VALENTINE’S DAY - ARE YOU READY?

Last year we saw a 30% rise in subscriptions on February 13th & 14th across the WhiteLabelDating.com platform, plus a 31% increase of ‘re-initials’ from members who decided to restart their subscriptions.

With love and relationships firmly in the minds of the nation, make sure your dating business is prepared. Why not update your landing page with a cheeky banner relevant to Valentine’s or tailor your campaign using relevant key words? The Partner Team are here to help you if you have any questions, big or small.

VALENTINE’S DAY COMMS UPDATE

To help complement your campaigns, the Comms Team have been busy as ever preparing a variety of promotions and useful offers to keep your members engaged.

On Monday, a virtual gift promotion will be going out to all countries and networks (except Alternative), to help kick start some fun dialogue between members.

On Tuesday, a Free Read and Access will be available to members from 6pm - 8pm (local time) in all countries / networks. This activity will be announced in a newsletter at 6am (local time) to give members time to receive the information.

The Valentine’s campaign will be tied up on Wednesday, where a 40% offer will be sent to all countries / networks. If you have any questions, please get in touch with your partner manager.

ONLINE DATING SUMMIT - FREE REGISTRATION!

We are pleased to announce that WhiteLabelDating.com is an official sponsor of the Online Dating Summit Conference (ODS), taking place on 2 - 5 March 2012 in Barcelona, Spain.

Due to our support of ODS, all WhiteLabelDating.com partners are able to attend the conference absolutely FREE, saving you 429 Euro! Please click here for further information and pass registration details.

PLENTY OF FISH - AD PLATFORM WEBINAR

On Tuesday 28th February, we’ve arranged for PlentyOfFish to host a webinar to enable our partners to learn more about their ad platform and how this can generate traffic for your dating business. The webinar will cover:

• An introduction to the POF ad platform
• A live demo
• Tips, tricks & tools for success on POF
• Q & A

Register today! If you have any questions, please email Jayne Musk or get in touch with your partner manager who will be happy to assist.

THANKS FOR READING!

Don’t forget to join us on Twitter, Facebook and check out our blog for up to the minute news and handy tips.

Best regards,

Louisa Page
B2B PR & Marketing Executive
WhiteLabelDating.com

ACQUIRE DATING TRAFFIC THROUGH PLENTY OF FISH

With over 149 million visits globally per month, top users of the PlentyOfFish ad platform have substantially increased their revenues by taking advantage of their targeting capabilities. You can target local consumers on a variety of different options including postcode, age, gender, education and profession.

For further information in advance of the webinar, check out the PlentyOfFish advertising blog for lots of free information that includes tips & tricks, case studies and tools for success.

AGENDA

PlentyOfFish will be presenting this webinar.  The session will give you the opportunity to learn about the advantages of advertising through the POF ad platform and to ask any questions that you may have to a member of the POF ad team.

The agenda will include:

• Introduction to the POF ad platform
• A walk-through how to use https://ads.pof.com
• Tips, tricks & tools for success on POF
• Q & A

WEBINAR DETAILS - REGISTER TODAY!

Date & Time:

• Tuesday 28th February
• 16.00-16.45pm GMT

To attend this online presentation, register and reserve your place today >>>

HOPE TO SEE YOU ONLINE!

We hope you’ll be able to login for this valuable session. If you have any queries regarding this webinar, please don’t hesitate to contact me at jmusk@whitelabeldating.com or 01753 271280.

Hope to see you online!

Best wishes,

Jayne Musk
B2B Marketing Manager
WhiteLabelDating.com

It’s that time of the season when love is in the air and you have to dip your hand into that ever worn pocket to treat the love of your life. YES you guessed it, Valentine’s Day, the day when men account for 73% of flower sales across the globe and when over 1 billion cards are sent between loved ones and potential loved ones, as a sign of admiration and much more.

So, what does this mean for the dating industry? More users online? More messages sent? More virtual gifts purchased perhaps? Indeed, all of the above… last year we reported that 63% of members would either be searching for a date or actually be on a date on Valentine’s Day. This led to record numbers of winks, icebreakers and private messages being sent and received. Now consider that statistic along with the continued record breaking member growth we have seen since…

To compliment this day and help increase member activity we will again be putting together a number of offers for your current members: free reads and promo offers to name but a few.

So what can you do I hear you ask? How can you be a part of this day? Why not update your landing page with a cheeky banner relevant to Valentines’, why not tailor your campaign using relevant key words? The Partner Team are always here to help you if you need any advice.

