Online Real Estate Technology

Australian retailers should be more imaginative if they want to dominate the online shopping landscape like their international counterparts, Sue Morphet says.

The Pacific Brands chief executive officer told a Brisbane business lunch on Thursday that online shopping was both a threat and an opportunity.

It’s just a matter of attitude, she said.

Comercial survival was in the hands of Australian retailers who had to embrace the online world, she said.

Ms Morphet said seven of the top 10 online retailers in the US were also bricks and mortar stores and it was a similar story in the UK.

‘In the US stores like Walmart, Staples, Sears and Best Buy and in the UK Tesco, Marks and Spencer are in the top 10 online stores,’ Ms Morphet said.

‘In Australia we don’t have any bricks and mortar retail stores in the top 10 online stores, none at all – we have eBay, Amazon, Deals Direct,’ she said.

‘Many of the successful online retailers can continue to have their bricks and mortar presence… but we need to understand this whole phenomena and move with it.

‘People shop for experiences not just for purchasing goods.’

She contrasted the success of boutique bookstores with the failure of other major book retailers as the industry faces an online squeeze.

‘The ones that do more than just price will be the ones that succeed,’ she said.

‘What we are seeing now is a consumer who shops on price or on quality, they will shop for the number one brand or the price point offer.

‘In order for us to justify the value of our brands our product has to be innovative, it has to have high quality and be very engaging in the needs, wants and emotions of the shopping public.’

Ms Morphet said recent calls for online stores to pay GST was unhelpful and energy should be focused on thinking of clever ways to appeal to customers.

‘Where the recommendation to buy used to come from traditional advertising or the sales person in the store, now it’s coming from social networks,’ she said.

‘Bonds has 60,000 Facebook fans.

‘Customers have always been able to go down the street and seek a better price … (but the) street is a whole lot longer and a whole lot easier to navigate.

‘We need to be frank, the problem is not the lack of a 10 per cent GST.

‘Retailers have to be offering excellent range, excellent value and excellent service, if you’re not doing that customers will go elsewhere and the internet as made it easier for them to do so.’

She says retailers need to think about how they pitch brands, use social networking marketing to communicate and satisfy customers.

Ms Morphet explained how innovative thinking saw a 1000 per cent increase for pillow sales when Pacific Brands launched its Tontine date-stamped pillows last year.

‘Innovation is what we need to redefine our categories,’ she said.

‘People have been buying white pillows for a hundred years … but this (result) was unbelievable,’ she said.

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More than a third of bosses say they check potential employees’ Facebook profiles before offering them a job.

Your potential new boss may have already checked you out on Facebook.

A new survey by recruitment firm Robert Half has found that more than a third of employers in accounting and finance admit to checking potential candidates’ Facebook profiles before offering them a job.

‘Given this reality, candidates need to be aware of their social media footprint’ when applying for jobs,’ Robert Half director Andrew Brushfield said, releasing the survey findings on Wednesday.

‘As a general rule of thumb, if there is anything online that employees don’t want their colleagues or bosses to see, they should remove it.’

The survey also found 23 per cent of employers are using social media to recruit, while a third of employees say they are comfortable being ‘friends’ with their boss on sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn.

Still, the survey also found 36 per cent of surveyed employees in the finance and accounting industry have seen the use of social networking sites damage other people’s workplace relationships.

‘While social media has helped foster a more interactive and sociable working environment, it is completely blurring the boundary between people’s personal and professional lives,’ Mr Brushfield said.

‘Before people friend’ their bosses, colleagues and clients, they need to think about the long-term implications it could have on their professional life and career development.’

The survey of 416 finance and accounting employees, and hiring managers, found only 38 per cent of companies had a clear social media policy in place for employees.

Forty-three per cent of companies that allow their staff to access social media sites at work either don’t have a clear social media policy in place, or don’t have a policy at all.

‘All organisations should have a clear social media policy to ensure that their staff use social media appropriately at work, and don’t damage the company’s corporate reputation,’ Mr Brushfield said.

Mr Brushfield offered a number of tips to workers and jobseekers to help manage their Facebook presence, such as ‘untagging’ themselves from an embarrassing photograph, and being aware of the various groups they join if their colleagues, bosses and clients are ‘friends’.

Also, while Facebookers may enjoy playing social network games and posting their results, Mr Brushfield questions whether professional contacts really want to know if you have bought a new cow on FarmVille.

