Bon, sans plus attendre, voici en rafale une liste désorganisée de points à retenir, qui vous permettront de prendre le poul de qui s’est dit aujourd’hui:

• Il y a un an, le mot d’ordre au Webcom était de convaincre les gens d’affaire de la pertinence d’utiliser les réseaux sociaux, et notamment Twitter, dans un contexte d’affaire. Cette année, on a surtout parler du besoin d’embaucher et de former des community managers, et de l’importance grandissante du mobile comme plateforme de consommation de contenu numérique.
• Il y a déjà 1 million de personne qui ont un téléphone intéligent au Québec, et d’ici la fin 2011 il y aura autant de téléphones intéligents que de téléphones sans-fil traditionnels.




• Jared Spool a clairement donner la meilleur conférence de la journée, et si il y a une chose que je retiens, c’est que ce n’est pas le nombre de features qui font la qualité d’un site Web, logiciel ou application, mais bien l’expérience usager. De plus, un site avec trop de fonctionnalités se traduit mal sur un mobile, et l’émergence du mobile va amener une simplification du Web.




• Le hype autour de Foursquare est maintenant terminé, et la valeur d’un check-in a largement diminué, et doit maintenant être remplacé par une valeur économique (un rabais lorsque on check-in dans un restaurant par exemple).




• Il n’est pas facile de mettre en marché une application sur le App Store. Frédéric de Pardieu a bien détaillé son experience de mise en marché pour mtrip, et je pense que la plus grande frustration est le manque de statistiques pertinentes fournies par Apple. On connait les commentaires des gens et le nombre de ventes qu’on a fait, mais aucun moyen de savoir les tendances de recherche sur le app store ou le nombre de gens qui ont accédé à la description d’une application sans l’avoir acheté. À quand les résultats de recherche payants sur le app store?




• Il y a 3 ans, quand le iPhone a été lancé, tout le monde trippait à lire des journaux comme le New York Times avec le nez collé à son écran. Mais avec l’arrivée de l’iPad, on se rend compte que c’est complètement contre-nature de consommer autant de contenu texte sur un si petit écran. La multiplicité des plateformes va continuer parce que c’est illusoire de penser qu’une machine peut servir tous nos besoins adéquatement.




• Lorsque on développe une application pour iPhone, il ne faut pas oublier que lorsque l’usager entre du texte, la moitié de son écran est caché par le clavier virtuel. Il faut donc prévoir le design et s’assurer que l’expérience usager ne sera pas affectée.




• On ne peut pas bâtir une communauté en ligne sans apporter de valeur ajoutée au public. C’est bien beau de dire “OK, je lance tel produit, on va créer une page Facebook”. Mais il faut être capable de répondre à la question que l’usager va se poser: What’s in it for me?!




• Un bon community manager ne fait pas qu’écouter et modérér une communauté, il doit être capable d’analyser les commentaires des usagers pour comprendre leur sentiment  et réagir en conséquence.




• Lorsque une marque décide d’investir dans les réseaux sociaux, il faut qu’elle soit prête à faire face à tous les commentaires du public, même ceux qui sont négatifs. Mon ami Laurent R. me disait qu’il connaissait quelqu’un qui s’est plaint sur le wall Facebook de Telus après avoir fait face à un service à la clientèle affreux, et qui a vu son post être effacé une heure plus tard. C’est l’équivalent d’appeler un client et de lui dire d’aller se faire f*&”/…




• Un principe que les nouveaux adeptes de Twitter devraient garder en tête: plus un individu (ou une marque) parle de lui-même, plus rapidement il va perdre ses followers. Twitter est un outil de partage d’information et de conversation, pas un outil de marketing direct!




• Et pour terminer, j’ai découvert cette vidéo amateure qui démontre clairement la nature humaine: il faut atteindre une masse critique de membres avant qu’une communauté puisse vraiment prendre son envol. Dans ce cas-ci, le 3ème fêtard à se joindre à la fête a vraiment fait lever le party!

But then a story like this happens, and I realize that the power of social media is a big deal after all.

A couple of weeks ago, someone close to me who grew up with a severe heart condition saw his health deteriorate fast. His doctors all agreed: only a heart transplant can save him. The only things is, Philippe El-Hage lives in a Lebanon (where there isn’t enough equipment to perform a heart transplant) and he does not have medical insurance. It order to live, he has to go to Paris to have his operation, which is to be paid in full by his family. Needless to say, they don’t have the required 220 000 euros (minimum) to pay for the surgery.

