Last Monday, I was interviewed about social media on Job Search Radio.  I spent about 20-30 minutes speaking about using social media sites like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter to find a job, and also discussed the RichmondJobNet site that we put together for the Greater Richmond Partnership.

Listen to the show here

This isn’t a political post, rather to show you how not to keep your “customers” up-to-date.  After hearing today that the bill the US Senate passed last night included hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars for manufacturers of wooden arrows for children, Puerto Rican rum manufacturers and American Samoa.  Wanting to read the bill myself (all 400+ pages, I hear), I went to senate.gov.

The fact of the matter is that you, the American citizen — the “customer” — won’t find any mention of the bill on the Senate’s homepage.  Matter of fact, I spent 20 minutes searching for it, and think I found it, but I’m still not sure because half of the bill isn’t about the economy.  I turned to a news site that offered a clear link to the legislation, and I found:

Sec. 308. Increase in limit on cover over of rum excise tax to Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.
Sec. 309. Extension of economic development credit for American Samoa.
Sec. 314. Indian employment credit.
Sec. 502. Provisions related to film and television productions.
Sec. 503. Exemption from excise tax for certain wooden arrows designed for use by children.

…and the list goes on.

Why do the American people detest Congress?  Perhaps it’s because Washington doesn’t provide us adequate usable access to the legislation that crosses the floor.  Here’s a link to the bill, and if you’re for or against it, call your Senator or Representative, but good luck trying to find their contact information on their web sites.

Many retail ecommerce web sites ended 2007 with a bang according to Nielsen Online and MegaView Retail. Of sites that had a minimum of 500K unique visitors during the month of December, here are the top 10 sites with the best conversion rates:

The Popcorn Factory: 29.5%
L.L. Bean: 23.6%
Abebooks: 20.6%
Hollister: 17.6%
Amazon: 17.6%
Lands End: 17.2%
Coldwater Creek: 17.1%
QVC: 17.1%
Cabela’s: 16.8%
Gymboree: 16%

See the chart for yourself at MarketingCharts.com.

Showing holiday shipping cutoff dates on your web site makes sense for many reasons. First, it sets the customer’s delivery expectation. Second of all, it will reduce the number of calls you’ll get asking if an order will be delivered by the holidays.

You should show this information in 2 places — the homepage and in checkout. I typically favor a rather prominent link on the homepage to a dedicated page that discusses holiday shipping. In checkout, you’ll want some messaging saying something like “Order by December xx to ensure holiday delivery.”

One thing we do effectively on the Virginia Favorites site is to list the estimated shipping date on every product page. This, combined with the holiday shipping information that lists cutoff dates, helps the customer determine if their order will arrive in time.

Before traffic starts to spike for the holidays, audit your paid search program (Google Adwords, etc.) for bids, new keyword combinations, and ad copy. You may want to create multiple ads for each ad group so you can quickly see which ad performs better. Also, make sure each of your ads click to a relevant page on your site.

For example, if you are bidding on “buy widgets,” make sure your ad headline has “buy widgets” in it and the ad, when clicked, goes directly to a page on your site that sells widgets. The homepage of your site is often not the best destination for a paid search engine ad.

It’s common convention for customers to register in order to check out, but many customers want to skip that step. While this may involve some IT involvement to make it happen, you can always ask the customer to save their information in an account after the purchase has been made.

If you must require customers to register, make sure they know the benefits of doing so, such as the ability to see order history, track orders as they ship, save shipping addresses, etc. When putting messaging on the screen to this effect, be succinct but descriptive.