The Praized Blog

Flickr picture by Michel Balzer

Following a tweet I sent early yesterday morning to try to build a list of Web Analytics / Google Analytics experts offering their services in Montreal, here are some names of consultants and companies in that field. Please note the following:

• This list is probably not exhaustive. If I’m missing anyone, I apologize in advance. You can let me know in the comments and I’ll update my post.
• This is not an endorsement of any of the people/companies on my part, just a alphabetical order list of names (and contact information) that were suggested to me.
• People privately suggested to me analytics experts that work inside large organizations that do not resell their analytics services. I chose to leave those individual names out of the list to avoid poaching.

1) Adviso (Google Analytics Certified Partners )

• Their main Web site
• The description of their analytics offer
• Contact person: Jean-François Renaud, @JFRenaud on Twitter or contact information
• Address: 909 Mont-Royal Est, MONTRÉAL, QC H2J 1X3, (514) 598-1881

2) Adapt or Die Marketing (suggested by Pier-Luc Petitclerc)

• Their main Web site
• The description of their analytics offer
• Contact person: Agustin Vazquez-Levi, @oggy on Twitter or contact form

3) Bell Web Solutions

• Their main Web site
• Contact persons: Alfonso Sacco or Remy Leclerc
• Contact form

4) Eric Baillargeon

• His main Web site
• His blog (showcases his expertise)
• Contact person: Eric Baillargeon, baillargeon(AT)gmail.com or @ericbaillargeon on Twitter

5) Cossette / Magnet Search Marketing (Google Analytics Certified Partners )

• Their main Web site
• The description of their analytics offer
• Contact: Julien Raby, probably also Sylvain Amoros, 514-282-4899 or contact form

6) Justin Cutroni (he’s in Burlington, Vermont but that’s close enough to Montreal) (Google Analytics Certified Partner)

• His blog (showcases his expertise)
• Contact: @justincotroni on Twitter, on Linkedin or contact form
• Of note: he’s written a book about Google Analytics published by O’Reilly in June 2010

7) NVI (Google Analytics Certified Partners )

• Their main Web site
• The description of their analytics offer
• Contact: @NVI on Twitter or contact form
• Address: 55, Mt-Royal W., suite 999, Montréal, 514 524 7149

8 ) Ressac Media (Google Analytics Certified Partners )

• Their main Web site
• The description of their analytics offer
• Contact: @ressacmedia on Twitter or getinfo(AT)ressacmedia.com
• Address: 305 Bellechasse, # 302, Montréal, 514.843.7029

9) Jacques Warren (WAO Marketing)

• His main Web site
• Specialized in Web analytics, his various services.
• Contact: @JacquesWarren on Twitter, contact form or 1 (888) 356-6008
• Of note: he’s written a book called Web Analytics and published by Eyrolles

10) W.illli.am (Google Analytics Certified Partners)

• Their main Web site
• The description of their analytics offer
• Contact: Matyas Gabor on Linkedin or Twitter. Also, @w_illi_am on Twitter or montreal(AT)w.illi.am.com
• Address: 400 De Maisonneuve West, suite 700, Montreal, 514 448.4035

UPDATE:

As soon as I published my blog post, I got the following suggestions:

11) Herman Tumurcuoglu

• His main Web site
• His analytics blog
• Contact: @AnalyticsCourse on Twitter, on Linkedin or (514)-605-3503
• Of note, he gives 2 courses at McGill University on Web Analytics

12) AT Internet

• Their main Web site
• Their analytics product
• Contact:  Alexandre Métier, alexandre.metier(AT)atinternet.com or Fehmi Fennia, fehmi.fennia(AT)atinternet.com
• Address: 33 rue Prince, Montréal, 514 658 3571

13) Samuel Lavoie (Google Analytics Individual Qualification)

• His Web site
• Contact: on Twitter, on LinkedIn and contact(AT)samuellavoie.com

14) Stéphane Hamel

• His Web site
• His Web analytics consulting offer
• Contact: Email: shamel@immeria.net and Twitter: @immeria
  

15) Alistair Croll

• His Web site
• Contact: acroll on Twitter or contact form
• Of note, he published an O’Reilly video “Croll & Power’s Communilytics Master Class” and a book “Complete Web Monitoring: Watching Your Visitors, Performance, Communities, and Competitors” with Sean Power

