One of the largest cinema/entertainment companies in Canada, Cineplex, has recently launched its very own - and I quote: “online social networking movie and entertainment community” (jeez, that was a mouth full!) called mycineplex (all lower-case letters; very creative, I know… also, btw, mycineplex will soon be available in french moncineplex - impressive).

According to Cineplex:

“Movies and entertainment news are a central part of the social experience and mycineplex provides entertainment and movie lovers with a new community to exchange their views. mycineplex is really a community built by movie fans for movie fans”

As part of the mycineplex experience, it gives community members the opportunity to rate, review and comment on movies, become fans of members and theatres, tag and bookmark interesting content, upload photos etc etc. Also, it offers members some cool contests, promotions, entertainment blogs and e-newsletters as well as online and mobile ticketing.

Now, some key things that I would like to point out from this initiative - lessons I think that can be learned from mycineplex:

1. Cineplex already has a “captured” audience through their various databases of movie-goers. Thus, they already have a good base for getting people to join the mycineplex community. A dream scenario for any starting online initiative.
2. mycineplex now offers Cineplex an excellent platform to diversify its revenue streams - offering more innovative and, often more measurable, marketig options to potential clients.
3. The one trait that mycineplex seems to display, the one trait that will most likely lead to its success, is the fact that they have concentrated on what they do best - movies. And this links directly to Cineplex’s core customer - passionate movie buffs.
4. mycineplex now offers Cineplex a very unique tool to garner customer insights, to build and/or improve customer profiles (demographic, psychographic, behavioral patterns etc), as well as being used as a platform to test and share some new innovations Cineplex might be thinking off.
5. mycineplex also now offers Cineplex a platform that can be easily merged with various other marketing initiatives, whether online or offline.
6. Purely as tool to build and increase brand loyalty, mycineplex’s offerings makes sure that every community member will stay loyal to the mycineplex brand - and, most likely, loyalty towards any other initiative with the Cineplex brand attached to it.

Again, mycineplex isn’t a unique online community (see Flixster) but fact is the Cineplex brand has now extended itself and has taken hold of an opportunity to send a message to their customers: “We understand your passion”.

If you have an established community or are looking to possibly build one, give mycineplex a visit, play a bit, test things, observe - chances are that you can only understand online community building better.

Not bad for an “online social networking movie and entertainment community”!

Last week Chris Beech blogged about the Google iPhone. Now there is Google Chrome, the new open source browser from Google. I first heard about it on Twitter on Monday, and shortly after it hit the news, ‘Google Chrome’ became a bigger search term than ‘Hurricane Gustav’ - which, on Monday, was at its destructuve zenith.

Is there any area on the web that Google doesn’t want to own?

If you’re interested, check out the comic book explanation of what Google Chrome is all about, here.

At World Wide Creative, we have Paul, who is a big standards compliancy guy. We’ve already had big discussions over whether we should bother about IE6, now that IE8 is here. With Google Chrome, what new challenges will this bring to Paul’s plate?

It’s already a tough challenge keeping a web presence consistent across browsers, now this…?

Google has been developing a new algorithm for indexing textual content in Flash files of all kinds, from Flash menus, buttons and banners, to self-contained Flash websites. Recently, we’ve improved the performance of this Flash indexing algorithm by integrating Adobe’s Flash Player technology.

In the past, web designers faced challenges if they chose to develop a site in Flash because the content they included was not indexable by search engines. They needed to make extra effort to ensure that their content was also presented in another way that search engines could find.

Now that we’ve launched our Flash indexing algorithm, web designers can expect improved visibility of their published Flash content, and you can expect to see better search results and snippets. There’s more info on the Webmaster Central blog about the Searchable SWF integration.

I guess this changes the ball game somewhat? Whoop. There it is.

Consider the case of Google. Of course, they have more of a case for global domination, but surely this is a bit ridiculous? Check out the names that Google owns…

Close…perhaps?
gewgol.com
goolgel.com
geggle.com
glogoo.com

Erm, what the…?
goooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooogle.com
1p0g0og1e.com
googlelovers.com
googlereligion.com
googlepaperproducts.com
google-yahoo-porn.com
google-yahoo-sex.com
googlefools.com

And then, our personal favourite:
googlepoo.com

Que? Google Poo?

If you’re interested, check out the full list here.

This is a question that has come up before: Where do you draw the line? For most of us, the answer is to buy the country domain, and then the .com. If you’re feeling frisky, then I suppose maybe some of the other Top Level Domains (TLD’s) are worthwhile (.net, .biz etc.), but in most cases, it’s just going to waste your money going any further.

This week I had the privilege of speaking at the Mega Media Expo 2008 at the CTICC. I promised I would post the slide show from my web usability presentation. So feel free to download the pdf version: Website Usability and Conversion of Traffic Document (approx. 5Mb in size).

In simple terms, images are currently indexed by the content that surrounds them, the page itself and the alt tags used to describe them. But Googles so called VisualRank (Page Rank for Product Image Search) means us humans will no longer be needed to help describe what the image is. It uses visual recognition to identify what is in an image in order to categorise it for search.

Visual recognition software is something that has been developed greatly over the past few years but it does throw up the question of “How effective can it be for search?”