Show your members you are thinking about them, show them you love them and be part of the experience that is Valentine’s Day.

Chris Georghiou, New Business Development @ WhiteLabelDating.com.

We are pleased to announce that WhiteLabelDating.com is an official sponsor of the Online Dating Summit Conference (ODS), taking place on 2 - 5 March 2012 in Barcelona, Spain.

Due to our support of ODS, all WhiteLabelDating.com partners are able to attend the conference absolutely FREE, saving you 429 Euro!

Attend seminars and presentations from the industry’s leading experts and enhance your online dating knowledge. In addition, a calendar of fun networking opportunities will also be on offer so you can socialise with other dating professionals during your stay, including go-karting, golf and Spanish wine tasting. Finally do not miss the very special WhiteLabelDating.com party which will be taking place on 3rd March at CDLC Barcelona – one of the hottest clubs the city has to offer.

For more information, please visit the preliminary ODS Conference schedule >>>

Click here to register and claim your free WhiteLabelDating.com partner entrance pass.

To set up an appointment for a meeting with WhiteLabelDating.com at ODS, please contact Jayne Musk at jmusk@whitelabeldating.com.

We look forward to seeing you at the Summit!

Last Friday our development team (globaldev) broke away from project work and held our very first Hack Day. A frantic seven hours of coding ended in a series of presentations and well-deserved awards.

In the photo are the day’s winners: Mat (left, Founders’ Trophy, chosen by Ross and Steve) for his project to enable searching by drawing on a map, Michael (right, Innovation Award, decided by Barry) for his machine-learning project to find scammers and Kris (centre, People’s Vote) for her (and Grant’s) desktop notifications system via Socket IO.

Below are project summaries written by each team. There were some hugely impressive efforts in such a short period of time and we hope to see some of these projects end up integrated back into the main system.

Featured members aggregator

Khalid:

My project aggregates all the featured members across a network. It displays a random selection of 100 members every x seconds, where the refresh period can be controlled by the user. The main concept here is to present the viewer with a constant feed of potential members without them having to interact much with the site. They can filter the members shown by gender, age and region.

Visualisations of today’s members

Ian and Matt:

We produced two visualisations from live WLD member data. The first shows a count of the selected action over the last 5 seconds. The other is a clickable/drilldown visualisation of various data for members that have joined the platform today.

Hudson CI (Continuous Integration)

Brian and Tayo:

The aim of our project was to get a Jenkins CI server set up in the cloud to continuously build and test our code base. Because that codebase is very large, we started by cloning a different, and very small codebase instead (a model of the enigma machine in CFCs) which conveniently had accompanying MXUnit tests that we knew ran very quickly. We installed Jenkins on our cloud server and set it up to pull from GitHub, installed MXUnit on the same box, added an ANT buildfile to the repo, and then stood back in amazement as Jenkins checked out the code base, executed the build file, ran the unit tests and generated test output.

Using the extensive range of plugins we got GitHub, email and Campfire integration up and running, and once we were feeling brave enough we got a partial set of the WLD platform’s MXUnit tests running towards the end of the afternoon.

Text classification from moderation history

Michael:

Could we create a system to automatically recognise the sorts of private messages that our Moderation team would recognise as likely to be scams, or otherwise disallowed? To find out, we trained a basic Bayesian classifier on over a quarter-million examples of messages - both good ones and bad ones - that had previously been subjected to the wise judgment of our Moderators.

Despite the rushed timetable and lack of opportunity to pursue any refinements, in this first attempt we achieved a 70% success rate in identifying bad messages that our moderators also identified as bad messages. The presentation was capped by a member of the company’s Moderation team entering sample messages into a live demo of the system.

Project estimates vs actual times

Sam and Jen:

Our team decided to crunch months worth of timesheet data in order to create the start of a historical project benchmarking process, entitled “Chaos Theory: The Predictability of Random Events aka Project Management”. This new process highlighted trends regarding project estimates vs. actual times that would enable the PM team to identify any persistent problem areas of projects that we can look to improve, plus provide guidance on what percentage particular phases take, on average, which will help with future project estimation accuracy.

Activity heatmap visualisation with Google Maps

Joel:

For Hack Day I worked on visualising user activity with a HTML5/canvas heat map integrated into Google maps to show regions of high member activity The source data was from a 24 hour period of unique user logins along with their location defined in their profile. The application allowed for zooming in to postcode level to view more specific data within major cities as well as the ability to view activity at a snapshotted timeframe. Currently the application allows for displaying of activity from the UK, Australia and the USA.

