February 7, 2006

  • AIMS Discussion List Is No More

    AIMS General Manager Dave Forde just sent out the word that the ADL (AIMS Discussion List) has ceased publication.

    For years, many of you have enjoyed the ADL (AIMS Discussion List), a bi-weekly newsletter full of great discussion and debate on various Internet marketing topics. It gave marketers a chance to connect and pose questions to one another with answers in the following issue. Over the last year we’ve seen a dramatic shift, or decrease in the amount of discussion for reasons such as inboxes being overloaded, work loads increased, etc. Therefore, I now think that it is time we say good-bye to the ADL and retire her at issue number #622.

    I think the big unspoken reason content on the ADL has been thin lately is that there are so darn many real-time sources of news and opinion. Blogs (like One Degree) and the feeds they push out have made it much easier to stay on top of industry happenings without the need of a weekly moderated discussion list.

    So, fellow ADL readers, if you are looking for:

    • Commentary from industry insiders
    • A spot to contribute your opinions
    • A place to have Internet marketing conversations, or
    • A way to get job and event listings in front of the net shakers in Canada then I humbly suggest One Degree is your new best friend.

    I hope the best for AIMS — as one of the founders I wish it nothing but continued success, even without the ADL I used to moderate. I know from conversations with many others over the years that the ADL was considered the primary value they saw in AIMS so it will be interesting to see how AIMS keeps its connections with the members without this important channel.

    A special note of thanks to our own June Macdonald who I convinced to take on the incredible challenge of moderating the ADL when it first launched. June was the best moderator the ADL ever knew and I don’t think it was the same after she stepped down years ago.

    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on February 7, 2006.

  • Black-hat SEO Earns BMW.de PageRank Zero

    For your reference — a warning call via IM transcript:

    Ken Schafer: What’s the point of having a site if it can’t be found?

    MarketerDood973: None.

    Ken Schafer: What’s the number 1 way people will find your site?

    MarketerDood973: GOOG

    Ken Schafer: Would it be bad if Google banned you from search results?

    MarketerDood973: very

    Ken Schafer: Would Google be right in banning sites that violate their guidelines…

    Ken Schafer: sites that use tricks to artificially boost their rank?

    MarketerDood973: Of course they would. Don’t want little scam sites getting unfair ranking. kick’em out.

    Ken Schafer: Do you know if *your* site is using any so-called “black hat” SEO techniques?

    MarketerDood973: Uh, what?

    Ken Schafer: Do you know that your “SEO expert” is living within the letter and spirit of Google’s guidelines?

    MarketerDood973: Well, uh, I trust them to do the right thing. They’re getting great results and the pages look fine. I don’t see a problem here…

    MarketerDood973: Besides, we’re a big brand…

    MarketerDood973: Google isn’t going after real brands, just the little scammers.

    Ken Schafer: Uh, what about BMW.de? They just got banned by Google. Check their site — PageRank = 0.

    Ken Schafer: Dood — check out Google Blogscoped and Matt Cutts if you don’t believe me.

    MarketerDood973: gtg

    If you have hired anyone to “do SEO” on your site you must immediately look into what they are doing.

    You can’t afford for someone else’s “over-aggressiveness” to land your brand in search result purgatory. Could you explain to your boss why your site completely disappeared from Google like BMW’s German site did last week or like Ricoh’s German site is about to?

    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on February 7, 2006.

February 6, 2006

  • gordonandfrank.ca

    Bell’s new mascots — two talking beavers named Frank and Gordon — have an eponymous website — frankandgordon.ca. I’m glad to see that the folks working on the site heeded One Degree’s recent advice and allow people to drop the “www” and still get to the site. I also really like that they registered the .com version of the domain but still use the .ca in the ads to make it clear this is a Canadian thing.

    Unfortunately, they didn’t read an older One Degree post called How To Add Spell-check To Your Domain Names (go read it, I’ll wait). Now there might be some obvious typo domains that they could have registered (and they may have for that matter — I didn’t check them all), but I know they missed a really big and obvious problem with that domain. Imagine this scenario which is close but not quite what Bell’s marketers imagined happening:

    Jimmy: “Dad, those beavers are funny. Can we go to their website to expand our brand experience interactively?”

    Dad: “Well Jimmy, what do you say we get on the ol’ interweb and Google some beavers.” (Okay I might have just found the second problem.)

    Jimmy: “No Dad, the commercial had their address at the end.”

