Alberta Business Marketing

Audio from the interviews that shape Alberta Venture’s “The Right Call” column.

COMING JULY 1, 2009:

Business’s Big Black Eye
What can business people do to reverse the eroding public perception of the free enterprise system?

NOW PLAYING:

It’s the Women, Stupid
Should companies mandate female representation on boards and in management?

Ethical Downsizing
If you have to cut your payroll, how can you do the least possible harm?

Religion and the Workplace
In an increasingly diverse workplace, should employers accommodate everyone or no one?
–

The Right Call is a rotating panel examining issues of corporate ethics. If you’d like advice on a compromising situation (no names used), send details to feedback@albertaventure.com, or login to this site and post a comment.

Tags: Alberta Venture's Audio Collections, ethics, Fil Fraser, Ron Ghitter, The Right Call, Web Exclusive
Posted in Alberta Business | | Comments Off

I was meaning to blog about the European Union’s “public diplomacy” tour through Western Canada (an area the EU’s trade delegation in Canada has hitherto neglected) tied to the launch in May of the Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement, a long overdue bilateral trade initiative between the EU and Canada. But instead I want to tell a story about a European company I am in awe of right now.

Most of the EU presentation in Edmonton June 12 reflected things we already know: that Canada and especially Western Canada have a “significantly undertraded” relationship with Europe, as EU representative Fred Kingston put it; that the relationship is more significant in terms of investment (Canada is the fourth largest foreign investor in the EU; the EU, No. 2 in Canada – the thousands of Albertans who work for Shell and Total and Schlumberger certainly know that); that there is a great opportunity to increase trans-Atlantic trade, especially in agricultural products.

Nope, I’d rather talk about what we can learn about harnessing the power of new media from Lego Systems.

I have a six-year-old son, Alex. In the viral (all senses of the term) environment of the school playground he heard tell of this website, lego.com. Here you can find entertainment related to licensed properties such as Lego Star Wars and Lego Indiana Jones. But the real marketing and merchandising genius is to be found in Lego’s own franchise, unveiled last January, called Power Miners. Never heard of Power Miners? Obviously you are not a male in grade one.

Power Miners are gruff-voiced heroes (no super powers as far as I can tell) who drive rock-pulverizing contraptions with names like the Granite Grinder and the Crystal Sweeper through mine shafts collecting energy crystals and fighting these rather ridiculous (certainly not nightmare-inducing) villains called rock monsters. You can watch them in animated movies, download or upload home movies of the toys (user-generated content, to use the catchphrase) and “play” them in video games. Lego seems to have discovered something that escaped Walt Disney: kids this age want their movies to be five minutes long (perfect for a web download), not 90! They’ll watch each video several times at a sitting and memorize the macho dialogue.

Alex could spend hours on this site if we let him. And it’s all free (consistent with Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson’s thesis about the future of business). Lego makes it all back and more selling the construction sets surrounding the characters and vehicles for anything from $10 to $70, each set produced from maybe 50 cents worth of plastic. We of course won’t buy these for our son. But he has an allowance and is willing to save up for extraordinary periods to buy them himself. He’s talked his little brother into pooling their funds for these purchases. They worked out a deal whereby they take turns getting to sleep with the toy in their room on alternating nights.

I say this with some dismay, being a hapless investor in Lego’s Canadian-based competitor, Mega Brands, but what the venerable Danish toy giant has done is brilliant. Best of all, it has no royalties to pay to George Lucas or Stephen Spielberg. It has created its own entertainment hit below the radar of Variety and the Hollywood Reporter, and is giving it away free.

Tags: BizBeat - Editor's Blog, Chris Anderson, European Union, Lego
Posted in Alberta Business | | Comments Off

Summary

Given recent Google pronouncements with respect to the nofollow tag and PageRank sculpting, it is prudent to limit the number of comments that blog posts receive and methods are discussed to do that.

Introduction

Blog authors often agree to differ on the subject of comments.  Some feel it is essential to have a dialogue going with their readers through comments.  Others are turned off by all the spam comments that can often be added and so avoid comments.

An additional issue with respect to comments is whether comment authors should be allowed to have a link back to their own websites.  WordPress by default inserts a nofollow tag on such links, given the risks of spam entries.  Those who feel commenters should be allowed to have a link can use a WordPress Dofollow plug-in which removes that nofollow tag.

Google has then made this subject more complex by suggesting that paid links should be flagged with a nofollow tag since they should not influence search engine rankings..  Some SEOs have then decided they would use the nofollow tag to modify the PageRank flow within their website: this was labeled as PageRank Sculpting.  A Google comment at the SMX conference in Seattle ten days ago has now further thrown everything into confusion.

PageRank On Comments May Evaporate – Matt Cutts

The Matt Cutts comment that sparked this discussion, as reported by Lisa Barone, ran as follows in the You&A With Matt Cutts session:

It seems like you supported PageRank sculpting a year ago and now it seems like you don’t support it anymore. Why is that and will it become a negative indicator?

