Canadians don’t care about the long tail of search

BMO logo

BMO logo

Hitwise just released their second post on Canadians and our search patterns yesterday. It seems leading up to May 30th, 2009, 51.56% of Canadian search terms contained one or two words. The long tail is all about 3 or 4 words search and that makes up roughly 32% of the searches for the same twelve week time period. According to the post, the UK seems to veery simialr to us. However, it’s the US where the long tail of search is starting to take hold. Searches using 3 words is comparable to two words and leaves one word searches in the dustry. This begs the questions,.. why?

Delving a bit deeper, we looked at search terms sending visits to a number of categories. Shopping and Classifieds websites broadly mirror the pattern for All Categories while search terms sending visits to Travel and to News and Media websites tend to be slightly longer. By contrast, 41.87% of search terms sending Canadian visits to Banks and Financial Institutions contained one word.

One word searches for Banks and Financial Institutions makes a lot of sense since most of our banks are abbriveated to a few letters/ one to two words these days. Do you see this trend continuing in Canada? Or are we going to a future more enline with the UK & US?

Update: Check out the latest post from HItwise that follows this posts theme: What Canadians are Searching for Online

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Why Winning New Business is like Dating!

Hands making a heart

Hands making a heart

I’m of the firm belief that winning new client business is just like striking out on the town and starting to date someone new. When I’m starting to date someone new I bring 4 qualities to the table with me: passion, genuine interest, humor and communication. It’s these same qualities that I bring when meeting new clients. I’m not one to dress up in a three piece suit and try to be someone I’m not. I’m a khakis or blue jeans and t-shirt kind of guy. However, I make sure not to leave home with out my 4 qualities. I would go as far as to say that they are more important then my BlackBerry, presentation deck or resume. I’ve certainly won a few clients without any of those things.

Passion
You can’t fake passion. Either you’ve it or you don’t. I’ve seen people try to fake it and it looks off… you can see right through them. There are a few things I’m passionate about in this world and they are digital marketing, and video games to name but a few. When I worked at an agency I brought my passion with me each and every day. Passion was like my calling card. Whether it was sharing my digital knowledge with the account team or teaching about blogs and search to everyone across the entire company. I think people use to miss my weekly e-mails about new digital trends & ideas when I went on vacation. Passion much like yawning is contagious. When you spread it around the environment, everyone (a new client or date) wants to work and be close with you. Never under estimate the power that passion can bring to the table.

Dating Bar Scene

Dating Bar Scene

Genuine Interest
Taking an interest and finding out what is important and matters to the people you are involved with is what genuine interest is all about. If you have a genuine interest in the client or date, conversation will flow naturally. The person will feel comfortable talking with you and confident you have intentions that go beyond the quick one night stand. Just keep the focus on them and the rest of the meeting will take care of themselves.

Humor
A great ice breaker I’ve found growing up has been my observational humor. No matter what situation I’m in, it’s helped me connect with people and break the ice. Humor is a great way to show that you are comfortable in the situation and it helps relax the other people you are with. However, I’ve learned that not everyone is funny and this should only really be left to those that have the ability to make other laugh. Maybe you are a better story teller or do a great magic trick, any of these would be a great way to break the ice between people.

Communication
The biggest key to communication is eye contact and active listening. It helps in showing that you are listening to the other person who’s talking. Also, I’ve found that letting the person finish what they are saying and not thinking of your answer as they are talking goes a long way to truly hearing what they say. This is the difference between active listening and just listening:

…the foundation of effective communication.  Active listening intentionally focuses on who you are listening to, whether in a group or one-on-one, in order to understand what he or she is saying. As the listener, you should then be able to repeat back in your own words what they have said to their satisfaction.  This does not mean you agree with, but rather understand, what they are saying.

If you can bring your active listening skills to any gathering then this will go a long way in your favor. It’s one of my skills I’ve been working on over the last 12 months in all aspects of my life.

Conclusion
If you truly bring passion, genuine interest, humor and communication to anything you do in life then this will shine through. Remember to be yourself and get as comfortable and relaxed as you can. At the end of the day you want people to like you for you and not someone else.

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comScore: The Next Generation of Audience Measurement

comScore Logo

comScore Logo

I’ve spend the last few days going over comScore’s Introducing Media Metrix 360: The Next Generation of Audience Measurement. The presentation was given by Magid Abraham the CEO of comScore at the Conversational Marketing Summit in New York.

