Interesting Vancouver was, yes, interesting. Held October 24 at the Vancouver Rowing Club, Interesting Vancouver was an evening of interesting people speaking about interesting things.
This multi-disciplinary conference originated in the UK, and Interesting Vancouver was the first time the event has been held in Canada. The evening's format fluctuated between 3 and 20 minute presentations.
What made the evening cohesive were the connections that flowed through the presentations, in particular, the call for storytelling, community and collaboration.
The speakers from the first half of the evening highlighted the need for stories.
AdHack's James Sherrett spoke on collecting local food and how food feeds our bodies and stories feed our souls. Laptop Bedouin, Darren Barefoot, explained how work and travel around the world is possible and that every day you should do something that scares you. And James Chutter discussed compositional strategies for storytelling and how that plays out in music, art and culture.
The second half of the evening highlighted great storytellers who looked at community and collaboration.
Most entertaining was Tom Williams of GiveMeaning.com who challenged the audience to consider who they are without artiface and suggested that the true meaning of who we are can be found by following our passions. In that vein, the passions of the next speakers were clearly that of social change and the environment. Naomi Devine, James Glave and Joe Solomon did a bang up job of highlighting their various causes.
The evening ended with Dave Ng and David Young, who both brought us around to thinking about different perspectives of the world and why multi-disciplinary study is so important to community and culture.
Many thanks to Brett Macfarland, et al. for organizing Interesting Vancouver, and please have a look at the live blog from Miss604 for a recap of the full evening.
Only 9 Days Remain Until ExpressionEngine Roadshow Vancouver.
And only 9 tickets are left!
If you're interested in coming, hurry up and register. Cost is $50 and the event is at the Havana theatre in Havana Restaurant on Commercial Dr. so space is limited to 60 attendees.
EE Roadshow is the first community-powered ExpressionEngine event. We're holding it in Vancouver, at Havana Restaurant, on Friday, September 26 from 1-5 pm (sessions). There is a party afterwards for attendees (5-7 pm).
This is an intimate group of EE users: individuals and companies with EE sites who are looking for inspiration, how-to knowledge and connections to other good EE users and developers, and EE designers and developers who are interested in connecting to each other and learning more about building in EE. Rick Ellis from EllisLab will be in Vancouver demoing new ExpressionEngine features and talking to EE users. (We're hoping for a sneak peak at the upcoming EE release.)
All the event details are here: http://eeroadshow.com/
And a special thanks to the Media Sponsor, TechVibes.
EERoadshow is brought to you by Kevin Shoesmith of Venn, Travis Smith of Hop Studios and me, Monique Trottier, of Boxcar Marketing.
Venn Communications System is a technical communications business specializing in the design and development of online communication suites, Web... [more]
Boxcar Marketing is an internet marketing company based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The principals are Monique Trottier and James... [more]
Internet Marketing Conference took place in Vancouver September 11 and 12 at the Coast Plaza Hotel. The conference was live blogged by Corey Rollins of AdHack.com, Rebecca Bolwitt of Miss604.com and me, Monique Trottier, of BoxcarMarketing.com.
You can find Corey and my posts here on TechVibes. Thank you very much for inviting us to blog on your behalf.
Below is a short summary of some of the sessions that were highlighted during the wrap-up session.
John Hossack offered up:
1. Rich Devine: Monetization models
Conversion rates don't tell the full story. Your SEM likely undervalues the full value. You need to monetize the micro-conversions: using store locator, downloads, newsletter sign-ups. These are contributors to the total value of the business.
2. Amy Mischler of dotMobi provided Jaguar data on display advertising on mobile space. They had 15K visitors to the mobile site through the promotion. Only a small percent carried on to book a test drive but the point was you're not going to get the traffic or reach yet but the conversions will be there.
Top mobile players at the moment are in the following industries: financial, auto, retail, entertainment, publishing.
3. Tom Leung from Google on testing. Pruning is a new feature in Google Optimizer. It's a powerful tool for speeding up your test by pruning the losers earlier.
4. Liveclicker. Video's time is coming for retail. It doesn't work for every thing but it's worth considering when done right.
James Carter, IIMA, was inspired by:
1. Capulet's social marketing session, in particular Twitter. This idea of micro-blogging finally made sense during this presentation. The integration with Facebook and a variety of other formats is appealing.
2. Gary Beal's 12 SEO Tactics are fantastically interesting. Optimizing 404 pages is definitely worth doing. Pay attention to this. Key site navigation should be on this page.
3. Crawford Kilian: Brought us back to class in terms of returning to concise marketing messages.
4. Using LinkedIn: The average pay grade of someone on LinkedIn is $140,000 per year. These are our peers. LinkedIn drove 25% of the IMC attendants.
Jon Husband reflected on:
1. The techniques and the mechanics of SEO software and tools can help you with the tech aspect, but where's the web 2.0 part? We can't forget the connected eco-systems of conversation. It will be interesting to see how social media plays out. It's not just the media, it's social.