This is where Facebook comes in. The groupe Un coeur pour Philippe was created in the morning of wednesday May 19th. Two and a half days later, there are over 3,600 members (by the time you read this, the figure will probably be  much higher) many of whom have made donations through paypal. We don’t have exact figures yet, but we know the donations are in the tens of thousands, if not more than a hundred thousand dollars. Events are being organized throughout Lebanon, in Paris, Montreal etc…

Can Facebook help save a life? If yes then all I can say is that in the end, social media does deserve all the hype. The REAL power of social media is not just in allowing people to connect or allowing businesses to create awareness their brand or product. It is still about gathering people from around the world to support a just cause.

If you want to help, join the group and donate through this paypal page. Thanks!

An obvious question, since for a product page with 10,000 fans, getting 10% of users to read, interact with and click on the link provided in an update means getting an extra 500 clicks compared to an update with a 5% CTR (I know, at this point you’re either wondering how come your product does not have a fan page yet, or why I feel the need to explain how a better CTR helps a brand)

Now back to the question at hand, with a typical yet oh-so-true answer: The best time to post depends on who your fans are! For example, if your fandom spreads accross the seven seas, you might have to think about timezones before publishing an update: If you post at noon in Montreal (lunch time), it will be 9:00 am in California (start of business day), 6:00pm in Western Europe (as people come home from work) and midnight in Japan (a little late, but perhaps just before going to bed?). Moreover, if your target audience is comprised of 13-17 year olds, posting at lunch time is useless as they are in school and won’t access their Facebook account until the early evening. Anyways, you see my point: there is no formula, so you should adapt to your audience.

However, if we were to define a rule (and I will), it goes as follows: the ideal moment to write your post  is when the proportion  of people reading their Facebook news feeds vs. those updating their status is the greatest. Indeed, the faster updates are being published in a user’s live feed, the faster yours will get bumped down the list. And if you aren’t on the live feed of your fans, you won’t get enough interactions and won’t have a chance of making the news feed of users who log on a few hours later.

Fictitious data showing that the ideal moment to update your status is when number of users (blue) is the greatest compared to the proportion of status updates (red)

So when exactly do we reach that moment of climax?

First an intersting graph taken from onehalfamazing.com shows that on average, fan pages get the best CTR from monday to wednesday, and the worst is from thursday to saturday.

Basically, most users update their statuses when they’re bored at home instead of being out enjoying themselves (or a few too many drinks).

What time is the best time if most of  your fans are in the same timezone. There is no rule, but from my personal experience and the above-stated rationale, the ideal point is probably in the late afternoon (between 3:00 and 4:00 pm) as a majority of users will start checking their accounts when they come home, but they aren’t likely to update their status until after they have read their news and/or live feeds.

Until Facebook releases a better analytics tool to track the CTR on Facebook page updates, you’ll have to take my word for it, or just try different options and adjust to the results!

But then I tried to think about which sites I check out on a daily basis. Apart from the obvious yahoo (news and hockey pool), gmail (email), meteomedia (local weather forecast), RDS (sports) etc… there was one not so obvious name that came to mind: hockeyfights.com

What’s not to like about hockeyfights.com? It’s got an ugly design, it’s easy to navigate and it was doing web 2.0 way before Facebook existed. And oh, it serves a very specific niche that no other website does:

It takes one of the best part of hockey (fighting), isolates it from the rest of the sport, and creates a community where you can see every fight in the NHL (thanks youtube), vote for the winner and write crap about Tucker, Kaleta or Carcillo to say how much you hate them. There’s even a ranking of the players with most fighting majors, and log of every fight in the nhl since 1974 (I’m not joking).

If you’re still trying to figure why I think fighting in the NHL is so cool to watch, check out this bout that took place a few weeks ago, between heavyweights Brandon Prust and Rick Rypien. Definitely one of the best fights I’ve seen in a while from two very tough customers:

Now THAT’S hockey!

Blogs have been mainstream for a good 5 years, or about a third of the Web’s lifespan. So in essence, it would be as if I decided to come out with a new model of terrestrial globe while millions of people are wasting their time trying to find themselves on google street view.

18th century terrestrial globe

In fact, I was inspired by a conference given by Bill Ives at webcom09 called “blogging in the age of twitter” where he defended the thesis that twitter will not destroy blogging but in fact encourage it.

Indeed, whereas microblogs like twitter and social networks like facebook are taking over as the sexy items in an online marketer’s toolbox, the fact remains that neither of these tools can provide any meaningful piece of content for others to consume. In fact if we were to grossly generalize how twitter is being used, we could say that 25% of tweets are general comments, 25% lead to the author’s blog or website, and 50% lead to other blog articles, youtube videos and other cat related time-consuming information sources. Therefore as twitter grows stronger, especially here in Canada where everything takes an extra 2 years to catch on, the rationale behind starting a blog becomes even stronger.

More people are navigating through the web using search engines, and more people are receiving tweets inviting them to consume information on other sites. And what sites generally have the best performance on search engines and hold the most interesting information for twittaholics?

Good ol’ fashioned traditional blogs!