I’m sure everyone has heard of the mammoth recalls of Mattel products.
I was curious how they were responding to this situation on their website, so I checked it out.
Overall, I think they have responded fairly well online.
Their homepage isn’t doing enough though. There is one small graphic on this topic, on the bottom right corner that says “Voluntary Recall Information”. Ironically, the teaser graphic is next to another one extolling their “Global Citizenship” (or perhaps Mattel thinks we’re so impressed with their corporate “citizenship”, we’ll stop thinking about the harm they have subjected children to worldwide). It would have been better if they were a bit more upfront, delivering a key message or two right on their homepage.
Clicking on the teaser, leads to a Mattel microsite dealing exclusively with the issue. The microsite is quite effective and has me reconsidering my previous criticisms of microsites.
While the microsite is small and simple, it has all the crucial info or clearly directs to it. The messages are clear and honest.
There are some missteps. There was a bit of spin with their headline “because your children are our children, too” (were our children not their children before when they weren’t being careful enough?). Also, there’s a big graphic on the bottom with happy kids playing in the field that’s inappropriate – kids aren’t so happy if they are sick from their toys or even if they have had to have a favourite toy taken away from them. This issue is informational, so there’s no need for stock photography here. Also, they place a media information section a bit too high and prominently.
I do like that Mattel’s has made finding out what products are recalled quite easy. Also, they posted fairly prominently FAQs that answer questions parents really would be asking and they answer these questions with a minimum of corporate-speak.
The most effective technique is a video message by the CEO that plays automatically in the top-left corner. It is fairly honest (which is the only thing they can do now to save their reputation) and clearly and concisely outlines their plan to prevent this from happening again. They must be worried sick about lawsuits galore, so I can appreciate that this is a difficult situation and appreciate, what seems to me, to be a sincere apology.
Though at one point, the CEO makes a comment that is an incredible understatement - he says “Mattel has recalled some products…” Try about 19 million!!
They also didn’t mention if any other of their partners in China would be facing death over this.
Update: Harvard Business School's "Working Knowledge" newsletter published an account on this topic, called Mattel: Getting a Toy Recall Right. The article touches on various online efforts Mattel used effectively.
Thursday, August 16, 2007
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
Quality Ingredients Make Bookmarks Del.icio.us
It has been one year today since I started using del.icio.us. Despite extolling its virtues ever since to everyone I know, I've stirred up little interest (foolish mortals not grasping the potential of social bookmarking & folksonomies!).
Until, coincidentally, yesterday when a friend, Glenna, (even the name is a coincidence) asked me about del.icio.us (little did she know what she was begetting).
Del.icio.us is my favourite web application and I keep finding more reasons to love it - and you will too if you read on and sample it.
Del.icio.us is a free web-based bookmarking service founded by Joshua Schachter in 2003, but was bought out by Yahoo.
Rotten old style bookmarks
While I have always loved bookmarking, it has a lot of limitations when done via one’s browser. I use the web a lot at home and at work and there was no practical way to share bookmarks, nor access them on the road. Another problem is that avid surfers and information hoarders, such as myself, quickly outgrew efforts at even the best attempts at classifications schemes via folders, subfolders and subsubfolders. Also, bookmarks could only appear in one folder (unless you bookmarked the same page twice) so you had to remember your filing convention.
It's del.icio.us!
The main difference with del.icio.us is that you tag a webpage with terms that you specify. Tags are keywords related to the webpage. Getting used to tags is not hard. You only need one tag per bookmark but can have as many as you want. Not sure how to tag a page - del.icio.us gives you suggestions on what others have tagged it. That's all you need to do.
