April 19, 2006

  • Should You Ask People To Unsubscribe?

    As part of the enhancements we’ve been doing to One Degree to celebrate our first anniversary we’ve moved to a new outbound e-mail system. Our intention from Day One was to provide daily e-mail alerts but we never had a nicely automated (and cost-effective) way to do this. We added “Feedblitz” to the site a few weeks ago and the uptake and feedback from new subscribers has been great. But we still have a load of subscribers from the past year who came to expect a weekly e-mail digest rather than an overnight push of links to all posts from the previous day. What to do, what to do. Well,

    • * We could just move people over to daily, but that didn’t seem right.
    • * We could tell them to sign-up for the new list and kill the old one (not good from a retention and customer service standpoint), or,
    • * We could let them know about the change and give them a chance to get out before we made the switch.

    We chose the last option and sent this message to our weekly digest e-mail subscribers on Monday afternoon:

    Important Changes To Your One Degree Subscription On Friday, April 21st One Degree will be consolidating this WEEKLY E-mail Digest with our new and very popular DAILY E-mail Alert featuring links to the prior day’s articles. Since you may have assumed you’d only hear from us once a week we wanted to give you a few days to unsubscribe from this list before moving your subscription to Daily Alerts. You can follow the link at the bottom of this message to unsubscribe. Please do so BEFORE end-of-day Wednesday if you DO NOT wish to get One Degree Daily Alerts starting Friday. To ensure that you continue receiving messages from us, you may also want to take a moment to add one (at) onedegree.ca to your white-list and address book. Another option you may wish to consider is subscribing to the One Degree Feed via your favorite feed-reader so that you can get real-time updates on what we’re adding to the site. Visit http://www.onedegree.ca/ to get the feed. Thanks for your attention and please let us know if you have any questions or concerns.

    I have to admit, I was a bit nervous about telling our gentle subscribers that they might want to unsubscribe. But my fear was unfounded.

    The fall-out 30 hours later:

    1. 14 people, representing 3% of the total list (430 subscribers), unsubscribed.
    2. Of those, 4, representing about 1%, turned around and signed-up for the Daily Alert immediately (i.e. it seems they couldn’t wait until we switched over on Friday and wanted to get the daily alerts right away).
    3. One comment (“kewl! — A Daily Dose”) for the change, zero against.

    We’ll see what happens on Friday when the new system kicks in. Hopefully, everyone will have updated their whitelists and we’ll get to their inboxes every day without incident.

    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on April 19, 2006.

April 18, 2006

  • The Web As Lobbying Tool

    While checking the weather the other day I noticed that “the Weather Network” is running in-house banner ads pointing to “allchannelalert”.

    The site is a public awareness/lobbying site to support The Weather Network’s “CRTC filing” to run a service to provide severe weather warnings across all channels (hence the name of the site). I thought this was a smart move and particularly liked the “madlib” “letter writing campaign” page that offers to mail your letter of support to the CRTC for you.

    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on April 18, 2006.

  • Tag Cloud As Heatmap

    Jonathan Snook (“snook.ca”) noted a bright idea a few weeks ago that I’ve been meaning to post. Snook pointed out that “The Guardian” in the UK has adopted a rather unique “heatmap” approach to organizing popular tags in their “Comment is free…” area.

    If you know a bit about CSS(Cascading Style Sheets) you’ll see that this isn’t that hard to execute and the visual effect is very impressive. I’d like to see more of this sort of innovative visual styling driven by real navigational needs instead of simply decorating the page.

    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on April 18, 2006.

April 17, 2006

  • Don’t Tell Me There’s Nothing New

    Let me share a current pet peeve with you in the hopes that you can avoid doing the same to your gentle readers (and maybe we can get the Globe & Mail to fix this for me). I like getting the “Daily Tech Alert” e-mail update that the “Globe and Mail” sends out each weekday.

    At left you see a bit of a recent issue of the newsletter.

    <image lost to link decay>

    Good content. Well laid out. So what’s the problem? Well, this is the April 11th edition of the daily tech alert. Why on earth are they pointing me to articles that are almost a month old? My guess is the criteria for what to post is something like “give me the four most recent Tech Reviews and place them here.” But obviously they’re posting less than they expected and now we end up the same links literally every day for weeks. I’m losing interest in the Daily Tech Alert because I keep seeing the same stuff. Moral of the story — don’t tell me that you don’t have anything new. Either get something new, or don’t send anything.comments by some of the top thought leaders in Canada.

    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on April 17, 2006.

  • No Syndicate Canada This Year

    We just got word from the organizers of “Syndicate Canada” (originally mentioned “in this One Degree article”) that they will not be holding the event this year despite a significant amount of planning that has already gone into it. The official statement is:

    We’ve recently made a decision not to hold the Syndicate Canada Conference at this point in time. This decision is based upon the realization that Syndicated technology is new and emerging into the commercial marketplace and many companies are still establishing themselves and are not quite ready to move forward in Canada. We will continue to monitor and assess the Canadian market to determine the best timing for an event.

    Given the (I believe) overwhelmingly positive response to the “Mesh Conference” and “BarCamp Toronto” it’s hard not to read this as cold feet about the ability of the market to support three major events in such close proximity. Too bad, I was looking forward to it.

    (Disclosure: I was asked by Jai Cole to be on the Advisory Board for this event and had given them my $0.02 worth the agenda for the conference. Note also that “Tucows” (my day job) is sponsoring lunch on the first day of Mesh).

    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on April 17, 2006.

April 11, 2006

  • Use Content To Segment E-mail Lists

    Preference-based and behavioral targeting are key to optimizing and even monetizing your email marketing programs. The more relevant your communications are the greater and more relevant the response.

