e-commerce
In the midst of a deadline on an SEO editing job where I am focusing intently on the finer points of massaging retail copy, I ran across a press release an article about a new company called Gazopa, a retail concept pioneering the world of image search.
Gazopa is really just scratching the surface. Their site is firmly in beta mode and only has a few affiliates - what I'm seeing today is loaded with not much more than Amazon, eBay and Etsy. But I like the idea, and I think the upside to this concept is potentially massive.
When I see a typical SERP (search engine results pages) for Google images, it reminds me of nothing but… Google's text-based SERPs from 10 years ago. If you remember what a typical Google search would return circa 2000 you might remember that it was a faint shadow of what it is today. It wasn't the fault of Google's algorithms that those SERPs were erratic, strangely weighted and sadly incomplete; it was more that the internet community - especially the e-commerce sector - just hadn't matured to take advantage of a more sophisticated search engine.
The explosion of visual media on the web has created what I see as a manifest destiny resulting in the balance of search for marketing and e-commerce being tilted more in favor of image-based SERPs, with text-based search becoming a fall-back option.
The UK's Daily Mirror ran an interview this week with pop icon Prince that's being panned all over the place because of the many outrageous statements the pop icon made therein about selling music on the internet.
The juciest excerpts:
"The internet's completely over. I don't see why I should give my new music to iTunes or anyone else. They won't pay me an advance for it and then they get angry when they can't get it."
"The internet's like MTV. At one time MTV was hip and suddenly it became outdated. Anyway, all these computers and digital gadgets are no good."
And so another popstar from the 80s refuses to come to grips with the cultural and financial realities of modern media. Or so he would have us believe.
The real reason for the granting of this exclusive interview seems to hinge on the promotion of an exclusive Prince CD release. Exclusive to? Buyers of the print editions of these same UK newspapers, of course. The CD is being bundled with the weekend edition for a consideration. I know, you're shocked to find this out.
In the interview he also also railed about the evil of pop culture and said that we all need more god in our lives.
That kind of absurdist celebrity prattle gives me a laugh. I love the idea of a filthy rich popstar wagging his finger at me about the evil of modern sexuality and telling me I need more god in my life. Especially when the popstar in question made the lion's share of his fortune by shrieking about kinky sex with women in tacky camisoles.
But I digress. What about the marketing wisdom of this move? The pros & cons:
Would you buy 14,000,000 shares in stock of a company you don't believe in?
That's apparently what JP Morgan Chase has done. Despite owning that amount of shares in the web browser Opera (approximately 14% of the company), they issued a release last week that warned their customers they would block customer access to Opera and Chrome for reasons of security/standards compliance.
I find browser wars a pretty tedious subject, but this strange tech news is interesting not only for its potential impact on e-com (Chase's customer base is so large that Chrome and Opera could lose users over this), and even more for the black humor of its subtext.
The idea that a financial institution would invest so heavily in a company and then smack it down by issuing a press release trumpeting their lack of confidence in it is a classic portrait of the dysfunction rife in the financial sector.
Got an evite to attend an e-mail "tactics & strategy" webinar going down tomorrow, hosted by yet another e-marketing guru on the scene who knows more than I do. And just for a moment I thought I might budget some time to look in on it. I haven't run e-mail campaigns for many months now and could use a little refresher to keep current my knowledge of e-mail practices.
But... no.
With more than 3 years of continuous education on email best practices I am at the point where I'm just hearing the same things over and over again, and I'm hearing them from e-marketing experts who don't actually operate directly in the e-commerce arena. No doubt the presenters at tomorrow's webinar have more knowledge than I about the finer points of online direct marketing. But time after time I have found that their perfect-world scenarios are often a luxury in the real world of day-to-day campaign management.
