The Widget UK Blog

Comments on products, promotions and activities at Widget UK Ltd, a UK based distributor of mobile computing products.

Using Social Media tools in Marketing Technology

widget | 01 July, 2010 15:46

Following satellite navigation to the Warren House conferencing centre on the Coombe Estate in Kingston, I ended up facing a closed white gate, of the sort exclusive urban communities put up to obstruct non-belongers. While TomTom assured me that my destination, a 12 hour crash course on social media run by Ecademy's Thomas Power (@thomaspower) was on the far side of the locked gate,  there was no visible way round. I stopped, and asked a man walking his small dog in the half light if there was another way to the hotel.
"Hotel," he said, perplexed.
"Warren House?" I said.
"Oh," he said, "it is not a hotel. No, no, no. We wouldn't have that sort of thing round here."
Reassured that nothing so indiscreet as a hotel had been allowed on the Coombe Estate, he directed me through the maze of exclusive roads. 

Like the residents of the Coombe Estate, the retailers of consumer electronics in the UK are a small and exclusive group. The established retail names of Dixons (back again), Comet,  John Lewis, Maplin and Staples have been joined by internet retailers such as Amazon, Dabs.com, Ebuyer and a few others, and the TV channels such as QVC and Ideal Shopping Direct have made progress in the last ten years, but new entrants are rare. 

While they are all doubtless monitoring what is being said about them on Facebook and Twitter, it is not immediately apparent how these tools could be used to reach the category buyers who are our customers. These individuals tend to be known for their focus on buy price and sell through numbers rather than the soft and fluffy measurements of social media reputation.

Part of the service Widget offers, however, is that if Widget sells a consumer electronics product, there is an implicit recommendation to our customers. The vendor has persuaded us that this product is going to sell and Widget has a track record of discovering and distributing growing product categories. 

It is clear that the online social media tools available can help inform this recommendation. Twice in the past week I have seen impressive demonstrations of the sheer amount of data available on the internet. 

Last Thursday at a presentation at the CIPR, Andrew Smith (@andismit) from PR and SEO agency Escherman, showed the sheer range of data analysis tools available from Google. Google knows how many people in each geography or each demographic searched for any word or phrase, and it will tell you, free of charge, in the hope that you will use its advertising service. 

Today, at the Ecademy social media course, Alterian, the course sponsor, demonstrated the SM2 reputation monitoring software, which can show how many mentions a product gets across all social media sites, and whether they are positive or negative. 

By looking at the number of searches, and the type of mentions products get, there is a lot more we, and the vendors behind us, could do to know where and when products will succeed in the electronics marketplace. 

Some products are niche, and will sell online where customers are specifically looking for them, but will not sell in a physical store. An example of this is the product CardScan, which Widget has sold for ten years. It does what it says on the tin - scans business cards. It is the sort of product that a small set of users really value, and they will go out and look for it, but the market for it is not large enough for it to sell successfully off the shelf.  We have tried it in two national chains, and the results both times were disappointing. 

Some products, however, hit the shops, and the public love them. Flip Video is a case in point. New, but exciting, it succeeded first in online retailers, then quickly made the transition to the national chains. Some of the people who wanted Flip Video, being early adopters, would buy it online. But there were enough retail park or shopping centre customers in its market to give it sell through for our bricks and mortar retailers.

Somewhere, in all that data that Google collects, there is the data which could have helped us predict these two results. I look forward to finding more of it.

   A gargoyle helps keep the riff raff out of Warren House.

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