Shopping In The Great White North

IBM recently announced a big win in its “smarter commerce” initiative. SHOP.CA, Canada’s largest online e-commerce marketplace, is using analytics software from IBM’s smarter commerce initiative to help engage increasingly empowered online consumers in a unique shopping experience, and build loyalty and sense of community.

A recent IBM survey of more than 2,000 Canadians showed friends and family are by far the most trusted influencers on purchasing decisions, but retailers are also gaining trust among shoppers here.

The same research also identified a growing movement among consumers to use social media to build communities with others who share their interests and tastes, and who consume the same. These strangers then help the consumer make more relevant discoveries and satisfying purchases.

SHOP.CA: One Stop Online Shopping

SHOP.CA’s online marketplace features millions of products across 26 categories and billions in multi-merchant inventory. Its website offers Canadians one-stop access to national and international brands, free shipping, free returns and no cross-border fees.

Also hosting a powerful loyalty program, SHOP.CA Rewards Dollars are offered for both purchases and online activities that generate a purchase, such as sharing a link to a favorite product with a friend, or posting written or video reviews to social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.

“With SHOP.CA, shopping will be forever changed in Canada,” says Don Tapscott, author and world leading business strategist. “It’s going to make shopping ‘social.’ People will become deeply engaged in the community. They’ll learn from each other. They’ll be able to collaborate, and because of the loyalty programs, they’re going to want to come back.”

SHOP.CA selected IBM’s technology as the e-commerce engine to power its consumer storefront, multi-merchant product catalog and SHOP.CA rewards program. IBM will also provide analytics on how site visitors behave and interact, as well as track their searching and buying histories. This data will get SHOP.CA insight on how, when and where to reach shoppers with content and offers personalized to their taste and preferences via mobile or social vehicles.

Smarter Commerce: A $20 Billion Software Market

Estimated at $20 billion for software alone, IBM has defined smarter commerce, a new, unfolding market driven by Web, social and mobile technologies which put more power in the hands of customers.

Today, 70 percent of the consumer’s first interaction with a product or service takes place online, and 64 percent of consumers make a first purchase because of a digital experience. Under the terms of the agreement, IBM is providing SHOP.CA with Coremetrics web analytics delivered through the cloud and IBM WebSphere Commerce Professional.

Go here to learn more about IBM “smarter commerce” solutions.

In the video below, Scott Laningham and I interview Don Tapscott at this year’s SXSW Interactive Festival about how digital technology is changing our world, detailing for us mere mortals its impact on business, education, children, and beyond.

Live @ IBM Smarter Commerce Global Summit Madrid: IBM Product Manager Mark Frigon On Smarter Web Analytics & Privacy

Mark Frigon is a senior product manager with IBM’s Enterprise Marketing Management organization, a key group involved in leading IBM’s Smarter Commerce initiative. Mark’s specialties are in Web analytics (he joined IBM as part of its acquisition of Coremetrics) and Internet privacy, an issue that has come to the forefront in recent years for digital marketers around the globe.

Effective Web metrics are critical to the success of businesses looking to succeed in e-commerce and digital marketing these days, and IBM has a number of experts who spend a lot of their time in this area.

One of those here in Madrid at the IBM Smarter Commerce Global Summit, Mark Frigon, is a senior product manager for Web analytics in IBM’s Enterprise Marketing Management organization.

Mark sat down with me to discuss the changing nature of Web analytics, and how dramatically it has evolved as a discipline over the past few years, including the increased focus by marketers on “attribution,” the ability to directly correlate a Web marketing action and the desired result.

Mark also spoke at the event about the importance for digital marketers around the globe to be more privacy-aware, a topic we also discussed in our time together, calling out in particular the “Do-Not-Track” industry self-regulatory effort that intends to put privacy controls in the hands of consumers.

If you spend any time thinking about Internet privacy or Web analytics, or both, this is a conversation you won’t want to miss.

IBM Leads New Forrester Wave For Web Analytics

Yesterday I wrote a detailed post about the recent IBM 2011 Global CMO study, which offered a variety of interesting findings.

