Mashable: Latest 7 News Updates - including “Black Friday Shoppers Destroy WalMart Displays [VIDEO]” |
- Black Friday Shoppers Destroy WalMart Displays [VIDEO]
- Tech Buzzwords Make Shortlist for Word of the Year
- Shop Small: Small Business Saturday Takes to Twitter
- 10 Tips to Avoid Cyber Monday Scams
- Meet the 2011 Mashable Awards Nominees
- How Digital Marketing Fueled Fashion Label Tory Burch’s Global Expansion
- Black Friday Online Sales Up 24.3%
- Facebook’s New Analytics Reminds Businesses to Engage Fans
| Black Friday Shoppers Destroy WalMart Displays [VIDEO] Posted: 26 Nov 2011 03:33 PM PST Black Friday sales hit a record high Friday — online sales rose 24.3%, but many shoppers opted to go to brick-and-mortar locations to spend their hard-earned cash. Judging from the YouTube clips that have emerged, that was probably not the best idea — videos of Black Friday mayhem at big box stores are going viral. Yesterday, we showed you shoppers fighting over a $2 waffle maker, and now we bring you footage from a WalMart in Mesquite, Texas. Shoppers are packed in the store and ripping what appear to be DVDs and/or video games from boxes and displays that read “$10 while supplies last” (literally). Some people — presumably employees — are shouting “Hey!” in a fruitless attempt to restore order, while others caught in the chaos are heard screaming and laughing as they’re jostled around by deal-hungry shoppers. The clip is titled “Black friday Walmart 11/24/11,” suggesting this incident occurred on Thanksgiving night, since many WalMarts opened early with Black Friday sales. We can only imagine there are other videos yet to be posted online. Did you encounter havoc at Black Friday sales? Let us know in the comments below. 1. Jarod Standifer     "And the waiting begins...." Standifer shares a photo of shoppers camping out to be sure of getting the best deals. .Click here to view this gallery. More About: black friday, trending, Video, WalMart For more Business coverage:
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| Tech Buzzwords Make Shortlist for Word of the Year Posted: 26 Nov 2011 02:28 PM PST   The Oxford English Dictionary has chosen its (two-word) word of the year: Squeezed Middle. Last year’s word of the year was big society, and the word of 2009 was unfriend. Those who spend time on Twitter might have guessed that OWS, occupy or 99% would have come out on top this year. They didn’t come out on top, but they did make the shortlist, alongside some notable tech buzzwords. Gamification, clicktivism and crowdfunding made the U.S. shortlist, while hacktivism, sodcasting (playing music on your phone’s speaker in a public place) and — not surprisingly — phone hacking made the UK list. Here’s the full U.S. shortlist for 2011′s word of the year, along with OED definitions:
The English language is ever evolving. Retweet and sexting were added to the dictionary in August, and earlier this year, Oxford acknowledged LOL, <3 and OMG. More About: Oxford English Dictionary, phone hacking For more Tech coverage:
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| Shop Small: Small Business Saturday Takes to Twitter Posted: 26 Nov 2011 01:24 PM PST President Barack Obama President Obama took his daughters to Kramerbooks and Afterwords Cafe in Dupont Circle to celebrate Small Business Saturday. Click here to view this gallery. Today is the second annual Small Business Saturday, an American Express initiative to “shop small” at local businesses, since America’s 27 million small businesses comprise 99.7% of the country’s employers. “Small Business Saturday” was a Promoted Trend on Twitter, which helped to fuel awareness, and American Express’ social media campaign seems to be working — there have been more than 30,000 tweets about Small Business Saturday, and more than 2.7 million people “like” Small Business Saturday on Facebook, compared to 1.2 million last year. Above, you’ll see tweets from politicians, athletes (some real, some not…), small businesses and small business ambassadors encouraging others to shop small and explaining why they choose to shop at mom-and-pop businesses. Did you shop at a small business today? Tell us why in the comments below. More About: Small Business Saturday, trending For more Business coverage:
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| 10 Tips to Avoid Cyber Monday Scams Posted: 26 Nov 2011 12:04 PM PST   Bari Abdul is Vice President of Check Point‘s Consumer Business, ZoneAlarm, focused on innovating consumer security for the digital age. He has over 20 years of experience developing and executing go-to-market strategies that deliver record revenue and market share. It seems that the holiday shopping season comes earlier and earlier each year. Luckily, in the digital age, you can ditch the long lines of Black Friday and join the Cyber Monday crew by doing all your shopping online. However, even though shopping online is quick and convenient, there are risks involved. According to Forrester Research, online shopping this holiday season is expected to generate almost $59.5 billion. And 90% of consumers will shop online, according to PriceGrabber's winter holiday shopping survey. This increased traffic turns the virtual marketplace into a winter wonderland for hackers, who are gearing up to swipe credit cards and personal information to commit fraud and identify theft. Cybercriminals exploit the holiday season and target Internet users through a variety of methods, including online shopping scams, fraudulent emails, e-card and phishing schemes and more. One of the main focuses for hackers this holiday season is social media. Beware of fake profiles on social networking and ecommerce sites that are meant to mimic well-known corporate brands and coax users into clicking on their content. Malicious content can easily hide in Facebook links and Twitter posts. So how do you keep naughty hackers at bay this holiday season? Follow these 10 tips to protect yourself while shopping online. 1. Install, update and activate your security software 2. Use strong, unique passwords 3. Only connect to legitimate Wi-Fi networks 4. Make sure it's the real site 5.Only shop from secure sites 6. Look for third-party seals of approval 7. Beware of deals that are too good to be true 8. Use a dummy email account 9. Use a credit card 10. Read privacy agreements If you do encounter fraud, contact the Federal Trade Commission and submit a complaint form on the FTC website. Bottom line: The holiday shopping season means more security threats. If you follow these tips, take the proper precautions and trust your gut, you will greatly decrease your chances of being scammed by hackers. Happy Cyber Monday! More About: cyber monday, features, online shopping, security, trending For more Business coverage:
