The Toronto Marketing and Technology Blog

Working is like playing a pinball game -- Ball goes up, ball goes down. If you're good, you won't let the ball drop.

Have you noticed that having a job and performing well at it resembles a pinball game? Ball goes up, ball goes down.

When you first start out in a role or position, you are at level 1. The ball moves slowly, and you are quickly learning with every possible hit on a new surface opening a door to a new knowledge bank of strategies.

As you catch your stride, everything becomes second nature. You plan tactics that align with a discrete and measureable goal in mind. You execute flawlessly with a smile of confidence in tow. You relish in the success that rapidly flows your way.

You will experience times when the ball is up, and stays up for a long period of time. Things seem to just work and hit the right places at the right time. Your spectators will stare in amazement of the A-type of player you are for achieving extreme heights. (Okay I could be over exaggerating, but it  adds oomph to my story)

Contrast this to situations when the tide does not turn in your favour. The levels become longer and the ball moves at an incredible speed.You are not able to keep the ball up even if the laws of gravity changed to negate the downward force of mass. (I'm not a physics major, don't shoot me if the last sentence didn't make sense). No one will be there to help you get back on track. You will have to rely on yourself again to regain your momentum and slowly climb the ladder that begins with fatigue and dissapointment to the top of the ladder where willingness to conquer and excitement resides.

Progress fades and you quickly learn lessons of failure: never let the ball drop. Dropping the ball brings uncertainty.  If you are uncertain, pause the game. Pausing the game is like taking a vacation. It will devour boundaries and allow you to attack challenges from new angles once the game is resumed. By doing this, you accelerate the probability of performing better the moment you start again.

In summary, carefully track the monitor and altitude of the ball.  When you least expect it, it could drop, causing a river full of unexpected results -- and no one likes bad surprises.

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My review of n49.ca | A site for local business reviews

I recently had the opportunity to vist the n49 booth at SES Toronto a week ago. Before I get into talking about the product I would like to mention the friendliness of the n49 team. Specifically, Tina A and just the video guy (I lost his business card, but he knows who he is). They richly informed me of the service that they are offering but in a non-salesman like fashion. I always appreciate people talking passionately about a product that they believe in.

What is n49.ca?

(As described on their site)

n49 is about sharing thoughts, opinions and experiences about local businesses. n49 allows you find and review local businesses, make friends with other n49ers, and create and share your personal business directory. n49ers rate and review restaurants, nightclubs, auto mechanics, spas, and just about anything else!

Businesses generating buzz- those most reviewed and favoured by members- find themselves comfortably at the top of search results. n49 lets you decide what the best businesses in your area are!

Features that the site has

Search for local businesses, and friends.

Rate a review on a system of 5 stars.

Review a local business.

Listyour business on n49 adding all types of media to it such as video, text, blogs etc.

You can think of it as a Canadian version of Yelp.

Business Model

I believe n49 makes money on sponsored listings that are on the top of search results.

My two cents

1) I don't get the name n49? It doesn't describe anything about what the business does: local business reviews.

2) I noticed by looking at profiles, that many people don't have any friends. A cool feature that they may want to add is a contact importer where someone can enter their gmail or yahoo email and see what friends are on the site already. Maybe I have a couple friends on the site and I don't know?

3) I noticed a bug in the software. When I received my notification e-mail it said my "  Your username is: " without printing my username.  :)

4) It's impressive that n49 donates $1 for every review you make on the site. Based on their revenues, I wonder if that would be hard to scale. Setting expectations at the beginning of the service is very important and could be detrimental. Good job with the charity feature!

5) I find it weird that in a local review site, you have the ability to put your relationship status. Local review business and dating site perhaps?

The n49 team definitely has put together a great service for people looking for reviews of local businesses around them. Let's hope it's a success!

