Warren Knight

UK internet purchases of household and technology products reaches 18 per cent

According to the latest GfK Retail and Technology figures, internet sales of consumer durable goods over the Christmas period in the UK reached 18%, the highest ever recorded total.   The internet channel comprises both Pure Player and Click & Mortar retailers and this record market share was equal to consumer expenditure worth nearly £900 million.

It is apparent that consumers are now fully confident using the internet as a channel for making their household and technology purchases, there is higher confidence in security and the ease of purchase has made this a hugely successful channel in 2009.  Consumer’s appetite for online shopping saw the sales of some categories rocket; GfK recorded one quarter of all Digital Cameras sold in December being done so online.

“The future looks positive for online retailers, its clear more consumers are using the internet as a channel for making large purchases,” commented GfK Commercial Director Anthony Norman.  “Stock availability, ease of ordering and price are all key factors driving the consumer to shop online instead of on the high street.”

www.warrenknight.co.uk thanks RetailBulletin

A new eMarketer report shows that the number of Baby Boomers embracing social media, especially Facebook, jumped drastically between 2008 and 2009.

In its Boomers and Social Media report, eMarketer takes a look at social media adoption among different generations. Results showed that while the percentage of Millennials maintaining a social networking site profile was fairly consistent from 2007 through 2009, the same cannot be said of Baby Boomers’ social media usage.

According to Deloitte data, 2009 was the year that social media bloomed for Baby Boomers, with nearly 47% of them actively maintaining a profile on the social web, which is up 15% from 2008. Further driving home that 2009 was the year of the social BB is the fact that from 2007 to 2008 there was barely a measurable change — just 1% — in that demographic’s adoption of social media.

Boomers also love Facebook () far more than other social media sites, with 73% of the group claiming to maintain a Facebook profile, while only 13% have taken a liking to Twitter (). We also find it somewhat shocking that only 13% identify themselves as active LinkedIn () users. One would think that given their place in the professional world, Boomers would we more active on the professional site.

For another quirky finding, take a look at the percentage of “Matures” — individuals between the ages of 63 and 75 — who use Twitter regularly. Seventeen percent is actually quite high when you compare it with the percentages of the other demographic groups. Also of note is that nearly all the Senior social media users (90%) have picked up Facebook as a new hobby.

It should come as no surprise that the digitally connected youth are the most socially active, with data showing that 77% of Millennials and 61% of Generation Xers maintaining social media profiles. Social media profile maintenance may not be on the rise for these groups, but that’s likely because they’ve been familiar with the web as a social platform for several years now.

You can take a look at two of the telling charts referenced in the report below:

www.warrenknight.co.uk thanks Mashable [img credit: Zazzle]

The Economist’s journal Intelligent Life has published an interesting article (archived below) on social commerce (focusing on user ratings and reviews), by Booker Prize shortlist author Linda Grant.

Our top takeouts/thoughts:

• User ratings and reviews turn a dry catalogue shopping experience into an interactive and engaging Pop Idol (X-Factor in UK) experience - allowing people to “talk back to the shop” and determine the fate of new products
• Democratisation is good, but not when it leads to mob law and the cult of the amateur – the crowd need (and want) to be led, not just lead.  Professional reviews and personal shopping recommendations offset the populism of user ratings and reviews – and also provide e-tailer opportunities for up-selling and cross-selling.
• The seeds of future social commerce may be found in the children’s site Star Doll – an online avatar that you can dress up in the style of celebrities – and share with your friends. A portable social graph AND a portable preview avatar that can try on clothes/outfits and that be shared makes big sense in fashion e-tailing

The article got us thinking about the authority heuristic (mental shortcut) in social commerce that people use to choose.  In addition to customer reviews, we know people are influenced by friends and experts.  Add celebrity into the mix – and you have the four corners of social influence covered for social commerce.

Social Commerce & The Four Corners of Social Influence

Social Commerce & The Four Corners of Social Influence

The iPad will use a highly responsive Multi-Touch display, allowing users to physically interact with applications and content.

