WJBC – Mar 11 – A bill under consideration in Springfield would require online dating sites to disclose if they conduct criminal background checks. State Rep. Michelle Mussman said despite the resistance to internet regulations, the bill is not overreaching. New Jersey and Texas already have similar laws and New York requires a reminder highlighting safety tips.
The full article was originally published at WJBC, but is no longer available.
OPW – Mar 12 – New iDating jobs listing is live on the Internet Dating Jobs blog.
Below see a couple of this month's most interesting offers:
____
From our esteemed Courtland Brooks clients:
POF
Spanish Customer Service Representative
Global Personals USA (Webdate, Fling, WealthyMen)
Traffic/Business Analyst
BlackDivine
Art Directors
____
Badoo
Director of Business Development – New York or San Francisco
eHarmony
Senior Director, Online Marketing
Match.com, Chemistry.com, People Media
Director, Midwest Advertising Sales
Online-Buddies
Director of Advertising
Sparkology
PR/Marketing Director
SpeedDate
Lead Product Manager / Director of Product
Zoosk
VP, Communications & Content
To see more open positions go here.
Do you have an idating industry job offer which is not included? Please, send it to petra@courtlandbrooks.com and we will add it to the list.
OPW – Mar 9 – For the full list of 29 lessons, go to the Courtland Brooks blog. Here’s 9.
– You are the absolute worst judge of whether your site is usable. You know too much about your site and its impossible to unknow it. So do AB testing!
– Do usability testing one morning every month and use 3 users. No labs or mirrors. No ‘big report.’ Debrief managers over lunch. Test competitors or comparable sites for your first test.
– Usertesting.com is great for quick and cheap testing but you can’t quiz users further.
– Bear in mind, graphic designers will kill you. They get bored and want to decorate stuff.
– Rather than use testimonials, monitor Twitter and favorite the favorable tweets and embed them into your website.
– Design your emails for mobile first, then PC.
– A photo of an attractive woman will lift conversions among males. Women are less effected by good looking photos of men or women.
– When listing buying options. Lead with the product you'd most like to sell. People gravitate towards your first listing.
– Add a high end product and that will boost sales at other levels.
The next Conversion Conferences are in Chicago, Florida, Dusseldorf and London, later this year.
NY TIMES – Mar 9 – HowAboutWe, which until lately targeted only singles, has been a success, attracting ~700K date ideas. But its founders quickly discovered the commercial paradox of the dating site: The better you are at finding love for a client, the faster she signs off and ceases to pay you. “If you succeed,” Mr. Schildkrout says, “you lose.” Later this year, Mr. Schechter and Mr. Schildkrout will release a new dating portal focused on committed couples. It will seek to get them out of their routines, off their feet and on the town for frequent dates.
CONTRA COSTA TIMES – Mar 9 – In dating, women and men have equal rights — but when it comes to popping that first question, it is still a man's world. In a recent Match.com survey of 5K single adults, only 10.8% of women admitted to asking a man out. Men have 20 times more aggression hormones than women do. And men want women who are hard to get because it makes them feel valuable. Some think a woman who asks out a guy comes off as desperate: "Shouldn't she play hard to get?" Certainly, women who prefer the pursuit may face less judgment online, says Whitney Casey, Match.com's Austin, Texas-based relationship expert and author of "The Man Plan: Drive Men Wild — Not Away" (Perigee, 2009).
HERALD SCOTLAND – Mar 9 – Bill Dobbie and Max Polyakov, founders of Cupid, have each netted £10.8M after selling a total of 12M shares. The sale, equivalent to 14.8% of the company, comes just days after Cupid revealed that Mr Polyakov, its business development director, has quit to launch a social gaming business in the US. Mr Dobbie and Mr Polyakov each sold 6M shares at 180p each. The buyers were institutional investors. Following the disposals Mr Dobbie retains 13.8M shares, some 17% of the company, while Mr Polyakov has 12.6M, or 15.5%.
GIGAOM – Mar 7 – TheComplete.me, formed by former Match.com executives, connects people through their interests using their real identity and encourages users to express themselves through Pinterest-like pinning of objects. TheComplete.me, which went public today at the Launch conference, pulls together a person’s profile using data from social networks. Their interests get visually represented on a FraME similar to a Pinterest Board. And like Pinterest, people can use a bookmarklet to add items to their FraME from anywhere on the web. The more a person shares, the higher their ME score is, indicating how authentic and real they are. Brian Bowman said he decided to leave Match.com after he realized that the company was not prepared to leverage the social web. Trish McDermott, former VP of Public Relations Match.com who is also on the founding team, said the old way of checking off boxes and creating lists of interests doesn’t reflect the true personality of people and actually keeps people from learning who someone really is. But with social networking, people are learning to be transparent and authentic.
by Ryan Kim
See full article at GigaOm
OPW – Mar 9 – Mark Brooks and Marc Lesnick will be hosting the next iDate Startup party in Austin during SXSW. The party is on March 10th, 2012 at Driskill Bar in Austin from 6:30PM – 8:00PM. Don't miss the opportunity to network and build relationships with a diverse group of dating industry professionals. Please RSVP here.
