Archive for November 2011
IBM Benchmark: Cyber Monday Online Spend Increases By 33 Percent Over 2010
So the IBM Benchmark is in for Cyber Monday’s online shopping extravaganza, and it appears that shopping from the office continues to king.
So much for post-Thanksgiving productivity at work!
Me, the only Cyber Monday deal I bought was a new version of VMWare Fusion for my MacBook Air. I’m a geek, and I like running multiple operating systems at the same time, what can I say? It also gave me a good excuse to try out the latest flavor of Ubuntu Linux (11.10).

Online sales for Cyber Monday stayed in line with previous years until a late afternoon surge pushed sales up 33.0% over Cyber Monday 2010.
But I was apparently in the minority. The U.S. Online retail sector delivered strong growth on Cyber Monday 2011 compared to the same period last year.
Here are the Cyber Monday headlines from the IBM Benchmark analysis:
- Cyber Monday 2011 Compared to Cyber Monday 2010 (year/year)
- Consumer Spending Increases: Online sales were up 33.0 percent over 2010, with consumers pushing the average order value up from $193.24 to $198.26 for an increase of 2.6 percent.
- Shopping Peaks at 11:05am PST/2:05pm EST: Consumers flocked online, with shopping momentum hitting its highest peak at 11:05am PST/2:05pm EST. Consumer shopping also maintained strong momentum after commuting hours on both the east and west coast.
- Mobile Sales and Traffic Grows: On Cyber Monday, 10.8 percent of people used a mobile device to visit a retailer’s site, up from 3.9 percent in 2010. Additionally, mobile sales grew dramatically, reaching 6.6 percent on Cyber Monday versus 2.3 percent in 2010.
- Cyber Monday 2011 Compared to Black Friday 2011
- Consumer Spending Increases: Online sales were up 29.3 percent over Black Friday.
- The Mobile Bargain Hunter: On Cyber Monday mobile traffic averaged 10.8 percent compared to 14.3 percent on Black Friday.
- Mobile Sales: Consumer sales on mobile devices reached 6.6 percent versus 9.8 percent on Black Friday.
- The Apple Shopper: Apple’s iPhone and iPad continued to rank one and two for mobile device retail traffic (4.1 percent and 3.3 percent respectively). Android maintained its position in third at 3.2 percent. Collectively iPhone and iPad accounted for 7.4 percent of all online retail traffic versus 10.2 percent on Black Friday.
- The iPad Factor: Shoppers using the iPad also continued to drive more retail purchases than any other device with conversion rates reaching 5.2 percent compared to 4.6 percent.
- The Social Influence: Shoppers referred from Social Networks generated 0.56 percent of all online sales on Cyber Monday versus 0.53 percent on Black Friday. Similar to Black Friday, Facebook led the pack, accounting for 86 percent of all social media traffic.
- Social Media Chatter: Discussions on social media sites leading up to Cyber Monday increased in volume by 115 percent compared to 2010. Top areas of discussion focused on consumers sharing tips about using price comparison websites while avoiding cyber scams, Cyber Monday deals for international consumers and conversations about Black Friday in-store shopping experiences.
“Cyber Monday was once again the big winner for the Thanksgiving holiday shopping season, with a record number of consumers focused on finding the best online deals,” said John Squire, Chief Strategy Officer, IBM Smarter Commerce. “Retailers that adopted a smarter approach to commerce, one that allowed them to swiftly adjust to the shifting shopping habits of their customers, whether in-store, online or via their mobile device, were able to fully benefit from this day and the entire holiday weekend.”
This news is based on findings from IBM’s fourth annual Cyber Monday Benchmark which tracks more than a million transactions a day, analyzing terabytes of raw data from 500 retailers nationwide.
With this data, IBM helps retailers better understand and respond to their customers – across the organization – improving sourcing, inventory management, marketing, sales, and services programs.
You can download the latest Cyber Monday IBM Benchmark report here.
From Black Friday To Cyber Monday: It’s All In The Clicks
Well, that day of the year has finally arrived.
That day where we all slink into our offices after four nice, long, official holidays where (mostly, we hope) people stay away from their computers and mobile phones and tablets and God knows whatever other else connected devices just long enough to make it feel like you got some real rest (even though many of you were probably dealing with unrelated, but similarly frustrating, realities —you know, like screaming kids and antagonizing in-laws).
