Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

Digital snacking – the death of downtime?

August 13th, 2010

Next time you’re in the queue at Starbucks or Tesco, watch people.

If it doesn’t look like they’ll get served in the next few seconds, chances are they’ll start prodding at their phone. Which will be in their hand. Ready. There’s even a phrase “Blackberry jam” that has been coined to describe being stuck at tube station exits behind office workers slowing to a halt as they breathe in that fresh phone signal.  http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Blackberry%20Jam.

Increasingly, people don’t do downtime. And this includes me. I’m not proud to admit it, but I find myself digitally snacking in the those oh-so-boring seconds in-between lift floors. Or waiting for the train to pull to a stop. Or while your colleague grabs a drink before a meeting. A watched kettle might never boil, but it’s definitely enough time to read the BBC headlines. I wager that checking facebook has replaced reading a tabloid as the nation’s favourite on the loo pastime (or is that a boy thing?).

I don’t say this is a good thing. It might even be a dreadful malaise, but it’s definitely real. And it’s getting worse/faster. Multi-tasking on iPhone 4.0 means – God forbid – that no longer do we need to stand by idly whilst the Spotify app hogs the foreground. Nope – we can start a track playing and check Twitter. Why has no-one updated anything in the last five minutes?

So what does this mean for marketers?
1. Recognise that mobile is not just a different screen size, but a different occasion, involving different mind states and needs.
2. Think little and often. It could be titbits of information, mini games or a decent facebook page; brands would do well to provide snacks.
3. Speed up. Marketing has always been about getting messages across efficiently, but boy, that really matters now. Halve your copy, and double its punch.
4. Social again comes to the fore. Opening up safari, then going to Google, typing a search and clicking on results is slowwwww. Just gimme the link or a Like button to press already.
5. Or provide alternatives. The world isn’t on its way to hell in a handcart. Downtime is good, and brands that help people to switch off will be more important than ever.

Guest blog: Carl Mesner Lyons is Marketing Director at toptable. He has been in marketing since the 90s and has worked on brands such as Guinness, the Guardian, lastminute.com and Capital Radio. Read more about his take on how brands can get famous and stay relevant at http://www.talkablelikeable.com/.

The State of Search Marketing Survey – guest comment from Ed Stevenson, MD of Marin Software

May 21st, 2010

Congratulations on your recent State of Search report.  I thought it provided some extremely valuable insight into the big issues facing our industry.

In particular, I was interested in the things that advertisers want to see more of from their agencies. Here’s the full list from the report:

• More insights from performance data, not just impression levels and basic daily reporting
• Better recommendations that can be implemented quickly
• More transparency of data
• More pro-activity overall
• More advice and assistance planning with ATL activity
• Direct access to tools for data without waiting for agency to provide it
• Ability to do more structured testing
• More meaningful (not necessarily more detailed) reporting and analysis
• Better understanding of the client’s company and its products to make PPC campaign changes easier
• More integration between SEO and PPC

What I think shines through here is a growing desire for control: advertisers want more of it; agencies have not always been able to demonstrate they can provide it.

Of course, advertisers have always wanted to know how their search campaigns are performing, but – as the report clearly shows – search spend has increased dramatically both in absolute terms and as a share of the overall marketing mix in recent years. With this growth inevitably comes greater scrutiny and a desire for more intelligence around how search is directly impacting the business.

The report also shows where this appetite for greater control can logically end up – with search being taken in house. Almost a third (32%) of clients are now taking this option and over half considering doing so. Clearly, in some cases this can make very good sense and certainly knowledge of ‘how to do search’ is no longer confined to a small niche of agency specialists – the basics are becoming commoditised.

But I still strongly believe that in many cases agencies can play a vital role in giving an outside perspective and adding creativity to search campaigns that advertisers can benefit from. And in a world where demand for exceptional search talent still outstrips supply, agencies can help clients access the skills of the best people available.  As I’ve written about before on my own blog, I think to succeed agencies need to directly address the issue of control. They need to be more transparent in their reporting. And they need to offer not just information, but insight and intelligence about campaigns and relate that back to the businesses they are serving in a language they understand.

A third of clients already see search as too important to outsource – and they may well be right.  The key to the future of agencies is to develop such a deep understanding of their clients, combined with outstanding creativity, so that an agency relationship no longer feels like outsourcing at all.

Guest blog: Ed Stevenson has worked in the search industry since the early days of AdWords and is now the Managing Director of Marin Software in Europe. Read more about his take on the rapidly expanding world of big search marketing at http://www.bigsearchblog.com.

You can read more about this State of Search Marketing Survey and download the full report here: http://www.reformdigital.com/reform-search-marketing-survey.

Bing & Wolfram Alpha? Research Based Search Engine Results Could Bring That Personal Touch

November 16th, 2009

You may (or may not) have heard last week about Microsoft’s deal with Wolfram Alpha – which has been in talks for the last few months and now allows Bing’s search engine to integrate Wolfram Alpha’s database results (in the US only for now). It should be noted from the start, that Wolfram Alpha is not a search engine itself, but more an information database.

The results will generally be integrated for certain niches, such as health (like nutritional information) and statistics (population, GDP, history, etc), but with a very unbiased and real time approach (with results you can interact with). And perhaps this is not huge news to some people, but it sort of hit me as big news.

