Courtland Brooks

Why Use Pre-Paid Payment Cards?

COURTLAND BROOKS - Jan 17 - Have you seen our payment processors spreadsheet? Our Courtland Brooks analyst reviewed the top payment providers, mobile payment providers and alternative payment providers that the dating industry are using. Just email me at mark@courtlandbrooks.com for a copy.  So why should you consider using a prepaid card payment system for your dating site?  Here's why:

   1. Its now very easy for users to use.
   2. Some consumers prefer to pay with cash.
   3. They like to control their spending
   4. They want to avoid falling into debt or ruining their credit score.
   5. They don’t want to incur finance or late charges
   6. They don’t have a credit card or have lost their credit.
   7. They are afraid of identity theft / prefer not to disclose personal personal financial information
   8. There are no fees like a prepaid visa or mastercard. A $25 paysafecard costs $25 and gives $25 of value online, just like cash.
   9. They fear losing track of recurring payments for a service they are no longer interested in
   10. They don't trust an online merchant or payment gateway the way the trust a brick and mortar business

Bonus
    11. Tens of millions of other people do it each year and some of them are quite savvy

As you consider which prepaid card provider to use, you should ask about security, fees and distribution points.  We work with PaySafeCard which we believe to be best in class and differentiated against their competition because they offer:

·         A secure product issued by an e-money issuer or bank depending on the market
·         No consumer fees
·         Readily available at more than 350,000 convenient retailers in 28 countries

See my Service Spotlight interview with Neil Steinhardt, the GM North America for PaySafeCard for a bit more information about PaySafeCard.  Neil is at n.steinhardt@paysafecard.com if you'd like to find out more.

(Disclosure: Optimal Payments and PaySafeCard are clients of Courtland Brooks)

The Science Behind The Smile

COURTLAND BROOKS - Jan 1 - The internet dating industry has already had significant impact on society. (See what internet dating executives think in this Courtland Brooks white paper).  People have more choice and knowledge about suitors than ever before.  But does this make them more happy?  Has the internet dating industry had a positive effect on the happiness quotient overall, I wonder?  Dan Gilbert (Harvard Psychology Professor and author of Stumbling On Happiness) is an expert on Happiness and was interviewed in the Jan-Feb 2012 Harvard Business Review. Here's some relevant points... 

Much of the research confirms things we've always suspected.  For example, in general people who are in good romantic relationships are happier than those who aren't.  People who participate in their churches are happier than those who don't. Rich people are happier than poor people.  That said, there have been some surprises.  While all these things do make people happier, it's astonishing how little any of them matters.  Yes, a new house or new spouse will make you happier, but not much and not for long.  As it turns out, people are not very good at predicting what will make them happier and how long that happiness will last.  They expect positive events to make them happier than they do, and negative events to make them unhappier than they do.  In both field and lab studies we've found that winning or losing an election, gaining or losing a romantic partner, passing or failing an exam-all have less impact on happiness than people think.  Very few experiences effect us for more than three months. 

Synthetic happiness is perfectly real, its just man-made.  Synthetic happiness is what we produce when we don't get what we want, and natural happiness is what we experience when we do.  One is not obviously better than the other.

People hate being bored.  People are happiest when they're appropriately challenged-when they're trying to achieve goals that are difficult but not out of reach.  People blossom when challenged and whither when threatened.  

If I had to summarize all the causes of human happiness in one word, that word would be 'social.' We are by far the most social species on earth.  If I wanted to predict your happiness, and I could know only one thing about you, I'd want to know about your social network-about your friends and family and the strength of your bonds with them.

The psychologist Ed Diener (aka Dr Happiness and co-author Happiness: Unlocking The Mysteries of Psychological Wealth) has a finding I really like.  He shows that the frequency of your positive experiences is a better indicator of your happiness than the intensity of your positive experiences. How good your experiences are doesn't matter nearly as much as how many good experiences you have. So wear comfy shoes, give your wife a big kiss and sneak a French fry.  The small stuff matters.  

