June 10, 2009: summarized from BrandWeek -- Spirit Mountain Casino recently bet big on a Web site redesign. The company spent nine months last year retooling www.spiritmountain.com.
The redesign was aimed to convert TV, radio, print and billboard promotions-placed in those markets with mentions of the site-into more casino foot traffic, said Chris Cherry, online marketing manager at the casino. To create a higher-grade landing page of sorts for the mass-media ads, Cherry and his team thoroughly revamped the site's look-and-feel, navigation and back-end system.
"The new Web site is largely responsible for convincing more curious online [visitors] to make the trip out here to see what we have to offer in person," he said. "Our [year-to-date] figures are very favorable and much better than what others within our industry are experiencing."
Since premiering the site redesign in January, Cherry said that the brand has seen sign-ups for its "Coyote Club" customer loyalty program spike by 31 percent when compared to the same period of the year before. He added that his company has also seen increased inquiries from organizations that now see the casino as a potential event or conference venue.
Charles Voloshin, senior account executive, eROI, Portland, Ore., said that the most-important analytical goal in the redesign was to increase viewer engagement. Voloshin pointed to statistics showing that visitors have been spending an average of three-and-a-half minutes per visit and viewing at least five pages. While the site's old system didn't record page views, he suggested that the five-page average for the newer version has outperformed expectations going in.
Voloshin said that the site has an "incredibly low" bounce rate, which is a statistic that measures how many visitors leave after only one page view. The casino site, he said, has had a bounce rate of 16 percent since the re-launch five months ago. He credited the homepage's navigation layout.
Read more at: http://tinyurl.com/n38sco
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Internet To Play Bigger Casino Role
CM Comment: There definately seems to be a shift underway as more and more casinos seek to expand the role that the Internet plays in their marketing operations.
May 26, 2009: summarized Gaming Today -- Casino operators from around the country descended on Las Vegas last week for the seventh annual Gaming Technology Summit, which featured conference themes ranging from assessing IT departments to capturing casino customers via the Internet.
The latter topic - expanding the casino's reach over the Internet - generated spirited discussion among conference attendees, as did a related topic, legalizing online wagering.
"Up until now, most casinos have used their website to book hotel rooms and drive business to the casino," said Tony Fontaine, president of propickracing.com, an online horse race betting site, and former vice president of interactive gaming for Station Casinos. "But they need to expand that application by driving those casino customers back to the website, where they can be captured and 'monetized' through various programs."
Fontaine said that one method of capturing an Internet customer is through legal gaming, which can take the form of trivia contests, skill games (such as poker), fantasy sports leagues or horse race wagering.
In addition to tapping into the scope and reach of the Internet, other conference sessions explored assessing a casino's Information Technology department, fine tuning casino marketing, advances in mobile gaming, social networking as a vehicle for marketing and promotions and how technology is being used toward the "greening" of casino and hotel operations.
Many casino operators were especially interested in enhancing their marketing efforts, especially facing the challenges of a slumping economy.
"It's surprising how many casinos still use a shotgun approach to reaching their customers," said a panelist in one of the conferences. "There's often an overlap in their efforts, with customers often receiving three, four or five of the same mail pieces.
"Casinos need to learn how to streamline and combine their promotions," he continued. "It's generally agreed that 20 percent of the customer base generates 80 percent of the business, so it's important to go after that top 20 percent."
Read more at: http://tinyurl.com/lkmko7
May 26, 2009: summarized Gaming Today -- Casino operators from around the country descended on Las Vegas last week for the seventh annual Gaming Technology Summit, which featured conference themes ranging from assessing IT departments to capturing casino customers via the Internet.
The latter topic - expanding the casino's reach over the Internet - generated spirited discussion among conference attendees, as did a related topic, legalizing online wagering.
"Up until now, most casinos have used their website to book hotel rooms and drive business to the casino," said Tony Fontaine, president of propickracing.com, an online horse race betting site, and former vice president of interactive gaming for Station Casinos. "But they need to expand that application by driving those casino customers back to the website, where they can be captured and 'monetized' through various programs."
Fontaine said that one method of capturing an Internet customer is through legal gaming, which can take the form of trivia contests, skill games (such as poker), fantasy sports leagues or horse race wagering.
