If you are feeling benevolent today or have 5 minutes to kill, Marc-Antoine Lacroix, Msc student from HEC Montréal, is conducting a survey of needs of website owners for his final research project.

I have created a very short online survey that requires less than 5 minutes to complete. The survey is confidential and contains no personal questions.

To take the survey, follow the link below:

http://www.hec-questionnaire.com/index.php?sid=12

Thank you very much for your collaboration!
Marc-Antoine Lacroix

If you have any questions:
lacroix.marcantoine@gmail.com
phone number : 514-393-3955

The survey is bilingual and the HEC system does not make it possible to identify who answered what.

This weekend, I stumbled into a review of ma-bimbo from Le Soleil, which apparently is one of the hottest websites in Québec right now.

The website is actually from a french company, with a french and an english version, but due to its popularity, I thought it would be interesting to mention it here.

So Miss Bimbo caters to *girls* teenagers, and is an online game where you “grow” a virtual character, with the objective of being the most popular and richest. The characters can get on diets, go to tanning salons, get breast implants, find a wealthy and handsome man to marry, do some esthetic surgery, become a social starlet, etc. In the article, the website’s founder compares it to a modern day version of the Barbie doll, and says it’s really an innocent virtual game.

Whether it’s “ethical” or not is a judgement I’ll leave to you; what’s interesting is that they’ve tapped into a niche that works very well in Québec (and in Europe as well). In just the past month, the website had a total of 893.000 visits from Québec (in a province with 7 million population !!!), with 130.000 visits from Outremont and 112.000 from Ste-Foy. And this is mostly word-of-mouth, as I haven’t noticed any advertisements in any media about the website.

I’ve spoken in the past with other entrepreneurs if a website catering to a local audience was viable, and most of their replies was that it had to be “generalist” — looks like this isn’t true anymore, if you’ve got enough imagination.

Picture taken by Alistair Croll

A Net Neutrality Rally was organized yesterday midday in Ottawa, where customers of Internet provider Bell Canada and sympathizers gathered to protest traffic throttling by large ISPs.

The rally is a consequence of Bell Canada admitting that they were throttling P2P traffic, even if the traffic was in fact managed by third-party resellers. These companies, and customers alike, felt abused by Bell Canada. Their position is that ISPs should not monitor or throttle Internet traffic; or in other words, that it should be “neutral”.

The Net Neutrality movement was in fact started in the US when cable companies and other ISPs voiced that Internet companies like Google, and applications that consumes a lot of traffic, like Bittorrent, should pay a fee to ISPs for the heavy use of their telecom infrastructure. Companies like Google argued that it threatened everything on how we view the Internet.

Bell Canada’s case is exacerbated by the fact that they are the dominant telecom company in Canada, and also they advertise their Internet service as “unlimited” and “consistently fast”.

Furthermore, P2P is 100% legal in Canada; and that’s why p2p throttling looks like a complete arbritrary move. Come to think of it, it also doesn’t make sense to throttle plans when you offer plans with download speeds of 16mbps. Of course people are going to use it to view and download videos and bandwidth-intensive apps, otherwise they would have taken the slower plans.

More photos of the event

Standoutobs, which aims to help companies find key talent, announced they have now a new partner, CUhire, a company dedicated on helping credit unions on their recruiting efforts.

I thought that this was a smart business move, in the sense that CUhire is certainly more knowledgeable and more resourceful when it comes to their industry — decupling then Standoutjobs’s sales effort. If they are capable of offering customized portals and features, this opens up new opportunities for Standoutjobs. The company’s main product, RECEPTION, is now free, but there is certainly business to be done here when they will decide to introduce a paying plan.

Ben Yoskovitz has also been busy putting together a podcast show focused on recruiting. OK, I admit I stopped listening when there was a 20 seconds pause at the beginning, but the show and the partnerships makes me think they are on the good track. Hope they will come up with similar creative initiatives next.

Search Engine Optimization and Social Media Optimization, aka SEO and SMO, are relatively new fields in marketing, and as such, are often overlooked by most people when launching a new service or a new product. I also know quite a handful of web people in Montreal who don’t understand SEO and see them as gimmicks designed to “fool” Google and other search engines, and as a consequence, are completely unnecessary if you have a good website.

