Daily Archives: 05/03/2013

Tina, on the birth of her one-year-old girl

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WHY THE IMPACT OF NEW TECHNOLOGY IS NEITHER COMPLEX NOR CONTROVERSIAL

A paper for presentation during the Third International Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference  – session 4.17 (complexity and nonlinear thinking) – by Stuart G Hall on 24 June 2000.

It has been taken as an objective truth that new technology is complex and controversial, for a whole host of reasons. The desk-top computer is obviously more complex  than the hand-held abacus. The genetic modification of crops is clearly more controversial than conventional plant husbandry. So it may seem like bloody mindedness to suggest otherwise – but I have a number of reasons to try.

Perversely my starting point is with more complexity, not less. New technology has allowed science to proclaim the twin births of complexity and chaos theory.  For the sake of simplicity I will characterise this as the discovery of randomness in the seemingly predictable, and the predictable in the seemingly random. Ironically new technology has opened up the possibility of simplifying complicated phenomena.

Does any of this sound familiar to you? That’s because people are “fast pattern completers” (1). They too are able to simplify complicated phenomena. People have long understood the non-linear dynamics of existence – it is obvious in peasant societies faced with the struggle to survive. What’s new is that Internet technology is allowing people in the West to express this ability – the controversy is entirely from a scientific point of view:

“The hubris of science is astonishing. It will come as quite a surprise to countless poets, philosophers, theologians, humanists, and mystics who have thought deeply about such things for thousands of years that complexity, diversity, inter-connectedness, and self-organisation are neither new or a science.” (2)

The impact of new technology may appear to have turned everything upside down. But in reality its putting everything back into place! (3)

References

(1) Farrell, Winslow How Hits Happen, Forecasting Unpredictability in a Chaotic Marketplace, 1998.

(2) Hock, Dee Birth of the Chaordic Age, 1999. www.chaordic.org

(3) Tina, on the birth of her one-year-old girl: “It has turned everything gloriously upside-down, while simultaneously putting everything in its place!”  http://babyzone.com/mom2mom/motherhoodresults.htm (now babble.com)

My social commerce Q&A today

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Your amount of commercial experience in a senior eCommerce role?

>Running e-commerce & content for global startup MedicExchange for 18 months (mid 2006 – end 2007) and heading up e-commerce in terms of marketing and SEO at eBay Inc’s Shopping.com UK for 15 months (June 2010 – Sept 2011); most recently in an innovative social commerce analytics role (contract) for Sony EU.

Your level of PPC Account Management and Optimisation skills?

>Ran the PPC campaign for MedicExchange to promote the site globally to specialists in the US, EU and Asia; monitored the results and altered the bidding and budget accordingly to optimise results; site estimated worth of $15m when I exited in 2007)

Your multichannel marketing (Print, Display, PPC, SEO, Mobile, Affiliate) experience?

>Shopping.com was a truly multi-channel marketing role, working with BallouPR to create print-based marketing in the form of a shopper survey in the Metro, and working with the Sun to run a Xmas mercy story for example; I worked in close collaboration with the PPC manager at Shopping.com to maxmise our ROI based on my previous experience at MedicExchange; in SEO I took the lead for building backlinks through blogger outreach, for undertaking an audit of on-page technical fixes including keyword optimisation and removal of duplicate content issues; on the mobile side we used CRM to promote our mobile app to our customers; I took the lead to build the affiliate network by building a relationship with independent consumer organisation Which? including taking free guides on our site, and for example working with 3M to promote a mobile app ‘Shopping Genius’ which was powered by our affiliate feed.

Your level of Google Analytics & Adwords experience?

>I’ve used Google Analytics to measure the success of standard web analytics social SEO initiatives in numerous roles, and used Adwords to research keywords for both PPC and social SEO purposes.

That you have a track record of improving conversion, sales or other metrics?

>Most recently I’ve contributed to the success of Sony EU Q3 marketing metrics by setting up a social dashboard with partner Socialbakers to capture performance against agreed KPIs and feeding that back into improved performance in the order of a 5-10% improvement in both UK and DE.

Despite tough competition Shopping.com UK maintained a steady visitor rate throughout 2011 of 1.5m visits every day, with 17m qualified leads delivered to merchants each month, despite the impact of Google Panda’s algorithm changes.

In terms of the ratio of orders to clicks Shopping.com UK returned a broadly steady 1.5% conversion in Q2 and Q3 2011, achieving sixth place out of the top ten comparison sites in the marketplace.

If you have any Product Management experience?

>After being headhunted to set up the ICAEW community, working with Microsoft UK, I was given a product management role as the community platform was the very first iteration of the code by the software builders. More recently at Sony EU the role involved product managing a social dashboard, starting by crowdsourcing metrics from across EU social media managers, and creating a multi-data driven dashboard from providers including Reevoo, Socialbakers, and Radian6.