Alberta Business Marketing

20 images, 20 seconds, 200 cities, 2,000 presentations, 200,000 people.

In a matter of seconds, thousands of lives and dreams were destroyed in Haiti. Now, the global PechaKucha network is joining with Architecture for Humanity to help rebuild Haiti, 20 seconds at a time.

On February 20th, 2010, the 280 cities that host PechaKucha events worldwide will converge to present one continuous edition of PechaKucha Night. Kicking off in Tokyo, the presentation wave will travel eastward, with cities presenting one after the other. Crossing all times zones and cultures, the event will be streamed live online.

Please save the date for Calgary’s contribution to this historic global event, which will be centered on the theme of rebuilding. Speakers include Calgary architects, planners, individuals and organizations at the forefront of disaster relief and rebuilding efforts around the world.

Saturday, February 20 at 7:00pm
Conoco Phillips Theatre, Glenbow Museum, 130 9th Ave. SE

Tickets available for a suggested donation of $20 at the door or in advance. All proceeds will go to Architecture for Humanity for rebuilding Haiti.

Additional donations may be made at ArchitectureForHumanity.org.

For more information or to purchase tickets, visit CalgaryCulture.com/PKNForHaiti.

About PechaKucha Nights:

Devised and shared by Klein Dytham Architecture in 2003 as a place for designers, developers and architects to meet, network and show their work in public, PechaKucha Nights are now taking place in 280 cities around the world. The format is simple: speakers present 20 slides each, for 20 seconds per slide. Calgary Arts Development has an agreement to host PechaKucha Nights in Calgary and will be hosting several PechaKucha Nights over the course of the year.

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Tags: Calgary Arts Development, Haiti, PechaKucha, Uncategorized
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Yesterday, Google announced a new service, Buzz, a service for users of its Gmail service to share updates, photos and videos. The service will compete with sites like Facebook and Twitter, which capture a significant percentage of the time people spend online.  Buzz is built into Gmail, which already has 176 million users, according to comScore,   Like recent changes to Facebook, Buzz allows users to post status updates that include text; photos from services like Google’s Picasa and Yahoo’s Flickr; videos from YouTube; and messages from Twitter.

The changes to the Gmail interface that include Buzz will be rolled out to users over the coming weeks.

For Google, Buzz is intended to encourage users to spend more time in their Gmail email site. Already, Google Chat, Google Calendar and Google Docs and Google Tasks succeed in making an open email window standard operating procedure for Gmail users, but these tools are generally used as a work platform.   I can access the tools on my computer or phone and  it’s the place I get work done!

Will Users see Buzz in their Email as spam?

By connecting social activities of users and making unsolicited suggestions of content for users, some from unknown sources, (friends of friends) Google risks upsetting users who will see such social interjections as spam.  Especially when they land in users inboxes.  Many folks perceive email to be the place where work gets done.   For its part, Google unhesitatingly says that bringing Buzz personal social networking to the work space is a good thing.

I disagree.

There is certainly a lot of social spam in social networks like Facebook and Twitter and when I log in, (whether for work or play), I know what I can safely ignore and what I need to pay attention to.  I also know how status updates, sharing links fits in the ecosystem of social networks.  For now, I can always step away from these sites and go back to email to focus on getting some work done.

Will Buzz generate more bling for Google?

Google has a problem.  Google is not Facebook.  Facebook with 400 Million users as it celebrated just it’s 6th birthday is still growing.  Social Media platforms are a growing source of revenue as users spend more and more time networking and Google wants a piece of that economic pie.  If all goes according to Google’s plan the new interface may make it easier to generate revenue by keeping Gmail users in their account, where adsense revenue can be generated from those ubiquitous ads that most Gmail users are already blind to.

Fine, so long as the new Buzz doesn’t upset a loyal user base and have us reaching for the Spam button.

What do you think?  Do you want social networking in your email?

Links:

NY Times reports on Google Buzz

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Tags: email, Facebook, google news
Posted in Alberta Business | | Comments Off

Yesterday, Google announced a new service, Buzz, a service for users of its Gmail service to share updates, photos and videos. The service will compete with sites like Facebook and Twitter, which capture a significant percentage of the time people spend online.  Buzz is built into Gmail, which already has 176 million users, according to comScore,   Like recent changes to Facebook, Buzz allows users to post status updates that include text; photos from services like Google’s Picasa and Yahoo’s Flickr; videos from YouTube; and messages from Twitter.

The changes to the Gmail interface that include Buzz will be rolled out to users over the coming weeks.

