Jordy Blog

Universal Wishlists: A Lesson in Open Marketing

Universal Wishlist Review

I’m not a big shopper, especially when it comes to traditional brick-and-morter stores, but the internet marketer in me loves new features that make online shopping more pleasant. Such is Amazon’s new Universal Wishlist feature. (OK, it’s not that new, but it’s still awesome.)

I love Amazon’s Universal Wishlist because it allows me to save items from other online stores right to my Amazon wishlist. Being able to store all of the products I want in one place has made Amazon my de facto shopping site for filing away stuff that I want now, but can only afford to buy someday. It’s my new virtual den of covetousness.

Other similar services exist as well. TheThingsIWant also looks kind of cool, and it has basically the same core functionality.  I haven’t tried it, but they supposedly have a feature that allows you to syndicate your wishlist to your blog. Very cool, and surely they’re getting some affiliate commission from that. I’m not sure that I would ever use wishlist syndication, but I can definitely see it being an interesting component of a personal or family blog.

It occurred to me that Google Product Search must have some similar feature, and sure enough, they do. Google shopping list lets you save products you want and compare prices across tons of online stores. It also lets you save notes and publish products in either a public or private list. Very cool. The biggest feature that it’s missing (for me, anyway) is the ability to make your own wishlist submissions for items from smaller stores (like the Mises.org store) that don’t show up on Google’s radar. Too bad. Still, it’s great if you only buy from big retailers.

Anyway, if you’re online shopping experience has been bound to one retailer, I now pronounce it unbound.

Lessons in Open Marketing

But, you might be asking yourself: “Why would Amazon extend it’s functionality to to other sites? Isn’t that giving away some of its secret sauce, let alone revenue?”

Answers:

1. Amazon uses the Universal Wishlists to make the “long tail” even longer, meaning it allows for even more product to be saved on it’s site. This is not necessarily to their direct benefit (since they don’t get the direct sale) but it does help build a shopping community around their site, and that’s as good as gold.
2. I’m sure Amazon also gets a bit of a traffic boost from this. When else would I ever go from Mises.org directly to Amazon? Having a “Click to add” to my Amazon wishlist right in my browser makes Amazon one click away from any retailer on the net. Now that’s smart. (This is somewhat analogous to building a brick-and-morter store in the mall. Why build right next to your competition? Because you can both benefit from the increased traffic that being in the the place for shopping will bring. If it’s sybmiotic, it works for everyone.)
3. Another win for Amazon: data mining. Suddenly Amazon knows what products I’m “eyeing” from other sites, often their direct competition. That’s great data to have when for making pricing, merchandising, and marketing decisions. That kind of competitive data is priceless, especially to an online store that process and act on that data quickly. Interested in a lawnchair from so-and-so? well here are our lawnchairs. X customer added Y watch from Z store? Why don’t we sell Y watch? You get the picture.

Overall I think implementing the Universal Wishlist a great, although somewhat unintuitive, strategic move for Amazon. It’s gutsy to encourage and facilitate increasing sales for other retailers; but it also builds community, increases site traffic, and provides meaningful (and actionable) data for competive analysis. Plus it builds goodwill –or at least it did for me. I appreciate being able to use Amazon’s wishlist feature wherever I find good products. That’s just good marketing.

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UTOSC 2008 and Utah Business Search Trends

My brother Gabe wrote an interesting post highlighting how Google Trends searches show that Utah is a hotbed of Open Source. It reminded me that I haven’t plugged the Utah Open Source Conference that’s happening this week. This conference is something you don’t want to miss.  I think you can still get tickets.

If your business is still not leveraging open source, you need to stop by to meet some of the people that can help you make it happen.

Now, on a separate nerdy note, I wanted to echo Gabe’s post by pointing out some business terms in which Utahans have peculiar interest according to search data in Google Trends.  When it comes to industry related searches, we rank #1 for Multi Level Marketing, #2 in Outdoor Recreation, and #3 in Telemarketing.

Utah also does a disproportionate amount of searches for online business terms: we rank #1 for SEO, #2 for Internet Marketing, #1 for Web Analytics, and #2 for Internet Business.

Can you think of any other obvious top Utah searches?  I’m looking specifically for business terms; although searches for jello, meth, and vouchers are interesting in their own right.

