The Importance of a Dot Com and Understanding Your Target Market

The importance of having a dot com instead of a .ca or a .mobi or any other extension right now motivated us to buy a bunch of new domain names and change all of our branding.

Until someone pointed out the obvious problem, we figured .ca would be a fine extension for our new travel site.  We liked the name Oggle.ca and since we couldn't get Oggle.com we assumed the .ca would be just fine.

But I think that's a problem many small businesses face.  My marketing teacher in grade 10 taught me one of the most important lessons I would ever learn.  "We don't care about what you think, we care about what your target market thinks."  This is somewhat paraphrased, but the gist is pretty clear.

My partners and I are all on a scale of tech that exceeds the regular population by a percentage ranging from 25 (myself) to 150.  This means we had (have) a bit of a hard time designing a site for people who don't understand computers as we do.  It took a close and very smart friend of ours finally pointed out why the .com is important.  

(If you don't know what I'm talking about, see the wiki article on domains here and the wiki article on .com here)

When I was just starting to email I had a new "friend" that was a couple of years older than me and just starting university.  She was trying to give me her email address on the phone and I kept mistaking the extension because I didn't see the relevance until after I had hung up.  

"Ok, so that was firstname.lastname (pretty simple) @ youbeesee.com, no, yubeceedot what? Uh, ok, ok, try again, ok, the letters..." and on and on.  Today it seems so incredibly simple that I barely remember that I even had a problem.

If only she had said, no, UBC as in "University British Columbia" dot ca as in short for "Canada" I would have understood more easily.

The problem I see is that today with email forwards and everyone having a .com email address whether its hotmail or a company address, no one needs to know what the domains are.  Of course the other big ones like .org or .net are pretty easy to understand because you've seen them so many times.

With email forwarding, electronic business cards and more it is even more unlikely you'll need to write an obscure email address down.

It is my experience that most people don't want to learn how the Internet works, they just want it to work without any effort.  This seems like a major component of Apple's advertising.  Simple, attractive, works, no viruses, etc.  How is this not attractive?  For people who use computers as simple tools to augment their lives and don't want or need to understand the inner workings I can see how Microsoft's nearly infinite ability to be personalized is more trouble than it is worth.

This is why we spent the extra money on a .com and others.  So when someone sees "Oistr" and manage to remember the odd spelling, at least when they automatically type oistr.com it will just work.

Someone Picks up the Press Release

A bit of success. I contacted Kwantlen University College and they're going to pick up our press release about Oistr. They're picking it up on the angle that I studied marketing there.

The great thing is that those students are definitely part of our initial target market. They're people who have traveled or want to and have experiences to share on our website. We're also hoping that if they become regular users of the site, they will grow as customers and eventually start booking trips. Also, this market also spends a lot of time online social networking and we may be able to use that to get more users.

Lucky for us, they will not only publish it in their local school paper they will also issue their own press release to all of the local papers in the areas of their campuses. Their reasons for issuing the release are for purposes of marketing as well.

If they promote the fact that their alumni are out starting businesses and being generally successful, they may be able to up their enrollment.

Help me, help you. I like it, it works for me.

Another great mutually benefical partnership.

Our Facebook Pitch Video, and Facebook Apps

Facebook in its quest to make money has done a couple things to control and promote good applications.

When the app platform was developed, it went from 0 - 60 in months, everyone wanted to get in on the fastest growing social networking site to make money. Anyone could submit an app and the facebook community could evaluate it. If it was good, it spread far and wide. That's the beauty of social networking.

A lot of bad apps were developed that didn't work, didn't hold true to facebook values or whatever. So facebook started the facebook developers fund. It sounded like a great idea, they'd take applications for funding and then pick the apps that will most likely keep facebook users using facebook, and give them money to make their apps better.

Facebook has also recently started charging a fee to become a "verified developer". This is $375 per year and you go through an evaluation process. The blogs that I've been reading say it's the same thing as an extortion racket and they're offended. One one hand I see their point because it's like the net neutrality issue. If people who have great ideas for apps can't afford or aren't willing to pay, then the users of facebook miss out on something that could potentially be great. Scrabulous would be an example, did those kids in New York know it was going to be huge, and would they have done it if they had to pay? Well, probably, but that doesn't mean others wouldn't have.

I think overall it will keep the flakes from putting up bad apps that I try out for a day or two and then delete, continually wading through the massive tides of unfinished, untested and plain crappy apps.

I think we should rely on user feedback and reccomendations instead of a fee to facebook, but they are a business and I understand.

We created a pitch video to try to get facebook funding. This is before we changed our branding to Oistr. I think we did a pretty good job. We didn't get the funding though.

Writing the Oistr Press Release

This is the release I plan to send to bloggers, newspapers and anyone who might want to write about our site once it is released as version 1.0

I've written it and re-written it. Writing a press release is actually quite hard.

You want it to be dramatic to get peoples attention, but you don't want to talk crazy. It has to sum up the business and what makes it unique without boring people. It has to be done in as little as 3 paragraphs, and certainly not reaching 2 pages unless each paragraph is more engaging than the last.

I think I've done quite a nice job. It's straight forward, it accurately describes what we are doing, it tries to convey the excitement we feel about the product and has specific calls to action at the bottom.