We all know the answer to that one.

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Having a branded Facebook page has become near-essential for many businesses. As such, companies should give as much thought and energy into planning and managing their Facebook page as they do a traditional website.

“The rapid adoption of the ‘like’ button and the rise of the Facebook ‘homepage’ are indications that marketing on Facebook has become a necessity for businesses large and small,” said Kimberly Maul, eMarketer writer/analyst and co-author of the new report, “Facebook Marketing: Strategies for Turning ‘Likes’ into Loyalty.” “Yet the fact that some companies have made Facebook the primary way they engage with consumers online raises serious questions about the risks and rewards of marketing within another company’s structure and rules.”

Most Fortune 100 companies now use Facebook for marketing. And HubSpot’s “The 2011 State of Inbound Marketing” report found that 44% of companies in North America see Facebook as critical or important, up from 24% in 2009.

A study from WONGDOODY (now Wong, Doody, Crandall, Wiener) provided a set of benchmarks for Facebook marketers. Among the 84 Facebook brand pages examined, 88% of their operators said they posted video content, 82% solicited fan stories or comments, 79% had their wall open for fan comments and 66% actively replied to fan posts and comments.

These are just some of the tools in marketers’ arsenal to build engagement on Facebook, keep it high, and turn it into something that benefits the bottom line—loyalty.

“‘Like’ is only the beginning,” said Debra Aho Williamson, eMarketer principal analyst and co-author of the report. “It is much harder to sustain the relationship post-click than it is to get consumers to make that first click. A brand’s Facebook fan base is only as strong as the effort put into managing it.”

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A combined 89% of marketers use (53%) or plan to use (36%) social media marketing, according to [pdf] a study conducted in Q4 2010 by Unica. Data from “The State of Marketing 2011? indicates of those planning to use social media, 26% plan to use it in the next 12 months and 10% plan to use it more than 12 months out.

Rich media marketing, with 87% combined usage/planned usage, and mobile marketing, with 85% combined usage/planned usage, have similar statistics to social media marketing. The numbers on rich media marketing in particular (50% current usage, 23% expected usage in 12 months, 14% expected usage in more than 12 months) are almost identical.

For mobile marketing, however, the numbers skew more toward planned usage, with a 43% current usage rate. Twenty-five percent of marketers expect to employ mobile in the next 12 months, and 16% plan to use it in more than 12 months.

Overall, 67% of North American and European marketers currently use email software. However, this figure rises to 80% of North American marketers and drops to only 47% among European marketers. On a combined basis, only 10% of marketers have no plans to use email.

While European marketers are less likely than North American marketers to adopt email, 40% of European marketers report mostly automated integration of email data with customer data, compared to just 30% of North American marketers. The overall automated integration rate is 34%, and 27% do not integrate email data at all.

Respondents exposed a lackluster record of search engine marketing integration with other marketing campaigns and programs. Less than half said it was “somewhat integrated” and almost as many indicated that it wasn’t integrated. Only 10% claimed “very integrated” search engine marketing for their company’s efforts.

About two-thirds (68%) of marketers see web data as very important to customer analytics and 63% see it as very important to making decisions about marketing offers and campaigns, according to other study results. A majority of remaining respondents consider both uses of web data somewhat important.

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Online retail giant Amazon said sales of digital books for the Kindle electronic reader have surpassed sales of print books.

‘Customers are now choosing Kindle books more often than print books,’ Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos said in a statement.

‘We had high hopes that this would happen eventually, but we never imagined it would happen this quickly,’ Bezos said.

‘We’ve been selling print books for 15 years and Kindle books for less than four years.’

The Seattle, Washington-based Amazon said that since April 1, it was selling 105 Kindle e-books for every 100 print books, hardcover and paperback combined.

The company said it had sold more than three times as many Kindle books so far in 2011 as it did during the same period last year.

Amazon began selling print books in July 1995 and introduced the Kindle in November 2007.

The US Kindle store offers more than 950,000 books including 109 of the 111 New York Times best sellers.

Amazon does not release sales figures for the Kindle e-reader.

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Facebook’s chief technology officer said the social network will start scanning for child pornography and images of missing children.

Facebook is teaming up with Microsoft and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to use photo ‘fingerprint’ technology to search for pictures matching those in the US organisation’s data base.