Want to help?  You can help one of Dan Gilbert's Phd collaborators, Matthew Killingsworth, to study happiness by signing up for a happiness tracking survey at TrackYourHappiness.org.  He contends that focus is a source of happiness. Mind-wandering makes you unhappy.

There are some lessons in here for designers of internet dating, social networking and daily deals sites. You should aim to keep people more socially engaged and focused while on your site, through learning and social gamification.  Which is why I'm headed to the Game Dynamics conference in March in NYC and reading Game-Based Marketing: Inspire Customer Loyalty Through Rewards, Challenges, and Contests. - Mark Brooks

Here's some more books that are also in the Courtland Brooks team library.
Gamestorming - A Playbook for Innovators, Rule Breakers and Game Changers
Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World

Read more at Harvard Business Review

10 Reasons PR Still Matters

RAGAN.COM - Nov 3 -

1. In the social universe, messaging is key - Communicate your key messages. That's where the professional communicators come in.

2. Reputation is a C-level concern - We're even seeing chief reputation officers being appointed.

3. Crisis is chronic - Ultra-quick response with finely-tuned messaging is a must.

4. Visibility is both an art and a science - Good positioning is the product of craftsmanship.

5. Marketing people are not necessarily social media geniuses - PR is still the best equipped to leverage the social message.

6. The media is alive and kicking - The scenery has changed, but the media remains the primary influencer of public opinion.

7. It's the economy, stupid - PR is the most cost-effective way to communicate to a broad audience.

8. Content and context - From blog posts to bylines to webinars to tweets, good content builds the face of the organization. PR should steer that ship.

9. Values make your brand - ...and make up a bigger portion of its brand strength than ever.

10. There is, in fact, a ROI - But don't just slap a dollar value on media placements and call it a day. PR builds a reservoir of goodwill, and that public confidence in a brand is the measure of that goodwill.
Quantifying public confidence can be accomplished through a combination of surveys, media tone analysis, traditional ad values and circulation numbers, market penetration, brand buzz, etc.

by Doug Flora, an account associate at Morrissey & Company
See full article at Ragan.com

How To Get Software To Run Your Business For You - Automation Tools Mixergy Masterclass

COURTLAND BROOKS - Oct 27 - If you'd like to get the inside track on the tools we use at Courtland Brooks, you may want to pick up a membership and watch this video on Mixergy. I give an overview of the following tools in the class...

 

• My Intervals
• Freshbooks
• Tungle.me
• EchoSign
• Relenta (CRM)
• Cision (PR)

We use all these tools regularly.  I don't know what we'd do without myIntervals for project management and reporting and paying my team. Freshbooks automates the mundane invoicing function. Tungle.me helps us nail down meeting times with multiple people across multiple time zones. We use Echosign for contracts.  Relenta for CRM and workflows. And Cision is the essential tool for getting access to press. 

Should You Buy Profiles for Your Virgin Dating Site?

COURTLAND BROOKS - Oct 3 - Starting up your own internet dating site has become something that almost anyone can do. Its really not to difficult to buy software and fire up a site. But the road to success is a lengthy and difficult one. In your startup days you may decide to give away free memberships to encourage people to use the site. These members need to be informed that they are ambassadors and therefore deserve to be well looked after and given plenty of attention.

You'll generally need to run extensive advertising and marketing, well selected, negotiated, tested and honed. You really have to get the word out to attract people to come to your dating site.

It's becoming apparent that some dating websites are choosing not to follow the usual steps when staring up their site. Instead they are opting to buy profiles to boost their member numbers on the site and therefore surpassing the need to give away free memberships. It's not just new sites that are using this practice but also existing ones that have seen their numbers drop and need to boost their members. But is this a good idea?