Dwight Schrute on Google Friend Connect

When I first read about Google Friend Connect, an upcoming service that will allow website owners to easily add social network functionality to their own websites, I immediately thought of these lines from NBC’s “The Office”:

Dwight: Why am I being forced to come in tomorrow and pretend that a website made sales that I made?
Ryan: This is a temporary measure to increase the legitimacy of the site.
Stanley: I don’t like when my clients call me to help them use the website, I’m not seeing commissions on that.
Ryan: I hear you Stanley, that is a great observation. Problems like that will not happen when we launch Dunder Mifflin Infinity 2 point O.
Stanley: When will that be?
Ryan: TBD. Phyllis?
Phyllis: Did the police solve the problem with the…
Ryan: Yes, yes they did, yes they did.
Ryan: Yes, the social networking feature of the Dunder Mifflin Infinity website was infiltrated by sexual predators.
Dwight: I don’t understand why our website has to have social networking at all.
Jim: Yeah, I actually have to agree with Dwight on that one.
Ryan: It’s all about creating a one stop shop consumer experience, alright? You’re chatting with your friends, you’re talking about the latest music, about the election; all of it is happening in our virtual paper store.
Jim: And then an older gentleman asked you “Boxers or briefs?”
Creed: I don’t get the big fuss here, I like the site.
Kelly: If I’d have created a website with as many problems, I’d kill myself.
Ryan: Do you have a question Kelly?
Kelly: Yeah I have a lot of questions. Number one, how dare you?
Michael: [slow clapping] Ryan has done a very good job, and I am not applauding sarcastically. Think about it, a month ago nobody would go on this site because we were worried about getting molested, or losing our identity, having it stolen. But now, at a time TBD, all of the problems will be in the past. Ya done good kid, ya done good.
– Source: OfficeQuotes.net

I thought all this was pretty funny, but the ability to drop social features onto your website with little more than some pasting of JavaScript might just prove us all wrong.  :)

Example:

3 of your friends liked SemiGloss Oxford White Cardstock #80.  Click here to get new friends!

777 – Keyword Search Trends

It’s officially July 7, 2007 — 777 — and I have a distinct impression that today might be the best 777 this millennium. Except for the obvious esoteric number fun, I don’t attribute meaning to it –unless the rapture comes, in which case I’ll quickly edit my post. :)

What I am interested in, however, are search trends. I think Gabe said it best: “It’s interesting that ideas come in and out of the public conscious in a predicable fashion, but more interesting that those trends can be quantified by search trends.”

My prediction: searches for the term “777″ will spike, but not near as much as “666″ did. Besides being a less emotionally charged keyword, “777″ is landing on a Saturday — which means that search volume won’t be nurtured by corporate-sponsored slacker surfing.

Still, I think searches for “777″ will bring Boeing a small share of Google love (think about it), and Amazon may even sell a few more copies of “777 And Other Qabalistic Writings of Aleister Crowley“. We’ll have to wait a bit for Google Trends to catch up and give us the full picture though –again, pending no rapture.

If you’re nerdy and find any of this keyword search trending talk interesting, check out my similar post on cyclical search trends.

As a side note, there are lots of SEO tools out there to analyze keyword popularity and search volume (WordTracker, Overture, and Google Suggest to name a few), and knowing how to use them can make website owners a lot of money. I’m generally more interested in the volume changes rather than total volume (slope vs hight), but you can make money (or get eyeballs) with either.

Geni Is Sweet Viral Marketing

Today’s my little brother Aaron’s birthday, a point that had eluded me until Geni notified me via email:

Dear Jordan Gunderson,

Aaron Gunderson, your brother, has a birthday today.

Click the link below to enter a birthday greeting for Aaron and we’ll deliver it today.

- The Geni Team

Short, simple, useful, and driven by info that I didn’t enter myself.  It was effective: I went to the site (which I’ve been dragging my butt on for months), updated some data, check out some of the features, etc.  Through one simple 4-line email that was pertinent to me, I got involved in their product and will continue to play with it.  Contrast that to the page after page of useless drivel you receive from most marketers (read “spammers”) and you’ll see why permission marketing really is the way of the future.

BTW, I saw Seth Godin speak in SLC yesterday, and I was impressed.  Since it’s already been covered extensively in the Utah blogosphere I’ll refrain from to much comment, but I just wanted to thank Phil, Ash, and everyone else for making it happen.  You guys rule!

