After a tumultuous year for Netflix, long-time Chief Marketing Officer Leslie Kilgore will be stepping down from her role with the company. In her place, Netflix has named Jessie Becker as its interim Chief Marketing Officer and appointed Jonathan Friedland as the company’s Chief Communications Officer.

Kilgore had been Netflix’s marketing chief for 12 years, but the company suffered a number of setbacks in 2011. They began with an announced price hike that angered many customers as the company raised prices for joint DVD-and-streaming subscribers by as much as 60 percent. But the bad news kept coming, as Netflix came forward with plans to separate those services and spin out its DVD-by-mail business as a standalone service called Qwikster that never actually launched. Along with the news that Netflix would not be re-upping its Starz streaming deal in 2012, caused many subscribers to reconsider whether they wanted to stick with the company.

While Netflix might have moved too quickly to separate streaming from its DVD business, the real issue is that the company mismanaged communications with its customer base, which up until recently had been pretty loyal to the company. For years, Netflix was named among the top companies in terms of consumer satisfaction, but a number of stumbles in a short period of time caused the company to lose subscriber and investor support.

Netflix lost 800,000 subscribers in the third quarter, and its stock has fallen from more than 0 a share to as low as over the past six months. While it’s been trading up recently — and has stabilized around 0 a share — it’s still a long way back to where things stood in the early part of last summer.

As a result, a shakeup in marketing and communications shouldn’t be too surprising: After all, Netflix doesn’t just depend on advertising to get people on board. It depends on positive word of mouth from its subscribers to start growing its domestic membership again.

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Netflix had a rough year, for sure: The company has taken its lumps from users, analysts and investors ever since it announced a major price hike and an ill-advised plan to spin off its DVD-by-mail service into a separate business called Qwikster. All of that has led to a massive decline in customer satisfaction, as the once high-flying company saw its rating drop to its lowest ratings ever, according to ratings company ForeSee.

ForeSee, which issues a twice-yearly report tracking customer satisfaction, reported that Netflix’s rating during the holiday season dropped seven points from 86 to 79 points, a decline of 8 percent from a year ago, making it the biggest loser in the survey. That’s a huge drop for Netflix, which for years had been among the top companies in the report. Meanwhile, Amazon, which typically battles Netflix for the #1 spot, was the clear leader this year, with a record score of 88.

Netflix’s customer satisfaction aside, the index of the top 40 Internet retailers was actually pretty good, with the average score for the group increasing to 79. So for now, Netflix is just average among the top companies in the survey.

Of course, it didn’t take a crystal ball to see this was coming: Netflix lost 800,000 subscribers in the third quarter, and domestic growth in the fourth quarter — which is usually pretty robust due to holiday gifts that come with Netflix embedded — is expected to be flat or down. Meanwhile, confidence in the company’s stock has collapsed, sending its share price from above 0 down to about . So it should come as little surprise that customer satisfaction dropped so precipitously.

Netflix is still the clear leader in the online streaming space, with about 24 million subscribers. But for years Netflix has relied on the virtuous cycle of positive word-of-mouth to help propel its growth. With customer satisfaction declining rapidly, it’ll have to work harder to retain existing customers and to win new ones.

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Facebook’s explosive growth has led many to question whether it will become the de facto hub of commerce for retailers. Facebook Commerce is alluring because it enables companies to harness social capital, and retailers are eager to tap into the tremendous word-of-mouth potential of fans liking products, making purchases, and sharing with friends.

Social media strategists often tell their clients to “fish where the fish are,” but while Facebook storefronts can be effective to facilitate impulse purchases, are they the right long-term strategy to grow sales through social media?  Perhaps not.

Traditional analytics and e-commerce platforms deliver rich clickstream data, helping retailers track browsing behavior and determine methods to optimize the purchase funnel on their site. These platforms also offer intelligence about which marketing programs (email, search, PPC, social or affiliates) are most effective at driving revenue.

Facebook Insights does provide valuable data on interactions and soft metrics such as impressions, likes and comments. While these are great for measuring engagement, retailers must ultimately make decisions based on factors that directly influence transactional metrics like conversions or acquisition costs, and Facebook’s analytics engine does not yet provide the level of relevant data required for effective merchandising.

