When establishing your services or products online as valuable, trustworthy, and overall a "safe buy" reviews are one of the most helpful tools you can use. Let your potential customers and repeat customers see what others thought of your products and services in a glance. After discussing with Rick, the CEO of Rockpick Legend Co., and his staff he has agreed that a customer review section on their website would indeed be beneficial not only to help validate the quality of products they sale but also to help answer some commonly asked questions. Since their shopping cart is set up through Volusion we incorporated a simple "add-on" and activated the customer feedback ares of the site with in just a few hours. This is extremely valuable tool is a simple digital mash-up made possible by what is known as Web 2.0.
To help the employees at Rockpick Legend Co. understand the value of this and other digital mash-ups we first had to define what a "mash-up" is, and what the term Web 2.0 refers to. The term Web 2.0 came about as broadband speeds started to increase beyond what had been possible when the internet first became popular with businesses and individuals; and computers became powerful enough to execute more detailed and challenging script with out delay or lag. When these two aspects began to combine on a "regular" basis developers pushed the boundaries of what they believed the internet could do. Huge servers hosting entire blog indexes were launched and easy to use interfaces were developed. The era of the "blog" was born. But that's not where Web 2.0 ended. Tags, Bookmarking, and many other "second generation" internet advances were made. In the storm of faster internet means more power, came mash-ups (Ross, 2006). They are the meat loaf of the internet world. Combining the power of this with the hosting of that, and the sound quality of this with the animation of that. Some mash-ups combine two programs such as this webpage is doing right now:
The Google hosted blog known as Blogger (which you are viewing right now) is using a Googled owned program called Picasa to host the photograph shown below in this very same blog. The mash-up required to incorporate a customer feedback section on a web-site (with out just publishing reviews by hand) is a Content Management System and a Web Analytic System.
In our case we are using the Customer and Product online storage system developed by Volusion as our Content Management System. This system holds all the products currently on our website (rather they are live or not) and all our customers who are currently registered with the website. Content Management Systems are often used in shopping carts, POS systems and more to help prevent duplicating information, keeping information easy to find and easily sortable in a variety of ways, and storing mass amounts of data with that is classified in certain ways (IE: customers are classified with a customer number, and inventory is classified with a separate sequence of numbers to keep them separate). While Volusion has developed a Web Analytic System which can be added onto their own pages as a mash-up (since they are not the same program just the same developer) so does Google and it is easily integrated with Volusion's Content Management System.
To help the employees at Rockpick Legend Co. understand the value of this and other digital mash-ups we first had to define what a "mash-up" is, and what the term Web 2.0 refers to. The term Web 2.0 came about as broadband speeds started to increase beyond what had been possible when the internet first became popular with businesses and individuals; and computers became powerful enough to execute more detailed and challenging script with out delay or lag. When these two aspects began to combine on a "regular" basis developers pushed the boundaries of what they believed the internet could do. Huge servers hosting entire blog indexes were launched and easy to use interfaces were developed. The era of the "blog" was born. But that's not where Web 2.0 ended. Tags, Bookmarking, and many other "second generation" internet advances were made. In the storm of faster internet means more power, came mash-ups (Ross, 2006). They are the meat loaf of the internet world. Combining the power of this with the hosting of that, and the sound quality of this with the animation of that. Some mash-ups combine two programs such as this webpage is doing right now:
The Google hosted blog known as Blogger (which you are viewing right now) is using a Googled owned program called Picasa to host the photograph shown below in this very same blog. The mash-up required to incorporate a customer feedback section on a web-site (with out just publishing reviews by hand) is a Content Management System and a Web Analytic System.
In our case we are using the Customer and Product online storage system developed by Volusion as our Content Management System. This system holds all the products currently on our website (rather they are live or not) and all our customers who are currently registered with the website. Content Management Systems are often used in shopping carts, POS systems and more to help prevent duplicating information, keeping information easy to find and easily sortable in a variety of ways, and storing mass amounts of data with that is classified in certain ways (IE: customers are classified with a customer number, and inventory is classified with a separate sequence of numbers to keep them separate). While Volusion has developed a Web Analytic System which can be added onto their own pages as a mash-up (since they are not the same program just the same developer) so does Google and it is easily integrated with Volusion's Content Management System.
Customer Feedback On 33B Basic Tumbling Kit
Because the staff at Rockpick Legend Co. already understands how Volusion operates we tried incorporating their customer feedback, however it did not give us the option to give a 1-5 star rating, and didn't give us the wonderful "Was this review helpful to you?" question on bottom. So we switched over to Googles add-on and found it was easy to integrate and worked even better! So we are now using a Google customer feedback add-on.
As far as the customers and the staff at Rockpick Legend Co. see it, this simple customer feedback option now offered on each product that listed on www.erockshop.com is seamless with their website. However, this website is a just one more example of digital meatloaf! Examine a little further and you'll notice that the customer feedback and reviews section of this website isn't the first mash-up to make it's self present. Verisign offers a SSL on the site already. This is a Secure Certificate stating that Verisign is connected to the website making it more secure and protecting your information while placing orders. And, a credit card processor (in this case it is Authorize.net according to Rick) is processing credit card information once an order is placed. There is a Facebook widget offering up to the minute status updates and coupon codes that may be currently available and an entirely different add-on working to process any coupon codes being in-put into orders.
Mash-ups are operating all over the web, most often with out our even knowing it. However, being aware of their existence, and knowing how to use them to our benefit can make us better marketing engineers, by putting power at our fingertips.
References and Further Reading:
Litchenburg, Joe (February 2, 2011) JoeLitchenburg.com, Strategic Marketing For Technology Companies. Retrieved January 2, 2012 from: http://www.joelichtenberg.com/2011/02/02/web-analytics-%E2%80%93-overview-options-and-technology-enablers/
Litchenburg, Joe (February 2, 2011) JoeLitchenburg.com, Strategic Marketing For Technology Companies. Retrieved January 2, 2012 from: http://www.joelichtenberg.com/2011/02/02/web-analytics-%E2%80%93-overview-options-and-technology-enablers/
Ross, Rob (June 27, 2006) iMedia Connection, Marketing Mashup Tools, Retrieved January 2, 2012 from: http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/10217.imc
No comments:
Post a Comment