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Collective Buying Power- Is Social commerce the next big Internet play?

Paul McSweeney — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 08:57:20 +0000

Collective buying power is when a group of consumers come together and use the old rule of thumb, there’s power in numbers, to leverage the group size in exchange for discounts.(source Wikipedia)
Collective Buying power is nothing new, but with the advent of social networks, internet companies are leveraging this concept with considerable success. This is social commerce – the use of social media in the context of e-commerce. It has never been easier to form social networks, and we know that we are all on the hunt for a deal! Take Groupon (www.groupon.com)- the main “social commerce” web site in the US. They already have 4m users in the US and this number is growing fast. Their target is 100m users, and the recent financing deal has valued the company at an eye-watering $1.35bn.
I see a number of reasons for the rapid growth of this. Peer recommendations are the strongest form of advertising, and if your friend sends you a discount voucher or recommends something to you; you are much more likely to go for it, than if a company has pushed it on to you. We know that social media gives the customer control rather than the advertiser, and this is simply another example of that. Through promoting the offer via their social network, the customer (and not the promoter) gets to decide whether it is a success or not. The seller is the individual and not the company. It is a trusted environment, and that is key. The potential for sales from a company perspective is huge if done right. Just think about it. You as the company send a customer an offer on 2 for 1 lunches provided 50 people come through the door on a certain day. The customer likes it and tells 3 friends. They in turn tell 3 friends. And so on. A viral loop is created via social networks. You can track the message, how it has been received, who has responded to it and the call-to -action. As a means of clearing stock for firms, this can be one of the most powerful means yet. Watch this space. Groupon have probably had another 100 subscribers in the time it has taken me to write this blog!

Here is an introductory video to show what it’s all about Collective Buying Power

Social Media: Are we making the right moves?

Paul McSweeney — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 13:06:26 +0000

We continue to twitter, add blogs, post articles we feel are relevant to our “followers”, but are they really out there and taking all this information in; never mind acting upon it? Social Media can be frustrating, and seem that at times, we are simply getting no return for our efforts. But we know at Severn Internet, that social media, has generated significantly more enquiries and ultimately business for our clients. So we know it works, and encourage you all NEVER to give up on it!

But we have put together a few of the common mistakes that are made in Social Media, in the hope that you can avoid the pitfalls, and ensure you make the time spent on social media much more effective.

1. Don’t follow people for the sake of it! You will spend too much time being interrupted by irrelevant tweets, blog posts and status updates. Results are achieved slowly, and over time. Followers, “friends” etc. does not equal sales necessarily.

2. You don’t need to use every social media tool. Focus on the social media sites that are most relevant to you and your business. The ones that are a good fit to you. If you are selling holidays to the over65s, then designing a glitzy page and profile on MySpace will not be the cleverest move you will make.

3. No flash in the pan. It is not easy to keep going..we know that, and we sympathise with you. If you are not prepared for the long haul, you simply won’t get anywhere. You need to have a long-term social media strategy.

4. Don’t treat it as kids stuff either! Give it the respect that it deserves..it is not easy, and you must not take your company’s online reputation in any way for granted. Set expectations and create policies in-house to enhance your online reputation.

5. Social Media is not free. You can sign-up for accounts on Twitter and Facebook for free, sure, but your goals will not happen without a significant investment in time and money. Start allocating a budget and some resources to it ..no budget, no time = No results.

6. Don’t say things for the sake of it! Your company has far too much to lose if you ruin your online reputation. Make everything relevant, honest, and in line with the values of your company and your clients.

7. Measure your progress..set realistic monthly targets for social media. Experiment all the time, but benchmark the time and money against the targets. Social Media, like all other marketing efforts, must result in a positive ROI/ Return on Investment.

8. It won’t happen overnight..small steps…

We know it’s not easy; but our clients continue to be surprised by the measurable results they are achieving working with us on their social media strategies. Drop us a line, and let’s see what we can do for you!

