Own your niches

Advertising Age recently ran a story about Purina’s jump into the role of curator for pet enthusiasts with its website www.petcharts.purina.com :

Purina Joins Pack of Marketers Turned Content Aggregators (if you aren’t an AdAge member, articles become unavailable after about a week)

The site is a good example of using technology to make the job of gathering, selecting, and publishing relevant content easier. The technology has enabled Purina to provide a valuable resource to their target – pet enthusiasts – in an efficient and effective way.

In the future, more and more brands are going to try to claim the curator role in the niches that make up their target market. Will you be next?

If you look at the niche communities that make up your target market, is the thought of owning them overwhelming? You know you have the insight to select relevant content, and the skill to craft complementary brand messages and programs, but how would you execute it?

As an Internet Technology Agency, Trioro is here to help you execute. We find the most effective technology for your goals and develop engaging easy-to-use online experiences for your audience – own your niches, and leave the technical details to us.

Trioro in the community

Though a little different from what we usually blog about, we’re pretty proud of our involvement and support of local environmental organizations, so we wanted to share. The organizations listed below are doing great work to improve the state of the environment by educating, enabling, organizing, and encouraging our communities to take real actions - making a positive impact on the environment. Check them out:

Earth Day Canada

Earth Day Canada is a national environmental communications organization mandated to improve the state of the environment by empowering Canadians to achieve local solutions.

Our Power

Our Power is a voluntary organization, partnered with the Toronto Renewable Energy Co-op (TREC), whose mission is to promote and facilitate community-based sustainable energy projects.

Zerofootprint

Zerofootprint's mission is to empower individuals and communities to fight climate change in measurable and practical ways. Zerofootprint develops applications and initiatives to measure and manage carbon and ecological footprint for the purpose of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Digital Coupons - part 2

A couple days after my last post on Digital Coupons insideTORONTO ran an article about the Downtown Yonge BIA providing its 2000 members the ability to offer digital coupons through its Mobile Yonge program. : Yonge Street stores going high-tech


Though not explained very well on the Mobile Yonge site, the system works by choosing coupons on their website or through a mobile version of their website. Then if you have a decent mobile internet browser, you redeem the coupon by viewing its unique bar code on your phone's screen, which the cashier scans at the time of purchase.

If you don't have a good browser, you're left to print the coupon at home and bring it with you.

I signed up to try it out, and I must say that only having two coupons available is a little underwhelming. I hope they have a lot more in the pipeline.

Persona's Defined

In the world of website development a persona refers to the description of a fictitious person that is very similar to an actual human that would visit your website.
Personas are typically given a real name so that the development team can refer to them as a real person.  The characteristics given to the persona paint a picture of what you would expect to see if someone fitting that description were using your website. 

Using only one persona to describe all the users for your website would be an over-generalization.  It is common to have several personas, each describing a different type of interaction and a different type of person that would use your website.

The approach of using personas allows a team to share a consistent understanding of who there users are that are going to work with the website being developed.  Personas also give clients and developers some common ground to help relate to the business need with the technical solution.  In a sense this provides a "human element" that helps the development team empathize and identify with the end user.  For the same reason it is common for the persona to be given a photo of someone similar to the persona.

The more detailed a persona can be, the better.  However, even a simple persona is helpful. 
Here's an example...

Kathy is a 30 year old business professional who is always on-the-go.  Kathy has Internet access wherever she goes and is quite comfortable with computers.  As a result her interest and time available to research new information is limited.

The development team can then infer that the following considerations should be made when building a website Kathy would use:
- be concise and straight forward so Kathy doesn't have to hunt around for what she wants
- it's okay to use familiar interface elements such as clicking column names to sort data, Kathy is probably familiar with this
- consider providing mobile content so that Kathy has access to the website from her Blackberry

Of course, this is a simplified example, but hopefully you get the point.

More information on personas is available here:

• Wikipedia
• Usability.gov
  

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Within Six Degrees

Trioro is proud to announce the addition of Six Degrees Medical Consulting to its growing list of clients in Marketing and Communications industries.

“We have been very impressed with the ideas, creativity and energy of the Trioro team. They have helped us recently with cutting edge ideas for use in our new business presentations. In addition, they redid our company website and gave us something that is now generating very positive feedback from our clients. I look forward to our next project with Trioro!”

Colin Buchanan

Six Degrees Medical Consulting

Digital Coupons

Some grocers are experimenting with digital coupons. The most promising of these looks to be a system where coupons are “loaded” onto the shoppers loyalty card. The shopper selects coupons online adding the coupons to their account. Then, at the register, the system retrieves the coupons for the products purchased.

What seems to be missing from these systems are options for the shopper to remember what coupons they have “clipped” once they are already in the store. Right now, the shopper needs to go online to look at their list and print it off.

An option to retrieve the list from a SMS text message might be helpful for the younger, on-the-go crowd, but they are not usually the target demographic for coupon clipping. In store kiosks may be a smarter option for the target coupon clipper. The kiosk would allow shoppers to scan their card to receive a print-out their coupon shopping list. Stores that already have self serve check-out kiosks might be able to avoid additional capital expense by adding this extra feature to this existing infrastructure.

There are also other types of digital coupons out there. One example is with mobile phones where the consumer takes a picture of an advertisement with their cell phone and sends it to a short code. The picture is matched to an available promotion, and a coupon is sent to the consumer’s cell phone. One company that provides this service is Snaptell.

Earth Hour: A Positive Measure

I was watching CBC Sunday this week - the day after Earth Hour. The show featured a segment, "Was Earth Hour Worth It?" The debate centered around whether or not Earth Hour accomplished the goal of raising awareness about climate change. The dissenting opinion was that turning off our lights for an hour isn't really accomplishing anything. The gesture may even leave some people feeling that they've actually done something to directly result in solving the climate crisis.

Our Power is an initiative started in Toronto to enable neighbourhood groups to purchase renewable energy systems for their houses. As a collective, the process of making a significant purchasing decision is easier. There is also an increased benefit of having multiple houses reduce their environmental impact.

Trioro supports the Our Power website. The statistics for the Our Power website were quite encouraging this past weekend. The traffic was up 400% over any other weekend. Although Our Power has been busy raising awareness, there has been no recent event to directly result in this traffic spike. The increased traffic was very specific to Saturday and Sunday. Our Power also has no direct affiliation with Earth Hour or the WWF.

This increased traffic to the Our Power website came from people taking their own initiative to do more than just turn off the lights for one hour.

Blogged with the Flock Browser