16) Sean Power

• His Web site
• Contact: @seanpower on Twitter or contact form
• Of note, he published an O’Reilly video “Croll & Power’s Communilytics Master Class” and a book “Complete Web Monitoring: Watching Your Visitors, Performance, Communities, and Competitors” with Alistair Croll

17) Nofolo

• Their Web site
• Contact: Stéphane Guérin, @stephaneguerin on Twitter or stephane@nofolo.com
• Address: 880, rue Père-Marquette, bureau 200, Québec, (418) 651-9996

For the complete list of Google Analytics Certified Partners outside of Montreal (or the latest up-to-date list of Montreal partners), visit the Google Analytics web site.

Such was the title of the presentation I did this morning to a great crowd at the most recent Montreal’s Social Media Breakfast. In the document you’ll find on Slideshare, I explore what is group buying, its benefits/downsides, its origin, the Montreal competitive landscape (8 players) and thoughts about where the phenomenon is going.

Some of the content of my presentation was inspired by a great webcast titled ” Local Social Commerce: The Explosion of Group Buying” and starring Greg Sterling (Screenwerk), Perry Evans (Close.ly) and James Moran (Yipit). You can see James Moran’s slides on the Yipit blog, a must-read if you’re interested in the space.

Picture source: Heelatch

Update: Adele McAlear presented right before me this morning. Her topic was “Turbocharge Twitter with Apps”. Check out her very detailed presentation here.

Yesterday night, Facebook finally announced their local/geolocation play: Facebook Places. It’s fairly straightforward. The main idea is that you’ll now be able to tag yourself and check-in/mention/review places when doing a status update in Facebook. Each place will have a page on Facebook with basic listing information coming from data provider Localeze (we use them at Praized Media as well). Depending on your privacy settings (set at “friends only” by default), structured status updates that mention specifically a place will appear on place pages. On place pages, you’ll be able to see if your friends are there or have been to the place in the past. You’ll also other “public” status updates (when Facebook users have chosen to broadcast that information to the world). This video shows you in details how Facebook Places works. Facebook Places is available for US locations to start, with other countries coming soon. It can be accessed on the Facebook iPhone app and at touch.facebook.com.

update: Business Insider has a “how to use Facebook Places”

Merchants

Facebook has no plan to monetize Facebook Places in the short term but merchants can claim their listing. I suspect claiming a place transforms it into a local Facebook fan page. It wasn’t clear if we can we link/merge Facebook Places to existing Facebook Pages. Techcrunch has a piece about how Facebook is promoting the new place pages to advertisers.

API

Facebook is also launching an API for Facebook Places. The read API is supposed to be available today. They’re also a Write and Search API in closed beta. As Jerome Paradis told me yesterday on Twitter, Facebook Places (through its API) is probably going to become the gold standard for local check-ins. CNET calls it “one check-in to rule them all”

Launch partners

Other than Localeze as US data partner, Facebook is also partnering with Gowalla, Foursquare, Booyah and Yelp at launch. Consumers checking-in using one of these four applications will be able to broadcast their structured local information in Facebook as well (and it will appear on the Facebook place pages as well).

Goal/vision

Facebook product managers say they have three goals for Facebook Places:

1. Share your location
2. See who in your network of friends is around you
3. Discover new places.

The long term vision was explained as follow by Facebook representatives: ”there are three places that matter: 1) Home, 2) Work, 3) The Third Place. The Third Place, a term coined by urban sociologist Ray Oldenburg, is the places we go, and share lives”.  With Facebook Places, you can now “create stories around places” via local status updates. “Stories are now going to be pinned to physical locations”, the vision is to create a repository of human memories around “places”.

Privacy concerns

Facebook has obviously learned from last December’s debacle when they got Twitter envy and reseted everyone’s privacy settings to public creating a huge fury. For Facebook Places, they default the check-ins to “friends only”, which means only your friends will see your “local” status updates containing a tagged place. Even before trying the service, many people on Facebook and Twitter seem to be freaked out by it (and if you are, you can opt out here by changing the setting on “places I check in”). As I wrote on Twitter this morning, we should try Facebook Places first before we all go crazy. Keep calm, breathe normally…

For those interested in learning more, you can probably still watch the archived press conference. The Altimeter Group has a good analysis.

