Over the next 18 months Sweatshop is looking to dramatically develop its websites, road races and retail operation. We are looking for key personnel to take the business forward as we intend to treble the size of the company in the next 5 years.

Sweatshop has an exciting opportunity for someone to join the E-commerce team to help drive online sales growth for Sweatshop. The key responsibilities of this role are producing and managing email marketing campaigns, creating and editing content for the website and working on website development projects in conjunction with the Head of E-commerce and external web developers.

Email Marketing

• Working with the Head of E-Commerce and internal marketing and events teams to create regular HTML email campaigns for online customers, store customers and race entrants
• Set up and management of campaigns in email marketing software, including analysis and reporting of campaign success
• Creating and maintaining triggered email campaigns, including footwear guarantees, product reviews, mailing list sign-ups and abandoned shopping carts

Content Management

• Updating content on website including banners, pods, vacancies, store information, advice, blog
• Researching/writing/collating content for website including advice section and product information
• Planning and implementing the ecommerce content strategy to increase site traffic, offer added value to customers and increase brand awareness
• Merchandising the website to ensure products are displayed in the correct order to highlight new products and top offers
• Liaising with internal designers to ensure web imagery is changed regularly
• Amending website content to help with SEO, including page titles, metadata and content keyword density
• Working with external search company admin system to improve site search
• Updating content on company intranet

Technical/Data Management

• Assisting in the creation and maintenance of microsites
• Creating landing pages for promotions
• Producing project specifications for web projects that enhance customer experience and deliver new functionality
• Testing web developments created by external developers
• Analysing and reporting on website statistics and promotions
• Setting up online forms for competitions and ad hoc promotions
• Regular submission of product database to Google Base and working with other Google webmaster tools
• Running SQL queries to extract data for email and postal mailings
• Collating and cleaning mailing lists
• Updating customer contact details
• Managing opt-ins/opt-outs from email marketing system

Skills/Qualifications

• IT/web or e-commerce related degree (desirable)
• Good knowledge and experience of web and e-commerce platform technology
• Passion for online shopping and excellent understanding of customer journeys, user experience and design
• Demonstrable experience in the creation of HTML emails and rules to ensure deliverability
• Excellent knowledge and understanding of HTML and/or Dreamweaver
• Experience of working with image software such as Photoshop or Fireworks
• Experience of working with Content Management Systems
• Solid understanding of SEO
• Strong analytical and data management skills
• Web/email copywriting skills
• Experience of using web analytics software to gain insights on users and site trends and identify opportunities for improvement
• Ability to communicate with people of all levels and to interact with technical resources
• Proactive
• Organised, able to prioritise, manage workload and meet deadlines
• Good attention to detail
• Interest in running/sport (desirable)

Interested candidates:
If you’re interested and share the company values of ground breaking customer service, integrity, success, teamwork and the welfare of staff, write to:

Sarah Whatley, Sweatshop, 12 Station Road, Hampton, Middlesex TW12 2BX or
email HR@Sweatshop.co.uk ]]> http://www.simonwhatley.co.uk/web-content-manager-sweatshop-co-uk-leading-specialist-running-retailer/feed 0 http://www.simonwhatley.co.uk/thoughts-on-a-social-media-marketing-strategy http://www.simonwhatley.co.uk/thoughts-on-a-social-media-marketing-strategy#comments Thu, 08 Apr 2010 09:00:38 +0000 Simon http://www.simonwhatley.co.uk/?p=2713 Social media marketing has three important aspects. The first revolves around creating buzz or newsworthy events, videos, tweets, or blog entries that attract attention, and become viral in nature. Buzz is what makes social media marketing work. It replicates a message through user to user contact, rather than the traditional method of purchasing via an advert or promoting a press release. The message does not necessarily have to be about the product. Many successful viral campaigns have gathered steam through an amusing or compelling message, with the company logo or tagline included incidentally.

The second aspect regards building ways that enable fans of a brand or company to promote a message themselves in multiple online social media venues. Fan pages in Twitter, MySpace and Facebook follow this model.

The final aspect is based around online conversations. Social media marketing is not controlled by the organisation and it is naive to think it ever could be. Instead it encourages user participation and dialogue. A badly designed social media marketing campaign can potentially backfire on the organisation that created it. To be successful social media marketing campaigns must fully engage and respect the users.

Only recently Nestlé fell foul of trying to control a conversation on Facebook about their alleged use of palm oil, by stating users should not parody the Nestlé or Nestlé-owned brands’ logos.

