It was interesting to read a report last week from Burst Media that indicated that the web is now the primary source for sports news and information. According to a survey (2,200 adults 18 years and older), the statistical breakdown is as follows:

“For both men and women (36.1% and 32.7%, respectively) the Web is the go-to for sports news, which is followed by local TV programming (23.7%), national TV networks (15.1%), local newspapers (6.7%), national newspapers (3.6%), and sports radio (2.9%).

This trend is particularly prevalent among the important 18-24 and 25-34 age segments, as we’ve seen in action with our Sports Opinion website, The Roar, which has been steadily growing its traffic over the past twelve months.

We mentioned a few weeks back how the readers of Lost At E Minor had written a series of comments about what Lost At E Minor meant to them and why they enjoyed reading the publication each day.

Well, it seems people in high places have been taking note.

We were thrilled late last week when we saw that Kevin Roberts, the Worldwide CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi, and the inventor of the influential Lovemarks branding ideology, wrote a post on his personal blog about Lost At E Minor and how it has become a player in the ‘Participation Economy’.

Roberts noted that, with Lost At E Minor, Conversant Media has:

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The once proud masthead of the Sydney Morning Herald was degraded a little bit more last Thursday.

Not much needs to be said; suffice to say there doesn’t seem to be the same divide between church and state (editorial and advertising) that there once was.

Back in the day, there’d be no way the lead article in the newspaper would match exactly the massive ad campaign also running.

Even if the lead article as determined by the editors happened to match the site sponsor, they wouldn’t have run it to avoid the perception that there was an editorial conflict.

Not anymore.

Click on the images to see what I mean.

Sports tipping is a big growth area. Ok, maybe not as big as fantasy sports nowadays, but sports tipping is a fun activity to keep your audiences engaged during a sporting season.

So when we wanted to set-up a tipping competition on our sports site, The Roar, we looked to see if there were any sports tipping plugins available for Wordpess.  Unfortunately not. (We’re massive fans of the content management system WordPress.  I reckon we know the platform inside out.)

So rather than pay yearly subscription costs to one of the large tipping providers, we decided to engineer our own sports tipping plugin for WordPress.

We get the following benefits:

• each tipper creates an account and profile on our site using WordPress’s user management function
• more recurring traffic to our site
• sponsorship opportunities available
• viral spread as people invite mates to join them in their tipping comp

Some of the features of our sports tipping plugin include:

• ability to set-up any number of tipping competitions, for ANY sport (or event – think tipping on a Presidential election)
• ability to customise whether missing tips for a round receive all home or all away games
• ability to customise points model for win, lose and draw results
• ability for a user to enter one or many open competitions
• comments on each round by fellow tippers (‘Go the Waratahs!’)
• reminder email sent by the system, tailored to the competitions a tipper is registered for
• import address book to invite mates to the tipping comp
• powerplay concept (each round one game gets nominated for double the points if you get it correct)
• open questions (ask an open question and mark it at any stage in the tournament)
• leaderboards by sport showing tipping rankings and movement within the round
• display of ‘legend tippers of the round’ board (those tippers who got all correct each round)
• and lots, lots more.

And here it is in action on our sports site, The Roar:  Sports tipping plugin for WordPress on The Roar.

Want your own tipping comp on your blog or site running WordPress?

If you have a WordPress blog and are interested in running your own tipping competition, then drop us a line to discuss how we can help.

I’ve had the pleasure of meeting with Kevin Roberts, CEO Worldwide of Saatchi & Saatchi, a few times over the years and in fact invited him to talk at the New York-based online publishing company, Flavorpill, a couple of years ago. So I’m very familiar with his concept of Lovemarks and how its infusion into a brand can help establish a longer-lasting connection with your customer. With that in mind, we were pleased to get some very Lovemarks-like feedback from readers of our pop culture website, Lost At E Minor, when we tied a giveaway into a question about what they liked most about the site.

Here is a sample of just a few of the responses:

Jimmy Smutek
I love the huge range of art and design from across a wide array of media. To have all of this information in one spot is fantastic. Additionally, such a huge amount of info could easily be overwhelming, but Lost at E Minor’s well designed, clean, organized, functional presentation takes all of this information and makes it not only accessible, but managable and enjoyable to boot. Truly fantastic site, don;t quite remember how I found it, but I am so glad I did.

Mela Tran
I love pretty much everything on this site. The music, the art, and definitely all the food. I pretty much go on this site everyday to get updated on whatever’s new and unique. Definitely a very original site!

Tambo
What I really love about E MINOR is the unexpected .. I love random mood browsing, and E MINOR is pure sensory indulgence!! I love all of the amazingly gorgeous art in all it’s forms presented on E MINOR. Thanks for the bottomless pit of inspiration. Another Random Thought.

Eric
LAEM is anything but. It lets me sit down once or twice a week and learn about dozens of new creative projects and emerging culture that don’t just feel like they’ve been sourced from the most diverse corners of internet, but instead the actual world; something I’ve yet to find anywhere else.

