FreshYields - Ecommerce and Internet Marketing Solutions

Back in the old days, marketing was simple. Outside of a nasty story in an editorial section of the newspaper (and you had to be real bad), the reputation of a company was developed by it’s marketing department through press releases and advertising campaigns.

Nowadays you have to deal with bloggers, social media, reviews on ecommerce sites, message boards, and more. Your company’s name might be as good as mud, and you have no idea. Let’s give an example scenario:

You work in the ecommerce marketing department for Home Depot. Things are going great. You have no idea that right now on Digg you are being called out for having bogus reviews on your site. There have been 563 diggs coming from a post on this blog. Add to that 62 comments on Digg.com, 7 users blogging about it after digging it, and 57 comments on the originating website. All of this in a week or so. What if the accusations are not true? Wouldn’t you want to defend your company from a potential loss in business?

Now the Home Depot may not be the best example, as I’m sure they could handle a situation like this rather easily. But what about your business? Are you prepared to suffer a huge online reputation hit without ever knowing? Are you prepared to see a slowdown in sales or leads without a clear explanation?

There is now a site available that can help the discovery process. ACS has release Serph.com out of beta. From their website, here is how Serph works:

When you type a query into Serph, it goes out and searches online social media to find the latest buzz. After it gathers the results, they are sorted and organized so the most recent buzz appears first. Serph gathers these results from blog search engines, social media websites, social news websites and social bookmarking websites. This allows Serph to show you exactly what people are saying on the web right now.

Entering “Home Depot” in the search box yields 8 pages of results for the previous day. In this case, the digg.com story is not included since serph was still in beta. But with the number of diggs, blog posts, and comments that are attached to this one story, I guarantee you that your online reputation is taking a hit.

Now how are you going to attack this? If it’s true, then you have to remedy the problem. Take down the fake reviews. If it causes damage, maybe issue a press release clarifying the issue. Hell, blame it on a renegade employee trying to be too ambitious. But if it’s not true, you need go on the offensive, clearly explaining the situation wherever your can. You never know, you may win over some of the diggers of the original story.

Home Depot is big enough that they probably have staff already available that can deal with issues like these. But is your business ready?

After receiving a 60-day domain name renewal for a website I had no idea I still owned, I decided to check out my “control center” to see what other surprises might await. Here is what I found:

• Freshyields.com - of course.
• One website I registered for a friend, and is still in use, although not by my friend. Hmm, maybe I should bill the new owner?
• One concept project I had years ago, but was lucky enough to be able to reuse the design for a great cause, and was even able to reuse the rock-solid content management system behind it.
• An ecommerce experiment that my wife and I tried, which flamed out.
• One blogsite about building your own sports bar in your basement that I haven’t touched in a while.
• Three websites dedicated to a a client that I haven’t had any work from in over a year.

What’s in your portfolio?

courtesy of Chris Prillo and blaugh.com…

Found a new service today that looks like a wonderful tool for organizations that want to sell a few items without all the headaches that full-blown ecommerce websites tend to create. Big Cartel is a simple build-it-yourself shopping cart that is perfect for bands, indie record labels, and artists that have a few things they want to make available. You can even sign up for free if you have 5 or less products. You will have a dot.bigcartel domain, but if you are only going to sell a few products, that’s no big deal.

You might wonder why FreshYields, a company that builds ecommerce sites, would blog positively about another company that builds ecommerce sites. Well, it’s really pretty simple. It’s important for our prospective clients to research all alternatives before deciding which solution is best for them. We feel it’s our obligation to find the perfect fit for any firm or individual that approaches us about ecommerce, internet marketing, or even just web design. Everybody has different goals, and it is important to not only meet those goals, but to do it efficiently.  Oh, and their site’s design it pretty kick-ass.  I’m a sucker for clean, standards-based design.

…launched a couple of months ago, with no fanfare from us. That’s what happens when the blog is down.

Gaga for Lulu is an upscale children’s boutique. Fresh Yields performed all aspects of the site build, from identity design to ecommerce backend. We will be embarking on a comprehensive Search Engine Marketing and Optimization plan in the coming months.

So much information is available about the leading ecommerce sites. Articles in Internet Retailer and Multichannel Merchant are great resources to find ideas and tips from companies selling similar products to yours.

Or a Squidoo, to be more specific. Now we get to see everything it is. If you are an expert, or think you are, and want to share you knowledge, this is the place. And, of course, I have signed up. Check it out at http://www.squidoo.com/clickandmortar

Anybody can throw up an ecommerce site nowadays, or start selling of ebay. What the successful web entrepreneurs understand is that it requires time a dedication. Be sure you have a plan in place on how to handle orders, customer service emails, and in some cases, angry customers. The latter will happen if you bypass the planning.

37 signals latest blog post on the Signal vs. Noise blog brings up a good point, as does some of the comments that follow. Showing the user visually what they are ordering at the confirmation screen can be a powerful usability feature that can instill confidence in a web shopper. But how much is too much? Obviously this will not work for some ecommerce sites where shoppers order many products at one time.

We are, really. We don’t just design pretty websites. We design pretty marketing websites. We don’t just implement ecommerce solutions. We implement ecommerce marketing solutions Everything you put on the web is marketing material. You are marketing to users. Whether it is just to get them to find info about your cause, your products, or to buy something from you, your web site is a marketing tool. Every decision we make about our projects should be thought of in a marketing sense, and how we can get the user to interact the way we want them to.

The old style of marketing doesn’t work as well anymore, thanks in part to the internet. Your users are your best, and cheapest marketing source. Hell, they may even pay you to market your product. They may fall in love with your product, or service, or cause online, buy it or into it’s theory, and start posting it on their blog. Then a few others pick up on it, and the ROI on your pretty marketing website goes through the roof.