Marketing

I was reading Sebastien Provencher’s guest post this morning on the LeWeb’s blog about foursquare and comparing it to Twitter.  I agree with Seb that fourSquare is not the next Twitter but I do think its a bit of a game changer in what its doing with in Social Mobile space.

foursquare gives users incentives to ‘check-in’ to different locations on their mobile phone.  It uses the phone’s GPS location to provide a list of local and popular locations for the user to check-in or the user can quickly create a new location profile.   The user can earn badges for each location they visit and it becomes a bit of a game to earn new badges and compare you points with your friends.  The user who visits an individual location the most earns a ‘mayor’ badge for that location.

I think the game changing aspect of foursquare is what its changing for user behaviour.   As users check into new locations they can instantly see other popular locations that are near them.    Right now that list is free from advertising and just based on the location and popularity of the locations.  Kinda like search engines were in 2000, where there race was on finding content and less on advertising/monetizing like search engines today.  Right now the user group engaged in foursquare is still quite small but its growing and ff this user behaviour continues it should develop into an excellent user intercept opportunity.

Advertisers could target users in their proximity with real-time offers.    This is already happening on the Twitter today and its only going to get more powerful with the social mobile connection.  Populating and controlling the list of ‘check-in’ locations will be increasingly important and profitable.  As will advertising that can connect with this location information in a meaningful form.

It will be interesting to see if foursquare can maintain a unique position here or if the other social networks will just duplicate its functionality and bring it internally.  Right now if feels like foursquare is more like an app on Facebook or Twitter than a social network on its own.  I would expect that Facebook and Twitter will continue to provide the identity data for the social mobile experience but the player with the local advertising is still an unknown.

For years now Google has dominated the search marketing field.  Its Pagerank algorithm attempts to find content that is the most relevant to the keywords being search.  In most cases this means placing a greater emphasis on older more established content and ignoring the newer content.  This has worked well for most content types except for breaking news and trending items.  When Michael Jackson died a search for “Michael Jackson” was more likely to bring up fan pages than articles around his death.

Enter Twitter and Facebook, for trending topics the social networks have an advantage in that they can see trending topics developing in real-time.  And yesterday they announced a partnership with Bing to power its real-time search component.  This should provide Bing with an advantage in the real-time search market.  Its not clear how big the real-time market is as compared to the more traditional search market that Google dominates.

Its will be interesting to see if Marketers start to place a greated emphasis on purchasing keywords based on real-time trends that be associated with their brands.  The search engines are already well equipped with bid based pricing models to handle real-time price fluctuations in keywords.

Leigh Himel has a good post about how the opt-out campaign approach should never be used.  We’ve both been the victims of CIBC’s wonderful new Infinite Visa upgrade program.  Without talking to me CIBC has decided to upgrade me to this new VISA program while I was in Portugal at Alex & Iuliana’s wedding.   This is a perfect example of an opt-out campaign, I apparently had a limited time period to opt-out of the upgrade program.

To make matters worst I’ve never received my Infinite Visa so someone could be running around with it right now.   When I login to my old CIBC VISA program no longer get balance updates and I only have until Aug 14 to use my new Visa.  All of my direct withdrawal aggreements also need to be transfered over to my new Visa ( which I don’t have ).  CIBC has even projected a lovely 1-800 to help transfer these direct withdrawals.  My first and only call to the number included 10 mins of horrible music while I wait for a CSR to respond and tell me I need to call the vendor and make the change with them instead.

I’ve been using this card for about 10 years now and I’ve even memorized the number.  What ever benefits this new CIBC Infinite card provides pale in comparison to the inconvience of getting this new card.  And by cancelling my old card on a fairly aggressive schedule they are ensuring that I need to find a replace from here, here, here, or here.  I don’t really understand how CIBC could roll out this type of campaign and expect it to be acceptable to anyone who actually uses the their cards.

I agree with Michael Arlington that Dr Horrible is not so horrible.  Jen at work mentioned it a few weeks ago and I was a little skeptical because of the music nature.  The production quality is really great and the story is very entertaining.  Its available for free on the Hulu site with ads here:

Rogers has recently started ‘helping its customers’ be redirecting search requests to its own landing page with advertising.   They’re even going so far as to redirect Internet Explorer search requests to this new landing page.  The page looks like this:

Notice the Rogers branding, Chatelaine and Macleans advertising on the page.  Not really clear how these are helping Rogers users…

Rogers has already received a lot of negative press for its iphone pricing and lack of competitive data plans.  This appears to be another example Rogers working very hard to completely assassinate its own brand.  Verisign tried the same approach a few years ago and eventually abandoned the product based on negative feedback.  Rogers appears to be lining up for the same experience.

When Facebook announced its SocialAds I think everything was fairly accepting of advertising inside Facebook. At the same time they announced Facebook Beacon’s though, which let third-party websites advertise users actions inside Facebook. Unlikely many of the other features inside Facebook, the Facebook Beacons were turned on by default and required users to turn them off.

Jay Goldman from Radiant Core, did an awesome break down of Facebook Beacon process. He went through all the beacon.js functinality and was able to see how the ‘toast’ component of the Facebook Beacon was suppose to be displayed on third-party sites. In a rather non-standard format the ‘toast’ slides up from the bottom of the screen on third-party webpages and displays a message that a Facebook Beacon is about to be presented for the user. Unfortunately the process Facebook used might not work with some browsers and if users missed the ‘toast’ screen the Beacon was automatically sent.