Hayley
I love the movement of Lost at E Minor, it goes from funky design in Prague to Diners in Nowhere USA. From creepy craigslist reenactments to cute bunny commercials to awing murals. And I love my city Halifax, NS, for all the tiny galleries, spoken word spaces, big bands in little pubs and cars that stop if a pedestrian even looks at the street.

Felicity C
Looooooooooooooooooooooove it
Originality
Stunning artwork
Totally unique

Artisitic
Transcending

Exciting

Myriad of colour
Individuality
Never disappoints
Obviously cool
Revolutionary

Hannah
I cant get away from this site! i check it almost everyday and everyday i am profoundly amazed by what i see and read. It so refreshing knowing that there are so many people in this world that have such passion for what they do and create. Right now i am attempting to write yet again another essay for school and i have just found something to link up my artist, cheers! Thanks for the constant supply of outstanding, shock, horror, beauty, talent.

Read more reasons why our readers think Lost At E Minor is a Lovemark brand.

Click through rates (CTRs). Ahh, that crazy metric that punches well above its weight in the debate about online advertising performance. Let’s state this upfront: I’ve never been a big fan on the focus on CTRs. New research backs this skepticism up with compelling data.

A recent study – “Natural Born Clickers” from ComScore and media agency Starcom – casts light on who clicks on display ads, who ends up at campaign sites, and provides some interesting take-outs for online advertisers and publishers. Adage covers the study nicely.

The first observation I pulled from the article is that 16% of the online audience in the US are responsible for 80% of clicks.

What to make of this?

Firstly, I think this resonates with how many of us behave online. We see ads. Some cut-through and register with us. Do we click? Well, it depends on the creative.

I’ve enjoyed the recent BWS ads which have run on The Roar. They politely expand and provide compelling reasons to interact with the brand (eg, by asking what kind of wine person you are via a short wizard within the creative).

So as with all advertising, getting cut-through in your message is a challenge. Many ads don’t register with consumers. But some will. The types of people who click on a lot of display ads may be those with time on their hands and not necessarily the people a brand is trying to engage with.

And clicking to end up at a new destination isn’t usually a goal of a consumer. But certain creative makes interacting with a brand more compelling.

So to me, CTRs are a measure of creative effectiveness as much as anything else.

What also comes out in the study is that a low number of clicks doesn’t necessarily mean display banners aren’t doing their job.

The study found that display ads, regardless of clicks, generate significant increase in campaign and brand site visits. Brand searches increased too. As did sales from those exposed to the display ads.

This effect lasts, with people exposed to the ads 45% more likely to visit the brand’s site after four weeks.

So online display advertising works. Can we end this debate now?

We recently completed a campaign on Lost At E Minor with an alcohol brand. The click through rates on the creative weren’t exceptional.

But we would be foolish to say that the campaign wasn’t a success.

To test the effectiveness, we must measure increases in sales. At the point of sale, are our audience more likely to buy the brand given it’s association with our site? I would say yes.

Or are they more likely to pay a premium price for the product? Probably yes again.

But these are harder to measure metrics, especially when a campaign is running across multiple sites and you’re trying to optimise site placement. But these are the right metrics to be assessing when judging online display advertising performance.

Another approach to testing advertising effectiveness is to measure backwards.

Pick a group of your ‘best’ customers. Then find out what path they followed to your brand. A little harder than CTR figures, but much more accurate.

With the rise and rise of Twitter, the practice of shortening URL links has become increasingly common. But why shorten a URL when outside of the 140 character length imposed by Twitter?

Simple: Analytics.

Instead of linking direct to a site, you can use a service such as bit.ly to shorten the URL. It will then provide interesting analytics on the number of clicks you’ve received on the link, from which locations, whether anyone has on-tweeted the link, and so on.

This is useful information, especially when running advertising campaigns for clients as it makes reporting much easier.

(In exchange for providing this service, the URL shorteners get data on what’s hot right now by inferring trends from all the clicks on the millions of shortened links they provide. Witness in coming months the rise of real time search, powered in part by the URL shortening industry. But this is another post…).

But there’s a rub to using a URL shortening service for the analytics on the clicks. And it’s called information slippage.

I’m always intrigued by how often semi-sensitive information is leaked unwittingly. Sequentially numbering your invoices? Then you’re leaking billing and business activity. Does it matter? Maybe; depends who gets the information.

So here’s how bit.ly and other services leak information.

If you ever see a shortened URL, you can copy the link, and simply append a + sign to the end of it. The resulting page shows the click activity of the link. Here’s an example I plucked from a newsletter calling for Silicon Valley pitches: http://bit.ly/NeAsF+

You can see the click activity on the link; implying to me this guy has a pretty large database he’s sending to. This may not be a big deal, but it can indicate to your competitors how much traffic you’re getting on your site, and where they’re based.

The issue with information slippage is that you’re unwittingly leaking this information.

It mostly won’t matter. But it could.

So it might be wise to consider the implications before you automatically shorten your next outbound link for tracking purposes.

Mobile strategy. It’s one of those line-items you put on your strategic planning to-do list each year. But invariably it gets bumped off the planning radar. Too hard. Space evolving too quickly. Too expensive.

We tackled it this year.

The first question we asked ourselves is what client (ie, handset) to optimise for?