Magid thinks that one of the flawed issues we’ve is in measuring people that surfing on multiple machines is that they get counted as different users. I know I surf at home, at school and then some more on my BlackBerry. So this means I might get tracked as three unique users when I go to 1up or Facebook or even GameTrailers.

Magid’s goal is to use a hyberd panel measurement method to collect and clean the traffic data. Then apply proprietary methodologies that leverage location, demographic and personal behavior information to finish tweaking the data.

Key Benefits for Participating Sites:

  • Comprehensive coverage; 100% of activity
  • – New “Universe Report” mobile and public machines

    – Census-adjusted metrics in current Media Metrix reports  (Home and Work

  • Improved coverage of At-Work population
  • Harmonization /  reconciliation of panel vs. server
  • Granularity
  • More timely reporting
  • Transparency

This sounds like a great idea in theory but I’ll be interested to see when the first report is available in a couple months. Check out the PDF to get a better idea of what comScore is trying to do.

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Tim Stock’s What GTA Can Teach Us About Connecting with Consumers

Dave over at hard knock life pointed me to a great presentation from the Forward ‘09: Brandologie conference in Portland. The presentation was done by Tim Stock from Scenario DNA and he talked about:

What connected his whole presentation was his use of Power, Perspective and Influence and how it’s related to the future of our industry. The other aspect of Tim’s presentation that I liked is his use of images from Grand Theft Auto, Iron Man, Transformers and other pop culture entertainment realms. I would encourgae you to go check this one out.

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Are you Optimizing your Images?

Poster for Superbad movie starting Michael Cera & Jonah Hill

Poster for Superbad movie starting Michael Cera & Jonah Hill

Optimizing your images may seem like a straight forward process and in many ways it’s quite frankly. However, it’s one of those processes that I find many over look when they are looking to preform search engine optimization on their site. People know they should be doing it but they don’t for many reasons (laziness being the number one reason I find).

I’m going to walking you through the process I use when optimizing Images across the 3 websites I run. When optimizing your images you want to look at two key parts: Title & Caption. However, this is already taking into account that you’ve chosen a relevant image for your article and that you are using a file type (JPEG, GIF, PNG and BMP) supported by most of the browsers out there today.

Title: This is the title that shows up when you hover your mouse over the image. If I’m placing an image of the movie poster for Superbad in my article. I would use the title: Superbad Movie Poster

Caption (alt text): The “alt” attribute allows you to specify alternative text for the image if it cannot be displayed for some reason. Our “alt” text is a brief but accurate description of the image. If we continue with the Superbad Movie Poster example. I would have the “alt” text as: Poster for Superbad movie starting Michael Cera & Jonah Hill.

By making sure you’ve the title and caption (alt text) filed out on your images. You’ll sleep safe at night knowing that search engines like Google and people using alternate technology like screen readers will be able to gain information about the image. One other item to rememeber is to store images in a directory of their own. You never wat to have your images spread out in  numerous directories and subdirectories across your domain. You may want to consider consolidating your images into a single directory (e.g. YourDomainName.com/images/). This simplifies the path to your images and keeps your site nice and organization. Clear and consis organiztion is a key success factor in search engine optimization in my opinion.

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Canadians Spending Time Online

Hitwise just launched in Canada recently. Their inaugural post is about How Canadians Spend Their Time Online. The following are the top 5 popular parent categories for Hitwise data:
Search Engines

Social Networks & Forums

Entertainment

Email Service

Business & Finance

Search Engines attract a much larger share of visits in Canada than in the US or UK. Search Engines account for a 53% larger share of Canadian internet visits compared to the US and 22% larger than the UK. Social Networks, Entertainment (in particular YouTube) and web based email are also much more popular (as measured by share of Internet visits) in Canada than in the UK and US. Conversely, Adult and Shopping and Classifieds attract a much smaller share of visits in Canada than in either the UK or US.

You can check out of the full post, which I think is a great comparence is my post yesterday about Canadians Social Media Habits. It’s great to see more firms breaking out Canadian data and not just lumping us into the US. I find we get left off of some global reports, which I’m extremely glad to see is changing.