Voice and SMS notifications with Twilio

Jon:

So, my project was to use Twilio’s voice and SMS APIs to send notifications to your mobile phone when you get a private message. The SMS notifications have obvious applications in any sort of reminder within the system, or maybe for sending out promotions, etc. The voice one was more a technology demo as having your message read to you over the phone is a bit of a gimmick, but could well also be of use for reminders. Some A/B testing would be in order there methinks.

Automated testing

Kevin R, Kanthan, Adeel, Dush and David:

The QA team, Kevin and Dush undertook a project on automated testing to increase efficiency and reduce costs, the aim was to ensure that before our software went live that we regression tested critical areas for added assurance.

We are constantly making updates to the system so we need continuous regression testing and that’s just not possible using a manual approach without significantly impacting the budget. Kevin’s involvement was integral simply because testers are not developers and some of these tests take coding and technical expertise. Hack day was also used to improve QA’s technical ability as we gained exposure to the fundamentals of scripting which will prove nothing but useful as we push on and provide the system with greater coverage using the automated approach.

Would Like to Meet

Tom and Kevin P:

The aim of our hack was to extend the appeal of the Encounters system by helping members who have matched to arrange a meet or date in real life. For this we give a member the option of ‘near me’, ‘near them’, or ‘meet me half way’ (which finds venues geographically located half way between the two members). Venues are found via the Factual API, with the member asked to pick three which are then formed into a custom private message as suggestions. We were pretty proud of this for a day’s work, and as an added bonus for the business: In order for members to use this service they would have to have a photo (for Encounters), and their postcode set (to find the venues).

Draw on a map to search

Mat:

My aim for Hack Day was to create a way to search for dating site members by drawing on a map. As I was working on my own, I did a little bit of research ahead of time in to what algorithm I was going to use and settled on one that worked by breaking up the drawn shape in to tiles on a grid. I liked this approach as it was super fast, capable of searching through thousands of members, and with the grid size set appropriately would obscure individual members exact location and protect their privacy.

I initially started implementing the core search algorithm in Haskell, but hit a roadblock when I found Hackage (Haskell’s equivalent of RubyGems.org) was down. A mad scramble to re-write in Ruby so I’d have something to demo, and a quick front end in JavaScript using the Google Maps API and I was done.

Real-time prototyping tool for HTML/CSS

Gavin:

It’s a real-time prototyping tool for previewing CSS and HTML. It lets you target individual elements in your design and manipulate their properties on the fly to see how your design will cope with those changes. This is really useful for previewing different types of content with different styles. When I get chance to develop it further hopefully we can use it our own workflow.

Tracking errors against deployments

Jim:

After seeing a graph in a slide on scaling GitHub I thought that tracking exceptions against deployments should be something we should all know about. I’d also been looking at playing with Etsy’s StatsD, so I built a gem that extends our existing Airbrake exception handling and posts the details via UDP to a StatsD server for graphing and aggregation. It’s a really simple addition, so hopefully we can get it up into production for some of our apps really soon.

Deployment dashboard

Kamil:

My project is a single resource containing information about all WLD applications. First incarnation enables OPS to monitor deployed code with ease while my aim in future versions is to provide a single deployment point as well. Click and Deploy will make deployments easy - display outstanding requests, update requests status and automate notifications for all applications in one, easily accessible place. The biggest challenge arose from the variety of applications being part of the platform — different ways of managing deployments (webistrano, capistrano, puppet), vast amount of managed hdosts and keeping security in mind. But once there, dashboard will allow both developers and members of operations team to easily determine what revision of code is deployed giving us more control over the platform.

Messenger

Jason:

Essentially “Messenger” is a chat based application that uses the existing messaging service within the WLD platform. Conversations appear with the member’s photo and last message and clicking them reveals an SMS/iMessage style interface. Users can send and receive messages, search messages.

Future features could include adding favourites, winks and gifts (sending and receiving) as well as a “cross-reg” check which would allow the app to tell the user what other sites they have accounts with and swipe between them. Also integrated but not demonstrated was Boxcar notifications for Push support from the app to iOS.