The first of the four key challenges mentioned that CMOs believe they will be facing moving forward was the massive explosion of data, and how they as CMOs reckon with that.

As the study mentioned, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data a day — so much that 90 percent of the world’s data today has been created in the last two years alone.

Put your head around that piece of data.

Hence, the increasing volume, variety and velocity of data available from new digital sources like social networks, in addition to traditional sources such as data and market research, tops the list of CMO challenges.

The challenge, of course, is how to analyze these vast quantities of data to extract meaningful insights and then use them to improve products, services or the customer experience.

Web Analytics Leads To Market Intelligence

One way to help with corporate Web sites is through Web analytics.  IBM has invested in this space through its acquisitions of both Coremetrics and Unica (which had an enterprise Web metrics solution entitled “NetInsights”).

Forrester Research recently placed IBM at the head of the Web Analytics pack in its most recent Wave report on the subject.

Forrester Research recently published their Wave report for Web Analytics, and in so doing named IBM has one of the Leaders and, in fact, putting IBM in the lead position on its Wave chart.

Not to say that IBM didn’t have some solid competition. Forrester noted four vendors lead the market, including Adobe, comScore and Webtrends.

Yet while the other three vendors had their own unique attributes, it was IBM which “viewed web analytics as a key component of its enterprise marketing management portfolio.”

In the Wave, IBM had perfect scores in corporate strategy and a top rating on current offering. This validation comes at less than 12 months following the acquisition of Coremetrics and Unica (forming the Enterprise Marketing Management portfolio), and provides further market recognition of IBM’s  Smarter Commerce initiative.

The Digital Marketing Optimization Suite is a key solution supporting this initiative.  While this Wave focused specifically on web analytics, IBM’s real strategic commitment is in helping organizations respond to shifting consumer and business trends.

In this way, IBM’s web analytics offerings are considered a critical component of the Smarter Commerce initiative, designed to transform how companies manage and adapt to customer and industry trends such as online, social and mobile shopping.

Leadership ratings for IBM’s Digital Marketing Optimization Suite come as a tribute to the powerful combination of capabilities from Coremetrics and Unica NetInsight, now a single on-demand offering that fuses customer profiles, web analytics, and digital marketing execution to enable marketers to turn site visitors into repeat customers and loyal advocates by orchestrating a compelling experience throughout each customer’s digital lifecycle.

Here’s what Forrester had to say about IBM’s enterprise marketing management capability:

IBM. Since our previous evaluation, IBM acquired both Coremetrics and Unica in 2010. IBM has consolidated these companies into its Enterprise Marketing Management software division, and product portfolio integration is under way. IBM is incorporating the complementary and notable features of Unica NetInsight into a merged web analytics solution based on the Coremetrics platform. To stay ahead, IBM must execute on its vision for enterprise marketing by completing the product integrations in progress, gaining market traction for major initiatives such as Smarter Commerce, and creating synergies between web analytics and other IBM assets such as eCommerce, business intelligence, and predictive modeling.

Go here if you’d like to learn more about this report and to learn more about IBM’s enterprise marketing management strategy.

Closed Coremetrics Deal To Provide IBM Customers Smarter Web Metrics

IBM announced today it had closed its acquisition of San Mateo, CA-based Coremetrics, a leader in Web analytics.

This acquisition will extend IBM’s business analytics capabilities by enabling organizations to gain real-time insight into consumer interactions.

It will also enhance IBM’s ability to help businesses rapidly gain intelligence into social networks and online media sources through a cloud-based delivery model, and to use this insight to create smarter, more effective marketing campaigns.

Smart marketers inside IBM are already looking at ways we can leverage this exciting new capability on IBM’s own behalf, and Coremetrics already has over 2,100 customers already leveraging their unique Web analytics capabilities across a wide range of industries.

These industries run the gamut, ranging from retail to financial services to media and publishing to travel and hospitality to education.  Current Coremetrics customers include companies like Holiday Inn, PETCO, 1-800 Flowers, Office Depot, Victoria’s Secret, and Virgin Atlantic Airways.

