Archive for the ‘Digital media’ Category

Google+ – Google’s combination of search and social

January 19th, 2012

Google’s announcement of the uplifting of Google+ (or G+) pages within search results has been eliciting reactions from a number of people in the search industry. Everyone seems to have an opinion about how they feel Google’s new preferences will affect search results, but in the furore that this has raised, businesses have to ask “How will the average searcher react?”

I think there are a number of ways in which this could play out for Google and, in turn, the businesses that get traffic from their search results. First I think it’s best to examine exactly how Google came to make this change. The rise of social media has put “the big G” into competition with “the big F”, even though they are in similar, but not the same, markets. For a large part, this decision seems somewhat ego-driven, because Google has confronted Facebook with their foray into Social through G+. So far G+ just hasn’t captured audience share from Facebook that Google hoped it would. So, to keep G+ front of mind, Google wants to increase its importance to searchers, in the hope that companies will flock to G+, bringing their fans with them.

Now those motives are not necessarily pure, it leaves search engine aware businesses with the realisation that Google’s results are no longer pure and neutral. However, for the average searcher, with little to no knowledge of how search engines actually work, will this make a difference? They will see these new details (like the result below), but their reactions are hard to predict.

Searchers seeing G+ or affiliated results, which their circles share, may believe that those pages are more trustworthy because Google and their friends endorse them. They are therefore more inclined to click on them as their level of trust in Google is high, which means that businesses could start to see G+ pages visited instead of their pages when people are searching for generic terms. This could draw greater numbers of businesses to create G+ pages as they believe their competitors’ G+ pages are gaining greater prominence in key search result pages.

Another alternative is that people start to distrust the entirety of Google’s search results because they no longer see them as neutral and unbiased. This is heightened by the fact that it is only G+ elements that are being integrated, not Facebook or any of G+’s other competitors. With this lack of trust, it could mean searchers have to find another trustworthy way to find new sites. This could mean a gap for a new search platform, becoming to Google what it was to Yahoo, or it could mean that Bing has an opportunity to seize market share. However, a new search platform would mean and entirely new problem for businesses to solve, as predicting where people will go is something that no one has completely nailed down yet.

At the end of the day, word of mouth is great when people are searching for a great place to have supper, or the new cool place to buy clothes, but friends and circles don’t know everything. We know that our closest friends don’t all have the same likes and dislikes as us, and that’s not taking into account the drive to acquire as many friends as possible. It’s a phenomenon we’ve seen in Facebook, where people collect friends to try and compete for the biggest number of friends. If people start to do that on G+, then all of those people will impact what search results they see, even if it’s a second cousin twice removed that you emailed out of family duty.

As a business, you obviously won’t know who your potential visitors are connected to, and how populated their search results will be by G+ results. This can cause businesses to potentially overestimate the impact of the new integration on their potential customers and panic. However, what they needed to bear in mind is that Google has been integrating social elements into their search results for a while, but never so overtly. Therefore without downplaying the effect that the change may have, it serves little purpose for businesses to panic that they’ll lose masses of searches overnight. For the moment, businesses need to ensure that their sites are well setup, and that they have a G+ page as well as one on Facebook.

[A potential side effect could be for those businesses with extremely poor customer service or some PR disasters in their cupboard. People are more likely to share information about bad experiences with their circles. This means that even if someone didn’t see a piece that was shared in their circle, future searches for the brand concerned could highlight the negative press. An example of this would be an article about Easyjet discriminating against a disabled businessman, which is likely to be shared in a G+ circle, so that could appear prominently when someone is considering booking a flight with Easyjet. This would make online reputation management even more important, as measuring this would be very difficult]

Blog post by Juliette van Rooyen, Search Consultant at Reform

Re-defining e-commerce sales

December 7th, 2011

What defines an e-commerce sale? This may seem like a question with an easy answer, “sales made online”, right? Not necessarily. A recent article in the Harvard Business Review by Darrell Rigby titled “The Future of Shopping” points out that the influence of e-commerce on sales is not simply about the daily report you receive about yesterday’s on-site sales.

The article asks “is it an e-commerce sale if the customer goes to a store, finds that the product is out of stock, and uses an in-store terminal to have another location ship it to her home? What if the customer is shopping in one store, uses his smartphone to find a lower price at another, and then orders electronically for in-store pickup? How about gifts that are ordered from a website but exchanged at a local store? Experts estimate that digital information already influences about 50% of in-store sales and that number is growing rapidly”.

