Have you ever risked your life rushing to the airport only to find out when you arrived that your flight was late?  Wouldn’t it be nice if someone called your cell phone and said, “Hey dude, slow down. Your flight is 45 minutes late”?

If you want to know if an arriving flight is on time for a friend or relative you’re picking up, wouldn’t it be nice if they called you and said, “Oh by the way, I’m late by 45 minutes and you don’t need to take off work to get me at the airport”?  Unfortunately, they are still in the air and can’t call you.  While internet flight status reports and real-time flight tracking are not new, you can now set up alerts to call your cell phone and/or e-mail yourself or others regarding changes to your flight.

One of my responsibilities at Blizzard Internet Marketing is to make travel arrangements for the numerous speaking engagements and trade shows Trent Blizzard attends all around the country.  While away on a trip recently,  he called to tell me he was running late and there was NO WAY he was going to make his flight.  He asked if I would I check out options for other departing flights and see if…  Just then, we both heard the sound of a text message being received.  “The flight gods are with me!” Trent exclaimed, as he checked the phone message.  The text message informed him his flight would be 45 minutes late, so he had just enough time to make it.  What a relief!

Trent then wondered if he would make his connecting flight.  So, I went to my favorite real time, on-line flight-tracking source, Flightstats , and entered his connecting flight number and date.  Indeed, it was a lucky day.  His connecting flight had another perfect 45-minute delay!

This flight tracker site has an array of helpful features, including flight availability by route, airport parking, historical flight ratings and airport delays.  My favorite feature on flightstats.com is the simple to use flight alert. This free online application monitors flights and sends informational messages to e-mail enabled devices and cell phones.  You receive flight alert messages in the event of a cancellation, diversion or delay greater than 30 minutes.

After logging in, go to Travel Tools and enter the airline, flight number and date of departure. Alert messages include:

• Status confirmation up to 3 hours prior to departure.
• Notification if the flight is delayed by more than 30 minutes.
• Notification if the flight is cancelled or diverted.
• Arrival notification when the flight lands.

If you select Departure Alert Messages, you receive a status update prior to departure and a flight departure alert. I f you select Arrival Alert Messages, you receive a message when the flight arrives at its destination. What great customer service!

I’m always looking for smarter ways to travel, so if you have any great travel tips, please share them with me and our readers in the comments area. Thanks!

Anyone who’s buying or selling advertising online doesn’t need a detailed explanation of why we want to be able to interpret whether a particular keyword phrase indicates an intention to make a purchase or not. We don’t just want traffic to our websites, we want traffic that converts.

While it’s sometimes fairly obvious - either from the words in the search phrase (where can I rent a beach house in Wildwood?) or from the detail within the search phrase (3 bedroom beach house in Wildwood with WiFi) - this is something that optimizers and pay per click campaigners struggle with continually. 

The Tool 

So, when MSN adCenter Labs unveiled their Commercial Intent Detection Tool about a year ago, it seemed like a great idea. Here’s what they say it does:

Predict a customer’s intention to buy, sell, or complete another kind of transactionbased on her search queries or recently visited URLs.

They backed the release up with an explanation entitled Algorithmic Commercial Intent Detection of Search Queries. The one-pager begins with:

Using algorithmic commercial intent detection, 52% of queries were determined to be associated with commercial intent. The alogorithm was deemed very accurate, with a rate of 90% for detecting both commercial and non-commercial intent.

The Research Behind the Tool  

Then, in the manner of content that appears to be scientific, it dryly goes on to explain why and how the algorithm testing was done. Human evaluators were used to check and verify the accuracy of the results. How? Apparently, they were asked if a phrase had commercial intent of not and their answers were correlated with the algo’s results.

We aren’t given any idea of how these human evaluators were chosen or why. Was there something that made these particular humans any more well-equipped to make that determination than others? Do they have an specific expertise in evaluating commercial intent? Did the testing involve 2 testers or 20,000? MSN’s explanation of the study doesn’t say.

So, I dug a little deeper and read the original research paper on Commercial Intent Detection presented by MSN engineers in 2006. I found that the study was based on the opinions of just 3 human evaluators:

We asked 3 human labelers ro label the search queries and pages. Each query or page is labeled as “commercial”. “non-commercial”, or “confused”. Each query was labeled by the 3 labelers separately. After labeling process on queries, we keep the queries/pages that were agreed by at least two labelers with non-confused labels.

What????? Are they kidding? I’m no scientist, but this seems like a very flawed process. Was any of the data cross-checked with the conversion tracking systems of real websites to confirm whether searches for those terms actually resulted in a sale or not?

My Simple Test 

Here are the results of a quick test I did using the tool. 1.0 is a 100% probability, so I interpret a .8478 as about 85%. The first column is the search term and the second column is the percentage of probability of commercial intent of the searcher:

I think that pretty much demonstrates the tool’s usefulness - or lack thereof - in evaluating keyword phrases.

How It Could Be Improved 

Chances are, we all have at least 3 people on staff who are very well-qualified to label a keyword phrase as having commercial intent or not. Why? Because they regularly view and analyze online sales through sophisticated tracking software. They know the phrases that brought buyers into the websites they manage and the click paths they took once there. Maybe next time, MSN adCenter Labs could at least use experienced Search Engine Marketers as their human labelers and, by using enough of them (way more than 3!), they may get useful data.

Commercial Intent of Web Pages 

The second function of the tool is interpreting the commercial intent of a web page. However, there’s no information at all that tells you how MSN adCenter Labs accomplishes that. I tried entering pages with and without ads on them and pages with BUY NOW! all over them and couldn’t really come to any conclusions. This part of the tool doesn’t even have any entertainment value.  

