The Perceptus Back Story

We were absolutely floored to stumble upon this great video about the Naque for Unique Names website!

This clever young fellow, DamageTutorials, seems to really enjoy creating his usernames with unique-names.com.

Not only is it a better quality video than we would ever be able to make, coming from us it would literally be self-promotion. When this fellow does it, it’s much more believable.

Thanks DamageTutorials! You made our day.

Update: Rats, it appears that DamageTutorials’ YouTube account has been deactivated. We’re hosting the video here on the blog, we can’t find contact information for DamageTutorials… so if you happen to see this, drop us a line.

Here’s the original YouTube video embed, though, it probably will never work again:

Check out the video DamageTutorial’s – Unique names – Thinks of a username for you in seconds on YouTube. Make sure that you turn on your speakers, the narration is quite good.

I care about email security and transparency of email content a lot.  I deal with it all the time as a contractor who produces a email newsletters for local retailers.  I’m also the guy who teaches end users (including family) to be extremely skeptical about all the email they receive because 90% of it is fake, SPAM, and scams.

So, I get peeved when larger firms do email communications wrong.

Today I received an email invite from a company claiming to do work for Fido.  I think it’s cringe-worthy.

My first step in my research was a quick glance at the Fido homepage – no mention of a new survey program, though, I didn’t really expect to find one.

Looking strictly at the email itself then, here are some tidbits:

Subject line:  Invitation to Join the Fido Listens Panel

OK so far.

From: Fido Listens Team <fidolistens@itracks.com>

Who is iTracks.com? I’ve certainly never heard of them.  Definitely a yellow caution flag.

The email copy talks about a survey and some prizes for participating in Fido’s latest customer feedback thing.

A lot of scams offer prizes or financial incentives.   Can you get two yellow caution flags?  Or maybe just upgrade to a larger one.

The survey link goes to  https://surveys.itracks.com/survey/RogersFido_4?ID=xxxxxxx.

Well,  iTracks.com hosts the survey.  Their homepage looks legitimate at least.  Funny, I was expecting iTracks.com to be an online MP3 store.

And a support email address of support@fidolistens.ca.

Wait, now what is fidolistens.ca? More on Fido Listens later on.

And a contact mail address of Ipsos Reid, a well respected research firm based in Vancouver.

Ah! I’ve heard of them. Actually, I know people who have worked there. Of course, anyone can write an email with someone else’s legitimate mail address.

So, let’s review. Yes, I am a Fido cellphone user.  But who is iTracks.com?  Do I really believe that they got my email address from Fido? Who is FidoListens.ca?  And is IPSOS really involved?

fidolistens.ca?  At least this was somewhat comforting.  The vanity domain of fidolistens.ca forwards to https://iaf.ipsos.ca…, i.e. a page belonging to IPSOS and transparently hosted by them on their own domain.

In the end, I feel comfortable doing a survey that is hosted by IPSOS.  But that’s only because I know that IPSOS Reid is a legitimate firm.  A little over a year ago I ranted about another Fido survey attempt in my blog post, How to Properly Use 3rd Party Web Services, I didn’t feel comfortable with the firm conducting that survey.

If you are using a 3rd party firm for surveys or anything that is customer related, please make it easy to verify that it’s legitimate.  At Papaya Polls, we offer to host our pages under your own subdomain.  It works great and it is very confidence inspiring.  I would have zero hesitation in doing a survey which had a web address of http://fidolistens.fido.ca or http://surveys.fido.ca.

Anyway, enough ranting.  Time to enjoy the sun.

It’s that time of year again!  Our Christmas tree is up.  Is yours?

If you’re a teacher, event host, or group organizer that is looking for a fun way to celebrate the festive season, Perceptus suggests that you visit our web based bingo card generating site, print-bingo.com and generate your free (and customizable) Christmas themed bingo cards.

Of course you’re free to create non-Christian bingo themed cards for the holidays. You can start your custom bingo cards by editing our word list for the Winter Holidays.

As always, basic use of our site is free. But you’re welcome to upgrade to a Premium access account for only $10.

Merry Christmas!

Today I got an email marketing message from Fido, my cellphone provider.

Probably.

Unfortunately, Fido used a third party email and contest manager that makes me unsure if the email is real or a scam.

The email “from” line looks good: fido.communication@fidomobile.ca.

But it’s trivial to fake a “from” line.

The email “reply-to”: fido.communication(xxxxxx)@mail.konversation.com

I removed the x’s which I suspect are unique to my email address and used for mail list management.  It doesn’t really matter.  Is this address confidence inspiring to the non-technical user? Nope.

Worse, the email is about a contest.  In the email there is a link to enter the contest:

http://kmkapp01.konversation.com/Fido/eNewsletter/Default.aspx?langue=en

What is Konversation.com?  And why should I enter my phone and other info into a website that doesn’t even spell conversation properly? (That’s a joke, I realize it’s a cute mispelling used for a website name).  Sure, there are Fido logos in the email and on the web page.  But who knows?  I’ve seen fake bank websites that also look authentic.  It’s easy to copy logos and verbage.

In the end, I decided to skip this contest.  Who knows if it’s a real contest or not.  Besides, I never win prizes anyway.

What should companies do?  Use their own domain for everything because they’re much harder to use fraudulently.  If they choose to outsource bulk email, use a provider that can use “bulkmailer.example.com” for their messages.  For contests?  “contests.example.com”.  For surveys, “surveys.example.com”.

In fact, that’s exactly what we offer with the custom survey domain feature of PapayaPolls.com.  We have several clients who host surveys using a subdomain of their primary domain.

It works for everyone.  The end survey respondents are confident that the survey is legitimately from our customer.  Our customers are happy that their survey respondents are confident, and thus willing to answer the survey.  And we’re happy to have paying customers.

So there you go.  A rant and an advertisment for one of our websites all rolled into one.  Not bad for a Friday afternoon.

I received an interesting, possibly exciting and expensive email from YSM today. Apparently, the minimum bid of $0.10 will be disappearing on many terms in the future.  Here’s a snippet from the email:

Pricing Update:
Minimum Bids will no Longer be Fixed at $.10

Starting in the next several weeks, the minimum bids for a number of Sponsored Search keywords will no longer be fixed at $.10. Your new minimum bids can be lower or higher than $.10. Content Match minimum bids currently will remain at $.10.

I wrote in a previous post about advertising pricing that Perceptus would spend several times more on advertising if the $0.1 minimum bid was reduced or dropped.  Well, true to my word, I’m logging into our Yahoo Search Marketing account right now to clean up our advertising spots in anticipation of the pricing changes.

There are a couple ways to interpret this change, here are a few of my theories:

1. this was an inevitable evolution of Yahoo’s advertising service that they’ve finally gotten around to implementing
2. advertisers are pulling out of the online advertising market or reducing bids due to economic conditions
3. Yahoo was loosing certain segments to Google due to lower costs per click
4. Yahoo wants to boost account counts to ward off the Microsoft bid
5. Yahoo read our blog and decided that Perceptus was right, and that $0.1 clicks don’t make sense in all cases

These are purely random guesses on my part. While I wish it was point 5, I think it’s a  combination of items 1-4.

Having said that, over the last month, our Google AdSense revenues are down and our AdWords costs are down noticeably. I wonder if online advertising is more sensitive to the economy than other advertising media.  I can turn off pay per click advertising campaigns in 5 minutes.  How many weeks does it take to reduce or cancel TV, radio, and newspaper advertising?  Anyway, those ponderings belong on our non-existent financial blog.