So online shopping is a bit of a godsend for people like me. We can browse, research, compare and share purchases with our friends, all from the comfort of our own home. I’ve been doing online shopping for many years now and am happy to buy all sorts of things — groceries, clothes, kids toys, books and more.  So when I was asked to buy a pair of shoes from www.styletread.com.au and to blog about the experience, I said sure, why not?

But then it turned out this is harder than it looks.  The reason being is that my experience with buying the shoes was so flawless as to not be worthy of writing anything at all! In many ways it was a complete NON EVENT.  I searched, I found, I ordered, I paid and Style Tread delivered exactly what I asked for.  There were no missing parcels, no wrong sizes, no strange transactions on my credit card.  What’s more, the shoes are awesome!

But in the spirit of writing SOMETHING, here are the things I really liked about StyleTread:

• the sheer volume of shoes was super impressive (I don’t think you’d find that many shoes in the whole of Canberra!) and the ability to search across so many different variables was both practical and user friendly;
• the ability to see the detail of the shoe at multiple angles was a huge winner. By dragging your mouse over the picture an enlarged image reveals great detail about the shoe. This works to increases the confidence in your purchase — you know what you’re going to get — and this is something so many shopping websites could learn from these guys.
• I really like the fact you could return the shoes for free if required. This is another confidence booster that encourages you to try shoes you’d not normally purchase – perhaps even add another pair or two to the shopping cart??
• When the parcel arrived (just a few days later) I loved the fact that there was a voucher encouraging me to share the style tread love with up to 3 friends, which each coupon having a code for a $5 discount. Not only do I get bragging rights but I look generous to boot!

The only slightly negative thing about my experience is that I got added to the enewsletter list and I don’t remember explicitly opting in. That said, however, I haven’t unsubscribed as I’m too busy looking at all the shoes and planning my next purchase!

Online shopping is certainly going from strength to strength but I think many online retailers could learn a thing or two from what this company is doing. It will be interesting to see the impact that the growth of online shopping will have on bricks and mortar stores over the next decade or so.  But I know where I’ll be. I’ll be shopping from home and looking forward to more non-event experiences.

The man hailed  as “Obama’s secret political weapon”, Ben Self, Program Director and Founding Partner of Blue State Digital, will be visiting Australia to divulge various secrets surrounding the most successful online campaign in history.

Ben  is coming to Australia as a special guest of the Internet Industry Association (IIA). He will be the keynote speaker at the IIA’s annual dinner on Thursday 12 February. He will then conduct a series of exclusive lunches and cocktail events where guests will be able to take part in a lively discussion about Obama’s campaign and unlocking the power of the internet for your business.

Follow the link below to the Couch Creative website for more info on exclusive events which will take place in Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra. The Threesides team plans to be tuning in at the Canberra event so let us know if you’ll be there and we can meet up.

Visit http://www.couchcreative.com.au/kingmaker09/ for more information. Some more info on Ben below (from the event website):

About Ben Self and BSD

Ben founded BSD in 2004 with three other individuals responsible for Howard Dean’s use of the Internet during his presidential campaign. The company now has offices in New York, London, Boston, Washington DC, and San Francisco, creating digital strategy and technology for political candidates, non-profits and companies. BSD powers the online presence of the largest and most prominent Democratic candidates and progressive organisations, including the presidential campaign of Barack Obama.

During his career, Ben has garnered extensive experience in digital technologies, statistical data analysis, data warehousing, database architecture and administration, system design, and system development. He has both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science’s from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Consumer Generated web based marketing – “Users are doing it for themselves” – 2008

Catchy title and an interesting methodology.  According to the reports summary the researchers aim was

“to investigate how travel related user-generated content (UGC) websites (also known as Web 2.0 sites) are being used by consumers and the impact that these sites are having on the information search and travel behaviour of these people. Recommendations can then be made to tourism organisations for development of more effective e-business strategies.”

The research involved an analysis of a several tourism and related websites of interest to Tourism NSW, Content analysis and interpretation. The study also involved a user survey. Have a read of the report summary and key findings for yourself but this was the major take out for us -

 “Tourism operators and destination marketing organisations cannot ignore the rising popularity of sites containing UGC content or the role that they may play in the travel planning behaviour of consumers. These sites can provide information that influences the final booking plans associated with travel. Moreover, information on UGC sites can cause travellers to alter their existing travel plans”

So the question for Tourism industry operators how well is your business doing to start meaningful conversations online that you can manage and interact with?.

We have been presenting our online marketing for tourism workshops across NSW in the last 12 months and we spend about 50% of our time talking about useful ways to encourage and coordinate User generated content about your business online. There is always a lot of interest in this area and now this research is supporting what we have been talking about. Time to update the e-book!

