Posts Tagged ‘Management Consultancy’

Social Search And Personalization: A Turning Point For Brands

April 13th, 2012

With Google’s privacy changes implemented on March 1st and pending changes such as the EU cookie law, there are a lot of people trying to explain how privacy and personalization works for users, and for many, the noise only complicates things further.  To cut a long story short though, it’s a golden opportunity for your brand and you can’t afford to miss out.

Here’s the lowdown.  Even if you’re not signed in to Google Plus, or Gmail, YouTube, etc. (which are all under the same umbrella anyway), and even if you’ve turned off your “web history” settings, your Google search results are still somewhat influenced by your past activity, your tastes, and even the general public. This may sound like a stormy time for some sites, as SEO transitions into part of an overall online marketing strategy (which it should have been all along, right?) that focuses on getting an effective brand and social influence and letting users determine how well a site fares.  But for established and upcoming brand names alike, this may be the perfect storm and the perfect time to take charge.

Branding has become easier on Google, with results for brand names inclusive of search results natural and paid (which is proven to be most effective when both are active), followed by social profiles such as Google Plus, Twitter, Facebook, Linked In,  along with video profiles, your location info, reviews and news about your brand, and even sites related to your brand.  Gone are the days where businesses felt like they had no control on how their brand was represented on natural search and maybe just stuck with paid search (I can think of many big name brands that once fit this category).  But times have changed.

Not too long ago, Google worked on making results more favourable to the country/market you are in.  But this has been magnified since, looking at your locality in more detail.  Results in New York are way different from those in Los Angeles these days and completely different from those in Europe.  Many consumers now are always logged in to one of the Google-owned sites, and often never bother to log out and the results start to cater to their interests.  Now whether this is good or bad for consumers is a different debate all together, but in this current set up, each one of us is now developing Google’s algorithm!

Google itself has focused on helping brands understand search, and they should, as it helps their own brand too.  Whether beta trials on verticals (image, video, rich snippets, local, etc) or helping to develop pilot programs on Google, it was the big brands who they contacted and wanted to get involved.  And search started being more human, whether quality control teams on Google’s end, or even how Google plus totals are becoming an influence on some rankings. More and more we are all becoming a part of a global development team, whether we know it or not.

And the reality is that getting a new brand established solely using a natural search strategy is harder to do in this day and age.  There is more competition for one, fewer unknown niches left to capitalize on, algorithms that favour sites with a good presence overall (and thus more resource to keep tabs on a multi-level strategy), while consumers communicate, share and look for each other’s favourites. The last part is key, many look for each other’s favourites, not exploring new ones, and this is a big debate too.  Does the current set up of social search and personalization allow for brand favouritism and less negative sentiment to show? Unfortunately to some, yes.  You’ll need more firepower, more resource, more people on board to get a message across. But if you are a major brand name…… you have no excuses.

Need more info on how it all works?  Well, drop us a line and let our team of consultants at Reform help guide your brand into a stronger search and online strategy.

Blog post by Niall Madden, SEO Director of Reform

Social Media Week 2012

February 22nd, 2012

Last week Social Media Week took place across London, New York and many other cities throughout the world. Five days were dedicated to all things social media, with events organised across each city for marketers to get together and mull over the conundrum that is social media. In London, free events were held at venues around the city, from trendy Soho restaurants, to digital agencies and conference centres, each promising insight into a different aspect of social media and how it can be used in every walk of life.

Events promising to tell us all we needed to know about social media in politics and finance, the impact of the Olympics on what we do as marketers, the Google+ dilemma, and whether Pinterest is here to stay drew in the crowds. With so much going on it’s difficult to single out any specific event, so below I’ve included a few of our team’s favourite insights.

Anti wifi paint. Heard of it? Neither had we, but this relatively new kind of paint that blocks out wifi signals is being hailed by some as the saviour of analogue experiences. In an age when discussion of digital de-toxing is a la mode, this paint through which signals can’t pass could provide just the escape digital hippies are looking for. Perhaps a bigger implication for this is security – this would be a quick and cheap way of preventing access to sensitive data from unauthorised users.

Everything happens so quickly today that news breaks on social media in real time, and 24 hour news coverage means that news is reported straight away, with less and less time for reflection and rigour. To combat this, a new type of ‘slow journalism’ is coming to the fore. One example of this is ‘Delayed Gratification’, a publication looking at stories from the last 3 months in more detail, with more rumination about the longer-term implications of events or about what the real implication of something was, after the hype has died down. So, will slow journalism be the saviour of print?

This feeds in to another event that we attended at which the panel talked about all the data that we give away to companies as payment for all the ‘free’ perks we get. Loyalty cards are a prime example of this, but the problem many companies have is that they are unable to properly use and process data to gain real insight from it. One particularly interesting part was the observation that we’re likely to see far more behavioural and mental health issues arising from the inability of people to deal with the large amount of data that social media expose us to.

My particular favourite take away from the week was an analogy used to describe social media in the minds of marketers by a panellist at the CIM Social Media Benchmark launch. Social media is like teenage sex, he announced. We all want it desperately, it’s a bit disappointing at first, but then we practice and practice and it gets better. Social Media Week 2012 showed to me that as a collection of marketers, we’re all very much in the keep practicing till it gets better stage!

Blog post by Penny Anderson, Consultant at Reform

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

Google Instant Suggestions Misleading Users And Businesses Alike

March 23rd, 2011

This isn’t exactly recent news, and maybe more along the lines of criticism. But so many clients and people in the industry have referred to it that we had to take a closer look.

