Here’s the techie bit, bear with me this starts to make sense (perhaps) in a minute.

If you’re considering moving a website from an established domain name (let’s say www.oldsite.net) to a new domain (perhaps www.rebrandedsite.com) be very careful. Google will tell you that using a 301 redirect is the way to go. However I made this apparently trivial change for a nameless client recently and they lost a major chunk of their Google traffic, like -60% traffic for over a month and still counting (though I think there is an upswing now). My advice, stick with the old domain if at all possible, Google ranking is hard to get and easy to miss.

Why do I mention this? Two reasons, 1) hopefully this tip will help others avoid my mistake and 2) I’m about to make a complaint about in-authenticity and it seemed like a a little honesty about my own mistakes up front might help me slip past hypocrisy here.

This week I attended my first CaseCamp, CaseCamp Toronto 5. Over all it was a pretty good event, hat tip to Eli for his hard work getting this new Camp going.

Perhaps my reaction to CaseCamp is a factor of having been spoiled by all the cool *Camp events in Toronto over the last couple of years. But it seems to me that authenticity is one of the central tenets that makes the Camp scene a successful one. It’s real people talking to real people on topics they care and know about.

CaseCamp 5 had a decent share of authenticity, for example Chris Matthews presented on Specialized Riders Club and he came across as really caring about bike riders, the site and the company he works for (probably in that order) and was happy to answer questions.

Other presentations seemed… well, less than authentic. BMW (that’s them in the photo, they had suit-wearing as an initial hurdle to acceptance) presented on their… well actually I couldn’t tell you what they presented on. They presented a corporate buzz soaked, bullet heavy, content challenged something-or-other that contained the phrase “our experiential matrix contains joy at the centre”. No kidding.

So that’s a long and rather snarky way of saying that I think authenticity is important, at Camps, in life, in online media, even in advertising BMWs. I’m not sure I can convince the BMW marketing guys of that, but I’ll try to keep it in mind myself.

[Photo by Tom Purves, used under a CC licence.]