    At a very basic level, email marketers should allow subscribers to check some key content preferences. This can be used to send them the best version of a newsletter or, better still, a dynamic content email.

    To take this a step further, marketers should be creating content that can be categorized by the type (info, offer, call to action) and keywords (topic, category). This information can be used to measure what individuals are clicking on, and by assumption, what they are interested in. Use this behavioral information to target them with similar content in the future.

    This is best done using emails with dynamic content but can also be accomplished by planning for some specific versions of each email, with each static version targeted at important preferences or behaviors.

    Although a good email marketing platform can measure this stuff and allow you to act on it, not enough email marketers use preference-based and behavioral targeting.

    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on April 11, 2006.

April 10, 2006

  • Bell Comments On One Degree’s Gordon And Frank Experiment

    Back on February 6th, we started an interesting experiment here at One Degree when I registered “gordonandfrank.ca” and pointed it to a One Degree article about the importance of protecting domain names. That post and several subsequent ones drew lots of traffic and a load of comments. One common theme was “why hasn’t Bell or Cossette” said anything about this. Well, now they have…

    Late last week I received this e-mail from Elaine Bissonnette, Director, National Creative Lead and Brand for Bell Canada. Here’s her message to us:

    Thank you for your comments and I must say that everyone at Cossette and Bell visits your web site judging by the number of emails I got. I agree with all of your comments about web domain names and spell check. We actually register all possible spell check errors when we advertise a web site in our communications. In this case since the web site was originally launched in Quebec back in October 2005 and we turned around in a record time to deliver everything, this has been overlooked by the folks at Cossette and me. This has been a great learning experience and most of my colleagues which are actually fan of yours and did relay the message.

    By the way the “www.frankandgordon.ca” site got a tremendous response with an average time per visit of 5 minutes (actually 35% of the visitors spend between 10 to 29 minutes on the site) and judging by the number of “pin the tail” download lots of kids will be playing this game during Birthday parties! We are looking at an update for the new campaign coming soon. Once again the comments are noted and I will make sure the team registers it as a priority in the next web campaign.

    Regards,
    Elaine Bissonnette
    Director, Chef Divisionnaire National Creative lead and Brand Creation nationale et Marque

    My guess is Bell handled this correctly. Wait for the storm to die down and then follow-up with a friendly, non-confrontational e-mail rather than coming down hard with lawyers and counter-arguments.

    So dear reader, what’s your take? What should Bell have done? Does this resolve the issue? Better yet, what should I do with the domain gordonandfrank.ca? Point it to the real site? Keep it here? Or?

    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on April 10, 2006.

March 31, 2006

  • Thought

    If you look to your right, and down the page a bit you’ll notice something called “sidebar”. That’s all the links I find around the web that I want to share with you. I’m doing this by posting a sub-feed from my del.icio.us account so that the whole thing is seemless seamless. Ooh, seemless seamless. Sweet.

  • Thought

    I’m totally excited about the eventual release of Will Wright’s Spore. This is going to be SO cool. The kids and I have had great fun with open ended video games and this looks like it will top everything else we’ve tried to date.

    I’m also loving the way YouTube and Google Video allow you to embed their video on my site!

  • Here vs. There

    I’ve been blogging for a long time (well a long time for a new communication tool, not long time as in “the long now” long). My first “hello world post” was on July 4th, 2001.

    Between then and last year about now I blogged on a semi-regular basis and managed to get about 430 posts online during that time.

    Then I started One Degree and for all intents and purposes stopped my personal blog. Slowly the old schafer.com was falling apart as more of my attention went to One Degree. Finally I couldn’t take it anymore and I ripped the site down and replaced it with some minimalistic pages about me and what I do. But because my blog still used Blogger software for the back end it was just too much to contemplate a total overhaul given my infrequent posting.

    Now that I’ve joined Tucows I really want to move schafer.com away from being a business site towards being my personal site.

    So, here’s how I’m hoping it will work out:

    • Here — Stuff about me, personal observations, asides, family and life stuff, capturing ideas, working through problems in public, etc.
    • There — One Degree is a group effort focussed entirely on Internet marketing, particularly in Canada, so most of my writing on that topic will be done over there.

    My guess is I’ll also be running a Tucows blog of some sort — I can’t imagine I wouldn’t — but you’ll have to wait to find out more about that.

    Any thoughts on the mix of “official” and “personal” blogging?

  • Thought

    The folks at 37signals posted this to their Flickr photostream a while ago and I wanted to capture it:

March 30, 2006

  • A Guide to CSS Support in Email

    The folks at “Campaign Monitor” have done a great service to anyone who’s ever needed to style HTML e-mail. I’ll let them tell you the problem they’ve helped you solve:

    If Internet Explorer is the schoolyard bully making our web design lives a little harder, then Hotmail, Lotus Notes and Eudora are serial killers making our email design lives hell. Yes, it’s really that bad. Inspired by the fantastic work of Xavier Frenette, we decided to put each of the popular email environments to the test and finalize once and for all what CSS is and isn’t supported out there. We’ll dig straight into our recommendations based on what we found, followed by the results themselves with a few more details about our findings.

    Their “Guide to CSS Support in Email” is highly recommended, as is Campaign Monitor’s e-mail marketing solution.

    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on March 30, 2006.

  • Solicit Post-purchase Reviews

     

    Here’s a “bright idea” courtesy of “Apple”. When I recently purchased some songs via “iTunes” my e-mail receipt came with a link asking me to review one of the tracks.

