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| Wenatex
New Information Management Solution Awakens Business Insight at Sleep System Retailer |
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| Potbelly Sandwich Works
Restaurant Boosts Revenues 2.5 Percent by Giving Performance Data to Managers |
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| Danske
Danish Supermarket Group Manages 10 Terabytes of Business Intelligence with SQL Server 2005 |
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| Acosta
Retail Services Provider Deploys 2.2-Terabyte Data Warehouse to Better Serve Clients |
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| Culver Franchising Systems, Inc.
Retailer Improves Operations with Microsoft Business Intelligence Solution |
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| Schoolkidz/Staples
ERP Software Upgrade Fuels Collaboration and Growth for Online School-Supply Retailer |
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| InMotion Entertainment
Airport Retailer Gains Real-Time Insight into Inventory with New Business Solution |
2009 Is Year Mobile Commerce Shifts into High Gear : http://bit.ly/Reo9P #retail 8:09 AM May 13th from twhirl
Online Services Delivers Enterprise-Class Communications to Growing Retail Business: http://bit.ly/8YCK5 8:01 AM May 13th from twhirl
Digital Issue of the latest RetailSpeak magazine: http://bit.ly/Tm4Hf #retail 6:49 PM May 12th from twhirl
SCCM helps Total Wine store employees focus on their customers and not worry about their IT infrastructure: http://bit.ly/m9orL #retail 6:35 PM May 7th from Seesmic Desktop
Hard Rock and DeepZoom: http://bit.ly/k6TNG #retail1:51 PM May 7th from Seesmic Desktop
RT @microsofttag: More Than Meets The Eye: http://tinyurl.com/cdyrcu .. i see some amazing opps with deepzoom + tag for online shopping 1:33 PM May 7th from Seesmic Desktop
awesome retail casestudy from Jamba Juice (via @SharePointWrTSF): http://bit.ly/XIQcE #SharePoint #BI10:41 AM May 5th from Seesmic Desktop
Tech Support / Troubleshooting via Social Media: http://bit.ly/2i9hF8:41 AM May 1st from twhirl
This morning, I was excited to hear that Kindle Publishing is now open to all blogs. I tested out the beta at http://kindlepublishing.amazon.com/ and found it very simple to use. All I had to do was create an account, and enter the details of my blog including the feed, thumbnails and a description. Amazon will make the blog available in the Kindle Store within 48-72 hours. According to the site, you will get paid 30% of the monthly blog subscription price for every subscriber to your blog and it also says in an FAQ “Amazon will define the price based on what we deem is a fair value for customers”. It also appears that you can’t make your blog free if you chose to, and I certainly hope that changes. In addition to making your blog available to Kindle users via the Kindle Store there are other options that I have been experimenting with to make blog updates available through other media. This blog is now available as a kindle download via the Kindle Store.
Magcloud is another option that I am experimenting with and can be viewed as the future of magazine publishing. Magcloud is the option for the rest of us that don’t use Kindles. Paper still holds its magic for many of us that refuse to be drawn to reading off a screen. You can create an account at http://magcloud.com/ and register your blog to be available for conversion to a printed magazine. I tested this out by exporting my wordpress blog out as XML and then converting the articles to a PDF file using http://www.blogbooker.com/ . It’s a fairly simple process of uploading the PDF to Magcloud and making it available for subscribers.
I also use http://www.TwitterFeed.com to automatically twitter my blog posts out to the twittersphere. This is an excellent way to notify people of blog entries and also to automatically twitter RSS Feeds from multiple blogs to your twitter account. I also use this for my group twitter account where several of my team mate’s blogs are automatically twittered through a single twitter account. Between these methods and RSS Feed Syndication using services such as http://www.blogburst.com , there are several ways in which you can make your blog available across different social media.
With the growth of Social Networks and Communities, we see a lot of conversations, recommendations of products and services happening outside of the retailer’s site. This presents an excellent opportunity for retailers to syndicate their product catalogs right to the place where the conversations and recommendations happen: blogs, social rating sites, social networking sites and other affiliate sites. I love what companies like Best Buy, Tesco, Amazon and EBay have done by making their APIs available for developers to integrate into their sites.
Best Buy Remix is the open API for Best Buy’s product catalog, featuring full product information including pricing, availability, specifications, descriptions and images for nearly a million current and historical products. It can be accessed via http://remix.bestbuy.com/ . I wasn’t aware that Best Buy had an affiliate program as well: you will notice the signup link there as well.
Through the Amazon Associates Web Service API developers can retrieve product information and access e-commerce functionality. This allows developers, web site publishers and others to leverage the data that Amazon uses to power its own business, and potentially make money as an Amazon affiliate. https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/advertising/api/detail/main.html
Tesco has its own API web to access the Grocery catalog at https://www.lansleytech.com/tescoapiweb/ . Check out Nick Lansleys blog for more information: http://techfortesco.blogspot.com/
The eBay API at http://developer.ebay.com/common/api/ enables developers to submit items for listing on eBay, get current listings and eBay categories and more.