2. Darren Barefoot's uses of conversation prism is interesting.
3. Prediction: Expect more nuances of behaviour and psychology in marketing.
James Richardson, Engine Digital, thought:
1. Online advertising and the track on tool demos were great.
2. The online advertising panel really spoke to him about running integrated SEO, PPC, display advertising, etc. All the various tracks need to be integrated. Don't have conversations in isolation. Take advantage of each other's successes and knowledge. The laws around advertising and planning need to happen in the same room. How many tracks contribute to the full success? Get them all in the same room early.
3. Protoshare.com: There's lots of wasted time during the development of campaigns. The time is squeezed and the prototyping platform is compelling because you can compress the conversations around what we are going to build. As an agency, we're trying to liaise between the client and the development. Making this faster and easier is worthwhile.
Mike Owen, Snap Technologies, offered the following key themes to the conference:
1. Engagement.
2. Testing.
Companies still making decisions based on gut instinct need to look at the numbers and understand the story they are trying to tell.
Related Links:
IIMA
If you liked this conference then think about other events locally.
FundFindr TV
Captured the event and they will be posting in a couple of weeks.
My final thoughts:
Regardless of what tools and online marketing activities you are engaging in, always remember that it's about People, Process and Technology. You must have all 3 in hand. The tools are only as good as the people using them.
Boxcar Marketing is an internet marketing company based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The principals are Monique Trottier and James... [more]
AdHack is a community and market for people-powered advertising. Anyone can create an ad. Anyone can buy an ad. Like an eBay for advertising,... [more]
This afternoon's session is on search engine optimization. Below is a quick recap of what the panelists say makes them tick or ticked.
Rodney Bartlett, Reachd, is our friendly moderator.
Gary R. Beal, Stickyeyes
Bill Barnes, Enquiro
Omar Al-Haijar, Magnet Search Marketing
Lyn Wilson, 6S Marketing
Ellerton Whitney, Earthbound Media Group
Alex Brabant, eMarketing101 and SEMPO Canada
6S Marketing Inc. is a leading Vancouver Internet marketing company with hundreds of clients, both large and small, across a wide variety of... [more]
Most companies have a website. A lot of individuals & companies have blogs. Yet, very few of them have traffic or make money out of their online... [more]
Erin Colbert of HubSpot recently presented on Website Grader, which is a tool that generates a quick SEO report and offers a grade on your site's performance.
TechVibes gets a 95.7 out of 100.
You can run your own report at WebsiteGrader.com, run a report for your competitor's site or run a report for your site and set a competitor comparison by entering their URLs. For prosperity sake, I saved the TechVibes report as a PDF.
With some of the report elements, you need to have a basic understanding of SEO in order to make a good judgement about whether to follow the suggestions or not. For example, their suggestions about heading tags, meta data, and images require some background knowledge and understanding of these elements' relevancy. But the information on incoming links, date last crawled, and social bookmark links are interesting, general business information.
If you think your site sucks, this is a good "freak out your boss" tool.
Jeff Nelson of Anduro Marketing presented SEO-Browser.com which helps you see what search engines see when they come to your site.
Paisley.com kindly volunteered to serve as an example, they are also a client of Anduro Marketing.
The site uses Flash and Javascript, which means that webpage content that people see and understand is not what search engines see and understand about the page.
By using SEO-Browser.com you can see what search engines see. (Notice with Paisley.com, they see nothing but the footer navigation.)
What does your site look like?
5 Quick Tips by Shannon Ryan, President and CEO non-linear creations, Inc., on Engagement Marketing.
non-linear creations is an Internet professional services company. We build and integrate on-line applications for major companies and public... [more]
Jason Burby is the Chief Analytics and Optimization Officer for ZAAZ, a web business consultancy implementing data-driven business initiatives for long-term clients across the U.S.
He's currently presenting on Website Monetization at the Internet Marketing Conference.
Jason started by presenting a couple of common problem with monetization, one being that:
We have many ideas to change the web site but it's hard to figure out what will add value. And we have no ways to prioritize them.
This means we have inefficiencies and low ROI.
The Process for Success is:
1. Define your goals. Set business metrics. Assign dollar value. Answer: What's the value of getting the lead?
2. Reports. Behavioural and analytics is a small piece of the pie. We need to understand everything we can.
3. Analysis shows us what's working and what's not. Prioritize the opportunities based on impact.
4. Optimization and action. Put the data to work and take advantage of the data. Use analytics, surveys, data, anything you can to make good decisions.
Most companies bounced between 2 and 3, and eventually stop looking at the data because they haven't set proper goals.
Jason is in the middle of telling the audience about the different types of data touchpoints: Attitudinal data, blogosphere, transactional data, analytics, etc. His main point is that we need to bring it together to analyze and understand what's going on.
