Online Dating

A student at Penn State posted a "My Opinion" piece called Internet dating sites unrealistic. She wrote a cynical view of online dating services and in my opinion never really gave them a chance. After viewing some profiles on Match.com she decide to write up a sexy profile under the alias "MeltNmyMouth69" (I have to admit, I laughed a bit at the name). She then proceeds to be surprised when she got a ton of winks (she had only signed up as a free member) from what she termed as Creepers. At the end of the story she proclaims:

You will not find love on the Internet.

If you truly are interested in a long term relationship then this is obviously the wrong approach. You have to take online dating seriously and put the time and effort into it. If you create a profile that is going to attract horny individuals, then of course this is who is going to contact you. Much the same way as if you are going to a bar dressed seductively, you are going to attract a certain type of guy. If this was not the type of men she wanted to attract then, of course her online dating experiment was going to fail.

CNNMoney has an article about the marketing approach one dating site called TeamDating.com took to get free publicity. This was all done without hiring a PR firm or consultant. TeamDating has appeared on many popular national TV shows like The Today Show, Good Morning America and Extra . Print publications include newspapers like USA Today. Every show or news piece TeamDating has appeared in has given them a huge traffic spike like with over 600,000 visitors when TeamDating appeared on the Today Show. The article doesn't mention what their average daily traffic is now but it does say they have 60,000 regular visitors (what does regular mean? Weekly?) and over 20,000 registered dating teams

Ray Doustdar, who owns TeamDating achieved his PR success through his own hard work of reading, researching and contacting media people. He spends over 90% of his work day dealing with marketing his dating service. He knows where his customers are and who to contact to get a story out. He also knows what type of story each media outlet is looking for and who there readers or viewers are.

Now days most internet businesses need a detailed marketing plan, and dating sites are no exception. Gone are the days of "if you build it, they will come"! Competition is huge in the online dating market and any company wanting to create a service needs to realize that marketing is the most important thing to your sites success.

Western Alumni Gazette from the University of Western Ontario has a piece about the owners of the dating service Christian Cafe. They go into details on how Philip and Samuel Moorcroft got ChristianCafe.com off the ground in the late 1990's, some of the challenges they faced and how the dating site is fairing now. Currently the cafe is one of the largest Christian site's on the internet with over a 100,000 members. The business is based in Markham, Ontario, Canada and employees 15 people.

For more information on Christian Cafe please read our review.

I found two dating advice articles recently that are not too bad (most tend to be regurgitated fluff pieces). The first one is called "Truth About Dating: Do clothes make the man?" and can be found at Seacoastonline.com. The author talks about men's clothes in great detail. He examines how men perceive clothes and how woman perceive men's clothes, especially when dating. He also writes about the metrosexual men, what they are and where the term came from.

The second article called "In the dating game, everyone has a quirk that just won't work" from The Seattle Times looks into online dating and dating profile deal-breakers. Some deal-breaker examples are given as well as what the underlying causes may be from them. The author also looks at some of the personality traits of the people with certain deal breaker quirks.

In 1965 the first computer dating service called Operation Match was born at Wesleyan. Questionnaires where sent to college campuses all over the United States where students would answer questions about their physical appearance, interests and their ideal date using a scale of 1 to 5. The students would then send in their answers along with a $3 fee. The answers where then transferred to computer punch cards which a Avco 1790 read. There were thousands of responses and it took about 6 weeks to create lists of matches for all applicants. The list of matches where then mailed back to the students.

For more information on Operation Match check out The New York Times article called, Computing the Mysteries of Attraction.

eHarmony has added free Icebreakers to their dating service. This allows non-paying and paying members to pick from 11 predetermined short messages and send it to their matches. Icebreakers include simple messages like, "Great pic…love to see more photos!". This type of feature has been used for a long time on other dating services so it is in no way a revolutionary thing but, I do think eHarmony needed to add them.

What Icebreakers do (and this has always been a major complaint with eHarmony members) is it gives free members the ability to see if their matches are currently using eHarmony and are not just potentially old profiles of members who don't log in anymore. If the new members has a match they really like, by sending an Icebreaker and getting a reply back they know it's an active profile and it will be most likely worth signing up to the service to pursue the communication. The only problem here is that eHarmony choices for Icebreakers are rather limited. Replying to an Icebreaker with any of eHarmony's current list of Icebreakers doesn't make sense. Most of the Icebreakers either ask a question or want you to do something like talk or request a picture, so there is no real way to say yes or no to a Icebreaker question.

Icebreakers will also give eHarmony more paying members in the long run for the same reason stated above. This is the second major feature eHarmony has added in the last few months. They obviously are feeling the competition from other serious matching sites like Chemistry and PerfectMatch.com. I wonder what else they have up there sleeve?

Related Story: eHarmony Members can now see "Who Has Viewed Me"