…we welcome your comments, but please don’t post using an altered version of any of our logos as your profile pic – they will be deleted.

Of course, this contributed to people doing exactly that, whilst Greenpeace also fanned the flames via both Facebook and Twitter!

Social media isn’t just about big networks like Twitter, Facebook and MySpace, it’s about brands having conversations.

(Lloyd Salmons)

How does this all translate into a social media marketing strategy? Here are some thoughts:

1. Listen to Conversations — Tap into the online conversations to find out what people are talking about, where they are talking and with whom they are talking.
2. Establish a Share of Voice — There are a multitude of conversations happening every day, indeed every second. When you join the conversation, what share of the voice do you have, or indeed want to have?
3. Set Goals and Benchmarks — Using the information and insights gained from following and engaging in conversations, you can then set the goals you’d like to pursue in social media.
4. Find Bloggers and Communities — This is really an extension of point 1. You have to know where the conversations and discussions are taking place so that you can allocate time and effort and get the best return on time invested. Finding the conversations isn’t as hard as it sounds; the first stop would clearly be via services such as Twitter and the faithful, yet still important, RSS feeds.
5. Identify Key Influencers — What and who are the key influencers? Where can they be found? What are they saying? Understanding the social graph–the connections between people–will also allow you to identify who the key people and organisations are.
6. Develop a Content Strategy — Success in social media largely depends on the quality of your content, whether this is generated by you or bookmarked or cited on blogs and services such as Twitter.
7. Pick the Right Tools — What tools should be using? Should you be on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn? What about MySpace and Bebo? Do you know your target audience and market? If so, what tools are they using? Twitter is fundamentally different from Facebook, which is in turn fundamentally different from LinkedIn. They may all be classed as “social media”, but apart from some cross-over, they have their own target markets.
8. Create and Deliver Compelling Content — This is the difficult part. Once you know where the conversations are happening and what is being talked about, you need a content strategy and bright ideas. These bright ideas need to be compelling and naturally flow. Contrived content won’t pass muster amongst your readers and followers. You need to contribute and enhance the conversation, not repeat it verbatim.
9. Engage and Facilitate Conversations — Social media is all about two-way conversations. The writer is no longer preaching to an audience, the audience is now a fundamental part of the equation. Readers are no longer passive bystanders, their responses to your content serves to enhance the content and your ideas.
10. Measure the Results — With all this social interaction comes a multitude of data; tweet history, web analytics etc. But what does it all means is the crucial question. Social media ROI can be measured, but what you measure is really up to you; whether it is tangible metrics such as sales and website visits, or intangible metrics such as influence and clout.

A well-planned, managed and authentic social media programme, based upon listening and responding to your audience will result in deeper and stronger relationships with your customers and brand stakeholders. By tapping into and implementing the knowledge and ideas of your customers and followers, you will be able to deliver what the customer wants and your products will vastly improve.

But what makes up a web community; what makes them successful? Below I discuss the four C’s of community: Content, Context, Connectivity and Community.

Content

A current meme when organising or building a website is the catchphrase Content is King. A big shift in the web in recent years has been the way websites are constructed. Today it’s a necessity, and indeed best practice, to separate form from content. In one hand you have the compelling content, whilst in the other you have the presentation, be it in the form of HTML and CSS, Flash or RSS, amongst others.

Quality content is one way in which you can make your website stand out. It is also a great way to attract the people who are needed to form the elusive community that your brand is hoping build. When considering community initiatives, there are three questions to ask: Where will the content come from; for example community driven or syndication? Does it provide indisputable value; does it have a unique selling point (USP)? Can a regular flow of quality content be maintained? Even pre-Web 2.0 initiatives have to focus on keeping the content itself fresh and relevant.

Web accessibility and search engine optimisation are also vital, so having content completely separated from presentation means a number of assistive technologies can make better use of the content, whilst the web robots can also readily consume the information.

Context

Context means understanding how people use your website, where they are in the user-journey and serving them the right experience at the right time. Well-designed applications and functionality have great opportunities to deliver on context.

For example, FriendFeed‘s iPhone version, which is simply a re-worked web interface, is perfectly designed for contextual usage on the go. Similarly, Remember The Milk updates the interface explicitly for mobile and iPhone users, whilst also syndicating the content to applications such as Google Calendar. (It is questionable whether user-agent switching is good practice, but that is a whole new blog post.) Conversely, Delicious makes no attempt at changing the user interface for iPhone or Nokia N95 users since the iPhone and N95 have full web-capabilities through their respective web browsers.

