Post your questions to @marinamann

We have a superb panel line up and what promises to be a heated discussion on social commerce including a few case studies, insights and strong opinions.

Social Commerce, The New Normal Influence Economy 
Most customer interactions with your brand and the customer buying decisions that goes along with that – won’t happen on your brand’s website. In 2010, U.S. e-commerce sales totalled $165.4 billion, up 14.8%. Opportunities are burgeoning as the cost of eCommerce operations drops and customers procure more goods & services online. In this session see case studies of how innovation in social media can drive the overall commerce model and enable brands to connect with customers and their friends to create value in earned media.

The panelists included:

Rochelle Grayson, CEO of BookRiff Media Inc., and Program Advisor, Industry Chair for the University of British Columbia’s Social Media Program @RochelleGrayson

Rochelle Grayson is CEO of BookRiff.com. BookRiff let’s consumers creates and publish their own books by mixing and matching content from published books, BookRiff creators and the Internet. Anyone can create a book compiled of riffs from start to finish in 48 hours and make it available for sale as an ebook or in print through bookriff.com. Along the way every content creator get’s paid for their used piece of mirco-content. Rochelle is a serial entrepreneur. She’s also Industry Chair for the University of British Columbia’s Social Media Program and instructor of Social Media monetization at UBC. Welcome to you.

Harley Finkelstein, Chief Platform Officer at Shopify; Harley explains his role in Fast Company

Harley Finkelstein, is chief platform officer at Shopify.com. Shopify is an Ottawa based eCommerce DIY platform used world wide. Sopify lets anyone set up an eCommerce store in 15 minutes. In the last 5 years, the startup has grown to power 16,000 stores in 70 countries and generates over 100 million in annual sales and growing. Harley is also a busy entrepreneur, MBA and lawyer.

Matthew Bertulli, CEO and Founder at Demac Media and Co-founder, Socialgift.com

Matt Bertulli was one of the first angel investors in Socialgift.com – Socialgift is a group buying startup that makes is easy for your friends to decide on a group gift and chip in and buy you something they agreed you’d love from a participating retailer or allows friends to contribute whatever amount they’d like to your gift. Matt is also co-founder and CEO of Demac Media, an e-commerce professional services solution agency in Toronto.

SocialGift from Mango Studios on Vimeo.

Daniel Patricio, Founder and Product Manager at Pinpoint Social @danielpatricio

Daniel Patricio is founder and product manager of Poinpointsocial.com, Pinpoint Social, is a self service platform that makes marketing on Facebook simpler and more effective. Pinpoint Social enables you to create dynamic Facebook fan pages and allows you to create customized campaigns, promotions or contests without the need to write a line of code. Pinpoint Social also provides detailed customer analytics.

See you there!

-Marina Mann  LinkedIn or Twitter @marinamann

Thanks for all the fish Mr. Jobs!
 

Add your thoughts and comments.

Marina Mann

The iPad Newspaper is out

Apple’s VP of Internet Service, Eddy Cue officially described the features this morning, Wednesday, Feb 2, 2011. The app was available in the iTunes store as of 12:00PM EST. It’s the first online newspaper designed for the iPad.

The new digital newspaper has an initial budget of about $30 million and a workforce of about 100 people. Most of its contents will be original although the newspaper also will use contents from other media owned by News Corporation such as sport videos from the Fox channel, according to The New York Times.

The Daily will offer about 100 pages of news and sports, with naturally, a high level of interactivity, breaking news, HD video and 360-degree photos. Users will have two subscription choices:  they can be billed either 99 cents a week or $39 USD for a year’s subscription. No news yet if  Apple’s iAds will be running on The Daily or if  News Corp. will be selling its own ads. For now, no one is talking about a print version – thankfully.

While Apple dominates the tablet market, competition is increasing. Samsung Electronics Co. and Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc. are making devices to rival the iPad – running on Google’s Android operating system. Global tablet sales may total 54.8 million units in 2011 and 208 million in 2014, according to Gartner Inc. Apple has sold more than 15 million iPads since its release in April, Cue said today.

Interested? Read more … A first look at The Daily, Rupert Murdoch’s iPad newspaper -Poynter ; Bloomburg.com ; News Corp’s ‘The Daily’ launches on iPad with Apple’s in-app subscriptions -Apple Insider; Apple and News Corps. “The Daily” Newspaper Hits the iPad, for $0.99 a Week or $40 a Year -Fast Company

Forty percent of Canadians accounted for 95 million orders
“About 39% of Canadians aged 16 and over used the Internet to place more than 95 million orders. This was up from 32% and the 70 million orders placed in 2007, when the survey was last conducted.  Relatively more residents of British Columbia (47%) and Alberta (45%) made an online order in 2009. Residents in British Columbia and Alberta are the most frequent online shoppers.” – Stats Canada

Security is less of an issue?!
Security concerns seem to be fading. Eight in 10 online shoppers paid directly over the Internet for some or all of their purchases. This data demonstrates a huge improvement in online payment security from PayPal’s 2008 survey which found that 51% of Canadians feel anxious about purchasing online. 40% feel anxiety due to a lack of confidence in the merchant’s security, compared to only 27% of American shoppers.

The bad news: Canadians are spending CAN dollars on US retail eCommerce sites

The fact is that large, traditional Canadian brands have backed out of eCommerce because they simply don’t have the right talent to operationalize with profitability. To name two biggies …

• Canadian Tire shut down their eCommerce online store in 2009: Canadian Tire Dodges Out of Ecommerce: Will It Bounce Back?