What it means: I believe this launch is huge for geolocation/local media space. It has come of age. Four years ago, when I launched this blog to talk about the intersection of local and social, many people didn’t see how these two topics could connect. I think everyone now understands the power of social when mixed with local. Facebook is the place where you aggregate/maintain your core social graph, your friends and colleagues. By introducing a way to easily structure status updates around local places, Facebook becomes the default local conversation engine for local places. I stated yesterday on Twitter that, “with the FB Places launch, we can officially say it: merchant/place reviews are dead. Status updates are the new merchant reviews.” I explained my rationale to Mike Blumenthal this morning:

• Status updates (or tweets) are easy to do.
• Many people have stopped blogging because doing short-form messages is so much “easier”, less time-consuming, than a big blog post.
• I think the same thing will happen to long-form merchant reviews. It’s going to become so much easier to do a quick status update review using Facebook places (and those will accumulate on the Facebook Place page) that a lot of people will migrate from doing reviews on Yelp (or IYPs for that matter) to do them
• I added that, for me, Facebook Places is not about “check-ins”. It’s about signaling socially your location. It’s about structuring a conversation about a
  local place and anchoring it to the right place.

Facebook Places will change the space forever.

There’s a new grassroot technology event in Montreal called “Tap in Tuesday“. Its goal is to have regular monthly mentoring events for startup entrepreneurs (aspiring and existing).

I’ve been chosen as the first “mentor” and I will be sharing advice and answering all types of questions about the fun life of a funded startup entrepreneur.

If you want to attend, you need to reserve your spot by emailing Gabriel Sundaram at tapintuesday@gmail.com

It’s happening this coming Tuesday August 10th at Café Des Éclusiers, 400 Rue De La Commune Ouest, Montreal at 6PM

More info on Montreal Tech Watch.

Flickr picture by Dale Gillard

The Yellow Pages Association just released new ComScore data regarding business directories access on mobile. Excerpt from the press release:

The number of mobile subscribers accessing business directories on a mobile phone increased 14 percent year-over-year to 17.3 million users in March 2010, extending the reach of Internet Yellow Pages beyond the personal computer. This increase outpaces 10 percent growth in the number of mobile media users who browsed the mobile web, used applications or downloaded content during the same time period.

In addition, the data shows that while mobile browsing (10.8 million subscribers with 21% year-over-year growth) is still the most popular way to access business directories on mobile, applications are used by 4.2 million subscribers and are showing a 42% year-over-year growth. SMS is the other popular method.

What I think is the most exciting news in the release is the demographic profile of those users. “58 percent of those who access Internet Yellow Pages on a mobile device are 34 or younger.”

What it means: following my last blog post about GPS inside mobile devices (see Four out of Five Cell Phones to Integrate GPS by End of 2011), the rise of smart phones, the future explosion of Android phones, and the interesting demographics of mobile business directories users, I have to ask: can mobile become the platform of choice for a directory publisher in the future? What would it take? The survey says “The number of people accessing Internet Yellow Pages on a mobile device at least once per week increased more than 16 percent year over year to nearly five million in March 2010.” That’s good but I think the directory industry needs to build applications that would be used multiple times per day in order to build a scalable and successful mobile-only business. It’s not impossible but the industry needs to innovate and right now, that’s not happening. Should a big directoy publisher buy Foursquare or Gowalla?

New data from iSuppli:

With cell phones increasingly becoming the nexus of the burgeoning markets for navigation and Location Based Services (LBS), the use of Global Positioning System (GPS) technology in such platforms is set to explode during the coming years, according to iSuppli Corp.

In the fourth quarter of 2011, 79.9 percent of cell phones shipped—amounting to 318.3 million units—will incorporate GPS functionality, up from 56.1 percent in the first quarter of 2009—or 187.8 million units—iSuppli predicts. (…)

iSuppli also sees an increased penetration of embedded GPS in a range of consumer and compute electronic devices by 2014. For example, iSuppli estimates that 18 percent of laptops and 42 percent of portable handheld video game players will have embedded GPS in 2014.

via Four out of Five Cell Phones to Integrate GPS by End of 2011. (found via Laurent_Local)

What it means: this massive deployment of geo-location technology will create new business opportunities that don’t even exist today. Every device and application will be able to have a “local” flavor, a local angle. And I’m fairly convinced people will feel “local” is more relevant.

