Here’s a nice little eBook, courtesy of Elateral.

Just the right thing to get those juices going for your New Year’s to do list. Of particular interest is the four principles and seven imperatives and some good links at the back of the book. Happy reading.

Here’s the download link. (You’ll need to give up your email address).

Of particular note is the immensely long home page, scroll all the way down to read a huge amount of information. We’re still getting comments regularly about designing ‘above the fold’ so it’s refreshing to see a client that understands that scrolling is probably easier than clicking through and keeps customers on the home page longer before they make their choice to enter the store. Think of it as the decompression zone that we build into stores in the offline world so customers can get used to crossing the threshold before deciding where to head.

Also worth noting is the launch. A particular time and date backed up by a twitter campaign (the more tweets the greater the discount) Lucky 10 to get the ball rolling on launch day.

Finally, retail design is all about the details. Nice to see a message about free shipping right there in the checkout button which you can see when you hover over the Shopping Bag button.

Sign in with twitter, create pin boards, pin images from web pages (unfortunately not from Google Reader) upload images and follow other users.

Still got 4 invites left so add your name to the comments if you want one.

More on The Escape Pod’s blog.

Originally spotted on Brandflakes for Breakfast

Five main areas are covered (with room for expansion) and the opportunity to submit your own stats.

Originally from Read Write Web via twitter

As many businesses look to embrace social media at least Asda have plunged in with both feet, whilst others prevaricate; mainly I suspect because they don’t know what they’re buying and/or don’t believe it has a part to play in their organisation. I’m pretty certain that (based on the kind of work we’re doing, more than anything else) that it will be the norm for businesses to have a social media presence of some description and more importantly that the people who run this side of marketing are employees who can be authentic about their brand rather than external agencies. Patterns of employment will also have to change. There’s no point having an online presence that clocks off at 5 o’clock.

At least Asda have a catchment audience in their own employees but many organisations seem to think that user generated content (UGC) will play  large part in their social media strategy. This seems a rather lazy way out and flawed. After all if you’ve got Facebook, MySpace, Twitter etc why would you go on a forum hosted by any business, it would have to be truly excellent in its own right. Organisations have to come to customers wherever they are, that’s always been the case in retail, and still the case online. Sainsbury’s forum for instance has as of today, 65,691 members but only 134 posts this month, there’s too many other things out there that are better and less brand led.

Another interesting part of Asda’s communication to their employees is that they’ve produced a poster (including a big brother mouse as a bomb, complete with fuse!) which while being rather foreboding at least shows they understand the perils of opening themselved up to the world online.

The posters, watch out for the interweb now …

Also worth looking at Asda on twitter and their YouTube channel, SYMtv (that’s Saving You Money tv)

And also worth looking at how Whole Foods run their whole online presence, as always the US is doing it better:

Whole Foods on twitter

Whole Foods Blog

On a more social media type front they use Baker Tweet to let their locals know what’s coming out of the oven.

Links:

Albion Caff

The Boundary

Night time shots and review An American in London

Jenny Tucker’s review on Sofeminine

Albion on Twitter

Baker Tweet

Originally from Seth

From Mashable: Dirk-Willem van Gulik is to join the BBC.

From everywhere today including the BBC: Facebook to pull Scrabulous.