The Vancouver 2010 Olympics Men’s Hockey Final has Canada vs. USA live on their website. You can view real-time stats such as goals, penalties, shots on goal, etc all on their real-time game statistics display. The Vancouver 2010 website is a perfect example of how events can use technology and social media to keep online visitors on their website; less bounces.

Here’s a screen shot of watch you see when you watch the Olympics 2010 Live on Vancouver2010.com’ live cast system. In this screenshot, you can see live statistics for the Men’s Gold Medal Game. I took this screenshot on Feb 28, 2010 12:46PM PST. It shows you stats for every period; goals, shots, penalty minutes, powerplay minutes, powerplay goals and more. Have you seen this feature on the website? Let me know what you think about the Vancouver 2010 official website in your comments below.

Here’s Vancouver2010.com’s website page to watch the Gold Medal Game:

http://www.vancouver2010.com/olympic-hockey/schedule-and-results/mens-gold-medal-game—game-30_ihm400101t4-nx.html

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As an Internet Marketer, I find it difficult to convince clients how social media can benefit their business growth. Its to be expected of course especially with small businesses caught up in the old mindset that sticking with their traditional marketing strategies will do them just fine. And of course, that is fine. That is unless you want to grow. Lend an open ear to our Internet Marketer I say and open your mind to Social Media.

Dell made 3 million dollars from Twitter

A couple of weeks ago, I had to explain to one of my friends how business can leverage social media platforms such as Twitter beyond his belief that its only useful if you’re a celebrity and that it can be used to increase your online sales and conversions. I showed him a recent article published on Internet Retailer that discussed an article posted by the New york Times online stating that Dell made 3 million dollars from Twitter over the last 2 years (sources below). In the article, it says that it took Dell 18 months to make its first $1 Million, but much faster to make its next. The reason for that is because when most people use twitter they dont realize how it can benefit them, but as soon as companies like Dell, GoDaddy, HostGator, RedFlagDeals, start posting promotional codes on their websites, people start listening and keeping on top of their tweets.

The fact is, leveraging Twitter (twitter followers that is), is no different that leveraging your newsletter subscribers. If you’re an online business, you have subscribers. They are your past customers, customers that have asked you a question in the past, and customers that have signed up to your email newsletter no matter how frequent or infrequent you send one out.

Here’s a Twitter/Social Media campaign being used by DomainsAtCost.ca to increase domain name registrations and other services:

DomainsAtCost.ca’s OH Canada Olympic .ca Sale

If you’ve never thought of using leveraging Twitter or Facebook to increase your online sales and conversions, you should. Depending on your customers of course, whether they are online or not, getting people to follow your company on Twitter and or Facebook is a good idea. If your customers are using these platforms on a daily basis, then why aren’t you trying to convert them from these platforms? Use Twitter and Facebook to promote coupon codes like DomainsAtCost.ca and Dell. Your followers will come to learn that if they subscribe and follow you, the next time a new promo code comes out, they’ll be notified.

Sources:

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/12/dell-has-earned-3-million-from-twitter/
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE55B0NU20090612
DomainsAtCost.ca DOTCA Domain Name Sale (landing page)

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So, I’ve been having some trouble uploading new photos to my facebook account. Actually, I’ve had a more than just a little trouble uploading photos; I’ve spent the last 4 days trying to. Ugh.

This isn’t the first time I’ve had trouble with facebook. Several months ago I couldn’t edit any of my photos, or post anything on my wall; pretty nuts. But, after almost going insane, I opened Internet Explorer instead and whaddya know? It worked.

Ummm, I had some extra time so I took screen caps to show you:

So if haven’t already figured out which browser I use from the title of this post, I use Google Chrome. I use Firefox too, but mainly for work, but for everything else such as gmail, adsense, analytics, adwords, Google Chrome is a cleaner interface.

Here’s my question: Since Microsoft owns part of Facebook, what’s stopping them from influencing the Facebook team to slow down cross-browser compatibility fixes for Google Chrome?