    Dad: “What was it, Jimmy?”

    Jimmy: “Uh, well it was the names of the beavers — Gordon and Frank. Yeah, it was gordonandfrank.ca.”

    Dad: “Okay, let’s go to gordonandfrank.ca”.

    See the problem? It’s frankandgordon.ca, not gordonandfrank.ca. And Bell didn’t think to register the alternate. What would Gordon say about this clear case of favoritism? So, what do you get when you go to gordonandfrank.ca you may ask? Why (after DNS updates), you get the very page you are now reading.

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

  • Major Canadian Brands Launch New Looks

    My guess is there will be lots of Monday-morning quarterbacking about three big marketing events this weekend:

    • Bell pushed their “talking beavers” branding campaign featuring Frank and Gordon into high gear.
    • The Globe and Mail rolled out a new version of their globeandmail.com website featuring a very blog-like approach.
    • Global Television introduced their re-branding during the Superbowl.

    We’ll most likely have analysis on the first two shortly but wanted to give you folks a chance for early reactions. What do you think of the new Bell, Globe & Mail, and Global campaigns? Any thoughts on the wisdom of tying these things so closely to the Superbowl when loads of deep-pocketed American brands are trying to get the attention of the press and public?

    Bell’s new mascots — two talking beavers named Frank and Gordon — have an eponymous website — frankandgordon.ca. I’m glad to see that the folks working on the site heeded One Degree’s recent advice and allow people to drop the “www” and still get to the site. I also really like that they registered the .com version of the domain but still use the .ca in the ads to make it clear this is a Canadian thing.

    Frank. Or is that Gordon?

    Unfortunately, they didn’t read an older One Degree post called How To Add Spell-check To Your Domain Names (go read it, I’ll wait). Now there might be some obvious typo domains that they could have registered (and they may have for that matter — I didn’t check them all), but I know they missed a really big and obvious problem with that domain. Imagine this scenario which is close but not quite what Bell’s marketers imagined happening:

    Jimmy: “Dad, those beavers are funny. Can we go to their website to expand our brand experience interactively?”

    Dad: “Well Jimmy, what do you say we get on the ol’ interweb and Google some beavers.” (Okay I might have just found the second problem.)

    Jimmy: “No Dad, the commercial had their address at the end.”

    Dad: “What was it, Jimmy?”

    Jimmy: “Uh, well it was the names of the beavers — Gordon and Frank. Yeah, it was gordonandfrank.ca.”

    Dad: “Okay, let’s go to gordonandfrank.ca”.

    See the problem? It’s frankandgordon.ca, not gordonandfrank.ca. And Bell didn’t think to register the alternate. What would Gordon say about this clear case of favoritism? So, what do you get when you go to gordonandfrank.ca you may ask? Why (after DNS updates), you get the very page you are now reading.

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

February 2, 2006

February 1, 2006

  • Building Trust — Explain How You Make Money

    Best Practice: Explain how your site makes money, or how and why it is funded if this is not apparent. This adds to the site’s credibility and overcomes fears that the site may be a scam of some sort.

    Rationale: Not all sites are what they appear to be and people are becoming wary of new sites as an increasing number of online scam stories are covered in the media and passed around as an urban myth. People are taught (rightly) that “if it is too good to be true, it is”. This has implications for legitimate corporate websites and web-based applications (Web 2.0 take note).

    Many new users, particularly those not familiar with your brand offline, will be very skeptical of your motivations until they get a sense that they can trust you. Design, ease of use, trustmarks, and real-world contact information all contribute to trust. But if people coming to your site cannot determine how you make money or why you built the site, they are likely to assign nefarious goals and may be reluctant to use the site. If it is not clear how your site makes money or how you benefit from making the site available, it is advised that you provide an explanation.

    Tip: Providing an explanation doesn’t mean linking to an essay justifying your site’s existence. Just adding “a free service to support users of our products” for example can ease concerns.

    Best Practice in Action: Ta-da List by 37 signals offers a simple free service but explains why the service has no cost despite being ad-free. Well done!

    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on February 1, 2006.

  • Do Overly Specific Subject Lines Impact E-mail Response?