It’s better than news of other recent Bing developments, such as how natural results on Bing offer content snippets and related keywords along with dividing the results across the keyword you entered, videos, local listings and several variations – a souped up version of Google’s “universal” project, or even the fact that the first page of results now includes several keyword variables, that results in 20 natural listings on the first page (which is quite a bit longer, but still shorter than the results page of Naver in Korea), because face it, its not new. Same goes for the Bing “XRank” thing they implemented, where users find out how popular the name of someone they entered is. Nothing new there.

So why is this still good news for Bing in my opinion? Because its about time! It’s about time Bing (previously known as MSN, Live, etc) started looking towards a different direction for providing search results. It had been wasting way too much time and probably too much money trying to be like Google in recent years.

FINALLY, Bing may be thinking “long term”, with this acquisition. Maybe it will use this and its Facebook share to give more of a “person to person” feel in results (even the real time Twitter results could help, if they figure out a way to get past the “junk”). Combining Wolfram Alpha with Wikipedia results (which Bing US already integrates under its own site) might help too.

Maybe even add a bit of new colleague Yahoo and their Yahoo Answers offering? Suddenly, instead of a commerial search engine going against commercial search engine, we’ve got one that is taking potentially taking the more “person to person” and “research based Wiki” approach. The one that looked many steps behind for a while now, is starting to look more modern? Strange, but its starting to hint at that.

Many innovative search engines have come and gone over the years, but the main reason many of these failed were that they simply lacked the budget to get seen, let alone have competitive results. Microsoft’s Bing at least has the budget part checked off.

But how about this Bing, forget about profit for a while. Let Google concentrate more and more on its increasingly aggressive marketing model (by this I mean, behind the scenes and how AdWords teams are concentrating on generating client spend. Not conversions, not traffic. Spend.) Take some more time behind the scenes and develop a more “personal” based search offering. Do it right and become a research based medium – and traffic might come back over (more than the single digit percentage share you have right now).

Then, when you’ve established a new type of user experience, turn up the profitability a little – in order to cover increasing resource and overall company management. This sort of approach worked like a charm for someone else, um, what were they called? Oh well, I guess this isn’t 100% new either.

Anyway, here are some reference points (saved as screenshots for non US users).

1) Wikipedia Content being served under Bing.com URL

2) Screenshot of a long page in Bing’s results for “auto insurance” featuring several keyword variables

Do I think Bing’s improved in the past couple of months? Yeah, but I also think it’s got a long way to go. Still, it’s finally looking in a different direction though, and thats a start.

UPDATE: You can integrate WA results on Google too, but only if you install this Firefox plugin – https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/12006

Blog post by Niall Madden, SEO Director of Reform

Our Trip to Search Marketing Expo (SMX) East 2009 in New York

October 12th, 2009

We all packed our bags and hit the bright lights of New York.  Actually, no, not really….. We have someone here in our New York office, and we sent him out to SMX 2009 at the Javits Center last week. 

There were many things to be seen at SMX East.  Perhaps more so than in the London equivalent.  Here is what we saw plenty of. . .
 
Out of the booths, or tables, stands, whatever you want to call them, it felt like HALF of them were about tracking solutions of either website traffic stats, or how to track, analyse, or manage Google / Yahoo / Bing PPC campaigns in one place, with an interface that’s user-friendly and generates the “right” customised reports.

The good side was that some of them had effective ways of separating what the user actually queried versus the ad campaigns keyword bid, and displayed useful figures such as your keywords “impression share” – which could help refine campaigns and increase returns further.  However, most of these applications made the same mistake – they were programmed in Dollars and Cents.  So no Pounds and Pence, and no Euros, makes it a lot harder for the more international sites to use at this point.
 
So I’d say one of the biggest disappointments was the lack of international influence.  Almost everything was very US market focused, with maybe versions coming out later for the UK market (once we asked).  Which is a shame, as some of them looked very promising, quite competitively priced, and ran quite smoothly.  Of course, things always look nicer in the showroom!

And going to the other end of the spectrum, “local search” was almost silent.  There was some buzz and several conferences about optimising via the Web 2.0 tools, a la Twitter, YouTube, etc.  But most of the buzz was around tracking and general SEO.      

There were a fair few “SEO Interfaces” – as perhaps more companies are looking for a more template approach to SEO.  Yet, it’s the “same old” in most cases.  Your Yahoo site explorer links, your Google PR, your Alexa page rank, and various other things you can find online and aren’t even the most reliable sources in some instances.  Then there are others that just over-analyse rankings and keyword density to the point where clients get obsessed with both!  And that’s not how SEO works in the first place.

Too many places trying to define it a certain way, and maybe that’s influenced by client marketing teams and needs.  If there was a template mechanism for measuring SEO accurately, it would be a hit for sure.  However, reality is, you cannot template SEO.  Every tool I’ve seen has promise, but then if you try it with three sites that you either own or have access to the data of – it will usually be way off with at least one of the three.  And that’s a horrendous rate for any marketing tool.  That’s why we give every website a customised approach.

As for my attendance, I was there on day two (Tuesday), as it was more SEO geared and had a “link building” conference.  However, for those that actively deal with link building, there was nothing new here.  The usual “does Google detect link buying” (only meters away from companies that buy/sell links for search marketing purposes!) – and the usual complaints from sites that are making quite basic mistakes.  As for link buying, it has at least becoming more internationally focused itself.  By that we mean, for the sites that want to dabble in buying links, link brokers now have a more international reach.  Since Google’s algorithm has a lot to do with link strength and location, it’s always a touchy subject.  Here at Reform, we make sure all sites know what they’re getting involved in before even considering such routes, and what the pros and cons are.

More details from SMX East 2009 can be seen at http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/020841.html
(which has live blog transcripts of every other session at SMX east too).