The Hasbro/Monopoly team has decided to remove the leaderboard from their Monopoly board top city vote. Maybe they weren’t happy with the line-up of cities or all the interest the vote process was getting. In a process that was fairly open from the beginning I’m not sure hiding the results at the last minute is a good plan. If you haven’t already vote go to:
http://www.monopolyworldvote.com/en_CA/world
When Facebook announced its SocialAds I think everything was fairly accepting of advertising inside Facebook. At the same time they announced Facebook Beacon’s though, which let third-party websites advertise users actions inside Facebook. Unlikely many of the other features inside Facebook, the Facebook Beacons were turned on by default and required users to turn them off.
Jay Goldman from Radiant Core, did an awesome break down of Facebook Beacon process. He went through all the beacon.js functinality and was able to see how the ‘toast’ component of the Facebook Beacon was suppose to be displayed on third-party sites. In a rather non-standard format the ‘toast’ slides up from the bottom of the screen on third-party webpages and displays a message that a Facebook Beacon is about to be presented for the user. Unfortunately the process Facebook used might not work with some browsers and if users missed the ‘toast’ screen the Beacon was automatically sent.
After much up-roar from users about the privacy issues around Beacons, Facebook has decided to change them so that the user has to explicitly confirm that they want a Beacon sent. Techcrunch has a great break down of the Beacon 2.0 process. I think this is a great win for user’s and puts them back in control. One thing you can certainly say about Facebook is that they do listen to their users and respond quickly.
CaseCamp Toronto 6 was last night at the Century Club. CaseCamp is marketing version of DemoCamp with marketing case studies instead of Demos.
As always the room was packed and there was a lot socializing going on before the event. This time the Century Club was divided so that there was a socializing area and a presentation area to make the mingling easier without all the chairs. I would guess there was close to 200 people there and most stayed for all the presentations.
Eli started the night with announcement that CaseCamp has partnered with nextMedia to provide sponsorship and logistics support. Eli’s has negotiated a deal that will ensure that sponsors are available and the event will continue to be free.
The Cases studies were:
1/ Mobile Marketing for Levis @ Virgin Fest
The Levi campaign revolved around selecting random people at Virgin Fest to be a local Levi spokesperson and be featured in local Levi’s advertising. To be selected as a Spokesperson they got their photo taken and gave them friends a unique code + an SMS short code to vote.
Vortex Mobile ran the mobile campaign and recorded 22,000 SMS votes for the short code and a peak of 24 Facebook groups from people that wanted their friends to vote for them. It was an interesting campaign but I thought it could have benefited from more online support, for example a Facebook Application to let people self-promote would have been great.
Treehugger.com is one of the leading green focused blogs and they have recruited writers to provide content around the world on green related issues. Initially they were one of the only green blogs but have had to adapt to a variety of competitors. It was interesting to hear about their focus on getting traffic Digg.com and their focus on getting articles submitted to different categories.
3/ GlobeandMail.com, Comments and Beyond
This case was focused on the GlobeandMail.com and how they added the ability for users to submit comments. The GlobeandMail.com had been struggling with how to enable users comments and maintain its ‘high-touch’ content service with an army of editors. After struggling to review every single comment they have decided on different levels of comment control, some articles have only community comment reporting, others have no comments allowed and some articles have only reviewed comments allowed. It was a good example of traditional media struggling to be relevant in the online world, nothing about it was that exciting and I think it just shows the struggles that the Globe will face going forward.
4/ Will Pate, Community Evangelist
The last case study was a little different in that it feature Will Pate and his process to become a community evangelist for Flock and now ConceptShare. Will is only of the most networked people I know and spends a lot of his time networking with people online and off. One message area I thought was really interesting was his messages about being authentic and being present. I think a lot of people seem to forget the being present part of the process and lose relevant conversations that eventually isolates them from their community.
CaseCamp was another great night and with the exception of all the pillars the Century Club was a great venue. I’m interested to see how the relationship with nextMedia will impact things and if it means we’ll see CaseCamp events more often.
Pragmatic Marketing held its network event in Toronto last night. Pragmatic Marketing is one of the leading training companies for Product Managers. Rich Nutinsky presented on “Start with the Ending” which really focused on thinking where you want to get to with your product line. Rich also spoke at length about building credibility with your peers.