Four years ago, around this time of year, Praized Media’s co-founders got together for the first time to discuss the possibility of launching a startup. We were very excited about the blogosphere and the quantity of local content being created in this new space. We thought there was an interesting business to build at the intersection of local search and local conversations happening in blogs. The first products we released (two years ago, almost to this date) were local directory and editorial tools that can be integrated within WordPress and MovableType, two leading blogging platforms. We also launched a Facebook application. All of those tools enabled structuring and aggregating of local conversations around merchant profile pages.

Turns out we were right about conversations but wrong about where and how the bulk of them would take place. We didn’t foresee the rise of the statusphere. In 2006-2007, the place where local “conversations” were happening was definitely blog posts (and associated comments) and consumer reviews in sites like TripAdvisor and Yelp. Fast-forward to 2009-2010, the blogosphere still exists but local conversations are now happening on Twitter and on Facebook, mostly in status updates. Check-ins are also part of the conversation and are being used in Foursquare, Gowalla and other location-based social networks. Social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) is now a mass-market. Facebook has close to 500 million monthly active users. Twitter has rocketed to 190 million monthly users, writing 65 million updates PER DAY!

Pew Internet said in October 2009 that 19% of Internet users now say they use social media services to share updates about themselves, or to see updates about others. That’s a huge number! It dwarfs consumer reviews and check-ins by a large factor. And according to a recently published ComScore report quoted by Brian Solis, “23% of Twitter users follow businesses to find special deals, promotions, or sales. Of that, 14% of Twitter users reported taking to the stream to find and share product reviews and opinions.”

Last year, I also discovered local user reviews are not that exciting from a monetization point of view as they happen at the end of the consumer purchase decision process, at post-purchase. The real money is earlier in the process, when consumers realize they have needs and when they start doing the research. I wrote about this in July 2009. And can you guess when business directories are being used most often? When consumers have needs (“I need to order take-out”) or are going through life events (“I’m getting married!”), early in the consumer purchase decision process.

When we built our real-time local activity stream and real-time local search technology last summer, it allowed me to see the enormous quantity of “local” information being publicly shared on Twitter and Facebook. Millions of consumers are now sharing activities and opinions about local businesses using Twitter and/or Facebook. They are also expressing needs such as “I’m hungry”, “My car just broke down” and “Does anyone have a dentist to recommend?”, even in smaller cities. I coined a new name for this: the “Needium” (the “need” medium). Local businesses would definitely benefit from hearing the voice of the consumer and engaging with them but these activities are happening on many sites and can be hard to discover through the noise. In addition, small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are extremely busy. Realizing this, we rolled up our sleeves and came up with this new game-changing product:

Introducing Needium.com

Needium.com (http://needium.com) is the social  lead generation and reputation management dashboard for SMBs. Needium monitors social media sources and detects business opportunities based on local user needs and life events. It also listens for merchant name mentions to enable reputation management functionalities. Needium aggregates and structures that information in a Web-based dashboard where merchants can log-in to easily join conversations (and more) without having to monitor all social media sites individually. Based on merchant information in our structured database, a series of pre-configured results are automatically created for them, using their location, categorization and some user social actions collected from publicly available social media activity streams.

Take for example, this account for a Holiday Inn hotel in Boston:

The left-hand side column, Opportunities, is where merchants will find the latest business opportunities we have discovered for them. If advertisers feel the opportunity is interesting for their business, they can communicate directly with the consumer using the “reply” button. In that column, they’ll find consumers asking explicitly for their products and services (see screenshot below) or find implicit statements as well. For example, a traveler from a different city saying “I’m going to Boston in 3 weeks” will potentially need a hotel room and might patronize restaurants and museums. In each status, we show the user name, the status update, the time when it was made and the source. We use a combination of verb and noun synonyms, taxonomy and semantics to identify these opportunities.

The middle column, Mentions, is where SMBs will find references to their business name. If they feel they need to reply to the comment (to correct an issue or thank a user for their comment), they can communicate directly with the consumer using the “reply” button. Again, we show the user name, the status update, the time when it was made and the source.

The third column, History, is where you find the various replied done by the merchant. When you click on “reply”, a light box pops-up (see below). Merchants can then type in their message/reply and hit “send”.