We are not only seeing more and more retailers make their APIs available so that they can be wherever their customers are but we are also seeing Social Networking sites open up so that you can take your networks to shopping sites for a true social shopping experience.
I have been using the terms Social Network, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Web, Social Software at random in the past. Over the weekend, I decided I want to really narrow down my usage of the terms. I feel that the term Social Web describes the mix of social Networks, collaborations, sharing content, crowdsourcing, social shopping, blogging, wikis, social tagging and more. Somehow, the Social Web, to me conveys the image of an ecosystem that enables all of the capabilities that we have come to love.
At the same time, the term Social Web seems to indicate the ecosystem on the internet and not necessarily the enterprise ecosystem. For me, social computing is all about enterprise applications leveraging the power of social to empower people with the social connections and capabilities to empower them further. So for now, I will be using the term Social Web to describe the ecosystem on the internet and Social Computing to describe it within the firewall. I would love to know your thoughts.
The early 90s didn't have as many options for going viral compared to today but in 1992 Snapple found out that not paying attention to customer conversations can be very damaging to business. Snapple initially tried to quell these rumors quietly, but eventually had to launch a media campaign to squash them, pointing out it would be bad for business to support controversial issues in such a way as the rumors implied.
Over the last few days, the internet and media was abuzz with the news about Dominos Pizza. Two Domino’s Pizza employees filmed a prank in the restaurant’s kitchen and decided to post it online. It didn’t take long for the viral power of social media to kick in and result in more than a million viewers view the videos. This is the kind of public relations nightmare that any retailer dreads.
Installing cameras seems like an obvious answer to thwarting a repeat of the incident. However, the real threat is in the snowballing of issues on the internet by not addressing it quickly enough before it goes out of hand. I think that social media monitoring should an important focus for any organization.
Social Media Monitoring can be as simple as using search engines to searching for keywords using complex social media monitoring tools. One of the simplest social media monitoring tools that I have implemented is to use a web part on our team portal site that shows a continuous feed of search results and twitter feeds with specific keywords. This information is available to anyone that visits the portal site and they can choose to respond to any of the tweets when they see something that requires attention. Here is a post that talks about the simple things that a company can do to monitor their social media presence in ten minutes a day: http://bit.ly/zvZLd
There are also several tools that you can use for monitoring and protecting your reputation on the internet. One such tool is Trackur, an online reputation monitoring tool designed to assist you in tracking what is said about you on the internet. Trackur scans web pages--including news, blogs, video, images, and forums--and lets you know if it discovers anything that matches the keywords that interest you. Another example is Visible Technologies that provides brands, including Microsoft, Panasonic and Hormel, the ability to bolster brand reputation, build revenue and measure the success of social media engagement. The company's TruCast®2.0 social media monitoring and engagement platform launched in May 2008. Radian6 seems to be a popular solution for engaging with social media.
Here is a list of some excellent tools for managing your online reputation:
· Social Mention is a social media search engine that searches user-generated content such as blogs, comments, bookmarks, events, news, videos, and microblogging services.
· BlogPulse from Nielsen Online. BlogPulse is an automated trend discovery system for blogs.
· Trendpedia finds the articles online that talk about your topics. Trendpedia organizes the articles in a trendline that shows the popularity of the topic over time — you can track a topic’s trendline from three months ago up to today
A few weeks ago, I had a meeting with a group of CIOs from the Food Services Industry and we had quite an interesting conversation around Enterprise Social Computing. During the conversation, we came to the conclusion (among many others) that organizations should not be looking at how to leverage Social Computing just because its the latest buzzword but rather look at the existing business challenges that they have and adopt Social Computing concepts and technologies to make the solution of those challenges easier. In this table, I have attempted to map some of the common business challenges against Web 2.0 technologies that these challenges could benefit from.
Most retailers that I meet with have already been exploring social media from the perspective of marketing, building customer communities and social shopping. In addition to this they are exploring ways that they can use the power of social computing within the organization. We have explored various areas in which the power of social computing can benefit organizations. This is a brief list of some of the areas that we have deployed solutions in, within organizations. Each of these areas has the traditional approach to it, and what I’ll call the Web 2.0 approach, that makes use of technologies and concepts such as Crowd Sourcing, Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, PSM’s, RSS Feeds, Instant Messaging, Unified Communication, Microblogging, Virtual Meetings.
- Employee Training
- Crisis Management
- Recruitment
- Employee Retention
- Marketing
- Customer Support
- Collaboration and Communication
- Knowledge Management
- Ideation and Innovation
Have you seen any other areas within the organization that could benefit from social computing? Feel free to comment. I will dive into each one of these areas in future postings
Solution Accelrators are free tools and guidance from Microsoft. These can help accelerate the assessment, planning and deployment of Microsoft technology. I have been working with several retailers in the past few weeks that are evaluating Sharepoint for Vendor Collaboration as well as Intranet deployments and were seeking resources to help them with make some of their planning decisions. All of the solution accelerators can be found at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/solutionaccelerators/default.aspx but here is a list specific to SharePoint:
The Collaboration suite provides guidance and automated tools to proactively plan, integrate, deploy and operate SharePoint technologies.