All of the Pragmatic Marketing course I’ve attended have been run by Steve Johnson and I found his insite very helpful when I was a software Product Manager. Now that I’m more focused on web applications I find the Pragmatic approach a little too formal for most of my needs. I think it needs to evolve for web applications which are typically a much shorter development cycle.
Rogers Sportsnet launched its new MySportsnet.ca site today which is a highly personalized site for Sports fans. MySportsnet.ca automatically customizes the content on the website depending on the users behaviour. For example if the user reads a lotabout Hockey they will get more content related to Hockey on their
homepage. The same personalization can also be applied to on-site advertising based on the users interests.
The site reminded me of a conversation last year about the real growth online being in the Implicit Web. For most websites today you need to be explicit setup and you have to
tell the site what you want and how you want to see things going forward. For many users this level of customization is not practical and creates a barrier for them to use the technology. RSS readers and social network sites run into this challenge where users don’t see a real benefit from the site until they invest a lot of time importing
their information. Facebook does a good job of allowing users to find friends from their personal email accounts like Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo.
Where websites can create an Implicit experience it can be very powerful. For example when you buy a Harry Potter book on Amazon.com it automatically suggests other books that you might like. This is based on user behaviour that Amazon.com can aggregate and create a recommendation for the user. The user does not need to
explicitly search for similar books or try to find other titles by the author. This is a great example of the Implicit Web Experience.
The challenge as marketer with the Implicit Web, is user privacy. In many cases its only possible to create an Implicit Experience a lot of user data and this creates a privacy concern. The easiest solution to have a clear privacy policy, avoid capturing personally identifiable information, and allow users to opt-out where practical.
MySportsnet.ca does a good job of handling these concerns. The site is powered by a desktop application ( PC only ) that is used to track the content that you read online. The application privacy policy states it doesn’t capture personal information and the application can be easily turned off and un-installed. After running it this morning and watching the site update as I read more about the Toronto Maple Leafs than the Toronto Blue Jays its easy to see how this can be a powerful experience. My only complaint was the the website wasn’t available at all when I closed the desktop application or if I used a different PC.
MySportsNet.ca is a great example of the experiences that are possible with Implicit Web and the balance with privacy that we’re going to face as we develop these experiences.
CaseCamp was back in action last night at the Century Room. As always Eli Singer and the Casecamp team had a great line up of marketing cases and the place was
packed. I really impressed with the turn out, my estimate was there was close to 200 people there. The presentation area and seating were well setup so that you could see and hear the speakers from almost anywhere. The four cases for the night were:
1/ Yamaha Motors Sled Talk Blog by Maggie Fox
Yamaha has created a blog for the snowmobiles written Chris Reid, one of its long time product planners and avid readers. Like most large corporation the thought of blogging was initially kinda of scary and initial concerns were around controlling the feedback/comments and messaging. The blog opened with alot of readers and minimal promotion
was done initially the attract readership while the program was monitored. I thought the tracking of user comments was fairly interesting with 43% positive, 48% neutral and only 8% negative. Through the blog Yamaha was also able to track interaction with a key snowmobile influencer and who his experience on the Yamaha blog led him to represent the Yamaha snowmobiles on other forums. Overall a great case, with a fair bit of meat about how Yamaha used their blog, monitored it and saw benefit from it.2/ Freshdaily and Blogto by Tim Shore
Freshdaily is one of Canada’s leading blog networks with blog’s covering the Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. Most of the presentation was focused Blogto.com ( being that Toronto is the center of the universe, this was all good ) and how the blog has evolved to become a major media source. The content is focused on cultural events and has
expanded to cover major events like the film festival and popular restaurants. The site has also started publishing to other media sources like the National post. The presentation was interested but I would have like to hear more about how Blogto is using social media.Their Facebook group was only mentioned briefly and they have a huge Flickr following as well. It would have to be great to understand how
their using these media.3/ BMW Canada by John Capella and Paul Curtin
This was probably the weakest presentation of the night. I think there was probably too much information trying to be covering in the little time allowed. I think it would have been good to pick a component of the BMW online strategy and go deep on it. Major online sites like the BMW M Owners club were glossed mainly as a result of time. I think BMW has been pretty innovating in getting its brand out their with BMW Films and some of their loyalty programs. I thought one of the most interesting aspects was hearing that 80% of BMW lease their vehicle so the customer satisfaction and retention programs are so important. The other key take away was that BMW seems 90% of their
buyers using the internet to research their vehicles.4/ Specialized Riding Club by Chris Mathews
Chris did a great job of setting the scene for why Specialized wanted to create a riders club and the decision to create a paid program rather than exclusively free one. As part of the riders club subscribers get stickers, shirts and all sort of Specialized crap but the biggest feature they get is the ability to create content. This was a conscience decision to only allow paid subscribers to create content in the form of rides, a journal/blog and other interaction. Free subscribers can participate in existing rides and events but
cannot create their own. I thought this was interesting process to monetize the site and create some clear definition around paid and free programs. Chris also provide alot of insight into what went well and what didn’t, talking about how the initial target was only high-end biker purchasers and believing that stores would not want to participate.