Three Tuns Brewery goes from strength to strength

David Harrison — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 13:12:39 +0000

I make no bones about the fact that John from the Three Tuns Brewery is one of my best mates, but that doesn’t guarantee you a mention on this blog! Even if you are the oldest licenced brewery in the UK!

I thought I should write up a little post about how well the brewery are doing. I played golf with John last Friday and he tells me that they are even getting business from Twitter now – which of course I will claim full credit for putting him onto! The Shropshire Star wrote a good article on his tweets last week – click here to read what they said.

In my opinion a brewery, like any other business, needs to have excellent customer service. Having a number of John’s clients as clients myself I know that they are really good, but it is the fact that certain things others fall down on are considered “de rigeur” that sets them apart – if I was running a pub I would want to know that my beer would arrive on time – apparently this is not a given in the licenced trade, but it is with The Three Tuns Brewery who have never been late with a delivery since John and Bill took it over.

They are really busy and approaching capacity again – John even suggested there might be a waiting list soon! My advice therefore is get in touch with them sooner rather than later – my personal recommendations would be the XXX and Clerics Cure beers – excellent, if a tad too moreish!

I’m sure John would also agree that their website, designed and built by Severn Internet of course, has not done them any harm either!

Congratulations Matthew … and Pippa!

David Harrison — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 12:24:43 +0000

Everyone here at Severn Internet would like to extend our congratulations to Matthew and Pippa on the birth of their baby girl Elsie, who we understand weighed in at just under 7lb. Mother and baby are doing well. We look forward to wetting the baby’s head Matt!!

Server upgrade commences next week …

David Harrison — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 13:00:53 +0000

It is easy to forget that if your website crashes, your business is also affected. You probably won’t receive any emails either unless you run your own Exchange server.

At Severn Internet we recognise this and that is why we have always hosted our client sites on a quality dedicated server. For those of you who wonder why hosting costs can vary so much it is more than likely that you are not comparing like with like. When we say a “dedicated” server we mean exactly that – our server only has our sites on it. This means that you are not potentially sharing your site with some dodgy porn site that could end up getting your own site blacklisted by Google through no fault of your own!

As a company, Severn Internet uses Rackspace to look after our server. They are by no means the cheapest, but as with most things in life you get what you pay for. A server is just like any other computer – it will occasionally develop some sort of glitch – what one needs is a company that fixes those glitches quickly – that is why we use Rackspace and also recommend them to those clients who need their own server too.

After a couple of years happily living in one box, we are going to be moving our sites to a new server over the next few weeks. For those of a technical nature, this is the spec of the new machine:

Dell 2970
OS : Red Hat 5 (64 bit)
PLESK 8 (unlimited domains with Spam Assassin and Dr Web)
Processor: Single Quad Core AMD Opteron 2347 processor
RAM: 4 GB RAM
Hard drive: 4 x 146 GB SAS Hard drives
RAID: – Hardware RAID 5
Hot swappable drives
Dual power supplies, Nics, Fans
Fanatical support,
Rackwatch Platinum
Managed Backup Agent + MySQL Agent

It is rather a good machine and has all the usual security, firewalls and back up you would expect. We look forward to improving our client’s hosting environment over the next few weeks.

If you are unhappy with your current hosts, please give us a call and we will be more than happy to give you a quote on our managed hosting services.

Pay your employees to leave!

David Harrison — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 10:24:16 +0000

It is surprising what one comes across after a period of random surfing, but this one was pretty amazing to me. I ended up there from reading about Amazon’s takeover of Zappos, but the Zappos culture is surely one of the reasons why they are so successful http://bit.ly/T0pWt gives you more information, but in a nutshell Zappos gives people the option to walk away early with a $1000 bonus! Sounds crazy? As they say though, it does mean that you know everyone who stays is a committed employee!

At Severn Internet don’t go quite that far, but we do have relatively relaxed working practices with people working from home, coming in a bit later or other such things. I think a relaxed environment makes for a more productive environment – no doubt they will all be in here soon asking for tomorrow off! It also helps the environment of course so a good thing all round really.