These scenarios and many others highlight the blurring lines between e-commerce and traditional bricks and mortar shopping, yet this is a topic that many traditional retailers have not begun to understand.

This blurring of the lines creates a host of issues for traditional retailers. How do you market to consumers in the digital age? How do retailers properly track what sources are driving revenue? In terms of marketing to digital age consumers it is apparent that the days of viewing digital channels, in-store marking and traditional advertising in isolation are coming to an end. A focus on creating the easiest and most rewarding shopping experience for the consumer will need to take precedence across retail marketing, creative and advertising agency offices with a focus on coordination of messages.

Marketing efforts will specifically need to increase for mobile and tablet devices as consumers are becoming increasingly savvy at utilising the power of these devices as tools help them shop for the best deals.

The article points out one particularly interesting example of this, citing Tesco’s brand in South Korea called Home plus. In an effort to “bring the store to the consumers at a point in the day when they had time on their hands… Home plus covered the walls of Seoul subway stations with remarkably lifelike backlit images of supermarket shelves containing orange juice fresh vegetables and meat, and hundreds of other items. Consumers wanting to do their food shopping could simply scan each product’s Quick Response code into their smartphones, touch an on-screen button, and thereby assemble a virtual shopping cart. Home plus then delivered the physical goods to the shopper’s home within a few hours”.

In addition to changes in the way retailers market themselves, another aspect of the traditional retail approach must also be addressed. How will various stores, the retailers’ website and marketing channels be credited for sales?  Most retailers still approach sales reporting on a per store basis with the website being counted as one store. As the example above clearly shows this approach is not necessarily relevant in the digital world.

If one store, for example, has a great sales staff but limited stock, it is very possible that consumers could be purchasing online as result of their experience in store. Who gets credit for this? Shouldn’t the great sales staff get some credit? Retailers that think of how to model a reporting system that gives credit where credit is due will likely be ahead of the game in relation to their competitors. They will be in a better position to encourage sales staff to meet all of the consumers’ needs rather than only the needs that can be met within the confines of the walls of the store.

As we can see the definition of an e-commerce sale is changing at a rapid pace and will continue to do so over the coming months and years. Retailers that look ahead and begin to address these changes no are likely to be at big advantage in the years to come.

Blog post by Mike Jennings Director at Reform

The untapped potential of online video

October 21st, 2011

Recently I had the privilege of jumping across the pond to attend the online media, marketing and advertising expo, OMMA. Not only was it two inspiring days of serious talks and discussions with all the most up-to-date news, information and ideas in the world of online marketing but plenty speculation on the future of digital.

My focus for the two days was to understand more about online video. The statistics, courtesy of comScore tell an interesting story:

In the US alone there are 108 million people watching online video with 1.3 billion videos been watched daily. Video has seen a 1,290% growth since January 2006. An amazing stat, and yet this fast growing internet segment is increasingly under-monetized. In 2010 the US spent $1,440 million on advertising and had 441 billion videos viewed as opposed to a $324 million ad spend and 63 billion videos viewed in 2006. So a 334% increase in spend but an astonishing 600% increase in videos watched. In August 2011 there were 185 million online videos viewed, 162 million of those were on YouTube alone. That is an average of 228 videos per person per month. For the average person that is, 17 hours a month.

When looking for examples of countries getting video right one needs to look at Canada, the US and China. China and the US both manage to get over 150 million unique views per month. Canada and the US both have over 180 videos viewed a month per viewer with the majority of the videos viewed are homemade and funny. However we can learn something from that. People like to be entertained and want funny content.

The heaviest consumers of online video are 18-34 year olds, with 49.7% being female users and 50.3% male. Men watch 1.7 times as many videos online as women, a ratio that has remained constant for the past two years.

Between 2009 – 2010, the growth among long-term TV programming sites of videos viewed increased 104%. So why then are advertisers not jumping in and making the most out of online video? Is it because we are still wary of the unfamiliar content, unsure of the true effectiveness, trying to put video into the TV model of storytelling?

I’m particularly excited to see the next stages of online video and how brands rise to the challenge to harness its potential. It’s already a big opportunity and growing by the day.

