The Official Fluid Blog

As we close out another strong year at Fluid, we’ve learned that three of our clients have made the Internet Retailer “2012 Hot 100 Best of the Web“ – the annual list of e-commerce sites that the magazine’s editors believe to have broken new ground in ways that other e-retailers can learn from.  We’re thrilled to see our clients land a spot on the list this year.  Congratulations to Benefit Cosmetics, Sur la Table and Wag.com and to the Fluid team for creating breakthrough designs.

Benefit Cosmetics

The Internet Retailer editors liked the bold graphics, video tutorials on how to use its cosmetics, along with the social features, including a tool that lets consumers post and answer product questions, and a social club that connects Benefit fans with others around the world.

Sur la Table

Innovative navigation that puts relevant deals right in the front of the shopper caught the attention of the editors when they reviewed Sur la Table. For this site, Fluid focused on interactive merchandising and conversion.

Wag.com

Fluid helped combine the hallmark efficiency of Quidsi, the parent company of Diapers.com and Soap.com, to deliver a whimsical experience that changes the way people shop for pet supplies.  Internet Retailers’ editors noted the site’s novel navigation approach, which lets pet owners browse by animal type — not only cats and dogs — to find needed products in one section, each with its own color scheme that serves as an anchor. Wag.com has the benefit of learning from sister site Diapers.com, which was also developed by Fluid.

Follow this link to see the complete Hot 100 list of companies.

-The Fluid Team

I attended the GlobalLogic Innovate! conference on Tuesday and Wednesday in Palo Alto. We work with a development team from GlobalLogic (formerly Cubika) in Argentina. Although some of the sessions were geared towards a more corporate audience and were a bit dry (imho), some of the other sessions had some interesting perspectives on innovation that directly applied to Fluid. Some highlights:

Sal Khan
Sal Khan, the founder of the Khan Academy, talked about how the Khan Academy came into existence and now thrives. The Khan Academy is turning the educational system on its ear by allowing students to master material independently at home, and better leverage teachers time at school to help struggling students and to synthesize the basic materials into more interesting projects. (Of course it also works great for independent study without any classroom time at all.)

The Khan Academy uses YouTube for instructional videos, offers online tests, and organizes all the materials. It also provides a dashboard for teachers or parents to oversee the work of their students. There is nothing especially trailblazing in the technology. They offer valuable content (the courses) in a way that scales well on the internet. Sal saw and addressed an immediate (and initially fairly modest) need, which grew incrementally based on concrete needs. And the result is a revolutionary fix for a problem as daunting as our befuddled educational system.

Geoff Moore
Geoff Moore is a venture capitalist and old school high tech Silicon Valley guru.

We need discipline around innovation. It is not inherently good. One must consider the return on the investment in innovation. We should focus on the key “moments of engagement” in your business (such as the initial impression of a PDP, for example). There are 3 goals of innovation:

• Differentiation: Break new ground. Must be ambitious.
• Neutralization: Keep up with your competitors (Microsoft is the master of this). Must be fast.
• Productivity: Save money. This equates to “best in class”, which is not terribly sexy but can be good business.

The three goals are mutually exclusive. Deliberately choose which you want, and maintain discipline to achieve it.

Tom Fishburne
Tom is a “marketoonist”. He was previously the VP of marketing at Method Soap, a company that depends on innovation to survive. Before that he worked at General Mills, a company that does not.

“Usage is like oxygen for ideas.” It is hard to get meaningful feedback from focus groups about products or product categories that do not yet exist. It is almost an oxymoron. A better alternative is to take products to market and see how they do.

In order to innovate, one must dare to differentiate and take risks with those differentiations. When innovating it is important not to dilute the creative ideas to the point that they no longer differentiate and are therefore irrelevant. To innovate one must nurture the germ of the creative ideas, and make them more revolutionary rather than safer. Most good ideas get killed by over-cautiousness.

I’ve been learning the results of Olympic events via Facebook. Unintentionally. But it is happening.

I wonder how NBC feels about that? They (and everyone else) better figure something out because timezone delay is doomed.

