Mary Meeker writes one of my favorite trends report each year, Morgan Stanley's Technology Trends.  This makes for great weekend reading.  It gives you both a US and global perspective on the trends most affecting the technology industry broadly, primarily from a B2C perspective.  It has already been forwarded to me by many of the [...]

Early this week Christian Carlsson, IBM Site Architect, wrote about IBM’s new Blue Business Platform for Small and Medium Businesses.  In his words, “the Blue Business Platform is a marketplace where IBM partners and software developers can market and sell their solutions online to small and mid-size companies across the globe.”  The plan is [...]

Several weeks back (this post has been percolating for a while), I received or interacted with three different examples of "green marketing" in a 24-hour period. 
The first was a banner ad from The Home Depot, which promoted two eco-friendly products, encouraging shoppers to "Go Green & Save." 
The second was a catalog from Design Within [...]

My father, Brian Douglas Hurt, passed away last night at 3am.  He passed in his sleep from a sudden heart attack and, fortunately, it seems like it happened almost immediately.  I got the call from my sister around 3:15am, and I have been ever up since, holding my mother, her, and my niece after it [...]

Land of Nod, a subsidiary of Crate and Barrel, offers unique, whimsical children’s furniture, toys, and accessories. These are high-consideration purchases, and they knew customer reviews could help shoppers make more confident decisions. After going live in March 2008, we sat down with Michelle Kohanzo, Marketing Manager, to see how Ratings & Reviews impacts their [...]

By Andrea Abdine, Community Manager
President’s Choice recently launched with Ask & Answer and they got great participation from their customers right off the bat. They did something new and innovative with Ask & Answer by selecting a particular group of customers, the "green thumbs," to get engaged in their community. They called the initiative "Green [...]

Seth Brady, a Director at PC Connection, wrote a terrific summary of his top 5 takeaways from the Bazaarvoice Social Commerce Summit a few weeks ago. Here is his post, along with 'reaction' and 'bottom line' summaries to these top five top takeaways:
   1. Lesson #1: Negative Reviews: Expect them AND embrace them.    [...]

As chief marketing officer you might think I'm most interested in excellent whitepapers, PR, events and such. Well…ok, I am. However, our culture and our people are a much higher priority for our success and our brand because our employees ARE our company. Your employees ARE your company. There are studies that prove employee satisfaction [...]

By Andrew Chen, Ask & Answer Product Manager

Earlier this month, we launched enhanced functionality for Ask & Answer so users can upload multiple images and captions with their questions or answers. Images can serve to clarify a question or paint a series of visual steps to solve a problem.  The Home Depot, Canada is one [...]

As everyone now knows, last night was a historic one in the U.S.  But did you also know that Obama made history for how innovative his online campaign was?
We had the pleasure of hosting Kelly Mooney, President of Resource Interactive and my peer on the Shop.org Board of Directors, as one of our keynote speakers [...]