Today I’m excited to announce the launch of New York, a theme for Shopify. Shopify is an e-commerce platform that lets store owners easily set up and manage their online store.
I have watched over the years as Shopify has grown into the awesome ecosystem it is today. Now, upon the release of this theme I am thrilled to be a part of it!
The new theme was built by the amazing and talented CSS ninja Shawn Allison. We have been working on it for the past couple months and are very excited to release it to Shopify users!
We saw the opportunity to create a theme that incorporates the best of existing themes, best practices, and a bit of our own design flare! With its clean vintage design and powerful customizations features, New York is perfect for almost any store!
The theme is easy to use and packed with lots of powerful features!
New York comes packed with 4 styles! New York’s 4 preset styles are inspired by some the city’s most iconic streets; Madison Avenue, Broadway, Wall Street and 5th Avenue.
Madison Avenue incorporates the classic 60’s style that has most recently become the theme of AMC’s Mad Men.
Broadway’s clean bright design, brings the bright lights of the theatre district to any store.
Wall Street’s minimalist design allows store owners to easily add custom colors or just let your products speak for themselves.
Finally, 5th Avenue brings high style to any store.
To learn more, check out the Shopify Theme Store and view a full demo of the New York theme!
Feedback? Email us at shopify@ninjaparade.com.
I’ve been spending a lot of time over the past few months thinking about social media and its interaction with the world of franchising. Why have so few franchise networks been able to successfully leverage social media tools, and why do so few digital media agencies look to franchises as prospective clients?
Social media has taken our world by storm and has long out grown its infancy. In fact, Facebook received its first round of funding in 2004 and Twitter was founded back in 2006. Popular platforms are widely adopted both by consumers and businesses of all sizes. Whole industries have already been spun out to support social media campaigns and range from campaign management tools, to full digital agencies. Online success stories are becoming more and more common, and ROI is a key focus any campaign. Why then have only a limited number of franchises been able to leverage this medium?
Franchise is a business structure rooted in process and operational control. These origins lead to slower adoption of new technologies and innovations. Corporately controlled entities have the ability to develop and implement new strategies without consulting outside agents for support, resources, or permission; whereas franchisors must take in to consideration varying expectations from their franchisees.
Franchisors looking to implement a social media strategy face the challenge of training and coordinating franchisees of different levels of commitment and technological ability. These are issues that have not yet been effectively addressed by digital media agencies, who tend to take the approach of developing strategies in house and then rolling them out on behalf of a corporation. The introduction of tens or hundreds of additional stakeholders, each of which is essentially running an independent business, adds a level of resource strain that up until now has limited the success of franchise campaigns.
Due to the obstacles facing franchises who are looking to engage in social media, many franchises have opted to take one of two courses of action. Either the franchisor lets social media grow organically by allowing each franchisee develop a local strategy or the franchisor decides to take control of the social media strategy at a head office level. Both of these strategies fail to fully leverage the power of the tools in use. Allowing franchisees to dictate their own use of social media can create a fragmented brand image which can sometimes have negative implications for the brand overall. While running social media out of head office can help alleviate this issue, this strategy fails to leverage the network power of an organization’s franchisees.
I have come to believe that a hybrid approach is required for social media success in franchising. This approach would involve both high level strategy and local level activation. The franchisor has only limited power to spread a message when compared to the collective power of its franchisees. A local level activation strategy would allow the entity to take advantage of its network. However, consistent and competent use of social media tools across all locations would require extensive training and support for franchisees. A lack of proper planning and well laid out practices and procedures is known to be a recipe for failure in franchising, and the use of social media is no different.
While franchising is still largely uncharted territory for social media, I feel that by applying proven implementation strategies from other areas of franchising to this new medium we can leverage the power of social media across entire franchise networks in ways that have not yet been possible.
Social media is not complicated, and its not expensive. In fact, its free! Anyone that tells you anything different is probably trying to rip you off. This is coming from someone that is currently making her living off providing help to companies on social media strategy and implementation. Hypocrite? I like to think not, and here’s why.
