Archive for the ‘Digital media’ Category

Is it an art or is it a science?

June 25th, 2010

Albert –László Barabási is probably not well known in the world of search and that is not necessarily surprising as he is a physicist living in Boston, USA. But he is a physicist with a difference, who employs detailed scientific modelling to help understand social behavioural patterns.

In his research he maps the daily movements of millions of mobile phone users over many months. His latest study of a random 50,000 person subset has concluded that 93% of human mobility patterns are predictable. If he is right, and there is no reason to believe otherwise, that is a big number – in fact that is a huge number.

At this point he seems to be most excited about the prospect for using his ‘data burst’ analytics to model the spread of viruses or road traffic engineering. From a marketers point of view these individual and collective physical travel habits will be of interest, but people’s virtual travel habits are likely to prove even more interesting.

With Google and Facebook representing the most travelled sites online, the brands that can best analyse the ‘data bursts’ of search and social media activity will be best able to ensure that their products and services lie in wait as each consumer makes the next click with their mouse.

But better still, a little bit of reverse engineering will actually inform brands as to the moves that their competitors are most likely to make. This is where the art of pursuing means reversion or trend acceptance will force the data analysts to take a back seat as the business tacticians plot their course.

Blog post by James Kilpatrick, non-Executive Director of Reform

Adding value to online retail: the in-store shopping experience

February 21st, 2010

With time to kill in between appointments last week I found myself in Top Shop’s flagship store on Oxford Street in London. Not for the first time I was struck by how different the shopping experience is. Indeed Top Shop is less of a shop nowadays, more like a nightclub-cum-youth club-cum-beauty salon. With TVs and music blaring, girls of all ages (thirteen up to forty!) were browsing, chatting, phoning, texting. Oh and there was some purchasing going on too. Top Shop is a real-life social media experience.

Back in the virtual world, in December 2009 £5.46 billion was spent online in the UK, a 17% increase y-o-y. According to the IMRG Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index, the Clothing sector saw an 18% annual increase in online spend and Accessories in particular saw a phenomenal 101% annual increase. Driven by a quest for shopping on demand, online retail, or e-tail, is certainly thriving.

The challenge for both online and bricks and mortar retailers is that the Millennial generation – defined as the mid-teens to late twenties who have grown up in a digital world – are a fickle bunch. They want social interaction but they also want a highly personal experience. They expect you (the retail brand) to know exactly what they want, and they want to have it now. They have been spoilt by the instant gratification of Google, and the infinite choice of niche sellers that the Web has to offer. It’s all about me, or “me-tail”, after all.

Customer acquisition and retention strategies must therefore be cross-media and highly targeted. Indeed, in its Industry Report entitled ‘The “me-tail” revolution’, Accenture urges retailers to radically reinvent themselves, and cite the example of Domino’s Pizza’s use of Facebook and mobile phone apps – as well as TV – to facilitate orders, and Best Buy’s leveraging of Twitter to answer customer queries.  According to Accenture, it won’t be long before this new generation of always-on customers spurns the concept of retail grazing.

Whereas for the last ten years, retailers have been trying to work out how their websites might add value to in-store spending, the tables are now turning. What is clear from the Top Shop experience is that the physical store space must now add value to the price-led, convenience and personalisation of shopping online.

This blog post was written by Amanda Davie, Managing Director, Reform.

Analytics & Content Strategy Among Key Topics

January 25th, 2010

As the UK search marketing industry awaits the sound of the Search Engine Strategies 2010 conference wagon wheels rolling into town in February, we took a look at the event’s schedule, to see what some of the key themes and topics will be this year.

Many will be excited to hear the keynote speeches from Avinash Kaushik, Google’s leading Analytics guru and Author, and from Jim Sterne, Author and Chairman of the Web Analytics Association. And indeed the theme of analytics and conversion modeling, conversion attribution and optimisation features frequently throughout the three-day event schedule. Clearly search marketers are no strangers to accountability, but being able to lift search out of its silo and beyond the last click, and to model its success in line with the performance of a brand’s website and of its entire cross-media activity is front of mind for the industry in 2010.   

There are the usual suspects for those new to search marketing such as Introductions to Paid Search and SEO and link building strategies. And it is important that such industry events accommodate the needs of new market entrants as well as stalwarts.

Another theme which has more prominence on the SES conference schedule this year than it has in previous years is the importance of ensuring that search informs and shapes content strategy. On Wednesday 17th February (Day 2) there is a panel called “Developing Great Content” which will explore a range of web content development strategies that are born of the search marketing set (as opposed to the more ‘traditional set’ of journalists, copy writers and designers).

Reform’s Amanda Davie will be speaking in this session, and will be joined by search content and publishing specialists from Site Logic Marketing, SearchEngineWatch, SuccessWorks and SEO-PR.

For more detail about the “Developing Great Content” session or indeed the SES London conference schedule in it entirety, please visit http://www.searchenginestrategies.com/london 

Google and Bing to Add Twitter Tweets in Search Results… Is That a Good Thing?

October 22nd, 2009

News came out yesterday that claimed both Google and Microsoft Bing are going to include a bit more tweets from Twitter in their search results.  The search marketing world was abuzz, with comments and ideas for how they can expand their search marketing capabilities and how Bing and Google will benefit greatly from these “real time” updates being integrated in their search results.

Really?  This is good news?  Perhaps I should tweet it to the contrary.  I say, hold on a second.  How relevant are most people’s tweets to the general public anyway?  Lets have a look.  Bing is already doing a beta of this in the US.  All I can say is that it’s good that it’s separate from the real results. 