Blog post by Anthony Dobson, Business Development Executive at Reform

Real time serendipity and a frictionless Facebook experience

October 14th, 2011

Mark Zuckerberg used the words ‘real time serendipity’ and ‘frictionless engagement’ throughout the F8 conference last month.  A rough translation reads, ‘more engagement and less spam’.

Much of the conference focused on the new “this is your life” time-lines and the new class of open graph apps, which no longer require authorisation for every story published.

Facebook wants us to think of our interactions with apps as ‘self expression’, reading, listening, watching and importantly making serendipitous discoveries about our friends, their interests and activities.  ‘Graph Rank’ has been introduced to keep app developers in check.  It is an artificial intelligence that manages discovery based on feedback to cut out spam.

Have the recent changes to Facebook impacted strategies for building fans and optimising fan page engagement?

The abiding principles of managing a successful Facebook page remain the same. It’s vital that page managers have a thorough understanding of Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm when planning strategies. Publishing timely, relevant updates tailored to the fan base and target audience, with the goal of optimising engagement and as a result, increasing reach.

The introduction of the hybrid news feed, featuring ‘top stories’ above ‘recent stories’, reinforces the value of knowing as much as possible about what makes your existing fans and your target market ‘tick’.

The ticker, a sidebar news stream where every story created now passes through in real-time is designed to create this ‘frictionless’ experience. The idea is to keep stories that are lightweight away from the main news stream so we never feel annoyed by a friend’s online activity. No more having to hide friends due to their obsession with Cityville.

As data comes in it will be interesting to see how this shift in lightweight stories over to the ticker impacts secondary reach for page posts.

Have you had any ‘serendipitous discoveries’ through the ticker yet or did you minimise it as soon as you found out how!?

The only change rolled out so far for Facebook pages, since this year’s F8, are improved page insights.  Facebook has made it easier for a fan page to measure how well they are faring against the competition as well as giving page owners a better understanding of ROI by introducing a few new juicy metrics.

We are now able to measure each post to a Facebook page in terms of reach (unique impressions), engaged users (Clicks), talking about this (stories) and virality (previously feedback).  The reach metric is also broken down to show organic, paid and viral reach.  We can now begin to measure the impact that sponsored stories have on viral reach and organic reach. Great news if you are managing a Facebook ad budget!

I’m particularly excited about the ‘people talking about this’ figure.   Every story or interaction created about a page, including Page likes, likes, comments, event RSVP and answers to polls are transformed into one account-able figure. This figure is not only available to track in insights but displayed publicly on your page.

Simply divide fans by ‘people talking about this’ and you get a figure you can use to measure the engagement of your page over time or the engagement of one page against another.

This public display of engagement is an excellent method to quickly monitor the health of a page and more importantly the brand that owns the page.

Guest blogger Hilary Pullen, Freelance Digital Marketing and Blogger

Gamification strategies are now a key part of UX and customer engagement – ignore this and your brand will suffer

September 30th, 2011

Social media is a game. Some people (like me) don’t get that at first. Or maybe in the early days social platforms relied very much on early adopters who were happy just making friends (and maybe making out with them) via social. In the last twelve months however, engagement, challenges, rewards badges you can virtually gift etc, have tuned me into the fun. I find myself immersed in a world of fans, followers, circles, news feeds and apps, and all that alongside my Klout perks, beta test invitations and the micro affiliate cash I can get for simply recommending a product or service to my followers. The power that rewards can leverage to an online brand strategy is awesome. See the overnight success of Badgeville, and the adoption of behaviour analytics as a basket of key metrics in the measurement of a brand’s power to engage customer loyalty meaningfully.

Simply organising your social media life, identifying and connecting with the people that matter to you emotionally brings immeasurable pleasure. As does listening and advocating those that you find thought-provoking and that you can learn stuff from, dipping into the musings of others you know it’s good to keep tabs on, and finding those people you perhaps knew long time ago when you had a different set of priorities that now keep you connected to a shared past. This emotional payback through connectivity is an intrinsic motivational driver to the key engagement piece, and is why I argue that, although I can see a world when Facebook is the suburbs with new and innovative social urban conurbations emerging, social experience utilising technologies is here to stay.