Needless to say that these words come from engineers who believe in the motto “build it, and they will come”. For me, experience shows this motto is true but what’s also true is that this happens after a very long period of time. Marketing is then necessary to speed up adoption of your product or service, and also reach out more efficiently to potential users.

In Montreal, there seems to be now a very active community of people working in Internet marketing and “pushing the boundaries”. This is a topic I am interested in, however, this is not a topic I am looking into covering in MontrealTechWatch, due mainly to lack of time. If you want to keep track of this though, Nicolas Cossette runs a very good blog named Montreal Social Media. He covers this week the Third Tuesdays meetup, a gathering of social media practitionners. I also find interesting his monthly tracking of companies doing Internet Marketing in Montreal.

I find those reports excellent, and hopes he continues — I am looking for instance into more reports about blog and social media adoption in Quebec and in Canada.

yulbiz, which started as a regular meetup for bloggers writing for business purposes, has now an official website and become an official organisation.

Like other similar meetups in Montreal, yulbiz uses the acronym yul — representing Montreal’s aiport code, and was started to extend online conversations between bloggers to an “offline” setting. The formula prooved to be popular, with profesionals in marketing, consultants, web entrerpreneurs, head of media and pr agencies attending the meetups.

The initiave sparked for instance the bloggers advertising network by Transcontinental Media, and it’s also the place where the co-founders of startup praized met. Their latest venture was publishing a book entitled “Pourquoi bloguer dans un contexte d’affaires”.

The initiative was so popular that it’s now also hosted in Quebec city, in Paris, Barcelona, Brussels and even Warsaw, in Poland. This is where yulbiz.org comes, as an organisation which would “manage” the growth, and also promote blogging, social media and networking.

There is an interesting article by Alain McKenna at Technaute mentionning that high-definition TV might save TQS, a local television station which filed for bankrupcy last month due to “shrunken” advertising revenues.

The theory, which came from its directors, was that high definition will allow pay-per-view, interactive and personalized content. The tv station would then be able to gather additionnal revenues, and also sell them at a higher rate.

It’s amusing to think that changing the physical channel, or medium (here, television), would get them better chances. For me, a media company should focus first and foremost on getting quality content - but cogeco, TQS’s main shareholder, doesn’t seem to make many efforts to get original, innovative, and relevant content. I don’t watch much tv, but everytime I stumble on TQS, they always seem to have old gags or old tv american series, whereas they should have focused on locally-produced, vibrant, even iconoclast shows. I think that as along as you have those, a media company can then focus on the medium to bring this content to as many people as possible.

High-definition TV is a promising technology but it’s no excuse to keep producing lame shows. Even then, when we will reach 2011, iTMS, netflix, amazon and millions of video podcasters would eat TQS’s lunch.

Seeing how Carl Mercier and Mat Balez managed to get on techcrunch and on the frontpage of digg last week, I was curious to see how other startups were doing on blogs.

The following map shows Montréal startups and new websites; with the size showing the total number of trackbacks they had for the last 6 months from the blogosphere, and the color showing the pace at which they are receiving new mentions on blogs, blue being 0 mentions per week and red being 200 mentions per week.

click on the image to get the large version

The data is taken straight from technorati. Furthermore, I distributed each of them according to their target market (if they were targeting the consumer or the entreprise market) and on the other axis, the interactivity and empowerement given to each user, from a list of criterias.

First, one comment: podbean and watchmojo’s size stands out from the graph, but I believe it’s mostly because they have gamed technorati in the past, by producing multiple rss feeds and by automatic generation of links on subdomains which are obviously engineered for Google and search engines like technorati. However, it’s fair to mention that podbean users (podcasters) are also promoting the service by themselves.

That said, one conclusion that I get from this graph is that websites that focus on interactivity/user empowerment do very well on blogs. refactormycode.com, defensio, librivox are getting a lot of traction, and for me, it’s because the users of these services have a very strong feeling of ownership towards the content on each website.

The subject of marketing and promoting services on the web has been for a long time a mystery to me, on how a web destination could suddenly become viral popular and have users promote the services themselves instead of the marketing department pushing it. Seeing this graph, the picture is clearer. The lesson is that it pays to make the user empowered, and second, it pays to be have a strategy for digg and techcrunch.