    I’m always surprised that sites (particularly commerce sites) don’t make better use of e-mail and “thank you” pages to get customers more involved in the community aspects of their services. Note that Apple also wisely does some subtle visual up-selling with the “those who bought your selections also bought” sidebar. Very nice.

    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on March 30, 2006.

March 29, 2006

  • DemoCamp 4 Another Success For BarCamp

    Self-confessed “strategy nerd” Mark Kuznicki gives us a “nice DemoCamp 4 overview” at his new blog “Remarkk!”. If you are not following what’s happening with “BarCamp Toronto” you really should be.

    (Thanks for the Diet Coke Mark!)

    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on March 29, 2006.

March 25, 2006

  • PR Disaster As Viral Opportunity?

    Did April Fools’ come a week early this year? Something very odd is going on over at “henderson bas” this weekend. Their home page has been replaced by this:

    <image lost due to link decay>

    The page title has been changed from “henderson bas — the nice agency” to “henderson bas — the cleanest agency in Canada” (the company’s URL is theniceagency.com). What’s going on here?

    All of this seems to spring from “Adrants’” publication of a purported “all hands” e-mail from the agency’s President, Dawna Henderson. Adrants Friday afternoon post called “The Nice Agency Isn’t So Nice” goes for the jugular, reprinting the full e-mail and then standing back as the comments flood in.

    I’m not going to republish the supposed e-mail here but you may want to “go read it” to see what all the fuss is about. In particular, look at the vitriol flowing in the comments to the post. I can’t imagine that this e-mail was planted at Adrants as a hoax by henderson bas — it just makes them look too bad. Part of me thought the “leaked e-mail” and the “humorous corporate response” looked a bit too much like a PR stunt but if that is the case it has gone horribly wrong in my mind. I can’t believe there could be a reason to inflict something like this on your company intentionally.

    So if we assume their home page is an attempt at damage control by making light of what’s going on at Adrants I’m not sure it is successful. My guess is lots of people (certainly most clients and potential clients of henderson bas) wouldn’t have caught wind of this. Now they’ve nicely drawn attention to the whole mess. Heck, I’m writing about it and now a few thousand more people know that not everyone thinks Henderson Bas is the Nice Agency! Finally, someone has done a nice job of taking this to the next level by starting “a CafePress Shop” selling commemorative shirts, hats, aprons, and wall clocks (as pictured here).

    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on March 25, 2006.

March 24, 2006

  • Ken Schafer Joins Tucows

    This is a slightly awkward but, given my role as Publisher and Contributing Editor of One Degree and “background in the industry” it does seem appropriate that One Degree break this story. Pardon me going all Michael Bolton and talking in the third person.

    “Dave Woroch”, VP Sales & Marketing for “Tucows Inc.” today announced via an e-mail to all Tucows staff that industry veteran and Publisher of One Degree Ken Schafer is joining Tucows as Vice President Marketing effective April 3rd. Tucows provides “Internet services” and “download libraries” through a global distribution network of 6,000 service providers. This distribution network primarily consists of web hosting companies, ISP (Internet Service Providers) and other Internet-related service companies. These companies use Tucows’ provisioned services to offer solutions to their customers: enterprises, small and medium businesses and consumers. Tucows is an accredited registrar with ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) and earns most of its revenue from domain name registration services plus hosted email, spam and virus protection, “Blogware”, website building tools, the Platypus Billing System and digital certificates.

    While Ken will be winding down his eight-year-old Internet consulting practice at the end of this month, One Degree will (okay, should) be unaffected by Ken’s new role at Tucows.

    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on March 24, 2006.

March 20, 2006

  • Spore — New Worlds, New Marketing

    Have you heard of “Spore” — the new game from Will Wright, creator of SimCity and the Sims? The PC game won’t be released for at least another 1 1/2 years but right now I’m pretty sure it is the best video game ever made.

    How can I say this? Well, I’ve seen Will Wright walk-through and talk-through what Spore is in both a “one-hour presentation” from the 2005 Games Developer Conference and an edited 35-minute version.

    I’m still getting my head around “micro-chunking” as a marketing strategy but I think there is something really big here.

    Spending 35 minutes watching Wright talk about his latest obsession is entertainment in itself. Heck, watching this on my Mac beat out watching CSI on TV one night last week. But it is also one of the best ads for a new product I’ve ever seen. Really a 35-minute infomercial full of passion and ideas that made me “ooh” out loud. We need to start thinking much more about making marketing that is inherently compelling AND entertaining AND incredibly easy to pass along. I found this on “Google Video” via “boing boing” and now you watched it on “One Degree” and if you took the time to watch the video my guess is you’ll be talking about this and passing it along to.

    Now, does anyone know if “EA” released this video intentionally, or was it a fan that put this online? Either way, this is a glimpse at the future of advertising.

    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on March 20, 2006.

March 15, 2006

  • Webnames Names One Degree One Of Canada’s Best

    It was nice to see that this month’s issue of The Server Room newsletter from Canadian domain registrar webnames.ca had some nice things to say about what we are doing here at One Degree:

    One Degree’s tagline is “where Canadian Internet Marketers gather” and Ken Schafer (One Degree’s publisher, contributing editor and recognized Internet marketing authority) has certainly pulled together an impressive roster of industry experts to share their knowledge on the gamut of Internet Marketing activities. The blog is updated daily, features Canadian-specific examples and covers topics as wide-ranging as affiliate programs, public relations and viral marketing. We consistently find the postings both thought-provoking and informative — definitely RSS or subscription worthy.

    Stop. We’re blushing. You had us at “impressive roster”. I don’t think we’ve ever been called “subscription-worthy” but we’ll take that as a high compliment in these days of overloaded inboxes. Of course, as soon as webnames.ca published this we fell off the wagon and didn’t publish for the better part of a week!