Games for Brands, a conference on gamification, is being held in London on the 27th of October and will be the first mover in what is set to become the new social media. A quick skim read of the list of keynote speakers sees representatives of the UK’s major broadcasters, agencies, and games developer communities, as well as the academics and social entrepreneurs. Harnessing the power of gamification and utilising it is going to be exciting and will be another step-changing crossroads in the incredible journey that digital is affording the marcomms sector. Bring it on!

If you would like to discuss your social strategy and the implications and opportunities that gamification represents, please contact Reform.

Blog post by Mary Keane-Dawson, non-executive director at Reform.

From riots to dinosaurs – how digital continues to amaze me

September 22nd, 2011

I am a student from Birmingham City University, working at Reform on my placement year. A couple of months into my digital year in industry there are few things that have struck me…

When I tell people I am working in digital for my placement year, a common reaction is to imagine a fantasy world, impregnable, with very techy people playing around with code on computers.  I don’t think that could be further from the truth at this moment in time. Digital is becoming more and more crucial to daily life and I for one welcome this.

Social media was recently blamed by many for enabling the London riots. However, I think the key point to remember is that it’s not social media itself that is the problem, its how people use it. For all the Blackberry messenger organised rioting, there were also some fantastic campaigns on Twitter and Facebook which help to restore faith in humanity, focusing on communities cleaning up and coming together.

This is the kind of reassurance that digital can provide, and it even extends to nations. During the earthquakes in Japan, Twitter, Facebook and Skype all helped families to reconnect and confirm the safety of loved ones. Analogue phone lines could not cope with the extreme high levels of people trying to contact each other, but digital platforms enabled contact and granted peace of mind in times of immense trauma.

And what about the power of social media to spread fantastic stories that would not be heard otherwise? The best example in the last few days is the story about one man’s experience with Marks and Spencer’s customer service. In case you haven’t already seen it, one customer who was overcharged for a sandwich was told in response to his complaint that he would receive a gift card in compensation. When he didn’t receive his gift card he asked politely for a hand-drawn picture of a smiley dinosaur to be included with the gift card (presumably as a joke?!). Wonderfully he actually got what he asked for, including a message apologising ‘unfortunately art was never my strong point…’ Check out the picture of the dinosaur – it’s actually quite good!

Digital is connecting more and more with the real world and we get to hear about real people and their experiences so much more than we ever could previously. What I love about the digital industry is that it’s volatile, it’s unpredictable, it’s challenging and it’s here to stay. Another plus is that apparently I’m a computer genius now that I work in digital. (It is worth bearing in mind that this is coming from my mother who is amazed because I know Ctrl+C…).

By Karen Hawey at Reform

The new domain name game

September 12th, 2011

Starting in January 2012, companies will have the opportunity to register new tailored domain names. Traditional naming conventions such as .com and .net will continue to exist, but brands will be able to use other words or phrases, such as their own brand name, as their domain name. For example, Reform.com could use reform.reform and other variations thereof using the .reform structure.

What will the cost for this new domain structure be? There’s an application fee which costs around £180,000, plus an annual running cost around £25,000. So, for many businesses, this kind of investment will prove cost prohibitive.

At Reform we’ll be monitoring what effect, if any, these new naming conventions have on search optimisation best practices. Will Google and other search engines favour one domain name over the other, and if so, could it lead to an unfair advantage in preserving top rankings? This will be an interesting space that we’ll be keeping an eye on for our clients.

Additionally, the new domain naming convention .xxx has been approved by ICANN after eleven years. Although some countries, such as India, have already started banning the new naming convention, brands and individuals now have less than a fifty day window to register to ensure their assets are not used in the adult online industry.

While the benefits of the .xxx domain include heightened parental control, as well as the hope that people will be less likely to unwittingly stumble across adult content, the 15,000 domain names that have been reserved are almost certainly not enough to protect all the people that may be affected. What about everyone else’s reputations?

ICM Registry’s chief executive Stuart Lawley said, “Regardless of what your personal views are on the existence of pornography on the internet, at least .xxx will give people the information they need to make a choice.”

Reform provides a bespoke brand monitoring service that can help you to ensure your brand is not misrepresented. With these new developments, it is more important than ever to invest in the right amount of diligence to protect your brand. Get in touch if you would like to know more.