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| Meet the 2011 Mashable Awards Nominees Posted: 26 Nov 2011 10:36 AM PST   Each year the Mashable Awards honors the best in digital media, companies and personalities. This year, we have 196 nominees across 4 majors categories up for 28 total awards. As always, you, our readers get to choose the winners. The Mashable Awards will be decided over the next few weeks by popular user vote. You can vote once per category each day until Dec. 16. Winners will be announced on Mashable Dec. 19, and will be honored at MashBash CES Jan. 11, 2012, during the 2012 International CES convention at 1OAK, the hot new nightclub at the Mirage hotel in Las Vegas. To learn more about all the finalists and what they did this year, visit the links below. Or check out the entire list of nominees here. Meet the 2011 Mashable Awards Nominees for Social Media
Meet the 2011 Mashable Awards Nominees for Technology
Meet the 2011 Mashable Awards Nominees for Business
Meet the 2011 Mashable Awards Nominees for Entertainment
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| How Digital Marketing Fueled Fashion Label Tory Burch’s Global Expansion Posted: 26 Nov 2011 09:09 AM PST   American fashion designer Tory Burch founded her label in February 2004, the same month that Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook from his Harvard dorm room. In the fashion industry, Burch’s rise has been nearly as striking: the 45-year-old CEO has expanded her line of ready-to-wear clothing and accessories to more than 450 department and specialty stores worldwide, as well as dozens of Tory Burch boutiques in the U.S., Europe and Asia. She opened 20 new shops, including several in international cities (Osaka, Seoul, Hong Kong, Kobe and Taipai), in 2010 alone. Much of her success can be linked to an aggressive digital strategy, says Miki Berardelli, who has served as chief marketing officer of Tory Burch since 2009. The company launched ecommerce immediately after opening its first shop in downtown Manhattan, and toryburch.com generates more revenue than any physical store. Burch is one of the few designers to maintain a direct, ongoing dialogue with her friends and fans on Twitter, which she does in an easy-going and authentic manner. The company’s blog, which is helmed by former InStyle editor Honor Brodie, is broadly recognized in the industry as one of the leading manifestations of ongoing, brand-developed content.  We spoke with Berardelli about Tory Burch’s advancements in ecommerce and social media, and how the company is investing in what Berardelli believes is the “future of ecommerce”: namely, shopping through Facebook. A transcript of our Q&A is featured below. Q&A With Miki Berardelli, CMO, Tory BurchYou joined Tory Burch in 2009. What drew you to the company? I think it was really Tory’s vision to create a luxury brand that is accessible and has a sense of social responsibility — those were things that resonated with me both personally and professionally. There was also of course the people and the culture and, from a marketing perspective, the emotional connection that the customer had, and still has, with the brand. How would you characterize the company’s marketing strategy at that time? Tory always says that in the early years, not having a tremendous budget forced her to really think out of the box and tap into her and her team’s creativity. It was very much about editorial relationships and personal appearances, which enabled her to connect directly to the customer. Seven and a half years years later, that startup spirit is very much alive. We still have not bought traditional advertisements in U.S. magazines, although we do some display and online advertising.  How else have the company’s marketing efforts changed since you joined? We continue to focus on all things digital. We redesigned our website earlier this year, which was very much about pulling all of the content [we have developed] into the shopping experience … [and] supporting mobile commerce. We’ve also done a lot in the social media space. Lately we’ve been focusing on the intersection of social, local and mobile, whether that’s for a new store opening in a specific market, or driving traffic into [our existing] stores. Given the rapid growth of the company, we’re also focused on analysis of our marketing efforts to ensure that they are effective. How much of your marketing spend is allocated to online versus offline efforts? It’s pretty even — or, I should say, it’s balanced. But everything we do, whether it’s our photography or our website, is all serving the marketing message of the company. At what rate is your ecommerce business expanding? What percentage of your sales now occur online? What percentage occur on toryburch.com? As we are a private company, we can’t disclose specific numbers. We are however forecasting a growth rate in the high double digits compared to last year. As for your second question, we see a slightly higher penetration of ecommerce sales to total business versus many brands that are distributed through retail or wholesale. What’s interesting