    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on March 15, 2006.

March 8, 2006

  • The Impact of Toronto’s WiFi Blanket

    Patrick Dinnen is a volunteer with the Wireless Toronto community group. Wireless Toronto launched in Spring 2005 with the goal of encouraging the growth of wireless networking and building community in interesting and innovative ways. Since their launch, Wireless Toronto has formed partnerships with local businesses to create a network of free-to-use WiFi hotspots across the GTA. As well as hotspots in cafes, bars, and restaurants Wireless Toronto switched on a free WiFi network covering the St Lawrence Market building in November 2005, creating Toronto’s largest public WiFi zone.

    One Degree: “Patrick, what does the “Toronto Hydro WiFi blanket announcement” mean to Toronto and to the “Wireless Toronto” initiative?”

    Patrick Dinnen: Thinking about these questions I come back to the goals of Wireless Toronto ‘a not-for-profit group dedicated to bringing no-fee wireless Internet access to Toronto. Our aim is to encourage the growth of wireless networking and to build community in interesting and innovative ways’. From that point of view, I think there’s much to be positive about in Toronto Hydro’s announcement. Although we got some more details from Toronto Hydro today there are still a lot of unanswered questions. But right now, here’s what I feel: Availability of competitively priced WiFi Internet access in 100% of the downtown core, which Toronto Hydro’s plan calls for, is a great move forward for Toronto residents, businesses and visitors.

    But more than that, blanketing the downtown core with seamless, and lower-cost network access opens the door to multiple opportunities for innovation in access to information and communication for residents, community groups, underserved communities and small businesses. I strongly hope that those broader opportunities are seized. In terms of what the announcement means for Wireless Toronto as a group, again it’s good news. This will give Torontonians a huge boost in terms of awareness and accessibility to WiFi. That will increase the number of people who use the free Wireless Toronto hotspots (which range from Oakville to Scarborough, Woodbridge to St. Lawrence Market). This increase in WiFi awareness can only help in Wireless Toronto’s goals of working with volunteers and partners to explore the opportunities for communication and community offered by WiFi. I’d encourage One Degree readers to visit the Wireless Toronto blog. We hope to help people keep on top of the deluge of news and opinion around the topic of WiFi in Toronto, this is just beginning.

    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on March 8, 2006.

  • Hand-written Notes In A Digital World

    I got a pleasant surprise in my mailbox the other day — a hand-written thank-you note from “fellow blogger” and CMA course instructor Mitch Joel:

    <image lost to link decay>

    The note was short, essentially thanking me for help on a few things that I was happy to collaborate on. He’d already sent quick e-mail thank-yous but this added touch really jumped out at me.

    By breaking free of “business as usual” he got my attention. It was even better that it was done by hand and that his script looks a bit like “hugh macleod’s gaping void style”.

    My guess is that the more we move business and personal lives online the more “old-fashioned” modes of communication will become valued. When was the last time you received or sent a hand-written note? What was the reaction?

    Bonus question: Do you even have the physical addresses of those that you count as friends and colleagues so that you could do this?

    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on March 8, 2006.

March 6, 2006

  • Half of Oscar Night Ads Have No URLs

    How are big advertisers doing at moving people from TV to the web? What better way than to use a global “must see” event like the “Academy Awards” to take a look at who’s pointing people to the web and who’s missing their big opportunity. Of the 69 spots shown during 12 breaks (some shown multiple times), 36 had URLs. That means that almost 50% of the spots didn’t even try to move people to the web to continue talking to them. Seems like a real waste.

    Here is a full list of all the ads and links to all the sites that were mentioned. I think if you review this you’ll find a few very interesting things — eBay doesn’t put URLs on TV ads? WTF?

    I’d be interested in some comments from you the esteemed One Degree reader on the strategies shown here. Click through on some of these URLs and see what the companies are up to. Some were clearly thinking about the value of the web and for others, it seems an afterthought. And some seem to have good intentions but poor execution — personally I’d have spent a few bucks and registered something a little more memorable than “www.health.gov.on.ca/babyvaccines”.

    (This analysis is based on the HD version of the CTV broadcast in Ontario)

    First Break

    • Toyota Camry “thenewcamry.ca”
    • Stayfree Drymax
    • Acuvue — “acuvue.ca”

    Second Break

    • Neutrogena — “neutrogena.ca”
    • Rogers On Demand
    • Ontario Government — “ontario.ca/smokefree”
    • Coffeemate (Zoot) — “zootreview.ca”
    • Stella Artois — “stellaartois.com”

    Third Break

    • McDonald’s
    • Lady & Tramp — “www.ladyandthetrampdvd.com”
    • Nissan — X-trail — “nissan.ca”
    • Staples

    Fourth Break

    • Acuvue — “acuvue.ca”
    • A&W
    • Mazda — “mazda.ca”
    • CIBC
    • Rona — “rona.ca”

    Fifth Break

    • Mission Impossible “missionimpossible.com”
    • Ford Fusion — “ford.ca” (mouse type)
    • Scotiabank — “findthemoney.scotiabank.com”
    • Neutrogena — “neutrogena.ca”
    • Rogers On Demand
    • Ontario Government — “ontarioculture.ca”
    • Canada Post
    • Saturn — “saturncanada.com”

    Sixth Break

    • “Inside Man”
    • Kia
    • Lipton’s Soupworks
    • Visa — “visa.ca”
    • Gilette Fusion
    • Walmart
    • Pantene
    • Slimdown — “slimdown.ca”