Many Facebook storefronts use iFrames or Flash to serve product content, which often results in SEO black holes that receive very little love from search engines. Given that 25-35 percent of traffic to large e-commerce sites is from organic search, the lack of search engine discoverability for product content on Facebook should be a concern.

Clearly there is value in maintaining a strong commerce component under your roof. Perhaps David Fisch, Director of Business Development at Facebook, said it best when he remarked “the storefronts are really only one piece, and really a pretty small piece, of the burgeoning area of social commerce.  Our interest isn’t in getting people to create tabs where people can shop but allowing consumers to shop wherever they are and helping them discover products through their friends.”

Fortunately, with the right mix of tools, the benefits of social shopping can be extended to your e-commerce site. Here are three ways to leverage Facebook and social commerce on your site to grow conversions and sales.

1. Social sharing

Social sharing taps peer recommendations to drive qualified traffic to product pages and conversion points on your e-commerce site. It lets consumers promote their purchases or product reviews to their friends on multiple social networks, which fosters brand advocacy and drives qualified referral traffic to your site.

Social sharing also helps retailers circumvent the challenges of news feed optimization. Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm is designed to promote relevance by favoring news feed posts from friends with whom you frequently interact. While your brand page may have plenty of fans and likes, your Facebook posts could get lost in the news feed unless consumers frequently interact with your messages or visit your page.

Peer-to-peer sharing is different because it leverages the high affinity scores that your consumers already have with their friends. Posts that originate from consumers may be more likely to filter to the top of the news feed than those from your brand. In essence, more impressions lead to more referrals and ultimately, increased sales.

2. Incorporate friends and social graphs

One reason retailers turn to Facebook is to replicate the shopping mall experience online – where consumers flock to stores with their friends to browse and purchase products. But social shopping is also possible directly on a retailer’s site after enabling social login.

Shoppers can choose to share their social profile data and friends lists when they sign-up on your site with their Facebook identity.  This social graph data opens the door to social shopping on your site. Here are a few ways your customers can incorporate their Facebook friends into the shopping experience:

• Filter product listings or reviews to prominently display content that friends have recommended.
• Invite Facebook friends to check out a particular product or visit the site.
• Recommend gift ideas for Facebook friends based on their birthday or interests.

By making the shopping experience social, retailers can turn on word-of-mouth to expand product awareness, increase time on site, and improve the likelihood of purchase.

3. Social Ads

Targeted social ads are another effective traffic-driver to product pages and conversion points on your site. Because Facebook accounts for about 12 percent of all time spent online in the U.S., it is an incredibly potent channel for advertisers.

Facebook advertising works for retailers partially because of the social network’s scale, but also because Facebook can target relevant ads based on a consumer’s demographics and interests. If you sell athletic shoes, you will generate more conversions and greater return on your advertising investment by targeting Facebook users who are interested in running.

Many retailers use Facebook ads to drive traffic to their brand pages on the social network. While this is an effective tactic if the goal is to build community on Facebook, your product pages or custom splash pages should be the destination if revenue is the immediate objective. Your e-commerce site remains the best place to track consumer behavior, influence conversions and measure performance indicators through more robust analytics tools.

Facebook has the potential to become a viable direct selling channel.  But until it evolves to support the sophisticated analytics, SEO and merchandising tactics that retailers already use on their commerce sites, it is perhaps best leveraged as a complementary sales channel, a branding and engagement tool, and a traffic-driver to your e-commerce site. Fortunately, the aforementioned ideas can channel the power of Facebook Commerce on your site.

Michael Olson manages marketing campaigns and demand generation programs at Janrain, a Portland software company specializing in social media and identity management solutions.

Image courtesy of  Flickr user Shlomi Fish.

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Every week, it seems there is more evidence that the balance of power in the book industry continues to tilt towards the author and away from the all-powerful publisher. One of the latest examples is John Green, who writes fiction for young adults from his home in Indianapolis, and whose latest novel has hit number one before it has even been published. Green gives credit for this phenomenon to his Twitter and YouTube followers, but the real credit should go to him for being willing to not just use social media as a promotional tool the way some do, but to actually reach out and engage with his readers and fans.