My page is at http://ragobeer.n49.ca . If anyone decides to check out the service, look me up! (since I have no friends that I'm aware of :) )

Democamp Toronto 18 - July 15, 2008

DemoCamp is a variation of the un-conference style of event, started by the TorCamp group as an excuse to have more regular meetings where community members share what they've been working on, demo their products, meet others (and share a drink or 3).

The next democamp is happening  on July 15, 2008. As always it's going to be a great time.
Registration is at http://democamp.eventbrite.com

Hope to see you there.

SES Toronto 2008 Day 2 : Web 2.0 & Search Engines

Moderator:

• Kevin Ryan, VP, Global Content Director, Search Engine Strategies and Search Engine Watch

Speakers:

• Chris "Silver" Smith, Lead Strategist, Netconcepts
• Ambles Kwok, Yahoo! Canada Senior Manager of Engineering, Yahoo!

What is web 2.0? by Chris Smith

Tagging and social tagging are hot buzzwords that make up the web 2.0 arena. The ability to distribute and share photos with friends and people around you raises awareness and increases traffic through image search.

He then goes into analysis of ranking and listings between in blended and universal search.
Using Widgets/Gadgets for distribution is an ongoing and hot trend. Some examples are to use Yahoo or   Google Widgets.
   
Is Yahoo! Search Monkey web 2.0?
Experimental - the census is that it's not.
Currently not showing up by default and is a neat way of differentiating yourself from competitors.


Web 2.0 and Search Engines by Ambles Kwok

SEO enables a website owner to drive traffic to a site, LOTS of traffic.
Give context to the information to users becomes 3 dimensional versus 2 dimension.

Search Monkey
Yahoo's Search Monkey as an example to differentiate yourself.
Search monkey = branded search
Shows search monkey examples

What does all of this mean?
Action item : give meaning to the data you

Context is king!
Keywords, URL, & links are SEO 1.0
Structured pages are SEO 2.0
Semantic Web is NOW! Adopt it NOW!
Think outside the browser
Define your own heatmap

SES Toronto 2008 Day 2 : Opening Keynote - Bryan Eisenberg

Speaker - Bryan Eisenberg , Co-Founder Future Now, Inc.

Bryan has been speaking at SES for 8 years.
Marketing Optimization is not just about the traffic. There are many things that affect site traffic that are sometimes out of control of the website owner.
He talks about stories of his clients and how they have optimized their sites using numerous tactics and strategies. He emphasizes alot about conversion optimization and driving not only traffic but conversion.

Displays Road map for optimization

Search Engine Strategies
PPC - Pay Per Conversion
SEO - Searcher Experience Optimization

Data Diarrhea
Evolution of Sales and Marketing
Every step in the evolution made it easier for the customer

The Secret to Converting Visitors
Conversion is a reflection of your effectiveness and your customers satisfaction.

SCENT : sniffing like a dog in user search behaviour - people roam around and delve further into links, but when they get lost or lose the scent, they retreat to where they started.

67% of consumers who visited online store that are intending to make a purchase left the retailer because they did not provide enough product information

Aligning Customers and Business Objectives - reiteration

Don't market like yesterday

Your optimization roadmap

Get good at free then pay - when you choose the tools that you're going to use, try out free tools and get yourself experienced with the data. Only after you are accustomed to  understanding and interpreting the data, then upgrading to paid accounts with more information will help you.

Operationalize a system for content planning and optimization

Stop, take more time planning for people flow
Take less time idling on execution
Invest in continuous optimization
Have better conversations - make MORE of them!

SES Toronto 2008 Day 1 - Universal & Blended Search

Moderator
Mike Grehan, Global KDM Officer, Acronym Media

Speakers
Mitch Joel, President, Twist Image
Dustin Rideout, Account Director, Digital Strategist, Wunderman
Andy Renieris, Head of Search, Yahoo! Canada Search

Speaker #1 - Mitch Joel
Optimized web pages in 1995. This is when people first began looking at optimization as a technique to get better results. Only a few websites being crawled, so there were not alot of tactics being executed.
1998 Network Theory - Linkage Data

Reality Check
20% of searches each day are totally new searches.

