hal9000.ie

Engagement is the holy grail of online marketing today and one of the emerging digital trends is the ‘gamification‘ of online platforms. It means the adding of game-like functionality or features to non-game applications.

Everyone likes to play games right? So, give them something fun to do and you’ll keep them longer, and they’re more likely to come back. The key thing is making it goal oriented. One of the biggest examples is FourSquare where you can attain the goal of becoming Mayor of a place.

The approach takes ideas from games and applies them to other areas where the aim is to encourage certain behaviours, such as returning customers. This Google Insights chart shows the rise in interest in the term as shown through search. The graph largely reflects US search, resulting from the more mature online market there.

Ways of gamifying include:

• giving badges for achieving goals (eg. FourSquare)
• showing a progress bar for things like form competions, profile completions eg. LinkedIn
• achievement levels for customer loyalty
• games with virtual rewards
• games with real rewards like entering a draw or getting a discount
• adding small games to entertain and encourage site retention

One of the recent ones created in Ireland was for Tourism Ireland and is a game on  Facebook. You can play it for yourself at IrelandTown. What would be interesting to see is how successful the game is and how the success is being measured. Tourism Ireland seems to be the first national tourism agency to use a game like this to promote their country and it is certainly an innovative strategy to use. By playing the game the user agrees to:

• allow IrelandTown access to the user’s basic publicly shared data
• allow direct emails from IrelandTown
• allow wall updates
• allow IrelandTown access the user’s data

This is valuable data and is most likely well-targeted in that people who play the game will probably already have some interest in Ireland.

But it’s not just a digital marketing trend, gamification is being used in training and various kinds of product design.

In the online context, it’s a little like the incredible popularity of social networks – people like to be social. Like all the best ideas, it’s obvious in hindsight. The online technology and broadband facilitated this growth. Similarly, people like to play games and earn things. Again the technology is there (and accessible) to facilitate. The key thing is tapping in to human behaviour.

Learn more about gamification in Business Week’s CEO Guide to Business Gamification.

Crowdsourcing is a means of leveraging the collaborative effort of the online community, made possible by Web 2.0 technologies especially social media, with the aim of realising a specific goal.

Read more about Crowdsourcing as a model for solving problems.

A  QR Code (or Quick Response code) is a  2-dimensional scannable code which is increasingly being used in the mobile context. They’ve been around for quite a while and have been widely used in Japan – a subsidiary of Toyota started using them back in 1994 – but are now finding new applications. They are particularly being used in online marketing.

Basically, you can easily create a code that can contain the URL of your website for example, which can then be scanned by a smartphone to bring the user to that site.

Here’s what one looks like:

If you scan this with your smartphone, it will open your phone’s browser and bring you to the hal9000 Blog page!

Offline meets online

It’s where offline meets online. For example, you can have a marketing message in a print medium – it could be a special Christmas Wine offer advertised to readers of a magazine by a supermarket – and the user could be sitting in the hairdresser’s (having the Christmas hairdo) and scan the  the QR Code with their Smartphone. This would bring them to the appropriate landing page for the Wine Offer on the supermarket’s mobile enabled website, where they can convert and make the sale.

Find out more about how to create and use QR Codes.

Have you seen one in use yet?

Sounds a bit like ‘free‘, sounds a bit like ‘premium‘..

FREE + PREMIUM = FREEMIUM

This is a business model that many companies are adopting on the web which provides for some ‘free‘ content and some ‘premium‘ content, that incurs a cost. The free content serves to engage users and encourages interaction, while the premium offers advanced features or special content. This can contribute towards the cost of providing the content. Services such as Skype and LinkedIn operate on the freemium model.

The big challenge for publishers on the web is how to pay for the cost of producing the content. There’s an expectation of content for free on the web that didn’t exist with print journalism. RTE’s website is one of the largest trafficed sites amongst Irish users. And it’s free.

Print media such as Murdoch’s The Times, on the other hand, have put all the content behind a paywall , with unclear results. While The Telegraph are planning to begin charging for some digital content next year.