As the Wall Street Journal  describes it, Green simply posted the title of his new book — a story about two young cancer patients called “The Fault In Our Stars” on his Twitter account — where he has built up a following of more than a million fans — and on his Tumblr blog, as well as a community forum based around Green’s work called YourPants.org. He then offered to sign the entire first print run of the book, and later followed that up with a live YouTube show, in which he discussed his plans for the book and read from a chapter of the uncompleted novel.

The whole process started on Tuesday afternoon, and by that evening, the book had apparently hit the number one spot on both the Amazon list of bestsellers and the Barnes & Noble list. Not surprisingly, this kind of word-of-mouth marketing multiplied by the force of social media has caused a lot of raised eyebrows in the industry. As one senior editor at publisher Harper Collins told the Journal:

Everyone is now focused on it, because when it works, it can be a runaway train

Obviously, not everyone is going to have the million-plus followers that Green has, or the devoted following on YouTube that he and his brother Hank have built up over years of doing what used to be called “vlogging” or video-blogging. The two have also created a couple of thriving communities of online fans such as Nerdfighters and YourPants, which are very similar in some ways to the communities that other artists such as Ze Frank have been able to create around their work (PDF link). The point is that no publisher or agent or industry had to create those things; the author did it himself with help from his fans.

Green is just one of the new authors changing the rules in the book business in unpredictable ways. Although he is still represented by a traditional publisher (a unit of Penguin Group), the kind of following he has been able to gather through social media gives him enough clout that he could easily decide to publish on his own, as author Barry Eisler recently decided to do, turning down a 0,000 advance after years of publishing through a traditional agency relationship. JA Konrath is another author who has argued that more writers should pursue the self-publishing route because it gives them more control.

Amanda Hocking is another example that many point to of how authors can become powerful entities in their own right, while controlling their own fate: Although she recently signed a -million publishing contract, her ability to negotiate that kind of deal was a direct result of the incredible success she had self-publishing her own young-adult fiction through the Kindle publishing platform, with many of her books selling for as little as 99 cents. In less than a year, Hocking was able to rack up more than million in sales, without any help from the traditional publishing industry at all.

And Amazon’s Kindle isn’t the only non-traditional outlet for authors. Startups such as Byliner are also carving out new niches in the space between the novel and the magazine-length feature, as are sites such as Long Reads and another startup called The Atavist that focuses on publishing long-form nonfiction.

Some feel that authors like Green are “outliers,” or exceptions to the rule, and that just because they can marshal an army of millions of Twitter followers doesn’t mean others can. The publishing industry, these critics say, is becoming more and more like the pop-music business, which focuses its attention on a few million-selling mega-stars — the book equivalent of Brittany Spears or Justin Bieber — while ignoring the bulk of writing that occurs outside the spotlight, where authors don’t get access to the publicity machine.

That may be true, and it may be that not every author can become John Green or Amanda Hocking. But that doesn’t change the fact that the same tools that these authors have used, whether it’s Twitter or YouTube or the Kindle Singles publishing platform and 99-cent books, are available to anyone who wants to use them. In a lot of ways, this takes more effort than simply signing with an agent and then complaining when the publisher doesn’t promote your novel properly and your sales tank — but at the same time, it gives authors more power to affect their own future, and create their own success.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Jeremy Mates and marya

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If you are looking to buy a motorbike and want the most bicycle for your cash, then you are looking for a used motorbike for sale. A motorbike for sale now-a-days differ from the older designs to the most recent ones. When you do locate a motorbike for sale, make sure to inspect it before purchasing. When looking for a motorbike for sale on the internet, you ought to still plan to visit the buyer’s location and personally evaluate the machine if at all possible, even if most of the particulars are available online. Your motorcycle insurance agency may even necessitate this to transfer your motorcycle insurance policy. After all, until you have actually ridden that motorbike for sale, you will not know if the seller is being honest or not, and your motorcycle insurance firm needs to know that it is insuring a safe vehicle.