Top things you can do with del.icio.us:
Cool stuff for the bookmarker
1. Import your existing browser bookmarks
2. Buttons can be added to your browser, so it's quick to use
3. Add comments or summaries to each bookmark
4. View bookmarks in your browser via downloadable del.ico.us toolbar
5. Back-up or export your bookmarks
6. Bundle tags to organize bookmarks into meaningful groups
7. Hide your dirty little secrets via “do not share” option
8. Search your and/or others' bookmarks
9. Create separate accounts for different things (eg. work vs personal)
10. Share an account with your work team or association for easy info sharing
11. Each tag you use has a unique url, so you can link directly to it (say I want to share my findings about Internet culture, here's the link)
Cool stuff for the social networker
12. Share directly with friends using del.icio.us via one click
13. Build a network of friends and bookmarkers you admire and monitor what they're up to
14. See who else bookmarked the same obscure site, look them up, and bond
15. Add del.icio.us' Facebook application to share with your Facebook friends
Cool stuff for the website manager
16. Add a del.icio.us button or link to your page/blog to encourage people to bookmark you
17. Learn who’s bookmarking your site and what pages specifically – also see the tags your users find applicable to you, which can be a real eye opener
Cools stuff for the Internet publisher or blogger
18. Syndicate your bookmarks - your bookmarks & your tags have individual feeds built in (using RSS) so people can subscribe to the feed in their readers
19. Automate the publishing of your tag(s) using the feeds (as I'm doing with the Net News on the right)
20. Publish your work account's bookmarks on your intranet
21. Copyright your bookmarks (you own them, not Yahoo) using Creative Commons
Cool stuff for searchers & researchers
22. Find people interested in the same topic as you and check out their bookmarks
23. Add value to the web, as tags help indicate what a webpage is really about, eventually technologies will be able to use these tags to help improve search engines (ie. semantic web)
24. Create custom tags to help research and micro-organizing (in gearing up for my graduate research, I started tags for Internet_theory, Internet_history, Internet_politics, Internet_journalism, etc.)
25. Subscribe to tags of your choosing and see updates in one spot
26. Check out the homepage for what's hot and recent in the community
Other cool stuff
27. Create a tag for yourself and keep track of all the online stuff related to you (or me)
28. Get gifts you want by bookmarking your favourite stuff with the tag “wishlist” and when someone wants to know what to get you send them this link (this was del.icio.us' own tip, but its the best!)
Not so tasty
One of the biggest problems with del.icio.us is that tags have to be one word. A further limitation is that all spelling variations of the tag are counted as unique tags (so you’ll see social_bookmarking, socialbookmarking, social_bookmarks and they are all treated as separate). While it’s great to be able to use the same tags as the larger community, your tags need to be readable to you, so find a convention you find useful and stick to it (for instance, I like to capitalize proper nouns and I like multiple words separated with underscores rather than compounded). It also doesn’t handle synonyms well (eg. I want to bookmark sites to order cookies to eat and sites discussing website cookies).
There are also a lot of competitors, but none as popular. I've tried StumbleUpon but haven't got into it. Yahoo MyWeb (why they launched a competitor to their own company is beyond me) has a cool feature that let’s you store a copy of the webpage despite what seems like copyright violation.
Here’s a helpful page to begin: http://del.icio.us/help/saving
Once you're on del.icio.us, be sure to add me to your network.
Until, coincidentally, yesterday when a friend, Glenna, (even the name is a coincidence) asked me about del.icio.us (little did she know what she was begetting).
Del.icio.us is my favourite web application and I keep finding more reasons to love it - and you will too if you read on and sample it.
Del.icio.us is a free web-based bookmarking service founded by Joshua Schachter in 2003, but was bought out by Yahoo.
Rotten old style bookmarks
While I have always loved bookmarking, it has a lot of limitations when done via one’s browser. I use the web a lot at home and at work and there was no practical way to share bookmarks, nor access them on the road. Another problem is that avid surfers and information hoarders, such as myself, quickly outgrew efforts at even the best attempts at classifications schemes via folders, subfolders and subsubfolders. Also, bookmarks could only appear in one folder (unless you bookmarked the same page twice) so you had to remember your filing convention.
It's del.icio.us!
The main difference with del.icio.us is that you tag a webpage with terms that you specify. Tags are keywords related to the webpage. Getting used to tags is not hard. You only need one tag per bookmark but can have as many as you want. Not sure how to tag a page - del.icio.us gives you suggestions on what others have tagged it. That's all you need to do.
