Third Tuesday with Yahoo! Canada’s Hunter Madsen is being held this evening.
And here’s a neat extra treat: blogger and podcaster Shel Holtz is in Toronto today and he will be attending Third Tuesday.
So, if you’ve ever wanted to meet Shel, hop over to the Third Tuesday Social Media Meetup site and register to attend (it’s free.)
Hunter Madsen. Shel Holtz. Meeting with Toronto’s social media community. What better way could there be to spend a Tuesday evening?
Yahoo!‘s services are close to the heart of every blogger. Flickr, del.icio.us, Upcoming. They provide us with means of finding, publishing and sharing information as we connect to and build our online communities.
And we wonder about their future. What plan does Yahoo! have for their social media services? Will they improve and offer new features that we can use to better connect with our communities? And for some of us, how can Yahoo! help us to generate revenue from our blogging efforts?
On April 24th., we’ll have a chance at Third Tuesday to talk about these and other issues with Hunter Madsen, Yahoo! Canada’s Head of Marketing.
This promises to be a good event. So, if you want the latest scoop on what’s happening at Yahoo! and their plans for social media, jump over to the Third Tuesday Meetup site and register to attend the event with Hunter Madsen.
I took in Kami Huyse‘s and Linda Zimmer‘s session on Second Life, second chance: Why you should be marketing in the virtual world.
Kami and Linda are in second life. They use it to meet clients. They use it for business.
Linda: Second Life is seriously engaging. If you go into Second Life, you must be willing to engage fully with it. Some companies have gone into Second Life and not delivered. This leads to backlash.
Why is Second Life so engaging? It’s ours. We’ve created it. We’re creating the world. And much of it is shared.
It’s spatial, interactive and persistent. You can move through the world and interact with others and with objects. When we log out, what we have created continues to exist. We can go back and continue where we 
left off.
BMW is using Second Life successfully. It’s actual property is only sparsely furnished. However, BMW is successfully using this platform to engage online communities. Social network has been pushed into the fore. Building corporate cathedrals is secondary.
IBM has allocated a multi-million budget to explore what Second Life means for collaboration and how new business models may emerge within the 3D Web.
Other companies are exploring Second Life’s potential for low cost prototyping. Starwood Hotels has had success in prototyping its aloft hotel concept. Cisco prototyped their vision of the “connected home” in Second Life.
MTV has developed a Virtual Laguna Second Life environment as a companion for their Laguna Beach series, offering fans of the television show and opportunity to place themselves in the show’s setting.
Second Life is about the future as much as the now. Kami provided a live demonstration. When she signed in, the login page showed that only about 30,000 people were signed in at that time. That’s a fraction of the number of people who have joined Second Life. Much of what we saw was empty rooms, which seems to be one aspect of the experience that drives skepticism.
Kami and Linda showed a series of slides demonstrating that, while the absolute numbers are still low, hours users were signed on is increasingly dramatically. Moreover, users span a broad age range.
Yes, there are limitations to Second Life. Usage is relatively low. The learning curve is steep. It’s still early days. However, the 3D Web has great potential and Second Life will give us insight into how people will interact as social networks become 3D.
For more info, Kami prepared some dedicated del.icio.us resources at http://del.icio.us/kamichat/SLResources.
Martin Byrne of Yahoo! Canada issued a call to action on behalf of the Canadian Search Engine Marketing/Optimization (SEM/SEO) industry. Byrne was a panelist at a session on SEM in Toronto this morning along with reps of Google and Microsoft
According to Byrne, Canadians love the Web. We spend more time sitting in front of a computer on the Web than do citizens of any other G7 country. This time is being drained from other media. And the online share of the total Canadian advertising spend has increased from less than 1% five years ago to over 6% this year. Byrne predicts that the Canadian SEM business will rise to approximately $400 million in 2007.
Against this background, he feels that Canadian businesses are missing the boat. Less than 36% of Canadian companies who do online advertising incorporate SEM/SEO in their programs. And they spend less than 18% of their online budgets in this area. Contrast this with the 79% of US online advertisers who engaged in SEM in 2006.
Why this low rate of adoption in Canada? One reason, low awareness. Recent research showed that 47% of online marketing decision makers were unaware that they can target Canadian users through Search Engine Marketing.