We thought we'd talk to some of the companies that sell profiles. Courtland brooks conducted a survey of 6 companies who claim to sell active profiles to online dating sites. The companies we contacted were;

• SalesProfiles.com 
• Evercurrent.com 
• Saledatingprofiles.com 
• Saledatingprofiles.net 
• Buyprofiles.com 
• and Profilenetwork.com 

We asked each company a series of questions including where they got their profiles from. The overall conclusion was that buying-in profiles from these vendors for your dating site is a bad idea.

The majority of the profile sellers refused to say where they get their profiles from and one even became aggressive and left the chat when I tried to push the issue. This was Saledatingprofiles.net. We noticed that 4 of the 6 profile sellers could only be contacted through private email addresses such as yahoo. Therefore if anything was to go wrong then it would be very difficult to contact them as they could just choose to create another email and not be traced. The fore mentioned Saledatingprofiles.net and Profilenetwork.com both have very bad reputations. Saledatingprofiles.net even claimed to have 40 million active profiles in the USA. Where are they trawling to get so many profiles? Could these be computer generated/fake profiles?

Of all of these providers, only one is worthy of any attention, Buyprofiles.com. They were able to tell us in detail how they get their profiles and informed us that they only sell each profile to one buyer. However, this is on a cost per head basis so may work out being very expensive.

We DO NOT recommend buying in mass profiles. But if you succumb to buy profiles you should only keep them on your site for 3-4 weeks in conjunction with a considerable advertising and marketing campaign. Then cull profiles that are unresponsive from the profiles that you bought-in.

We should clarify at this stage. We DO recommend doing co-reg deals with other sites, and even buying profiles from existing dating sites. But watch you don't break any Terms & Conditions from the site you're buying profiles from.

There are many risks involved in buying profiles. You could lose your money to a scammer. There's a good chance the cheap profiles you buy-in are either entirely bogus or have been trawled from existing dating sites. Are you prepared to take a (deserved) hit on your site's reputation? This also affects the industry reputation. There has been a backlash in the media recently among users who are getting frustrated about going to dating websites and finding bogus profiles.

You cannot build a healthy brand on deception and that is why Courtland Brooks does not recommend buying profiles. Free memberships and aggressive marketing strategies may seem costly to begin with but it is the best way to build a strong, honest brand and the results will follow.

When Wal-Mart builds a store, they have to spend a lot of money to stock the shelves. Same deal with internet dating sites. You need to be ready to spend some money to stock the shelves with people, real people, before you'll be able to sell anything and start making money.

New Clients: Plentyoffish and 51Taonan

COURTLAND BROOKS - Sep 6 - We're very proud to announce that the Courtland Brooks team is now working for both Plentyoffish and 51Taonan. POF is the top dating site in USA, Canada and UK according to Hitwise. We worked with them before. From September 2006 to March 2010.  Now we're back with them. 51Taonan is China's no. 4 dating site and top free dating site, and showing tremendous promise in this burgeoning, huge growth market. 

Adults Behave Better with Teddy Bears in the Office

COURTLAND BROOKS - Aug 24 - Want your team to be nice to each other?  Put more games, kids toys and a smattering of teddy bears around the office and adults will play more nicely with each other at work. So says an article in this months Harvard Business Review.  Kids stuff reminds us of our childhood and we tend to play more nicely with visual reminders of play and youth within view.  So what should we do at Courtland Brooks? We're a distributed workforce spread from San Diego, to Edmonton, to Orlando, to Prague and Malta? We have a virtual office now, thanks to Sococo.net.  Perhaps they will allow us to customize our office more in future iterations of their IM and VOIP enabled virtual office environment.

New Branding Rules: Tell Me a Story

COURTLAND BROOKS - June 18 - Consumers dull pounded senses are tired of traditional advertising. These days you have to be more targeted, and more imaginative, as a marketing manager.  We're in a new era of emotional branding.  If you're not hitting your audience at their hearts, and sexual senses, you're probably not converting users on your dating sites very well.  

Here are some great examples of story telling, courtesy of this wonderful article at ragan.com.  

Harley Davidson is the rawest of machismo brands.  See how they use Youtube to further that branding through storytelling.    