Top things you can do with del.icio.us:
Cool stuff for the bookmarker
1. Import your existing browser bookmarks
2. Buttons can be added to your browser, so it's quick to use
3. Add comments or summaries to each bookmark
4. View bookmarks in your browser via downloadable del.ico.us toolbar
5. Back-up or export your bookmarks
6. Bundle tags to organize bookmarks into meaningful groups
7. Hide your dirty little secrets via “do not share” option
8. Search your and/or others' bookmarks
9. Create separate accounts for different things (eg. work vs personal)
10. Share an account with your work team or association for easy info sharing
11. Each tag you use has a unique url, so you can link directly to it (say I want to share my findings about Internet culture, here's the link)
Cool stuff for the social networker
12. Share directly with friends using del.icio.us via one click
13. Build a network of friends and bookmarkers you admire and monitor what they're up to
14. See who else bookmarked the same obscure site, look them up, and bond
15. Add del.icio.us' Facebook application to share with your Facebook friends
Cool stuff for the website manager
16. Add a del.icio.us button or link to your page/blog to encourage people to bookmark you
17. Learn who’s bookmarking your site and what pages specifically – also see the tags your users find applicable to you, which can be a real eye opener
Cools stuff for the Internet publisher or blogger
18. Syndicate your bookmarks - your bookmarks & your tags have individual feeds built in (using RSS) so people can subscribe to the feed in their readers
19. Automate the publishing of your tag(s) using the feeds (as I'm doing with the Net News on the right)
20. Publish your work account's bookmarks on your intranet
21. Copyright your bookmarks (you own them, not Yahoo) using Creative Commons
Cool stuff for searchers & researchers
22. Find people interested in the same topic as you and check out their bookmarks
23. Add value to the web, as tags help indicate what a webpage is really about, eventually technologies will be able to use these tags to help improve search engines (ie. semantic web)
24. Create custom tags to help research and micro-organizing (in gearing up for my graduate research, I started tags for Internet_theory, Internet_history, Internet_politics, Internet_journalism, etc.)
25. Subscribe to tags of your choosing and see updates in one spot
26. Check out the homepage for what's hot and recent in the community
Other cool stuff
27. Create a tag for yourself and keep track of all the online stuff related to you (or me)
28. Get gifts you want by bookmarking your favourite stuff with the tag “wishlist” and when someone wants to know what to get you send them this link (this was del.icio.us' own tip, but its the best!)
Not so tasty
One of the biggest problems with del.icio.us is that tags have to be one word. A further limitation is that all spelling variations of the tag are counted as unique tags (so you’ll see social_bookmarking, socialbookmarking, social_bookmarks and they are all treated as separate). While it’s great to be able to use the same tags as the larger community, your tags need to be readable to you, so find a convention you find useful and stick to it (for instance, I like to capitalize proper nouns and I like multiple words separated with underscores rather than compounded). It also doesn’t handle synonyms well (eg. I want to bookmark sites to order cookies to eat and sites discussing website cookies).
There are also a lot of competitors, but none as popular. I've tried StumbleUpon but haven't got into it. Yahoo MyWeb (why they launched a competitor to their own company is beyond me) has a cool feature that let’s you store a copy of the webpage despite what seems like copyright violation.
Here’s a helpful page to begin: http://del.icio.us/help/saving
Once you're on del.icio.us, be sure to add me to your network.
Tuesday, August 07, 2007
Internet Law Can Be Fun
I’m trying to convince a friend starting her legal career to specialize in Internet law. She believes that Internet law would be too much of not-so-much-fun intellectual property law.
I can see her point, as exemplified by a panel discussion I attended at Mesh last May on "The Future of Entertainment" that was hijacked, despite the moderator's best attempts, by discussions of digital rights management. And while I concede it is an important topic, it is rather dull.
An exciting bit of Internet law, however, arose last month out of a ruling by the Supreme Court of Canada.
I was stunned that the Supreme Court actually seemed to understand how websites work and that the inherent differences of the medium mean that precedence based on offline media don’t necessarily apply.
The case was against Dell computers and is more complicated than I’ll pretend to fully understand, so forgive me if I oversimplify (see this CBC article for details). The point I find very important is regarding the defendant's claim that terms of an e-commerce sale were not apparent enough as they were only accessible via a hyperlink. The Quebec Court of Appeal upheld the notion that a link from a contract to further conditions essentially was not binding as it was separate from the main contract.
The Supreme Court of Canada, however, disagreed, as the Blakes Bulletin on Information Technology summarizes the Court's ruling on this point:
Though if the further terms and/or conditions were referred to, but not linked to, then it would be considered separate.
