Stealing From Video Game Developers

Video games can teach e-commerce merchants many lessons. Video game developers can teach even more valuable lessons. This Curagami post shares five tips online merchants should steal today including:

• Create Great Products
• Develop Community and then Listen, Learn, and Change
• Give customers chances to collaborate
• Forge badges, banners, and other rewards
• Define how rewards are earned but don’t forget serendipity and surprise

With such great marketing is there any wonder why Blizzard Entertainment has more than thirty million Overwatch players? Doomfist is a new brilliantly named Overwatch character and gamers are talking about little else this summer. Doomfist is more important than Game of Thrones to gamers. 

Stealing the community, gamification, and engagement tips from video game developers will help any online merchant move from "website" to "platform" and from "us" and "them" to we: http://www.curagami.com/e-commerce-lessons-doomfist/ 

Dumping WooCommerce
The DIY don't need to know code to build a great and scaleable online store may be mostly myth. Like all bell curves there may be one or two highly profitable Shopify, Volusion or Big Commerce sites but those few "rich getting richer" sites stand on the shoulders of many little guys just scaping by.

If that sound like a rigged game we agree. We shared all the reasons we dumped WooCommerce including our own idiocy in this mythbusting Curagami post:

 

http://www.curagami.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/curagami-logowide.png

New SEO Looks Like Old SEO
Thanks to David Kutcher we've embarked on a 3 part journey. Our goal is to show how and why the "NEW SEO" is beginning to look a lot like the OLD SEO.  Our journey has three parts that all start here:

http://www.curagami.com/why-new-seo-looks-like-old-seo/?v=7516fd43adaa

 After that we move to:

* Brands (http://www.curagami.com/new-old-seo-brands/?v=7516fd43adaa )
* Love (coming soon)

* Community  (coming soon)

I'm in Columbus at Ohio State for my year anniversary of being treated by the great Doc Byrd. Will finish Why The NEW SEO is Looking Like The OLD SEO when I get home.

In the meantime BRANDS is live.  

Crossing Ecommerce Rubicon
We are making progress on adding Woocommerce to Curagami. The goal is to cross the content / commerce rubicon. The gulf between effective content and commerce is large. The promise of Woocommerce, an ecommerce shopping cart and database appended to Wordpress, is elimination of the artificial and rapidly useless separation between content and commerce. 

The Social / Mobile / Connected times we inhibit require a new approach to online commerce. We plan to relaunch Curagami.com next week.  Stay tuned, join us for coffee (subscribe http://www.curagami.com/signup/?v=7516fd43adaa ) and we will journey across the rubicon together :). Marty & team Curagami

 

5 TIps To Cross Ecom's Rubicon
Smart merchants are beginning to cross the ecommerce rubicon between content and commerce. Discover 5 Tips to cross your online store's ecommerce rubicon.

5 TIps

* “Magazine” your content
* Curate from brands
* Curate from customers
* Lean & Visual Win
* Tie In Email, Social & Mobile

Going to incorporate @Guillaume Decugis and Scoop.it's ideas on Lean Content on this not very lean post too. I set aside some content to keep the post pinging with fresh content.

Evergreen means our team will refresh the content (or ask for help from our Ambassadors to do so) regularly. Not all content is equal. Places in our "evergreen" regularly scheduled updates category must be earned (lol).

So help 5 Tips to Cross the Ecom Rubicon earn evergreen status, or better yet contribute your thoughts and we will curate in.

Crossing the Rubicon between content and commerce is the BIG ISSUE in online retailing today. Discover our tips to cross and add yorus.  

Ecommerce For Everyone
There are some web marketing lessons learned best by creating an online store such as:

• Words Matter as they lead (or don’t) to conversion.
• Design Matter as it leads (or doesn’t) to conversion.
• Money Is The Best Metric.
• Money Helps Create The Best Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
• Money helps create a testing culture.

 
Creating a store is so easy, we developed Curagmai's Bookstore with Amazon's Associates tool in about half a day, everyone should have an ecommerce store these days.  

As Rodney said in Back To School - Shakespeare for Everyone!

Read our Ecommerce For Everyone post: 
http://www.curagami.com/magical-thinking/news/shakespeare-for-everyone-ecommerce-lessons/

& Visit the new Curagmai Bookstore
http://www.Curagami.com/books.html 

Do you have an affiliate store you want to share? Email martin(at)Curagmai.com and we will create a gallery of cool stores for personal brands, companies and B2B marketing teams. 
 

