Month: November 2005

November 24, 2005

  • Hey AIMS, Get Your Own Content

    Funny, I was just about to write a little “welcome to the blogosphere” post to tell “AIMS” we’re happy to see them “blogging”, but now I’m not so sure. Turns out AIMS -stole- inadvertently posted (and has since taken down) — word for word — “this post” by Marc Poirier that ran earlier this week on One Degree.

    Here’s Marc’s post:

    According to PEW’s recent survey of Internet usage (links to PDF), search is now the second most popular Internet activity, edging towards email as the primary Internet application. Search usage jumped dramatically from 30% of American Internet users in June 2004 to 41% in September of 2005. By comparison, email is used by 52% of American Internet users, up from 45% in June 2004. Also of interest in this report is the recent rise in local searches, as well as some demographic data on search usage among various important population segments.

    And here is theirs, attributed to Drew Fiala:

    According to PEW’s recent survey of Internet usage, search is now the second most popular Internet activity, edging towards email as the primary Internet application. Search usage jumped dramatically from 30% of American Internet users in June 2004 to 41% in September of 2005. By comparison, email is used by 52% of American Internet users, up from 45% in June 2004. Also of interest in this report is the recent rise in local searches, as well as some demographic data on search usage among various important population segments.

    I’ve sent off a note to AIMS to see what their policy is for posting on their blog — it may be that they need to pull in the reins a bit until everyone gets comfortable with blogging etiquette over there.

    Update: As noted above, AIMS took down the post as soon as we let them know about the problem. Thanks for the quick turnaround Dave!

    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on November 24, 2005.

November 23, 2005

  • Seven Words You Can’t Say In E-mail

    My guess is there are a lot more than “seven words”: that will get your e-mail newsletter sent to the penalty box and one of them has to be “porn”.

    Stefan Eyram wrote an article this week provocatively titled “Porn, The Best Practices Industry”. I was just about to send our weekly summary e-mail newsletter to the list (expect it at 11:45AM folks) but on my final check before hitting send I paused and thought “Hmmm, good article, but if I put that title in there no one is going to see it because it will get caught by every spam filter worth its download.”

    So I took it out and added this line at the top of the newsletter:

    (We are not providing a link to one of our posts this week because we thought it might trigger filters — you’ll have to come to the site to get the link)

    This raises a few questions:

    1. What *are* the terms that will get you sidelined by most spam filters? (Consider generally accepted offensive language as a given — no need for potty mouth in the comments folks!)
    2. Is there a list somewhere?
    3. How much should we change our content to satisfy overly aggressive filters? I remember paidcontent.org at one time used “phree” instead of “free” in the e-mail versions of their articles. Confused the hell out of me.
    4. Should we “bleep out” dangerous words? I was going to rename the article “P**n, The Best Practices Industry” or “Pron, The Best Practices Industry” but it seems to me that filters must be looking for that kind of stuff by now anyway.

    Bonus Question: Is anyone filtering feeds for content? I.e. might posts in our feed with the word Porn trip some corporate filter? Your insights are welcome.

    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on November 23, 2005.

November 21, 2005

  • Why Are You Searching For “Live 8 Marketing” and “Yaris”?

    We finally got around to tagging One Degree for Measure Map this weekend.

    For those of you not in the loop, Measure Map is a new blog analytics tool from the wonderful folks at Adaptive Path. The stats feel very relevant, the interface is pretty and generally intuitive, but the functionality is still only half there (given that we’re part of the alpha test I’m assuming there is lots more to come). Measure Map shows that the recent tide of search visitors coming to One Degree after searching GYM (Google Yahoo MSN) for information on Yaris and Live 8 continues unabated.

    Here are our top ten search terms this weekend:

    1. yaris.ca
    2. uncle yaris
    3. live 8 marketing
    4. The Marketing of Live 8
    5. marketing of live 8
    6. onedegree
    7. e learning jobs toronto
    8. toronto porn
    9. clever headlines
    10. flash shopping cart

    So, searchers — you got here because you searched on Live 8 Marketing or Yaris or something like that — what were you looking for? Idle curiosity? School project? Something in the news? Something on TV? I don’t get why all of the sudden we have hundreds of people visiting the site to find out about the marketing of a music event that happened months ago (or a new car from Toyota). Why are you here?