Another great nite for the CaseCamp team, I think my final thoughts were that its hard its probably best to present a single smaller more focused case than try to present too much. Everything was well organized and a great environment to network and see what other companies are up working on.
I’ve written an article for OneDegree.ca, you can find here:
http://www.onedegree.ca/2007/06/03/building-your-brand-in-facebook
OneDegree.ca was recently purchased by Kate Trgovac from MyNameisKate.ca fame and this is my first article working with her.
I missed most of the Mesh07 Wrap but it didn’t seem like a lot of people stayed for it either. It was a muggy day and most of us had been out late the night before. The socializing moved over to thePoque Mahones and it seemed pretty quiet there too.
Overall I thought Mesh07 was again a great place to network but still lacking as conference. I really found the bigger panel like discussions to be a complete waste of time and lacked any meaningful content or discussion. The smaller sessions were a lot more insightful so I’d suggest there probably needs to be more of these and less of the big
full session keynotes.
I’d also suggest that Mesh needs to start eating its own cookies ( as Mike McDermett puts it ). The wiki was missing from last year and it would have been great for people to be able to add to the schedule. Specifically the rooms weren’t displayed on the online scheduled and the speaker bios were not available in the paper version.
It was also very hard to track the online activity around the conference without searching Technorati or Google directly. I’d suggest there should be a process for each session to allow people to submit blog links, photos, videos etc.. It should be really easy for me to see what is happening in other sessions. This would also help to
promote mesh for more people who might be on the fence for next year.
I’d also like to see more start-ups and more students participate. I’m not sure the conference can survive otherwise.
The afternoon sessions on day 2 were great. I focused on probably the smallest room and it allow for more intimate discussions:
How to Pitch VCs with Rick Segal and Susan Dingwall Williams
I read both Rick and Susan’s blogs regularly and I was excited to see both of them. Rick did a great job of providing an quick overview of how to pitch VCs and the keys to get VC interest. I didn’t there was really anything new in his presentation was but it was great to see everything outline. Some key highlights for me were the time lines for
funding, 6 months to raise, 18 months to provide and the rinse and repeat until exit. And ALL VCs are looking for an exit plan. Rick also spoke briefly about Angels in Canada, and believed their issued approximately $21M last year in capital. Many of the Angel funded projects were not practical for VCs.
Build a Team, Build a Culter with Mark Dowds
I was seriously impressed with the setup and process that Mark went through in this session to start the discussion. The audience was divided into groups of 4-5 people and each group member was given a hidden agenda. In many cases these agenda conflicted and the group was asked to develop different aspects of their companies strategy of
vision. In my group was some members were focused on having fun and others were focused on results, and punishing for bad results, it ended up being a funny corporate vision of ‘Have fun performing, or else…” The process was great and it was interesting to see how each group tried to solve these differences.
Building a community with Kate Trgovac
Kate had the unlucky position of closing off the conference but she did a great job of creating a discussion around building an online community. She used several current examples, like flickr, or facebook and was able to help define what is an online community and what is a platform. It helped that there was also many people in audience that
were actively in the process of trying to build a community.
Mesh07 Day 2 kicked off with a bit a little weak with the PR session with Richard Eldeman. Unless you were really into PR this one was difficult to handle.