And all you could do was think about how nice it would be to come back into the nice peaceful and quiet office on Monday so you could get back to…shopping.
Yes, boys and girls, cyber Monday has arrived.
But judging from the results of the IBM Coremetrics Benchmark Black Friday e-retailing analysis, you really need not worry about coming into the office anymore just so you can get yourself an extra slurp of broadband.
This is 2011, yo, all you gotta do is break out that iPad and you’ll be standing in front of Macys women’s wear or Best Buy’s electronics section in seconds!
But while you’re out there figuring out your Cyber Monday strategy, I’m going to hit the highlights reel for the weekend in e-shopping.
E-Retail Shopping: Hit ‘Em Early and Often
U.S shoppers apparently took great advantage of early sales this holiday, driving a 39.3 percent year-over-year increase in online Thanksgiving day spending while setting the stage for 24.3 percent online growth on Black Friday compared to the same period last year.
Here’s a quick snapshop of the other key trends:
- Consumer spending increases. The aggressive shopping we witnessed on Thanksgiving Day this year carried over into Black Friday, with online sales increasing 24.3 percent annually.
- Mobile Bargain Hunting. Black Friday also saw the arrival of the mobile deal seeker who embraced their devices as a research tool for both in-store and online bargains. Mobile traffic increased to 14.3 percent (compared to 5.6 percent last year).
- Mobile Sales On the Getgo. Sales on mobile devices surged to 9.8 percent (a tripling from last year’s 3.2 percent).
- Apple’s One Stop Shop. Mobile shopping was led by Apple, with the iPhone and iPad ranking one and two for consumers shopping on mobile devices (5.4 percent and 4.8 percent respectively). Together, the iPhone and iPad accounted for 10.2 percent of all online retail. Apparently, it ain’t easy bein’ an Android on Black Friday.
- The iPad Factor. Shoppers using the iPad led to more retail purchases more often per visit than other mobile devices, leading one to wonder about the real estate to deal closing ratio. The bigger the device, the larger the average order value? Possibly, but this number can’t lie: Conversion rates for the iPad were 4.6 percent, compared to 2.8 for all other mobile devices. The iPad was this weekend’s e-shopping mobile king.
- Social Influence. Shoppers referred from Social Networks generated 0.53 percent of all online sales on Black Friday, with Facebook leading the pack and accounting for a full 75 percent of all social network traffic.
- Social Media Chit Chat. Boosted by a 110 percent increase in discussion volume compared to 2010, top discussion topics on social media sites immediately before Friday showed a focus on the part of consumers to share tips on how to avoid the rush. Topics included out-of-stock concerns, waiting times and parking, and a spike in positive sentiment around Cyber Monday sales.
- Surgical Shopping Goes Mobile: Mobile shoppers demonstrated a laser focus that surpassed that of other online shoppers with a 41.3 percent bounce rate on mobile devices versus online shopping rates of 33.1 percent.
This data came from findings of the IBM Coremetrics fourth annual Black Friday Benchmark, which tracks more than a million transactions a day, analyzing terabytes of raw data from 500 retailers nationwide.
With this data, IBM helps retailers better understand and respond to their customers — across the organization — improving sourcing, inventory management, marketing, sales, and services programs.
You can get more background on the study here.
Social “Star Wars”: The IBM Software Social Intelligence Team
During my recent visit to Bangalore, I shot the attached video with my almost-new Canon S95 digital camera. This was a meeting we were having with our new “social intelligence” team there, a crack team of young, but very bright, social media listening superstars.
For far too long, I’ve been putting off learning how to use iMovie, but now that I have my handy MacBook Air 11″, complete with 128GB SSD drive and 4GB RAM, I decided it was time to put the Air, and myself, through the video test.
To demonstrate how easy it is to learn how to use iMovie, I walked into the tool this afternoon with virtually no real experience to speak of, and arrived at the product below about 2 hours later. Watch out, Spielberg and Scorcese, the Turbo knows (well, almost) how to produce a video now!
Thanks to the great team in Bangalore for patiently smiling into the camera as we made introductions to our WW team who were situated back in the States during this meeting.
IBM And Scripps Foundation: Crowdsourcing A Cure For Malaria
Consider this: In 2006, 247 million people became infected with malaria.
