The Federal Trade Commission yesterday said that companies engaging in word-of-mouth marketing, in which people are compensated to promote products to their peers, must disclose those relationships.

In a staff opinion issued yesterday, the consumer protection agency weighed in for the first time on the practice. Though no accurate figures exist on how much money advertisers spend on such marketing, it is quickly becoming a preferred method for reaching consumers who are skeptical of other forms of advertising.

I’ve ranted about the PayPerPost, need for full-disclosure debacle a couple of times and have one more such rant in me, which I’m considering posting here later this week. However, if the FTC steps in, it may make my harangue moot. More to follow on this I’m sure.

Via TechCrunch and CopyBlogger

For generations, American parents have trusted Barbie to prepare our daughters for adulthood, when they’ll be judged by completely unrealistic standards of beauty. Now, along comes everybody’s favorite plastic blonde with another reality check for the little she-tots. There’s no better way to say “Merry Christmas, and get ready for a lifetime of household drudgery� than the Barbie Real Vacuum by Bissell.
Ah, but we shouldn’t be so cynical. It doesn’t befit the season. Besides, the Barbie Real Vacuum is more than just a toy-slash-propaganda-piece; it’s an honest-to-Gaea cordless, rechargeable sweeper. A rotating brush, an easy-empty dust cup, and a washable filter make it easy for the wee lass in your life to make herself useful. Just one push of a button converts the Barbie Real Vacuum to a hand vac, and the whole thing weighs a mere 3.25 lbs, well within the capacities of all but the scrawniest kids.
It’s wonderful how those innocent, wide-eyed bambinas love to help out around the house. Take advantage while you can with the Barbie Real Vacuum by Bissell. After all, in just a few short years your little girl will be stealing your cigarettes and sneaking out of the house every night. There’s nothing the Barbie Real Vacuum can do about that, but at least you’ll have gotten some housework out of her in the meantime.

Feminist or chauvinist, you can’t help but appreciate such witticism!

Now to the point… Woot.com, having such clever, sharp-tongued writers on staff, surely could produce an exemplary blog, right? Certainly as a fan of theirs, I expect their blog to be absolutely killer! Unfortunately, it’s anything but. For the most part, it’s merely a copy-and-paste of their product-of-the-day descriptions. Attention retailers: Product description copy does not make for acceptible blog posts.

Because this is such an important point, let me restate it for emphasis… PRODUCT DESCRIPTIONS DOES NOT A BLOG MAKE!

I think somebody must have let Magazines.com in on this, because a year ago they abandoned their uninspired blog which was full of nothing but product descriptions.</RANT>

Why? Because the team at WordPress.com has come up with new regulations about what is and isn’t acceptable on blog postings, and if you cross the line, they’ll not only shut your site down with less than twelve hours warning, but they’ll also ban you from ever signing up again.

It starts with banning blog entries that have (sponsored) links from PayPerPost, but that’s a sticky slope and it’s easy to have that move into other prohibited areas, including perhaps exactly what your business blog is about. Then what?

So, come clean, are you hosted on WordPress.com? And if so, what’s your opinion on this clarification of their Terms of Service and its implementation within the community?

Online since December 2005, the blog covers aspects of business in the Middle East, with a stated aim of focusing on marketing, advertising and media. There are several contributors.

The blog is a product of Maktoob Business – whose website banner claims that the group has the world’s largest Arabic community.

A recent blog post reports on Maktoob’s newly-launched (beta) Arabic search engine, Araby.com, which Maktoob claims has a number of competitive advantages over the Arabic version of the engines developed first for English:

• optimized to deliver Arabic-language results from Arabic sources
• specialized search channels including Arabic news sites, photos, blogs and forums
• a dedicated channel for searching Islamic topics

The press release here provides more detail and some pr elaboration.

