Zynga: Words With Friends

Saw an ad on Hulu. This one is targeted at the adult women demographic; at least that's my impression after seeing the ad.

At 13.3 million monthly online users, Zynga's Words with Friends is one of those online social games that has breached the offline barrier with Hasbro bringing it into the modern board game audience. How is this not just a knock-off or modern refresh of Scrabble?

It is an interesting notion, but the people who already play the online game aren't the right audience for this type of game play. After all, one of the reasons why the online game has so much traction with adult players is that we don't live near our friends.

The future of smart glass

This is a concept video from Virgin Media Business. A lot of these technological components, like smart glass, holographic imaging, and gesture navigation already exist. Holographic imaging for a variety of applications from cooking to video conferencing to remote medical diagnostics from a healthcare provider is not just for science fiction.

The Tale of Two Bookings

For the first time on an extended road trip (longer than a day, shorter than a week), I did something that I thought was reserved just for the unplanned and spontaneous. I traveled without reservations for half my trip. Traveling in the off-season (autumn or spring) to places usually visited in the summer does offer some travel discounts on the basis of supply and demand.

I planned to end day 1 of the road trip at Forks since it was at the midpoint of two places where I wanted to see the next day: the Cape Flattery lighthouse at Neah Bay and the Hoh Rain Forest in the Olympic Nat'l Forest. I booked a room at the Forks Motel in downtown Forks, mostly because it was the only non-Twilight-themed lodging place that had rooms available on a Saturday. Their online reservation system was easy to use and even sent me an email confirmation immediately after booking. When I got to the motel to check-in, the front desk already had my key ready. Checking out was just as easy. I'd say that for such a low-key motel that attracts a lot more fishermen (this season it's coho salmon), it did a lot of things right for customer retention. When I filled out the guest comment card, I only put my room number on it. What I didn't expect was a personalized note from their guest services manager thanking me for choosing their motel:

This is the first motel where I received a personalized response by email. It's awesome. Sure makes me want to stay with them again. 

When I drove further along my mostly planned route to Lake Quinault, it was already dusk. I had a few options available for Sunday night's lodging. Lake Quinault Inn was on the other side of the lake and had no cars in its parking lot. How safe would you think a woman would feel booking there. That one got skipped. The parking lot at Lake Quinault Lodge was decently full. A cashier at a local grill recommended the Rain Forest Village Resort for its more reasonable prices.  It's a fancy name for an inn with motel-styled rooms. It was apparent after getting my room key here that it was the sort of place one goes to escape from the city and possibly the summer heat. The room itself was designed to let air in and didn't have a heater. It was cold and brisk indoors. As for the other standard amenities that resorts are supposed to have? This place had none, not even have a telephone nor an alarm clock radio. It did, however, have a mostly working TV that received four local stations. Good thing I packed a library book. For the most part, it was on par with the Forks Motel; except the customer retention part. Maybe it's an oversight, or maybe it's because there are very few lodge-styled places next to the lake.

Who needs amenities with a view like this?

Would I stay at the Forks Motel again? You bet. Not only is it inexpensive, it satisfied every requirement I had in a motel room. I travel a lot domestically and internationally, and the amenities, however insignificant they might be, are worth a lot to a tired traveler. The Rain Forest Village Resort? Don't know. There are other lodging options I would check out if I'm in the area again. Also, this isn't based on price. The two lodgings were equally priced and both were in desirable vacation locales.

Hulu's Ad Targeting

Ordinarily, Hulu has been spot-on for serving up content that I like or that my fellow Huluians enjoy watching. Except for tonight. Earlier I had been surfing the web for recipe ideas for a Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) themed potluck, and subsequently hit a few culturally Spanish-oriented websites. Hulu usually presents users with one-question surveys about their viewing preferences. Sometimes these ads are represented in a way that is purely a commercial play where an advertiser pays a viewership fee and essentially hosts the entire video feed with one extended commercial at the beginning; or with regular commercial interruptions.

Tonight's pop-up ad was a user preference survey targeted at the Spanish speaking audience. Why I was targeted for this survey can only be traced to the cookies on my laptop. I have no problem with Hulu's surveys; it's a fair exchange of time, considering that I watch videos for free on Hulu. The experience is no different than a cable-tv subscription service where you pay to have to watch the commercials. I digress. This is where Hulu really should have used its own data warehouse for survey targeting instead of relying on web cookies. I haven't even watched a Spanish tv show or movie on Hulu. 

