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With four people dedicated to chat and email responses, Memorysuppliers.com is one of thousands of ecommerce companies adding chat to its marketing and customer service mix. And why not? A February 2008 study from Forrester Research, "The ROI of Interactive Chat", found merchants with click-to-chat options (also known as "reactive" chat) earn a 15 percent return on investment (ROI) on the chat service itself. Merchants with chat invitations and pop-up windows tied to user actions (also known as "proactive" chat), meanwhile, earn a whopping 105 percent ROI.

Bernardo Huberman, Hewlett-Packard's director of the HP Social Computing lab, and fellow researcher Gabor Szabo have published a highly detailed report (PDF) on "predicting the popularity of online content." Focusing on content submitted and popularized on popular social sites Digg.com and Google's YouTube, the two concocted not one but three ways to predict how much traffic and overall user interaction a story or submitted video will receive well after it hits its initial popularity.

The IAB Ad Unit Guidelines are intended for marketers, agencies and media companies for use in the creating, planning, buying and selling of interactive marketing and advertising. The IAB's Ad Sizes Working Group meets on a bi-annual basis to review proposed new ad units and issue updated voluntary guidelines as appropriate. The process whereby these new units are reviewed and considered can be downloaded here.

From the "Research that Makes Spammers Giddy" department, Jordan McCollum over at Marketing Pilgrim points to an interesting new study from Ball State University's Center for Media Design and ExactTarget. The study, Messaging Behaviors, Preferences, and Personas looked at how different groups of people interact with media and which sales channels work best to reach them.

With 60% of online shoppers cite free shipping as a reason they are more likely to shop on the web (Harris Interactive, July 2008), if you use free shipping as a marketing vehicle, you want to make sure you communicate your offer at every touch point. In the current issue of eM+C magazine, you'll find my article Get Your Site Into Shipping Shape This Season with ideas on how "get the most mileage" out of your free shipping offer from search engine to shopping cart (this version includes screen shots):

Although there are many forms of Web Monetization (I've listed out nearly 15 forms), the newest iteration of web marketing: widgets, haven't yet fully cashed in. Widget, Gadgets, Applications, Canvas Pages, Embeds, it goes on and one. One thing is clear, the rate of widgets continues to increase, take for example Facebook's application platform has over 15,000, 20,000 applications in just about 9 months. Granted, many of those are slightly tweaked clones of each other, the top 100 widgets clearly has adoption. In some cases, there are sophisticated companies developing widgets, the RockYou's and Slides of the world can really zero in and focus, or take the garage developers such as the two Russian developers who created Scrabulouos, or lastly, the big corporations or interactive firms that are getting in on the action -often with limited success. Yet, how do we monetize widgets? There's only a few ways, some tied back to traditional methods, and some leaning on the new media.

If you use Google Analytics, you have likely experienced its value in understanding your shoppers and how they interact with your site. But there are deeper levels of understanding to attain. If you start tuning the data you feed to Google Analytics by "tagging" your URLs, you can generate reports of your advertising campaigns and traffic sources, and therefore gain even more meaningful insights.

Plenty of studies suggest customers want demand free shipping: * 61% online shoppers prefer to shop with a retailer that offers free shipping than one that doesn't. - Forrester Research (2007) * 43% of shoppers abandon their shopping carts because of unexpectedly high shipping charges. - PayPal, comScore (2008) * 60% claim free shipping is a reason they are more likely to shop online. - Harris Interactive (2008) * 90% believe free shipping offers would entice them to spend more online. - The Conference Board (2008)

As Whitney Hess stated earlier this year: UX Design isn't just "a step in the process." Users themselves experience much more than just the look and feel of an application.

The market of online videos is getting bigger and wider everyday. Becoming easier and faster to access the internet, we can make our own videos and post them easily on websites. In other words, streaming videos has become increasingly easier.