Web Strategy Blog

Events, Social Media and Chocolate

Today I spent the morning attending an amazing event in San Francisco: The Chocolate Salon at Fort Mason and it got me thinking about how dramatically the promotion of local events has changed in the past few years with the prevalence of social media and Web 2.0 technologies. Its a topic that appeals to both the chocoholic and web strategist in me.

The event itself was fantastic - a chocolatey, gooey and somewhat indulgent day for people who love everything chocolate. I checked out the Chocolate Salon site and hit cacao nirvana when I discovered TasteTV's "Chocolate TV" video segments!!! On it you can see every imaginable story around chocolate and the event: some examples of chocolate couture, chocolate hairstyles, stories about some of the fantastic chocolate manufacturers and retailers that we have right here in San Francisco.

How does social media play into it? For starters, like a lot of things I go to these days I learned about the event from both upcoming.org and meetup.com from my friends listing it as something that they were going to.

Here is a list of basic social tools that likely will (or should be used) to promote and report on the event before, during and after:

- Blogging - I'm blogging about it and so are others

- Comments on the event sites, blogs, etc.

- Twitter - attendees were twittering about the event

- Flickr - I uploaded photos to Flickr from the event and many others did too

- Groups , reviews, ratings and forums were formed in sites such as Yelp

- Video's and podcasts were created around the event

- E-Commerce - of course a lot of the local manufacturers and vendors have websites with e-commerce

and then there is the use of so many "sharing" tools that are inherent in many of the above that create a viral effect: "send to a friend", tagging, send a message, get link, get code.

What else could have been done? Social bookmarking on sites like Delicio.us or Ma.gnolia, recipe sharing, links to food or chocolate blogs, a wiki on chocolate related topics, mobile alerts, FaceBook groups ...the list goes on and on. What social tools do you use for events?

Online Market World

Next week the Crimson Interactive group will be out in full force at Online Market World in San Francisco. I will be moderating the opening general session on the Future of E-Commerce and participating in a panel on Social Media Best Practices. My colleagues Rich Julius will be in a panel on Understanding the Business Customer and Esther Lim will be participating in a panel on Turning Customers in to Brand Advocates. If you wil be at the conference - please let us know, we would love to meet with you!

E-Commerce 2.0

I've been doing some research on E-Commerce and the use of social media - its not something that we hear a lot about these days explicitly. Yet it seems like social media is more immersive in the E-commerce user experience than ever before. I like this presentation from Jaap Favier of Forrester, it has some basic points that resonate with Web 2.0 in general: consumers have multiple connection points, consumers trust recommendations from friends, influencer's have power, consumer generated content, consumer innovations and the fact that companies will offer experiences and collaboration - not just products.

For me - the ideal e-commerce 2.0 experience will be predictive of my needs, be dead-easy to execute/ fulfill and will have rich social and immersive experience attached to it.

HP Unveils Video Merchant Services for Retailers

In a recent Business 2.0 article HP talked about its new offering for Retailers - its basically a digital platform that archives movies and television shows and a web service that enables video downloads. I should say up front that Crimson is working on helping HP on this initiative and although I can't comment specifically what HP is doing - suffice it to say that its impressive. Overall, HP is going after a minimum of 15% of the market of the $35 billion Americans spend each year on DVD sales and rentals, downloads and other video purchases. HP believes there is a huge opportunity in long tail video content - those video's that have a loyal fan base, but its not large enough for profitable mass distribution. A new service called Manufacturing on Demand which will allow a user to order a video online and potentially have it shipped within 24 hrs! As a frequent downloader of video - I am personally excited about the potential to increase the scope of available content. HP launched with their first BETA customer Wal-Mart and is now working on refinements. This is just the first release with many new improvements to come as the offering develops. With strong relationships with both the studios and retailers, it looks like HP's big bet will pay off.

Will there be a DRM-Free Music Future?

In a recent public announcement Steve Jobs discussed DRM (Digital Rights Management) and the fact that Apple would welcome the labels getting rid of DRM all together. Apple has been recently criticized, particularly in Europe because of the proprietary nature of their DRM technology called "Fair Play" which allows music sold on iTunes to only be played on an iPod player.

No matter what your music player preference - consumers are wanting DRM free music downloads. It was obvious to me that when attending some music industry conferences recently that the labels aren't any closer to understanding that opening up DRM might actually help increase music sales. In the heyday of the original Napster when digital music files were being freely swapped, the music industry was booming - since shutting it down, music sales have been declining.

EMI stands out as one of the forward-thinking labels - in December they experimented with selling some Nora Jones tracks DRM free on the Yahoo Music Store. EMI has been rumored in the WSJ to announce that they will sell a substantial portion of their music catalog as DRM-free music files - so the results must have been encouraging! If they do in fact start to publish all of their music DRM free, I for one will applaud and support that as a consumer with my wallet!

The Retail Experience - I love browsing!

I finally had a chance to view Steve Ballmer of Microsoft's video of retail of the future from the NRF. It shows a woman managing her shopping list through her cell phone and using that to navigate through the aisles in an efficient way. It made me laugh because I actually know someone that has most of the aisles mapped out at the local grocery store to a shopping list. I have made fun of his obsessiveness of mastering the granular details of store layout, and this video validates his process! I'm not sure that this would be very appealing for a lot of people (including a lot of women I know) who actually like - oh dare I say - prefer to browse! I guess it depends on your perspective of the retail experience, I find shopping fun and entertaining. Others find shopping a chore that needs to be made as efficient as possible.