Wingman Extraordinaire: Final Notes on the Shop.org Summit

One of the best things about the recent Shop.org even in Las Vegas was having my dear friend Alison Jeske – Director of Product Management at Drugstore.com, be my partner and official “sidekick” for two of my round table presentations – ‘Analyzing the Customer Experience’ and our very well attended ‘Critic’s Corner’ where she and I were allowed to play the Siskel and Ebert for Ecommerce.

We had a blast covering search, email and real time site examples; highlighting the good, the bad and the occasionally ugly sides of UI, site design, messaging and the like. I’ll refrain from going into presentations and evaluation specifics in fairness to the sites covered because those examinations were done for educational purposes.

So instead, here are a few things I will offer up:

1. I always get a positive response to one of my tried and true marketing recommendations which is to weekly test your keywords! For most of you merchants, I am certain there are 10-15 keywords or phrases that can really drive traffic and business. You should therefore be typing those keywords and phrases into each of your major search engines each week and reviewing not only your natural search results rankings, but the actual experience as well – see where you land when you click those links. Is it what you expected? Is it what you wanted?
2. And while we did not cover this in great depth during the show, I encourage you all to check out Alison’s latest insights captured last week during an interview at the Streaming Video West Conference. You can hear her shared thoughts on streaming video as presented on Woman’s Radio.

In closing, let me extend my personal and heartfelt thanks to Alison who proved to be the best round table and critic partner ever!