    I just got my weekly e-mail newsletter from Ticketmaster Canada and — like it does every week — my mouse went back-and-forth between the “delete” and “open” buttons as I decided what to do. Take a look at the newsletter as it appears in my inbox:

    <lost due to link decay>

    Now that the kids are older there isn’t much chance we’ll be going to Disney on Ice, so my first inclination is to hit delete. But, if I decide to open the message despite it looking like a completely unappealing offer to me, I find something very different:

    <lost due to link decay>

    I wonder how many Billy Bragg or Kris Kristofferson or Violent Femmes or Rob Thomas fans will be missing these shows because the subject line turned them off?

    This problem isn’t unique to Ticketmaster — it is a fundamental flaw in newsletters. Because you are addressing more than one topic per e-mail, the subject line can never be both explicit and concise. One Degree faces this problem every week. We send an e-mail digest that provides lines to a week’s worth of articles. Usually, we pick a few hot topics and highlight those in the subject line, but we can never mention everything that might be of interest to all readers. Has anyone come up with a solution to this problem, or is it just something we have to live with and test to minimize the impact?

    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on February 1, 2006.

January 30, 2006

  • Some People Think TD.com Is Always Offline

    Do you type the www. whenever you want to visit a site? No? Well, you are not alone.

    Just as we learned that we didn’t need to say “http://” when promoting a domain, many marketers are now dropping the www as well. And since most sites are set up to redirect users to the website even without the www, people are learning they can cut out four keystrokes by skipping the “dub-dub-dub”. But what happens if your website isn’t configured correctly? You end up turning customers away like the TD Bank has been doing for years now. Try going to “td.com” — here’s what you see:

    <image lost due to link decay>

    Loads of visitors will look at this message and assume that their site is down (or has been hacked or something). Some might guess that TD just misconfigured their servers and try again with the www but the vast majority will assume the site is down.

    Even if only a few thousand people over the course of a year do this, what kind of an impression does it leave on those people when they get this message? “Their site is down? I’m not sure I want to trust them with my money then!” Or (in this case), “maybe they don’t want me at their site — it says I’m not authorized. But I have an account there — did they lose it?” So here’s something for you to do *right now* — type all your domains without the www and see what you get. If you don’t get your official site, you know what you’re working on this afternoon!

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

  • Every Business Needs A Blog

    I truly believe this — every business must have a blog. Well, to be honest, every business should need a blog — I’m just not sure when we’ll go from “should” to “must”, so get one now and avoid disappointment.

    Way back in 1995 I would tell anyone who’d listen that they had to have a website because eventually everyone would use the web to determine what companies they were going to deal with. As hard as it may be to believe, this was a radical idea at the time and many scoffed. Few would scoff now — can you imagine doing business with any company that had no Internet presence? The next frontier isn’t the dissemination of information via corporate websites — that’s now table stakes. Increasingly businesses will need to convey authority and enter into conversations with their “fan club” (in the Seth Godin sense of the term).

    That’s what blogs do. Mark my words — by 2010 you will not trust any company, politician, pundit, author, or anyone else looking to promote an idea or service if they don’t have a blog. By default, people will assume you have a blog and if you don’t they will say “they must have something to hide”. Agree? Disagree? Are there some companies that will never need a blog?

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

January 24, 2006

  • Where Did Your Privacy Policy Come From?

    Let me play David Blaine for a moment and channel your inner thoughts. Think about your privacy policy. Imagine the first line of it. Read it silently to yourself in your mind and I’ll see if I can make out what it might be. Are you thinking “Your privacy is very important to us”?

    I had a client recently who provided me with the copy for their privacy policy page and it looked very sophisticated — and included privacy coverage for things we weren’t planning on doing on the site. And that got me to wonderin’…

    A quick Google search on “We offer certain features that are only available through the use of a “cookie”” revealed where they had found their policy. It looks like they aren’t alone because (at this moment) “We offer certain features that are only available through the use of a cookie” reveals that 718 other sites had the same idea. So where did your privacy policy come from?

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

January 12, 2006

  • The Big Six For 2006

    I have been invited to speak to the Council of Communications Directors for the ministries of the Ontario Government tomorrow morning. The topic is “The Big Six For ’06 — The Six Big Internet Trends In 2006″.

    Here’s the list I’m working from:

    1. Blogging
    2. Feeds
    3. Findability
    4. Search Marketing
    5. Simplicity
    6. Moving Beyond Text

    I’ve only got one hour to cover all this which means it will be a whirlwind tour of these key themes impacting all businesses using the Net today. My goal is really to snap their heads back and make them focus on how the Net — and our ideas about what is important online — are changing. Feedback on the list and how it impacts government would be appreciated.

