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Category: Michael Garrity

4 Internet Marketing Lessons From My Mexican Holiday

Published November 27, 2006

Gentle ocean breeze, white powder sand, Mai Tais hand delivered to an umbrella protected beach chair – yes indeed, there’s nothing like a week’s vacation in the Mexican Riviera. I’ve included a picture of my hotel here just to help those of you currently struck at your desks to find the motivation to take your own trip sometime soon.

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But what, you might be asking, does any of this vacation boasting have to do with internet marketing (the philosophical foundation of our special onedegree.ca). Lots, it seems. To outline this point, I have included here “Michael’s 4 Internet Marketing Lessons from my Mexican holiday”.

Lesson 1: Travel Review sites are really just fancy words for “Blogs” about travel.

I use www.tripadvisor.com and I love it. Do you remember when your only source of online information on a hotel came from the hotel chain itself? It was the sound of one hand’s thunderous self-applause. Well, now there is a real-time forum for discussion on virtually any hotel or resort in the world, along with rankings and pictures and real people to ask questions to who just got back from where you are thinking of going. The consumer value of user generated content in the travel industry has turned 60 year old grandmothers from Wichita into blogging machines without them even knowing it. Move over Paul Theroux!

Lesson 2: The traditional travel industry still hasn’t realized that the Internet has changed its business model forever.

My wife (who is also an Internet professional) really wanted to use the local travel agent. She argued that she was really nice and helpful and close to our house. My wife even started the search for our holiday with her and got prices and availability options. But what came apparent very quickly is that as we wanted more information over a period of days, the restrictions on the agent’s working hours and availability became a huge bottleneck in our search, and eventually we turned to the Internet to get all of the information we needed in real time (in this case using www.selloffvacations.com). Even still, my wife was committed to booking with the local person. Unfortunately, we made our final decision to book a special available deal on Saturday morning and she didn’t work on the weekends. We had no choice but to book our holiday through the “always open, always on”, Internet travel service. That industry will not survive without changing.

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Running Room Moves Communities Online

Published October 6, 2006

When it comes to offline community building around a brand, there are very few local examples as successful as “The Running Room”:http://www.runningroom.com/. But does this offline success translate into an equally persuasive online offering? Do they really “get” online?
If any of you are runners or even just like to walk your dog early on a Sunday morning, you will likely already know that the Running Room understands community building around a brand. Every Sunday morning at eight o’clock, outside of every Running Room outlet everywhere in Canada, there is a gaggle of hyped-up, spandex-clad runners in nice shoes and water bottle belts warming up for a run with their designated “community”. Whether you’re a slow 5K’r or a marathoner in training, there is a community of like-minded people waiting for you at the Running Room.
The Running Room, it seems, sells more than shoes. They sell a running lifestyle and they back it up by fostering an active community that lives this brand and congregates around their properties. In short, the Running Room is everything that an online social network aspires to be. Which made me wonder, what does their website look like and do they do as good of a job online as they do offline?
First, I need to be honest that I really did want their site to suck. It is always much more fun to write about a smart company caught with their pants down than to have to write about a smart company being smart. Unfortunately, this article will be the latter. With one notable exception, their site does a very good job of reinforcing their core offline values, online, and is a good example of a company leveraging their core strength through their online property.
Let’s look in more detail.
The Running Room
The homepage www.runningroom.com drives you immediately to the key content areas for their community (not their commerce): the “events” page, the community “forum” page, the “photos” page and other important pages designed to get you to put down the cheese doodles and go for a run. The “forum section”:http://www.runningroom.com/discussion/ is especially impressive with tens of thousands of entries around discussion threads on topics ranging from “running when you are pregnant”:http://www.runningroom.com/discussion/viewforum.php?f=6467&sid=b29b49074e0cc99d331ef9288b63f22b to “the right foods for a 10 km run”:http://www.runningroom.com/discussion/viewforum.php?f=16. It’s not the slickest discussion forum I’ve ever seen but it is well organized and clearly well used by their core community. Even the marginal runners have a home, where posts like this one entitled “I finally got bleeding nipples again!!”:http://www.runningroom.com/discussion/viewtopic.php?t=25650 chum up the waters for the “run till it hurts” crowd. Everywhere it’s community first, commerce second.

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Behavioural Targeting – "Smart" Marketing or Dangerous Privacy Violation?

Published September 18, 2006

Is the application of online behavioral targeting through the portal players an example of “smart” marketing, as a recent One Degree interviewee suggests or a “hornet’s nest” of potential privacy issues as Cyber-lawyer Eric Goldman suggests. You decide.
“Yahoo!”:http://www.yahoo.ca/ Canada’s Hunter Madsen stated in Ken Schafer’s latest “5 Questions interview”:http://www.onedegree.ca/2006/09/14/5-questions-for-hunter-madsen-marketing-director-yahoo-canada that:
bq. Most advertisers are dabbling in BT [Behavioral Targeting] these days … but the smartest players dived right in more than a year ago, and they’re pulling results that would surprise you.
Leaving aside Mr. Madsen’s objectivity in deciding which “players” get to be considered the “smartest”, I find it interesting that he is the second employee of a major portal to pitch me on “BT” in the last 2 weeks (albeit Madsen’s was an indirect pitch). Clearly, BT is all the rage in the portal community and it’s a race to see which portal player gets the most companies onto their proprietary system.
But, before we all run out and sign deals with the portals in an attempt to be one of these “smartest” players let’s do a quick review of what exactly is being proposed so we can make a marketing decision that is best for our companies and not for one that is best for the portals.

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