The definition of prescient from the definitive source of everything, Wikipedia:
“Having knowledge of events before they take place; possessing or exhibiting prescience.”

While he steadfastly claims not to have had inside information, with Google naming a VP of Commerce today, kudos go out to our Chief Experience Officer, Andrew Sirotnik, for predicting this in a blog post several weeks ago.

Since Andrew’s post built an interesting case for the move, I won’t elaborate except to say it is clear the stakes are rising on ecommerce in general and, more specifically, distributed commerce, where consumers are able to interact with brands and products from wherever they spend their time. It will be interesting to see where things evolve from here.

Nice prediction, Andrew. What do you have for us next?

Josh Himwich, Director of Ecommerce Solutions at Fluid client Diapers.com, will be speaking on getting the most out of the agency/client relationship at the Internet Retailer Web Design & Usability Conference next week in Orlando, Florida. The Diapers.com team is an incredibly sophisticated group that knows their business inside and out. Certainly their results speak for themselves. We couldn’t agree more when Josh says “good design firm management begins with having specific business goals and expectations in place even during preliminary meetings.” If you are at the show we highly encourage you to attend the session, which is on Monday at 10 am.

More info on Josh’s session here.

And a related article here.

Hard work met celebratory fun for Fluid last Wednesday. And one of us ended up bald because of it. Channel 5 News was there to share our exciting news with the whole Bay Area.

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Fluid is excited to announce the launch or new site for Calvin Klein Fragrances, http://www.calvinkleinfragrances.com/. Fluid has been working with the Calvin Klein Fragrances team for several months to develop a new site that integrates the entire Calvin Klein fragrance line into a single, unified site experience while allowing each brand to express its own individuality. Individual fragrances include ck one, eternity, obsession, euphoria, escape and the latest addition to the line, ck free.

Synergy, forethought, planning, and commitment are commonplace words thrown around in the sales cycle for agencies pitching products and services the world over, industry-wide. Fortunately, these buzz words are not isolated to direct revenue-generating activities.

Team building can be traced back to the late 1920s when researchers conducted studies and observed worker productivity in a mid-West industrial facility outside Chicago called Hawthorne Works. Behaviorists studied groups of industrial workers in various conditions and determined that the most compelling evidence was observed in the building of a sense of group identity, a feeling of social support and cohesion that came with increased worker interaction. The study also demonstrated that workers had a tendency to perform at higher productivity at work-related tasks, most notably after performing non-work-related tasks.  Shortly thereafter, the onset of company sponsored team building activities was born.

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Social Design Principle 2: Encourage Authentic Conversations

Previously we identified how important it is to deliver unbiased information to consumers and cited the Amazon Effect as evidence.  Authentic conversations promote products, get valuable customer feedback, and establish a presence and a voice for your brand.  There are many methods, but the two most common are:

• Maintain a blog – Blogs are great for engaging in dialog with customers and initiating ways to discuss products, services, and future feature development.
• Use Authentic Advertising – Promote products in an unbiased, authentic way.

Start a Blog
How can a company initiate authentic conversations?  First, start and maintain a blog.  It’s easy, it’s cheap, and it’s familiar to customers as a way to interact and communicate with both the blog authors (the company) and other blog readers (the community)!   Make your blog a window on your company and reach out to customers.  Engage them, and ask them about both their good and bad experiences with your products and services.

“When you have authentic conversations with people, you learn enough to actually improve your product with them, freeing you from the need for the hard sell.  No longer will you have to convince people your software is worth it, because by working with the very people you’re selling to, you’re guaranteeing a valuable product.” – Joshua Porter, Designing for the Social Web

Some retail web sites place their blog on the homepage of their store.  Woot.com, an online retail web site features one discounted product per day on their homepage, and they present it in the context of a blog post.  This product is then advertised via RSS and Twitter feeds, and the blog post attracts hundreds of customer comments and even more exposure every day.  This daily blog guarantees a constant stream of fresh, new content and drives return visits.

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Without further ado, I present to you Fluid’s Canine & Feline Department:

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