In addition to tapping into the scope and reach of the Internet, other conference sessions explored assessing a casino's Information Technology department, fine tuning casino marketing, advances in mobile gaming, social networking as a vehicle for marketing and promotions and how technology is being used toward the "greening" of casino and hotel operations.
Many casino operators were especially interested in enhancing their marketing efforts, especially facing the challenges of a slumping economy.
"It's surprising how many casinos still use a shotgun approach to reaching their customers," said a panelist in one of the conferences. "There's often an overlap in their efforts, with customers often receiving three, four or five of the same mail pieces.
"Casinos need to learn how to streamline and combine their promotions," he continued. "It's generally agreed that 20 percent of the customer base generates 80 percent of the business, so it's important to go after that top 20 percent."
Read more at: http://tinyurl.com/lkmko7
How Twitter Will Change The Way We Live
June 5, 2009: summarized from Time Magazine -- The one thing you can say for certain about Twitter is that it makes a terrible first impression. You hear about this new service that lets you send 140-character updates to your "followers," and you think, Why does the world need this, exactly? It's not as if we were all sitting around four years ago scratching our heads and saying, "If only there were a technology that would allow me to send a message to my 50 friends, alerting them in real time about my choice of breakfast cereal."
I, too, was skeptical at first. I had met Evan Williams, Twitter's co-creator, a couple of times in the dotcom '90s when he was launching Blogger.com. Back then, what people worried about was the threat that blogging posed to our attention span, with telegraphic, two-paragraph blog posts replacing long-format articles and books. With Twitter, Williams was launching a communications platform that limited you to a couple of sentences at most. What was next? Software that let you send a single punctuation mark to describe your mood?
And yet as millions of devotees have discovered, Twitter turns out to have unsuspected depth. In part this is because hearing about what your friends had for breakfast is actually more interesting than it sounds. The technology writer Clive Thompson calls this "ambient awareness": by following these quick, abbreviated status reports from members of your extended social network, you get a strangely satisfying glimpse of their daily routines. We don't think it at all moronic to start a phone call with a friend by asking how her day is going. Twitter gives you the same information without your even having to ask.
The social warmth of all those stray details shouldn't be taken lightly. But I think there is something even more profound in what has happened to Twitter over the past two years, something that says more about the culture that has embraced and expanded Twitter at such extraordinary speed. Yes, the breakfast-status updates turned out to be more interesting than we thought. But the key development with Twitter is how we've jury-rigged the system to do things that its creators never dreamed of.
In short, the most fascinating thing about Twitter is not what it's doing to us. It's what we're doing to it.
Read more at: http://tinyurl.com/qtvneh
I, too, was skeptical at first. I had met Evan Williams, Twitter's co-creator, a couple of times in the dotcom '90s when he was launching Blogger.com. Back then, what people worried about was the threat that blogging posed to our attention span, with telegraphic, two-paragraph blog posts replacing long-format articles and books. With Twitter, Williams was launching a communications platform that limited you to a couple of sentences at most. What was next? Software that let you send a single punctuation mark to describe your mood?
And yet as millions of devotees have discovered, Twitter turns out to have unsuspected depth. In part this is because hearing about what your friends had for breakfast is actually more interesting than it sounds. The technology writer Clive Thompson calls this "ambient awareness": by following these quick, abbreviated status reports from members of your extended social network, you get a strangely satisfying glimpse of their daily routines. We don't think it at all moronic to start a phone call with a friend by asking how her day is going. Twitter gives you the same information without your even having to ask.
The social warmth of all those stray details shouldn't be taken lightly. But I think there is something even more profound in what has happened to Twitter over the past two years, something that says more about the culture that has embraced and expanded Twitter at such extraordinary speed. Yes, the breakfast-status updates turned out to be more interesting than we thought. But the key development with Twitter is how we've jury-rigged the system to do things that its creators never dreamed of.
In short, the most fascinating thing about Twitter is not what it's doing to us. It's what we're doing to it.
Read more at: http://tinyurl.com/qtvneh
U.S. Deals Blow To Online-Poker Players
CM Comment: This week's big news from the world of online gambling.