For Google, Buzz is intended to encourage users to spend more time in their Gmail email site. Already, Google Chat, Google Calendar and Google Docs and Google Tasks succeed in making an open email window standard operating procedure for Gmail users, but these tools are generally used as a work platform.   I can access the tools on my computer or phone and  it’s the place I get work done!

Will Users see Buzz in their Email as spam?

By connecting social activities of users and making unsolicited suggestions of content for users, some from unknown sources, (friends of friends) Google risks upsetting users who will see such social interjections as spam.  Especially when they land in users inboxes.  Many folks perceive email to be the place where work gets done.   For its part, Google unhesitatingly says that bringing Buzz personal social networking to the work space is a good thing.

I disagree.

There is certainly a lot of social spam in social networks like Facebook and Twitter and when I log in, (whether for work or play), I know what I can safely ignore and what I need to pay attention to.  I also know how status updates, sharing links fits in the ecosystem of social networks.  For now, I can always step away from these sites and go back to email to focus on getting some work done.

Will Buzz generate more bling for Google?

Google has a problem.  Google is not Facebook.  Facebook with 400 Million users as it celebrated just it’s 6th birthday is still growing.  Social Media platforms are a growing source of revenue as users spend more and more time networking and Google wants a piece of that economic pie.  If all goes according to Google’s plan the new interface may make it easier to generate revenue by keeping Gmail users in their account, where adsense revenue can be generated from those ubiquitous ads that most Gmail users are already blind to.

Fine, so long as the new Buzz doesn’t upset a loyal user base and have us reaching for the Spam button.

What do you think?  Do you want social networking in your email?

Links:

NY Times reports on Google Buzz

Tweet This

Tags: email, Facebook, google news
Posted in Alberta Business | | Comments Off

In CMA’s Weekly Watching Brief February 5th edition (accessible to CMA members), there was reference to a study from the US-based CMO council regarding the value of loyalty programs. I found this posting very interesting for many reasons, but mostly because it illustrates how easy it is to potentially mislead people, whether intentionally or not, by including a few choice numbers. In the classic 1950s book called “How to Lie with Statistics”, the author Darrell Huff describes how easy it is to prove whatever point you want by choosing which numbers to present and how to present them.

In the case of this posting, I am referring to its fairly rash generalization regarding loyalty and reward programs. There are probably as many different types of loyalty and rewards programs as there are published studies about them. Loyalty programs could be something large and complex, or as simple as a frequent coffee-buyer card from your local shop. To state that 61% of marketers believe that the consumers who take part in these programs are their best and most profitable customers demonstrates such an oversimplification as to make this statistic practically meaningless. How did the survey respondents choose to define loyalty program or best customer and which ones were included, or excluded? There are no consistent definitions of these concepts and I have rarely met a marketer who has actually pursued a data-driven assessment of their own program to find this statistic to be true. It depends on so many factors including the type of products or services being offered, the competitive context, the types of rewards being offered and the types of consumer behaviours required to earn these rewards. Depending on how a program is set up, its heaviest users could actually be the least profitable customers.

Too often marketers are willing to turn over any quantitative assessment of marketing initiatives to the data geeks or finance and take the answer at face value, without questioning the results (unless of course they are positive). There are usually many ways to skin the proverbial cat, including such things as definitions of test and control cells, definitions of success and what costs are included in profitability calculations. And depending on how these various factors are defined you could come up with very different results. Since these calculations are used to support decisions about potentially significant major marketing investments, you need to be completely confident in how these calculations were done and what was, or wasn’t, included. I strongly encourage marketers to get more involved in the analysis and understand the definitions being used, how the results are calculated and what other factors could influence the outcomes instead of simply going along with an answer because it was calculated to 6 decimal places.

By Paul Tyndall, Senior Manager, Predictive Modelling & Segmentation at RBC. Paul is also a member of CMA’s Marketing Technology and Database Intelligence Council.

Tags: Databases / Analytics, Research
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I stumbled on Google’s spam filtering services and was pleasantly surprised The other day I was helping one of our clients with some email challenges they were having with spam with their hosted Microsoft Exchange services.  Ever since changing from their former email provider from an Edmonton based POP3 service to Microsoft Hosted Exchange solution we [...]

Tags: 403.775.2205, Anti-spam techniques, bank account, blackberry, business computer solution, Business IT, business solution, Business/Finance, Calgary, computer solution, Computing, E-mail, E-mail archiving, E-mail spam, Edmonton, Google Inc., Spam, spam filtering, spam filtering services, spam solution, Spamming, technology, Technology/Internet, USD, Windows Small Business Server, World Wide Web
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