Conclusion

The most discouraging thing about MSN’s Commercial Intent Detection Tool is that nothing about it appears to have improved since it was released. It is what it is and it’s not likely to get any better.

I’m afraid I can’t put much stock in this tool as something useful for serious marketers. I think your own experience and instincts can give you much better insight to the commercial intent of a search phrase. Of course, we all have tracker data to fall back on when we really want to interpret commercial intent in a meaningful way.

You’ve all dealt with the harried and harassed guests at the front desk.  Their plane was delayed, the airport lost their luggage, and the kids screamed the whole way.  Unfortunately, their vacation experience started when they left the house, and your online reviews could possibly suffer from a traveler’s bad mood.

 What can you do to help guests travel safely and conveniently to your doorstep?  Arm them with some great travel tips to keep them  happy, safe, and on-time!  I was just reading an article that my online friend Shane Keener from the Places to Stay blog sent me from BudgetTravel.com called the Family Travel Handbook  

This article had some great advice for traveling with kids - here are my favorite tips:

Sign kids up as Frequent Fliers

Check the car-seat - don’t use it on the plane.  I just put mine in an airline-provided plastic bag and it’s traveled well every time.  Car Rental car seats are dirty.

DONT preboard.  An extra 1/2 hour strapped in a seat? No Thanks!

Only the essentials - divide carry-on items by parent.  Dad has the fun stuff, Mom has snacks diapers, etc.  Then you’ll know who has what and you’re not digging around in your bags the whole flight.

Bring a few empty 8oz water bottles & refill once through security.

Not all of your guests will be families - so provide some essential items for adults to find your front door.

Printable directions with a map

Transportation information (shuttles & taxis) along with the location of the desk/taxi stop at the Airport Terminal

Let the guests send directions and reservations information via SMS (Text) message to their cellphones

Is your site mobile friendly?  Add a sub-domain to your site that is mobile friendly and contains location information, maps, directions and phone numbers. 

Provide a “suggested packing list.”  If your evenings are chilly, let your guest know beforehand. 

See if your confirmation pages and emails are compatible with a trip organizing service like TripIt.com.  Pretty handy for frequent travelers.

Keep in mind, the journey is part of the vacation…making sur eyour guests have a good one is a great service to offer.  Sometimes a “How was your trip?” is enough to release tension.  A sympathetic ear and some help with lost luggage goes a long way to gaining a good review.

texting photo from Nesster
packing photo from Tomeppy
Kid flying photo from ninjapoodles

As the Social Media Marketing wave keeps rising, Blizzard keeps surfing it. Blog link building, online media rooms, entire blog website designs, and online brand management are just a handful of the places this wave has brought us. Recently we have, for the benefit of our clients, begun testing the popular social site, Squidoo.com.

Squidoo allows users to design a “lens” for any and all topics imaginable. A lens is basically a single webpage on which you can include video, text, links, photos, and a variety of other media. However, the real benefit to our clients is the rankings that can develop from these lenses. Think of it like a free directory listing over which the author has complete control.

Here are some examples of lenses published for three clients:
Destinations Link Hospitality
Lahaina Island Accommodations
Peak Properties

For most of the clients tested, a search for the client’s name and location most often produces their Squidoo lens in the top ten search results. This is a great brand and reputation management tool. Often their lenses appear above many directories they have PAID to be listed in!

Another great aspect of Squidoo is the ability to create a “Group.” A group is a collection of similar lenses. The “Blizzard Client Directory” group is the one we have constructed that has become a moderately powerful page in a relatively short amount of time. From this group we link to our client’s websites as well as their individual lenses. The potential traffic, ranking and SEO benefit is immense.

Squidoo is but one small piece of a GIANT internet marketing puzzle. Keeping up with trends, new ideas and techniques keeps our clients on the edge of what is being done in todays online marketplace. If you’d like to hear more about Blizzard and our offerings - contact our Business Development department or send an email to rfp@blizzardinternet.com.

In Carrie Hill’s article, “Top 5 Reasons You NEED Maps on Your Travel Website“, she discusses the importance of offering maps to help drive website visitors to make a booking on your site.

Why put a map on your site? The top five reasons, from Carrie’s article, include:

(more…)

JavaScript is a programming language that is mostly used in web pages, usually to add features that make the web page more interactive. When JavaScript is included in an HTML file, it relies upon the browser to interpret the JavaScript.

According to Wikipedia, one major use of web-based JavaScript is to write functions that are embedded in or included from HTML pages and interact with the Document Object Model of the page to perform tasks not possible in HTML alone. Here are some of the most common uses of JavaScript:

• Opening or popping up a new window with programming control over the size, position and ‘look’ of the new window
• Validation of web form input values to make sure that they will be accepted before they are submitted to the server
• Changing images as the mouse cursor moves over them
  Blizzard Associate - Blizzard Internet Marketing, Inc.

We refer to Flash in a lot of our articles that discuss new websites and website redesigns. Although many people may already know what Flash is, it may be helpful to others to learn about it.

According to Webopedia: Flash is a bandwidth friendly and browser independent vector-graphic animation technology. As long as different browsers are equipped with the necessary plug-ins, Flash animations will look the same. Using Flash, a user can create their own animation or import other images.

Flash was known as FutureSplash until 1997, when Macromedia Inc. bought the company that developed it. You can learn more about Flash at the Macromedia website.

Blizzard Associate - Blizzard Internet Marketing, Inc.