Monthly Archive for September, 2006

SF Tech Sessions: Enabling Mobile Communities

Published
by
Joel Fugazzotto
on September 11, 2006
in Business, Community, Content and Retail
. 0 Comments

This month’s SF Tech Sessions features three startups that are building communities on the mobile platform. The companies are:

1. WAPtags is a mobile search and bookmarking site that is building an ad-hoc community around search results. Users can leave comments on sites, creating conversations and connections between visitors who found the site through WAPtags.

2. Twitter is built to let you take an online community - your friends, blog readers, or site visitors - and make a mobile community around them. Users can send SMS updates to Twitter which are saved online and can be posted to website or sent to friends’ phones.

3. TextMarks allows people to create instantaneous mobile communities based solely on text messages. Anyone can define a key word and choose an automated response when that keyword is sent to the system. But a community is created when users allow people to subscribe to the key word, then any subscriber to send messages to the group allowing anyone with a keyword, whether they know each other or not, to join in.

It strikes me that potential in mobile communities for retailers is huge and it’s worth watching this area as it continues to grow.

You be the Manager/Coach

Published
by
Joel Fugazzotto
on September 10, 2006
in Business and Community
. 0 Comments

Here is an interesting use of customer/community feedback.

The Flyers, a minor league baseball team in Schaumburg, IL, allow the fans, voting online, to decide the team’s starting lineup each night. The fans determine the lineup, the pitcher, and who will play what position.

Now take this idea a few steps further and imagine what retailers and manufacturers could do if they had direct access to their customers during product development, allowing them to build the products with the features and options most desired.

Online Communities driving traffic to shopping sites

Published
by
Joel Fugazzotto
on September 8, 2006
in Business, Community and Retail
. 0 Comments

A press release from Hitwise shows the trend that community sites such as MySpace are increasingly driving more traffic to shopping sites and retailers. The report details MySpace.com’s phenomenal growth over the past six months increasing 67% to a 4.88% market share of all U.S. visits to websites.

But what was even more striking about the report was MySpace.com’s impact on upstream visits to shopping sites:

Social networking site MySpace.com accounted for 2.53 percent of all U.S. upstream visits to Shopping and Classifieds category for the week ending August 26, 2006, up from 1.28 percent six months ago (week ending February 25, 2006).

Compare Myspace.com’s upstream visits (2.53%) to the big three search engines, Google (14.93%), Yahoo! Search (4.69%), and MSN Search (2.33%) and it’s obvious that online communities have the potential to be just as important to retailers as search technologies in driving traffic.