    Seventh Break

    • Subaru — “subaru.ca”
    • Mastercard — “mastercard.ca”
    • Rogers On Demand
    • Ministry of Health — “www.health.gov.on.ca/babyvaccines”
    • Fancy Feast
    • Best Buy — “bestbuy.ca”
    • L’Oreal Preference

    Eighth Break

    • L’oreal
    • Da Vinci’s Code — “thedavincicode-movie.com”
    • Tostitos
    • Cadillac Escalade — “cadillac.gmcanada.com”
    • Scotiabank — “findthemoney.scotiabank.com”
    • L’oreal — Natural Match — “naturalmatch.ca”

    Ninth Break

    • Ford Escape — “ford.ca”
    • Kraft — Philadelphia Cream Cheese
    • Aveeno — Active Naturals
    • Aveeno — Daily Moisturizing
    • “I Walked The Line”
    • Ontario Government — “ontarioculture.ca”
    • eBay

    Tenth Break

    • Nissan — X-Trail — “nissan.ca”
    • Neutrogena — Deep Cleaning — “neutrogena.ca”
    • CHFI
    • “Special 8” Lottery — “olgc.ca”
    • Stella Artois
    • Revlon — Remmel
    • Lean Cuisine — “leancuisine.ca”
    • Ministry of Health — “www.health.gov.on.ca/babyvaccines”

    Eleventh Break

    • Blockbuster
    • Colgate Total
    • Aero Chocolate Bar
    • Scotiabank — “findthemoney.scotiabank.com”
    • Wendy’s

    Twelfth Break

    • Jeep — “jeep.ca”
    • Canadian Forces — “forces.ca”

    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on March 6, 2006.

  • Net Marketers Can Learn From Direct Marketers

    As President of Wiest & Associates Inc. — “The Customer Acquisition and Retention Company — Daniel G. Wiest has long been considered one of Canada’s leading direct marketers, and now one of Internet marketing’s innovators.

    One Degree: “What skills or techniques from the direct marketing world do you think are most lacking in Internet marketing and what do we lose by not having them in our online toolkits?”

    Dan Wiest: I apologize in advance if this response rubs a few readers the wrong way, but please scan my entire answer before deciding how loudly to cheer or jeer. In return, I promise not to sound too much like my grandfather’s “when I was your age…” ramblings in the process. One big shortcoming I see too frequently is the absence of leveraging that core knowledge we’ve already gained from offline testing. I’m not saying that pure Internet marketers don’t generate rich information and insights. Quite the opposite. In fact, I think we’re kicking the pants off of the traditional media holdouts with the wealth of actionable data we’re able to produce. And we’ve become the masters (sometimes…) at turning that information around to produce even more relevant communications and offerings. But the preceding decades have rewarded us with vast resources of test results, analytics and careful study of the factors that motivate people. Somehow these historical treasures seem to have gotten pushed aside in the excitement surrounding all of the new tools and techniques. Forget about the new tools for a moment, and consider this: I don’t imagine for one second that human needs and wants were somehow genetically altered by the arrival of the Internet. Yes, the techniques and media options for matching and delivering solutions those human needs may have changed dramatically. But human behavior itself hasn’t. So why not begin with the knowledge of what consumers have already been proven to respond to?

    In defense of the pure online guys, they’re masters at testing things like e-mail subject lines, clickthrough stats on content and time spent navigating specific pages. And this stuff is absolutely wondrous and critical to advancing direct marketing. But do they truly understand why some of that stuff is working? And could they have started with a stronger proposition in the first place if they were working from a strategic approach that was grounded in offline learning? Allow me to roll back the clock for a moment. I suspect many online newbies may never have read John Caples’ “Tested Advertising Methods.” Perhaps you are even saying who the heck is John Caples? Caples was BBDO’s creative director for years. He also happened to start his career in the 1920’s and published this book in 1932. It may calm your ancient fears to know that this book’s been in print almost continuously since that time, and Caples was even elected to the Copywriter’s Hall of Fame in 1973, and the Advertising Hall of Fame in 1977. Why bother reading a book from 1932? Because Caples was not only a brilliant writer, but he also happened to invent many of the techniques that we use today for split creative testing. This book is still holding up as a direct marketing copywriter’s bible of testing wisdom. Caples doesn’t just analyze what works, but he always matches those quantitative results up with why it works. Are the examples used in the book outdated? They’re painfully outdated. But the analysis of those examples is more astute than most direct marketing copy tutorials I’ve seen published since. If you’re still hanging in there, now I’ll raise another toast to the strictly-online guys. I never wish to discount the experience of those who only have the benefit of learning from digital executions — they have absolutely moved direct marketing forward by leaps and bounds. All I’d like to do is save them from having to re-discover what’s been fine-tuned for them already. What are we losing by sometimes lacking this historical knowledge in our toolkit? Lots. Pure online folks might be able to start their construction of campaigns at a strategic level of understanding what is likely to generate a response, as well as why it’s likely to motivate. This understanding obviously helps improve initial response metrics. But I think it also makes you lots smarter about your post-campaign analysis of why particular elements of a campaign worked; and how to take advantage of those findings. I also think that online marketers might be a lot tougher on themselves if they had the benefit of direct marketing media training and analysis. Parting shots: I’m excited about the possibility of Internet marketers taking greater advantage of this knowledgebase from the offline world. The Internet marketers can leverage that learning far more than the traditional marketers were ever able to. That’s going to make our business more enriching for marketers. And more enriching for our prospects and customers.

    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on March 6, 2006.