Essentially, Canada has been a one provider marketplace until recently. Consequently, there has been a lack of education and promotion of the channel in Canada. There is also a desperate shortage of talent and skills in Search Engine Marketing/Search Engine Optimization. In fact, in Ontario, you cannot obtain formal educational certification in this area.
SEM agencies have had a harder time establishing themselves in Canada. They have long sales cycles, small budgets and limited campaign opportunities. By contrast, the SEM agency business in the US has been expanding rapidly. Byrne warns that if we do not stimulate the industry in Canada, the indigenous companies may not be able establish themselves and the larger US-based companies may simply move into Canada.
Byrne suggests an aggressive action agenda to turn this situation around. SEM Agencies need to get together. Canadian rsearch/case studies must be developed and distributed. Client education channels and opportunities must be created and expanded, especially for small and medium businesse. Standards for policing of traffic quality must be developed. ‘Black hat” vendors should be shut down. And the seach engines need to step up and shepherd the industry to success.
What is Yahoo! Canada doing? They came late to the party with their Canadian platform, but they have launched here now. And they will soon be launching a platform in Quebec. They have located a comprehensive management and client service team in Canada. They are working aggressively to assemble a network of Canadian publishers.
According to Byrne, Yahoo! Canada sees their own success as depending on: supporting SEM education for Canadian businesses, building a stronger SEM industry and growing the SEM business.
All in all, Byrne’s presentation showed that Yahoo! Canada understands the value of being part of and giving to the community. With this approach, watch for them to break out in awareness and profile in the Canadian market this year.
Jason Dailey of Microsoft Canada focused 
on the adCenter product that Microsoft has just launched in Canada. Dailey suggested that conversion rates for clients using adCenter are increasing substantially. For one client, conversion rates have increased from 1/2 to 1% to 5 to 5 1/2%.
Some search issues: The average time from query to answer is 11 minutes. Nearly 50% of complex queries go unaswered. Only 50% of the web is searchable. And currently search is a destination, not fully integrated into our routine processes. Microsoft is attempting to leverage their platform and technology to expand the number of touchpoints for search capabilities.
Eric Morris from Google Canada pointed to 
the free tools and services provided by Google. YouTube and Google Video are a great way to generate great traffic for your company. Google Sitemaps provide you with visibility about which of your pages are in the Google Index and how the crawler is finding you. Google Maps provides businesses with a means of being searched geographically by uploading company information through Google Base.
According to Morris, the two most important factors in search engine marketing are targeting and reach. Google provides advertisers with the ability to reach over 85% of Canadians in any month – either through Google sites directly or partner sites.
Google’s contextual advertising appears in Gmail. Google believes that contextually relevant ads in email are useful to users and effective for advertisers. However, Morris did acknowledge in response to a question that, in the aggregate, contextual ads yield a much lower click through rate than on search pages.
Google has added a display advertising program to keyword and contextual ads to provide a full range of advertising opportunities.
Finally Google Analytics provides users with the data they need to understand and fine tune the performance of their sites to achieve their marketing objectives.
Julie Batten of non-linear creations rounded out the morning by focusing on organic search. She presented four tactics in this area.
Social media marketing (SMM) should be used to encourage interaction and information sharing. An example of this done right is the Google Pain Relief letter –
Google sending a letter and headache tablet to a blogger who had complained about the large number of recent changes in Google. An example of social media marketing gone wrong: The Coke Score Flog. Bloggers punished Coke with negative posts about this fake blog.
Link Baiting. An example of a success: How Much is Your Blog Worth? This simple widget generated more than 42,000 links and raised the host blog to # 25 on Technorati.
Personalized search. Search engines now encourage users to create personal profiles so that their home search page can be personalized to reflect their preferences and behaviour. This can be a challenge for marketers. They can respond by incorporating elements that will support users to incorporate the information of most interest into their personal profiles. Include product information, buttons to tag and local information.
RSS marketing. As RSS feeds are attached to more and more current content, the Web usage patterns are changing. Companies should harness this trend by adding RSS feeds to their content.
All in all, this morning’s session provided an interesting contrast between the style and approach of the three major search engines in the Canadian market.