I guess my problems are more likely due to the fact that Google Chrome is still a baby in comparison to Internet Explorer and Firefox/ Mozilla, but its Google people; come on! Support it! Google rocks! =)

Am I the only one having problems with Google Chrome and Facebook? Let me know in the comments below! Thanks!

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How Blogs & Social Networks Killed Yahoo! GeoCities

I just received an email from Peter & Jerome, WAYN.com founders, announcing their new release and having reached the 15 million member milestone. WAYN, “Where Are You Now”, is a social network that has always focused on connecting people from around the world.

Here’s a cool video you’ll find playing on their homepage; they do a great job “painting a picture” of the experiences you can get by being a WAYN Member:

Here are screenshots of their new site (above) compared to its old version:

Besides getting rid of the wacky cartoon character from their logo, here are some of the new hot features youll find with the new WAYN.com:

• Create a plan telling your friends what you are up for doing and invite your mates to join you!
• Twitter and Facebook integration. Synchronise your WAYN account with Facebook and Twitter and share your plans with all your friends
• Friends of your friends. Find out who from your friends are already using WAYN
• Improved Website Layout & Navigation. Improved taxonomy making it easier to browse
• Travel Tools. Aiding you on your travels.

Despite the cleaner look and newly added features, I wonder if their new look and feel is already too little too late when you look at some traffic statistics compared to TravBuddy.com, a social networking web site specializing in connecting travellers.

TravBuddy.com was launched in 2005 and allows users to find travel buddies planning to travel to the same places at the same times, create travel based blogs, upload travel photos and review bars, restaurants, hotels and attractions. If you’ve never seen that featured on TravBuddy.com, I would seriously check it out; its really really cool. As of today, TravBuddy.com has 1,558,666 registered users (proudly posted on their homepage) compared to 15 million WAYN.com members. Despite WAYN.com’s much larger member numbers, the number of unique visitors to their site is taking a dip.

Let’s have a look at site analytics chart I pulled from Compete.com (WAYN.com vs TravBuddy.com):

(click to see the a larger image and year over year data)

I keep a close eye on the multitude of social networks; which ones are popular in North America, Asian, Europe, etc. One in particular, TravBuddy.com, is I’ve known for a while whom I would consider to be WAYN.com’s direct competitor when it comes to a traveller’s social network.

Over the past year, WAYN.com has seen a yearly change of -38.79% from March 2008 to March 2009 and a monthly change of -35.26% from February to March 2009. In TraBuddy.com’s case, the number of unique users to their site has actually increased 87.25% over last year. Despite WAYN.com’s drop in unique users, it will be interesting to see if their facelift will help them retain their users and regain their spot over TravBuddy.com

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I have a question for you, when was the last time your facebook/blog-reading exhausted eyes looked at a GeoCities website? If you don’t know what GeoCities is, or was for that matter, you probably won’t be in shock and have any understanding as to why I’m chuckling while I write this post. GeoCities was founded in 1994 and became a popular web-based system that provided online tools to create your own website, ie. http://www.geocities.com/kingrosales or http://kingrosales.geocities.com. Yahoo! purchased GeoCities for more than $2.87 billion in 1999 at a time when GeoCities had more than 1.1 million users and was one of the original products for its present web hosting services.

I created my first GeoCities website in 1998 (over 10 years ago, hence the chuckling) and discovered how easy it was to create a site without having to rely on my HTML skills. I remember feeling like I was doing something very cool and revolutionary. I was so hooked in fact, I started making GeoCities websites for all these girls I had crushes on (I can’t believe I’m not erasing that haha – well, it did work 50% of the time anyway). They were great tools to learn from back then.

Having a GeoCities website meant that you didn’t have to worry about setting up a domain name and hosting account for your site. All you had to do was create an account, create some images and write your own html; that was it. The file manager was built in and it was really straight forward.