Content vs. Communication
47% vs. 33% communication
There has been and always will be potential to optimize things.

1) Web site owners job is to understand how the search engine works -> trust and relevancy.
Opportunity : to be all over the place

What is content?
Text, tags, images, audio, video, news, press releases, thoughts, social.

Speaker #2 - Dustin Rideout

3 key points

1) The environment is changing : people are viewing content differently
2) CRM = Consumers really manage
3) It all starts with the consumer social actions mimics search

Speaker #3 - Andy Renieris

How to optimize for Yahoo engine Focus group takeaway?

3 types of mediums to be involved with : social networks, social media, and social search. These are the hot new trends currently.

Try out wikia search by Jimmy Wales.

1) Yahoo vs. Google presentation Blended search

2) Talks about Search Monkey as new product that Yahoo has launched for brands to differentiate themselves. A link to visit to start working with Search Monkey: developer.yahoo.com

SES Toronto 2008 Day 1 : Beyond Linkbait - Getting Authoritative Online Mentions

Panel Discussion: Beyond Linkbait - Getting Authoritative Online Mentions

Moderator
Andrew Goodman, SES Toronto Co-Chair & Principal, Page Zero Media

Speakers
Greg Jarboe, President and Co-Founder, SEO-PR
Joe Thornley, Chairman and CEO, Thornley Fallis Communications and 76design
Jim Hedger, SEO Consultant, Metamend Search Engine Marketing

Greg Jarboe
He started off with a simple insight:
Fool people once, can't fool them again. Don't try the same tactics of link baiting over and over again.

If linkbait tactics worked last year, can they be as effective this year?

He went into detail of Harlequin example statistics on influential bloggers , blog posts,  and inbound links.
Do things differently second time. Improve on what worked and be creative. People notice the same thing over and over again. It won't work as effective as before.

Joe Thornley
Results Through Niche, Community and Content

Involving yourself in the discussion, he's a blogger and uses Twitter to as a tool to engage with people.

Outreach best practices
1) Do not buy lists - a conventional web 1.0 thing to do to create artificial links for a person.
2) Use the method of their choice - go where they are going to involve yourself with that discussion
3) Get to know them, and who they are as a customer.
4) Offer something without a request

Be patient and giving. If you need quick results, you've waited too long.

Jim Hedger
In reality, it's simply hard work to build out links.

Being of Good Value
1) Get involved in conversations
2) The internet is a conversational medium, use it to your advantage
3) Create informative content - you will create a healthy following of readers

Insights about your industry
Offer your own techniques, tactics and forecasts

Do nice things
Acts of kindness go a long way in this community [This is a pont that people often forget. This should be in business books in my opinion]

SES Toronto 2008 Day 1 : Getting Found in Maps and Local Search

Local search is one of the topics that I am interested in currently. Mainly because  there are a large amount of challenges that exist that stand in the way of having a relatively smart and user friendly solution. Things such as availability, relevance of information, having information at the exact time I want it etc. are just some of the roadblocks.

Here is summary of the panel discussion : Getting Found in Maps and Local Search.

Speakers
Ian White, CEO, Urban Mapping
Candice Faktor, Creator, www.ourfaves.com and GM, www.toronto.com
Nick Patsiopoulos, Product Manager, Yahoo! Canada

Speech #1 - Ian White

Solving local search means identifying on and off-line merchants who can fulfill commercial inquiries.

Here are some stats that he rambled about:

40% queries inherently local. This means that a high percentage of searches that people make are about things around them, the city they live in, or products around them that a user is looking to buy or research about. He then goes into detail about IP based geo-targeting and its limitations, more specifically it is poor for local search and demonstrates a service area misrepresentation ie, mapping a persons location to a region is difficult.

Speech #2 Candice Faktor  

Candice gave an overview of the properties that she is involved in, both toronto.com and ourfaves.com.