Why? Because people behave differently with each touchpoint. You must assign a dollar value to different site behaviours so that you can understand the value of the channel this month vs. last month, quantify the value of the overall channel, and maximize the opportunities.
The big question of the day is:
How many of you have truly been able to quantify overall value of the web channel to our business?
Boxcar Marketing is an internet marketing company based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The principals are Monique Trottier and James... [more]
Techvibes is hanging out at the Internet Marketing Conference today in Vancouver.
One of the morning sessions was presented by Darren Barefoot and Julie Szabo of Capulet Communications, who spoke on the many-armed starfish of social media marketing.
In 25 minutes, Darren and Julie whipped the audience through 5 arms of the social media starfish.
1. Blogs
Darren presented a case study of Brother Canada who used Capulet Communications for a blogger outreach campaign. They were looking for 20 bloggers who would review one of the new Brother printers. You can see one of Darren's outreach posts here. By using originality in their posts to 20 bloggers (in particular they personalized the pitches by making a comic strip with Flickr photos of the blogger and speech bubbles), they were able to get 17 of 20 bloggers interested in test driving a printer.
2. Twitter
Julie used the CommonCraft video for Twitter to illustrate what Twitter is and then went on to talk about Carnival Cruise and how they use Twitter as a customer service tool for announcing sales and discounts and new features based on customer feedback.
KPBSNews also used Twitter during the California wild fires to sent out status alerts on evacuation announcements.
3. YouTube
EA Sports found themselves needing to formulate a response to a fan video regarding a glitch that appeared in Tiger Woods PGA TOUR 08, where Woods appeared to be walking on water. EA Sports used YouTube to demonstrate that the "glitch" YouTube user Levinator25 thought he found in the game, is not a glitch at all. It's an interesting way to approach public relations.
The other 2 arms were Flickr and MySpace. More to come ...
UPDATE
Back from some great afternoon sessions and I wanted to finish this post because the examples for Flickr and MySpace were worth mentioning.
4. Flickr
DeSmogBlog wanted to find a way to engage with their audience and talk about climate change without necessarily talking about climate change. They used Flickr to run a "Green Photo" contest. The green photo could be something green, someone green (with envy perhaps) or enviro-green. As a non-profit they were not required to pay for this type of use. (Nikon Stunning Gallery would be an example of a paid use for a contest.)
5. MySpace
Gretsch Guitars is celebrating their 125 year anniversary and are using their MySpace profile (perfect for music, guitars, fans) to direct fans to their Next Gretsch Greats contest page. The key take away with this example is that instead of developing a separate fan community or network site, they went where their fans are already interacting. The contest cost them people hours and resulted in 55,000 votes, which means 55,000 visits to their site.
To review, the top 3 talking pints:
1. Go where your users are.
2. Do your research.
3. Be original in your pitch.
Techvibes is hanging out at the Internet Marketing Conference today in Vancouver.
The Keynote Address was "Competing on Web Analytics" by Eric T. Peterson, Web Analytics Demystified.
In 2007, in the bestselling Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning, Tom Davenport and Jeanne Harris described how great organizations like Harrah's and Netflix used analytics to create a sustainable, competitive advantage.
Eric T. Peterson of Web Analytics Demystified, and author of a book by the same name, extended Tom and Jeanne's work to demonstrate how companies like Google, Amazon.com, Capital One and John Deere are using web analytics to create this sustainable and competitive advantage.
His presentation, Competing on Web Analytics, established the common problems that organizations face, in particular professing a love for data but not making good decisions based on that data, and outlined the best ways to approach analytics to capitalize on the opportunities represented in the data. I'll summarize some key points below.
Key Actions to Improve Your Ability to Compete:
1. Do not believe that web analytics is easy.
Eric made a great point about how organizations buy-in to this idea that the data is easy to get, therefore, understanding the data must be easy. He challenged the audience to do better. Analytics is not just about generating reports. It's about getting the right people, looking at the right data, at the the right time.
2. Do not assume anything.
Do not assume that the people collecting the data understand the business needs behind why they are asked to collect said data. And do not assume that the people requesting the data understand what they are reading in the reports.
3. Do take the time to define and implement fundamental web analytics business processes.
Eric's website offers some whitepapers and checklists of what processes organizations need to implement and the type of people who can best perform the tasks required throughout the process.
4. Do leverage the processes you define on an ongoing basis.
Eric suggests creating a matrix of needs and capabilities, then conducting a gap analysis and following up with a plan of action that lets you fill the gaps efficiently. He also warns that if you don't continue to follow your processes, then the system breaks. You do not want to be revisiting data to determine if it is clean or accurate. Your processes need to be followed 100% of the time.
The closing quote is worth noting:
If it's worth doing, it's worth doing analytically.
Boxcar Marketing is an internet marketing company based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The principals are Monique Trottier and James... [more]
