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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.

Yandex – Yet ANother inDEX?

September 26th, 2011

There are parts of the world where Google is not dominant. In Russia the search engine Yandex is the market leader with a market share of over 60%. Helped by rapidly growing internet usage in Russia, the search engine doubled the number of searches it handles between 2008 and 2009. For online businesses operating in Russia there is no question about the importance of Yandex (for more about search engine marketing in Russia read our Internation Search Review post) but since the launch of an English language search engine in 2010 should the rest of the world be thinking about Yandex?

There are two aspects to this question:
1. Will Yandex gain a large worldwide market share?

2. Are there other reasons to observe what Yandex is doing?

Will Yandex gain a large worldwide market share?
In my opinion, no. Right now people have no reason to use Yandex. It is not integrated with any of the online services commonly used in the West, nor is it the default search engine on any of the main browsers. The only ways Yandex can increase market share are either by spending a lot of money on advertising (this is working, but very slowly, for Bing) or by being better at search than Google. Unfortunately for Yandex, they can’t just be a little bit better they need to be a lot better; studies (by Microsoft) show that people say the quality of results from Bing are equal to those of Google, but only when the Bing results are wrapped in Google branding. Any new search engine that wants to dominate the market needs to be an order of magnitude better, just as Google was in 1998.

The search technology behind Yandex
Google beat the competition with their PageRank algorithm. Page and Brin realised that strong webpages were more likely to be linked to from other strong webpages. In other words, they picked a feature that they thought good webpages should have and then built their search engine to rank pages with this feature.

Yandex’s MatrixNet algorithm is very different; given a list of good pages for a queryspace, MatrixNet uses machine learning to decide which features distinguish them from the average. Then they rank pages with similar features in that queryspace. This method is a great defence against spammers because any feature that becomes common is no longer a powerful ranking signal. For example, if everyone has an optimised title tag then having an optimised title tag is not a signal of quality.

The main weakness with the MatrixNet approach is getting the list of good pages to begin with. The internet is too large for this to be manually curated so there has to be another algorithm to generate the list of quality sites. This algorithm must be very conservative in the sites it selects, otherwise results quality will suffer a lot; imagine if having a large number of AdSense ads became a positive ranking factor!

Google’s recent Panda updates use a similar approach. Matt Cutts (Head of Web Spam at Google) has said that they “came up with a classifier to say, okay, IRS or Wikipedia or New York Times is over on this side, and the low-quality sites are over on this side”. However, this algorithm update can only reduce rankings, not increase them so Google do not need to be as conservative with how it is applied (some site owners say they should have been a lot more careful).

As evidenced by their Panda update (and many other projects), Google has the technical ability to do machine learning at web scale. Should Yandex’s approach begin producing SERPs of amazing quality then Google can copy their approach before Yandex’s market share reaches critical mass. This is why Yandex need an order of magnitude improvement over Google; they need to capture a large amount of market share before Google improve their algorithm to match.

Why you should pay attention to Yandex
Like Yandex, the browser Opera also has a large market share in Russia without being a big player in the West. Opera introduced features like tabbed browsing and “speed dial” that have since been imitated by Firefox, Chrome and others. Web designers watch how Opera are innovating because some new features will cross over into the mainstream.

Similarly, you should keep an eye on what Yandex are doing because they take a different approach to search and successful features from their algorithm are likely to appear in other places.

Blog post by Richard Fergie, Consultant 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

Search engine marketing in Malaysia – International search review issue number 7

August 1st, 2011

Reform has this week published the latest paper in its international search review series. Continuing the focus on markets in Southeast Asia, this instalment looks at the internet and search market of Malaysia.

With internet penetration increasing from 15% in 2000 to 59% in 2009, it’s clear that there has been significant change in this country’s technological outlook over the last decade.

This is another market where Google has consolidated its dominance of the search engine arena, growing its share from 51% in 2008 to 85% in 2011.

The increase in internet penetration (16,902,600 internet users as of June 2009) has occurred in spite of the fact that the quality of the broadband in Malaysia is still rated as ‘poor’. This, combined with a growing number of increasingly sophisticated mobile devices, has led analysts to believe that mobile search will become ever more important in this market.

Advances in mobile technologies can also be looked to as the facilitators for the phenomenal popularity of social media sites in Malaysia. This is a country that has Facebook penetration of 88.4%, and which accounts for .47% of Twitter’s world voice.

Since 2009 the number of Malaysian web users using social media to keep in touch with family has increased to 71%.

To find out more about the search market landscape in Malaysia, download a copy of the review – and let us know any comments or feedback that you might have. You can also download past issues of the International Search Review to see what we discovered about Chinese internet development and the Russian search behaviour evolution amongst other things.

Contact us and we’ll send you the next issue of our International Search Review before anyone else.

Blog post by Juliette van Rooyen, Consultant at Reform.