• The Bay shut down their eCommerce store after their director of eCommerce (with a team of two) left to join TD. Sadly, the recent relaunch of www.thebay.com is a rudimentary brand brochure, a store locator and a clumsy user experience.

A few Canadian retail eCommerce success stories are worth mentioning

• La Senza, a Montreal company has been quietly doing a great job selling panties online and shipping FREE across Canada
• Lululemon has seen some incredible growth in eCommerce: New Mantra Pays Off For Lululemon
• We also have Indigo Books but they still can’t seem to get search right. Looking for Doug Coupland turns up ZERO responses!
• Then there’s The Shopping Channel and Mountain Equipment Co-op – both have moved into Web 2.0 with product merchandising and customer reviews.

Launch, Learn and Iterate: Strategic Thought Starters for Canadian Retailers

• The unarguable truth is that Canadians want to buy from Canadian retailers for a number of reasons – mostly to save on the headache of expensive shipping and often outrageous duty fees.

• “Expect US retailers to move into Canada with greater force in the next few years to capitalize on Canadian online spending habits. Setting up a Canadian face of an existing eCommerce sites is a small investment than building from scratch. Canadian retailers must consider that online retail is still growing faster than brick-and-mortar sales. B2C eCommerce will enjoy a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of at least 10% according to eMarketer’s projections, and US retailers are well aware of the opportunity and are moving fast.”- The State of Canadian Ecommerce

• Canadian retailers are lagging behind due to anxiety of running and setting up an eCommerce webstore. However with a strategy that comes from the top, specialized talent in strategy and execution, the right data and open source tools, an eCommerce webstore can be ope operationalized internally or outsourced profitably.

Canadian Retailers: Here’s How To Get Your Webstore Right!

1. Create a Web channel line of business so your Webstore does not suffer from lack of specialized leadership and talent. While you’re at it, separate out your lead-generation from the Webstore product development activities. They are not equal.
2. Operationally, integrate Customer Care systems across all channels including Web. Your customer is not a Web customer, a call-centre customer or an in-store customer. Treat your customer as one customer. Make your Customer Care VP accountability for customer retention across channels.
3. Name a buyer for your online store to select products based on your online customer profiles. Operate with a limited product selection. You don’t need to sell all your products online! Enough said.
4. Do simple right when it comes to user experience. Don’t start out with every feature you can think of. Launch with simple features that work perfectly, like: a Blog, Search, Online Product Merchandising and Photography, Check Out, Shopping Cart + Shipping, and finally an intuitive My Account.
5. Keep your data accurate and clean. Get your product information, categorization and taxonomy right. Managing your data is the not-so-secret, quintessential sauce to a successful online retail business.
6. Do not make your IT department responsible for Webstore management and development! If you do, everything that can go wrong will go wrong. Instead, investigate and select the right eCommerce technology that will enable you to deliver the best eCommerce customer experience. Put together a manageable publishing and feature maintenance plan.
7. Think MOBILE. Whatever you create or iterate needs to work on a number of mobile platforms. Optimizing for mobile commerce or m-commerce could mean very little effort. Mobile commerce doesn’t need to be expensive.
8. Good luck and if you need help, email me: marina@marinamann.com

No Flash support, just like the iPhone. I can put up with blue boxes in the place of websites on the iPhone, but not on a tablet that I’d like to use for surfing! (Not to mention Jobs single highhandedly contributing to the demise of Flash – but that’s anther story.)

No multi-tasking. You can’t have two applications open at the same time! It feels like 1994 computing.

No camera for video conferencing. No camera for taking pictures. Nada.

No widescreen mode. Movies formatted for widescreen are squished into the 4:3 aspect ratio making it unusually painful to watch.

Apple only applications. The iPad will only run applications from the iTunes store, unlike any standard mini-laptop that runs all kinds of applications.

Side loading only. Think you can download whatever you want off the Internet onto your iPad? Think again! The only way to download anything to your iPad is by hooking yourself up to another device using a cable. (Come on Jobs!)

It’s not perfect, however there are a number of wonderful things about the iPad. For everything you need to know check out Gizmondo.com

The even bigger question goes beyond the availability of digital content, but begs the question of  paid content. Will consumers pay for content they currently get for free? Do people pay for water? We’ll see…

More about Apple’s “news” tomorrow:

Apple iTablet rumour round-up – Telegraph

The Apple Tablet: a complete history, supposedly — Engadget

Play Paywall!, the new web game sweeping the newspaper industry » Nieman Journalism Lab

Business Insider, Chart of the Day

Apple’s Market Cap Closing In On Microsoft’s (MSFT, AAPL)

Remember when Apple was on death’s door and needed an investment from Microsoft to survive? Well, a lot’s changed since then.  In May 2000, Apple’s market capitalization was $17 billion. Today it’s $182 billion. Meanwhile, Microsoft was around $356 billion in May 2000. Today it’s around $261 billion.

Jay Yarow and Kamelia Angelova

The game-changing news is that Apple has done away with copy protection technology known as digital-rights management or DRM. “DRM-free” means music can be copied an unlimited number of times, to any device. It remains to be seen if this change in business model drives net new paying customers to iTunes (or those previously known as the pirates).