John Eckman Sr. Practice Director: Community, Content, and Commerce

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John Eckman has over a decade of experience designing and building web applications for organizations ranging from small non-profit organizations to Fortune 500 enterprises. As Sr. Director of Optaros Labs, John works with Optaros clients — including Turner Broadcasting, the Associated Press, Rodale Publishing, Walmart.com, and 20th Century Fox - to put in place strategies for leveraging the Assembled Web to drive revenue, deepen customer engagement, and increase their digital footprint. He received a BA from Boston University and a PhD from the University of Washington, Seattle, and completed an additional Master's in Information Systems from Northeastern University in 2007.

Social Commerce Presentation from Magento Imagine Conference

Posted on 05 Apr 2011

I shared the slides from my social commerce talk at the Magento Imagine conference earlier, but now the video has been posted: I’ve also taken the audio from that video and converted the SlideShares slides into a screencast, which syncing the audio to the slides: With Friends Like These, Who Needs Revenue? View more webinars [...]

The Problem with Time on Site

Posted on 16 Mar 2011

Time is Running Out (Photo by Andrea Zamboni, cc-by-nc license, http://www.flickr.com/photos/zamboniandrea/170324255/) In a previous post (Metaphors That Mislead Us: User, Audience, Visitor, Shopper?), I discussed the way in which the terms we use to describe the people who interact with our web-based applications can shape our thinking, encouraging some approaches and limiting or making others [...]

Real Curation Requires Effort, Point of View

Posted on 15 Mar 2011

Curator's Hand, by Marinmuseum, cc-by-nd, http://www.flickr.com/photos/marinmuseum/5345449107/ Many of today’s popular deal-a-day sites claim to be creating “curated” experiences for their audiences. Many social media publishers focus on “curating” the stream of blog posts, tweets, and other content objects on specific topics. But what does that curation really mean? What’s the point of view behind the [...]

Metaphors That Mislead Us: User, Audience, Visitor, Shopper?

Posted on 14 Mar 2011

"I Am" photo by Allison Felus, cc-by (http://www.flickr.com/photos/wrestlingentropy/405308094/) The metaphors we use to describe digital technology end up misleading us. We attempt to understand new technologies by bringing the context of previous experiences and hoping to find relevant analogies, but those analogies often carry other unintended meanings and can obscure possibilities. For example, we think [...]

eTail humor

Posted on 24 Feb 2011

I’m a big fan of Criggo, a blog that runs bad headlines, editor’s mistakes, and other humorous ephemera from newspapers. Today I found this entry from a few days ago, appropriate since I’m at eTail West: Is it really so simple? No need for community and content, no need for exclusivity or behavioral psychology, no [...]

It has come to our attention . . .

Posted on 17 Feb 2011

I download lots of whitepapers, ebooks, and webinars, habitually – just part of trying to keep up to speed with what’s going on in eCommerce, social computing, content management, and open source software in general. Often downloading these things requires registration, and some level of profile information: an email address, a phone number, a corporate [...]

Magento Imagine eCommerce Conference

Posted on 14 Feb 2011

Last week I had the opportunity to attend and speak (“With Friends Like These, Who Needs Revenue?“) at the inagural Magento Imagine eCommerce conference in LA. It was a great show, with way too much going on for a simple summary, but I’ll try my best here to capture some of the highlights and point [...]

Stuck in the Middle with You

Posted on 11 Feb 2011

The first part of this week I was out in Los Angeles for the inaugural Magento Imagine eCommerce conference (more about that to come). En route, I ended up trying (via standby) to get on an early flight for one leg (ATL to LAX), and just got squeezed onto the flight as the last passenger. [...]

The Difference Between You and a Media Company

Posted on 07 Jan 2011

(From ICanHazCheezburger) Sounds a bit like a lead-in to a joke, doesn’t it? Like the difference between you and a media company is that you haven’t laid off half your staff, or the difference is that the media company has likeable characters, or . . . Actually it’s a great blog post by Joe Pulizzi [...]

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