Google Matt Cutts | How to Get Better Visibility on Google

USA TODAY's Jefferson Graham interviews Google engineer Matt Cutts on how to get your site to the top of Google with 5 basic, common sense SEO tips.

Industry Speak: Interview with Shannon Low - Shoplette.com

Industry Speak' is a series of interviews where we speak with practitioners in the online industry on their thoughts, theories and anything else in between. Watch this space for more interviews coming your way. This week, we speak to Shannon Low, Founder of Shoplette.com and Mobrick.

Q. Tell us a little about yourself and/or Mobrick.
Mobrick is a web startup founded in Singapore in early 2008 to build socially-driven and location-relevant web services that are fun and useful.

Our flagship product is Shoplette, a service you can use to tell your friends what you bought and where you bought it, check out what your friends have bought and where they’ve been shopping, discover new stuff to buy and new places to shop, and find out what’s hot and where to shop in other countries. It's all about shopping!

Q. How did Shoplette.com come about?

Shoplette came about because we love shopping, and a lot of people around the world seem to as well. We realised that shopping is a social activity - we go shopping with our friends, and we talk about shopping with friends. When people talk about shopping, the most common phrases we hear are "Check out what I bought!" and "Where did you get that?" So that's when Shoplette was born. We decided to create a web service for people to tell their friends and other people what they bought and where they bought it, so that people can exchange shopping information casually and discover new things to buy and new places to shop more easily.

Q. Shoplette.com is now in beta. What else can shoppers expect in time to come for Shoplette.com?

We've been working on a number of new features for the service, to provide a more fun and useful experience around social shopping and the concept of sharing what you bought with your friends. We want to bring the community of shoppers closer together, giving them more ways to talk to one another about shopping and where to buy great stuff.

Looking ahead, we're exploring more location-relevant features, and we're interested to go mobile. We believe that with mobile phone and location integration, we'll be able to provide some very interesting location-based features.

Q. How can potential advertisers work with Shoplette.com on building mind-share for their brands?

We're in the shopping space and we're all about shopping, so that's a great fit with brands involved in retail. Getting your product posted on Shoplette by a customer who bought it is a subtle yet powerful form of recommendation for the product, store and brand which spreads virally to the customer's friends. So, simply encouraging their customers to post items on Shoplette is already one way to build mind-share for the brand.

For broader ways to reach potential customers, we are rolling out an advertising programme which allows brands to advertise on Shoplette in various ways, targeting the customer profile that they want to reach.

For deeper engagement of existing and potential customers, we are rolling out a retailer programme to provide brands and retailers with a presence on the network and the ability to engage users on the site in appropriate and effective ways, all of which we aim to translate to bringing the right customers to the doorsteps of retailers.

Q. What do you see as the biggest opportunity in social media (or social retailing) over the next 12 months?

There's been growing interest in the social shopping space and yet, there's still a lot of unexplored territory in this space beyond the current ideas of product recommendation, price comparison and online shopping. We're trying to explore what happens if you approach shopping as a social activity, rather than the individual activity of deciding what you want to buy, doing some research on the Internet, and then clicking "Buy" on an online shopping site.

Q. Do you think social media is enough to be the only marketing channel used in time to come?

I think it depends on what you want to achieve and where you are in your marketing campaign. Social media has shown to be effective in certain situations and for certain products and services, some of which can spread, in the beginning, through social media alone.

However, as a product or service grows in customer base, sophistication and its touch-points with customers, social media becomes one of the many ways through which to reach potential customers, depending on where the customer is and what touch point is accessible to the brand. Ultimately, I think consistent brand awareness needs a broad campaign utilising many different ways to generate and maintain the momentum of conversation around the brand, of which social media would certainly have an important part to play.

We like to thank Shannon for his time for this interview!

The Web in 2010

Though this presentation in SlideShare (by Jimmy Wales) was made in 2007, it's immensely intriguing stuff about future web trends. Here is a list of my top 5 (in no particular order):

1. Mobile to become the dominant platform for connecting to the worldwide net.
   
2. Virtual worlds like Second Life to democratically elect their own virtual governments.
   
3. Information overload affects some individuals. Doctors might even be able to give affected people medical certificates for 'switch-off' holidays to be away from the computers and mobile devices.
   
4. Facebook becomes an operating system that is shipped with PCs and computers, with influence by Microsoft.
   
5. Printed newspapers become smaller & niche - and ends up as a more expensive, luxury item.
   

| View | Upload your own

Great stuff - worth some thoughts on where the world's corporate organisations, governments & societies are heading towards in the next 3 -5 years (perhaps even earlier than that in some cases).