The Microsoft Online Services suite provides guidance that automates discovery and assesses requirements for migration to speed up the onboarding and migration process with Online Services products.
For years, Business Intelligence has consistently been top of mind for executives. Given the current economic turbulence, commodity pricing and increased competition, there is an explosive demand for insight - the ability to connect people, data and systems to provide the right information at the right time and in the right format to make a real impact on the business.
Join Aberdeen Group, Microsoft, ProfitBase, RedPrairie, Torex and TXT e-solutions for a webcast on how technology can help you address the need for accurate and accessible data everywhere, anytime on any device, to make better and faster decisions at a low total cost of ownership.
The webcast, on March 17 – 7:00 – 8:00 am PST/ 15:00 – 16:00 GMT will address the following:
- Business and Operational Intelligence in the Current Economic Environment
David Hatch, Research Director, Business Intelligence – Aberdeen Group - Business Insight for Consumer Goods, Hospitality and Retail –
Leveraging Technology
Jan de Jong, Industry Solutions Manager, Microsoft Corporation - Delivering Business Insight to Everyone, Faster and Cheaper
Willem Haring, Business Development Manager, ProfitBase - Performance Management for your Retail and Supply Chain Enterprise
John Russo, VP, Performance Management Solutions, RedPrairie - Torex BA Retail Insight Out of the Box
Stuart Dean, Product Manager Solutions Management, Torex - Value Chain Intelligence for Superior Business Performance
Stefano Lena, VP Global Sales, TXT e-solutions
Please click here to register for the session on March 17.
We look forward to sharing our insights with you.
The Microsoft Retail Industry Team is now on Twitter. You can follow us via http://twitter.com/msretail for regular updates, news and events. We will also be using this account to tweet from Industry events and conferences.
Impulse buying can account for a significant percentage of all supermarket purchases (I've seen different research reports peg it between 20% to 60%. One of the latest reports puts it closer to 20% See article).
Market Basket Analysis enables retailers to discover which items tend to be bought together. Retailers use it to understand the purchase behavior of groups of customers, and use it for cross-selling, store design, discount plans and promotions. A great example of cross selling is Amazon.com's recommendation engine that gives you suggestions of books you may like based on your purchases.
Microsoft SQL Server 2008 empowers informed decisions with predictive analysis through intuitive data mining ─ seamlessly integrated within the Microsoft Business Intelligence platform and extensible into business applications.
SQL Server Analysis Services 2008 has many rich and innovative data mining algorithms, most developed by Microsoft Research to support common business problems promptly and accurately. One of the algorithms enables Market Basket Analysis.
This VIDEO WALKTHROUGH shows how you can use the Shopping Basket Analysis Tool within Excel 2007.
To test this out you will need:
- SQL Server 2008 (Download Evaluation version)
- Excel 2007 (Download Evaluation version)
- Download the Data Mining Add-ins for Office 2007
An excellent opportunity to learn more about Sharepoint 14: Check out the Early Bird Registrations. With many Retailers already running Sharepoint for their Intranet and Extranet sites the new capabilities are certainly worth looking at. A great example is the Kroger site built on Sharepoint. You can also find several case studies of retailers improving employee efficiency using Sharepoint at CASE STUDIES
I have been exploring several solutions that would enable retailers to reduce the usage of paper at the store level. Retailers can opt in for several solutions that include Digital Receipts, Digital Coupons, Digital Shopping Lists and so on.
I've seen several solutions that address Paperless Receipts and recently heard about TransactionTree at the NRF Expo. The TransactionTree Solution enables retailers running a point of sale system to provide an electronic proof of purchase. The application captures an image of the paper reciept and emails it to the customer. In addition, it also makes it available through TransactionTree's NoMo Paper web based portal.
Another solution that I have been exploring is the Digital Receipts Platform from Third Solutions. The Digital Receipts network provides the tools and documentation necessary for Point of Sale and online shopping cart developers to quickly update their solution to start generating and storing digital receipts using the ARTS Digital Receipt XML Standard.
The ARTS Digital Receipt standard is the result of a two-year effort by retail and technology industry leaders. The Digital Receipt Alliance -- whose members included Office Depot, Home Depot, VISA, NCR, HP-Verifone, Intuit, Microsoft, America Online, and Valicert -- initiated work on this effort.
There are several solutions out there that work with the Digital Receipt Standard and I'm curious about actual implementations by Retailers.
I have talked about Digital Coupons and Digital Shopping lists (also this) in previous posts and think that these and other solutions can help further green the retail store environment.
Interesting Solutions to enable retailers to reduce paper at the store:
- CellFire - Digital Coupons
- Knotler - Mobile Shopping Lists
- Ikan - Automated Grocery Lists
- Transaction Tree - Digital Receipts
- Digital Receipts Network - Digital Receipts
- MediaCart - Computerized Shopping Carts can provide marketing and promo info on screen
Check out other ways that Microsoft can help retailers achieve their green goals: http://www.microsoft.com/environment/