In some instances the context in which the content is displayed will require reduced functionality. For example, the Last.fm mobile site does not allow you to play music, but simply search music listings, view recommendations, events and friend listings, and edit settings. However, through its API, Last.fm is able to offer its data and platform to third party developers to aid the building of new applications and communities, thus changing its context.

Connectivity

Connectivity is the ability of a system, whether that is a web-based community or a device like the iPhone, to connect with little or no modification. In the realm of communities, the ability to easily connect to your peers is the Holy Grail of the application.

Successful communities thrive on fluid, hard-to-measure activities that are, in the purest sense, relationship-based. It’s not all about mass communications — although Twitter and YouTube are both bucking this trend — but more about the micro-interactions. Designing experiences that support thousands of micro-interactions means that the community is able to function, unhindered, almost indefinitely. Facebook lends itself expertly to micro-interactions through the user’s ‘wall’.

Companies are turning to communities as the new customer relationship management (CRM), but this requires people to mind them. Organisations such as 37Signals and WildBit very effectively use Twitter to broadcast service updates and sometimes apologies, whilst the BBC and The Guardian online use it to broadcast links to new content.

Continuity

People often don’t like change, but communities that thrive often do so though evolution to meet the needs of users. Communities need to be flexible to evolve while still providing a valuable and consistent user experience which can be sustained. Too much of a radical change will almost certainly have a detrimental impact upon visits, at least initially.

Building communities is the new marketing for a brand, whether that is through wholely-owned properties or 3rd party social media services such as Twitter, WordPress or Ning. The starting point to any community is finding a niche that is currently underserved and serving that community better than anyone else. But Brands need to know a few things before they head down the community path. The web is saturated with communities. Some are thriving, while others have come and gone. Creating a community is not like your average marketing campaign that you can ditch it is a failure. If the community is successful the four C’s of content, contect, connectivity and continuity will have to be maintained and indeed, developed.

If you’re already working with video on the web, an online editor is fast, easy and free. In theory, these services could bring video editing to people who would otherwise never engage in it. People already engaging in video editing can benefit from automatic software updates and the sharing made possible by online communities.

Here’s a brief look at some of the services out there in the ether.

JumpCut

Jumpcut, acquired by Yahoo in 2006, lets you upload video, photos, and audio, or import from Flickr or Facebook, and edit using a Flash interface. Jumpcut is the most developed of the editors, allowing you to add a long list of effects, transitions, and captions to the videos. It also incorporates fine grained control of trimming and audio levels (uploaded background audio and voice). The complexity of the interface makes it great for detailed edits and mashups, but borders on being too heavy an application for the internet.

Checkout the Jumpcut website.

Eyespot

Eyespot is a fully featured editor like Jumpcut. It has a drag-and-drop interface that lets you upload video, photos, and audio and then add transitions, effects, titles, and music. The editor isn’t as attractive and easy to use as Jumpcut’s, but Eyespot offers a good deal of free media sets from partners like The Colbert Report, Public Enemy, and Dreamworks Pictures. Eyespot’s white label editor is becoming available on more and more sites, with the NBA being a prime example.

Checkout the Eyespot website.

Cuts

Taking a slightly different tack, Cuts is a great example of a Web 2.0 “mash-up”, where two online applications are merged. In this case a video is taken from YouTube, MySpace or Google and you cut, loop, add preloaded sound effects, and insert captions to enhance the original. Editing is straightforward, consisting of changes to the sound, caption, and navigation levels for the video. Every edit can be re-cut, embedded, and emailed. In the future, Cuts will be expanding into simple editing for digital movies and TV shows.

Checkout the Cuts website.

Motionbox

Motionbox is best known for deep tagging videos, but they also have an editor that is ideal for trimming your Motionbox content and joining the videos together.

Checkout the Motionbox website.

Photobucket

Photobucket leverages the most recent Adobe Flash tools. Unlike other services, users can “mash up” video clips with audio files and photos, and add effects and transitions.

Checkout the Photobucket website.

Michael Wesch speculates that the accessibility of the internet both to add and receive content is leading to a massive paradigm shift in human thought and society.

However:

The internet still follows the fundamental form of the written word and the motion picture: non-participatory reception of information.

The exact interface of scripting language is irrelevant. The internet is essentially a series of Guttenberg presses and Edison kinetoscopes connected by telegraph wire.