Lessons learned:
I can see her point, as exemplified by a panel discussion I attended at Mesh last May on "The Future of Entertainment" that was hijacked, despite the moderator's best attempts, by discussions of digital rights management. And while I concede it is an important topic, it is rather dull.
An exciting bit of Internet law, however, arose last month out of a ruling by the Supreme Court of Canada.
I was stunned that the Supreme Court actually seemed to understand how websites work and that the inherent differences of the medium mean that precedence based on offline media don’t necessarily apply.
The case was against Dell computers and is more complicated than I’ll pretend to fully understand, so forgive me if I oversimplify (see this CBC article for details). The point I find very important is regarding the defendant's claim that terms of an e-commerce sale were not apparent enough as they were only accessible via a hyperlink. The Quebec Court of Appeal upheld the notion that a link from a contract to further conditions essentially was not binding as it was separate from the main contract.
The Supreme Court of Canada, however, disagreed, as the Blakes Bulletin on Information Technology summarizes the Court's ruling on this point:
The difference between clicking in order to access a clause via a hyperlink and scrolling down an Internet web-page to do the same was deemed insufficient for a finding that a clause accessible by hyperlink was external to the contract while one accessible by scrolling through the contract was not.
Though if the further terms and/or conditions were referred to, but not linked to, then it would be considered separate.
Lessons learned:
- Website managers – make sure all applicable terms & conditions are linked to
- Consumers – read all those terms and conditions, even if you have to scroll & click
- Supreme Court – congratulations on understanding the web medium
- My legal friend – see Internet law is cool and fun!
Thursday, August 02, 2007
Biggest Canadian Internet Success Ever
Disney’s recent purchase of Kelowna, British Columbia's Club Penguin for $350 million dollars US (for details read the Globe & Mail article) must now make Club Penguin the biggest monetary success story for any Canadian Internet company.
Club Penguin is a gaming and social networking site for pre-teens. I believe they were so desirable not only for the stickiness of their site with a very desirable demographic, but also because they had a viable, profitable revenue model already in place that didn’t rely on advertising.
To back up the claim that Club Penguin is Canada's biggest Internet success story ever, below are the other contenders, in order based on my unscientific opinion of their monetary worth and their influence.
Note: I’m not listing companies that supply behind-the-scenes technology or ISPs (thus ruling out Nortel). Companies needed to have started in Canada, and not as a child of an American corporate parent. Also they need to have a presence outside of Canada (thus ruling out ChaptersIndigo, CanWest, Rogers, and Corus - who while they have popular web properties in Canada, they have no, to little, influence outside of Canada).
Top Canadian Web Successes
1) Club Penguin
2) Flickr (originally Vancouver, British Columbia)
While Flickr sold out to Yahoo for a paltry, rumoured, 20-30 million, this photo-sharing website is one of the most popular and most used websites in the world. (Yahoo is making Flickr their only photo site and will soon shut down Yahoo Photos. I had to transfer all my photos today to Flickr, which I ashamedly admit, I'd never used before).
3) Kevin Ham (Vancouver, B.C.)
One of the first and best domainers, making and owning a portfolio of websites worth at least $300 million and with revenues of $70M a year. (Read Business 2.0 profile)
4) Open Text (Waterloo, Ontario)
One of the first search engines and an early leader in web-based content management.
5) CryptoLogic (Toronto, Ontario)
One of the top four online gambling software companies. While tighter online gambling regulations in the States have hurt, they are still doing well and have recently done such high-profile partnerships as a gambling site with Playboy.
6) Lavalife.com (formerly Toronto, Ontario)
While they didn't invent online dating, they revolutionized it by making it much more fun and thus became North America's most popular dating site. They sold out to an American company for $152.5 million CDN.
7) NowPublic (Vancouver, British Columbia)
Billed as the world's largest citizen journalism network with thousands of citizen reporters in 140 countries. The company recently received (see CBC article) one of the largest investments ($10.6M) in citizen journalism.
8) Abebooks.com (Victoria, British Columbia)
The world’s largest used book online marketplace still continues to grow. They have recently bought other book websites and remain a favourite with bibliophiles.
9) Justwhiteshirts.com (Toronto, Ontario)
This company, selling men’s clothing (not just white shirts despite their name), was an early e-commerce success story. Somehow they managed to lose their head start and went out of business last year.