Now, I’m looking forward to Dave’s next session in March, Digital Advertising – What’s Next?
Registration for mesh07 opened today.
The line-up of keynote speakers at this year’s event includes Richard Edelman head of the eponymously named PR firm, Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster, TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, GiveMeaning‘s CEO Tom Williams and tech entrepreneur Austin Hill.
Last year’s mesh conference was a colossal success. Great speakers, great participants. Fantastic discussion.
I wholeheartedly recommend mesh for anyone who is interested in exploring the leading edge of social media and the new communications. I’ve registered. You can do it too by registering online.
OK. So, I shelled out $75 to attend the session on Search Engine Marketing that Dave Forde has organized.
Actually a pretty interesting panel, including Eric Morris from Google Canada, Martin Byrne from Yahoo! Canada, from Microsoft Canada. I wonder how many compliments they’ll exchange.
I’ll post about the session when I get back within Wi-Fi range.
My colleagues at 76design have launched their new Website. I think it rocks! And I hope you like it as well.
The 76design site is a companion to the Thornley Fallis site. Both sites are built around the blog and podcast content of the employees who work at the companies. This “social media design” enables visitors to learn about the companies through the blog postings of the people who work here. People like Michael O’Connor Clarke, Chris Clarke, Terry Fallis, the PR Girlz, the 76design team and me.
We designed our Websites this way because we understand that companies are in essence the people who work for them. And we want visitors to come to know us through the eyes of our people. If we are successful in creating an environment that attracts and supports creative, thoughtful people who are passionate about their work, this will show through. And we will be successful.
At least that’s our belief. And as time passes, we’ll test this belief through experience.
Please let me know what you think of our sites. Do you like the approach? Does it work? How can it be improved?
Word today that the next CaseCamp will be held in Second Life.
Throughout 2006, marketers in Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa and Vancouver have come together at CaseCamps to share some of their best work and to exchange advice on how it could be made even better.
The concept is simple. A marketer has 15 minutes to present a case study with a maximum of eight slides. Then the audience spends fifteen minutes discussing the case, asking questions and offering comments.
Bryan Person talks about how the background to this initiatve in a dedicated episode of his New Comm Road podcast. Kate Trgovac, C.C. Champman, and Eli Singer, the founder of CaseCamp, are the other organizers of this event, which is being hosted at Crayonville.
If you’re interested in experiencing the Second Life CaseCamp, you can register at the CaseCamp Wiki.
Eric Hagborg is a man with a mission. He wants companies to make their websites work for them. And he told Ottawa CaseCamp how he does this.
What makes a strong corporate Website?
How can you support these things?
How can you do this?
Eric illustrated the effectiveness of this approach by citing the experience of his client, ipMonitor to dramatically increase visitor retention and conversions on its website. Following a reworking of their corporate Website, they increased visitor retention by 59% and increased conversions by 128%
Pretty good results. And a pretty good presentation from a guy who knows his business.
VOIP wunderblogger Alec Saunders wowed the inaugural CaseCamp Ottawa with a boffo presentation on how he has used his blog to promote the profile and credibility of his company, Iotum.
He started with three benefits to corporate blogging:
After twelve months of working on his site, Alec’s blog is generating over 184,000 visits a month. He likens this to the equivalent of a small magazine. He ensures that this generates traffic for the Iotum corporate site by crosslinking regularly to the Iotum site.
Why does this work? In a nutshell:
What do you have to do to be a good blogger?
And just as importantly, Optimize for Google:
Alec closed off his presentation by citing his post on the Voice 2.0 Manifesto. In the past twelve months, 1.6 million posts have been indexed by Google on Voice 2.0 – a topic that Alec coined. Clearly, this guy is onto something good.
Other presenters included: Ian Graham on competitive intelligence; Mitch Brisebois’ on marketing software as a service and Eric Hagborg on how his company, Axionic, helped a client to dramatically increase visitor retention and conversions on its website.
About 40 people attended this first Ottawa CaseCamp. It appeared that most were drawn from web design firms. A much different crowd and a much different atmosphere from the Toronto CaseCamp, which has a much stronger advertising and marketing flavour to it.
Congratulations to Peter Childs for the initiative in launching this in Ottawa.