There’s only one answer here and it begins with an i. As in iPhone.

The iPhone is a seam in the mobile fabric as it enables real online experiences and ties in with Apple’s micropayments model. So finally the promise of mobile can be unlocked.

The second question: build a stylesheet-optimised view of your site or engineer an application?

To me, this is a no brainer, but I’m still hearing lots of people opting for the former. So here’s the differences between the two options, as I see it.

Stylesheet view benefits

• Your site looks a bit better than if viewed natively on the handset

iPhone Application benefits

• Enables micropayments via iTunes
• Opens up new ad and sponsorship inventory
• Enables geo-awareness and geo-targetting
• Opens up Freemium model for content
• Reaches new audiences via App store
• Enables offline usage
• Enables future expansion of the app

It’s a compelling way to expand your business and get learnings on a platform you can’t afford to not be across.

So we received a number of quotes from dedicated iPhone app developers. It’s costly. For a basic application, you’re looking at $30,000+.

So we decided to build our own one, partnering with one of the smartest developers I’ve worked with.

The initial focus was to build an iPhone app for The Roar and Lost At E Minor.  But we engineered it in a way that allows it to be used by other publishers.

Our goal is to offer it to other publishers for a fraction of the price and risk of building it themselves.

The beauty of this approach is that publishers can now get a low risk, high quality and low cost mobile presence immediately.

If you suspect mobile will be core to your firm’s DNA, then this app will be perfect.

Why?

Instead of doing your mobile planning in meetings based on what you think will happen, base your strategy on real life learnings from actual usage.

Our application provides ad serving and reporting. So you can see usage patterns within the app, and tailor your strategic play based on actual usage.

Then when you’ve engineered your application, which has your own IP and is tailored to your audience and content, you can simply provide an update to the app and it seamlessly slips over to your own application code base.

Here’s the other benefit: our app provides a cost effective opportunity to test the mobile space for your company, rather than spending big bucks to have it fail.

I’m a big believer in moving fast (as opposed to failing slow, which like pulling a band-aid, accentuates and prolongs the pain). Get software into production and work out from there what the next step is.  Spend a little, but save a lot.

But the real benefit of the app is that it’s beautiful to use and unleashes your content to a new audience, revenue streams and medium.

A summary list of features for release 1.0

• All content available offline (means it real fast to use and can be used while commuting)
• Loads content over Wifi and Data networks
• User option to disable data load over data carrier (in case they don’t have much bandwidth on their plan)
• Loads images for each article
• Enables a YouTube video for each article if embedded
• View reader comments for each article
• Configurable maximum number of comments per article
• Configurable ordering of comments
• Ability for users to post comments to the website via the app
• Auto-saved user details for posting comments
• Email article links to friends
• View articles by category
• Various branding options
• Integrated advertising management and reporting system
• Configurable Article listings
  - Display image for leading article
  - Display article teaser text
  - Display/Disable category icons
• There’s also a lot of smarts behind the scene which checks for data connections before certain actions, and so on.

In short, we’re really excited to be launching this application for our sites and to offer it to other publishers.

[The applications will be live for download shortly via the iTunes app store.]

Screenshots

So, I’ve been doing a little test by using Microsoft’s new search offering Bing, as my exclusive search engine. There’s been a lot of hype about Bing; so I was interested to see how it stacks up against a service so comprehensive I’ve labelled it our collective brain.

First thoughts are that Bing does the 80% type searches well. Search for your homepage or a standard 80% term and the results are good. It also has some nice bells and whistles; such as thumbnail previews of search results.

But here’s the thing.

Once you get to the 20% type search terms (I guess you’d call this the ‘long tail’ of searches), Bing’s pretty average.

So today I reluctantly booked a cut (haircuts, how I hate thee). This was the search term I used:

tony and guy the junction

(Note, by the way, that there are five words in this phrase. A general pattern emerging in search is a lengthening of search terms being used as people get more ambitious to find the exact result they’re searching for, and/or re-search after a poor initial results page.)

So I ‘binged’ tony and guy the junction.

The results speak for themselves.

Bing’s results
www.myspace.com/flamingodude <— Que?
The Diary Junction Blog <—- heh?
Tony & guy salon Toronto | Yelp <— Ah, no….The Junction, not Toronto.

Bing very nicely copies Google’s search URL structure, so it’s easy to replace bing.com with google.com, and hit enter to see what Google chucks back.

Google’s results
www.toniandguy.com.au/newcastle.html

No need to look further. Perfect.

Ahh…Google. Come here my friend.

The great JT himself gave this endorsement of My Secret Playlist on his blog yesterday:

Meanwhile, My Secret Playlist is a crafty website that asks the musicians themselves who they are listening to and/or are inspired by right now. In other words, it’s like reading the juiciest part of Rolling Stone right there …. while having instant access to that featured track. Brilliant…

(Psst, My Secret Playlist is published by Conversant Media, who are also behind the clutch art and culture site, Lost At E Minor, which is also worth a thorough browse.)

So I guess that means that we’re officially hip now. Right? Yeah? I mean, it’s JT! C’mon!

Check out the post here.