The ‘Money Settings’ within the new facebook privacy settings are not that easy to get to

As Katie Linendoll pointed out today on CNN, it was a matter of time until facebook was going to start its serious efforts to monetize. That is what their new privacy settings are all about. The more you are willing to share, the more facebook will be able to cash in. As simple as that. – check out my youtube video for detailed explanation on that statement.

As a result, facebook needs to make all the efforts in the world to keep you from changing the default privacy settings. And boy do they. Below is a short video, where I illustrate exactly how facebook protects their ‘money settings’. I refer to the settings that will:

1. Share your entire wall including your posts with all 350 million facebook users
2. Allow friends to pass information about you to applications and websites

[pro-player width='650' height='400' type='video']http://www.online-marketing.lu/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/facebook-privacy-money-settings.mp4[/pro-player]

Pretty clever those facebook guys ey…

There is nothing much to moan about – it is facebook’s platform and they can do as they please. We don’t have to spend our time on there – yet many of choose to (including myself). But going through your privacy settings is definitely recommendable.

Luxemcall – A pretty creative scam

If you are on the luxgsm network in Luxembourg, you might also have received some strange SMS messages every now and then about making cheap international calls. Here is a screen print from my phone to show how the sms looks:

Suspicious as hell – let’s check it out by starting a visit to the website:

OK, I get the picture. Dial a premium number (900 number) in order to save money…that makes sense
Luxemcall sends the sms to your mobile from a Turkish number (+90 042 01 1). That very much looks like the number you need to dial from your Luxembougish telephone ‘900 43 015′. I have to give them points for that. I honestly think that is quite far-fetched and rather creative. Scams really impresses me sometimes.

Just before I finish, let’s look at the internet domain name that this runs on.
It is registered to:
Company: Finarea SA
Name: Dekker Monique
Address: Viale Carlo Cattaneo 1
City: Lugano
Country: SWITZERLAND
Postal Code: 6900
Phone: +41 919335412

Even that telephone number looks suspicious (without knowing it).

I did not spend too much time looking, but there are numerous similar style webpages registered with the same company. This example here shows an iPhone app you download from their website and not from Apples’ iTunes Store (which is the only legit place to get apps for the iPhone):

I just wanted to share this one with you, because I think it is a creative scam.
Either way – if you fall for this scam, I hope you will be smarter next time.

Numericable (Coditel) in Luxembourg – How something so little could change so much

Every now and then, your internet service provider’s service goes down. It sucks, but it happens. Over the past couple of months this has been happening too much to Numericable (formerly known as Coditel) in Luxembourg. Usually, I just sit and wait until it comes back up and use my iPhone to access the internet on my computer. This time the damn thing was down for hours and hours, so I decided to call their support line. After choosing language and service from their phone menu, I finally get a voice (in a different language than I chose) that tells me the waiting time exceeds 10 minutes and that my call will be terminated. So I go to their internet site. The re-branding to ‘Numericale’ is rather recent, so I still refer to them as ‘Coditel’. I go to coditel.lu and see this:

The whole thing is build up to tell me that I live in Brussels, Belgum and that their service is available in my area. No guys…I live in Luxembourg – that is also why I went to .lu and not .be. Furthermore, I thought you re-branded to Numericale, so why am I not re-directed? So, I go to numericable.lu myself, and get this:

Again, the title is setup to target people in Brussels, Belgium. At least the content on the website is designed for the Luxembourg market. Anyhow, I wanted to know if they post anything about their internet service being down on their website, as I could not get to speak to anyone. So I go to the ‘accueil client’ section which means something along the line of ‘customer section’. Nothing either…so I go to the ‘contact us’ section. Then I get this:

Baam – a nice google maps error, because numericable is not able to integrate google maps properly.
As to be expected by now, there was no message on the website about their service being down.

Here is what I don’t understand about Numericable

1. Why don’t they just transfer the visitors from coditel.lu over to numericable.lu?
2. Why don’t they adapt their .lu websites to target the Luxembourg market?
3. If they don’t want to publish that their service is down on the internet, that is kind of understandable…after all their consumer customers are not able to access the internet and then read the message because it is down. But Jesus Christ – then have some voice on your phone system that confirms to the people calling that the internet is down (before they start messing around with their modems and computer settings) – it is not that rare that this is the case anymore.

Conclusion

Numericable is the major player in triple play (tv, phone and internet) in Luxembourg. Something as simple as this, should be a no-brainer. To me this is a complete and utter embarrassment.

The scary thing is that both sites, coditel.lu and numericable.lu, have an analytics tool (google analytics) installed. The reports that this tool generates, is able to perfectly outline the problem to Numericable…if only they would read/understand the reports. What we have here, is a perfect example of the 10/90 rule. The analytics tolls itself is only 10%, while using the tool to your benefit is 90%. I think it is fair to expect a business of this caliber to not make these school-boy errors. Please do your business a favor and check its website for mistakes like this. They are completely unnecessary and really harm the user experience – and thereby also you.