    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on January 12, 2006.

  • Zip Is Amazing, But How Would You Know?

    While I would never want to invalidate Tessa’s critique of Zip.ca I did want to rise to their defense and say that after you are a subscriber the service is just fantastic. I’ve been a customer for over a year now and just love them. The site is a bit quirky but once you’ve used it a few times you get the hang of it and everything works just as it is supposed to. They’ve been amazing at delivering and collecting information about my DVDs and their shipping status and responsive to customer service requests. And they use e-mail really, well-personalized information about my account when sending regular shipping notifications that my whole family has come to depend on. Still, Tessa’s points are valid.

    If new users are frustrated during the sign-up process they’ll never get to experience the service. Another issue Zip has is that it is not entirely intuitive to non-users how life-changing DVD subscription services are. I use it as an example of the Net fundamentally changing business models — Zip is so much better than the local video rental place they’re in an entirely different league. But when I’m discussing the concept most people have a ton of questions about how it works, why I signed-up, lots of misconceptions, and a fixation on price and process. I think the same thing holds for other technologies that I consider life-changing — broadband, Macs, PVRs, digital cameras, HDTV, iPods, podcasts, and feeds come immediately to mind. Have you found technologies or online services that “rocked your world” but you still left you unable to make others understand why you were going on about them so passionately?

    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on January 12, 2006.

December 8, 2005

  • Can You Take “Less” Too Far?

    To follow on from my “Getting Clients Involved In Less” post, I thought I’d share what I’ve done with my corporate site at “schafer.com”.

    My site has gone through many changes in the just under 10 years I’ve been running it (the site will be into double digits in January). It shrinks and expands in direct proportion to the clarity I have around what I’m offering my clients. Usually, when I introduce a new service or change what I’m doing, I end up adding more to the site to make sure people understand the new stuff we’re offering.

    But after a while, I realize that most of what I was saying didn’t really matter and could be done away with. Then the site starts to shrink again. A few weeks ago I launched a new version of the site — probably the sparest iteration since our “hello world” page a decade ago. It’s four pages long. The logo is the only image on the site. Nothing dynamic, web 2.0, Flash-enabled, or even particularly exciting.

    I like it — but then again I’m already sold on my services so maybe I’m not the stereotypical site visitor we should be building for! I guess I have a bit of a concern that this might be too much less — that I’ve taken out something that a new prospect would expect to see — that I’ve created a disconnect that will cause potential clients to pause and think twice about using our services.

    This is a particularly sticky situation because our primary services are helping people make “their Internet strategy smarter” and “their website better”. So if I’ve done a bad job on my own site, I’m not going to get a lot of clients. So here is the issue. I think this site is a fine example of getting the job done with less, which I feel is a critical skill these days. But will clients — who probably haven’t thought about the benefits of simplicity — look at this the same way I do? Or will they see it as an underdeveloped site where they were expecting brilliance?

    Your feedback on the site is welcome. Take a look at “schafer.com” and let me know — did I take minimalism too far?

    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on December 8, 2005.

  • Getting Clients Involved In “Less”

    There is a growing movement towards “less design and more constraints” in designing for the web — much of it sparked by Jason Fried of 37 Signals. At last month’s Torcamp I had an interesting conversation with Jon Lax about this concept and how the biggest problem facing companies that want to adopt “less” as a design sensibility is client buy-in. Clients typically want more not less. When you’re paying for something the first reaction is that more is always better, but of course that isn’t the case.

    Probably the most dangerous point in the process is when you unveil a mock-up or prototype to the client’s team. Invariably people will say they like it “but…” — and with that but we start getting a laundry list of enhancements. “Wouldn’t it be cool if…”, “I think a user might want to be able to…”, “I don’t see anything for User Group F, G, and H on the site, could we put in a new section…”. You know the drill. The same thing happens when teams brainstorm the next iteration of a site. We naturally default to adding rather than taking away. To focus people on “Less” instead of “More” I suggest that we switch the goals of unveilings and brainstorming.