No, it won’t hurt your site. You can do your links however you want. You can use it to eliminate links to sign in forms and whatnot, but its a better use of your time to fix your site architecture and fix the problem from the core. Suppose you have 10 links and 5 of them are nofollowed. There’s this assumption that that the other 5 links get ALL that PageRank and that may not be as true anymore (your leftover PageRank will now “evaporate”, says Matt.). You can’t shunt your PageRank where you want it to go. It’s not a penalty. It’s not going to get you in trouble. However, it’s not as effective. It’s a better use of your time to go make new content and do all the other things.

Andy Beard has clearly stated what is needed.  In asking Can Comments Kill Your PageRank?

I do have some thoughts though:-

1. I think we need a strong statement that external links with nofollow would not cause PageRank to evaporate.
2. Nofollow is a simple solution for user generated content and comments, but if it has any effect of PageRank disappearing, we are going to lose the links on tons of blogs totally.  It would be a sad day that an action by Google reduced the interlinking of the web.
…
5. Links that lead to pages blocked with robots.txt and other hanging pages really need to be nofollowed. I think we need to know that in that situation PageRank wouldn’t normally evaporate, but I can understand why that might not be confirmed.

As yet, there has been no clarification on this issue from Google.

Webmasters Handle Comments Differently

It is interesting to note that Webmasters do handle Comments differently.  Michael Gray with his latest entry, The Big Fat RSS Lie, adopts what seems to be his normal policy in displaying, Comments on this entry are closed.

On the other hand, the Daily SEO Tip blog actively seeks comments from as many as possible, as with the latest post:Let’s Create the Ultimate List of Keyword Research Tools by Ann Smarty.  This seems to be the approach that most blog writers adopt.

PageRank Null Hypothesis Suggests Limit Comments

What is the best policy given what Matt Cutts had said.  One possible line of reasoning is set out in a post on a PageRank Null Hypothesis.  This would suggest that all links are included in a first phase PageRank population.  This means that the more links one has from a blog page (including comments), the lower PageRank contribution that each outlink carries.  This argument might suggest avoiding comments to limit the number of outlinks.

Conversely, comments often add useful content that is of interest to readers.  The resulting post and comments then has more content which may rank better in keyword queries.  This suggests that it may be better to have a balance allowing a number of comments but cutting these off after a certain time.

Avoiding PageRank Comments Problems

Given the above, the Comments Policy on the SMM blogs has been changed.  To capture worthwhile comment content while avoiding the more spammy comments, comments are now closed off after 21 days.

In order not to lose the possibility of useful comments after 21 days, the Google Friend Connect Social Bar has been added to the bottom of every SMM blog post so that visitors can comment there.  Such comments would not be part of the Web page content for search engine ranking terms but it does mean that other visitors can read the further comments.  Hopefully this gives the best of both worlds.

Here is a short video introduction to the Google Friend Connect Social Bar:

Post from: The Other Blokes Blog

Blog Comments And Google

Posted in Blogging | | Comments Off

…and yet we still rely on consumer research techniques that were designed by statisticians in the 1950s. I’m not a psychiatrist, but it seems to be that there is something vaguely neurotic about an industry that continues to do the same thing, at great expense, knowing full well the outcome will have a 90% probability of being wrong. Innovation needs a fundamentally new and different approach.

Why does the traditional statistics based research not work?

I think the problem has more to do with the real lives of people in a world that is much less predictable than it once was. In the case of a high frequency CPG, let’s say toothpaste, it is almost impossible for someone to accurately predict how they will react when they are in the store buying toothpaste, unless they are rigidly brand-apathetic (that is, they always use the same brand no matter what, which is generally because it is easier to stay with what they are doing than try to figure out all the other alternatives).

For instance, a respondent might say in anticipation of buying toothpaste (in a research or interview or any other setting – even in-store) that he definitely will or is somewhat or very likely to buy a new product, even if it costs ten cents more. However, when I am actually in the process of buying the product, my actual decision will be based on a number of unanticipatable variables: how much money do I have in my pocket, how full is my basket and how much have I already spent, am I feeling frugal today, is the toothpaste only for me or is it for the family, what other brands are on sale, and so on.

Clearly people’s projection of buying behavior, which we call buying intent, is necessarily unreliable. In a simpler world, when brands behaved in an orderly fashion and consumers lived in a rigidly budgeted, regulated world, this may have been different.

What is the alternative?

Simply put, people’s predictions of amalgamated behavior is likely to be much more accurate than their prediction of their own behavior. This is at the heart of the economic principle captured in James Surowieki’s book, The Wisdom of Crowds.

ProteanPrediction Collective Wisdom Engine is a proprietary process that integrates this theory into a very practical market-ready system. As a component of any innovation development strategy it can be used to guide development teams in incremental steps, rather than quantum (and very expensive, but very risky) leaps.

The Collective Wisdom Engine is particularly powerful when used as a mechanism to involve the entire organization in the process. I am not sure there is any proof positive, but it makes sense that the collective wisdom of the people who work with the product and brand on a daily basis is likely to be more interesting than the collective wisdom of a random or specific external crowd (although, not necessarily more accurate). It can also be accomplished at a fraction of the costs of traditional, research based methodologies.

Tags: Branding, Customer Experience, innovation management, market research, prediction markets, protean consulting, protean research, Research, Strategy, wisdom of crowds
Posted in Advertising | | Comments Off