iWeb Communities: Blog

Yesterday, November 14th, was the third edition of Webcom Montréal at the OACI headquarters. Even if the quality of the conferences was uneven, some are worth mentioning.

One such highlight was the opening conference by Debbie Weil, which discussed corporate blogs and CEO blogs. The american corporate blogs “guru” used many examples to illustrate its presentation, and some catchy (but oh so true) sentences to punctuate her speech. For Debbie Weil, to implement a corporate blog, you need to aim after shooting : “ready, fire, aim”. She also explained that “links are the currency of the blogs”. So let’s link to Geoffroi Garon who wrote a good summary of this presentation (in french).

Later, Stéphane Hamel, Jacques Warren and Simon Rivard were on a panel about web analytics. This was a really interesting topic since we are currently looking to hire a web analytics specialist. The discussion turned around conversion rates and new indicators to evaluate campaign’s results. Muriel Ide reported on this conference in the AMM’s Marketing Interactif Blog (in french, again).

On another panel named “How to obtain qualified traffic on your Web Site with Organic Referencing”, Guillaume Bouchard from NVI Solutions, Guillaume Brunet from Médias Transcontinental, and Patrick Tapp from Canoe, talked about useful hints to increase the notoriety of a site. M. Tapp explained how to evaluate the advertising investments while M. Bouchard praised search engine optimization. Les Affaires‘ and SEPAQ sites were used as examples to explain the different ways of optimizing a site. What we should remember from this is that ads could bring rapid result while SEO is longer but more durable process.

Mitch Joel, an eloquent speaker, was giving a presentation in the afternoon about “New World Tactics for Marketers in a Digital World”. Contrary to many (too many) speakers, M. Joel knows how to do an efficient presentation : a sentence, a number, an image. For him, we are at a turning point and it’s time to “burn the ships” and to review the way online marketing is done. Let’s steal some of Muriel Ide notes :

• - 20% of online research on Google have never been done before
• - 616% in growth for Youtube from april 2006 to april 2007
• - 2424% in growth for Facebook for the same period
• - 48% of leisure time is spent online
• - 9 billion videos have been viewed online for july 2007
• - Half of the public is over 34 years old
• - 3 hours is the average time spent watching online videos by week
• - 17% of Playstation owners are over 50 years old

Now that almost everyone can access the internet, we have to change the way we reach customers, and must work to build communities. Interesting point of view, even if it’s not always easy to find the best way to implement such things in the hosting industry and its particular market. Anyhow, it makes you think…

Finally, still regarding the construction of communities, Robyn Tippins from the popular MyBlogLog service, came to talk about the best practices in community building. You can access her presentation on her blog. This topic came many times during the day. iWeb has a really large clientele, and it would be great to offer them means of communicating, of representing themselves through the company, and of participating in building a knowledge base.

In short, Webcom 2007 was rewarding in terms of reflexion and networking. Let’s try to use these teachings in a concrete way…