Blog post by Anthony Dobson, Business Development Executive at Reform

Why businesses need a digital audit

August 16th, 2011

Economic recovery or double-dip recession? Business targets achieved or way off the mark? Regardless, now is an optimal time to assess your digital marketing capabilities, to shave off any inefficiencies (both in terms of Pounds and practices) and to bolster your revenues and profit margins. Yes, you heard me right: digital can be inefficient. Comparative to traditional marketing it might come cheaper, but there are swathes of improvements to be found and made. These are improvements that lurk in the data and in day-to-day operations.

The best way to make these improvements is to have a digital expert audit your SEO, PPC and social media efforts. An audit provides the best opportunity for you to discover meaningful ways to extract full value from your digital endeavours. This is because an audit not only tells you where your digital practices stand in relation to current industry best practices, but also gives you an actionable strategy to close whatever gaps exist between where you are and where you ought to be.

It’s easy for the people behind brands to become overwhelmed by and abandon the very technology meant to enhance their digital efforts; technology can be a false friend that way. It’s also easy for the people driving a brand’s digital presence to get complacent once their efforts have achieved a certain level of success. With today’s economy demanding more output from less resource, unless a strategy is failing outright, people don’t have the time to see if that strategy could be improved. It’s easier still to leap into new digital channels before creating a sustainable strategy because of the sense of urgency created by the impression that every other brand is already on Facebook or Twitter. You feel like you need to run to catch up, but what you wind up doing is running just to stay in place. And along with all that wasted effort is wasted money.

The easiest thing of all, however, is to seek expert assistance in assessing and addressing the gaps between where your brand currently stands and where it would stand if you optimised your approach to digital.

Reform’s SEO audit takes into account overarching brand objectives and makes suggestions for website changes in that specific context. It also provides a thorough examination of every aspect of your website and guidance on how to comply with SEO best practices, adherence to which will culminate in the brand’s increased presence in natural search results.

Our PPC audit uses the same holistic approach. Rather than examining individual AdWords campaigns, a brand’s PPC strategy and performance are looked at in their entirety and refined to better meet the brand’s online objectives. This can range from increased share of voice on Google to increased website traffic and increased revenue from ecommerce.

Our social media audit simultaneously demystifies the world of personas as well as the best methods to engage with customers. It lays the foundation for the brand’s influence to grow and to improve its ability to listen to, interpret and participate in important conversations. Consultants performing a social media audit are careful to identify different target markets and create optimal strategies for each. They also take the time to build your brand’s personas; they don’t just look at what the competition is doing. This is not an exercise in keeping up with the Joneses; it is an exercise in developing a mature, sustainable strategy to drive your brand’s objectives.

Each audit will separately improve a brand’s digital performance. Taken together, the audits provide a powerful mechanism by which to enlarge a brand’s entire digital footprint.

These audits – separately or together – also save money by increasing efficiency and making digital efforts more effective. Ultimately, the consultants who perform audits deliver strategies that allow brands to squeeze more out of less by creating greater efficiency and greater efficacy – a fitting solution in today’s economy.

Blog post by Samantha Horwitz, Product Development and Projects Director at Reform

How businesses should (or shouldn’t) react to Google’s latest update

May 20th, 2011

SEO has come a long way in the past decade, with companies focusing on search as a key component of their digital marketing strategy. And while you can probably guess I would be in the position to say such a thing, the truth is that SEO can indeed make or break a business on the web, leveling the playing field in this day and age between big names and local startups.

Companies around the world have started to use a good portion of their overall marketing resource based on how they perform in search. This is great, but it seems to me as still less of a “plan to action”, and more of a “knee jerk reaction”. The recent Google Panda / Farmer update was a major example of this – with companies “reacting” left and right wondering what they did wrong. While we love the fact that in today’s marketplace, many businesses are watching their search engine marketing performance much more closely – unfortunately, many are also believing everything they hear! So yes, SEO has indeed come a long way – and companies won’t fall for just anything, but there are certainly are still a fair bit of misconceptions going around the industry.

One recent example was the Overstock.com SEO Spam incident that you may have heard about on both the major news sites like CNN, or industry sites such as Search Engine Land where the major US retailer was penalised in the Google algorithm – supposedly (but this reason was never fully confirmed) for having a link building strategy that consisted of bulk .edu links. Weeks later, Overstock itself issued a statement saying that they had made the fixes Google required and sure enough they were back in the index – and all was well.

