Salmat Pre-Shop® News | September 2008

Welcome to the September issue of Salmat Digital's Pre-Shop® News.

I went to two stores one weekend in August to buy things I had found on Lasoo. One I had set an alert for and was very pleased to see it come up in an offer. The other was my Father's Day present, a set of dumbbells. So I'm going now to create two awful analogies.

The first. Unlike me, pre-shopping is already strong. But it is getting stronger and stronger with each passing day, and will continue to do so (hopefully like me with my new dumbbells). Your customers are online searching for the products you sell right now. And less than 10% are finding your site.

The second. Just like strength and fitness, online success does not happen overnight. The earlier you start, the earlier and greater the payoff. Building links and teaching the search engine crawlers all takes time. Start now and enjoy the increasing benefits to your sales over time.

Anyway enough preaching, poorly disguised by two very bad analogies, and let's get onto some fun stuff. I hope you enjoy the newsletter below.

We have also recently opened up our Salmat Digital divisional website, which explains our various products in full.


Kind regards

Paul Marshall
Executive Director
Salmat Digital

Web rules of engagement

If the current era of the Internet could be defined by one word, that word would arguably be "engagement". This is the era when businesses are engaging with consumers, and consumers are engaging with each other on a massive scale. As Rupert Murdoch famously said last year, "media companies don't control the conversation any more".

The dominance of social networking and sharing sites such as Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and Digg has eliminated the "we talk, you listen" relationship that companies thrust onto consumers in the early days of the Internet. Today the brands with serious traction and credibility realise that the relationship between brands and consumers is a two-way street.

It has become apparent that this new economy has some specific rules of engagement:

    * There is one media platform sharing more in common with other platforms
    * Copies have no value
    * Value is in the uncopyable - Immediacy, Authentication, Personalisation, Trust, Virtue
    * Media wants to be liquid
    * The network effects rule, the more you have the more you get - Metcalfe's Law
    * Attention is a currency.

Keeping these rules of engagement in mind when taking on the new communication frontier should serve you well, as they will remain constant, as everything else changes.

Universal metrics for ROI measurement

Initially, the metric that was used as common currency for doing apples to apples comparisons of web real estate was the "hit" - the number of client requests to a web server. This was quickly outdated as pages became more sophisticated and "hits" were being registered when they shouldn't have been.

So marketers decided to disregard how many "hits" there were since it was no longer one page equals one "hit" and it was more valid to see how many page views there were. However, this metric soon became outdated as well when AJAX (asynchronous JavaScript and XML) became the standard for usability in the Web 2.0 world. Now, more than half of a page's content could change without a new page view ever being registered since the URL remains the same.

So, the impression was born to be the apples to apples comparison metric for marketers. Regardless of what all of the information on a page is doing, how many servers are "talking" to produce a complete page of information, the one thing that remains constant and relevant to marketers across all mediums is "how many times did my offer appear in front of the eyeballs of a consumer?".

When you are more or less accurately measuring this number online, your Internet campaign can be made comparable to campaigns for print and catalogues (circulation/readership/distribution), TV (viewing audience) and radio (listening audience).

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Sound bites…


67% of consumers research products via the Internet before shopping in a store.


- Accenture



Online will influence over 50% of retail transactions by 2011, even though only 15-20% will be transacted online.


- Jupiter Research