The 2nd keynote was a big hit with Jim Buckmaster, the CEO of Craigslist. Working at Trader Corporation I’ve followed Craigslist for awhile so it was great to hear more information about their business. The most interesting aspect was their business philosophy. Craigslist is a unique position of many alot of money and not really needing to
create huge profits for its investors. I really admire them for them for this approach and their view Craigslist almost like a utility/service for people in many aspects of their life, from dating to finding a home, or getting a job.
Jim handled most of the questions directly but really didn’t have much information to reveal. The company still has 24 employees, with 2/3 focus on the technology and 1/3 focused on customer service. They have no sales or marketing people. Their office is in a small victorian house in San Francisco. I’d love to visit their office at some point.
In Canada they receive over 500,000 classified ads per month and the site ranks 7th in overall site traffic. Toronto is the 2nd largest Canadian Craigslist city, after Vancouver and both cities are the top 25 overall Craigslist cities. Craigslist revenue was not disclosed but Jim did mention that they are charging for job postings in 7 cities and real estate brokers in NYC. They began charging after discussing with their users in these cities and found that charging would provide a good barrier for spam or too much content. Before charging in any category they discuss the concept on the user forum for that category/region.
The singular strategy that Jim talked about was listening to users and providing services that users want. I love the concept of this but I think it might be a little mis-representative. For example Jim mentioned that users do not want video. I’m not certain this is entirely true and providing video would substancially increase the
complexity and traffic requirements of the Craigslist experience.
As a fan of Green technology I was excited to hear Jim discussing page views per kilowatt hour. Craigslist can achieve 175K per kilowatt hour, which he believed was industry leading. Craigslist currently runs on approximately 200 servers hosted at multiple locations. Overall I really found Jim’s discussion/interview to be very entertaining and it did provide alot of incite into the Craigslist business.
Day 1 of Mesh 2007 is complete and I think my overall impression is that Mesh continues to be a great conference to network but the sessions were fairly weak.
Many of the sessions are panelist based and lacked diversity. For example the new vs old media lacked anyone from the old media. This made for a fairly repetitive and dull session. I’m not sure the selection of panelists was ideal either, many didn’t have a lot to offer. I felt that many sessions were too long, often running close to a hour. So I’d like to see shorter sessions, maybe even more tracks so the sessions can be smaller and more intimate.
There seems to be a strong shift to professionals from last year. I don’t know if the student numbers were reduced or if less showed up. I haven’t met many students yet and the number of startups, hard core geeks also seems to be down. Many of the people I’ve met have been ad agencies…
The after Mesh social event was kinda disappointing too with the group fragmenting around the distillery district. The speakers were no where to be found ( atleast till 11pm when I left ) and the boiler room was difficult to get seated where service was available.
I’m excited about Day 2, the line-up is much more solid and if all else fails there is lots of breaks for meshing.
The Mesh 2007 Conference kicked off today with a great line up of speakers and panelists. One of the great aspects of the Mesh Conference is the social interaction between speakers. Its a great environment to interact with speakers and other members of the industry.
One of the dominate themes I’m seeing at this years Mesh is the exploitation of the Long Tail. Content continues to find readers on the internet. For example Cynthia Brumsfield talked an online web camera watching cheese age, and people are watching. I think this is a great example of the Long Tail. It costs almost nothing to web enable cheese aging but a certain percentage of the population will watch and it can be monetized.
I think we’ll see more example of this going forward and there are niches developing that represent significant opportunities. For example this year’s Mesh also featured a Charity 2.0 presentation and Women 2.0 presence. Niches are hot right now and its becoming cheaper to connect people across geography that have a common interest or goal.
The popularity of Facebook has taken off in Toronto. The population of the “Toronto Network” on Facebook is close to 10% of the city’s registered population. This is amazing market penetration and its creating some interesting situations within the online community. For example, typically students and teachers maintain a certain professional distance. Facebook’s original strategy was to go after solely students and its penetration’s still seems to be higher in these younger demographics. Now that teachers are joining Facebook it puts them in immediate contact with their students. Problems have already started to develop with defamation on Facebook and many schools are setting up policies for how they will respond.
Facebook as a whole is not that dissimilar from the internet except that it allows people to connect more readily and provide a more accessible platform to communicate. Its brought together the concepts of blogging, email, digging or bookmarking content, and social groups. In the past it was difficult to find your friends web pages or blogs and teachers rarely interacted with them. Now they can easily encounter them through the Facebook network and there is much more publicity around inappropriate content. Facebook also creates a perception of privacy with its exclusive friend network and group settings but the full privacy settings are rarely used.