Nearly 1 million deaths are caused by malaria each year and 85 percent of those are children, who die from the disease at a rate of one every 30 seconds.
In fact, malaria is the leading cause of death in Africa for those under age five.
According to the World Health Organization, malaria is both a disease of poverty and a cause of poverty; survivors are often subject to impaired learning, school absences, lost work and increased economic distress. Where prevalent, the disease can account for 40 percent of all public health costs.
There is no reliable cure or vaccine for the prevention and treatment of all forms of malaria — particularly the drug-resistant strains caused by Plasmodium falciparum, which kills more people than any other parasite and is of particular interest to the researchers.
Crowdsourcing A Cure For Malaria
IBM’s Watson computing system broke new ground earlier this year when it defeated two celebrated human competitors on the “Jeopardy!” game show.
Now, The Scripps Research Institute is hoping to do something equally novel but more critical to human health with part of the prize money from that tournament: Find a cure for drug-resistant malaria.
And it’s asking for the public’s help.
Scripps Research and IBM are encouraging anyone in the world with a personal computer to join World Community Grid (WCG), a sort of “supercomputer of the people” that will crunch numbers and perform simulations for “GO Fight Against Malaria”—the project that Scripps Research and IBM have launched.
World Community Grid is fed by spare computing power from the nearly 2 million PCs that have been volunteered so far by 575,000 people in more than 80 countries.
Now that’s crowdsourcing!
Breaking It Down Into Wee Bits
WCG gives each PC small computing assignments to perform when the devices aren’t otherwise being used by its owners, then sends the results to scientists seeking a faster way to cure disease, find renewable energy materials, create clean water techniques, or develop healthier food staples.
Or, in this case, perform simulations for the fight against malaria.
Scripps Research, which has already used World Community Grid to discover two promising new inhibitors of HIV to advance the treatment of multi-drug-resistant AIDS, is now taking on the malaria project as well.
By tapping into World Community Grid — which turned seven years old just this past week — Scripps Research scientists hope to compress 100 years of computations normally necessary for the effort into just one year.
The scientists will use this resource to more quickly evaluate millions of compounds that may advance the development of drugs to cure mutant, drug-resistant strains of malaria.
Data from the experiments will then be made available to the public.
Elementary, My Dear Watson
Earlier this year, scientists for seven World Community Grid projects received half the $1 million first-place prize from the “Jeopardy!” game show tournament that saw IBM’s Watson computing system compete successfully against two former human champions.
Watson, named after IBM founder Thomas J. Watson, was built by a team of IBM scientists who set out to overcome a longstanding scientific challenge—building a computing system that rivals a human’s ability to answer questions posed in natural language with speed, accuracy and confidence.
“Working on malaria started as a hobby that I advanced during nights and weekends for a couple years, when I wasn’t working on FightAIDS@Home,” said Alex L. Perryman, Ph.D., a research associate in Scripps Research Professor Arthur Olson’s lab. “With persistence and a lot of help from IBM and from fellow Scripps Research scientists, we are now ready to launch the largest computational research project ever performed against drug-resistant malaria.”
The team at Scripps Research successfully proposed a project whose design and development would benefit from the winnings. Perryman, who describes the malaria project in more detail here, explained that “Without the funding provided by some of the money that Watson won on “Jeopardy!,” this Global Online Fight Against Malaria project would not have been possible.”
Background: World Community Grid
World Community Grid is one of IBM’s exciting philanthropic initiatives. Founded in 2004 and running on Berkeley Open Infrastructre for Network Computing (BOINC) software, it provides computational power available to scientists who might not otherwise be able to afford the high speed computing they require for timely research.
To date, 19 research projects have been hosted on World Community Grid, spinning off 30 peer-reviewed papers.
Nine of the projects it has hosted have generated particularly promising results that are being further researched, or followed up with a second phase on World Community Grid.
If it were a physical supercomputer, World Community Grid would be one of the world’s 15 fastest such machines.
Go here to learn more and to participate in this important new research effort and help the global fight against malaria.
IBM’s 2011 Midmarket CMO Study: Sustaining Brand Loyalty With Today’s Social Consumer
IBM is on a roll recently with its market research, and this go ‘round centers on the concerns of chief marketing officers (CMOs) in the midmarket (small-to-medium sized businesses).

