The Social Media Emperor Is Naked

Everyone even remotely involved with any ecommerce business over the last few years has heard how important social media is, experts have been dropping phrases like "paradigm change" and I'm getting bored of it.
 As figures begin to surface about how social media drives sales it's becoming clear that it's not the marketing holy grail that Facebook and the host of agencies would have us believe:

Survey data from Reuters/Ipsos shows that Four out of five users have never bought a product or service as a result of advertising or comments on Facebook.

Monetate's Q2 report showed that social referral traffic converted at 0.59% on average compared to 2.49% for search traffic.

So lets say you had an "average" ecommerce site and you wanted to add 10% to your sales as part of a marketing project. You'd need to deliver more than four times more traffic to achieve this growth by social media referrals than by increasing your search traffic.
This would be fine if it was four times as cheap/easy to deliver traffic from social, but social requires constant   activity to engage with people and encourage them to follow/like your site, it can become a real time suck, and it often ends up drawing in people from elsewhere in the business to produce creative assets.

Why doesn't it drive sales directly? Who knows? my guess is the difference in intent between using Facebook and using a search engine; when I use a search engine I'm looking for something, it's an active process with a goal in mind. When I use Facebook I'm consuming content, be it from friends or pages I follow, it's passive. I don't visit Facebook to shop, in much the same way as I don't go to the pub to buy shoes.

Facebook is a place to hang out with friends, like a park or something, I react to being sold to on Facebook in the same way as I would to someone trying to sell me junk I don't want in a park. I think the crux of it is the word social; it's social media, not commercial media.

So why do businesses keep spooging money at social media? In some cases it's because they are big companies with a big budget put aside for branding, they don't expect it to drive sales and that's fine.
But many small companies misunderstand the role of social media and mistakenly expect it to make sales as this post over on SEOmoz highlights.

Another reason businesses prioritise social media is that it's much easier to understand than SEO or PPC. Now I don't want this to come across as flippant, but I am so it will - sharing LOLcats pictures is quite a lot easier than learning the technical aspects of SEO or managing PPC campaigns effectively.

I'm not saying that social media doesn't have it's place, but that place is not driving sales to ecommerce sites. Branding? Sure, knock yourself out, but if you think Facebook is going to deliver bus loads of paying customers to your site you'll be disappointed.

Semi Automatic Data Entry

I had a project recently where I was asked to upload product data to an ecommerce site, but the data was extremely poor quality. Such poor quality that importing it directly would be like trying to extinguish a  massive burning pile of shit by pouring water on it - the best possible outcome would be a massive steaming pile of shit.

Fortunately none of the data sets were particularly large so I resorted to manually creating the products in the admin using the customer's spreadsheets as a reference. I looked at the data and realised that much of it could simply be copied and pasted, but that it needed sense checking and wasn't complete enough to import.
What I needed was a way of speeding up the copying and pasting of the good bits of data, I ended up using Auto hot key.

AHK is basically like VB scripting in Excel but for EVERYTHING!

It lets you send keystrokes, mouse clicks, whatever you like, and most importantly jump between any programs. So I wrote a quick script that, when pointed to the first cell in a row of data in Excel, would run along the row storing each value as a variable then alt+tab over to a browser with the website admin open. Next it clicks in the right places to open the create-new-product dialog and pastes the various values in the appropriate places ready for me to fill in the missing data and sense check the result before saving. It cut the time to create each product by over half.

Now I know this is a bit of a duct tape and cable ties approach, in an ideal world I would have sent the customer data back with *another* copy of the template file and refused to even look at it until every last value would import seamlessly. But I just wanted it done, creating the script and doing it this way took less time than I imagine it would have taken to explain the intricacies of Magento's product import functionality to a non-techy. especially as I barely understand it myself.