Each column comes with its search box, enabling merchants to search for specific opportunities or mentions using particular keywords.

The business model is simple: monthly fixed-fee subscriptions. The product will be available in self-service and in white-label to leverage large sales channels like Yellow Pages, search engine marketing firms, newspaper publishers and other local sales channels. Additional services available are Twitter and Facebook accounts creation and a fully-managed service where we take care of the SMB communications with consumers on Twitter and Facebook (think of it as “community management” in a box).

We believe reputation management is now a commodity, a must-have in social media filtering but that the real big opportunity is in social lead generation. Our Yellow Pages experience and expertise helps us find and surface the real SMBs business opportunities happening in social media. We think the current quantity of leads is just the tip of the iceberg. We are already working on better semantic analysis, social hints as well as a few other techniques to get an even better signal out of the noise. With that improved analysis, with more people signaling their location every day, with usage growth, hundreds of local opportunities per day in most major Yellow Pages categories will be made available. This is the true evolution of word-of-mouth marketing and tremendous value will be created by channeling this “local voice of the Internet”. As we’ve stated before, we believe local conversations on the Web are the great local search disruptor and we will be happy to work with you to empower you to capture these new revenue opportunities. If you’re interested in a test account, please contact me at sprovencher AT praizedmedia.com. You can also follow Needium news on our Needium-specific Twitter account.

Loic and Geraldine Le Meur have just announced the theme to this year’s LeWeb conference in Paris. It’s going to be “Platforms”. You can watch the introduction video here.

The 2009 edition was extremely relevant and it’s probably one of the best conferences I’ve ever attended. You can read the various posts I wrote when I was there. I believe the Le Meur’s have a created a world-class conference and I urge everyone (especially my European friends and contacts) to attend, You can register here.

This week, TechCrunch published international traffic growth trends for Twitter and they are impressive. The source is Pingdom.

Pingdom took a look at Google Trends for Websites traffic data for Twitter.com to see where the service is experiencing the fastest growth in terms of monthly usage. Again, that means its findings are far more fit for deducing overall trends than they are able to accurately detail Twitter’s user numbers, since a lot of people use desktop and mobile clients for tweeting.

Regions/countries that are growing are:

• Latin America: Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Venezuela
• Asia: India, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia
• Europe: Italy, Spain, Russia (Pingdom mentions that most European countries are growing but that these three have experienced extra sharp growth)

Additional pieces of data in the TechCrunch article:

For your information, Twitter COO Dick Costolo at the beginning of this month said they are currently at 190 million users, who are collectively posting some 65 million tweets per day. And last April, Twitter’s lead engineer for its International team, Matt Sanford, said over 60% of registered Twitter accounts were already coming from outside U.S. borders.

What it means: I wanted to specifically write about Twitter’s international growth following this tweet from my friend Perry Evans. He wrote last week, following a European trip where he probably met many European media companies: “Twitter, you have a major uphill battle in Europe. Everyone I met in media circles this week seem exceedingly skeptical of your prospects”. I wrote back to him on Twitter saying: “They were skeptical of Facebook two years ago as well…”. When I spoke at the EADP conference in 2007, many senior Yellow Pages execs in Europe didn’t think Facebook was relevant. History proved them wrong. Ten years ago, I could have written a blog post titled “Google is not going away”. Most senior execs at media companies didn’t think Google would be a direct threat. Twitter has been growing and will (has?) become an important international media company. To dismiss them is to risk being fooled for a third time.

For a flat monthly fee of $25, businesses can enhance their listings that appear on Google.com and Google Maps with a yellow tag that emphasizes specific information such as a coupon, video, website, menu, reservations, photos, or a custom message. Tags do not affect the ranking of the listings, and we clearly indicate which parts of the search result are sponsored.

via Google LatLong: Google Tags rolling out nationwide.

First found on Blumenthals.com.

What it means: related to my previous post about local monetization, Google is now launching a fixed-fee product called “Tags”. This has been the bread and butter of online monetization at directory publishers. The model is proven and will resonate with small merchants. Question: why did it take so long for Google to launch this?

Update: thoughts from Greg Sterling on this announcement. He adds “The mobile distribution of Tags may ultimately turn out to be more significant than on the PC.”