10) Cambrian House (Calgary, Alberta)
A leader in crowdsourcing via its online community peer producing software.
11) Ice.com (Montreal, Quebec)
One of the largest jewelery e-tailers and certainly one of the nicest looking.
12) Weblo (Montreal, Quebec)
I’m reluctant to put this virtual reality site on here as it seems to be much ado about nothing. Lots of money being spent with the hope that audiences will come but there’s not much there to draw them in.
I was going to put SitePoint, publishers of web development books, videos and websites and forums, but although co-founded by a Canadian and with roots here, they are based out of Australia.
Honourable mentions:
Club Penguin is a gaming and social networking site for pre-teens. I believe they were so desirable not only for the stickiness of their site with a very desirable demographic, but also because they had a viable, profitable revenue model already in place that didn’t rely on advertising.
To back up the claim that Club Penguin is Canada's biggest Internet success story ever, below are the other contenders, in order based on my unscientific opinion of their monetary worth and their influence.
Note: I’m not listing companies that supply behind-the-scenes technology or ISPs (thus ruling out Nortel). Companies needed to have started in Canada, and not as a child of an American corporate parent. Also they need to have a presence outside of Canada (thus ruling out ChaptersIndigo, CanWest, Rogers, and Corus - who while they have popular web properties in Canada, they have no, to little, influence outside of Canada).
Top Canadian Web Successes
1) Club Penguin
2) Flickr (originally Vancouver, British Columbia)
While Flickr sold out to Yahoo for a paltry, rumoured, 20-30 million, this photo-sharing website is one of the most popular and most used websites in the world. (Yahoo is making Flickr their only photo site and will soon shut down Yahoo Photos. I had to transfer all my photos today to Flickr, which I ashamedly admit, I'd never used before).
3) Kevin Ham (Vancouver, B.C.)
One of the first and best domainers, making and owning a portfolio of websites worth at least $300 million and with revenues of $70M a year. (Read Business 2.0 profile)
4) Open Text (Waterloo, Ontario)
One of the first search engines and an early leader in web-based content management.
5) CryptoLogic (Toronto, Ontario)
One of the top four online gambling software companies. While tighter online gambling regulations in the States have hurt, they are still doing well and have recently done such high-profile partnerships as a gambling site with Playboy.
6) Lavalife.com (formerly Toronto, Ontario)
While they didn't invent online dating, they revolutionized it by making it much more fun and thus became North America's most popular dating site. They sold out to an American company for $152.5 million CDN.
7) NowPublic (Vancouver, British Columbia)
Billed as the world's largest citizen journalism network with thousands of citizen reporters in 140 countries. The company recently received (see CBC article) one of the largest investments ($10.6M) in citizen journalism.
8) Abebooks.com (Victoria, British Columbia)
The world’s largest used book online marketplace still continues to grow. They have recently bought other book websites and remain a favourite with bibliophiles.
9) Justwhiteshirts.com (Toronto, Ontario)
This company, selling men’s clothing (not just white shirts despite their name), was an early e-commerce success story. Somehow they managed to lose their head start and went out of business last year.
10) Cambrian House (Calgary, Alberta)
A leader in crowdsourcing via its online community peer producing software.
11) Ice.com (Montreal, Quebec)
One of the largest jewelery e-tailers and certainly one of the nicest looking.
12) Weblo (Montreal, Quebec)
I’m reluctant to put this virtual reality site on here as it seems to be much ado about nothing. Lots of money being spent with the hope that audiences will come but there’s not much there to draw them in.
I was going to put SitePoint, publishers of web development books, videos and websites and forums, but although co-founded by a Canadian and with roots here, they are based out of Australia.
Honourable mentions:
- Iceberg Radio - one of the largest and first Internet radio portals
- b5media - blog syndicate
- Chilly Beach - web-based Flash cartoons that transitioned to a TV series
- MegaDox - legal documents
- Simply Audio Books
Please feel free to disagree with my completely unscientific ranking. Add a company or suggest a re-order.
In preparing this blog posting, I realized that there really is pretty much no coverage on the history of Canada's role in the Internet. So if you know of some additions, please let me know!
