Except…

In my rush to get things done, I copied the wrong ‘John’. The actual John whose email was entered into the BCC field was a John that I really do NOT want to be exposed to the contents of the email.

I process over a hundred emails a day, so I don’t delay in pressing SEND when I’ve reviewed the email.

As the email was being sent, I had one of those moments when your heart races into your throat. I had the wrong person blind copied. The. Worst. Feeling. Ever.

But now is when I’m happy to be using Google Apps for Domain for our email. (In fact, I so happy with the service for so many reasons.)

There’s a feature in Google email for businesses which lets you undo your send, so long as it’s within a minute or so of pressing Send. So I was able to undo the send, copy the right John onto the email, and move forward again.

Heart back into chest.

Yet another example of why having the right tools, configured in the right way, is so essential to a small but growing business.

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 feautures 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.

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.

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.

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.

Google generates these links automatically, based on what it thinks is the most common and relevant pages in your site.

You can remove sitelinks you don’t want by using Google Webmaster.

Here’s a great example of why you should always monitor this section and remove inappropriate links! (See highlighted section starting with ‘Man caught with …’ )

Consider this: the top 10 shows in Australia are currently attracting as few as 700,000 viewers nationally compared with over two million for Packed to the Rafters last month (during ratings season).  This is a decrease of almost 3 fold.

This scheduling insult to TV audiences may have been acceptable in an age without choice.  But the internet has changed this. Consumers now have serious amounts of choice.

Hulu.com is leading the charge.  Hulu hosts more than 1,000 shows with over 130 content providers – not only NBC and Fox, but Sony Pictures Television, MGM Studios, Lionsgate, Paramount Pictures and PBS. The site also offers full-length films.

Hulu’s unique visitors for October was 24 million according to ComScore. On average, a visitor watches 10 videos on Hulu each month. These are impressive numbers indeed.  While not yet available in Australia, the impact of the Hulu model will be felt strongly within the TV industry.

Executives can no longer take for granted a return of eyeballs once the summer period is over.

While they may come back this summer, sooner or later there will be a dramatic moment where the free to air numbers fall of a cliff.  At that point, the convergence of your TV device with your PC will come together at a rate of knots.

Until then, I’m off to catch some Hogan’s Heroes on TV.  “Hoo-oo-gan!!”

If we accept that Google is becoming the repository of all our information (via its enormous web archive of over 25 billion pages), and the collector of all our questions (via our 400 million search queries a day), it’s not a such big step to argue that by owning the input and the output, it’s becoming a collective world brain.

If Google can predict flu outbreaks, presumably its engineers can also pull back our collective mood (the world is ‘grumpy’ based on search terms), hopes, dreams and more.

Should Google become a collective asset for the world to harness in non-commercial ways?

Judging by Yahoo’s top searches for 2008 (with Britney Spears at number one), Yahoo is its teen sibling.

[Note: I first published this over at Lost At E Minor]

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