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Canadians Social Media Habits

One Degree has a mini-post about Delvinia and their recent survey about Canadians and our use of social media. You can go and check out the post: Even More Social Media Stats about Canadians. Results are based on 11,559 regionally and  demographically representative* AskingCanadians™ panelists surveyed, 50/50 gender split, broken down  as follows:

1,112  were 18-30 year olds (NGen)
3,432 were 31-44 year olds (Gen X)
6,222 were 45-65 year olds (Boomers)
793 65+ were olds 65+

Some of the high lights from the survey include:

Canada’s view towards Social Networking:

  • 83% of female Canadians aged 18-30 feel digital technology allows for easier social connections, compared to their male counterparts at 76%.
  • Only 6% of NGen and 4% of Gen X report visiting recent media darling, Twitter, in the last month. The same as other, less talked about social networks including Hi5, DIGG and Tagged.

SHARING INFORMATION

When sharing information online, here’s how Canadians felt:

  • Only the majority of NGen are comfortable sharing demographic information (53%) – the majority of all other generations are neutral or not comfortable sharing information like their age, gender and marital status.

*Representative of Canada, based on Stats Can figures

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Events: Net Change Week, Social Gaming 2009 and Search Engine Strategies Toronto

Looks like June is going to be a busy month on top of me taking my last class at Ryerson. There are 4 events I’m looking to attend on top of Web Analytics Wednesday.

Net Change Week: June 8 -12th, 2009
Net Change is a week-long event designed to explore how social technology can bolster social change. Presented by the Social Innovation Generation team at MaRS (SiG@MaRS), Net Change Week will tap into the potential that exists when new methods of communicating, organizing and mobilizing are brought to bear on chronic social issues.

Search Engine Strategies Toronto: June 8 -10th, 2009
SES Toronto will be packed with sessions covering topics such as PPC management, keyword research, SEO, social media, local, mobile, link building, duplicate content, multiple site issues, video optimization, site optimization, usability and more while offering high-level strategy, big picture, keynotes, an exhibit floor with companies that can help you grow your business, networking events, parties and more.

Art From The Unexpected: June 16th, 2009
Creativity isn’t something only reserved for the creative department. What about letting those who actually run the businesses have a go at it, too? Art From the Unexpected is about challenging 20 of our industry’s leaders, who don’t typically get to be visually creative in their day-to-day, to create an original art piece. That’s not all. They will join us in presenting their one-of-a-kind creation to you.

Social Gaming 2009: June 23th, 2009
The Social Gaming Summit 2009 is a one day event focused on the intersection of games and the social web. This year’s event will focus on helping social games developers build, monetize, and grow their social games. We’re bringing together the leaders in free-to-play games, social networking, and payments infrastructure for a full day of panels and talks.

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The Digital Gamer: All Grown Up?

Nintendo Wii - Mario Kart - Digital Gamers

Nintendo Wii - Mario Kart - Digital Gamers

On Monday the Yahoo Search Marketing Blog posted The Grown-Up Gamer. As a digital marketer and gamer I decided to check out the article. I thought it would provide me with some new knowledge or bring a unique perspective to the search game. However, the article mainly focused on how gamers are mostly 25 – 54 and that as marketers we shouldn’t be ignoring this target group by just advertising to kids.

Wait! Gamers aren’t kids anymore..? This can’t seriously pass as news worthy in 2009. Its great that Neilson’s did the study and Yahoo felt like posting it but the Entertainment Software Association has been posting this type of demographic information year over year for as long as I can remember. Just look at their industry facts page:

  • Forty percent of all game players are women. In fact, women over the age of 18 represent a significantly greater portion of the game-playing population (33 percent) than boys age 17 or younger (18 percent).
  • Sixty-five percent of American households play computer or video games.
  • The average game player is 35 years old and has been playing games for 13 years.
  • In 2008, 26 percent of Americans over the age of 50 played video games, an increase from nine percent in 1999

Major newspapers around the world, The Economist and Business Week are covering the industry as more people move towards gaming as their chosen form of entertainment. With the added benefit of games like Halo & Grand Theft Auto and campaigns like I love Bees having brought video games and interactive entertainment into the mainstream even more. The average age of a gamer should not be considered news. If you are in marketing and you don’t know this. Then I believe you’ve been living under a rock of the last 6+ years.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user World of Oddy.

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Event: Web Analytics Wednesday – Fionn MacCools

logo_newI’m be attending my first Web Analytics Wednesday in Toronto at Fionn MacCools on June 3, 2009.  Please join us for Toronto’s premier digital measurement networking and social event.

Host: Patrick Glinski
Date: Wednesday, June 03, 2009 at 6:00 PM
Venue: Fionn MacCools
Address: 181 UNIVERSITY AVENUE, Toronto Ontario (Venue | Map | Group)
I started digging more into analytics last fall and I can’t wait to meet some local people in the industry. Hope to see you there.
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