As a marketer its a great opportunity to interface with a variety of different age groups on a single platform. There are very few sites that have penetrated as deeply into the Toronto population across different age. It will be interesting to see if Facebook can maintain this position or they will fade away as different age groups seek specialized experiences. For example do students really want to be on the same platform as their teachers? Do co-workers want to be on the same platform as their drinking buddies? Some of these situations can be handled with the Facebook’s existing security model but many cannot. As Facebook increases user privacy it will risk slowing it growth.
Online advertising growth in Canada is taking off. IAB Canada just released their report on 2006 growth and it was 80% over the 2005. While I have great respect for the IAB I thought their summary of reasons for the growth were extremely weak. One of the biggest trends in advertising is the consumer shift towards online. Many industries are reporting that the majority of users consider online media first when doing product research or making a purchase decisions. Combine that with a very strong internet market penetration in Canada and you get an amazing online advertising growth story. Advertising almost always follows the consumers, the IAB seems to get this wrong with this statement:
“Add to all of this, results from the 7 CMOST (cross-media optimization) research studies that the IAB has undertaken over the past 4 years, plus the fact that in the past two years alone, over 1,000 senior-level advertiser, agency and publisher representatives have taken the IAB’s Intensive One-Day Course in Interactive Marketing and Online Advertising — and you get a sort of “perfect storm” that was able to move the Canadian Online advertising dial forward to such an extent,” says Paula Gignac, President of IAB Canada.
I don’t believe that Advertisers can build the market, no matter how many senior-level advertisers participate in the IAB workshops.
Geosign announced this week that they got $160M in funding. Geosign has been operating in a fairly low-profile for the last few years and I was only aware of them through discussions with some of the Tucows crowd. I’ve also seen Product Managers postings for some of their online properties like Hockey.com. Still it was surprise to see them raise $160M and come into the Canadian media spotlight with such force.
From what I understand of their business model they’ve developed a repeatable process for selecting generic domain names, and developing them into revenue generating sites. They have a wide selection of online sites, none of which I would say are industry leading but all of which generate some money.
I think their business model is really another extension of the Long Tail. For years companies like GE have insisted that you need to be market leader in your industry/category to profitable. The Geosign model shows that with a big enough tail of smaller sites you can still be very successful without a leadership position.
For the past few years Google Adwords has been the dominate SEM marketing tool in Canada. Yahoo had a ridiculus process to advertise to Canada through its American site, and different process for Quebec. MSN had no really clue what they were doing and it was difficult as a small business to engage them. All of that has changed in the last few months.
Yahoo launched their Panama platform into Canada a few months ago. I haven’t really had a reason to try another SEM until recently so I tried to setup Yahoo’s new platform. I seemed to encounter the same problem with my account, after sending few emails to the Yahoo CSR team and waiting. Yahoo still insists I need a US account to market to Canada and the Yahoo US process has a problem with my Canadian credit cards. Yahoo’s plan is that I would use the US account to “GeoTarget” Canadian regions. Yahoo always seems so close, yet so far, I gave up on Yahoo at this point…
Microsoft launched their new Adcenter for Live.com a few weeks ago. In contrast to Yahoo, Microsoft really got it right. Gone are the MS Passport requirements and IE dominated interface. The new site a great feel, worked great with Firefox and I had the campaigns I wanted setup with a few minutes.
I’m now running campaigns on both Live and Google ( Sorry Yahoo, maybe next release), the results still heavily favour Google because of the number of impressions achieved. One benefits that Microsoft Live has is that I can down bid with along more control than Google Adwords. This lets me get more leverage traffic from a relatively small budget. I’ve never been a huge Microsoft fan but its great to see them creating some competition for Google
Over the past week I’ve been taking the TTC ( Toronto Transit Commission ), mainly because my car has some electrical problems. I like the down time after work to just relax so I thought I’d investigate options to use the TTC more often. The TTC pricing is very complicated but an excellent example of behaviour focus pricing and value.