    Rather than saying “what’s missing”, “what next” or “what else can we do for people”, let’s try asking these questions:

    • What can we take away without impacting the user experience?
    • What words can we remove without looking meaning?
    • What can we get our servers to do so that users don’t have to?
    • What can we remember from visit to visit so users don’t have to repeat themselves?
    • What processes can we reduce?
    • Where can we user simpler language, plainer English, and a less formal voice?
    • How can we make pages smaller so they load faster and require less scrolling?
    • How can we anticipate what users will commonly want to do next and make that painfully obvious?
    • Can we do this with fewer people, less time, less technology, less money, and less pre-planning?
    • Can we create artificial constraints that will make us look for more elegant solutions?

    If we set up our processes to reward these questions — if we encourage “less thinking” instead of “more thinking” we’ll all benefit. Have you had any success in convincing clients that simpler is better (but still worth paying for)?

    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on December 8, 2005.

December 7, 2005

  • Seth Godin’s Squidoo Launches

    Squidoo is now live in beta and is definitely worth checking out. They may have my favorite homepage right now (see above). How’s that for minimalism! I was one of the alpha testers for the site and did what I think many people will do — I built an About Ken Schafer Lens (Squidoo’s term for a web page). Actually, I don’t mean that everyone will make a page about Ken Schafer, I mean lots of people will build lenses about themselves — just in case you thought my ego was completely unchecked. Earlier today Heath Row of Squidoo sent this e-mail to all the alpha testers:

    You may notice something special about Squidoo today. We have quietly — and completely — moved out of the closed beta test… and into a public beta. That means that anyone can visit Squidoo, find lenses, claim lenses, and build their own. We’re thrilled to open our doors to the public, and to let everyone use the platform that you’ve been helping us test and improve these last few weeks. But we’re not going to tell anyone yet. Except you. So, now’s the time for you to share what you’ve been working on during the secret beta test. Email your lenses to friends. Post a lens to your blog. Tell your mom. And, for a limited time, your friends will be the only people to know that Squidoo is finally live. Thanks for working with us over the past two months. We can’t wait to see how the general public responds to what you’ve been building!

    Ready. Set. Squidoo.

    Heath Row

    Senior Director of Community Development Squidoo

    P.S.: Yes, it’s OK to blog about this.

    It will be interesting to see how people respond to the public version of the site. There was a lot of initial buzz when Seth started talking about it followed by a lot of “whatever” kind of posts. I think this is a natural outcome of early hype on products — blogs can generate some much heat so quickly, but it often isn’t a very lasting effect. Take a look at Squidoo (maybe read my lens and create your own), then add a comment below with your initial thoughts.

    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on December 7, 2005.

December 2, 2005

  • Canada.com Redesigns Around Content Channels

    If you’ve been to canada.com in the last few days, you’ll notice that Canwest’s flagship site has been given a makeover.

    Earlier this week Chris Powell at Marketing Magazine posted a brief overview of the changes:

    The revamped site–which draws content from 43 websites, including CanWest’s 11 daily newspapers, the Global and CHTelevision sites, and vertical sites including the recently relaunched driving.ca, remembering.ca and working.com–boasts a new look, greater navigability and new “targeted content channels” including travel, health, video and lifestyle. Additional content and features include event and restaurant listings, city guides, local shopping guides, telephone directories and maps. Canada.com has also partnered with what CanWest Interactive president Arturo Duran calls “tier-one companies” such as Expedia, Mapquest and Google on associated features like travel, maps and content and search-related advertising. CanWest says the revamped site will also give advertisers the ability to integrate their products and services “with the most relevant content environment that best reaches their target consumer.” The site also offers access to the latest digital technology, allowing participating advertisers to “leverage multiple rich media platforms” to carry their message. Current advertisers on canada.com include Saab, Dell and Rona.

    It’s interesting to see this relaunch of the site that has three million unique visitors per month coming hot on the heels of the driving.ca launch and so close to the holidays. I know that tradition has it that e-commerce sites shouldn’t muck around with their sites after Thanksgiving, but maybe it’s okay for content sites to use this time from some end-of-year housekeeping and redecorating.

    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on December 2, 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.

October 17, 2005

  • Silly Names Are Back — And That’s A Good Thing

    Have you noticed all the funny names these Web 2.0 companies have?

    Take a look at a few new companies that are either on or about to hit your radar:

    • Squidoo
    • Flickr
    • Yuku
    • Meebo
    • Skype
    • Rollyo
    • Writely
    • Qumana
    • Memeorandum
    • Gada.be
    • Zvents
    • Joyent
    • BunchBall
    • Pretty much anything Techcrunch writes about

    Now before you start giggling and saying “another sure sign of bubble 2.0”, let’s consider why having a silly name might be a good idea. In fact, I’d say these companies are some of the smartest on the Net and trendsetters rather than dotcom wannabes.