Some people simply assumed that Overstock had simply fixed things up, while some people complained that it was unfair that the big companies get such an advantage and got reinstated (not bothering to check why), while most companies only remembered the first part of the Overstock story, spending the time since chasing their SEO team, consultant or agency about some other new story that made the rounds in the industry or mainstream press. Perhaps direct competitors did look a bit closer at the overall situation, but we cannot confirm this, and thats not the issue here anyway.

Either way, it seemed like no one from any of the groups above double checked the story. If Google says no to bulk link acquisition and Overstock got banned from Google, does that mean Overstock’s bulk link acquisition got them in trouble? No. It was a poor misconception, an assumption that A+B=C. Clients should expect more from an agency, consultant or in house team, especially when monitoring competitor activity. We in this industry should be looking at the full answer and not taking other people’s word all the time. The EDU links by the way are still quite active in many places (example: http://www.alumni.ncsu.edu/s/1209/index.aspx?sid=1209&gid=1&pgid=632) – and so what changed then? Well, on the pages that got penalised for generic terms such as “living room furniture” – Overstock.com had pop-up/expandable text coded within the tags of their page. The pop-up text was filled with keywords and was in Google’s cache and visible to text browsers (screenshot of this example below).

The text strategy was reported by a competitor and got penalised shortly after. Yet, when Overstock was allowed back in, what changed? The links stayed, yet the hidden text is no longer there. Could this have been the “real” reason why the penalty was imposed in the first place?

No one will know for sure, but the point is that many companies will go by what they hear/read and that there are still many misconceptions about SEO as a whole. Here at Reform we make sure we try to not just throw some excuse about why sites perform the way that they do, but examine closer into it and find out what the real reason may be – instead of a “one size fits all” answer. With this extra insight and custom approach to your overall digital marketing strategy, SEO can become more of a natural approach, rather than a mystery. Not necessarily the wrong answer or right answer, but exploring multiple answers and possibilities and avoiding any potential misconceptions is key to any project we take on.

The ‘super-injunction phenomenon’ – is your digital reputation under attack?

May 11th, 2011

It can take years for a celebrity to build their reputation, but it can all be undone with one tweet.

Whether that tweet is written by the celebrity or not, the nature of the beast is that this tweet can spread so quickly that it very soon becomes common knowledge and, to all intents and purposes, fact.

So, how can celebrities manage their reputation online? Who is responsible for making sure that the image they are creating for themselves in the public eye is reflected online?

Who is responsible for reputation management?
There are two key people who need to be involved in both creating and managing a reputation – the celebrity themself and their management team. They both need to share a clear strategy on how they are going to build and maintain this reputation both on and offline.

Celebrities are brands and brands are alive 24/7. People don’t stop talking about you on Twitter or Facebook outside of office hours, which means that these kinds if channels need to be monitored 24 hours a day. Just like a celebrity can’t choose whether to be famous or not when they wake up in the morning, they also need to be in ‘celebrity mode’ online, constantly building their brand. If they don’t, they risk undoing all their hard work.

The other party who needs to be involved is the celebrity’s management team. I am constantly terrified at the lack of time and investment that agents, PRs and publicists put into their celebrities’ digital presence. I understand that this is a whole new world with different rules, but online reputation management is not a choice anymore, it is an essential part of their job.

So, to all celebrities and their management teams, my advice is this.

1. Take it seriously
If your brand comes under a cyber attack – a wave of negative publicity – it is very often too late to limit the damage. Tweets are in the public domain forever and it is impossible to ask everyone to remove their posts.

Reputations can evaporate in seconds. The speed in which this gossip spreads is astonishing. It is human nature to gossip and all Twitter does is give people an opportunity to listen and participate in it on a massive scale.

2. Have a plan – the best form of defense is continued preparation
Most of us invest in software and technology to protect the things we love the most – smoke detectors, burglar alarms and virus protection. If you have a brand or reputation that is worth saving then you need to invest in someone to develop a plan on how you might manage an attack on your reputation and to be able to respond intelligently 24/7. They need to live and breathe social media and have a true understanding of what the celebrity is trying to achieve.

3. Start NOW

Blog post by Rosie Sayers, Strategy Director at Reform

« Older Entries