Us vs Them on Technology

Ok, so the title may be a bit misleading. I'm not really trying to start some kind of class warfare on the use of technology. Instead, I simply want to level the playing field.

We've all seen big business, and the cool and fun things it can do with the Web. Denny's, for example, with its live social media feeds, Pizza Hut with its pizza ordering app, Dominoes with its "Check your order status real-time", and so on. Small and medium sized businesses, however, don't always have easy access to this kind of highly customized technology and almost never have time to really think and spec it out.

Dynamic is fun

If you have a Website where you do some kind of dynamic user interaction, like make a sale, receive a customer request, or track an order, you have access to gems of information that, if presented in the right way, can be fun, interesting, and engaging.

MaggieMudd received orders online. We had built out a system for online cake orders that did everything from upload photos to create collaborative spaces so customers could interact with the cake decorator to design their own cake. It was nice for the customer. But there was also a valuable and interesting by-product: Data.

Take a look at this information. Through simple calculation, the company was able to dynamically feed data about their orders. Most interesting is the delivery miles, which turned out to be an overall distance of almost once around the earth for the city of San Francisco alone. There are other data points as well that talk a little bit about the kinds of orders that MaggieMudd got, which also gave a little bit of insight into the character of the company.

Social media is an open publishing platform

MaggieMudd was able to publish dynamic data through the Facebook platform. This was particularly useful when it came time to engage in so-called social commerce. What is social commerce? Isn't all commerce social since it takes place between humans who must interact in some way in order for a commercial transaction to take place?

Well, yes, all commerce is social, but some types of e-commerce can have a social overlay which can help to distribute products through certain social media channels. The jury is out on how effective this type of commerce is for a company like MaggieMudd, but as it goes in any kind of business that sells consumer goods, more distribution points are better than less.

The positive side is that to set up social commerce on Facebook does not require a bunch of new work because the data and the processes were already designed and set up years ago.

Status reports are always appreciated

Lastly, I wanted to show a page that MaggieMudd did to show customers the status of their orders. Order status was already tracked in the order management system, and to make that data available to customers in real-time only required that the data be re-hashed in a fun and playful way.

In fact, this page was really a no-brainer, since all the data points that were already being used by the company employees were now able to be used to engage the customer.

You might be sitting on a gold mine

If you have data about your customers, you can always use that data to further engage those same customers. And that is as good as gold, because if your customers like to engage with you, they almost certainly will come back when they are again in need of products or services like the ones you offer.