OPW – Mar 5 - I'm covering the Conversion Conference in San Francisco. Here's a smattering of 13 takeaways from Jared Spool, Tim Ash and other gods of usability, from Day 1.
For a longer list, of 30 takeaways, see the full post at the Courtland Brooks blog.
– Think of order abandonment as a buying signal and part of the buying process. Remarket via email immediately with title 'Oops, was there a problem with your membership.' Follow up exactly 24 hours later reminding them of the original deal, and exactly 7 days later with a new offer. Link back to the order so they can complete it.
– Video spokespeople (a la Talking Heads) work well for conversions. Keep it short.
– Use Brightcove, Wistia or Oculu for video hosting on your web page so you don't lose traffic to Youtube/Vimeo.
– Blip.tv, Viddler and Tubemogul offer video syndication.
– If you must use a promo codes box in your sign up box, also include a 'want a promo code?' link and allow people to reference a promo code. See Macys.com for example of this new best practice.
– Keep your nav menus to 4 items.
– When using images of people, have them look at the area on the web page, i.e. your call-to-acton, where you want users to focus. Smiling people staring at the user will hammer conversions.
– Use Optimizely.com or Google Optimizer for AB testing.
– People will only use your navigation if the content on the page fails.
– Put social proof in the right bar of your pages. i.e. 14k happy users, 144k fans, etc.
- Try the 6ft call to action test. Stand back from the screen 6ft and see if you can still see the call to action.
– Use pics of women. Men prefer women, and women prefer women.
- If you use testimonials, just pick a couple, and bold out keywords to make them scannable, and link out to more testimonials.
I'll add more notes tomorrow. This is a killer conference. I'm so glad I'm here to learn and share with you.
The next Conversion Conferences are in Chicago, Florida, Dusseldorf and London, later this year.
UNLIMITED MAGAZINE – Mar 6 – In 1965 a group of Harvard students started Operation Match that used questionnaires to identify compatible matches. When the students sold it three years later they had received ~1M responses which resulted in a few marriages. Today North America’s dating sites attracts 22M users a month, says online dating industry analyst Mark Brooks. Online daters have upwards of 1,000 dating sites to choose from, aside from industry giants Match, eHarmony, OKCupid and PlentyofFish. "Starting a dating site is like starting a restaurant," Brooks says. "It’s very attractive but there’s a lot more to it than meets the eye."
Brian Schechter and Aaron Schildkrout created HowAboutWe.com in 2009. The site is built around going on "awesome dates," with users able to see a list of date proposals in their immediate area. The company has raised ~$19M. Another site Sparkology is invite-only dating site. Other startups include Soul2Match, which links potential dates based on their photos and facial features, and Luv@FirstTweet, which uses Twitter to match singles. At TheJMom.com, matchmaking is left up to parents.
In a report in the Journal of Psychological Science in the Public Interest, a team looked closely and critically at the online dating industry. The researchers found that while online dating has great potential to improve meeting potential romantic partners, the exclusive matching formulas many online dating sites claim to have are unsubstantiated and likely little more effective than randomly approaching strangers at a bar. Sites and apps can facilitate face-to-face interactions quickly. Mark Brooks agrees. "I don’t think people want to come home and spend hours and hours tappity-tapping on the keyboard. They want to be in front of people," he says. "Computer-mediated communication is not gratifying enough for the human soul." Brooks thinks three trends will define the future of the industry: location-based services, mobile services and behavioral matchmaking. "Dating sites that do well will be serving their users’ interests, which means a little more immediacy, a little more help and going mobile," he says.
That instant face-to-face interaction is what MeetMoi, a location-based mobile dating company led by CEO Alex Harrington, has been facilitating since 2007. Users are matched with one another based on preferences and proximity, through application-based and mobile web-based dating.
by Cailynn Klingbeil
See full article at Unlimited Magazine
See all posts on Match.com See all posts on HowAboutWe
See all posts on eHarmony See all posts on Luv@FirstTweet
See all posts on OkCupid See all posts on Soul2Match
See all posts on POF.com See all posts on TheJMom
See all posts on MeetMoi See all posts on Sparkology