The accessibility of these devices to add content had only changed the scope of the content, not the basic form. Regardless of who made it, I’m still reading text and watching movies.

A semi-global library is a remarkable acchievement (Remember that most people in the world still don’t have net access).

But the real acchievement of the internet has been to SIMULATE participation. It has made non-participatory addition of responsive content more rapid; even instantaneous.

E-mail or a chat room, for instance, has infinitely sped up communication across distances. But it is still not a fully sensory, participatory conversation, and we’ve had to find ways to compensate for that.

This trajectory will eventually lead to virtual reality. Increasingly sophisticated pseudo-sensory simulations of the full sensory, participatory reality of which we are a part.

This is a movement towards making the non -participatory form imitate the participatory reality.

We’re trying to make the printed word imitate what we already experience every day.

The natural interaction between us and the world.

During the 1990s business leaders and venture capitalists grappled with how they would make money from the web. This was tipified by the two VCs, Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital, investing $25 million in Google in the late 1990s; they new the search engine created by Sergey Brin and Larry Page was a winning formula, even though the pair had not yet monetised search. Bricks and mortar compaines were deemed “old hat” as the dotcom bubble was expanding. Companies such as eBay, Amazon and Yahoo! were at the forefront of every investors’ chequebook. Every company needed a 21st Century “Blue Sky” web strategy; every company needed to do e-commerce. However, the bubble burst and everyone was brought down with a bang. Boo.com is a classic example of the fallout from the over speculation.

Today, the reality has shifted from solely bricks and mortar or dotcom, to a balance between the real world and cyberspace, of traditional business operations complemented by the unversality provided by web-based technologies. The web has given businesses a greater understanding of their customers. With Web 2.0 a new type of web is emerging, further enhancing the understanding of a user or customer through the creation of online communities, where information is shared and new ideas evolve.

There are numerous examples of web communities from the early FriendsReunited to MySpace and the more specific Islandoo for the Channel4 TV progamme Shipwrecked. Web 2.0 is all about collaborative networks tipified by Flickr, del.icio.us, Wikipedia and YouTube. However, Web 2.0 has primarily been used in the consumer arena, as identified by the examples, but the use of such technologies has far reaching implications based on understanding how people interact with the technologies and behave online. Linking people across countries, time-zones and company boundaries will enable people to work together without hierarchical boundaries, bringing people together as one team to collate the best input. This is emphasised with the concept of a wiki whereby any end-user can make changes to the shared resource without the need for specialist software and expensive training. This makes sharing knowledge extremely easy.

Other areas of Web 2.0 is the technology identified by the term “folksonomy”. Simply, a folksonomy is defined on Wikipedia as:

… an Internet-based information retrieval methodology consisting of collaboratively generated, open-ended labels that categorize content such as Web pages, online photographs, and Web links. A folksonomy is most notably contrasted from a taxonomy in that the authors of the labeling system are often the main users (and sometimes originators) of the content to which the labels are applied. The labels are commonly known as tags and the labeling process is called tagging.

While it takes time for an expert to create a taxonomy specific to a particular organisation in order to categorise or define data, folksonomies do not require fixed taxonomies. Instead, users define their own descriptions of the data to be described by applying tags to the data, whether it is a bookmark in terms of del.icio.us, an image on Flickr, a video on YouTube or a document in a company repository. Over time, these tags can be amended by other users resulting in a definition that is more specific. This enables users to find information with relative ease, without having to type the exact keyword.

Web 2.0 will bring a whole host of issues into the business arena. While there are clear benefits from establishing communities and social networks, people with different views, be it political or religious, can drive the agenda. Further complications arise through the necessity to audit changes to the data and ensuring the data is indeed accurate (Wikipedia has had cases where people have maliciously altered data to either enhance their own profile or devalue the significance of historical events).

The toolbar can be downloaded via the following link: http://www.snapfiles.com/get/AccessibilityToolbar.html

The Web Accessibility Toolbar has been developed to aid manual examination of web pages for a variety of aspects of accessibility. It consists of a range of functions that:

• Identify components of a web page
• Facilitate the use of 3rd party online applications
• Simulate user experiences
• Provide links to references and additional resources

Much like Chris Pederic’s Web Developer Toolbar, which was popularised through Firefox, this toolbar can be used as an aid for manual checking of many of the Web Content Accessibility Guideline’s Checkpoints (WCAG) 1.0. None of the toolbar functions listed will tell you whether a page conforms to a particular checkpoint, but they will help you in assessing conformance.