Not being able to read Arabic, for me the Araby.com site is a closed book. But could Araby.com be a serious Arabic competitor to Google and Yahoo! A contender in its rather large niche? This blog post by one of the developers, Isam Bayazidi, sounds a cautionary note – it’s beta, he’s saying:

One thing for sure, Araby.com, and the verticals in it have a long way to go with development. We only released early to give users a peak into what is cooking, and get feedback on it.

This time, however, I’ve received an email from a large ecommerce retailer with a slick Web presence but no “face” to the firm and sporadic problems with customer service and quality control. They ask:

“what you would do with a blog or two and what the benefits would be for us?”

Before I start free-associating my answer, I thought perhaps you, dear reader, might have some interesting or innovative ideas about how to leverage a blog to make an ecommerce company better in the online world?

From Neville:

So my prediction is – more RSS feeds by consumer-focused businesses such as supermarkets. It’s getting easier for people to use RSS (often without realizing it) and will get easier still as more businesses offer information via RSS, as simpler ways of describing it emerge (like ‘ live bookmarks ,’ for instance), and as it becomes ever more easier to get the information offered via RSS. (Related development: expect more advertising in RSS.)

It’s the heir to the direct marketing throne.

The introductory section is obviously unique to this area of the site (and yes, it’s dynamically generated so that new blog entries cause the intro listing to change too). You can see the more traditional blog view of things by going to the blog store categories, like Online Store: Parenting.

Now I’m helping my sister out with her splendid Art Dolls.info site and she’s moving from just talking about how to make soft sculpture art dolls to actually selling them, based on reader demand.

My question is: who is doing innovative work in this area and what models are out there to help guide us in taking yet a further step towards what I’ll call blogstores (since everyone seems to love inventing jargon)?

To me, this is a logical evolutionary step in blogging. Most companies that have online sites either have catalog based software backends that are highly structured but expensive, or have everything built by hand, making it prohibitively difficult to add new products or services on a daily or weekly basis.

Blogging, of course, solves these sort of content management difficulties by allowing you to focus on the content, on what you want to say (or sell, in this case), rather than worrying about how it’s going to be formatted and displayed.

Admittedly, the features of a high-end catalog or online shop management system, features like cross-selling and up-selling, aren’t going to be easily rolled into a blogging backend, but I believe that there are many hobbyists and small businesses that could benefit from being able to use their blogging tool as a comprehensive backend for their store, main Web pages and more traditional weblog areas.

Back to my sister’s site, here’s the first doll she’s selling:

The first doll for sale at the Art Dolls site, as written up and displayed at Dasselrond Needs a New Home, is on a page that seems very busy. It’s very “bloggy” with all the recent postings, categories, archives, Google ads, etc., and probably isn’t the most effective presentation of something for sale.

What do you think of that page, though? Do you like narrative descriptions of products? Should the images be at the top of the entry? Should there be “buy now” buttons like you see at the Waldorf in the Home site?

The blogging system underlying Art Dolls is a piece of clay ready to be molded into whatever shape we want, so I’d be interested in your thoughts independent of whether they’re blog-centric or not. If we need to strip out all the extraneous material and just have the dolls for sale with their narrative descriptions and buy buttons, we can do that.

Thanks for your help, dear reader, and if you want to help Dasselrond find a new home, don’t hesitate to act quickly. He’s a beauty!

I visited the site, which requires registration (yuck!), and didn’t any evidence of the network. I didn’t register though, and maybe that’s a must do. Anyway, since I’m such a fashion buff, I’m sure it’s something I’ll keep an eye out for.

You’ll want to check out the panel’s Powerpoint deck for charts of blog-related revenue growth and other goodies. Steve shared that 13% of online revenue is attributable to his blog. Not bad!

I’ve also blogged a recap of the session here.

Two
of the retailers express some concern over the effect their blogs will
have on the bottom-line. Since the blogs include links off to other
sites, their marketing gurus feel it will lead readers away rather than
driving traffic to their ecommerce sites. That’s a valid point, since
the primary purpose of the blogs is marketing and driving sales.

One retailer questioned the appropriateness of putting product links
inside the blog posts. A quick review of all three blogs showed they
each did, with Ice primarily using hyperlinked images of its products
to draw visitors in.