CMOs from midsize firms are striking a better balance today between investing in solutions that drive efficiency and those that improve decision making, foster collaboration, and enhance customer relationships.
First, the headline: Building and sustaining brand loyalty is the top concern for midmarket CMOs, yet 72 percent of them are not sure how to effectively build this loyalty.
Additionally, 70 percent of these CMOs are concerned about data explosion, as they are tasked with making sense of highly complex information generated constantly from a variety of sources such as consumer blogs, Tweets, mobile texts, and videos.
Calgon, take me away!
The report also suggests that today’s CMOs need to be better prepared with an empowered consumer that is impacting brands instantly on Twitter, Facebook, and other social channels (Look no further than this week’s challenge that Bank of America faced when its Google+ channel was “brandjacked”!)
Sixty-one percent of midmarket are struggling with how to transform this shift into a business opportunity. Many CMOs are focused on understanding the markets versus understanding the individual consumer in order to shape marketing strategies.
Only 40 percent of midmarket CMOs are taking the time to understand and evaluate the impact of consumer generated reviews, blogs and third party rankings of their brands!
What’s the Problem?
The proliferation of social media and mobile devices is creating a new breed of consumer that is digitally savvy and is able to quickly compare and evaluate which products and services they want to buy.
Mobile commerce is expected to reach $31 billion by 2016, yet 62 percent of midmarket CMOs are not prepared to capture the business opportunity mobile commerce presents. This increase in the mobile shopping trend further increases marketing challenges, complicates data collection and analysis, and threatens both customer service and customer retention.
Like their peers in larger organizations, midmarket CMOs are also being held more financially accountable to their organizations to produce business outcomes at a faster pace.
The study also revealed that while midmarket CMOs believe ROI on marketing dollars spent will be the most important measuring stick for determining success of their business by 2015, the survey noted 72 percent of CMOs are unprepared for the plummeting level of brand loyalty.
Aside from current economic conditions, there’s an even bigger factor impacting brand loyalty.
Innovations in technology and the spread of social networking have provided buyers with new tools for discovering, comparing, evaluating, choosing and experiencing brands.
With the growth of social networks and a need for transparency, trust and personal exchanges between the consumer and the marketplace are now forming the cornerstone of small and midsize marketing efforts.
Everyday consumers are creating 2.5 quintillion bytes of data with 90 percent of the world’s data created in the last two years alone. Savvy marketers are gaining insight from social media and incorporating it into their strategies.
The key is predicting what consumers will want and then adapting marketing strategies to give them the right product when, where, and at what price they want it.
Today, retailers are embracing technologies such as analytics to make sense of massive amounts of data consumers are generating every single second to effectively target the individual consumer and enhance the shopping experience.
IBM Case Study: Lee Jeans Teams Works to Understand the Individual Consumer
Lee Jeans, one of the most recognizable apparel brands in the world faced the challenge of capturing and analyzing the huge volume of information being generated by a variety of sources before any merchandising decisions could be made on its website, Lee.com.
By adopting analytics technology, Lee employees now have the capability to quickly make informed decisions that will improve the consumer’s shopping experience.
Now, all the information that merchandisers need such as how well items sell, what is currently in stock and what consumers are saying through social media channels is organized into simple visuals that are shown over product thumbnail images on the Lee website.
With this visual layout that mirrors Lee.com, the merchandisers can easily move products around based on popularity and availability.
Merchandisers are able to see which products are being viewed most often and most importantly, which ones are being purchased most often. This ultimately allows the Lee team to display the site in a way that provides the best shopping experience for consumers.
Lee is now also able to obtain all product view data, online sales, abandonment rates and conversion rates to give Lee merchandisers a quick snapshot of product performance. Lee is also capturing consumer sentiment data generated from social media channels such as Facebook and brand rating website Bazaarvoice.
Facebook ‘Likes’and Bazaarvoice ratings are also included in the tool at the product level and these insights are used to help with marketing and merchandising decisions. Using social media and analytics Lee can now make faster and more informed merchandising decisions targeted at its customers with a simple click of the mouse
Go here for more information on the IBM Mid-Market CMO Study.
You can also register for the IBM Smarter Commerce webcast on Nov. 17 at 10am ET to learn more.