    Fact is, a unique name has gone from affectation to necessity for building an online brand. As we’ve moved to word-of-mouth marketing and building buzz via the blogosphere, the ability for people to find us (and maybe more importantly) *the ability for us to find out when people are talking about us* has become essential. Do a Technorati search on Seth Godin’s “Squidoo” and you’ll find that pretty much all of the results are about his new start-up. Whether you love or hate the name, you have to admit that you’ll be able to track it online with great clarity. Compare that to the super-hyped “Flock” social browser. A Technorati search on “Flock” does give us lots of posts related to the yet-to-be-released application, but it also gives us a ton of noise (“flocks of children”, “preaching to the flock at church”, “flock of geese”, “people flock to it”, etc.). Pity the Flock evangelist doing an ego surf!

    And being clever and picking a non-English term doesn’t help much. Compare a Technorati search for posts about feed reader “Rojos” to “one for competitor “SearchFox” — Rojos is buried in non-company-related Spanish pages (rojos is Spanish for “red”).

    Interestingly enough, while I had this post in draft mode Seth Godin blogged on this very topic. Seth adds a lot of nuances to my thoughts here and I highly recommend you read his post as well. My guess is that all those companies with “funny names” had no trouble at all finding this post while Flock and Rojos might never see it.

    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on October 17, 2005.

October 14, 2005

  • Google Toolbar Is A Blogger’s Best Friend

    Here’s your tip of the day: If you are doing a lot of blogging, or commenting on blogs, you really need to download the Google Toolbar.

    Along with the usual easy searching and auto-filling of forms, you also get spellcheck added to all your forms. So if you were to, say, add a comment to this post while using the Google Toolbar, you’d be able to hit the spell-check button, catch your typos, and hit post knowing you’ll look just a little bit more literate. How cool is that?

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

October 7, 2005

  • Clever Headlines Don’t Pay In A Web-centric World

    This image is from a recent Globe And Mail article entitled (as you can see) Snow Storms The Big Apple. Now I’ll admit that this is damn clever copywriting. But as a headline for web-based content, this just doesn’t fly.

    Why?

    Well, if you read this out of context (just the headline and a link in an e-mail, search results, or a feed for example) it is really hard to pick up that it is an article about Canadian artist Michael Snow’s new Museum of Modern Art one-man show in New York City. So lots of people who might find this interesting will skip over it. Worse still, the headline might confuse search spiders (although the body of the article certainly has lots of relevant keywords that people might search for). And I guess there is a chance that people searching on snowstorms might also end up getting this article when it really isn’t a good result for them. Take a word of advice and go study what Nick Usborne preaches about online copywriting. And leave the clever puns for those poor folks stuck in print.

    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on October 7, 2005.

October 2, 2005

  • The Blogosphere Is Talking About You Mitch Joel

    Occasional One Degree Guest Contributor Mitch Joel of Twist Image was one of the “participants” in our “One Degree Calling challenge. Our post listed ten Canadian Internet companies with links to their home pages. My goal was to see who was paying attention to the blogosphere and how quickly they would respond if someone “pinged them” with mention and/or link in a blog post. Mitch did well, replying in less than a day (I think that’s great). But he took a bit of exception to my methodology:

    Here’s why One Degree is kind of off. It actually took me no time at all. I get the One Degree RSS feed as soon as they are posted, I just don’t read all of it right away — specifically postings with titles that seem to have little immediate relevance to me or are ambiguous (like One Degree Calling). If you’re into the Blogosphere (like I am), then you’ll have hundreds of feeds (like I do).

    And a bit later he says:

    If anything, One Degree Calling was a better example of how fast word-of-mouth can spread online as I probably would not have even read a post with a title like that unless someone had specifically told me to. Getting beyond the little One Degree “experiment,” what it made me realize is how much great content is out there, and how much care has to go into making every word count. Especially the call to action — which in this case was the title. If it does not resonate with me, no matter how much I like everything else that has come out of there, I am just ambivalent towards it (maybe One Degree could have done multiple postings for each company, so one could have been titled, “One Degree Calling Twist Image” — that I would have read fast).

    I appreciate Mitch’s feedback and I know he gets this blog stuff more than most in Canada, but I think this shows that our methodology was perfect. My goal was to see who monitors the blogosphere, not who reads our feed.

