Web Clicks: Cyber-Style Spring Cleaning

Web Clicks: Cyber-Style Spring Cleaning

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Time for a little spring cleaning this month, and as I began organizing my notes I came across these nuggets, all worth examining a bit more closely for imaging/CE retailers as we roll into the warm weather months.

Execution Is Everything!
I saw this stat on the National Retail Federation (NRF) website recently and thought it was worth passing along. A recent study conducted by the NRF revealed that 2% to 5% of revenue is lost when store-level employees don’t execute company communications strategy. With bottom lines as tight as they are these days, that’s a scary percentage and certainly makes it worth circling back with your floor staff to make sure they are dotting the I’s and crossing the T’s regarding store selling philosophy in their exchanges with your customers.

Mobile Apps or Mobile Web?
An interesting question has arisen recently with regard to consumer behavior when it comes to their mobile habits, and what the answer may be is worth looking into for retailers. Do consumers want mobile apps or mobile web? The choice between developing a mobile app or a mobile website accessible by browsers may best be made by determining which type of mobile audience you are seeking. A recent study by Yahoo! and Ipsos indicates that mobile users largely prefer browsers for shopping and doing searches but tend to use apps for navigation and making connections. For now it appears focusing on an effective mobile website is the direction you need to keep heading in.

iPhoneography
I spoke with the folks at New York’s Adorama recently about the development of their new iPhone Toolshed site that offers accessory products aimed at lifting what they refer to as “iPhoneography” to new heights. When I asked Adorama’s vice president of Marketing, Brian Green, about the continued push to get images off of smartphones and turned into print profits, his response focused on changing a mindset that has set in with digital imaging over the last decade.

“Adorama believes that you have to get people out of the mindset that once you have a camera, everything else is free—to make them realize that spending a little extra money, whether on iPhone accessories or prints from your iPhone photos, can deliver a much higher level of satisfaction with photography. So along with special offers and other incentives, we need to educate our customers using all the new media now available to us,” Green explained.

He’s right. While digital imaging tech has brought so much that is great to the imaging world, it has also made consumers a bit lazy with regard to sharing their memories. A quick e-mail or upload to Facebook and the memory is shared and it doesn’t cost a dime. Green is right, retailers need to show the value inherent in all the amazing photo merchandise products available today and incentivize their customers to take a closer look at all the possibilities.

Continued Evolution of P&S
The push at Samsung (and they’re not the only ones) on the point-and-shoot front of late is not only about Wi-Fi with instant social uploads and auto file backup to a PC, but also about potentially developing an “open” camera operating system. While nothing has been officially announced, the idea here is about a point-and-shoot camera that perhaps runs on the Android OS. Let’s face it, the traditional point-and-shoot market is suffering from a severe case of app-envy, and the notion of some social network apps that let you share and see images from Twitter or Facebook and maybe immediately comment on what you’re uploading or seeing is enticing. The smartphone world has certainly shown us that anything is possible.

Polaroid’s CES announcement of the SC1630 Smart Camera that is powered by Android and offers 16MP resolution, 3x optical zoom, a touch-screen display and Wi-Fi was as unexpected as it was revealing as to where the market is heading. Remember the megapixel wars? Seems especially silly nowadays . . . no?

The P&S space is clearly feeling the heat from the ever-evolving smartphone market so these new directions are both encouraging and fascinating.

Careful When Clicking
Not unlike a set of keys, smartphones (since they are with us all the time) are often misplaced and sometimes even lost altogether. A recent study by security software maker Symantec might force you to be a bit more careful with the device from this point forward. They claim nearly 75% of the people who find a lost smartphone will immediately try to access the images on it.

The study included the intentional misplacement of 50 smartphones with simulated personal and corporate data on them. The Symantec research found that overall 89% of the phones were accessed for personal information and 83% were accessed for business-related info. Only 50% of the finders tried to return the devices back to their owners.

The moral of this story is, as we have often implored you to do, to continually emphasize how important it is to always back up your image and video files (not to mention maybe thinking twice about what’s being captured).

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