What you should do now

1. Open a new browser window
2. Go to your website by typing in the address manually without ‘www.’
3. Now try typing in the address manually with ‘www.’
4. Are both version doing what they should do?

If yes: Good – well done.
If no: You should get in touch with us and get the problem fixed.

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UPDATE 14-Dec-09:
Looks like Numericable Luxembourg fixed the redirection problem as well as the Brussels content targeting issue.

Amazon’s iPhone app picture recognition analysis

I just had the pleasure of trying out Amazon’s new feature in their iPhone app. There is one feature of the app which really impressed me. Not because it is there, but because it works (and it works fast). It’s really simple – you launch the app, you take a picture of a product and amazon will send you back the link to that specific item in their store. Here is how I tested it and what happened:

1. Take a picture of the product in question
2. Submit the picture to amazon
3. Get the reply with product recommendation
4. Check out the product and buy it if you like

For those who forgot they asked amazon to find a product for them, and for those who prefer to buy producs on the computer rather than on their phone, amazon also sends you an email (to the account registered with your amazon account) with a link to the product:

What amazes me is the speed at which amazon’s picture recognition works. It took literally one minute from taking the picture to having the product recommendation. But the tuly amazing thing about this service, is that it actually works and recommends the real product. Remington has several trimmers that look the same. Yet, amazon still managed to pick out the right product for me. I am amazed.

There had to be a downside…and there is. Even though my amazon account is registered to my address in Luxembourg, Europe, I am still taken to the US amazon store. I really don’t see what the big deal is for amazon to guide me to my ‘home store’. By recommending me products from the US store, amazon will not make any sale to me (and other non-US residents) via their iPhone app.

The app is free from the itunes store – click here to get it.

SEO Example from Real Life: How being on top of search engines can make you leader in your offline business

As Luxair was playing crazy again with their prices, I decided to catch the train from Luxembourg to Frankfurt at 42€ rather than catching the Luxair flight at 330€. I will not get too much into that now… I will write a separate post on Luxair and their retarded pricing policies another time. Right now I want to share my hotel experience in the Frankfurt Airport area.

As all I need is a clean place to sleep before I catch my morning flight to San Francisco, I google’d ‘preiswert frankfurt airport hotel’. I google in German, as an English search will just give me the large portals and hotel chains that are either over priced or leaves me browsing hotel portals for ages. I find ‘Motel-One’ as the first organic result.

When clicking through, I get a nice clean website that tells me what I want to know and doesn’t over-inform me with all kinds of irrelevant crap. So perfect, this is what I need – I go ahead and reserve my room without entering information that is none of their business anyway (such as what flight I will be taking from the airport etc).

At the airport, a shuttle bus picks me up (free of charge) to take me to the hotel. It is a 10 minute drive that takes me to an ‘office village’ close to frankfurt airport. I can’t help but see lots (and I mean lots) of ‘to let’ banners on the office buildings in the area. Definitely not much activity going on here…The shuttle bus drops me off just outside the ‘Motel One’. Across the street is a similar hotel called ‘B&B Hotel’. Same size, same concept, same ‘49€ per night’ advertising outside. The only difference: all the lights are off on the floors of the B&B Hotel. In short – the hotel is empty. Motel One on the other hand has lights in the rooms on all 6 floors and there are people in the lobby. I enter with the feeling that I made a good choice…

Being the internet geek that I am, it is very important for me to have internet access. The friendly staff at reception informs me that there is free internet in the lobby, and at 12€ for 24 hours (or 4€ per individual hour) I can have wireless access in my room. I of course take the flat rate option. 12€ is a lot of money to access the internet for 24 hours, but compared to other European hotels, this is a fair price. When I go outside to smoke, I notice that there are many people in the lobby on their laptops benefiting from the free internet access there. Each of them are having a drink and some even a sandwich as well.

So now to the conclusion. In my eyes this experience is a very strong illustration of the power of good online marketing. We have a hotel in an area that expected lots of business from nearby office buildings. As the offices are all unoccupied, the hotels will not get any business from there. The B&B Hotel is suffering from this, while Motel One has invested in Search Engine Optimization that brings them business because they are on the first page of google results for good generic search phrases. It doesn’t stop here! Because Motel-One’s customers find the hotel via the internet, chances are quite high that these are people who spend their time online. The hotel understands this, and give people two options. Either have internet in your room and pay for it, or come to the lobby and use it for free. The hotel then banks on people buying drinks and/or food when they are using the internet in the lobby. So not only does Motel One have more customers than its competitor – they are also generating additional income by providing internet access and/or food & drinks. Great work Motel One – back to the drawing board B&B Hotel.
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