Author: Scott Savage Page 31 of 68

MasterChef – Generation Y Best Practice Marketing

On June 17, 2009

MasterChef has been a huge surprise hit in Australia. The TV ratings have been sensational for Channel 10, with an average of 1.96 million viewers nationally (not bad from a total audience pool of just over 20 million). What keeps this average so high? The key, ironically, is the stickiness created by the side dishes. The MasterChef website gets an equally, if not more, astonishing 2 million views per week.

This website content is what keeps people engaged. Full show episodes stream very quickly from the site not long after screening, letting you catch up if you have missed an episode or just feed your addiction. Every recipe on the show is uploaded and available for those at home to have a crack, and beautiful images are cycled past the viewer. The taunt of “Can you master this MasterClass dish?” next to a picture of a beautiful coffee eclair is a great teaser to engage those at home.

The engaged community that has been built can be confirmed on Twitter. There doesn’t seem to actually be an official MasterChef twitter account, but that hasn’t stopped loyal fans creating unoffical ones and swamping Twitter with comments about how hungry they are, which recipes they love and who they want to get kicked off. The episode finished over an hour ago, but tweets are still coming in faster than one per minute. I really hope someone is monitoring this community really closely, what a great way to get feedback on the franchise directly from your customers.

Even if they are not monitoring the Twitter community, they will at least be monitoring their public forums. Yet another nod to the importance of communities in building a loyal following behind a brand. Over 30,000 posts proves that people are enjoying it, and breaking down the forums by participant gives a great selection criteria for the next season’s contestants (rumoured to be celebrities). Finally, they also have a Digg-like rating system on each recipe, so again the community can feel engaged and contribute back to itself.

How do you then cash in on this community? The product integration with Coles is subtle yet very effective. Recipes have a cost from Coles listed below them, for example this tasty soup is a mere $3.50 per serve. The PDF that you print to take to the shops of course has a Coles logo in the top right corner, as well as any notes about whether Coles stocks the item or not. They could have even taken this to the nth degree by having “MasterChef Prefilled Shopping Carts” from Coles Online, what armchair chef doesn’t want the ingredients delivered straight to their house? Even better, you could pre-empt the episode and deliver the Mystery Box challenge ingredients on the night of the Mystery Box episode! Now that would be challenging our engaged community.

The only thing that Channel 10 have done wrong, is screen Biggest Loser USA directly after MasterChef on a Sunday night. Then again, for some reason Biggest Loser makes me hungry too… 🙂

What happens when a domain name expires?

By Scott Savage

On June 13, 2009

In Internet, SEO

Recently I noticed that the scottsavage.com domain name was not being actively used and was about to expire. Having historically been on scottsavage.net, I thought this would be a great opportunity to quickly grab it. It turns out the process takes a very long time, giving the current owner plenty of time to renew their registration. I found this chart to be the best explanation of what happens during the process:

Flow chart of the Domain Expiry Process

As you can see it takes almost 3 months from when a domain expires to when it is finally available for public re-registration by a different owner. You can track the progress of a domain name towards expiry by using a whois tool.

Once it is available you can register it through any domain name reseller, or if you are really keen (like I was) you can use a domain name backorder tool which will automatically buy the domain name as soon after it ‘drops’ as it can. I have used the Godaddy domain backorder tool twice, and have been successful twice so I strongly recommend it. I still think however that the biggest risk is the current registrant renewing some time before the final deletion phase, which of course is unfortunately completely out of your control.

So as you might have guessed, as of this week I have secured scottsavage.com! It expired on the 24th of March, so that illustrates just how slow the process is. The next question is whether I migrate my blog to that domain or not, and what effect this will have on my SEO… hmmm… too scared to do this until I do some more research…

Exchange 2007 certificate migration

By Scott Savage

On May 21, 2009

In Microsoft, software

Exchange 2007 uses SSL certificates extensively across the IMAP, POP, IMAP, UM and IIS services. I assumed that adding an SSL certificate to one of the Domain Controllers would propogate that certificate across all the controllers. I guess it makes sense that I was wrong, SSL certificates aren’t something you want spread or activated widely. If you do need to move or copy the certificate across servers though, it is a simple 3 step process in the Exchange shell:

1) Export the certificate from the original server:

Export-ExchangeCertificate -Thumbprint 5113ae0233a72fccb75b1d0198628675333d010e -BinaryEncoded:$true -Path c:\certificates\export.pfx -Password:(Get-Credential).password

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa996305.aspx

2) Import the certificate into the new server:

Import-ExchangeCertificate -Path c:\certificates\export.pfx -Password:(Get-Credential).password

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb124424.aspx

3) Enable the new certificate:

Enable-ExchangeCertificate -Thumbprint 5113ae0233a72fccb75b1d0198628675333d010e -Services “POP, IMAP”

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa997231.aspx

Done! 🙂