Coremetrics: Providing Real-Time Social Media Intelligence

Coremetrics offerings can provide real time intelligence on what consumers are saying about the products and services being offered to them and allow clients to make fact-based, accurate decisions on marketing expenditures. As a result, marketing teams can gain deeper insight about their consumers and present personalized recommendations, promotions and other sales incentives across a variety of channels where consumers interact with their brands. These channels span traditional outlets such as storefronts and catalogs and newer outlets including all forms of eCommerce and social media.

Coremetrics offerings are a new addition to IBM’s business analytics portfolio, with the web analytics capabilities clients need to help understand the shopping habits, likes and dislikes of their customers.

In addition, Coremetrics’ software complements IBM’s existing software and services portfolio of offerings from WebSphere, information management and business analytics and optimization.

Coremetrics’ capabilities will help businesses empower their marketing professionals to automate and optimize their marketing processes and create the greatest possible return on their marketing expenditures.

Consistent with IBM’s software strategy, IBM will continue to support and enhance Coremetrics’ technologies and clients while allowing them to take advantage of the broader IBM portfolio.

Joe Davis, CEO of Coremetrics, had this to say about the closing of the deal: "IBM and Coremetrics can help businesses rapidly gain intelligence into social networks and online media sources through a software as a service (SaaS) delivery model and incorporate this insight into their business processes to create smarter, more effective marketing campaigns.”

"Together, we can develop powerful new business analytics solutions, delivering a single source of information about every aspect of your online business — every customer, transaction, product, channel and supplier — to measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and drive measurable business results. Further, we deliver on-the-go access to real-time analytics and performance data on all major smart mobile devices, including iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry and Android."

Coremetrics: Smarter, Faster Web Marketing Via The Cloud

Since 2006, IBM and Coremetrics have partnered to deliver a leading cross-channel business analytics solution specifically for use with IBM WebSphere Commerce software. 

Coremetrics for IBM WebSphere Commerce was designed to provide business managers with a clear view of their web sites, and to automatically create targeted marketing campaigns based on visitor behavior directly within the WebSphere Commerce solution.

Today’s announcement builds on this shared history and positions IBM to expand its analytics strategy, which includes a range of offerings available throughout IBM’s Software Group as well as the IBM Business Analytics and Optimization Consulting organization — a team of 5,000 consultants and a network of analytics solution centers, backed by an overall investment of more than $11 billion in acquisitions in the last five years.

The acquisition builds on a successful collaboration between Coremetrics and IBM around WebSphere Portal products.  Coremetrics will deliver integrated analytics within WebSphere Portal while also incorporating offline information. This will enable clients to take advantage of Coremetrics’ complete suite of analytics and marketing applications and services.

This acquisition also expands IBM’s portfolio of cloud computing services that offer a wide range of security-rich, cost-efficient technology resources over the Web, which can be integrated with clients’ on-premise systems.

Consistent with IBM’s software strategy, IBM will continue to support and enhance Coremetrics’ technologies and clients while allowing them to take advantage of the broader IBM portfolio. 

Coremetrics’ approximately 230 employees will join the IBM Software Group which has acquired more than 55 companies since 2003.

Next Gen Web Analytics

Just got off a Webcast entitled “Next Generation Web Analytics,” and presented by Forrester’s John Lovett, whom had somehow had escaped my radar.

Though the Webcast didn’t cover the Unica Insight tool in any detail, it did provide an excellent overview of how organizations need to evolve and adapt if they’re to fulfill the promise of customer intelligence that can be delivered via the Web digital footprint.

The net? (My interpretation):

• Web analytics made a promise it couldn’t keep…the infinitely measureable Web didn’t materialize.
• Data collection is the root of complexity…Stop digging through the logs, you’re missing the forest for the trees.
• Value is in the empowered interpretation, not the enduring collection, of Web customer intelligence.
• The “action chasm” renders analytics inert. Need to move towards an in-dash navigation.
• Which means more data confidence is required, so folks stop questioning the accuracy and focus on the actionability.
• Orgs need to build a foundation of analytical excellence, which begins with a strategy that evolves out of guiding business objectives.
• Technology is simply the enabling factor.

Smart and somewhat self-evident stuff, but easy to lose sight of in an enterprise with lots of switches, levers, and pilots.  : )