I'd love to hear what anyone else thinks.

Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, December 2008 — Oggle Interactive announced today their new travel-tourism site aimed at increasing customer travel satisfaction.

“Stats are showing a decline in satisfaction from customers that book trips through big online companies, and we aim to fix that. As travelers ourselves, we’re also sick of the corporate pandering that most travel sites inevitably pass on to their customers, and we present a better option.” - Co-founder and Marketing Director Scott Carmichael.

Oistr.com, in its infancy, is designed to be a unique integrated travel resource that uses a wiki-style aggregation of information to present all sides of the travel world to its users. Designed to be media rich and map-based for geographical reference, the future will see the addition of travel blogs, games, online booking of hotels, flights and restaurants, and the sponsoring of users that inspire other people to travel.

Currently the site is giving users a unique and powerful interface to show their travels and allowing them to recommend places to go, businesses they liked or didn’t, and to share their pictures and video in trips or right on the business listing. The “trips” can be public or private but Oistr asks that useful information for other users be marked as public with or without your contact information. Also, make friends, be a traveling leader people will watch or ask for advice. If you found a great deal out there or a bait and switch, others want to know.

Oistr is asking for your help. Go to the website, www.oistr.com, use the customer feedback feature and tell us what you think! Explore the site, inspire others to travel and guide them by showing your travel experiences, or simply your own home town.

In Canada, Fat People Get a 50% Discount on Flights

This is less of an education and more of a rant. Anyone who is here to really learn something other than my opinion, read a different blog or blog entry.

It's official according to the Supreme Court, "Functionally disabled by obesity for purposes of air travel" get a second seat free.

This has little to do with the main subject of this blog. The only tenuous connection here is that I feel for business owners that are being sold out by bureaucracy that has been repackaged with a fake sticker that says "defender of the people". Specifically when it actually hurts the people it is supposed to help, and make everything more expensive for the rest of us.

The best part is, the the Canadian Transportation Agency's ruling doesn't even give a proper guideline for how to determine is a person is "functionally disabled by obesity for purposes of air travel". The best they've got? Whether or not the armrest will go down. If you refer to someone serious, like, you know, a doctor, they have a very specific definition of what obese is.

When I set up my business I had to get a business bank account and license from the city before I could apply for an office. To get the office, I had to go buy insurance (arguably a good idea generally, but still not my choice), in order to hook up the alarm I had to pay another fee to the city for false alarms I hadn't had yet, do a search in city hall to determine if the office was zoned properly for my technology business and then apply for a residency permit to be allowed to go into the office I was paying rent, insurance and alarm bills for.

So yes, I get uppity when a business like an airline has to charge their other customers more so that obese people (many of whom have a choice about being obese) can have a second seat for free.

Before anyone throws the old argument "but obese people don't choose to be obese" in my face, I counter with yes, most of them do. Unless they have some kind debilitating medical condition (obviously not including laziness) that restricts their diet and exercise, it usually is their own fault.

I will continue my beliefs about why most obese people have a choice here.

As a wealthy society, we should be helping those less fortunate. My point here is that if we want to stay on top of all of this wealth we need to drop barriers to making a profit so that we have a better chance against businesses in countries where they can focus on conducting business instead of waiting at city hall for an occupancy permit.

Also, so my taxes don't go to bailing out our national airline again.

Oistr Development, Travelocity, Expedia, Opentable

This is my first blog entry about my latest business venture.

Statistics show that satisfaction with online travel bookings is actually falling. That's not what you'd expect considering how many companies there are and how they're all trying to improve themselves.

How can this be? Well it's been pointed out that industry growth is slowing and in order to compete, the big companies like Travelocity and Expedia need to differentiate themselves by adding silly crap and unnecessary flashy features.

Did they ever ask what customers want?

Our thoughts were how about a website that caters more to customers than businesses, adds a social networking aspect, is map-based to give a geographical reference and even provides games aimed at getting people outside even if it's in their own town.

It's still in development, if anyone wants to take a look at how it's developing you can see it here. We're still working on plugging in the content. Business listings are provided by a bunch of sources to give the most content, Yellow Pages, Martiniboys for nightlife, Open Table for good restaurants and Travelocity themselves for hotel content.

The big players seem to cater to the hotels and destination businesses and put them above the customer. Travelocity treats customers pretty well, but these guys all seem to have a phobia of stepping on businesses toes.

We want people to post pictures and videos of any business listed on our site. Post your own picture of a hotel room right under the business's advertising version, let people see for themselves if they're liars or honest.

There's a company called Tripit.tv that encourages people to make videos of their hotel rooms, (most travelers have a video camera, at least they have video on their cell phone) and then they'll get a cut of the commission if that hotel is booked through Tripit.

Inherently, the system is designed so that people only make good videos. In fact, even if the place was crappy, they'll still make a good video because otherwise they have no shot at a commission.

What if you could post a video if it was good or bad? The incentive here is that you can prove how bad it was, we don't just have your word for it. If you're quick enough to catch a desk agent being an ass, post it. That's the honesty factor. Plus, the hotel has the option to respond in public, it's a conversation now between customer and business.

We have high hopes. I'll keep updating as we go along. I hope people try it out.