  • Scoble Brightlines Memeorandum

    Recent One Degree interviewee, Robert Scoble is often seen as an edge case (although he “hates being called that). I think Robert sees himself more as “canary in a coalmine” — out ahead of us but doing what will one day become common practice. The term edge case implies a way of using things that will never be seen as normal. In any case, whether Robert is an edge case or not, I’m starting to think that he is a “bright-liner”. You might not know that word, so let me digress for a moment to explain what it is before saying why Scoble might be one and why it might impact your brand.

    The term bright-line rule is gaining common use but still doesn’t show up in most dictionaries. I fell in love with the concept after reading Virginia Postrel’s New York Time’s article on resolutions. In it she deconstructs Professor Thomas C. Schelling saying in part:

    Another approach is to use bright-line rules, which make it harder to cheat through clever reinterpretation. That may explain why many people find it easier to eliminate whole categories of food, like carbohydrates, rather than simply to cut back on calories. “Just as it may be easier to ban nuclear weapons from the battlefield in toto than through carefully graduated specifications on their use, zero is a more enforceable limit on cigarettes or chewing gum than some flexible quantitative ration,” Professor Schelling wrote. He once resolved to smoke “only after the evening meal.” That rule “led to tortured reasoning Thanksgiving afternoon, or flying west across the Atlantic with perpetual afternoon, and it stimulated lots of token sandwiches on leaving the ski slopes to drive home.”

    Yesterday Scoble decided to stop reading Memeorandum. No “I’ll only check it at the end of the day” or “just when I have a few minutes between meetings” kind of stuff. This is a clear brightline. Scoble’s approach to Memeorandum is similar to his stance on full vs. partial feeds — Scoble won’t subscribe to partial feeds. Full stop. Why does this matter? Besides showing us a bit more about Scoble as a person, it also points to the increasing stress we all have in keeping up with an overly complex world. My guess is we’ll see more arbitrary brightlining (like “I don’t watch anything with Ryan Seacrest in it”) in the future. What happens when your brand becomes “dead to me?”

    How will you ever get me back?

    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on March 6, 2006.

February 21, 2006

  • Two Weeks With Gordon and Frank

    Last week we did a one week update on our little “gordonandfrank.ca” experiment. Here’s what we see after two weeks:

    • 21,026 pages served (a bit less than half of One Degree traffic).
    • 4,032 people clicked through to the real Bell site.
    • 2,001 people got here by searching on phrases using Bell, Beavers, Frank, or Gordon.
    • “Bell Beavers” is the most common search term. 683 people got to One Degree using that phrase!
    • 89 people got here because of Norm MacDonald. They’re still angry about this.
    • 46 people have taken the time to post “often gushing” comments about the mascots.

    Here are the top twenty “beaver-related” searches driving our traffic:

    1. bell beavers
    2. frank and gordon
    3. bell canada beavers
    4. frank and gordon beavers
    5. rankandgordon
    6. frankandgordon.ca
    7. frank and gordon bell
    8. bell canada commercials
    9. bell beaver commercials
    10. gordon and frank
    11. frank and gordon commercials
    12. gordonandfrank.ca
    13. bell canada beaver commercials
    14. voices of frank and gordon
    15. bell frank and gordon
    16. frank & gordon
    17. “frank and gordon”
    18. bell beaver
    19. bell canada beaver
    20. bell commercials

    Interestingly enough, traffic is increasing over time, not dying down as I assumed it would.

    Today’s lesson: You never know when you’ll blog something that has a *huge* impact on your traffic and the profile of your site. My quickie post about an ad I saw during the Super Bowl now accounts for half the entire one-year-old site’s traffic — after only two weeks!

    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on February 21, 2006.

  • Do Real People Know About Agencies?

    I’m not sure that the average Bob and Betty on the street have that much appreciation for the role of advertising agencies in the ads they see. If they do it’s probably a stereotypical Darrin Stevens or thirtysomething concept of what goes on.

    The reason I ask this is that the folks commenting over at Gordon and Frank seem to be very quick to talk about Bell’s agency. For the first week, most of the comments on our post were generally negative towards the ads and to Norm MacDonald’s involvement. Then on Monday, February 13th the posts took a turn and became overwhelmingly positive. I’m not sure what might have caused this — maybe the ads changed or something. Anyway, here are a few representative posts:

    Hilarious. It’s about time we show our great Canadian sense of Humour. How about stuffed animal mascots for sale. Great fund raiser for our future Canadian Athletes. I buy a pair. Keep up the great work.I’m proud to be a Canadian and a Bell subscriber.

    Hooray to the Bell Marketing department to hire a company with a sense of humour. Enjoy the ads, breaking up the sometimes dry CBC commentary.

    Frank and Gordon have to be the BEST ad on TV for a long time. In fact, the advertisers at the Super Bowl paid millions to have their ads seen and I dont remember one of them!!!! SO Frank and Gordon have certainly outrated even the Super Bowl.. They are wonderful, funny, and all Canadian. Right on Bell for picking the right ad for the 2006 Olympics, I hope we see more of Frank and Gordon for other events, you’ve got a winner there. Good One.!!!!!

    I love the Frank and Gordon commercials! They are so much fun to watch. Great work for whoever came up with these commercials! Keep up the good work!!!

    Half the fun of watching the Olympics this time around is seeing Frank & Gordon in the commercials. Their website is great too. I would love to buy the stuffed version of the duo. And if you think about it, its just funny that Norm is the voice of Frank, the patriotic beaver. Because, I, for one, haven’t watched this much CBC in a long time. I wouldn’t even think of turning to an American station to watch the Olympics.