To find out, I investigated how good human beings actually are at deciphering images. With the thought that, if we struggle on some image recognition, how good could a machine be?

I use the term “human being” loosely as my test group were 6 members of the World Wide Creative team. Below are the images used and the descriptions they came up with.

Descriptions:
Bird
Bird
Bird from Chenobyl
Frog butterfly
Entry into worth1000.com photoshop competition
Manipulated picture of bird frog and butterfly

Descriptions:
Rhino
Elephant
Dustbin with street person
Mans head in fire jet
Your transmission is being monitored
Guy with head up a engine component that resembles a traffic one

Descriptions:
squirrel rat
kangaroo
mamouse
squirrel rodent
squirrel
museum display of prehistoric rat

Description:
Gremlin
Toy
Frog Boat
ugly man on boat
popeye on drugs
cartoon drawing of shek on drugs

Descriptions:
Dead Rat
Roadkill
Dead possum
your government working for you
Yellow Lines
Roadkill

Descriptions:
Baldy
Bald guy
Surprise
Wide Eyes
Baby
Dave Duarte

Extremely diverse tagging by humans! So would Googles’ visual recognition be any better? Bearing in mind search engine optimisers already manipulate the alt tags for their own gain anyway, should the question rather be: “Could visual recognition software be any worse at providing a good search result?”

…and, yes, that is Dave Duarte’s head in the foreground.

I will try and persuade Mike to put his presentation on Heavy Chef. Watch this space.

In terms of practical ways in which you can utilise social media to help your link building for SEO as well as help build your brand, there is a really good article written by Jane Copland from the SEOmoz.org team. Its over a year old but still really good and definitely worth reading:

http://www.seomoz.org/article/social-media-marketing-tactics

If Google really values the site linking to you, it is likely to generate more link juice for your site.

I found a great little tip earlier today (courtesy of the guys at SEOMoz.org which helps to hack the search engines and give you and idea of what Google considers to be the most important/relevant site in a particular location, without any keywords being entered. This can be really useful if you are link building to target a particular country.

Just use the following in your search box:
“inurl:co.za site:.co.za”

In Googles eyes here are the top 50 .co.za sites within South Africa:

1) .co.za
2) www.google.co.za
3) www.ananzi.co.za (Can you believe it!)
4) www.thetimes.co.za
5) www.southafrica.co.za
6) www.mg.co.za
7) www.weathersa.co.za
8) www.statetheatre.co.za
9) www.businessday.co.za
10) www.iol.co.za
11) www.standardbank.co.za
12) www.engineeringnews.co.za
13) www.tourismcapetown.co.za
14) www.reservebank.co.za
15) www.thestar.co.za
16) www.jobs.co.za
17) www.bluetrain.co.za
18) www.citylodge.co.za
19) www.legacyhotels.co.za
20) mybroadband.co.za
21) www.krugerpark.co.za
22) www.districtsix.co.za
23) www.scienceinafrica.co.za
24) www.wheretostay.co.za
25) www.careerjunction.co.za
26) www.sagoodnews.co.za
27) www.mountnelson.co.za
28) free.financialmail.co.za
29) www.tourismnorthwest.co.za
30) www.cycletour.co.za
31) www.winemag.co.za
32) www.wineroute.co.za
33) www.tourismgrading.co.za
34) www.ushakamarineworld.co.za
35) www.africatrade.co.za
36) www.moneyweb.co.za
37) www.yellowpages.co.za
38) www.redribbon.co.za
39) www.dieknoop.co.za
40) www.proudlysa.co.za
41) www.capepoint.co.za
42) www.nafest.co.za
43) www.arrivealive.co.za
44) www.aatravel.co.za
45) www.cellc.co.za
46) www.eatout.co.za
47) www.whalefestival.co.za
48) www.goldreefcity.co.za
49) www.germanchamber.co.za
50) www.3am.co.za

Add the following to your search and see the sites within a niche:
~”keyword”

So what happened?

1) Google had indexed the links to different pages on their old website and was happy. These links were as follows:

www.domainname.com/ourteam.php

2) The new site was created and with it new urls for the pages:

www.domainname.com/about/ourteam.html

3) The new site was then launched replacing the old one.

4) A potential visitor goes to Google and types in a search bringing up a link to the companies website.

5) The problem is, it is a link to the old website. So when the potential visitor clicks on that link it goes to an error page. Google starts to become unhappy and has no reason whatsoever to keep sending people to dead pages.

So how do you resolve this problem when you launch a new site?

First thing to remember is it needs to be done before the new site goes live.

The way we do it here at Word Wide Creative is to start by listing all the url’s from the old site and placing them in an excel file. We then go through the new site and place the new url’s next to the most relevant old web pages in the excel file.

This is the preparation work that is then used by our programmer who uses a 301 re-direct (301 basically means permanent). You place a bit of code on the server that permanently re-directs anyone looking for a specific url on the old site to go to rather go to a specific url on the new site.

So now what happens is when google sends someone to your old link, the visitor is re-directed to your new site instead. More importantly they go to the right page on the new site.

Once you have gone live, Google’s “Webmaster Tools” is a great resource and will help you to find any broken links you might have missed.

Note: Sometimes even with 301 re-directs your ranking positions will go down (sometimes considerably) in the short term. This is just the search engines figuring out how the re-directs are working.