Intel, used the story of wedding photographers in China.  

So, Intel, of all companies, is featuring a wedding story?  

How are you showcasing your success stories on your dating sites?  Isn't it worth sending a cameraman to the weddings of some of your users?  What does your company stand for, and how is your CEO and staff committed to helping users find what they're looking for.  Pictures are worth a thousand words.  Moving pictures are worth more.  

Youtube is the second largest search engine next to Google, so you really should be using it to generate business and build a more enduring and impenetrable brand story in the minds of your users.  

The personals business isn't personal enough.  How are you standing out from the crowd.  eHarmony and Match have shown that TV works.  They keep doing it.  Youtube is superior to TV.  

We like the visual aspect of video marketing.  Yes, its time consuming to produce, so use your members and crowdsource to them.  And it can be a pain to track and distribute, but Tubemogul.com makes life easier.

Grindr And Manhunt, Gay And Growing

COURTLAND BROOKS - May 19 - Grindr and Manhunt have enjoyed huge growth over the last several years.  Just how big are they in the USA and the UK?  I asked them, and they responded open-kimono to us.  This is for the benefit of their members to gage their success, the press, and for the rest of the internet dating industry to compare.

Jonathan Crutchley, the Co-founder and Chairman of Manhunt.net, who also operates Dlist, ManhuntDaily, ManhuntCares, and BigBearDen, among others, tells us that they don't charge in the UK market yet.  But that will change within days. (you saw the news here first!).  Manhunt.net has been free in the UK for a few years now, building up market share against the leading site Gaydar. 

Manhunt has been expanding geographically and testing into new markets like China for the last several years.  Four years ago Manhunt entered the Australian gay dating market at a time when Gaydar had the market to themselves.  With some aggressive marketing and helpful word-of-mouth, they've replaced Gaydar as the leading gay dating site Down Under. 

PG straight paid users on most internet dating sites stick around for 3 months.  How long do they 'retain' on Manhunt?  Manhunt's typical member sticks around for 15 months.  Manhunt is designed to be quite addictive and the customer service is first rate, so their 'reorder' level from members quitting and then returning is also very healthy.  It pays to treat people nicely when they leave. 

My Colombian ex-girlfriend (hi Xenia) told me a Colombian saying.  'You really get to know someone not when you meet them, but when you part ways.'  We stayed good friends after our 3 years dating, I hasten to add. 

So when you part ways with your members, look after them.  They may well return to you if you leave them with a pleasant memory.  At least don't screw it up for the rest of the industry.  i.e. don't require faxes to cancel like be2!

Straight sites charge $20-$50 a month.  But there's something magical about membership rates under $15.  Manhunt charges ~$12 a month.  People stick around a lot longer and are more inclined to talk about sites that charge under $15 and still manage to deliver top notch service and a full database of users.  You don't have to go free to be somewhat 'viral' these days. (I despise that term 'viral,' btw.  Viral = be good + do something interesting + give people the tools to spread the word)

The conversion of registrant to paid members on mainstream, straight dating sites is 10%.  Manhunt's conversion rates are upwards of 15%. 

Typically, it costs in excess of $40 to bring in a paying member to a PG straight dating site.  But Manhunt's cost of acquisition is less than half of that.  You can see our first interview with the Co-founder of Manhunt, Jonathan Crutchley in April 2007, here.  And our subsequent interview with Jonathan and the CEO Adam Segel in December 2009.

Grindr is a phenomenon with 1,980,000 users worldwide, as of 30th April, 2011, and 8,000 new users per day.  In April, 2011 they had 499,700 average active daily users logging in, 782,700 weekly, and 1,154,800 monthly.  Not too shabby considering that Joel started the company with $5k capital and is yet to do anything in the way of advertising!  So the cost per new user is, get this, $0! 

In the USA Grindr has 741,800 users and in the UK there's 254,600 users as of 30th April, 2011.  We captured the founding story of Grindr in December, 2010 when we interviewed Joel Simkhai, the founder and CEO of Grindr right here on Online Personals Watch.