    I’m happy that Mitch gets our feed (told you he was smart) but I certainly wouldn’t expect him to read everything we post and I certainly didn’t mean to imply that all ten agencies should have round-the-clock monitoring of One Degree in case we mention them in passing.

    What I would expect is that all these agencies have set up multiple ego-searches on their names, their company names, their client’s names, and all the associated URLs using all the blog and feed search tools like Technorati, PubSub, BlogPulse, Google Blog Search, Bloglines, Feedster, etc. The name of the post was intentionally cryptic and intentionally mentioned all agencies at the same time — my goal was to see who would find their company and URL mentioned in an obscure post and respond to that. Since we put all the agency names and URLs in the post and in the feed, it should have been picked up by all the search engines within a few minutes of us sending our pings. So anyone monitoring the blogosphere should have got wind of this the next time they checked their ego feeds.

    I’m okay with people checking these once a day (once an hour may show signs of addiction!) so Mitch’s response-time was perfect, even if it was based on word-of-mouth. In June I mentioned Technorati in a post and within a few hours of the post going live, David Sifry founder and SEO of the blog search firm had added a comment to the post. I’m sure he didn’t know we existed before we posted about his service, but as soon as we did, he was there. That’s what I’d like to see from all Canadian web agencies now, and eventually from all Canadian companies.

    Oh by the way Mitch, I’m posting this 4 hours after you posted and that’s only because you posted at 5:30AM on a Sunday morning! I hope the title of this post got your attention!

    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on October 2, 2005.

September 29, 2005

  • Search Optimize Viral Campaigns

    Does search engine optimization matter when you are doing a viral marketing or teaser ad campaign? Absolutely! One Degree and the “Uncle Yaris” TV ads give us a textbook example. Because I wrote about yaris.ca a few days ago, we’re getting a ton of search traffic right now on the terms Uncle Yaris and Yaris.ca.

    I find it truly ironic that I wrote “they’re from Toyota as a simple Google search will tell you” and now that page itself is the top result:

    Google will redirect you to the site if you search on yaris.ca, but Yahoo shows this:

    <lost due to link decay>

    And MSN puts One Degree at the top of an Uncle Yaris search as well:

    <lost due to link decay>

    My quick review of the search results didn’t reveal yaris.ca as a result for any of the searches now driving traffic to us.

    Lesson learned? Teaser campaigns will generate LOTS of search activity. If you haven’t optimized your site so that the search engines can find you, your curious customers won’t either. Any SEO experts out there want to chime in with a few suggestions on what Toyota should have done with yaris.ca — other than hire you?

    And to Toyota? Thanks for running a TV teaser campaign for One Degree! We’re lovin’ the traffic!

    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on September 29, 2005.

September 28, 2005

  • Toyota’s Quirky Uncle Yaris

    <image lost to link decay>

    So “Toyota” has started a TV teaser campaign based around “Uncle Yaris”. The ads feature the “quirky” Uncle Yaris — who looks like he could be my nephew, are uncles really that young these days? — doing “quirky” stuff. Did I mention the ads are “quirky”?

    The ads end with a full screenshot of the web address “yaris.ca”.

    The ads of course tie into the Canadian launch of the new sub-compact “Yaris” that was “announced at the Frankfurt Auto Show” earlier this month. I can’t really say I understand this campaign. The site doesn’t do anything and doesn’t ask anything of me (no sign-up or send to a friend or find out what this is about or anything). I can Google Yaris and find out everything I need to about the car — so what exactly is the point of this campaign? Is it to get people like me to post things like this?

    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on September 28, 2005.

  • Solving The Feed Search and Partial Feed Puzzle

    One of the nice things about all this “Web 2.0” stuff is that we get some new problems to solve. Let me outline a problem that’s been bugging me for a while now that was brought top-of-mind by the launch of Google Blog Search a few weeks ago. I’ve also got a possible solution I want to put out there for feedback.

    Here’s the situation:

    1. Ad-supported sites rely on people seeing the ads on their site. That’s how they make money. That’s good.
    2. Feeds allow ad-supported sites to notify past readers (subscribers) that there is new stuff at the site to see (along with the ads that support the content). That’s good.
    3. If an ad-supported site publishes a full feed with all the content, ad-free, they don’t make any money. That’s not good.
    4. If you put the ads in the full feed it kills much of the value of the feed to the subscriber and becomes very hard to measure. That’s not good.