Now, the discussion is moving towards what kind of business model to use for Mobile Apps, whether to provide a free App, a once-off payment (which includes updates)  or to go for a subscription-based model.

There’s an interesting piece on the development of the Georgina Campbell App over on Krishna De’s blog. This one is for the iPhone and they went for a yearly, subscription-based model which will allow them to further invest in the App. But they haven’t ruled out a ‘micro payments‘ model, where only content accessed is charged, or a monthly subscription.

Of course, with Mobile, you have to develop for Blackberry, Nokia, Android etc. depending on what platform you expect your users to be on.

A Denial-of-Service is a targeted attack on a website, which results in an extremely bad case of  ‘the computer says no’!

While it’s not specifically restricted to the internet and website services, the term tends to be most often used in this regard. The perpetrators attempt to interfere with the operation of a website by preventing the service functioning effectively and often results in the unavailability of a website. It does this in a variety of nasty technical ways, but perhaps the easiest way for the non-technical to think of it is that a perpetrator jams a website by sending so many queries that it uses up all the resources and nobody else gets a lookin!

Ireland’s CAO has been the latest high-profile case to fall victim when the site was forced to shut down in August and thousands of students were left unable to accept their third-level offers.

Another recent victim was blogging platform Posterous. Also in August, the site had an initial outage after which they moved IP address, but then had to endure a second attack. In then end they had to move datacenters and significantly upgrade their systems.

In April 2007, you may remember Estonia bearing the brunt of a DoS attack when many government websites were forced offline. The attack originated in Russia.

Cybercrime Statistics

Up to date figures detailing the number and scale of attacks are hard to come by, and the impact in lost revenue. However, the UCD Centre for Cybercrime Investigation found that 30% of Irish organisations who took part in a survy in 2006 had been victims of an attack [Source: ISSA/UCD Irish Cybercrime Survey 2006]

DoS and the law

Interestingly, the only relevant law in Ireland dates back to 1991 when internet use was less common and both public services and business were less reliant on online availability. Not surprisingly, the law doesn’t specifically address the problem and even if found (a big if!), the perpetrators might escape prosecution.

Why DoS?

Which brings us to the perpetrators. Why does someone do this? It’s hard to know and quite hard to find out. As Posterous said:

The motive of these attacks is often unclear. It could have been an individual hacker/cracker who wants to show off a bit. It could have been a piracy group that was upset about us removing abusive material. It could have been a foreign government wanting to silence someone using Posterous to protest.

A Splash page is the landing, or home page, to a website that serves as an introductory or entry page. It tends to be a page containing graphics for aesthetic purposes,  with a link to enter the site proper.

From an SEO perspective, a splash page is wasted effort as it’s the page for your domain’s URL, but generally contains no text, therefore little or nothing  for search engines to index. Also, as they often have flash or graphic content, the page may take longer to load. Load speed is now a ranking factor with Google, so this is relevant to any design decisions made.

From a users perspective, the aesthetic value added tends to be more than outweighed by the negative experience of taking longer to get to the content the user is interested in.

But for those who insist on retaining a splash page, a user friendly way of achieving the same effect might be to cookie the page so that a visitor is shown it only on the first visit.

Alternatively, a lightbox effect could be used for a similar graphic effect, but could be accompanied by a fully optimised home page.

An example of a splash page is www.dunneandcrescenzi.com.

I do like the restaurants, but it takes soooh  long to find the menu and the phone no. to book, that I’m tempted to give in to a Big Mac!

The ‘long-tail‘ in ‘long-tail  SEO’ refers to optimising a page (or site) for lesser searched for keywords, in order to target the less competitive terms more effectively.

Targeting the common, or obvious, search terms can be difficult if you’re operating in a competitive market. Getting onto page 1 of the search results pages and subsequently getting traffic is more valuable than never getting to page 1.

So, the idea is to target the less common terms because this is easier to do, due to lower competition.

And, if you target enough ‘long-tail’ keywords, you can increase your traffic significantly.