If you have comments about how to leverage other tools like del.icio.us, stumbleupon, emails, you are more than welcome

Note: i just had an email asking how i put akoha, praized or standoutjobs even though their features are not public yet: they were just put in the middle of the graph

Transcontinental Media is launching the 20th of September a local advertising network, allowing announcers to advertise on Québec-based blogs. The initiative will focus initially on a small subset of bloggers, presented as the 20 most influental blogs in Québec, and will show ads from high-end announcers and from its subsidiary Les Affaires.

The initiative is organized by Guillaume Brunet, although Michel Leblanc presents himself as the father of the idea.

This is a direct result from Yulbiz, a local event started by Michel Leblanc and Philippe Martin, where business bloggers meetup and discuss about their web projects and business issues. Since attendees were also heading communication agencies and media groups, I see this as a natural outcome of Yulbiz, and a proof of the group’s dynamism and success. It is noteworthy that they have also published a book lately on the topic of blogging.

Here is the list of the blogs participating:

• Michel Leblanc, who is specialized in marketing and blogging
• Philippe MArtin, social media, blogs and video blogs
• AMM-PCM, a group blog on interactive marketing
• Guillaume Brunet,
• Christian Guy,
• Benoit Descary, focused on new technology and tips
• Stephane Guerin, who blogs about marketing and technology
• Martin Lessard, a blog about Internet culture and society
• ipub.ca.cx, a blog about advertising
• Michael Carpentier, an entrepreneur fron Quebec city
• Vlancom, a blog about advertising and communication
• Yanick Manuri, on online advertising
• Groupe Vectis, on management and marketing
• Alain Theriault, a startup “coach”
• Stephane Hamel, a web analytics blog
• Benjamin Yoskovitz, web entrepreneur
• Geoffroi Garon, Stratégie d’affaires et communauté Web
• Marc Snyder, a blogger in PR and communication
• Yves Williams, a web entrepreneur
• Eric Baillargeon,
• Claude Malaison, on social media
• VC TV, a video blog on startups and entrepreneurship
• and Montreal Tech Watch

I like the fact that it’s local, which means ads are highly relevant to any Montreal Tech Watch reader. Products like Google AdSense are inadequate for bloggers as they were designed mostly for high-trafficked websites. Blogs on the other hand don’t have as much readership, but they are highly focused and influential, which calls for specialized ad networks like this. Transcontinetal Media also want to increase overall readership of the blog network, which left me wondering what they are preparing for the future.

This might be old for some of you, but Jakob Nielsen published a study on banner blindness, which shows that Internet users never look at anything that looks like an advertisement. Eyetracking shows for instance that readers “jump” straigtforward to the content.

In times where advertising budgets are shifting to the web, and where companies and most web startups rely solely on advertising for their revenues, this raises core questions. As marketers and advertising specialists search for more intrusive elaborate ways to get their message in front of the customer’s eyes, internet users fight even more (unconsciously or not) to focus on what they were looking for, i.e. content.

In Montreal, I have been reading Yannick Manuri’s blog, where he asks questions about effectiveness (here here and here). I have talked about the subject to other marketers and most of them think advertising should be blended with content so as to force high click through rates; which I view as a quick fix that will get you shot down by your audience in the long term.

What are the solutions then? I think, first everyone should question how advertising on the web should be done. What we see mostly these days are copy&paste of the messages found on print&TV: ad copy is broadcasted, over and over to the masses. Internet is the only medium which allows one-to-one and personalized communication, and that is not leverage enough actually. Ideally, the message given to each reader should be highly relevant to him/her and his current needs. Second, I think, and this is just a personal opinion, that you can’t build an industry with only advertising. The television industry has done this way for the past half-century, but unlike the web, their content is broadcasted, and most of it entertainement. People now use the web for highly focused tasks, and find information for their work, for events they will attend, communicate with friends&colleagues, etc. Those are needs, and as such, there must and will be a way to monetize it. Saying otherwise doesn’t make sense to me, it would be like, say, goods at the grocery store should be provided for free, and will be supported by advertising.