Friday, July 27, 2007
Microformats
In an earlier post, I discussed the potential of the Semantic Web. I wrote how the problem with current web content is it cannot be distinguished by machines and that the goal of the Semantic Web is for machines to be able to read web content and understand at least some of it and then be able to prioritize info and automate tasks for us as a result.
One of the comments to this posting, by Stephen Fetter, pointed out that adding this level of meaning would no doubt complicate web publishing for non-professionals and remove the egalitarian nature of web publishing.
Then to prove Stephen's point, I learned on Wednesday of a growing technique to add semantic meaning to web content, that even I, an OLD pro, found initially intimidating.
Prior to reading a SitePoint article called Microformats: More Meaning from Your Markup I hadn't heard of microformats, though the project is more than two years old.
Microformats are special attributes for various types of data, for instance for event info (date, place, etc.), for people info (name, address, etc.) and others. The attributes are added to standard HTML tags.
To assuage our concerns that we'll have to do web coding completely different, the microformat gurus at Mircoformats.org assure us microformats are:
I was still a bit intimidated until I tried Mircoformats.org's code generator and 1) was impressed at their tool doing the work for me 2) noticed the code it wrote was not very complicated.
Here's my contact information written with microformats:
Now if web publishing software like Dreamweaver just came built in with this level of support, then non-programmers would be more able and more likely to use it.
Microformats have a long way to go both in terms of people coding with it and applications using it - but it offers a lot of potential to save time and greatly improve web content.
One of the comments to this posting, by Stephen Fetter, pointed out that adding this level of meaning would no doubt complicate web publishing for non-professionals and remove the egalitarian nature of web publishing.
Then to prove Stephen's point, I learned on Wednesday of a growing technique to add semantic meaning to web content, that even I, an OLD pro, found initially intimidating.
Prior to reading a SitePoint article called Microformats: More Meaning from Your Markup I hadn't heard of microformats, though the project is more than two years old.
Microformats are special attributes for various types of data, for instance for event info (date, place, etc.), for people info (name, address, etc.) and others. The attributes are added to standard HTML tags.
To assuage our concerns that we'll have to do web coding completely different, the microformat gurus at Mircoformats.org assure us microformats are:
Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards. Instead of throwing away what works today, microformats intend to solve simpler problems first by adapting to current behaviors and usage patterns
I was still a bit intimidated until I tried Mircoformats.org's code generator and 1) was impressed at their tool doing the work for me 2) noticed the code it wrote was not very complicated.
Here's my contact information written with microformats:
Glen Farrelly
Webslinger
Eglington Ave.
Toronto, Ontario, Canada416-123-4567
This hCard was created with the hCard creator.
Now if web publishing software like Dreamweaver just came built in with this level of support, then non-programmers would be more able and more likely to use it.
Microformats have a long way to go both in terms of people coding with it and applications using it - but it offers a lot of potential to save time and greatly improve web content.
Thursday, July 19, 2007
Web 2.0 Smites Business 2.0
Forbes.com ran a story earlier this week on the probable demise of print magazine Business 2.0 and the death throws of tech magazines.
Business 2.0 is one of my favourite magazines as it focuses on the business role of new technology, that is not just tech for tech's sake with all the gory, nerdy details but how technology can actually be used to make something happen, and make money.
In the article, Bye-Bye, Business 2.0, the author, Brian Caulfield, believes this is due in part to ad revenues moving away from traditional methods to targeted, online methods. Caulfield also claims blogs scooped up a large amount of remaining advertising dollars.
I was discussing this at lunch today with Brad Einarsen of Haven Knowledge Systems, and we noted that it appears Business 2.0 was done in by the rise of Web 2.0.
Isn't it ironic (in the incorrect, Alanis Morissette use of the term), don't you think?
As one who works in the Internet, I should be happy to see more ad revenue spent online. But having worked for a website that relied on advertising six years ago, I'm very familiar with what happens when the economy inevitably cycles downward - ad revenue dries up and the lay-offs begin (even if it is a few days before Christmas!).
Based on another article I read today, it appears that some facets of online advertising is even more problematic. Banner ad click-through rates are low - we all know that, but according to Dave Morgan in his blog posting Outing the Heavy Clickers, the few click-throughs they do get tend to be from one small, and not necessarily lucrative, segment.
