Adobe have released their “Scene 7 2009 Online Customer Experience - The Next Generation” survey.
Amongst its detailed results it shows a growing trend within owners of online stores who are looking to add social media type functionality to their site in 2009.

Over 90 percent of our survey’s respondents are planning to invest in new rich media and social networking technologies to ensure their brands and products stand out on the web.

The survey aims to identify what businesses plan to do in 2009 to enhance online customer experience and increase sales conversion rates. Leading companies from all industries worldwide were asked what rich media merchandising, social networking, mobile and personalisation features they use or plan to use, along with their expected or actual effectiveness and timeframes to deploy these features.

This year’s survey also asked for the first time in-depth questions in the areas of personalisation, social networking and mobile marketing.

Below is a selection of the highlights from the survey which include the most popular deployed features and their effectiveness, as well as business investments planned over the next 12 months:

• 92% of all respondents planned to conduct customer experience projects within the coming year. This is up from 53% last year as, perhaps because of the economic climate, these projects were delayed until the half of 2009.
• The top four rich media features implemented were, in order of popularity, lifestyle imagery, alternative views, audio/animation and zoom.
• The top four most effective features were zoom, visual filtering & advanced search, lifestyle imagery/photos and search landing pages.
• Globally, the highest ranking planned rich media features for 2009 were 360-degree spin, online catalogues, podcasts, product comparisons and videos. The greatest adoption of planned versus already deployed rich media features are in the areas of product comparisons, podcasts, 360-degree spin, mix and match and 3-D visualisation.
• When looking across all features surveyed and comparing 2008 responses to 2009, social networking features moved up significantly across all questions with respect to deployed, planned and effectiveness.
• Approximately one-fifth of all global respondents have deployed blogs, RSS feeds, user ratings/rankings/comments and syndicated content with over 30% listing user ratings and blogs as their highest planned features for 2009.
• User ratings/rankings/comments, URL sharing, user generated content and blogs were ranked as the most effective features, while syndicated content ranked lower in effectiveness.
• Although personalisation features had a low adoption rate, all falling below 15%, the trend remains flat or down for these features year over year. The top two features used are personalised stores and web-to-print applications. It is interesting that most personalisation features continued to earn the highest effective or very effective rates over 80%.
• Similar to personalisation features, there remains lower adoption of mobile features, which all fall below 11%. However, this is an increase over last year’s results of 5% usage rate. Mobile promotions used to drive to store or web was the highest deployed tactic.

These results have confirmed the importance of adding content to your site regularly, using blogs and RSS feeds to push new content regularly to the search engines. URL sharing and social bookmarking remain an excellent way to build links to your site from the social networks and interactive features like user ranking, comments and reviews build trust and confidence in both your products and stores. These are all effective tools to drive search engine optimisation, the majority of which can be easily managed by store owners themselves.

Contact Vanilla Storm for more information on how you can ensure your site utilises these proven techniques to grow your online business.

To read the full report from Adobe, you can register to receive your copy here.

Details of the development of a new internet browser were hurriedly announced by Google yesterday after an employee “accidentally” sent a comic book about the new browser to a third party blog.

Information released by Google confirmed that the browser, called Google Chrome, represents a new generation of web browsers, as the software will have the capability to process individual scripts, pages and tabs simultaneously - what they call multiple processes - therefore speeding up the browsing experience. This is a major step forward as all other browsers process information element by element, so if an element (e.g. Javascript or a video download) freezes processing part of a script or there’s a pause in the download, other aspects of the browser can stop working. As the web moves towards greater adoption of video content and more interactive user experiences, this should make browsing considerably quicker.

The timing of this launch is even more interesting given that Microsoft has only recently launched the beta version of it’s latest incarnation of Internet Explorer, version 8, that web designers around the world are now already testing their work with.

As is usual with Google software products, the Google Chrome browser will be released as a Beta download later today, initially only for Windows users (Mac and Linux versions are in development). Surprisingly, the software will be made openly available to the open source community. What’s even more surprising is that they list the Firefox and Apple WebKit projects with credits, as portions of code from each project appear to have been re-used in the new browser.

Given how good Firefox already is, Microsoft should now have great cause for concern.

This is interesting news given that Firefox is currently one of the most stable web browsers and when combined with Chrome, these two browsers should further eat into Microsoft’s share of global web users. At present 78% of web users use Internet Explorer, though this number has been consistently dropping from a peak of 95% back in mid 2004.

I’ll post a link to the new browser download page tomorrow, but for the time being, you can read more about the new browser here:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/fresh-take-on-browser.html

or for those more technically minded, you can read the full comic book here:

http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/index.html

UPDATE

The new Google Chrome browser can now be downloaded from:

www.google.com/chrome

On first glance it appears to have a couple of interesting features and is quite slim and fast though no RSS feed handling yet, which given the number of blogs in existence, is quite a major missing element.