    Relax people, don’t get political, it’s just a commercial and a good one at that. Cheers to the advertising agency that came up with this one. They are fun to watch and I’m sure the US would love to see our Bell commercials on their TV. Toques off to Frank and Gordon.

    I have not seen any commercial that makes me want to split a gut. Hats off to who ever created Frank and Gordon. I simply Love them!!! Its nice to have a hardy laugh at the end of a work day. Kudos!!!!!

    I’ll be honest, I’m a little suspicious. I’ve been checking IP addresses as these comments come in and I’m not seeing anything that says they are planted. They come from all over the country through many different services providers at all times of day. Given the traffic, these pages are getting there aren’t even an abnormally large number of comments. Besides, people seem to really like the beavers.

    In fact, CFRB’s Daily Poll is about Frank and Gordon today and “love” is beating “hate”, 84% to 16% as I write this. So maybe Bell does have a huge groundswell of support for these new mascots. Maybe they’re the next Spuds Mckenzie. But I have to ask, do you know anyone in the real world that talks like this about advertising? Anybody have examples of ad forums, TV discussion boards, etc. that show similar passion for ads? I’m just curious.

    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on February 21, 2006.

February 17, 2006

  • Someone Is Paying Attention To gordonandfrank.ca

    Well, we still haven’t seen anything official from Bell or Cossette about our little “gordonandfrank.ca” experiment, but a sharp reader did find proof that someone at Cossette is paying attention.

    “gordonandfrank.com” redirects to the official “Bell Beavers” site at “frankandgordon.ca”. A quick WHOIS shows that “Fjord Interactive” (the interactive side of Cossette) registered gordonandfrank.com on — February 10th — five days after One Degree registered the .ca.

    Domain Name: “GORDONANDFRANK.COM
    Registrar: DOMAINPEOPLE, INC.
    Whois Server: whois.domainpeople.com
    Referral URL: http://www.domainpeople.com
    Name Server: NS1.FJORDINTERACTIVE.NET
    Name Server: NS2.FJORDINTERACTIVE.NET
    Status: REGISTRAR-LOCK
    Updated Date: 10-feb-2006
    Creation Date: 10-feb-2006
    Expiration Date: 10-feb-2007

    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on February 17, 2006.

February 15, 2006

  • One Week With Gordon And Frank — So Much To Learn

    This whole “Gordon and Frank” thing is offering some really interesting insights into cross-channel marketing.

    Not up-to-speed on the saga? Here’s a recap:

    1. Superbowl Sunday — See Bell Beaver ads tagged with “frankandgordon.ca” URL, wonder if they registered “gordonandfrank.ca”. They didn’t.
    2. Register the domain.
    3. Monday, February 6th — write an “article for One Degree” explaining why Bell probably should have bought the alternate domain and point gordonandfrank.ca at it.
    4. Read “the Marketing Magazine article” and realize this is a huge campaign that will go well beyond the Olympics.
    5. Wait for someone at “Bell” or “Cossette” to notice.

    So, after one week, where were we:

    • 6,618 pages served.
    • 1,225 people clicked through to the real Bell site.
    • 745 people got here by searching with words like Bell, Beavers, Frank, Gordon.
    • “Bell Beavers” is the most common search term that gets people here.
    • 34 people got here because of Norm MacDonald. A lot of them are angry.
    • Then again, some people love the beavers so much they’re looking to buy Frank and Gordon plushies.
    • The National Post’s Mark Evans “talks to” “Frank and Gordon”.
    • Still no word from Bell or Cossette.

    Things we can learn from this exercise:

    1. Typo domains can drive real traffic. Don’t expect your customers to remember exactly what your URL is and help them in any way you can. In particular register variations on all your marketing domains.
    2. Think like your customers. Bell and Cossette might be on a first-name basis with Frank and Gordon but to many of them they are the “Bell Beavers”. Bell should be buying AdWords on that term to get people to the right site and similar terms should be part of their SEO strategy.
    3. Listen to the blogosphere. We’ve been talking about this for over a week now and “others” “have” “been” “pointing” “to us” but Bell has yet to join the conversation.
    4. Check your logfiles. We sent over 1,000 people to the real site in the first week (over 1,600 as I write this). I have to think we’re the top non-Bell referrer but Bell doesn’t seem aware of this.

    I love the idea of driving traffic from one channel to another and I commend Bell for doing that. I’m even growing fond of Gordon and Frank (the kids think Gordon — the one on the right — is WAY cooler than Frank). I also commend them for the overwhelming task that a unified all-company marketing platform must be to create. But if we’re going to do this we have to do it so it really works for the customer and that will take more care in the future. So dear One Degree reader, do you see any other lessons to be learned from our little experiment?

    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on February 15, 2006.

February 9, 2006

  • Beavers And Caribou Drive One Degree Search Traffic

    Man, this is turning out to be a very weird week. Our traffic is through the roof because of two innocent posts — one about “Bell’s Beavers” on Tuesday and the other about “Google’s Caribou” last March.

