John Eckman Senior Director, Optaros Labs

Email: jeckman@optaros.com  Twitter: @jeckman | Contact John

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.

Ecommerce Trends – Content, Community, Commerce: Sears’ Shoes Experience

Posted on 27 Aug 2010

Today Sears announced the launch of a “new footwear experience” at sears.com/shoes.  It’s worth checking out as yet another example of a mainstream, multichannel retailer embracing what we’ve been calling the assembled web, both in terms of the convergence of content, community and commerce and in terms of the widely decentralized and distributed nature of | View post »

Nordstrom Conversation-focused Redesign

Posted on 24 Aug 2010

I’m absolutely loving the new Nordstrom.com, launched over the weekend. They’ve dramatically simplified navigation on the homepage, offering the user the choice of Department, Brand, or Conversation: The main content in the center offers a flash-driven set of vignettes, allowing the Nordstrom team the ability to set up editorially driven, fashion magazine style interactions which | View post »

Facebook Like -I Like it like that Amazon Levis and the Facebook open graph

Posted on 17 Aug 2010

At the beginning of 2010, Facebook rolled out a number of significant changes to their platform, including most notably the introduction of the Open Graph protocol and Facebook social plugins. Since then, retailers have been trying to determine the best strategies for taking advantage of these options. Two significant strategies (at least) have emerged so | View post »

Customer service on Facebook?

Posted on 12 Aug 2010

Mashable had an interesting piece yesterday about the market for applications which connect your company’s Facebook page to its customer service function (Facebook Pages Become Customer Service Centers). They note two such applications — Parature for Facebook and Get Satisfaction’s Social Engagement Hub — and ask: Do you think Facebook Pages can serve as an | View post »

WPBook 1.5 Released – Let the Streaming begin!

Posted on 08 Mar 2010

WPBook So for a while I’ve been working on and beta testing the next version of WPBook. Tonight I’ve just tagged it for release, so it will be available for download shortly. (I’ve already been running it here for a while and testing it on a few other test blogs). The main improvement in WPBook [...]

Content and Commerce: Celebrity Style

Posted on 23 Feb 2010

Interesting article in yesterday’s New York Times about blogs which combine “shop the look” with celebrity photos. Specifically included are INFDaily, CelebStyle.com, and JustJared – though obviously there are many other picking up this trend, which has its origins in the celebrity stalking watching print magazine world. The technology, from vendors like gumgum and Pixazza [...]

Comcast XFinity: TV (Almost) Everywhere

Posted on 28 Dec 2009

There’s been lots of industry buzzz about Time Warner and Comcast’s TV Everywhere plan, which would allow subscribers to fixed-wire cable offerings access to premium content over internet connections, freeing content from the cable box (or cable card). Although it isn’t exactly setting content free on the web, it does seem a positive step in [...]

Comcast XFinity: TV (Almost) Everywhere

Posted on 28 Dec 2009

There’s been lots of industry buzzz about Time Warner and Comcast’s TV Everywhere plan, which would allow subscribers to fixed-wire cable offerings access to premium content over internet connections, freeing content from the cable box (or cable card). Although it isn’t exactly setting content free on the web, it does seem a positive step in | View post »

Commerce and Community: Sears' Santa's Helper Promotion

Posted on 01 Dec 2009

MySears keeps doing great work with respect to the convergence of content, community and commerce. Take this holiday promotion, for example: It’s a smart combination of tactics. Users are encouraged to write reviews (which helps sell more products at Sears), and in exchange can both help a charity (Heroes at Home) and potentially win $750 | View post »

WordCamp NYC, WPBook, WordCamp Boston

Posted on 14 Nov 2009

Here’s the slides from my presentation this morning at WordCamp NYC. It was in the “beginning developer” track so I tried to focus on the overall structure of how the plugin does what it does and the hooks/actions/filters used. Hard to fit the talk into 30 minutes with time for questions and roadmap – there’s [...]

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