The optimal way to locate a motorbike for sale is by word of mouth. Another way to locate a motorbike for sale is by trying the internet. Knowing where to locate a motorbike for sale can many times be difficult, but it is still the preferred method for finding these unique bikes – and a necessary one for those minus the technological knowledge to build their own.

Obviously, you can still locate a motorbike for sale at various bicycle shows – although the owners are many times more disinclined to part with their valued motorcycles. In the past, the only way to locate a motorbike for sale was for you to be lucky enough to reside in a place where somebody wished to sell one. Now, with the internet, that is not the case any longer.

Before you even start to look for a motorbike for sale, however, you ought to first be certain that you understand what type you are looking for. You can also go to shops which will have motorcycles for sale. You may find one you want to buy there, but you can also simply research different makes and models to decide what sort of motorbike you want to concentrate on in your search.

One thing you wish to try and do is get more bicycle for your cash – in other words, locate a great deal on a pre owned motorbike for sale. From that you can use a common sense approach to the best motorbike for sale – which one is suited for your needs balanced with the lowest cost.

There are many issues to take into consideration when picking out your very best option for a motorbike for sale. If you are depending on the internet, locate a trusted online source to search online for a used motorbike for sale. This will help you are aware that the factual information you locate on the website about every individual bicycle can be trusted, as well. Sellers take note – it is worth taking care to get great pictures when offering a second hand motorbike for sale – pictures of the motorcycles are one of the main things you ought to look at.

In conclusion, before you purchase any motorbike make certain you are getting yourself the best motorbike for sale.

In recent years, there has been no shortage of well-funded, well-staffed photo-sharing startups vying to become the next Flickr. But all the financial backing in the world can’t buy one of the most necessary components for startup success: dedicated users. Almost since it was founded in 2004, Flickr has remained the destination of choice for many great photographers. In many ways, Flickr’s biggest competitive edge is its passionate user base.

In recent months, Tortonto-based startup 500px seems to be becoming the new favorite site of a lot of Flickr “power users.” Some 27,000 of the site’s 67,000 current members joined in the past two months, founders Oleg Gutsol and Ian Sobolev told me in an interview this week. What’s especially remarkable to me is that the company, which is bootstrapped and currently has just four full-time employees, has attracted all this growth purely through word of mouth. “We didn’t have the money or manpower to dedicate to marketing,” Gutsol said. “So we concentrated on developing a good site, something that we also would like to use ourselves.”

500px won’t be a stranger to money and manpower for much longer, if all goes according to plan. The company is currently in the process of raising an undisclosed amount of venture funding from a group of New York-based investors, Gutsol tells me. The money will be put toward bringing on more staff to help accomplish a variety of goals, from site translation for worldwide expansion to developing plug-ins for Adobe Lightroom and Apple Aperture.

500px is targeted mainly at professional photographers and highly skilled amateurs, people whose photos would be at the upper echelons of a site like Flickr. “We see Flickr more as a photo storage site, where anyone can upload all their photos in one place and share them with their friends,” Gutsol explained. “We’re interested in getting the best photography in the world in one place, and growing the best photography community.” 500px’s main revenue source is selling per year premium accounts that allow users to create unbranded portfolio websites. The company also allows users to make their photos available for purchase, and 500px collects a 5 percent commission on all printing sales.

500px started eight years ago as a community for photography buffs within the social blogging website LiveJournal. In its early incarnation, photographers had to submit their images to 500px for moderation, and the community’s curators had to approve of a photo’s quality in order for it to be published. Gutsol and Sobolev eventually realized that 500px’s original format wouldn’t scale, so in 2009 they got to work on building a site with algorithmic photo evaluation capabilities that would still appeal to high-quality photographers without needing so much editorial oversight.

500px in its current, mostly automated incarnation was launched on October 31, 2009. “We worried that with scale, photo quality would decline, but it has not been affected at all. The more people are joining, the better it’s gotten,” Gutsol said. “I’m blown away daily just looking at the front page of the site.”

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