I’m planning to go to work and home on the TTC, and I work 5 days a week ( Mon to Friday ) so that’s a total of 10 trips per week. On average I work a total 220 days a year. So that’s approximately 440 annual trips, or 36 trips in an average month. So lets look at the options available:
Plan Per Trip Weekly Monthly
Cash $2.75 $27.5 $99
Tokens/Tickets ( 5 or 10 tokens ) $2.10 $21 $75.6
Day Pass ( Family Too ) $8.50 $85* $306*
Weekly Pass ( Transferable ) $3.00 $30 $130
Monthly Pass ( Transferable ) $2.70 N/A $99.75
Monthly Pass – Annual $2.48 N/A $91.50
I’m ignoring some options like the GTA Weekly Pass( including the suburbs ), Express routes charges, and convention events passes. The TTC provides a webpage for the Full TTC rates.
So the winner for me appears to be the Tokens/Tickets. It would be interesting to understand the other considerations that the TTC looks at with their pricing.
I’m sure they know that a percentage of all Tokens/Tickets purchased are never used. Do enough people lose/keep their Tokens/Tickets to make this program the most profitable?
Do people with the monthly pass really travel enough on the weekends to make up for the extra cost?
I was reading an article in The Toronto Star yesterday about the number of university applicants, and how Canadian universities can’t handle the load. You can read the full article here:
I thought David Foot’s response was very disappointing and the tone of the article was basically that we could just wait any the problem would solve itself. Lets be clear about what that means though, if 10,000 apply and there are only funds for 2,000 people then 8,000 are not getting education. So if we do nothing these people are not getting educated and have a decrease ability to earn money and contribute to our economy. Does that sound like an acceptable solution?
I think this is a key function of government and they should be well prepared to handle these situations. They have access to birth records for everyone in Canada, every 5 years we do a census to ensure everyone is alive and kicking… It SHOULD be pretty easy to project the require university resources based on this information. In anycase, I hope the echo generation doesn’t get screwed in all this…
Pragmatic Marketing has launched a new coursed focused on Roadmapping for Product Managers. I’ve been a big fan of the Pragmatic Marketing courses since I took their Practical Product Manager course a few years ago. One of the hardest areas of being a Product Manager is determining when to schedule features you’re customers need. Its a difficult balancing and can mean the difference between success and failure.
I haven’t taken the Pragmatic course yet but I’m hoping to when it comes through Toronto later in the year.
Recently the Sony Playstation and Nintendo Wii have hit the streets with a small number of units and insane customer demand. The interesting part around this how Sony and
its retail partners handled the demand.
In Canada, Toy-r-us and Sears Canada seemed to take the fairly normal route of accepting pre-orders on a first-come/first-serve approach. This is pretty simple but the challenge is when to start accepting pre-orders.
BestBuy took a different approach and did not accept pre-orders prior the console launches. The result was a long list of people waiting outside of each of stores and an
overloaded BestBuy.ca. The BestBuy approach created some interesting situations where a variety of groups employed ‘homeless individuals’ to stand inline to buy the consoles. The Toronto Star has a good write-up on this process and it’s a common approach for high demand ticket sales.
The result is that many of these consoles are now being re-sold on Ebay and other online sites at a considerable mark-up. This essentially puts the consoles well outside the price range of their target consumers.
The concert ticket industry has had problems with this for years has developed a number of processes to stop professional groups from profiting on these launches. Approaches for tickets include arm bands, lotteries and other scenarios to make it less profitable. None of these are prefect and it would appear that we’ll be seeing more of these approaches in the consumer electronics market.
There have been several articles around getting your site ranked in search engines and a whole economy has developed around SEO ( Search Engine Optimization ). While this is critical in getting users to your site, the advertising value of your site is also tied to its relative position with competitors. Calculating your competitive positions is difficult at best and in most cases the only the solution are third-party measurement companies. In the US there are a variety of third-party measurement sources but in Canada
the leading provider is comScore.
For those not familiar with third-party measurement services, they measure a sample of internet users and create an estimated traffic report based on the sample’s behaviour.
The sample of internet users is normally in the form of a group of users who volunteer to run tracking software on their computer. With a large enough panel these estimates are generally considered accurate enough to rank competitive sites and provide a good indication of relative value between sites.