Give me or anyone else that understands the first thing about the internet a half hour and we could have you up and running with a Twitter account, Facebook page, and even a blog. But so what? Those accounts are ghost towns unless you are able to effectively leverage them to reach out to and engage your audience. Social media is a platform like any other. It is how you use social media tools, whether or not you are able to translate your brand into an online environment and then sustain that presence is what really matters.
There seems to be a common misconception that if someone has a lot of ‘friends’ or knows how to get attention online they will somehow be able turn any brand they touch into digital gold. These people are what I would describe as self-proclaimed ‘social media gurus’. Sure this type of personality may be able to get you some followers by metaphorically standing on a mountain top and screaming out your name to the people they know; but how is this sustainable and more importantly how will this strengthen your brand and your community?
Effective reach should not be measured by comments, page hits, followers, contest submissions, or even the number of times your content is shared. Sure those metrics can be helpful to see how many people your message is reaching, but what’s more important is who your message is reaching, why they are there in the first place, and whether or not they will be coming back.
The thought that I might be compared to companies that are effectively taking advantage of their client’s technological ignorance to extort more money than their services are truly worth makes me sick. These ‘social media gurus’ give a bad name to anyone working in the realm of social media consulting. Effective social media strategies require planning, trial and error, creativity, a thorough understanding of a companies primary business activities, offline activation, and more than anything else….time! There is a lot of value to be found in working with people who will help develop deliver your company’s social media strategy, just remember to stay away from the social media guru.
Social media and customer service, are they an effective mix? Its a fine balance but my feeling is that social media can and should be used as a tool for enabling customer service. People are talking about you and your company and you need to be where the conversations is happening.
When it comes to customer service, ignorance is not bliss. Online feedback about your business can be positive or negative. It is important to take the good with the bad and to use negative comments as an opportunity to turn unhappy customers into evangelists through timely issue resolution or simply by listening. Twitter is rapidly becoming the most popular online medium for customer service.
Engaging with customers in public forums brings about its own issues. Companies are faced with the challenge of effectively helping to solve customer problems without encouraging more people to post public complaints as a means of receiving better service. Furthermore, companies must be very mindful of how their action in resolving conflicts will be viewed by the public at large, one does not want to appear to give preferential treatment to individuals with larger greater influence. Companies also need to avoid enlarging an issue or complaint with continuing conversations in a public space. It is often in the best interest of the company to move the conversation on to the phone, email, or direct message until the problem is resolved.
Many start-ups are emerging to meet the growing demand for social media aggregation and management. PostRank is an interesting tool that allows companies to see where their content is being republished throughout the ‘social web’. Other players in this space include social media management tools such as HootSuite and TweetDeck which have been rapidly popularized as solutions for businesses and individuals looking to manage their image and following online. These tools allow small business owners or marketing companies to track their following and view what is being said about them. In addition to allowing managers to track mentions, post messages, and view their follower count, many of these services also collect key metrics relating to performance.
Dell was one of the first large corporations to fully embrace social media as a medium for customer service. The company is know for its extensive presence on Twitter in particular. Check out all of their Twitter accounts here. Zappos, another company known for its customer service, has also been quick to embrace to benefits of social media as a means of managing their image through customer service. The company encourages all of its employees to use Twitter and publishes all of their user names online. Just the other day I found this article on how Twitter is being used by Dominos Pizza franchises in Chicago, its awesome story! The bottom line is that while Twitter and other social media platforms may help to enable customer service activities, they should be viewed as a complement to offline customer service not a replacement.
I have long been fascinated what it takes to develop of strong corporate culture. A couple years ago while watching an interview with Tony Hsieh on an Oprah special, ‘Millionaire Moguls’ , I got my first glimpse of Zappos.com. I always remembered that the multimillionaire CEO sat in a cubicle and only made $37 thousand a year.