about Tory is that she launched ecommerce immediately after opening [her first] store on Elizabeth Street [in New York]. Ecommerce has always been at the forefront, and toryburch.com is our largest store. Mobile sales is currently our fastest-growing segment. The proliferation of iPad has definitely impacted our business, seeing a tremendous amount of traffic to our site [from users of those devices] specifically. What have been among the biggest marketing and ecommerce challenges as you’ve expanded into new markets, particularly China? China’s fascinating. The rate at which the Chinese sector is embracing ecommerce is unlike anything I’ve ever seen. The challenge lies in understanding the landscape and deciding what makes sense for our brand, just as we do here. We launched our first Weibo site in support of the opening of our first store in Bejing. We are currently building ecommerce-enabled sites to support the markets that we’re in in Europe and in China. Tory Burch has made considerable investments in developing online editorial, largely through its blog. Why have you invested there? Is it paying off — and if so, how? "While the voice is consistent across all platforms, we treat each one differently because they are all unique.” Tory wanted to tell the brand story in a more editorial way, and that led to hiring Honor Brodie from InStyle, who is now our creative director. She built a team that focuses on the Tory blog, which is expression of all the things that inspire and entertain Tory, whether it’s an artist or author or even another designer. The blog doesn’t talk much about Tory, but about other things, and I think that’s what’s unique about it. Honor and I [have] worked together to integrate the blog and commerce. We’ve brought in all the content into the shopping experience so that the customer can explore and connect with the brand while they’re browsing product. We do look at the analytics of customers who explore content, and have found that they are a more highly engaged customer across the board, not only in how much time they spend on website, but in terms of their purchases and loyalty as well. What does your current investment in social media look like? We’re currently on Facebook, Twitter, Flipboard, Tumblr, Foursquare, YouTube, and Weibo in China. [Those accounts] are run by a small team of two people, except for Twitter, which is run by Tory herself, and Weibo, which is run by our team in Shanghai, in partnership with our editorial team in NYC. [Tory has] always embraced social media, and if it feels right for our brand, we’ll launch it, test our way into it, learn quickly and make adjustments as appropriate.  What about video? The film genre is very important to Tory. We believe it’s a dynamic way to tell the brand story, we do all different types of films — behind the scenes during a seasonal photo shoot, or filming Tory on one of her trips where she gets inspiration for her designs. It’s a pretty varied mix of content, and we’re continuing to learn what is successful. With so many platforms to choose from, how do you decide where to invest your time? I can’t think that we’ve ever scaled back any of our efforts anywhere. We do make sure when pooling resources to manage another social platform that we do it well, that we take our time and think through how to do each platform differently. On Tumblr we do one strong image and a letter, and on Facebook we do more behind-the-scenes content. With Foursquare, we focus on the location element. While the voice is consistent across all these platforms, we treat each one differently because they are all unique. What sort of return on your investment have you seen? And how do you measure it: sales conversions or engagement? We measure both. Although we have a very strong and growing Facebook and Twitter community, we [also] want to have a truly engaged community. In terms of metrics, we look at Klout score, amplification and responses. We pay close attention to what types of messages we post and how they are received, and that informs our thinking going forward. It’s truly a constant learning process. You’ve recently begun experimenting with Fcommerce by offering discounts on certain items through Facebook. Why have you pursued that strategy in particular? We’re testing some concepts now, including exclusives on Facebook. It’s more of a surprise and delight for our Facebook community, and so far it’s been successful in driving excitement and sales. Consumers who are fans of a brand on Facebook have a certain appropriate expectation that there should be an exclusive benefit just for them. [Our exclusive discounts] are about tapping into that sensibility. Do you think Facebook will ever become a major sales channels for you? If not, what value does it offer you as a company? We believe that social shopping, or Fcommerce as everyone is calling it now, is the future of ecommerce. The demographic skews younger on Facebook compared to our core customer, so we see it as a really important way to connect with that consumer. We’re embracing [Fcommerce] with our Facebook shop and our exclusives early on so we can learn quickly. I don’t think we’ll import our full catalog to Facebook. My hunch is — and Honor and I talk about this a lot — that the experience should be curated in some way, and we’re testing some ideas and concepts with that in mind. We love Google Catalogs, the idea of taking our traditional printed formats and bringing it into a digital space, but I think — as we were mentioning earlier about social platforms needing to be slightly differentiated — that is true of social shopping as well. Does the same potential exist for other platforms? They’re all so different. I think about Flipboard and being able to create your own personalized content, but it’s hard to say. Facebook is certainly the destination where social shopping is being most closely integrated, both on Facebook Pages and on retail sites. Are you planning to set up a Google+ page? Yes, we’re excited. What advice would you give other brands — fashion or otherwise — going forward? I think it’s about being yourself. In the social space it’s just as important to stay true to your brand and your brand’s lens just as you would anywhere else. More About: fashion, Marketing, Miki Berardelli, social media marketing, tory burch, trending For more Business coverage:
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| Black Friday Online Sales Up 24.3% Posted: 26 Nov 2011 08:45 AM PST
Mobile devices accounted for 14.3% of all online Black Friday traffic, up from 5.6% last year, and they were responsible for 9.8% of online sales. The iPad proved to be the king of post-Thanksgiving retail — its users were more likely to purchase than other mobile users, with conversion rates reaching 4.6%. Ecommerce sales increased from last year in many retail sectors, from home to apparel to beauty, and web traffic catapulted department store sales to 59% higher than last year’s Black Friday. Black Friday was a hot topic on social media channels, too. Visits to Twitter and Facebook were likely to yield chatter about Black Friday sales, out-of-stock items, parking troubles and long lines. The volume of Black Friday dialogue was 110% more than last year, and there was “a spike in positive sentiment” around and anticipation for Cyber Monday. Did you use your mobile device to shop on Black Friday? Are you holding out for Cyber Monday? Let us know in the comments below. More About: black friday, online shopping, trending For more Business coverage:
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| Facebook’s New Analytics Reminds Businesses to Engage Fans Posted: 26 Nov 2011 07:22 AM PST   This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business. In the past several years, businesses large and small have come to realize the positive impact of engaging their brand-loyal public and — more importantly — potential customers, via Facebook Pages. While fan pages are typically seen as a destination for users to remain privy to brand news, a recent comScore report shows that a Page is really just the place where content resides, as fans are 40 to 150 times more likely to consume branded material in their news feeds than on the actual fan page itself. This discovery led to Facebook's expansion of “Page Insights,” including new metrics and analytics designed to constantly remind business owners of what truly matters: engaging content.  Facebook utilizes an algorithm that ensures the most relevant content for each user finds its way onto that particular user's news feed. The relevancy of this content is determined by a number of factors, including how many times it is liked, shared, commented on, etc. When fans of a company interact with branded content, it can then be passed on to their friends and their friends’ friends. With fan acquisition as the main motive behind the Facebook strategy of most businesses, it is helpful to learn that friends of fans are more likely to visit a brand's store, website and even purchase a product than the average, uninfluenced consumer. In addition, the average friends-of-fans group for the top 100 brand pages on Facebook is 34 times larger than the fan group. This means that a business can often have greater influence amongst its second degree connections, and the virality of a page's content can be directly related to the success of a business. So, ultimately there’s a need for better insights into Facebook content consumption.  Facebook’s Advertising Communications Manager Elisabeth Diana states that the "real purpose behind Facebook Page Insights is to provide all page admins with ways to understand how to reach and acquire new customers." New metrics have been created in order to provide businesses with not only information about how people are interacting with a brand Page, but also a glimpse into how people are connecting with the Page’s content in other parts of Facebook. One of the metrics added to Facebook’s Page Insights is "People are talking about this." This set of data counts stories that are eligible to appear in a user's Newsfeed, such as any likes, wall posts, comments, shares, questions answered, RSVPs to events, Page mentions, photo tagging and location checkins. The metric allows the page administrator to know what posts have proven the most compelling and interactive. Another metric added to the equation is the metric of virality, which allows for insight into how viral a particular post is. Virality is determined by dividing the number of "people talking about this" by the reach (the number of people who actually saw the content). Diana notes that because virality is a percentage, whether a business is large or small, the metric "can be used to compare across all Page posts." The virality metric allows page admins to analyze the success of individual posts and will hopefully lead to an improved page strategy through a better understanding of the audience. Along with these new metrics comes aesthetic changes as well. "Whether you want to get into the deep end or wade in slowly," Diana says, Facebook wants to make their Page Insights "digestible for everyone, easy to sort and actionable." She says most of the heavy numbers have been removed from Page Insights, but "for those needing something a little more hardcore, there is always the option to export to a spreadsheet." Either way, Diana says, "this is just the first step in enhancing Page Insights for small businesses and brands; there is more to come" — so, look out for the Facebook Insight API. In the meantime, however, Facebook will continue to help business owners figure out how to provide their audiences with the most engaging content possible to guarantee the greater reach and increased sales. More About: analytics, Facebook, fans, features, Marketing, mashable, Social Media, trending For more Business coverage:
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