After much up-roar from users about the privacy issues around Beacons, Facebook has decided to change them so that the user has to explicitly confirm that they want a Beacon sent. Techcrunch has a great break down of the Beacon 2.0 process. I think this is a great win for user’s and puts them back in control. One thing you can certainly say about Facebook is that they do listen to their users and respond quickly.

Facebook has published new usage numbers, the growth continues to be impressive, especially in Canada.

• 47 Million Active Monthly Users
• 50% of active users return daily
• Average 21mins daily, 192.5 mins per month
• 57 Billion Page Views Monthly ( #6 overall website by Pageview )
• #1 overall Online Photo site
• 13.8 million photos uploaded daily

Canada continues to be above average in growth with:

• 6.9 Million Active Monthly Users
• 65% of active users return daily
• Average 30.6 min daily, 371 mins per month

With this sort of growth is not hard to see all the active around Facebook Marketing in Canada and why so many people are interested in the FacebookCamp events.

As part of my day job I’m now actively involved with running a lot of events and I attend almost every major consumer show in the Toronto area. The annual Autoshow is back in town and all the local media is a buzz with Automotive news. I was at the show on Friday with my father. This got me thinking about ideas to improve the show for both vendors and attendees:

1/Know your buyer
I’m over 6′ and too many of the vehicles at the show have the driver seat locked in the far forward position to show off the back seat. I know we’ve all heard of back seat drivers but how many do you think will buy cars in 2007? I don’t think there’s a bigger turn off for a buyer than thinking the car is too small to be comfortable which is exactly what happens with the seat way forward. Some of the smarter vendors, like Volkswagon, have their cars powered so that the driver can adjust accordingly. I’m not sure why all vendors do go this route, maybe its the cost of electrical at the show?

2/Stop the fake Viral BS
Almost every year some mysterious person comes up to me while in a vehicle and tells me “How they bought car XXX and love it, best car ever…”. Watching the person for 10 mins you can see him/her cycling around a particular vendors both repeating the same story like a canary. Its embarassing for the person and the car manufacture, you know who you are…

3/Make it easy
At every show I see less and less people lugging around a large back full of crap. I don’t believe most people want brochures, handouts etc.. Some people want more information and an ability to follow-up. Get an email address and enough information to provide more details later. You don’t need my date of birth, sex, dental history etc… Make it simple.

Over the past week I’ve been taking the TTC ( Toronto Transit Commission ), mainly because my car has some electrical problems. I like the down time after work to just relax so I thought I’d investigate options to use the TTC more often. The TTC pricing is very complicated but an excellent example of behaviour focus pricing and value.

I’m planning to go to work and home on the TTC, and I work 5 days a week ( Mon to Friday ) so that’s a total of 10 trips per week. On average I work a total 220 days a year. So that’s approximately 440 annual trips, or 36 trips in an average month. So lets look at the options available:

Plan                                                     Per Trip    Weekly         Monthly

Cash                                                    $2.75         $27.5             $99
Tokens/Tickets ( 5 or 10 tokens ) $2.10         $21                $75.6
Day Pass ( Family Too )                  $8.50         $85*              $306*
Weekly Pass ( Transferable )         $3.00         $30               $130
Monthly Pass ( Transferable )       $2.70          N/A              $99.75
Monthly Pass – Annual                   $2.48          N/A              $91.50

I’m ignoring some options like the GTA Weekly Pass( including the suburbs ), Express routes charges, and convention events passes. The TTC provides a webpage for the Full TTC rates.

So the winner for me appears to be the Tokens/Tickets. It would be interesting to understand the other considerations that the TTC looks at with their pricing.

I’m sure they know that a percentage of all Tokens/Tickets purchased are never used. Do enough people lose/keep their Tokens/Tickets to make this program the most profitable?

Do people with the monthly pass really travel enough on the weekends to make up for the extra cost?

Unless you’ve been living in a cave you’ve probably seen something about the new Apple iPhone and probably heard something about it being a BlackBerry killer. In isolation the iPhone looks a pretty cool phone with its multi-touch and iPod functionality included. When you start to looking a the BlackBerry and what’s made it successful though the iPhone is lacking. First is security, the BlackBerry has a very strong and established security policy that has made easy to integrate into most corporate environments. Next
BlackBerry supports the BES (BlackBerry Enterprise Solution), the BES provides industry leading connectivity between wireless networks and the enterprise mail server. Rogers, Bell, Telus and maybe even FIDO all have high speed connections supporting the BES. The BES also builds on the BlackBerry security model by encrypting all traffic, again making it easy for enterprises to accept. And lastly the BlackBerry brings preferred data rates as a result of its connection between carriers and the BES. I don’t think the Research in Motion has much to worry about from the iPhone currently…

But can the BlackBerry take over the digital music space that Apple and the iPod currently own? Like the BES Apple has done a great job in developing supporting services into
iTunes. Any serious contended for the digital music space needs to take on iTunes, which huge artist, audio books and podcast and libraries. iTunes also make all these extremely easy to import onto the iPod. Microsoft and its Media Player are far more complicated than iTunes and really miss the simplicity of the process. Microsoft’s solution is also further complicated by digital licenses and rights management. Any vendor that wants to go after the digital music space will need to develop a replacement iTunes or partner with Apple.

As is often the case the success of a device is really dependent on the supporting infrastructure that’s available for it. The Microsoft Pocket PC platform and Palm devices suffered from similar problems where the devices were individually very powerful but lacked the supporting tools to really get mass adoption.