The nature of websites makes automatically tracking users web browsing somewhat complicated, especially when web sites share links across multiple domains. Its easier for the tracking software to ignore links to certain file types such as images or movie files. Its more complicated when comes to frames since the tracking software doesn’t know the details of the frame. The whole website could be contained within the frame link so it can’t easily be ignored.
As a result when a site with a frame link is loaded it will normally create a separate user visit for the frame linked domain.
For example a user visiting www.domain.com that loads a linked image from www.differentdomain.com would not trigger a visit for the differentdomain.com. However this seems this is different with frames. If the users visits www.domain.com and loads a frame linked from www.differentdomain.com the tracking software normally tracks this as a separate visit to www.differentdomain.com.
Why is this a problem?
Well if you have a popular domain and want to boost a less popular domain you can do so with basic frame link. A similar approach can be used with multiple smaller sites to boost a single domain. The key is that the all the sites need to get traffic from the sample users in order to trigger the double count. The double count will only
effect the sites relative ranking by the third-party tracking and will not generate additional traffic to the site. In some cases using frame links may actually hinder your own SEO plans.
How can you benefit from this situation?
Using an effective frame linking strategy a company can rank highly in third-party traffic measurement and in some cases overcome a competitor with higher direct visitors. An affiliate program using an frame link would certainly help your competitive ranking.
It would be great to see measurement services exclude these frame links since in a lot of cases they don’t represent real traffic. Until they do frame links will be an important tool in competitive market segments.
Aeroplan has just introduced a couple of rather dramatic changes to their program. For those you not familiar with Aeroplan its Air Canada’s frequent flyer program and designed to be a tool to keep people flying Air Canada. Today they introduce 2 changes:
1/ Expiry on Aeroplan Miles
Points now expire after 7 years and all existing points earned before Jan/2007 will expire Dec 31, 2013.
2/ Automatic Closure of inactive accounts
Accounts not earning points are automatically closed. It appears you need to earn at least 1 point per year or your account will be closed.
If you miles expire or you’re account closes you have to pay $30 + $0.01 per point to get them back.
Frequent Flyers programs can be a sort of ‘golden handcuff’ for travelers. Once you start building up points you want to stick with that company to get maximum value, even if the airline provides absolutely horrible service. I’m surprised that Air Canada would want to risk loosing these customers over something as stupid as point expiry. I would expect that many points are never redeemed or redeemed once for a big family vacation which may not be possible with this new system.
The other group of effected customers is the infrequent flyers that doesn’t fly regularly and will loose their accounts under this program. This seems to open again open Air Canada to competitors without unclear business advantage. Does it really cost so much to keep Aeroplan accounts open per year? Wouldn’t they want to keep the account open so that they could send them spam from partners?
Aeroplan also implies that the changes were required to provide additional reward flights to customers. I’m not sure I see the connection and a couple of checks for flights I had planned for Dec/2006 and July/2007 are not showing additional flights available. I had checked the same flights 2 weeks ago.
Overall a fairly confusing change for a program designed to improve customer loyalty.
For those of you familiar with DemoCamp, CaseCamp may be the polar position with its flashy power point presentations and marketing case studies. For anyone interest in online or interactive campaigns its a great event to see what works and what doesn’t. CaseCamp Toronto at The Fifth Club Wednesday nigth after a summer break and several other CaseCamps around the Canada ( Montreal & Vancouver ). I enjoy CaseCamp because it lets me see how online marketing campaigns are evolving. This months cases included:
After the success of Fuel’s presentation, I think the format of Casecamp should be amended to show the actual interactive campaign. I thought the same after the first Casecamp in which Royal Bank did an interactive campaign and didn’t show the actually interactive until after their presentation was completed. I’m looking forward to future CaseCamps with more interactive presentations.
Unspace has a great article on what they’re calling LiveSearch. There are few great examples of this display, then filter approach at work. One of my favorites sites is the Trulia.com site in the US that provides a Real Estate search. They’re continually improving the interface but the basis premise is get the user listings as quickly as possible and then let them filter to find what they want. When combined with an AJAX interface, it can be a really powerful user experience.