Every day it seems, I see another Web 2.0 start-up, many are quite cool, but most seem to rely on ad revenue and I think many of these ones will tank (unlike others such as Web 2.0 darling, T-Shirt designer and retailer Threadless). Still, I'd be more nervous to be in the newspaper business now (particularly in the Classifieds department).
Business 2.0 is one of my favourite magazines as it focuses on the business role of new technology, that is not just tech for tech's sake with all the gory, nerdy details but how technology can actually be used to make something happen, and make money.
In the article, Bye-Bye, Business 2.0, the author, Brian Caulfield, believes this is due in part to ad revenues moving away from traditional methods to targeted, online methods. Caulfield also claims blogs scooped up a large amount of remaining advertising dollars.
I was discussing this at lunch today with Brad Einarsen of Haven Knowledge Systems, and we noted that it appears Business 2.0 was done in by the rise of Web 2.0.
Isn't it ironic (in the incorrect, Alanis Morissette use of the term), don't you think?
As one who works in the Internet, I should be happy to see more ad revenue spent online. But having worked for a website that relied on advertising six years ago, I'm very familiar with what happens when the economy inevitably cycles downward - ad revenue dries up and the lay-offs begin (even if it is a few days before Christmas!).
Based on another article I read today, it appears that some facets of online advertising is even more problematic. Banner ad click-through rates are low - we all know that, but according to Dave Morgan in his blog posting Outing the Heavy Clickers, the few click-throughs they do get tend to be from one small, and not necessarily lucrative, segment.
Every day it seems, I see another Web 2.0 start-up, many are quite cool, but most seem to rely on ad revenue and I think many of these ones will tank (unlike others such as Web 2.0 darling, T-Shirt designer and retailer Threadless). Still, I'd be more nervous to be in the newspaper business now (particularly in the Classifieds department).
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Searching; Finding
Website search keeps coming up for me lately.
First, there was the discussion and blog posting on the Semantic Web, then a coworker asked me to look into ways to limit a search to only meta data (still looking), and then last week a coworker sent me a link to a exciting example of using a search tactic to help users and achieve marketing goals.
As so many web users are search dominant, one of the first things I did when I started managing my company’s website was to make sure we had a good search engine. That was five years ago and at the time many corporate websites’ search engines were abysmal to problematically useful.
We purchased a search engine from Verity (now owned by Autonomy) and I have been very happy with their product and service. In addition, I helped make the search engine more user-friendly by adding a custom thesaurus. As our business has so much jargon, the thesaurus redirects automatically from plain language or acronyms or official terminology.
Fine tuning a search engine
There is still work to be done with the search engine. It doesn’t allow natural language (eg. “Where are you located?”) nor does it allow fuzzy search for misspellings. And while Boolean (ie. searching with operators such as “and”, “or”, “not”) is supported, the default is to use only “and”. If one searches for Glen Farrelly, it looks for those two words together. If it gets no results, I would like it to try looking for the words Glen or Farrelly. Searchers should also be able to choose to limit their search to clearly-defined areas.
The above techniques help improve the results returned, but the problem remains that most search engine’s results pages are not that helpful.
Problems with corporate search engines
There are almost always too many results and they aren’t presented in a reader-friendly format. To make results read a bit better, I have been making sure all my title tags are short and indicative of the content. I could, possibly, have the text displayed under the title populated from the contents of the meta description tag – but this takes a lot of work to write and to code for an entire website. These techniques improve the results page, but don’t solve all the issues.
Sometimes people just have quick questions, such as address or opening hours, that can be answered in a sentence or two. Also search engines don’t generally have the ability to allow results for designated items to have custom replies.
These two items would allow a website manager to take the most common searched for items or items that are a priority for the company and display a short, well-worded reply and/or a link or two to more information.
I have seen sites do this, though not very often and then not particularly effectively. Until last week…
Finding the answer
Go to CoastCapitalSavings.com and introduce yourself to Julie.
Coast Capital Savings, based out of British Columbia, is Canada’s second largest credit union. I’d never heard of them, but now I’m in love with Julie.
Personal finance is boring, so very, very unbelievable boring (like boring enough that I’d watch reruns of Small Wonder instead of reading about it online). But Julie makes it so much fun.
Type in “GICs” and she finds a way to make talking about term deposits not boring! Auto insurance and RESP are also amusing - even contact info is funny. Julie also “sings” to you.