‘We care deeply’ about stopping abuse, Facebook officer Bret Taylor said while revealing the alliance during testimony at a US Senate Commerce Committee hearing in Washington on mobile phone and internet privacy.

Microsoft PhotoDNA technology used at search engine Bing and online file storage service SkyDrive will be put to work at the world’s leading social network.

PhotoDNA has already evaluated more than two billion digital pictures at Microsoft services, finding 1,000 matches on SkyDrive and 1,500 matches through Bing image indexing, according to Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit associate general counsel Bill Harmon.

‘PhotoDNA identified horrific images on our services that we would have never found otherwise,’ Harmon said.

With Facebook among the world’s largest photo-sharing services, ‘their participation in the PhotoDNA program will significantly expand the program’s impact,’ Harmon added.

Each month Facebook users share more than 30 billion pieces of content including pictures, news stories, blog posts, and web links, according to Microsoft.

‘Identifying graphic child pornography in a sea of content like that is a daunting task, but PhotoDNA is helping to find the proverbial needle in a haystack,’ Harmon said.

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Prime Minister Julia Gillard has switched on a glimpse of the future in Armidale, the first mainland community to receive national broadband network (NBN) services.

The NBN roll-out in the northern NSW city will ultimately bring super-fast broadband to 4882 premises, including the University of New England, but the first to benefit are the Presbyterian Ladies College Armidale and seven others.

‘This is a transformative infrastructure for our nation’s future,’ Ms Gillard told a ceremony at the private girls’ school on Wednesday.

‘It stands to radically change the way we live, the way we work, the way we study, especially in rural and regional Australia, which has so often been forced put up with second best.’

Of the Armidale premises taking part in the NBN program, 88 per cent have agreed to a connection but not necessarily to a paid service.

The NBN is already operating in the Tasmanian towns of Smithton, Scottsdale and Midway Point.

Another connection is being rolled out in a growth corridor of Adelaide.

The Armidale service will give users access to internet speeds of 100 megabits a second, five times faster than existing ADSL2 copper connections.

‘Unlike the old copper-based internet service, slow connections will be a thing of the past,’ Ms Gillard said, adding the NBN would be a boon for teaching in rural and regional areas.

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy said the Armidale launch was a landmark moment for the nation.

‘It is a significant milestone in our vision to deliver affordable high-speed broadband to every Australian home, school and business,’ he told the ceremony.

Independent MP Tony Windsor, whose electorate of New England includes Armidale, said the NBN had plenty of critics, but the project would reduce the gap in living standards between cities and regional areas.

It had the capacity to overcome the disadvantages of distance and remoteness that country Australians had lived in for many decades.

‘Distance will be irrelevant in terms of education, health, aged care, business opportunities, location.’

But not everyone is impressed with the planned $36 billion fibre-optic network.

Opposition communications spokesman Malcolm Turnbull said there were cheaper ways to deliver fast broadband across Australia.

Mr Turnbull said it would be cheaper to bring fibre within a kilometre of homes and use the existing copper network to bridge the gap.

‘You can deliver very, very fast broadband for at least half the cost, if not more, of fibre-to-the-home,’ he said.

Nationals senate leader Barnaby Joyce suggested the Armidale NBN roll-out was political payback for Mr Windsor’s support of federal Labor’s minority government.

But Ms Gillard rejected the suggestion, saying the decision was made by NBN Co.

‘What they wanted to do was to have release sites of different types around the country so they could learn some lessons about the broader roll-out,’ she said.

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The number of internet users in China, already the world’s largest online market, hit 477 million at the end of March, a senior government official said.

The official from the Telecommunications Administration Bureau, which falls under the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, announced the figure at a meeting in Beijing, the official Xinhua news agency reported on Monday.

The number of people using the internet in China had hit 457 million at the end of 2010, meaning that more than one-third of its 1.3 billion-strong population were online.

China’s spiralling online numbers have turned the internet into a forum for citizens to express their opinions in a way rarely seen in a country where the traditional media is under strict government control.

The growing strength and influence of the web population has prompted concern in Beijing about the internet’s potential as a tool for generating social unrest, and authorities have stepped up surveillance in recent years.

The government blocks web content that it deems politically sensitive in a vast system dubbed the “Great Firewall of China”.

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The head of the company behind the national broadband network (NBN) has apologised for mistakenly misleading the public about his previous responsibilities at communications firm Alcatel-Lucent.