Google’s blog at http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/rt-google-tweets-and-updates-and-search.html tells me that with Twitter integration, I can now find up to date snow conditions at my favourite ski resort.  So I tried to look for the “weather in Chamonix” and “weather in Whistler” on Twitter Bing (http://www.bing.com/twitter/).  Which by the way is the same as http://search.twitter.com for the most part.

One had no results, the other had ONE.  And it wasn’t even of any use.  No real time info, just some person tweeting that the weather was nice…. yesterday – so much for real time.  

Lets try something more commercial then… what’s more commercial than insurance!!  Here the results are split between blatant sales pitches (that came from automated twitter accounts and have links that redirect to affiliates) and people’s every day lives – such as one that reads “I just got car insurance, what up yall!!!”  True story, not mine.

Don’t get me wrong, Twitter has a lot of use for people that already know you or your company, your brand, etc, and want to know more or be kept posted – such as our Reform Digital account that lets followers know the second this blog is posted (quite ironic I know).  But if you’re a complete stranger that happens to query something related to this page’s content, I’d rather you find this posting in the search results and not the much briefer condensed tweet – which will of course put this lovely page an extra click away. 

While I know many brands have taken advantage of Twitter, to launch unique offers to users who “follow” them, in some ways like the email lists of old – putting this sort of thing on the regular search results sort of defeats that purpose.  Brands lose out from the quality of direct connections that are more likely to convert, and users lose out by seeing a wave of search results that get valued by the engines, but don’t really have much use in most instances. 

From the user end, will it open more Twitter accounts?  Maybe.  Critics such as Steve Rubel of Edelman Digital believe that Twitter already has the users who want to use it.  For the most part, he feels “everyone who wants to publicly tweet is already doing so”.  And I agree.  But, I do think there will be a wave of new accounts and more traffic for Twitter with this search engine integration. 

Brands, advertising, just like the profiles that went astray when mainstream media looked at MySpace and Facebook as revenue generating opportunities.  Its one thing to make sure your brand reserves their presence, and I’m all for proactive campaigns – but there’s a difference between a Tweet about a product offer from a person I know and a search result featuring a tweet from a stranger that tries to befriend me.  Can I really trust the latter? 

One positive that Bing’s Twitter integration claims to have is that it will only expose the tweets from the last 7 days.  This is a good start, as the last thing I want is an archive of tweets muddling up the index in Bing or Google for that matter.  On the other side, all the tweets I see in the results are pretty irrelevant.  Only time will tell I guess.   Twitter can be easy to spam also, which is why I liked the fact that it wasn’t fully integrated in search.  And it’s very easy to post an article and just get loads of accounts to link up to it.

Some articles cite that you can get real time weather, news opinion from regular people and sports information now that Twitter will get integrated on search.  Hmmm, I could get that stuff online already.  This just makes sure I get to see everyone who bangs on about it and thinks I care.  Lets see how Google fares. Good luck.

Blog post by Niall Madden, SEO Director of Reform

Update: Here’s what the US version looks like (for those that can’t see it).

Bing Twitter Homepage in US

We need to look beyond the media landscape to predict future media change

October 5th, 2009

 

It’s normally around this time of year that the next year predictions start to tumble from the media trend spotters.

And some trends don’t require a crystal ball or an econometric model to forecast, for example:
• Yes, Google probably will make big waves in the smart phone market
• Most phone and computer manufacturers will try and replicate Apple’s super intuitive touch screen technology
• Online TV consumption will rival traditional box set consumption
• Social media tools such as Twitter will amplify – and potentially replace – some traditional PR and publicity vehicles

But let’s forget about 2010 predictions and look ahead to ten years time. How different will our media consumption habits really be by 2020?

Nigel Gwilliam, Head of Digital at the IPA has recently returned from a fact finding mission to Japan and China – two nations with a very different media landscape to here in the UK, and for many different and sometimes contrasting reasons. Here are some of the IPA’s observations in terms of digital media consumption:
• The Japanese have been using smart phones since the late 90s. Email on the move is “so 1999, darling” (I don’t know the Japanese for darling, sorry!)
• In China there are over 200 internet addition treatment centres and boot camps
• In 2007, half of the top ten best selling books in Japan were written on – and for – electronic handheld reading devices
• In Tokyo, teenage girls can attend a fashion show and buy the clothes they see on the catwalk there and then – via their mobile phones

Are these signs of future times for Western media consumption? Not necessarily. Media habits evolve as a result of external influencing factors in society such as economic growth (particularly the import/export market), government regulation, cultural attitudes and education (the teaching of English as a foreign language).

Let’s look to the East for some examples of factors that have influenced media consumption:
• In Tokyo, it is frowned upon to talk on the subway. So people don’t talk on their phones, they email on them (cultural)
• Chinese netizens prefer anonymity, so they don’t publish (blog) as much as UK netizens (government and the “censor culture”)
• There are no Japanese mobile phones outside of Japan (economic)
• Manufacturers and mobile phone networks work together – product doesn’t necessarily come before marketing (economic)
• The isolation of single-child families in China has led to an explosion in online socialising (cultural)

As avid, future-gazing media planners we need to look beyond 2010 and who will be the next Google killer, and think about the broader socio-economic backdrop and how this will impact digital Britain in the years ahead. What factors will influence the adoption of new media and new devices? What will be the barriers? And the enablers? It’s certainly a complex predictive model. Perhaps we need a crystal ball after all?