Global Warning

Pete, Keith and Andy G:

Our idea was to create an interactive 3D globe displaying an assortment of member data, plotted across the continents. From messages sent between members to the number of members online now, all sorts of interesting data could be presented through an interactive, highly engaging, location based view. The 3D globe was built using WebGL and THREE.js, the JavaScript 3D engine. User actions were streamed to the browser using HTML5 EventSource and Cramp, an asynchronous event-driven Ruby framework.

Time off: holiday booking system for the team

Barry and Tim:

With the aim of replacing our paper-based holiday booking system with something befitting a web dev team, we sought to produce a web app to help us move into the twenty-first century. We built most of a Rails 3 app that implements Google Apps authentication via OmniAuth, Twitter Bootstrap for layout, Active Admin for administration and an ICS file exporter. It mostly worked but was greeted with widespread apathy by an ungrateful team who will now have to submit their holiday requests by post three months in advance…

Real-time notifications in the desktop app using Socket IO

Kris and Grant:

Implementing real-time notifications into the platform using sockets. Our aim was to increase user engagement with the WLD platform and stimulate interaction between members. We used Node.js, Socket.io, prototypejs and HTML/CSS.

STANDARD TEMPLATE TO CLOSE

Launched over eight years ago, the Standard Template will be coming to an end on 31 March 2012. If you still have dating sites on the Standard Template, they must be moved to the Premium Template before this date. Any sites still left on the Standard Template after March will be closed down.

WHY ARE WE DOING THIS?

The Standard Template has simply run its course and it makes sense for us to continue hosting and developing the Premium Template to help you maximise the potential of your online dating business.

The Premium Template offers the member improved layout and versatility plus a faster, better all-round service. It is the only template to host all tech developments and feature launches, including extensive search functionality. Partners that have moved their site to the Premium Template have also seen up to a 10% increase in conversion rates.

NEXT STEPS

If you have any sites on the Standard Template, please get in touch with the partner team or your partner manager. They can help you upgrade your sites to the Premium Template or can transfer members to another site in your portfolio.

Don’t forget - any sites still left on the Standard Template on 31st March will be closed down. Please contact the Partner Team who will be happy to assist you.

THANKS FOR READING

If you have any queries regarding your dating portfolio and the Premium Template, please do get in touch. The Partner team are here to help.

Best regards,

Louisa Page
B2B PR & Marketing Executive
WhiteLabelDating.com

WINNER OF ‘BEST DATING SOFTWARE PROVIDER’ FOR 3RD YEAR RUNNING!

We are pleased to announce that WhiteLabelDating.com has won ‘Best Dating Software Provider’ for the third year in a row at industry awards, iDate. Steve Pammenter, Co-founder & Director of Partnerships, says: “With a dedicated in-house team of web developers, partner team and customer care professionals, WhiteLabelDating.com continually works hard to be the market leader, providing the best service for our great network of partners who run a global collection of sites on our platform.” Thanks to everyone who voted for us!

JANUARY COMMS ROUND-UP

The Comms team have been busy as ever with a variety of campaigns to keep members engaged and encourage that all important conversion to full membership. From special offers to grab the attention of sales shoppers through to information regarding new functions for members whose sites have recently upgraded to the Premium Template, they have seen some great results and are now planning for the all-important V Day… Please click here to read the January Comms Round-up.

V DAY IS AROUND THE CORNER…

Whether you personally love it or loath it, you can’t deny that Valentine’s Day is the biggest date in the calendar for relationships. With the media and high street already pushing 14th February at full throttle, singletons will be online looking at dating sites.

Make sure that your dating campaigns are ramped up - If people are actively looking for a new relationship, then it’s your job to help them find it! Why not speak to your Partner Manager for some extra ideas? They are here to help you succeed.

WELCOMING BILL & RICHARD TO THE TEAM

We’ve enhanced our senior management team, welcoming Richard Gale as Commercial Development Director and Bill Richards as General Manager. Richard Gale (right) will be tasked with exploring new and innovative methods to maximise existing infrastructure and developing further revenue streams. Previously, Richard was at News International, where he was Brand Director for The Sun managing marketing activity as well as looking after SunBingo and SunDreamTeam. Beforehand, Richard was Director of Marketing and Sales at Playboy.

Bill Richards (left) will be tasked with managing the customer care, moderation and retention teams to ensure total customer satisfaction. Previously Head of Customer Data and Analytics at News International, Bill was responsible for transforming its direct marketing capability and customer intelligence to bring the customer to the front of their company. Bill has also worked with EMI, IPC Media, SportingBet and MTV. Welcome to the team guys!

