Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Social shopping for real: An embeddable widget to sell your stuff to your friends on social networks

Told'ya helps you build and display a storefront widget in about 2 minutes on your Facebook, Blog, MySpace... and populate it with stuff you would like to sell. Payments are made via Paypal and Told'ya gets a $0.99 cent fee per transaction.

This is social shopping in its purest form (C2C social selling): users sell stuff to people who are in their own social graph, using the platforms where they socialize with them...

Here's a screenshot of my demo store, as only US residents can publish a store:



Update: here's a competing offer called Cartfly, and a demo store widget:



Update 2: here's yet ANOTHER competitor: Put-A-Cart. Man this space is getting crowded...

Social Advertising Best Practices

IAB logo IAB has just released its Social Media advertising best practices.

"These Best Practices are intended to help
protect consumer privacy, ensure transparency for what and how data is being used, and to define consumer permissions. The purpose of this
document is to provide best practices that illustrate, inform, and
facilitate greater adoption of the medium by defining creative components, data usage, consumer control, and privacy guidelines and by providing social advertising examples."

Click here to download the "Social Advertising Best Practices" PDF.

Monday, May 18, 2009

Banners as standalone shopping widgets: really shop in display ads!

Here's a link to cool demo of a campaign launched in the US by 1800flowers, of a rich display ad embedding a fully functional e-commerce storefront.

You can browse bouquets, search, view product details, add your selection to the basket, checkout and pay without leaving the website you are on, all within a Flash expand layer.

How's that for interactive direct advertising?

An alvenda production.

Thursday, May 14, 2009

How to use a billboard in a tourist spot to get instant massive social media coverage of your brand

The McDonald's Picadilly interactive billboard.
See end of video to see what I mean...
Brilliant!
A Leo Burnett production.

Google Search Options

Here's an update on yesterday's post on Google's Snippets: the full video tour of Google's new 'Search Options', edging the search engine closer to real-time search...

Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Google's 'Rich Snippets' Lets Webmasters Enrich Their Organic Search Results - via MarketingVOX

Yesterday Google debuted Rich Snippets, a feature that enables webmasters to build on the "snippet" of content that appears for their sites in organic search results.

What's displayed in Google's search results is data about people and reviews/ratings, see screenshot embedded below.



Another sign of Google preventing traffic from reaching ecommerce websites and shopping engines by using content it crawls: true, this is currently made possible if the webmasters 'set it up' to be displayed, but for Internet users, why go visit the targeted page if the content you need is displayed straight in the engine's search results?

 
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