    On Tuesday I wrote about how I felt that Bell Canada’s “Beaver Ads” should have anticipated that people would get confused on the exact URL for the campaign — “frankandgordon.ca”. I registered “gordonandfrank.ca” to see if my theory was correct and pointed that domain to “my post” on the topic. After DNS updates kicked in we started getting hundreds of visitors to that page and the traffic seems to be increasing each day. So, in the spirit of learning and sharing, here are the top 100 searches people did to get them to One Degree so far today:

    • bell beavers
    • bell canada beavers
    • google caribou
    • gordonandfrank.ca
    • frank and gordon beavers
    • degree by mail
    • frank and gordon
    • frankandgordon
    • frankandgordon.ca
    • leevalleytools
    • liberty village toronto
    • miles nadel, mdc partners
    • “blast radius” toronto
    • “frank and gordon” bell
    • “gordon and frank”
    • “jane motz hayes”
    • “ok go” video dance routine
    • “toronto” + “b2b lead generation”
    • “vice president”
    • “service development” wireless
    • “zip.ca”
    • +frank +gordon +bell +commercial
    • .frankandgordon.ca
    • 15earn
    • 247 internet sales toronto
    • account supervisor
    • adwords research
    • airlines trivia
    • ajax web sites
    • alex tew next venture
    • alexander younger
    • beavers
    • beavers and bell
    • beavers on the bell commercial
    • bell beavers commercial
    • bell canada beavers commercials
    • bell canada beavers gordon
    • bell canada frank and gordon
    • bell canada norm macdonald
    • bell commercial norm
    • bell commercials beavers voices
    • bmw search marketing banning
    • campaign banners
    • can west interactive canada
    • conservative party commercials download
    • caribou gmail
    • cma ken schafer
    • commerce in canada during the 1900s
    • ctv cto
    • download googleearth
    • eloqua email deliverability spam test
    • frank and gordon beavers pictures
    • frank and gordon bell
    • frank and gordon bell canada
    • frank and gordon commercials
    • frank and gordon norm mcdonald
    • gmail caribou
    • gordon and frank
    • gordonandfrank
    • how much do marketing degree get paid
    • idleagent
    • jane motz hayes
    • kraft globe mail advertising rfp
    • kraft recipe
    • liberty village + toronto
    • liberty village porn
    • link:http://www.campaigner.com/
    • list distribution channels
    • kraft canada
    • maclaren mccann
    • maclaren+mccann%2c+sony+canada
    • marketing themes
    • marketing, brand extensions
    • mitch joel
    • number of subscribers to sympatico in canada
    • one degree
    • online social network for teens
    • online vs paper percentage of canadians who shop online
    • podcasting projected growth 2006
    • recipes from kraft
    • rogers launches wireless broadband
    • sned mail to one account and have it automatically forward to another
    • subway promotion
    • subway scratch and win
    • super bowl xl
    • “frank and gordon”
    • sympatico beavers gordon
    • ten percent rule
    • the birth of internet advertising
    • the essential message
    • the target new yorker
    • the voices of frank and gordon
    • toyota yaris tv campaign
    • trivia questions insurance professionals
    • voices of bell canada beavers
    • web design contractor job in vancouver
    • what degree is the one for me?
    • what is 15earn
    • yahoo canada
    • yaris toyota commercial song

    Note 1: A full 43% of our search traffic is coming from Frank-n-Gordon related searches — two days after we first posted about them. I’m not seeing any paid search adds on these terms that could drive people to the real site and the site itself doesn’t seem to be fair too well on many of these searches.

    Note 2: I hope that Bell and their marketing partners are watching and listening to the blogosphere as there seems to be a storm brewing about Norm MacDonald doing the voice of Frank. Apparently, LOTS of Canadians have no fondness for ex-Canuck MacDonald.

    So it seems that Bell and their agencies should:

    1. Figure out what to do about gordonandfrank.ca
    2. Buy a ton of search terms to collect up all the people obviously interested in the site and unable to find it
    3. Deal with the *”Norm Storm”* that is building just over the horizon
    4. Start reading One Degree regularly (no Bell or Cossette IP addresses showing up in our logs as far as I can tell) 🙂

    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on February 9, 2006.

  • New Gmail Features About To Launch?

    Garrett Rogers at ZD Net was nice enough to link to our almost one-year-old What is Google Caribou? article in his very interesting speculation that Google is testing added Gmail functionality. Rogers speculates that Google may be following Yahoo in offering a domain-based version of Gmail for site owners and corporations.

    Google’s GMail has been firing on all cylinders, but it could be on the verge of getting even more horsepower. Based on information found buried deep within the javascript source, we can start to see the bigger picture for GMail — what else could they possibly add to this mail client? Their next big move will likely be GMail for domains — a powerful way for anybody who owns a domain to utilize GMail as a mail server, not just a client. Yahoo has their own small business mail product which does precisely this, and now evidence suggests Google is planning the same.

    While he notes that this is speculation it is a logical step forward for Gmail (one I’ve been waiting for) and the case he makes by poking around in Gmail JavaScript is compelling. Would you move your corporate e-mail to Gmail if you had the option?

    Update: This story is getting real traction and right now (very early Feb 9th) it is number 4 on Memeorandum. Ironically I wrote Gabe Rivera earlier last night suggesting he take a look at One Degree and consider adding it to the Memeorandum feed pool.

    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on February 9, 2006.

  • Oglivy PR Gives One Degree Props

    Ah, the things you find in your web stats. We started getting some traffic from a new site yesterday and in checking out the link I found Ogilvy BlogFeeds.

    Here’s how Ogilvy characterizes the site:

    The Ogilvy PR BlogFeeds are our feeds from some of the most influential blogs out there. The ones we’re reading every day. Visit any of the categories below to get a snapshot view of all the headlines. Pick and choose blogs to add to your own personal RSS feed aggregator — or just bookmark these pages to always get the latest headlines from blogs relevant to you.

    I was honoured to see that they had this to say about One Degree:

    This collaborative blog brings together thinking from numerous contributors in the Canadian Online Marketing industry. The blog covers and interesting range of topics and offers a great non-US perspective.

    It was also nice to see that they included us up there with other blogging luminaries like Seth Godin, MarketingVox, John Battelle, and Duct Tape Marketing among others. Good company!

    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on February 9, 2006.