Alcatel-Lucent was fined $US137 million ($A130 million) after a US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Department of Justice (DOJ) investigation found it had paid bribes to government officials in Costa Rica and other countries to secure contracts.

NBN Co Ltd chief executive Mike Quigley was Americas president and then president and chief operating officer of the firm between 2001 and 2006 when the events took place.

Mr Quigley had previously stated Costa Rica fell outside his jurisdiction but on Monday he confirmed to a joint parliamentary hearing in Sydney this was not the case, and apologised.

‘I clearly was advised by one of my previous colleagues in North America, who’s currently still with Alcatel-Lucent, to check for me whether Costa Rica was within my area of operation and control,’ he said.

‘On the basis of that advice I stated that it was not.

‘This was an error for which I unreservedly apologise.’

NBN Co had issued a statement on Friday saying that contrary to previous advice, Costa Rica was among the many countries in North, Central and South America that were part of Mr Quigley’s ‘wide-ranging portfolio of responsibilities’ between March 2001 to January 2003.

Federal opposition communications spokesman Malcolm Turnbull said Communications Minister Stephen Conroy and the government should have been more aware of Mr Quigley’s role with Alcatel-Lucent.

‘Nobody is suggesting any impropriety or dishonesty on the part of Mr Quigley,’ Mr Turnbull told reporters on Monday.

‘He’s clearly made a number of mistaken or false statements which he has now corrected and apologised for.

‘There’s no effort to impugn his integrity but as representatives of the people whose taxes are paying for this NBN, we are entitled to ask questions and try to get to the facts.’

Mr Quigley said it would be better for him to refrain from making further comments about the US investigation into Alcatel-Lucent, which operates in about 130 countries.

‘There’s a hearing taking place in early June in the US which is a settlement between Alcatel-Lucent, and the SEC and the DOJ and I don’t know the details,’ he said.

‘I don’t believe it is my job to start defending Alcatel-Lucent in light of this investigation.

‘I am not going to be involved in a situation in which if I say something in response to a question I could then… get it wrong – the best thing to do is to stop answering detailed questions.’

Mr Quigley earlier said at no time had the SEC sought to interview or question him about those matters.

Alcatel-Lucent agreed last December to pay $US137 million in fines and penalties to settle the US charges relating to bribes paid in countries in Latin America and Asia between December 2001 and June 2006.

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Luxury marketers take note, according to a February 2011 Affluence Collaborative survey, wealthy internet users connect with brands on social networks for significantly different reasons than the general population. The social networks they use to do so are different, too.

Among the general population, the main reason cited for connecting with brands on social networks was to receive deals and discounts. This result from the Affluence Collaborative survey backs up earlier research from several sources on why consumers follow brands on social sites.

But according to Affluence Collaborative, this was a much lower priority for the wealthy. Their top reasons for following brands were due to a preexisting affinity for and a desire to be kept informed about the brand. The least-cited reason mentioned by all groups surveyed was to be entertained, suggesting that social media marketers still need to provide fans with value, even if it isn’t directly in the form of a coupon or sale.

These findings coincide with earlier research from ExactTarget, which showed that a huge component of liking a brand on Facebook was due not just to an affinity, but as a means of self-expression for others to see. This promotional desire was more pronounced in Facebook users than Twitter followers or email subscribers. Affluents then, in their “love of the brands” they connect with, are largely acting as brand ambassadors.

On the surface, a November 2010 L2 Think Tank survey might appear to contradict these findings. Affluent members of Gen Y (ages 19 to 33) cited promotions and offers as the main reason for engaging with brands on social media. Women were more likely than men to engage with brands in general and to want to receive offers. However, the survey included those who were “projected to earn $100,000 in the next two years”—meaning the respondents were more aspiring than actually affluent. The second biggest motivator was still an affinity for the brand.

Data from the Affluence Collaborative study also reveals that the affluent aren’t using the same social networks as the general population. Facebook was the No. 1 social network used by all groups surveyed, but LinkedIn and Twitter attracted affluent internet users at nearly double the rate of the general population.

Any marketer targeting affluent consumers needs to know not only where to reach that audience, but what appeals to them. For wealthy internet users, connecting with a brand is largely about the brand itself, not gimmicks and offers. Affluents need to see a consistent message that makes following a brand meaningful for self-expression, just like when buying a brand in real life. Watering down the brand in order to gain a large social following may drive away the very people trying to be reached.

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