Disrupt Or Die
Sorry you are too late. You won't be able to win the tactical warfare my team and I did. Your ability to create meaningful differentiation with tactics is over. So BURN YOUR WEBSITE DOWN. 

Not literally, but we need to SHOCK Small to Medium Sized Businesses (SMBs) into an important realization - it's BLUE OCEANS or ELSE. Why bother putting up a 4 page site no one will care about, share, link, like love or think about ever again after they've visited once.

Instead of wasting your TIMEM and TREASURE why not BLOW UP what you think you should be doing, discover blue oceans and create lasting competitive advantage. Costs are the SAME, but one has the shelf life of a May Fly why the other may just provide the ROI needed to do the next cool thing.

You know were we would VOTE and if you are going to miss Exinent's Ecommerce Meetup in the Triangle of North Carolina tonight you can play catch up with our Haiku Deck.

http://www.curagami.com/magical-thinking/marketing/the-new-ecommerce-meetup/ ;

While writing content for online environments you must think of the following paradox: reading is the PRIMARY action performed on the web. AND people try to read as LITTLE as possible (online) 20%!...

Ecommerce Strategy vs. Tactics
Which comes first ecommerce strategy or tactics? Trick question. Doesn't matter as long as you end up swimming in a blue ocean.

Yesterday at the Digital Summit in Charlotte, NC we ran into a familiar problem. "Marty we don't have any content," an growing ecommerce website shared.

I shared the good and bad news. The bad news is developing an effective content strategy takes time, focus and money. The good news is there are things to do in parallel that bring all pieces together such as:

* Create an Ask.

* Begin to CURATE content.

* Curate 90%, Create about 10%.
* Listen and set up Key Performance Indicators to LISTEN better.
* Develop a testing culture.
* Begin the journey to sustainable online community.

Added video notes to explain all of this to our Ecommerce Questions Haiku Deck: http://shar.es/1guIF1

Find video notes on platforms, content curation and community on Curagami's YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/tSHeIxtrs4g

Hero Marketing: Compete with Amazon shares passion, customer focus, exponential thinking & need to create movements not promotions needed to win online and how SMBs can compete with Amazon.

Here are 5 tips to increase e-commerce sales through quality customer service and relevant content, targeting the 2nd step of the consumer conversion funnel

$50,000 New Ecommerce Web Design Contest
FOMs (Friends of Martin's) are working on a cool event to support my +FedEx keynote talk in Maryland at the end of February. We have 3 partners willing to contribute time into a "prize" to help online merchants pivot to the NEW Ecommerce.

If you would like to contribute email Martin(at)Curagami.com (not on our site yet as we may fill our partner roster from friends and social. Read more about the contest on G+
https://plus.google.com/102639884404823294558/posts/M3n5Ds4Tk9p

Never been more important to know your website's long tail than in ou social / mobile / connected time as Amazon proves and WaNeLo illustrates.

Showrooming Scurge
Most retailers HATE people showrooming in their stores. That's stupid as it is like trying to hold back the tide. Better to embrace showrooming - the practices of shopping in the world and then buying online for better price.

One way to embrace showrooming occurred to this morning watching Bruno Torturra discuss how easy it is to stream a live event to the web. Torturra is streaming protests, but retailers brave enough to encourage showrooming could use the same tactics to build a powerful Ambassador layer.

The recipe is simple:

1. Create content explaining how to stream live video.

2. Create a community to share your "shopping videos".

3. Provide social rewards (encouragement and features) to filter.

4. Rinse and Repeat

Your customers could help keep your prices in line, alert you to cool merchandising by competitors and a million other near real time benefits. You can't go into something like this halfway.

It's an all or nothing idea and that means listening more than you talk (some sites, brands and companies are better at 2 way communication than others). Early today team Curagami wrote a piece about competing with Amazon (http://sco.lt/58qhn7 ).

Add this "video showrooming army" to that and you get differentaion from the monster. Cool thing is cost of creating such cool and cutting edge competition is minimal (webpage and some serving). I wouldn't host on YouTube unless you were strapped for cash since you want the SEO juice flowing in your site's direction.

Soon retailers will be glad people are in their stores FOR ANY REASON, beat them by embracing showrooming now.

After Curagami's annual Black Friday online retail study ecommerce 2015 trends such as free returns and ship to store are clear. This Haiku Deck explores trending online retailing tactics, strategy and pressures merchantsface in 2015.

Top 5 Black Friday Websites Curagami's annual list sees Big Boys move in. Amazon tops the list. There are surprises & we share our Black Friday scorecard.