June 10, 2009: summarized from The Wall Street Journal -- In an apparent crackdown on Internet gambling, federal authorities in New York have frozen or seized bank accounts worth $34 million belonging to 27,000 online poker players, according to representatives for the players and account holders.
In an operation that began last week, the office of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York froze or issued seizure orders for bank accounts in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Arizona held at Wells Fargo, Citibank, Goldwater Bank and Alliance Bank of Arizona.
A spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney's office had no comment.
The accounts are managed by Allied Systems Inc., and Account Services, which handle cash for popular online poker sites, including Full Tilt Poker, Poker Stars, Ultimate Bet and Absolute Poker. Though the money belongs to the poker players, it is held for them in accounts managed by the two service companies.
Account Services, which had an account worth $15 million frozen in its San Francisco bank, doesn't accept deposits, but writes checks to players who are cashing out, said lawyer for the company, Jeff Ifrah. As a result, thousands of players receiving checks from the company won't be able to cash them, he said.
The seizures come as a debate over Internet gambling heats up in Washington. Last month, U.S. House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D., Mass.) introduced a bill that would legalize and regulate Internet gambling.
Federal authorities say online gambling is illegal, but Internet-gambling advocates say it is a gray legal area. In 2006, Congress passed a law making it illegal for banks to processing payments for unlawful Internet gambling. Critics say the law is unclear.
Poker players don't consider poker a game of chance, but a game of skill, and argue that poker shouldn't be lumped in with sports betting, for example.
The government has prosecuted Internet gambling in the past, including sites that allow users to bet on sports and play poker. The massive seizure by the U.S. attorney is the first time federal authorities have targeted online poker accounts, according the Poker Players Alliance, a Washington-based lobbying group for online poker players.
The Alliance said there are 10 million Americans who play online poker for money, and estimated the market at $6 billion.
The Alliance "is disappointed that this unprecedented action has been commenced against law abiding poker players," said former U.S. Senator and Alliance Chairman Alfonse D'Amato in a written statement.
Read more at: http://tinyurl.com/n4rb6b
June 10, 2009: summarized from The Wall Street Journal -- In an apparent crackdown on Internet gambling, federal authorities in New York have frozen or seized bank accounts worth $34 million belonging to 27,000 online poker players, according to representatives for the players and account holders.
In an operation that began last week, the office of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York froze or issued seizure orders for bank accounts in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Arizona held at Wells Fargo, Citibank, Goldwater Bank and Alliance Bank of Arizona.
A spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney's office had no comment.
The accounts are managed by Allied Systems Inc., and Account Services, which handle cash for popular online poker sites, including Full Tilt Poker, Poker Stars, Ultimate Bet and Absolute Poker. Though the money belongs to the poker players, it is held for them in accounts managed by the two service companies.
Account Services, which had an account worth $15 million frozen in its San Francisco bank, doesn't accept deposits, but writes checks to players who are cashing out, said lawyer for the company, Jeff Ifrah. As a result, thousands of players receiving checks from the company won't be able to cash them, he said.
The seizures come as a debate over Internet gambling heats up in Washington. Last month, U.S. House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D., Mass.) introduced a bill that would legalize and regulate Internet gambling.
Federal authorities say online gambling is illegal, but Internet-gambling advocates say it is a gray legal area. In 2006, Congress passed a law making it illegal for banks to processing payments for unlawful Internet gambling. Critics say the law is unclear.
Poker players don't consider poker a game of chance, but a game of skill, and argue that poker shouldn't be lumped in with sports betting, for example.
The government has prosecuted Internet gambling in the past, including sites that allow users to bet on sports and play poker. The massive seizure by the U.S. attorney is the first time federal authorities have targeted online poker accounts, according the Poker Players Alliance, a Washington-based lobbying group for online poker players.
The Alliance said there are 10 million Americans who play online poker for money, and estimated the market at $6 billion.
The Alliance "is disappointed that this unprecedented action has been commenced against law abiding poker players," said former U.S. Senator and Alliance Chairman Alfonse D'Amato in a written statement.
Read more at: http://tinyurl.com/n4rb6b
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