Over the weekend I was in Montreal and staying downtown at the W Hotel. If you’re familar with the W Montreal you know its very well positioned for walking around the city. Its also right around the corner from Royal Bank’s form there head office during the 1920s. I’ve been using Royal Bank for about 10 years so I was kind of excited to see the office as its been featured in several movies. I walked over on a Saturday and the office was still accessible and even featured a bank machine on the main flour. To my surprise when I tried to use the bank machine it was out of order. I asked the security guard and he seemed unable or unwilling to do anything about fixing it. I could find no phone number of the machine for help so I left to use another machine, and in fact had to pay the additional $1.50 to use a Scotia Bank machine a few blocks away. No big deal but annoying…
On Sunday I returned to the same bank office as I now needed cash for the taxi to the airport ( after a night of drinking in Montreal… ). The fancy office was again accessible but the bank machine was still out of order. I find this very indicative of the overall banking experience over the last few years in Canada. They’ve really lost track of their customers. The reality is that I could just as easily sign-up with Scotia Bank, CIBC or TD and have a very similar experience. In most successful businesses the head office would be fully functionality, any employee would enabled to fix the situation or a phone number would have been available to correct situation. There are very fes businesses in the world that could exist like this though and continue to survive..
There’s seems to be a new approach to launching a website redesign. If you’ve been following the Yahoo home page design since February you’ve probably seen their new site and had the option to swap between the new and old designs for several weeks. Yahoo has only recently started forcing moving users to use the new interface but they’re still allows users in Canada to chose. They’ve been maintaining the 2 designs for a while and their home page isn’t the only example, there’re doing the same in the Yahoo Mail interface. Users can choose the flashy new AJAX interface and the old mail user interface.
Yahoo is not the only company following this soft-launch approach for site designs, Microsoft is doing the same with their MSN/Hotmail Mail and the new Live Mail Beta interface. Both mail products bring forward all of the users email, contacts and other personal data but just introduce a new user interface.
On the other end of the spectrum is the new Digg v3 site redesign which took the hard launch approach. For weeks many of the top stories on the site related to the new design and how users want to maintain the previous look and feel. In some cases Grease Monkey scripts were developed to help re-create the older site design look and feel.
All of this points to a rather interesting question about site redesigns and how they should be launched. The hard launch approach, where in a new design is launched and old design is forgotten, may not be the best approach for design launches. I haven’t seen any research that indicates a redesign is disruptive for the user but my own experiences have been limited to much less complex sites. Some key questions need to be answered:
Overall I think all of the newer versions of the sites mentioned above are vast improvements but as dependency on the user interface increases it may be harder and harder abandon old designs.
Update: This post was also picked up by Onedegree.ca.
I attended a new marketing event last night, CaseCamp. Based on the popular BarCamp/DemoCamp format its goal is to bring marketing professionals together. It was first event and it consisted of 4 marking case studies. There are a number of rules for the cases including a max of 5 slides, and 5 words per slide. The cases consisted of:
Overall I was very impressed with CaseCamp. It had a much different feel from DemoCamp ( my only other camp experience ) but was very incite full to anyone interested in marketing. Eli did a great job organizing and I think CaseCamp will only improve as it evolves, for example the the 5 words per slide limit will be removed, and I expect the next CaseCamp to be a similar success.
I took part in a panel at last nights Toronto Product Managers Association meeting on building a business case. I’ve developed and executed alot of business cases and it was great to get different prespectives on the process. The panel consisted of :
The discussion focused alot around the different goals behind developing a business case and how these are vary based on the origanization. Paul’s prespective coming from Banking was that a business case is aways required to proceed and requires many levels or review and approval. Sanjay’s view was that in smaller companies the need to innovate is greater than the need to track your decisions process behind each innovation, the result is a much shorter business case review. My own views are somewhere in the middle since I’ve worked a variety of different size organizations and different stages of business development.
You can find the presentation here.
Web 2.0 has reached Toronto and the Mesh conference aims to bring alot of the leading innovators together. The conference is May 16 and 17 in Toronto and you can find more information here:
I’m hoping to get some ideas and inspiration for my day job working on the Autotrader.ca site in Ontario. We’re really in need of some web 2.0 magic 
You are being tracked by gvisit, see the results here. Gvisits lets you track visits on a Google Map based on their IP address. The technology is not perfect in that the IP address mapping is dependent on the users internet provider keeping accurate geographic records. Its still intersting to see a visual representation of all my visits though.
FYI, you can still see my visitor link above I’ve disabled it because it was slowing down my site.
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