    (Oh and while we don’t have any “Toronto Porn” we do have “Toronto’s Porn Alley” for your viewing pleasure.)

    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on November 21, 2005.

November 14, 2005

  • New Way To Recover From Customer Service Problems

    Jason Fried from 37signals points out a really fantastic approach to dealing with service problems.

    Last month blogging ASP TypePad had some service issues where the growth of the service made access to some blogs very slow. There was widespread criticism of the service at the time and it seems that Six Apart has not only resolved to make things right they’ve given us a great new approach to providing customers with recourse.

    image lost to link rot

    As you can see in the image above, they are positioning the credits you can request almost like a survey, forcing you to consciously think about the impact their scaling issues had on your specific blog.

    My guess is that many people will look at this goodwill gesture and take a small discount or none at all because they’ve done this in good faith. The alternative for them would have been to give everyone a credit that would have kept most users happy, but that would likely have been the highest of the bunch offered here anyway, so they can only gain from this.

    Has anybody seen this voluntary credit request pattern seen before? I really like it.

    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on November 14, 2005.

November 9, 2005

  • Where Did Viral Marketing Start?

    While doing some “ego surfing on Google” I stumbled upon something I wrote seven years ago and completely forgot about. Back in September 1998 I wrote “Viral Marketing at its Best” a post to the (at the time) incredibly influential “Online Advertising Mailing List” run by “Cliff Kurtzman”. This was the first time I wrote publicly about viral marketing although we at Sony Music had been working on viral things back in 96 and 97 even though I don’t think we used the word back then.

    My post is a deconstruction of the then new idea of “Wish Lists” with an aside to explain “forward to a friend” links:

    Hi all, I just finished customizing the new personalization tool at CDnow and it strikes me that it contains one of the nicest pieces of “viral marketing” to come along in a while.

    I’m not sure who is taking credit for coining the phrase viral marketing this week, but in essence, it means developing marketing approaches that “spread” from one person to another, like a virus.  For a quick overview of the concept check out “Fast Company’s article”.

    The best known example is the little sig file added by free email services (Excite’s includes a link and the tag “Free web-based email, Forever, From anywhere!”). Another variation is the ubiquitous link on news pages asking people to “mail this article to a friend” (Like on the bottom of the Fast Company article cited above). In both cases the marketer gets to drop a little message into a “friends” in-box, and best of all it comes with a free third-party endorsement (“Hey Betty, if Bob uses Excite, it must be good — let’s check it out!”).

    CDnow offers to build a “Wish List” of CDs I’d like to buy but don’t have the cash for. It then conveniently lets me publish this wish list to my friends as a “Gift Registry”. If they follow my custom link, they can purchase the products from CDnow and they will ship it directly to me, thoughtfully removing the purchased gift from my list to avoid embarrassing duplications. Brilliant.

    I spent an hour going through the site, putting together my wish list, checking it twice and hoping that some web-savvy Santa would fill my stocking (preferably for Halloween instead of Xmas!)

    To summarize:

    1. I win — people might give me CDs (see my sig file!).

    2. Friends win — people say I’m hopeless to buy for.

    3. CDnow wins — They get a loyal customer (me), new customers (my gift buying friends), and get brand awareness everywhere (check that sig file again!).

    The only things I would have done to improve the service is to make the links in the Gift Registry live, and to give examples of how to include your link in a sig file (for newbies). My guess is that you will see Gift Registry links popping up in everyone’s sig files this fall. I mean, what the heck — someone might actually buy you something!

    I’d be interested in hearing other examples of outstanding viral marketing. (And did I mention to check out my sig file?)

    In the post, I reference an article from Fast Company in 1996 called “The Virus of Marketing”. That was the first time I heard the term and I believe it pre-dates “Hotmail’s sig file” and “Steve Jurvetson’s claim to the term” (Steve is “now blogging infrequently”). It was certainly well ahead of “Seth Godin’s”: influential book “Ideavirus” which is probably where most people came to know the term — that was released this century. Of course, now it is fashionable to talk about “WOM” rather than viral marketing.

    This stroll down memory lane brought up two questions for me: # Are there any examples of the term “Viral Marketing” being used before December 1996?

    Have you ever stumbled on anything you wrote online a long time ago and found it either particularly prescient or incredibly embarrassing?

    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on November 9, 2005.