Overview of Toronto.com
Where to go and what to do in Toronto is all available on toronto.com
Entertainment focussed individuals are a target market
Interactive media property + local search engine
1mm unique visitors/month
10 years old
Part of Torstar Family

Overview of ourfaves.com
User generated content
Sister site to toronto.com owned by Torstar Digital
Torstar's first web 2.0 site
Launching in western Canada soon

SEO how we do it : how toronto.com touches local search

10 years old
relevant title tags
descriptive body copy
Dynamically generated title tags
SEO Training
Circular linking on site
Quality links

SEM - How we use it
Drive traffic to areas we don't naturally rank high in
Couple SEM with core categories naturally optimized eg. restaurants
Strategically drive traffic to pages
SEM traffic drives deeper engagement than natural SEO traffic

Toronto.com's Local Search Product is being revamped.

Key Challenges that they face
- servicing the local business market
- High cost of sale
- less sophisticated buyer of search
- budgets smaller

Speech #3 - Nick Patsiopolous Yahoo! Canada

Online user reviews were an important part of local activity processes
If you're implementing a local search solution, online user reviews is important

How to Target Mobile
-make sure your business comes up in Search Engine local results
-Create a mobile site

SES Toronto 2008 : Opening Keynote

Live-blogging the opening keynote at SES Toronto 2008 Day 1

The future of Marketing

by Fredrick Mackini, Founder of IProspect Chief Global Search Officer, Isobar

There were many topics that Fredrick talked about. I will talk about the ones that really stood out as alot of his content was very valuable.

Here are 5 topics that Fredrick discussed in the Opening keynote of SES Toronto 2008:

1) Statistics on search, Google Video, Youtube and reach over MTV.

Many statistics were given on the amount of content being consumed that come from searches off Google Video and Youtube over the conventional media types such as MTV. People are interacting with the content by uploading their replies and comments and more views are being obtained. This type of interaction is hard to measure offline.

2) Different audiences uses different keywords to find you in search

He used a candle in a jar product as an example to drive home his point.  The customers of this product saw the product first hand and entered in keywords in a search engine to find the product online. The keywords that they used to find the product online were not what the company had expected. The company then used the search terms that people typed in to get to their site and adjusted their content on the site to reflect this.. This is a good example of how marketing content on your site is an iterative process to adjust to what your users are searching for.

3) Competitors stealing your off-line advertising

This is an interesting topic that I haven't put too much time to think about. There is a significant gap between off-line ad campaigns and how firms market themselves online through a variety of campaigns. There is the potential for your competitors to use your off-line ad campaign to their advantage online, stealing your potential customers. Making a holistic campaign that converts people from off-line to your online site is essential and must be thought out very well if you want your campaign to be successful. Integrating your campaign with the competitive landscape will be fundamental to your campaign.

4) Take PPC campaigns Global

You may be limiting your PPC campaigns by only keeping your PPC campaigns to a local market. He went through pricing of campaigns and cost of acquisition around the world. For one of the campaigns that his firm ran, the COA prices were a lot less around the world than in the US and Canada. Places such as South America, Europe, Australia were significant cheaper for them in acquiring customers for their clients.

5) Search-Leveraged Press releases

He went into a discussion about Search-leveraged press releases to get the word out in a marketing campaign. It detailed how releases are ranked, how people pick them up and the spill over effect of a successful press release. This led into a segway of how content is raised to the top of the search page.

Overall, Fredricks opening keynote was very entertaining and his ending comments that covered the future of search just confirmed my view of where it's going: search centric and community driven.

The power of a rooftop

Shelter is a necessity. We need it to protect ourselves from rain, cold, the wind, sharp things flying around etc. Imagine now, that all of a sudden the roof  that you suddenly took for granted became non existent. You now had only four walls with no top. Could you manage and carry on with a reasonable livelihood without a top?

A rooftop signifies security. Even though you have a roof over your head? Do you feel secure?