Public companies have to show their numbers. Grindr and Manhunt don't.  FriendFinder is public now and more companies may IPO. i.e. eHarmony. Yes, Manhunt and Grindr are private companies, and they've chosen to share these very privvy numbers. Wouldn't it be nice if we could collect these numbers from the entire industry directly, to be able to show the press and investors the trending in our humble little industry? Or at least to the rest of the Internet Dating Executive Alliance so you could have some sense of the industry numbers in the aggregate.  Your comments please.

Choosing An Online Payment Processor

COURTLAND BROOKS - May 17 - Finding a payment processor for your online business doesn’t have to be an arduous process. The key is to find a processor that can offer you the right merchant account for your deposits, a secure payment gateway to process the transactions, and fraud prevention and detection tools to safeguard your online business. You can source each service separately, but if you want to simplify the management of your online payments you should choose a single source provider that can offer you all three -this will save you both time and money. To help navigate your choices, keep these points in mind:

1. Choosing the right merchant account. If you are planning to accept payments from around the world, you should consider multi-currency processing. Some payment processors will allow you to accept payments in one currency and receive settlements in the currency you choose. If you have locations in multiple countries, it is important to choose a payment processor with banking relationships that can provide merchant accounts in those countries.

2. Pricing. While it is important to make sure you are not overpaying for processing, beware of gravitating to the lowest cost provider. If a processor offers you slightly higher rates there are often tangible benefits associated with the incremental cost. This can include services like a dedicated account manager and in-house risk management team. Your payment processor is an important partner and it is important to know they are monitoring your account for fraud and keep you informed of new services that can benefit your business. A lot of processors still mail-out statements and chargeback reports. It can be a significant benefit to managing your business if your processor provides you with access to online reporting of your processing and any incoming chargebacks.

3. There are also some direct factors that can impact your processing costs. Inquire if the processor has the ability to provide some type of “intelligent transaction routing”, a service where transactions can be routed to lowest cost acquiring bank based on the card type and where the transaction originates. For example, if the payment is presented with a U.S. issued BIN credit card, with a US address, coming from a U.S. IP address that transaction could be sent to the merchant’s U.S. merchant account. If another transaction is from the U.K. issued BIN, address and IP, it will route to the merchant’s U.K. merchant account. This can significantly lower your costs and the consumer’s will not pay cross border fees that are often levied by the banks, making it a win-win for both you and your customers.

4. Payment gateway functionality makes all the difference. Make sure you choose a secure online payment gateway that offers global payment processing, fraud tools, comprehensive integration tools, and set-up support. You should be able to accept all major international credit cards, and many offer processing of direct debit payments as well. The gateway should be easy to integrate to your website and provide hosted pages if needed. If you are offering subscription services, make sure you can manage your customer profiles and set recurring billing schedules. If you need to manually enter transactions, you will need a web-based virtual terminal.

5. Online payment fraud is a concern for all online merchants. To minimize your fraud exposure, your online payment gateway should be provide the standard array of fraud prevention tools including CVV/CCV2 and address verification as well as more sophisticated tools like credit card BIN look-up and velocity checking. Your online payment gateway provider should also be able to provide you with Verified by Visa and MasterCard SecureCode and will even configure custom risk rules that fit with your business model.

6. To effectively manage your business, you will need to make sure you have adequate reporting tools. Real-time reports are the best option that allows you to monitor transaction processing. Make sure to ask if you can schedule reports and if they are available in various formats.

7. PCI-DSS compliance for any business in credit card processing is mandatory. When sourcing a payment provider, it is important to ask if they are PCI compliant. If you as a merchant require assistance in becoming PCI compliant, your payment processor should be able to provide assistance. The better providers will have knowledge staff and partnerships with organizations that can provide you with certification. If you are a larger business that stores credit card data you might want to a payment processor that can provide tokenization, a process that can significantly reduce your PCI compliance liability.