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

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

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?

More info on Josh’s session here.

And a related article here.

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.

This berth aligns with federal initiatives like the National Service Bill signed by President Obama that calls upon Americans to volunteer in their communities. This initiative, created to bolster the efforts of AmeriCorps, is supported by $5.7 billion dollars, enough to triple the size of AmeriCorps’ service programs over the next eight years and includes new solutions for students trying to earning money for college.

In line with support from the aforementioned empirical evidence and initiatives by the new administration, many sites like idealist.org (which boasts nearly 16 thousand opportunities for individual and team volunteerism) and justgive.org (inspires users to make donations in the names of friends and family in lieu of standard gifts)to worthy causes) have realized increased membership and participation.

In the same vein that “going green” supports our global environment and is a sustainable solution for woes stemming from the economic downturn—so too are team building activities, designed around volunteer activities. Clearly, businesses are more likely to engage in activities that not only support the community, but also have cost-saving implications. Gaming activities like paint-ball for office team-building days have much higher cost implications than volunteering, and add no value to the world at large.

In keeping with our mission to provide value added and sustainable e-commerce solutions, Fluid recently engaged in an office-wide service event to add value (social commerce, in a sense) to our local community.

The outing included a donation drive for the underprivileged and under served members of the greater San Francisco community, in addition to participating in the kitchen dinner service for Glide, a radically inclusive organization dedicated to the betterment of SF through daily food services, health care, substance abuse rehabilitation, services for battered women and children, and GLBT advocacy since the 1960s. Fluid served 700+ diners that evening, and left the facility with a sense of pride, humility and mindfulness that couldn’t have been achieved by playing rounds of mini-golf, and brought the spirit of working together back to the office environment. While the measure of value that the outing has benefitted our working environment is difficult to quantify, the example below clearly demonstrates it.

Smiles all around: Pearly whites came to serve dinner

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.

”Blog post as advertisement” is a new form of advertising and is becoming more popular.  Using social design a company can essentially advertise without advertising, which is referred to as authentic advertising.

Use Authentic Advertising

CC Skye’s website is an interesting example of a successful use of authentic advertising. They leverage celebrity endorsements without making it look like a celebrity endorsement. On their product detail pages, they identify the colors of their products with the celebrities who have been seen wearing them. This is reinforced with a photo that looks like it was taken by the paparazzi.  The “guerilla style” photography works and makes the photo appear authentic.  In this example, the image implies that Kim Kardashian was not paid to promote the product, and that she genuinely likes the product and the style.

Authenticity, if delivered in a meaningful way that is relevant to the products, has the potential to be more powerful than traditional advertising.  A customer may be more inclined to buy a bracelet if their friend has one and raved about how cool it is, or even if they knew that an admired celebrity also likes it.  Social influence can be a powerful tool to attract attention to products. The trick is to create designs and build web applications supporting both authenticity and delivering the experiences in ways relevant to the customers and the products for which they are shopping.
Committing to authenticity helps your business in several ways:

• Engaging in conversations via blog posts helps address the needs of customers quickly and efficiently.
• Exposing products via authentic advertising generates interest and associates products with admirable individuals and desirable outcomes.
• Encouraging people to provide constructive feedback about products and services benefits the company and makes customers happy.

People appreciate that their voices are heard and are even more impressed when the company acts on that feedback with future product enhancements or service initiatives. Providing customers a way to become invested in the products through authentic conversations will make them more likely continue to do business with the company and more likely to bring their friends along, too!