Coupon Codes Can Kill Conversion

Speaking of coupons, I once read a Marketing Sherpa case study demonstrating that the inclusion of a “coupon code” field in your checkout process actually hurts conversion pretty significantly.  If you think about it, calling out out the fact that a little research could save your customer money entices them to leave your site in search of the deal.  Inevitably, some don’t come back to hit submit; and if they do come back, many do so with a coupon nailed right to your top line.  Again, these are people that were about to purchase anyway –it’s like you want them to be jerks.  :)  But seriously, I’m amazed every time I see coupon codes featured heavily on GoDaddy and other big sites that should know better.

Shameless Plug for DealDino.com

My friend Rick Galan created DealDino.com, a nice little coupon (affiliate) site that I think is worth checking out. There’s really not a lot to it, but I like that. Personally, I’m not the kind of shopper that will scour the net for deals and then try curb what I really want to whatever deals might be available. Rather, I’m the type that online marketers (like myself) hate: I first find what I want, get to checkout, then scour the net for coupons so I can get whatever I’m already getting at a discount. (I’m a total jerk, I know.)

Anyway, that’s why I like DealDino. Yes, you could view a list of “best deals” or “most recent deals”, but I just select the store I’ve already decided to buy from, then view only the coupons I care about. For me that beats doing a Google search for “toys R us coupons” (for example), selecting a few page results, then using the ‘find’ command to determine where amidst all the keyword stuffing a legitimate coupon link actually hides –if there is one at all.

So if you shop online at all, check out DealDino. It takes about 2 seconds to search for coupons, and it could save you a lot of money.

Software for Starving Students 2007.01 — RELEASED

Here’s the press release we sent out:

The 2007.01 release of Software for Starving Students is now available for download.

Software for Starving Students is a free collection of programs organized for students (but available to anyone). We’ve gathered a list of best-in-class programs onto one CD (one disc for OS X, one for Windows), including a fully-featured office suite, a cutting-edge web browser, multi-media packages, academic tools, utilities and more.

More info:

• Project homepage
• A complete list of included titles
• Screenshots

Please help us out by seeding the torrent, spreading the word, and burning copies for your friends and family. (Nothing spreads holiday cheer like good, free software.)

Happy Downloading!

Last year this got hundreds of thousands of downloads after getting posted on the front page of Digg. Here’s this year’s entry.

MarketingSherpa Purchased by MEC Labs

It looks like MarketingSherpa (a great company that sells internet marketing case studies, etc) was just purchased by MEC Labs (MarketingExperiments.com). The MarketingSherpa story (like most successes) is pretty inspiring. Anne Holland talks about it an email just sent out to readers:

“Back in March 2000, when I founded MarketingSherpa from my second bedroom (yes, honestly), I dreamed it would grow to be the most tremendous source of practical research for the marketers of the world. Now we’re at 237,000 readers, three main offices and nearly 700 case studies. It’s been an incredibly satisfying and exhilarating ride!

“And now things will speed up even more. I’ll still be here (naturally.) Our team is just getting bigger — both at the MarketingSherpa brand and also with the ability to lean on the research and technical team at MEC Labs.

MarketingSherpa really does have great content, and it’s always free for a week or so after appearing online. If you like e-commerce, internet marketing, or SEO, you should definitely subscribe to their free “best of weekly” newsletter.

WOMA Needs a Website

Janet Meiners posted about an upcoming Wasach Online Marketing Association (WOMA) meeting with CJ (Commission Junction).  It sounds like WOMA does some really fun stuff, but for being all about internet marketing, I’m surprised that it has basically no internet presence at all.  Month after month I’ve been waiting for a WOMA website to appear, but alas, nothing.  If it weren’t for Janet constantly keeping us clued in, I would never have heard of WOMA.  That’s bad, considering that I’m probably its target audience incarnate.

WOMA, let me help you set up a simple blog site to give some credibility to the fun & interesting things you do.  It makes no sense at all not to have one, especially for you.  I’m sincere about being willing to help because I love Internet Marketing and really think Utah can benefit from a group like this; but nobody will be benfited if nobody knows you exist. Please setup a website so Utah can know what’s going on.  If you want help, there’s a contact me section on my blog; I could have it up for you in 15 minutes if you give the URL.