THANKS FOR READING!

As always, don’t forget to check out our blog for all of the latest news, plus join us on Twitter and Facebook for up to the minute ideas.

Best regards,

Louisa Page
B2B PR & Marketing Executive
WhiteLabelDating.com

January is an interesting month in the world of online dating. On one hand, everyone’s watching their pennies after over-spending at Christmas, but on the other hand, singles are determined to find love in the New Year.

With that in mind, we kicked off January with the gift of a ‘second chance’. The Ice Breaker re-set allowed members to send out a brand new introductory message for 2012, increasing member activity within the site and tempting the basics to upgrade to read their replies.

Determined to avoid the lull that can hit businesses mid-January, January12 was born; an offer of 6 months membership for just £10, re-billing on a 6 month period. We followed this up with a reminder email 3 days before the offer expired. The campaign proved successful with lots of members upgrading.

As you all know, our Standard Template sites are soon to be no more. So far this month we’ve sent emails to over 250 sites letting members know all the benefits of the Premium Template. If you’ve yet to move your site or have any questions regarding the Premium Template, please don’t hesitate to contact your Partner Manager.

We closed January with a ‘Knowledge is Power’ campaign, promoting our Read Notification Bolt-on, which we are already seeing a strong uptake on just a few days in.

Now to get ready for Valentine’s Day…

See you next month!

Jenna Keating, Email Marketing Executive.

It has been 18 months since the retention team began and what a rollercoaster it’s been.

The last time I wrote about retention was back in December 2010 where I gave a ‘day in the life’ account of what the team does on a daily basis. Today, February 2012, we only have one original ‘retentionee’ left. So before I start giving you the low down on everything else, I would like to introduce you to the new team: Ross, Alex, Dave, Bell, Jamie, Bindi, Danesh and Rais.

The basic process is still the same; our aim is to understand why members wish to cancel and then use the offers we have in place and knowledge of the product to assist them in the hope that they will stay with us for a bit longer. Since my last blog, the offers we provide have been developed. We not only provide an incentive to our members but also drive revenue in the form of a wide range of offers and discounts across all of our subscription packages.

We have started to notice that members are realising the value of taking up a longer subscription and these particular offers are fast becoming a contender for our most popular incentive. Everyone loves a bargain but what we provide also means that members have some extra time to perfect their profile, use the site facilities and find their match.

The team I have now are second to none. As a result of the business continuing to grow, the average number of calls we are handling per month has risen by 25% in comparison to January 2011. Out of these calls, the number of people we are turning around per month has also increased by a massive 76%. That’s an incredible achievement and is all down to the highly skilled individuals we have recruited and the offers we have available to us. We even have days where, as a team, over a third of all cancellation calls are turned around and this certainly doesn’t look like it will be stopping any time soon.

So, what next…. we’ll continue to adjust targets / KPI’s to get the best performance out of everyone. We’ll also carry on listening to our members’ feedback so we can make sure the processes we have in place reflect the needs of our customer base. As well as this, one of our main priorities for the coming months (alongside retaining custom), is success stories. After all, this is the point of our business and we are really keen to utilise the value of these and show those who may not have found their next relationship yet that the service we provide really does bring people together.

I hope that the next time I write; I will be able to update you on our progress in collecting testimonials and may even share a few of our member’s stories with you.

Alex, Customer Retention Team Leader.

Global Personals Ltd has enhanced it’s senior management team, welcoming Richard Gale as Commercial Development Director and Bill Richards as General Manager.

Richard Gale (right) will be tasked with exploring new and innovative methods to maximise existing infrastructure and developing further revenue streams. Previously, Richard was at News International, where he was Brand Director for The Sun managing marketing activity as well as looking after SunBingo and SunDreamTeam. Beforehand, Richard was Director of Marketing and Sales at Playboy for Europe.

Bill Richards (left) will be tasked with managing the customer care, moderation and retention teams to ensure total customer satisfaction across the Global Personals portfolio. He will be responsible for scaling the teams to best support the growth in international business and to help monetise customer data. Bill’s background is in the collection and use of customer data, Internet-based systems and online marketing. Previously Head of Customer Data and Analytics at News International, Bill was responsible for transforming its direct marketing capability and customer intelligence to bring the customer to the front of their company. Bill has also worked with EMI, IPC Media, SportingBet and MTV.

Welcome to the team guys!