It’s 0.5in. thick and weighs just 1.5 pounds − thinner and lighter than any laptop or netbook. The screen is 9.7in. and has an LED-backlit display. It uses special adaptive charging technology to deliver up to 1,000 charge cycles without a significant decrease in battery capacity over a typical five-year lifespan. A new software developers’ kit will enable the development of better ‘universal apps’ by marketers.

The iPad comes in two versions, one with Wi-Fi and the other with both Wi-Fi and 3G. Apple and AT&T announced breakthrough 3G pre-paid data plans for the iPad in the US, with on-device activation and management. No UK carrier has yet been announced.

The iPad will include 12 new apps designed especially for it and will run almost all the 140,000 apps in the Apple App Store.

A newspaper reader program from The New York Times and games by videogame maker Electronic Arts have been designed for the iPad, while Major League Baseball has demonstrated how it plans to use the device to enhance its own digital offerings.

Apple claimed the precise Multi-Touch interface will make surfing the web on the iPad “an entirely new experience, dramatically more interactive and intimate than on a computer.” It includes an almost full-size ‘soft’ keyboard and users can import photos from a Mac, PC or digital camera, then see them organised as albums and share them in slideshows.

Use can also watch movies, TV shows and YouTube, all in HD, or listen to music from the iTunes Store. The device will sync with personal music and video collections in the same way as iPods and iPhones.

Apple also announced the iBooks app for the iPad, which includes Apple’s iBookstore, allowing users to buy and read books on the device. The iBookstore will feature books from major and independent publishers, including Penguin, Macmillan and Harper Collins.

Apple has also introduced a new version of iWork for iPad, the first desktop-class productivity suite designed specifically for Multi-Touch. With Pages, Keynote and Numbers, users can create formatted documents, presentations with animations and transitions, and spreadsheets with charts, functions and formulas. The three apps will be available separately through the App Store for around $10 (£6) each.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs said, “The iPad creates and defines an entirely new category of devices that will connect users with their apps and content in a much more intimate, intuitive and fun way than ever before.”

The iPad will be available in late March worldwide for a suggested retail price of $499 (£310) for the 16Gb Wi-Fi-only model, $599 (£370) for the 32Gb model, $699 (£430) for the 64Gb model. The Wi-Fi and 3G models will be available in April in the US and selected countries for a suggested retail price of $629 (£385) for the 16Gb model, $729 (£450) for the 32Gb model and $829 (£510) for the 64Gb model, although international pricing and worldwide availability will be announced at a later date. The iBookstore will be available in the US at launch.

This story first appeared on marketingweek.co.uk

Installing the Google Analytics code is pretty easy – usually nothing goes wrong, and it is simply a matter of copying and pasting the code that Google provides you with. However, there are some cases where you might want to change the default code:

• Tracking visitors across different domains
• Changing the session timeout
• Setting keywords or referrers to ignore

Google provides clear instructions for these tasks but nobody is perfect so sometimes errors will be made and nothing will be tracked. Normally it would take you 24 hours to realise this, 5 minutes to fix what you thought was the error and then 24 hours to find out that you hadn’t actually fixed anything. Repeat this cycle until you give up or get it sorted. Here is my guide to help speed this process up and make it less likely that a small typo in your Google Analytics code will take a week to fix.

So what do you do when there is no data in Google Analytics?

1. Firstly, visually confirm that the tracking code is on the website. It sounds like a simple thing but you can end up looking pretty stupid if you miss this step out.
2. Then install httpfox or some other program to monitor the requests your browser is making
3. Start up httpfox and perform a full refresh (Ctrl-F5) of a page.
4. In httpfox search for requests made to the google-analytics.com domain. If you see a request for _utm.gif then you know that data is being sent to Google Analytics. Apart from checking that the UA id is correct I have no more ideas about what could be going wrong here.



5. If there is no request for the tracking pixel then something is wrong with the code (duh?).
6. For simple errors (like typos) the firefox error console will give you a pretty good idea of what has gone wrong.
   Firefox Error Console shows that I missed of the closing quotation marks when setting the session timeout to 5 minutes
7. For more complicated changes to the code use a more powerful tool like firebug to find out where the error is occurring.
8. Fix the problem and then repeat steps 3 and 4 to check that information is being sent to Google Analytics.

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