic and IBM team up to make Watson a Doctor (video)

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2012/10/30/cleveland-clinic-watson/

ibm dr. watson Cleveland Clinic and IBM team up to make Watson a Doctor (video)

Medical research facility Cleveland Clinic and IBM are teaming up to develop ways to let supercomputer Watson become a useful tool for doctors. The machine’s ability to analyze language and scour its database for answers is hoped to offer quicker and more exhaustive diagnoses for patients. As modern medical students spend less time memorizing diseases, they’re focusing on learning how to think critically and navigate the huge amount of available data. Big Blue is also hoping that the Jeopardy champion will learn how to digest a person’s medical records in order to match up their history with maladies. We’re just nervous that someone will give Watson a telepresence robot and send him out onto the wards — you’d be worried about his bedside manner if you’ve seen his ruthless quizzing manner.

Continue reading Cleveland Clinic and IBM team up to make Watson a Doctor (video)

Filed under: ,

http://w ww.engadget.com/2012/10/30/cleveland-clinic-watson/”>Cleveland Clinic and IBM team up to make Watson a Doctor (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 30 Oct 2012 15:46:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |   | Email this | Comments

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Wednesday, October 31st, 2012 news No Comments

Source: http://gizmodo.com/5950527/facebook-crazy-statistics

medium They have 1 billion users, but that’s not Facebook’s only amazing statistic. There are a lot more, starting with a staggering 1.13 trillion likes. One point thirteen trillion likes, people. It’s crazy. Here are the rest of their stats, compiled since the first day of Facebook:

Over 1.13 trillion likes

since launch in February 2009. Wow.

140.3 billion friend connections

to one billion total users. Is everyone connected to everyone or what, Kevin Bacon?

219 billion photos.

These are photos actually in the system, not including the deleted ones. They believe they have had 265 billion photos in their servers since fall 2005. Flickr is weeping.

17 billion location-tagged posts,

including check-ins as of September 10, 2012—since August 2010.

210,000 years of music played so far.

62.6 million songs that have been played 22 billion times. The most staggering fact about this: their music-listening app only started in September 2011 and this data is from September 11, 2012.

More useless but neat facts:

• Facebook says that the median age of the user is about 22 years.

• The top five countries, in alphabetical order, where people connected from since the 1 billion user record was achieved: Brazil, India, Indonesia, Mexico and the United States.

• Of that 1 billion, there are 600 million mobile users. Not bad.

Head? Spinning!

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Wednesday, October 10th, 2012 Uncategorized No Comments
« Previous Entries

Digital Consigliere

Dr. Augustine Fou is Digital Consigliere to marketing executives, advising them on digital strategy and Unified Marketing(tm). Dr Fou has over 17 years of in-the-trenches, hands-on experience, which enables him to provide objective, in-depth assessments of their current marketing programs and recommendations for improving business impact and ROI using digital insights.

Augustine Fou portrait
http://twitter.com/acfou
Send Tips: tips@go-digital.net
Digital Strategy Consulting
Dr. Augustine Fou LinkedIn Bio
Digital Marketing Slideshares
The Grand Unified Theory of Marketing