These days, telling someone you had a GeoCities website wouldn’t probably get you very far, especially if you were applying for a web design jobs; I’d leave that part out and stick with your Photoshop skills. From what I’ve been reading in some blog comments about this topic, you’d probably even get laughed at.

“So what’s happened to GeoCities?”

April 24, 2009 – GeoCities will close later this year

Just this past week, Yahoo! announced that it would be closing GeoCities later this year. Fortunately, for current GeoCities account holders, they’ll have time until about the end of the summer to create a new site elsewhere or do what would help Yahoo create new business by switching their free accounts to paid hosting accounts.

When I found out that Yahoo! was closing Geocities yesterday, the first thing I remember thinking was, “when was the last time I saw a Geocities website appear in any SERP? Over the last several years, the web has simply been evolving as a blogger’s playground; static and old Geocities webpages are simply not enough to keep up with the growing number of emerging blogs publishing new content frequently. When was the last time you saw a Web 2.0 product promoting static websites like GeoCities sites? Blogs rule the SERPs; there’s BlogCatalog and MyBlogLog which was actually acquired by Yahoo! in January 2008 for $10 Million. Blogging platforms such as Blogger and WordPress a tremendous advantage over static websites with the built in technology that gets their pages ranked higher and faster. Plus, why would anyone choose to build their website with a platform that had leaderboards and skyscrapers all over it when they have blogger and wordpress that don’t?

Google has Blogger, Yahoo HAD GeoCities… well, at least has MyBlogLog, and Microsoft has Live Spaces – when was the last time you saw the latter two in a SERP?

Im not ruling Microsoft out yet, I mean they do own part of Facebook and since their acquisition of Avenue A/RazorFish in May 2007, have not only managed Facebook advertising, Microsoft also manages advertising for top names like the Wall Street Journal; read, Microsoft serves up ads for WSJ. All that Microsoft can do now is either A) attempt another takeover bid on Yahoo! or B) Build another “me too” product and call it “Plugger”.

If you’re like me, you have so many social network accounts that you can’t even remember them all, let alone the passwords for them. I believe Blogging and Social Networking go hand in hand in taking down GeoCities. Before there was Facebook, there was this huge void in time after when only Friendster (which now has a primarily Asian user base), MySpace, Hi5 and maybe a handful of other social networks ruled the social networking landscape and when pre-Blogger and WordPress sites dominated SERPs (read, Wikipedia’s list of Social Networks). Thats when platforms such as LiveJournal and Typepad were at the top of their games. After that, more and more people started making their own blogs thanks to Blogger and didn’t have to worry about being fed ads on their sites and was really simple to setup. More and more people began contributing to blogs, commenting and then creating their own blogs; creating what we now know as the Blogsphere. Facebook became successful because it had the right formula from the start (despite the fact that its founder may have based its code off of Friendster). This formula is what made Facebook spread like wildfire and become this uber social platform.

When was the last time you went skipping along and thought, “I am going to build myself a free website on GeoCities!!!”??? I mean, when was the last time I told myself I wanted to build a website that did nothing but waste some space in a cold server room?

These days, more and more people aren’t simply creating static websites or even blogs. You know what they’re building? they’re building their own social network! I hate to break it to you Mr. “I just spent $100,000 on a development team building another Facebook”, but its called, “try Googling ‘free social networking scripts’”. I’m creating a “How To Build Your Own Social Network In 15 Minutes” product for clickbank, so if you want to know more about this in the future, you should subscribe to my feed.

The bottom line is that as much as we’re all aware of the fact that the days of static websites are long gone, Yahoo closing GeoCities gives us a significant event for our future’s history to look back and… blog about haha.

In a similar post on CNet News, JCPayne commented this: “The Yahoo CEO seems prepared to kill off everything other than search and then turn over babelfish, altavista, overture and all the rest over to Microsoft in the end.” – I found this pretty interesting and I’ll definitely be keeping notes as the rest of the Yahoo story unfolds.

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