Here’s a list of topics Julie fields including her easter eggs (including my favourite, the robot dance).
Most importantly, Julie is helpful to users. This is crucial. If it doesn’t help the users, it is at best a passing lark or at worst it could backfire by frustrating users.
Julie is genius on so many levels…
For users:
I have had this type of feature on my wish list for the last two years. Verity did offer a product to achieve some of this, however, Julie has raised the search bar.
First, there was the discussion and blog posting on the Semantic Web, then a coworker asked me to look into ways to limit a search to only meta data (still looking), and then last week a coworker sent me a link to a exciting example of using a search tactic to help users and achieve marketing goals.
As so many web users are search dominant, one of the first things I did when I started managing my company’s website was to make sure we had a good search engine. That was five years ago and at the time many corporate websites’ search engines were abysmal to problematically useful.
We purchased a search engine from Verity (now owned by Autonomy) and I have been very happy with their product and service. In addition, I helped make the search engine more user-friendly by adding a custom thesaurus. As our business has so much jargon, the thesaurus redirects automatically from plain language or acronyms or official terminology.
Fine tuning a search engine
There is still work to be done with the search engine. It doesn’t allow natural language (eg. “Where are you located?”) nor does it allow fuzzy search for misspellings. And while Boolean (ie. searching with operators such as “and”, “or”, “not”) is supported, the default is to use only “and”. If one searches for Glen Farrelly, it looks for those two words together. If it gets no results, I would like it to try looking for the words Glen or Farrelly. Searchers should also be able to choose to limit their search to clearly-defined areas.
The above techniques help improve the results returned, but the problem remains that most search engine’s results pages are not that helpful.
Problems with corporate search engines
There are almost always too many results and they aren’t presented in a reader-friendly format. To make results read a bit better, I have been making sure all my title tags are short and indicative of the content. I could, possibly, have the text displayed under the title populated from the contents of the meta description tag – but this takes a lot of work to write and to code for an entire website. These techniques improve the results page, but don’t solve all the issues.
Sometimes people just have quick questions, such as address or opening hours, that can be answered in a sentence or two. Also search engines don’t generally have the ability to allow results for designated items to have custom replies.
These two items would allow a website manager to take the most common searched for items or items that are a priority for the company and display a short, well-worded reply and/or a link or two to more information.
I have seen sites do this, though not very often and then not particularly effectively. Until last week…
Finding the answer
Go to CoastCapitalSavings.com and introduce yourself to Julie.
Coast Capital Savings, based out of British Columbia, is Canada’s second largest credit union. I’d never heard of them, but now I’m in love with Julie.
Personal finance is boring, so very, very unbelievable boring (like boring enough that I’d watch reruns of Small Wonder instead of reading about it online). But Julie makes it so much fun.
Type in “GICs” and she finds a way to make talking about term deposits not boring! Auto insurance and RESP are also amusing - even contact info is funny. Julie also “sings” to you.
Here’s a list of topics Julie fields including her easter eggs (including my favourite, the robot dance).
Most importantly, Julie is helpful to users. This is crucial. If it doesn’t help the users, it is at best a passing lark or at worst it could backfire by frustrating users.
Julie is genius on so many levels…
For users:
- Narrows search results on key topics and directs to the most applicable pages
- Offers links to info that customers are looking for or company wants to push, or both
- Humourous approach makes dreary financial topics more interesting
- User-friendly to the ultimate - as not only is the feature easy to use, it engenders a friendly feeling (except when Julie sings)
- Homepage real estate is premium (see my posting on the topic) and this delivers multiple tailored messages plus well-positioned calls to action in a relatively small space
- encourages viral marketing (after all a colleague passed it on to me and now I’m passing it on to you)
- helps differentiate the brand as more fun and unique than the other stodgy, impersonal institutions
- encourages website visitors to become more engaged with the site and to dig deeper into the offerings, if only to see how Julie responds
- with new items added to Julie’s array, it encourages users to return to the site
- hard for competitors to copy (yes the major banks can afford similar technology but they don’t have access to the same persona or gifted production team)
I have had this type of feature on my wish list for the last two years. Verity did offer a product to achieve some of this, however, Julie has raised the search bar.
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