 
Grab the report summary and industry summary here - http://www.crctourism.com.au/BookShop/BookDetail.aspx?d=634

Wait a second…. what do you mean we forgot to tell them about our threemos movember effort??

We have a confession to make – we have spent the whole of Movember double dating our website – but we aren’t sorry either….

During november, the threesides office has been growing mo’s to support Movember – the mens health fundraiser for depression and Prostatc cancer. We have dubbed our team Threemos. We have been ‘growing’ all around town drumming up support to try and reach the $1000 mark.  Well as of the 26th Movember we have raised $1445 and we are seeing if we can hit the big $2000 mark now.

So – back to the double date – during Movember we created a mini-site using WordPress, threemos.wordpress.com .  On this site we posted a blog to follow our fundraising efforts and encourage people to leave comments, have been collecting donations and running a poll to see who has the hottest mo.  We have been spending so much time at threemos that we forgot to tell the threesides world what we have been up to.

Well now it’s out – we have gone public with the news and we hope that our website will still love us in December (despite the month of neglect).   We have picked up some great fundraising and sponsorship marketing tips that we plan to share with you in the coming months and tell you how we have made the most out of movember.

But in the mean time – head over to threemos and share the movember love!

How many domain names (known as web names or URL’s) have your currently got registered for your business?. The answers should be more than one even if you have only one business or one product.

When registering your main domain name for your business eg: yourbuiness.com.au click the other boxes that ask if you want to buy the variations of the name such as .com / .net / .net.au / .biz. If you in Australia you should be paying between $20-$40 (for 2 years) for .au domains and anywhere between $10 – $30 for .com and .net domains. Once you own all of these domains you can redirect them to your main site and ‘park’ them with your main domain names.

So why bother? for the extra $150 that you might pay for 3 or 4 more names you have taken one more step to securing your online Intellectual Property. I am always recommending to clients that they purchase all variations of domain names that refer to their business or product. I recommend using .au domains as your main web name if you are an Australian based company with an Australian based customer base (they are prioritised in google.com.au / yahoo.com.au etc) . If you have international customers consider the .coms and .nets

Here’s a few good reasons why you should own all of your URL’s:

• competition – 103,915,943 currently registered domains in the world – how many are your competitors?
• Search engine optimisation – your URL is a key SEO tool allowing your site to be found and indexed in search engines
• changes to Australian domain laws - anyone will be able to onsell .au domains to the highest bidder under new laws that have just come into effect.

Here’s the story from the newsletter I got from our web hosting company Jumba.com.au :

.AU Domain name policy changes
The policy changes regarding the sale of .au domain names came into effect on 1st June 2008.

How does this affect me?

The policy changes effectively means that the ban on consumers purchasing .au domain names and selling them to the highest bidder has ended. Consequently the risk of competitors registering .au domain names associated with your online brand will increase significantly.

If you haven’t registered the com.au and net.au domain names for your business or product name, in the future you may have to bid for them from auction sites against other prospective purchasers.

I also read a good story on Flying solo about tips on naming your business. Have a look on the site as they also have some good pointers on understanding copyright and IP as well.

Here are some good resources for understanding and registering domain names:

www.mywebname.com.au – Australian domain name look up service and excellent list of top Australian hosts and domain name registers

www.domaintools.com – useful domain searching tools

www.whois.net - global domain look up service – see who owns what

www.jumba.com.au - australian based Internet service and domain name registration service

The next steps are thinking about product and people friendly web names – if you make and sell easy accounting software consider yourbusinessname.com.au and easyaccountingsoftware.com.au as well.

We’ve been working on the marketing for an event ‘The Fireside Festival‘ due to kickoff in August 2008. It’s one of those jobs where we’ve been pencilling the events into my own calendar!

Yes Canberra is cold in winter, there’s no denying it but what about celebrating winter through cosy fireside experiences like degustation dinners, winetastings, local artists hosting studio tours and bed and breakfast getaways. That’s how the FIreside Festival came about. It’s been running since 2005 and is held at a number of different venues across the Canberra Region during every weekend in August. Starting with 5 venues the event now covers 24 venues with over 100 events.

Having spent 12months in the northern hemisphere last year and experiencing the Christmas markets of Europe complete with roaring fireplaces and open braziers on every street corner I think this is a concept that will really do well back here in Oz during winter and a great example of thinking outside the square and reinventing your product to create new opportunities.

The new website we’ve developed with Osky Interactive has been launched at www.firesidefestival.com.au

More info on the festival in the Fireside Festival media release:
media-release_fireside-festival-20081