Wrapping up WordCamp Boston 2011

Photo by Peter Wood, cc-by-nc-nd license.

This last weekend I finally got drafted and posted Closing the Books on WordCamp Boston 2011 over on WCBOS site.

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Don’t Be a Tool – Content Management Strategy

Here are the slides and speakerrate info for the talk I gave yesterday at WordCamp Boston.

Although the slides themselves are less entertaining without my voiceover, video from the talk will be made available – and I will link to it here as soon as I have the url.

Slides:

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WordCamp Boston 2011

The other major reason I haven’t been very active here in the last few months is WordCamp Boston, coming up in just under two weeks (July 23rd and 24th).

This year’s camp promises to be even bigger than last years, with content from 30+ speakers spread out over one and half days at the Boston University student union. We’ve even got a pre-conference workshop the Friday before and a reception Saturday evening at the Microsoft NERD center.

If you haven’t already got tickets, you’ve missed regular registration, but you can still get in on late registration (which just means you’re in line after the regular registration folks for lunch and T-Shirts) for just $40.

Magento Imagine eCommerce Conference

Last week I had the opportunity to attend and speak (“With Friends Like These, Who Needs Revenue?“) at the inagural Magento Imagine eCommerce conference in LA. It was a great show, with way too much going on for a simple summary, but I’ll try my best here to capture some of the highlights and point to recaps by others.

First, some of the highlights from keynotes by those outside the Magento team:

• Blake Nordstrom, talking about being customer-driven, not just customer focused. Make sure you’re actually delivering something she wants, not just what technology makes possible. He also discussed Nordstrom’s much vaunted customer service, saying “if you’re talking about customer service, you’re not doing it.” Lastly, he touched on mobile-in-store and the fixed cash register as one of the worst parts of the whole customer (and associate) experience – something Nordstrom is actively working on
• Naveed Anwar (@nanwar) from PayPal (with the envious email address geek -at- x.com) talking about mobile commerce, and the extent to which it will be transformative, not just additive to the customer experience.
• Marten Mickos of Eucalyptus (and formerly MySQL AB) talking about the importance of Open Source and new versions of “Open” to the overal eCommerce ecosystem – lack of proprietary lock-in may be the ultimate lock-in, because knowing you can leave at anytime has a way of eliminating the desire to leave – forces competition on service and value.
• Brian Walker of Forrester (blog, @bkwalker) talking about “Agile Commerce.” It’s time to drop the “e” from eCommerce, “but since we’re in L.A., we can’t just drop the ‘e.’ We need to blow it the hell up.” Walker noted that by 2013, “51% of total US retail sales will be influenced by or made online.”
• Warren Adelman from GoDaddy (blog, @asocialcontract), sharing the history of their infamous SuperBowl commercials, and revealing that the first SuperBowl ad very nearly starred William Hung rather than the “GoDaddy Girl” – how the world might have been different had that happened!
• Alfred Lin from Sequoia Capital (@Alfred_lin) (and ex-Zappos) describing the history of PayPal and how it grew to success in “Growing a Billion Dollar Online Commerce Company.” (Slideshare link)

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Facebook Commerce 1.0? JC Penney’s Usablenet App

Last week I participated in two roundtable discussions at the PluggedIn Ventures Summit on Ecommerce.(There were lots of interesting tweets during the summit – search for the #pisummit hashtag). When the issue of Facebook for commerce (or F-Commerce) came up on the Social Commerce panel, I pointed to JC Penney’s new Facebook app store as an example of what’s wrong with F-Commerce. In this post I’ll expand a bit more on why I think that’s the case, and what that means to retailers looking to understand how Facebook fits broadly into their multi-channel strategy.

During the initial roundtable of the day, the discussion turned to Facebook, and its role as the new portal:

While I can understand the impulse to draw parallels between the role AOL held for many (especially media) companies in the early days of the (commercial) internet, I think we’ve got to be careful to not miss the lesson the portals never properly learned: on the web, everything else is always one click (or one tab, or one window) away.

In other words, Facebook may be the new portal, but does the concept of a portal even make sense in a world of multi-tabbed browsers, multi-tasking users, and multi-device access? If there ever was a world in which a portal could truly be the user’s starting point and the window through which that user viewed everything on the web (already a questionable claim), that day has long passed. Many web users spend significant amounts of time “on” or “in” Facebook, true, but what else are they doing at the same time?

The question becomes more than just academic when you come at it as a large scale retailer trying to create a strategy for Facebook.

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