Jon Stribling

My own piece of the Internet
 
Jon Stribling

How to beat online only retailers

I was cleaning my glasses the other day and they snapped in half. As a person with a very high prescription this was not good news. So I took myself off to the large Australian optical retailer, OPSM. The service was fantastic. Not only did they give me free contact lenses for a week so I could see, they made sure I had a comprehensive eye test and advised me to change the type of lenses I wore. Having done an online price check i know my flash new glasses will cost more, but I still walked out of their …

Process is the forgotten P

At Uni I had a professor given to pithy aphorisms like, “Don’t take drugs, masturbate instead. It’s better for you.” She was wildly unpredictable and a fantastic educator who could see beauty in a framework. To her the structuralism of Lacan, Jakobson, and de Saussere amongst others, was a beautiful tool she used to hack away at cultural texts to extract any meaning she wanted. Balkan politics, gender relations, sado-masochism, it was all up for grabs. Somewhat perversely, she was also enamoured of post-frameworks like post-structuralism and deconstruction as devices for staying relevant with the cool kids and keeping her …

So what went wrong?

As an IT veteran, I’ve spent many an anxious  night watching terminals waiting for the load to drop, a server to come up, or just looking for meaning in GB’s of log files. It sucks bug time. So I feel sorry for the technicians associated with Click Frenzy who right now are working feverishly to get the servers back up. They would be wondering what hit them and the marketing folks would be caught between congratulating themselves for accidentally making the right call and calling the IT folks to tell them how much money this is costing them. When the …

Will Click Frenzy work?

Inspired by the success of Cyber Monday, the post-Thanksgiving online sale in the USA, an Australian online retailer group have decided to create an Australian version – Click Frenzy. The online sale, which the promoters say will stop a nation, runs on the 20 November. With participants like Myer, Target, Just Jeans, Portmans, Dotti, Dick Smith, Bing Lee, Ted’s Cameras,  SurfStitch, StyleTread, The Iconic, DealsDirect, and Booktopia, Click Frenzy has created a pretty big buzz in the past week with reports in the print and tabloid media. Power Retail, the promoters of Click Frenzy reported that after a profile on A Current Affair, traffic to the Click Frenzy website spiked massively. Click Frenzy is an exciting …

Why people drive across town to save $2

In 2009 the Australian Banks were required to notify customers of the $2 fee to use an ATM belonging to another bank. According to The Age there has been a 40% drop of people using foreign ATM’s which surprised economists who had forecast that there would be a negligible change in consumer behaviour as a result of making a previously hidden fee visible. Apart from the absurdity of expecting economists to know anything about human behaviour, there should be no surprise about the results. To an economist or a bank $2 is a very small amount of money. To a …

Does social technology liberate or enslave?

So does social technology liberate us or enslave us? I was sitting at my local weekend cafe having a long macchiato (I know, I know) and the kids were having some babycinos when I spied a young bloke with four women sitting at a communal table across from me. There was an obvious attraction between them, there was hair touching, flicking, and preening. There was much touching and mutual adoration with the eyes. And they all had good hair. I watched with the indifference of a parent with two toddlers, tired and incapable of adult conversation let alone the idea …

Facebook is for community, not advertising

I read recently that 13 million Australian’s visit Facebook a week. That is a pretty serious number and a good reason why marketers should take Facebook seriously. Right? Well perhaps, but not in the way you think. According to WebTrends, Facebook’s advertising click through rates (CTR) are 0.051%, which is well below Google’s CTR of 0.4% and the industry average of 0.1%. Still, with a reach of 76% in Australia, Facebook cannot be ignored. So what this means is that Facebook is not the place for your advertising dollars, but it should still factor in your plans to build an …

SEO is not dead, just maturing

There has been a flurry of comment recently about how Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is either dead, or in the process of being violently clubbed to death by Google. The argument is best summed up in this Forbes article which says that traditional SEO is being subsumed by content marketing as a result of Google’s algorithm updates which prioritises community value and interaction over inbound links. We are told that the future is PR not SEO. SEO as a practice is evolving in response to a changing market, as it has always done. When I first discovered SEO in the 1990s, the …

Well duh, experience makes a difference

If you read up a newspaper recently you would have read that some fashion importers and wholesalers have stitched up deals to prevent Australian consumers buying goods cheaper on international websites and that consumers are up in arms. Australian retailers should be concerned. Almost 50% of Australian shoppers appear to be focused on getting the best price regardless of location. The latest ACMA research report (http://engage.acma.gov.au/commsreport/e-commerce/) into online shopping in Australia, reported that the number of online shoppers buying mostly from overseas had jumped to 19%, and that 29% of shoppers buy from overseas and Australian retailers equally. Some retailers …