the webthinking blog

Different users have different ways to find their destination, no doubt about that. Today, I have witnessed (via WebEx) a very unusual behaviour: one had “binged” the name of a private client site in order to get to it. Whoa! I must admit, it was a unique keyword combination that happened to return “the bookmark” as the number one result. Deep.

Oh wow, it is definitely worth spending an hour and twenty minutes now to see how Google Wave will change the web, the way we think of it and use it. It also explains why GOOG did not buy Twitter or Facebook. They need the critical mass to embrace this new way of thinking.

BBC study: consumers spending 25 minutes viewing streaming media on the web.
When BBC moved from Windows platform to Flash the amount of people they were able to attract increased 8x.

Watch the whole video:

Looks like Startbucks just entered Twitter land. Barista – a caramel macchiato and a tweet, please! Thanks!

This is a good one… I was trying to get a shipping quote on UPS.com, but it seems like one app server has gone missing – 410 gone that is. And I’ve got this response several days in a row.

I’m happy to report that I’ve already met one of my goals for this year, getting the only Google certification existing out there: the Advertising Professional. Interesting experience, about 120 questions in 90 minutes. Not to mention I had to wake up at 7AM on a Sunday morning because Prometric had a scheduled maintenance at 10AM. It was well worth it at the end of the day! :)

I don’t normally talk about my day job on the blog, but I’m extremely proud about running this web project and the way it came to life: Renaissance Investments “invest well. live better.” Merging web sites without affecting the client experience is not always easy, but it is nice to get a positive feedback in the end. I also want to tip my hat to my team – it was quite a ride!

So, if you are an investor or an adviser, check out Renaissance Investments or Investissements Renaissance. There you go – you got my next step – getting some Google juice to flow.

This week I had the privilege of attending the Google Financial Services Conference here in Toronto and meet cool people like Chantal Rossi, Sabrina Geremia, Paul Botto or Chris O’Neill of Google.

There are five themes re-shaping Marketing today:

• Integration: consumers are hard to find and harder to influence!
• Innovation: today’s buzz word is “video” – online video; “click to play” geo targeted video ads can be delivered depending on your location
• Inclusive: advertise all your assets, not only what you think is popular
• Interactivity: consumers like to get involved; how does it feel to have an extra 10,000 brand managers out there?
• Informed: make the most by measuring your data intelligence!

There you go, the five “I”s of today’s Marketing.