Smart (phone) thinking

July 15th, 2011

Every so often, you see something that genuinely makes your jaw drop. Sheesh, you think, that’s an astounding idea, why did no-one else think of that? A few days ago, the jaw-dropper in question (at least for me) was a piece in the Telegraph about what Tesco is up to in South Korea – a QR code-based ‘virtual shop’ service that allows commuters to identify and scan groceries while waiting for their train and then have them delivered only a few hours later.

It’s impressive because it’s pretty much a perfect blend of technology, convenience and logistics. Admittedly, South Korea is years ahead of the West when it comes to search and smartphone usage, but the QR codes and virtual store aspects exist here already – Amazon, Ocado and the like all have apps that allow you to scan and shop on your phone.

Where the UK would fall down, aside from the lack of a mobile signal in subway stations (!), is probably the logistical side. Online grocery shopping here is currently based around centralised distribution centres, which add time to the process. If you want your groceries in a couple of hours, they’d have to come from retail stock at a nearby store or equivalent. And, of course, it could only really work in urban centres where all your customers live close at hand.

Still, assuming that this is a harbinger of things to come, it’s amazing to see where we’re going in terms in mobile search and technology. The essence of successful grocery shopping is convenience, and this new service seems to be about as convenient as you can get.

By Anil Haji, account director at Velvet Integrated PR

Happy Birthday, Reform!

July 8th, 2011

Our second year spelt data and growth for those businesses who dared, against a backdrop of traditional retail fallout.

Reader, please indulge me for a paragraph or two, while I have proud founder moment…

Reform is two years old this week. My baby is out of nappies, standing on its own two feet and has the world at its oyster. I write this blog from our office in New York – we have an awesome view across the rooftops and water towers of mid-town Manhattan – and on Monday I am meeting our newest client, a large US retailer who will be launching a new brand and ecommerce proposition this autumn, under Reform’s digital stewardship. Back in London we’re having a second birthday party this week for clients, partners and our extended family of fellow digital industry professionals. In year two we won assignments from Debenhams, Austin Reed, and Getty Images – the latter for whom we’re implementing a 7-market international search strategy across North America, Europe and Asia.

And most importantly, we finished the year in profit again. So I have a lot to feel proud about in terms of Reform’s achievements.

Wise business mentors warned me that year two would be difficult. The terrible twos. Apparently years two and five of a start-up business are the hardest, although the pessimist in me fears that the years in between – years three and four – are unlikely to be a walk in the park!

Year two certainly threw some curveballs our way: selling digital management consulting isn’t easy, we found; even though so many businesses are crying out for our skills and expertise to identify and realize incremental revenue growth through digital. Board directors are scared – scared of the impact of the recession on their bottom lines, and scared of what they don’t know about digital in this brave new world. We have a responsibility to educate and empower them to test new commercial and operating models. The braver ones put their trust in Reform, and in digital, this year.

A second year of marriage is the year of cotton. For Reform, the second year was definitely the year of data. Data goldmine or data minefield? Data is omnipresent; it already underpins all decision-making in digital planning: data which informs customer targeting, acquisition, engagement and broader business planning insight. Yet still, most businesses can’t see the wood for the trees in terms of the value opportunity of data. So we ran an event in February called “Unlocking the formula for growth: why understanding data is key to business success” where we looked at the practical applications of digital data sets such as search, social and web analytics, and we heard from BT’s Chief Customer Innovation officer how this business was tackling the challenge of converting data into meaningful and actionable insight.

Data is also a double-edged sword. In inexperienced, untrained or silo’d hands, it is all too easy for digital insight to be taken at face value, as Rory Sutherland, vice-chairman of Ogilvy Group explained at this year’s Google Zeitgeist:

“One of the unfortunate byproducts of the digital revolution is that our ability to process and communicate that which is numerical, sequential, rational, proportionate and intuitive, has leapt ahead of our real understanding of human psychology and human nature. So there is a kind of imbalance that’s created, which, in many cases, leads to inefficiency in the value creation that businesses can actually achieve.”

Our ambition for year three at Reform is to continue to help businesses to unlock the revenue potential that digital and data proffers.

The UK high street has suffered its worst year of trading for 25 years and just this week Jane Norman and TJ Hughes closed their doors to shoppers. You can’t help but wonder if these retail businesses had started out on their digital journey sooner and taken advantage of the exponential growth in online shopping habits, that their decline in revenues could have been reversed.

In a year when Marks & Spencer see a 30% uplift in sales from customers who watch movies on their YouTube channel, and where etailer ASOS made their first million (£) via its mobile commerce platform, it seems ludicrous that culturally and commercially, ecommerce operations within retail businesses are silo’d, that bricks and mortar stores see their online shop as an internal threat and compete for customers.

When Reform was founded in 2009 our mission was – and indeed still is today – to help businesses to embrace digital change and to realise incremental revenue growth. As Charles Darwin said, and as we often quote, “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one that is the most adaptable to change.”