    So a partial feed (while not the preferred choice of subscribers) is the logical compromise. Subscribers are notified of new relevant posts and can easily click-through to see the ad-supported content. A compromise, but a good thing.

    And here’s the problem with that situation:

    1. Feeds (through ping services) also act as notifiers for aggregators and search services. Because this makes it possible for prospective readers to find a publisher’s content, this is good.
    2. But a new class of services only looks at what is in the feed to assess the content. So anything not mentioned in an ad-supported site’s feed is not crawled and therefore not searchable by users. For both publisher and reader, this is a bad thing.
    3. The problem is made worse by the fact that one of the best new services, PubSub only reads feeds, not the full related posts. That’s bad.
    4. But what is really bad is that Google Blog Search is only crawling feed content, not the original posts.

    So the essential problem we’re faced with is you need to produce a full feed so that people who might be interested in your content can find you when using ping-centric search tools. But producing a full feed means that regular readers can avoid ads on your site by viewing your content only in their feed reader.

    And finally, my suggested solution:

    • Create a “Public Partial Feed” that is easily available and conspicuous on your site. Make it so that auto-discovery can find this feed.
    • Make a “Ping-friendly Hidden Full Feed” that is hard to find unintentionally and have that feed sent to ping-centric search tools.

    Is anyone doing this? Are there any issues I’ve missed in using this approach?

    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on September 28, 2005.

September 27, 2005

  • One Degree Calling

    When I took iStudio to task for not having a feed, iStudio fixed the problem and let me know via a comment at One Degree within an hour of the post going live.

    This morning I started wondering if any of the other web shops and interactive agencies in Canada are paying attention to the blogosphere. The scientist in me figured an experiment was in order.

    So, here is a list of ten randomly selected Canadian interactive shops. Let’s see how long it takes them to spot their company name and URL and add a comment to let us all know they found this contest they didn’t even know they were participating in. I’ll update the post with “time to reply” updates as they find us.

    Results To Date:

    To Be Heard From:

    • Blast Radius
    • Critical Mass
    • Devlin
    • Henderson bas
    • Indusblue
    • N5R
    • Note to our competitors: To make sure comments are legit, e-mail me from your work e-mail so I know the comment is really from the company and not from a “passionate customer” helping you out! Note to those reading our feed: To make sure those monitoring feeds instead of blogs have a fair chance I’m posting the whole post rather than an excerpt this time.

    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on September 27, 2005.

  • Turn Complaints Into An Advantage

    A few weeks ago we started getting what I called “subscription spam” through our e-mail newsletter sign-up forms. It seems that comment spam attacks are mistaking e-mail sign-up forms for comment fields. Apparently e-mail lists are now collateral damage in the comment spam wars. Because we use a double-opt-in process we saw bounces from the fake e-mail addresses the spammers were using. That’s how we knew this was happening. And it was getting pretty irritating because these automated tools were becoming more aggressive and we were seeing several bounces per hour from these silly things. Worse still, the bounces were coming back from big portal sites and from their perspective it looked like we were spamming them! I sent off a note to Campaign Monitor to see if they had been seeing this with other clients, but it seemed we were the first ones with the problem. The way Campaign Monitor turned this complaint to their advantage is a great lesson for all marketers…

    Rather than give us the typical “your problem not ours” answer, David Greiner at Campaign Monitor started working with us to figure out what was going on. We did a bunch of tests on our site using code variations they came up with until we found something that did the trick. Today Campaign Monitor rolled out an upgrade to their service that includes the changes they first figured out using One Degree as a guinea pig. To me this is a great example of how to use in-bound e-mail and customer complaints in general as an asset rather than a burdensome, but necessary cost centre.

    Campaign Monitor shows us how to do this right:

    • Read your support requests and reply promptly.
    • Have those designing the service involved in customer support so they can feel the pain of their decisions and will feel motivated to fix problems as they arise.
    • Don’t abdicate responsibility even when at first the problem doesn’t appear to be yours.
    • Take advantage of passionate users who’ll help you figure out how to improve your product for their needs, and then roll those enhancements out to the broader customer-base.
    • Use a blog to keep customers up-to-date on what you are doing with the product and to share knowledge between customers.
    • Give props to those who help out. They might just blog about you too. (Thanks for the link David!)

    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on September 27, 2005.