Another retailer not mentioned in the article, Stone Creek Coffee, has also just added a blog. From what I can tell, the blog is part of their home page.

Bluefly asserts that their blog
has had a positive effect on sales, even stating that visitors who
click to the blog “have been more likely to make a purchase than those
who visit Bluefly directly.� I think they call that “qualified
traffic,� which is certainly one thing a blog can do for you.

Here are some random thoughts…

• Blogging
  as a marketing channel will vastly increase in popularity over the next
  few months. I congratulate retailers such as these who are willing to
  lead the way.
• Yes, definately include links to products in the blog posts. That’s why you have the darn thing anyway!
• Rather
  than giving readers a sales pitch, tell a story. Talk about the
  experience of using the product. Refer to other related articles found
  on the web and work a product link in. Do what eHobbies does in showing
  photos of their employees having fun playing with products.
• If
  blogs are going to prove themselves as viable marketing tools, then
  it’s imperative there be some system in place to track their
  effectiveness. That should be a given and not something difficult to
  do. After all, blogs are just a website and you can track statistics
  about site visits, referers and page views, have unique URLs for each
  product which can be tracked through to the ecommerce site and on
  through to purchase, and track movement from the blog to the main site
  as well.

I contend that, though blogs are not for the faint of heart,
they will prove themselves to have viability for retail marketing. In
an ideal scenario the benefits they provide will occur in sequence:

1. They’re
   niche-driven attracting readers who are interested in the topic at
   hand. That’s qualified traffic. It makes sense that those will be some
   of the best customers.
2. If the blogs are routinely updated visitors will come back again and again, many of those being existing customers.
3. Trust and brand loyalty will result.
4. Many
   of these customers will become evangelists for you and talk about you
   via their own consumer-generated media outlets (blogs, IM, chat rooms,
   email, etc.).
5. Your blog will become a center of influence around which a community of interested customers/shoppers develop.

What’s not to like about that!

Here are links to each of the blogs mentioned: Ice.com, eHobbies.com, Bluefly.com, and Stone Creek Coffee.

[Special thanks to Rich Ottum for stimulating my thinking about this issue in two blog posts he did.]

Link

I think people shop online when they know what they want, but it’s harder to browse online. With Xmas coming up, if I have a specific idea for a present for someone, I’ll get it online for the convenience. But just knowing that I have to buy *something*, I’m more likely to go to some physcial stores where I can just wander around and see what catches my eye.
One exception is when I’m tipped off to fun things through blogs. Often, blogs are great at turning up weird, offbeat products I wouldn’t have seen elsewhere, from some specialty shop or whatever. I can think off the top of my head of at least 3-4 products like that I’ve bought thanks to blogs. So what about a blog specifically about shopping? A personal shopping assistant?

He replied, “have you seen mightygoods.com?” No, I had not, but it’s exactly what I had in mind. Written by Margaret Mason, who writes the wonderful Mighty Girl and is a contributor to The Morning News, the site explains its mission thusly (you know how I love blog mission statements!):

Mighty Goods is a shopping blog that’s updated five days a week. We spend a great deal of time finding and posting things we love. These aren’t just any old things, these are exactly the right things. They will brighten your eyes, match your couch, and fix the annoying problem that’s been bothering you. They will make you want to fortify the economy with your purchasing power.

I love the tagline, too: “Hooray for stuff!”

Link

Another example of a commerce blog. 19-year-old student Keiko Groves is selling her original clothing line through her LiveJournal weblog where she mixes updates of her funky modified thrift-shop clothing with pictures of her boyfriend and puppy. According to this Orlando Sentinel piece, She makes just about enough to pay for her college tuition and cell-phone bills and the blog has brought her to the attention of more established designers. Steve Rubel calls her the future of marketing, which may be a slight overstatement, but if she’s what the future of marketing looks like, it is a welcome sight (the fact that she serves as her own model for her clothing probably doesn’t hurt, in her case).

Link