This was the survey ad that popped up:

Here's what's weird about the popup. There is a disclaimer on it, even though it is entirely in English. When you click through from "yes, let's get started" it warns you again that the survey is in Spanish and that you can "opt out" from the survey. Uhmmm..

If Hulu advertisers really wanted to know more, wouldn't it be more appropriate to have served up the popup in a bilingual format; or in formal Spanish intended for an American audience?

At it's core, it is a strangely written survey letter which started off great but leaves you wondering what is the real purpose of the mailer. Perhaps this was the least offensive demographic targeting method available to Hulu's ad agency (or in-house marketing team) since there isn't an ad choice in the user settings for foreign language movie preference.

Pardot: My first drip test

Probably the most bothersome of this whole affair is the waiting. Pardot's drip campaign setup requires you to put in a minimum 1 day (can't do partial days, hours, or minute settings) between when a user is sent an email and opens or clicks. For every open or click, add another day to your test cycle. For brevity, this test only uses two email templates. While I could have Pardot do more complicated actions, I don't want to have to delete or reset my test addresses in Salesforce, so these actions just trigger the Pardot side of the data.

Having four unique-by-content templates (video, case study, webinar, and general) for persona nurturing is a lot better (Thanks Kate!) than setting up 40 unique templates. Except, to start the personas, I'll have to create at least three sets of eight persona content pieces. Each set would include body content, a video placeholder image and a video link, and a unique call to action.

The drip report display is a big step up from what you could get out of Silverpop's EngageB2B product (and much cleaner too) which shows how many prospects are in each section of the drip.

Pardot - Sample Drip Progress

Parkopedia

Before I started working in downtown Bellevue, I had to find where to park near my workplace before I was issued a parking pass for my building's parking lot. The high end of the downtown parking scale is $24/day and the Civica parking garage next door gouges you for $18/day. The low end of parking downtown is free at either the mall or Safeway's parking structure, roughly a half mile walk. There's also the Bellevue Transit Center which is two blocks north, which doesn't have a route that passes near where I live. At the moment, the only option I have is to commute via driving into work.

I stumbled upon the Parkopedia website and it is very cleverly done. The site allows you find parking lots, public and private parking garages, and parking meter-enforced spaces.

Here is a sample map and listing of downtown Bellevue:

Parkopedia Map - Downtown Bellevue WA

Address Listings, Available Duration, and Price

There's even another service listed on the site for parkatmyhouse.com, where users can find a house or private garage to park a vehicle at, for a fee of course. There's not much action on the eastside. This is more useful for homes and garages near a metro airport, train station, or transit center.

Promote a post, only $7 on Facebook

Well, that was weird. I was just doing a shout-out to all my Seattle friends on Facebook and was notified that I could 'promote' the post.

Out of curiosity I clicked 'promote' and Facebook wants $7 for opportunity. Well, here's the thing. I don't represent the business that I'm promoting, just spreading the word about their special customer offer to other consumers.

Companies should be paying me to promote their posts; not the other way around. What do you think?

Automation Quirks: Pardot

Pardot's integrations with third party vendor software make it competitive among vendors that offer marketing automation solutions; but there are quite a lot of quirks (read this as lost functionality) when you go from using the soup version of an email marketing platform to a nuts version; Pardot is definitely the latter.

I was setting up an email for a rebroadcast. It is a basic flat email with a tracked link for a webinar invite to a select group of prospects in our database. That is pretty easy to put together. Heck, all I had to do was make a copy of the previously broadcasted email. Although, a lot of vendors don't require this step. Anyhow. To set up a rebroadcast, I had to pull out a list of 'opens' from the previous broadcast (which, fortunately, I didn't have to export and re-import as a list) and append it to the new broadcast as a suppression list. Weird. Normally, I would be able to just suppress any lead record who received the previous 'email' in say, Silverpop, and broadcast as usual.

It just causes me to have 'more stuff' within the user environment in Pardot. Now I have an extra list that I don't need for future broadcasts, but I need for this one. I have a stinkin' suspicion that if I delete the list, I'll lose the attributes of the send data for the affected prospects.

I have noticed, however, that if you have a distinct question in Pardot and look in their help or idea forums, and can't find it...the solution does not exist. And, if you really wanted them to implement it, you could suggest the idea to their idea forum and users can vote it up to the top of the queue for development.