Then this past fall Inc Magazine published an amazing article on Tony Hsieh written by Max Chafkin. Zappos stood out as being truly unique, driven by a passionate team and obsessed with the consumer experience. Zappos is North America’s largest online shoe retailer, the site has also begun selling clothing and other merchandise. This past summer Zappos was bought be Amazon for a total of approximately $928 million. Talk about a flip! For more information on the acquisition, check out this TechCrunch article.
To say the least, I have always found Zappos to be fascinating and I was curious to learn more. So last week when I found my self in Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) I decided I’d see if I could pay the Zappos head office a visit. I went online at Zappos Insights and was able to easily book a free tour. The company runs the tours multiple times a day, Monday-Thursday.
I must say the tour was a great experience, one that I’d recommend to anyone interested in entrepreneurship and corporate culture. Zappos really does it right.
I got picked up before my tour by one of a number of official Zappos Shuttle Vans. Door to door service to the office was complimentary with my tour. The shuttle is used by the company to pick up anyone from vendors and suppliers, to people simply taking a tour. The shuttle staff were just as friendly as any one I would me later that day. Not to mention, while I was the only one on the shuttle they offered to make a special stop at Starbucks and bought me my morning latte (on the company). Remember now, this is a free tour!
The office wasn’t very big or particularly glamorous in any way. However, everyone there was simply happier than the average worker, everyone wanted to be at the office, and everyone wanted you to be there too. Zappos employees are known to go through an intense two week incubation process during which the company searches for the right ‘culture fit’. At the end of the two week process, those employees that are offered a position are also offered $2000 if they quit immediately. Essentially, the process looks to eliminate anyone that isn’t in it for the right reasons. Not to mention, employees at Zappos are offered the opportunity to fast track through management by taking in-house courses. The company’s reasoning is that since they are growing so fast, why not allow employees the opportunity to build the career they want.
The Zappos lobby features a popcorn machine, Rockstar Enery Drinks, a collection of memorabilia on the history of the company as well as a bookcase filled with multiple copies of books on personal and business development. Any visitors to the office are welcomed to take any book they like home with them. I picked Made to Stick. The day I went, the following books were on the shelf (yes, I copied down all of the titles…lol).
While I am more than ever impressed by what Tony and his team have created, I don’t want to spoil the tour for you by giving away all the details…nor do I want to bore you right now! I have uploaded some pictures from the tour here on Flickr, feel free to take a look through. And next time your in Vegas, put down the drinks and hold the slots for an afternoon and head out to the Zappos office!
I have long been fascinated by technology. I am currently in Las Vegas where I just attended the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). CES brings out over one hundred thousand technology enthusiasts each year. Over the last few days, I have had the opportunity to experience some amazing new products not yet released to the public. Among the new technologies were 3D televisions, ultra flatscreen TVs, giant touch screens with live data feeds, and many more new consumer focused devices.
Innovation changes the way we see the world, and the way we interact. I have started wondering, how does technology influence culture? How have changes in technology shaped how we view our national identity? In Canada, technology has radically impacted our ability to connect. Whether it was the invention of the telephone, the typewriter, the television, the computer, the laptop, or the cell phone; technology has brought us together in ways that we once thought impossible. We are now able to share news, events quickly and easily. Our culture, one that spans the largest land mass in the world, can now be brought together with the click of a button. Technologies that may seem far off now, will one day have an impact on the very foundation of who we are and what we believe in.
I have posted a few pictures that I took in Vegas on Flickr. Check them out! Among the products featured are LG’s 3D Flatscreen TV, Intel’s 3D Video Games, and Intel’s touchscreen wall. I think that this wall is quite remarkable. It shows live data streams from sites such as Google, Twitter, or Flickr and allows the user to physically manipulate the data on a giant touchscreen interface. While Intel is unsure as to how this technology will be commercialized, it is believed that applications in such spaces as transit info or scheduling could be useful.