So reader, why not make your next year the year of digital reform, of business change, and of incremental growth? That’s certainly what Reform’s third year will be all about.

Blog post by Amanda Davie, proud Founder and Managing Director of Reform.

Reform has a Twitter Wall, a birthday gift from our partners at Ultra Knowledge. If you would like to wish Reform a happy birthday via Twitter, please do so using the hashtag #happybirthdayreform. Thanks!

 

Analysing Google Search By Image & Google Instant Pages

June 22nd, 2011

Last week Google instituted two new additions that span across regular and image search results, first “Google Instant Pages”, geared at making experience online faster for users and an update to Google image search, known as “Google Search by Image”, which allows for the user to drag and drop an image in the Image search bar without entering text and thus search for related images. This could also be done through a right click on a Chrome or a Firefox plugin (sorry Explorer).

Previously this was available through TinEye, yet Google has pushed image search further than TinEye since Google provides both text and search results that suggest what you’re looking for while TinEye only returns images. Upon entering these hybrid results, you can continue to drag and drop images or search for text results.

However, overall, it does look like Google’s results are varied. Google relies heavily on colours and the general shape of the image presented, plus proportions of what’s shown in the image – along with traditional factors such as text around the image, image file, etc.

Say you put in a picture of one of my favorite actors, Jack Nicholson. Not only does Google Search by Image identify that the image is Jack Nicholson but it returns pictures all throughout Jack’s life to help me decide which picture I’d like. It also provides me with the imdb profile for Jack as well as his Wikipedia page, if I’d like to learn more about him. These two results are taken from the natural results for the term “Jack Nicholson” followed by various images, then single image results where the corresponding page is listed.

jack nicholson

The algorithm for the image itself, though, seems to pick up the black background and I’m wondering if this matters for pictures of people that are not celebrities. To test this theory, I dragged in a picture of me looking smug at a friend of mine’s wedding.

matt-dorville

As you can see Google has picked up the black of my coat as well as the very white light around me to believe that these photos of people with dark clothing and a white background are more pictures of me. Though there are pictures of me throughout the internet, Google couldn’t figure out it was me in the picture (strange though, since I do consistently throw a smug look). Instead it focused on color, the fact that I was standing (all the photos show the subject standing straight) and my focus is directed at the camera (which Google only picks up on somewhat). Probably the most embarrassing part of this is that a majority of the selection are, in fact, women.

Another significant change that Google instituted is “Google Instant Pages” on their main algorithm. After Google’s recent commercials with Chrome indicated, the speed of the browser to opening pages has been put to the utmost importance. They have recently found a way to eliminate load time of a page by pre-rendering the top result. Since Google has faith that you will choose their number one option the page automatically loads, taking out wait time. However, Google Instant Pages only works when it’s almost entirely certain that it knows what you’re looking for, so not to waste bandwidth. When Google is very certain it knows where you want to go (such as when you enter a big brand name), it pre-renders the pages, allowing the load time for the page to be much quicker. Time will tell how efficient this is for sites that change content frequently.

These two additions have changed search by instituting search by image and having the search engine prerender a page. It’s also probably not a coincidence that this update is close to the appearance of Chrome books, which promises a faster experience. Though this recent addition does look a lot better than Google Wave, we’ll have to wait to see how these additions are accepted by users in the future.

Search engine marketing in Indonesia – International search review issue number 6

June 10th, 2011

This week, Reform has published the sixth installment in our “International Search Review” series. After reviewing India, South Korea, Russia, Japan and China we have decided to place a focus on Southeast Asia, starting with the fourth most populated country in the world, Indonesia.

Although internet penetration in Indonesia is only at 14.2%, with 34,850,920 users overall, the rise in mobile search and social media has lead to a lot of investors looking at Indonesia in terms of growth potential. Smartphones have become increasingly popular in this country, with some analysts predicting a possible leapfrog in technology, where users would skip using a computer in favour of mobile technology. In this International Search Review, we investigate Indonesia’s market potential in search, mobile search and social networking.

Key stats and findings to take from our review of Indonesia include:

• Poor quality of broadband and a low internet penetration may contribute to a rise in smartphone sales and a subsequent increase in mobile search.
• With 95% of the search queries, Google controls the vast majority of Indonesia’s search market.
• While Google does better in Indonesia’s search market than Yahoo!, Yahoo! does better than Google in the mobile market, a figure that becomes more important as smartphone sales increase.
• Indonesia is the second largest user of Facebook in the world, clocking in with over 34 million users.

To find out more about the search market landscape in Indonesia, download a copy of the review here – and let us know any comments or feedback that you might have. And view past issues of the International Search here. Contact us and we’ll send you the next issue of our International Search Review before anyone else.

Blog post by Matt Dorville, SEO Strategist at Reform

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