Ecommerce Is A Mobile & Social Game
The more I do this, web marketing, the more game-like everything feels. Mobile and social are acting like huge pythons squeezing content into a game. Content shock is the other trend impacting your content marketing.

In 2003 your content could be factual and visually boring and it would work. Not so much anymore. Today you must think of your content like pieces on a chess board. How can you achieve your goals by developing relationships between your content, your customers and advocates?

Mobile and social make ecommerce a game too as WaNeLo.com demonstrates. WaNeLo.com is a "clean slate" built to mashup massive amounts of content that already exists, make creating "YOUR WaNeLo.com Store" fun (you swipe through content) and collect a nice fee for being the first retailer to get the many changes to online commerce brought to you by a smart phone near you (and most of the time people are within 10' of their smart phones at all times).

We began the conversation about how to make an online store a game a few weeks ago on G+ (https://plus.google.com/+MartinWSmith/posts/RdjAjWoJTHw ).

This @HaikuDeck shares how to make content more game-like. Here are a few easy ways merchants can begin to create gamification:

* Create an Ambassadors Program to identify your 1% Contributors and 9% Supporters.
* Provide a public profile for Ambassadors (if they choose) with a good URL (cool.com/ambassadors/marty for example).
* Curate great Ambassador content first to OTHER Ambassadors and next, and this should be a smaller set, to the public via your site.

* Begin to track key Ambassador functionality such as social shares, links and likes.
* Create feedback loops for Ambassador actions (200 Likes, 100 links and 3,000 social shares to date or yesterday or last week).

* Steal LinkedIn's famous, "Your profile is 80% complete" Call-To-Action (CTA).

Might seem strange to talk about adding gamification to ecommerce NOW when the holiday tsunami is only days away, but most ecommerce teams have their plans made up. While social media means any plan must respond to what is happening now, most ecommerce teams are working a quarter ahead.

Successful gamification isn't easy, but rewards are huge. Instead of invading Russia in the winter we suggest merchants begin building foundation by creating an Ambassador Program. Ambassadors, those fans, friends and supporters willing to help, become critical when you want to turn gamfication ON (and you will).

There is a new invisible giant, a giant using 5 "tricks" so the "new seo" is hard and harder to see and understand. This Haiku Deck and Curatti blog post is about how to see the invisible giant. How to win hearts, minds and loyalty online.

Ecommerce Revolution In 2015
Yesterday we planted a flag stating our intention to create an ecommerce revolution in 2015. Today first objections were heard. Learn why Can't is music to a marketing geeks ears and how you can join the ecommerce revolution so you can say, "Yeah, I helped with that," when others say they wish they could have been there.

Join The Ecom Revolution Today
http://bit.ly/ecom_revolution_google  

Revolution Has Begun, Now Join & Contribute
Are you as frustrated, bored and wanting more from ecommerce as we are? "We" is five marketing, merchants and Magento programmers who know TOGETHER we change the way we communicate, share and sell things to one another.

Learn More
http://bit.ly/ecom_revolution_google 

Crowdfunding is a new powerful marketing channel similar to what email marketing used to be - high profit, low cost with big social and UGC benefits.

Ecommerce: 5 Common Easy To Fix Blunders
* Hiding Free Shipping.
* Not using Branded Free Shipping.
* Not offering Faster Free Shipping.
* Deal of the Day.

* Men, Women, Kids (or similar) "Human" Categories.

This new Haiku Deck shares 5 common easy to fix ecommerce blunders. Fixing any 2 of these 5 ecom mistakes will make for a better holiday seasons for your online store. 

Social & Mobile Ecommerce
Ecommerce is being transformed by social and mobile. The implications for merchants are VAST. How your Ecommerce site creates conversations and digitally listens will determine its value. No matter how social your online store it isn't social enough for the immediate future.This Haiku Deck can help your site do things like:

* Create conversations that lower costs and increase profits.
* Build an online community.
* Learn to listen "digitally".
* Scale your store to the next level.
* Create an engine that mines User Generated Content.

Can your store be too social? Not so much as it turns out.

There is a new invisible giant, a giant using 5 "tricks" so the "new seo" is hard and harder to see and understand. This Haiku Deck and Curatti blog post is about how to see the invisible giant. How to win hearts, minds and loyalty online.

We've named the hard to see new seo The Invisible Giant. Thousands have now seen, interacted with, shared and commented on The Invisible Giant. Have you?

Haiku Deck
http://shar.es/1nCjlP

Curatti Blog Post
http://curatti.com/invisible-giant-hard-see-new-seo/