It has been six months since Google Instant officially became part of the default search results in the US (and since then in some other countries too), and actually there is an interesting transcript of a presentation at SMX in New York that touches base on this.

But that’s more of a side note. What I want to talk about here is that when people type in a query and see keyword or brand variations suggested, they think that these are the top terms people are querying based on the main term. For example, if you look for “Reform Digital”, Google will suggest “Reform Digital Limited” or “Reform Digital SEO” or “Reform Digital London”. Fair enough. Google Instant will often suggest up to five terms as you conduct your search, and they are often some of the top variations of the query; however that is not always the case and they don’t appear in any particular order.

A recent test, based on data from different clients and companies that we work with, as well as Google data, showed that the suggested terms were actually a selection of five key terms found in what Google considered to be the top ten queries around a term. From as long ago as 2006 you could go to a URL on which Google was testing what was then known as “Google Suggest”, where they used estimates of Google impressions (perhaps query estimates?), which differ by market. Google then took the top ten variations that it sees in terms of impressions and lists them out. Have a look at the following URL which we generated using the term “mobile phone” as an example, to see what we’re talking about http://www.google.co.uk/complete/search?output=toolbar&q=mobile%20phone (or http://www.google.com/complete/search?output=toolbar&q=mobile%20phone if you want to see the US variations). This kind of query can be done with any term to see what terms Google Suggest would return (ie first four or five listed on the page) and to see what the other contenders are (based on query totals next to most terms).

So what we saw is that Google picks the five search terms that it’s going to show via various parameters, but to have a decent chance of being listed amongst those five, you need to at least be in its list of the top ten (or know how to automate queries etc). In terms of timings, we saw that Google Instant’s suggestions don’t respond immediately to changes in impression volumes, there is some delay. When checking for AT&T following the announcement that they were buying T-Mobile at the weekend, it wasn’t until late on Monday that a T-Mobile variation appeared in the list of top ten key terms, and even then there was no “impression total” next to it (it’s the only keyword suggestion with no data on that above URL).

Or, for another example, for the term “Reform” (including the space, as if you were going to add another word), Google’s top ten list includes the term “Reform Digital”, and it actually now gets the most queries of the group. But as a newer addition to the list, it’s not one of the five being suggested when you search in Google proper.

So Google Suggest is definitely sensitive to a combination of historic data and trends, and, like everything else on Google, it’s subject to manipulation. Website owners have looked at getting users to query variations to make their business look cleaner, for example “Business Name scam” is a common suggestion. Tools such as Amazon Mechanical Turk – where users are paid very small amounts to do basic tasks such as “like” or tweet something – have also been used by sites in the past to try and manipulate the results, as have several other methods of pushing query data.

This issue comes into play when looking at brand reputation. What if one of the ten terms was some other negative comment about your company? How can we get a more positive variation up there in its place? Of course, if all five of Google’s suggestions were negative, you probably have other problems!

Blog post by Niall Madden, Search Director of Reform

Update: “Scam” variations of a keyword are now blacklisted in Google Instant – so… “Business Name scam” won’t reveal a drop down. Nor does it appear in the URL that lists the 10 keyword variations. However, some brand names still have the “scams” variation, for now.

What data tells us, and how it helps us to improve.

February 4th, 2011

“Data consists of propositions that reflect reality, such as measurements or observations of a variable.” (Wikipedia)

The definition doesn’t necessarily fire one up with enthusiasm or excite your imagination, right? Once I had a boss once who was fond of saying to me, usually when I’d come up with a new and crazy idea for a product or service, “Ah, Mary… that’s all very good, but what does the data tell us?”. She would then squint her eyes and turn on her heel in a most disturbing and enigmatic way. I finally realized, years later, that what my boss hoped for was by my burying myself in the ‘data’, and scrutinizing it for pattern, shape and linear connectivity, the empirical truth and Holy Grail of marketing certainty would emerge… and into the bargain, she would avoid the risk associated with impulsive experimentation. Today marcomms, marketers and media folk have the collective opportunity to use data to afford both discovery and alacrity of purpose.

All around us, the web provides endless streams of real time data… after all, that’s what enabled the internet to become a reality – bits of datum connecting with other bits of datum. Now that should makes us EXCITED, because as it is real time data, we can test and experiment with our new ideas, and gauge almost immediately if those ideas are having the desired impact on our customers and our commercial objectives. We have this opportunity to disseminate and analyse enormous amounts of consumer behavioral data, sound bites, conversations, blogs, films, tweets, transactions and check out drop offs etc.  There’s so much of the stuff, where does it begin and where/when will it end?  THE TRICK IS – DO NOT BE OVERWHELMED!

Reform recognizes that our clients and their agencies will need independent expertise and informed guidance into how best to manage all this information and shape it into meaningful business insights.

We also recognize that solutions must be both robust and cost effective, and most often a selection of automated tools alongside human squirreling, will yield the most powerful results.  To this end we have developed sway, our proprietary tool for developing business strategy based on information derived from amalgamating digital data sources. Our sway breakfast seminar on February 15th is a must attend event, and the opportunity to learn more about Reform’s services in this area. (for more info about this event please contact events@reformdigital.com). I hope to see you there!

Blog post by Mary Keane-Dawson, Non-Executive Director at Reform

The Good Wife & The Evil SEO

January 19th, 2011

Well, it seems like the Reform blog has had its share of UK entertainment influence, with it’s brilliant Strictly Come Searching series, but back over here there’s a series that’s quite big on CBS TV (and I hear its pretty popular in the UK too) called “The Good Wife”, which is a courtroom / legal drama for those that don’t know.

Anyway, I haven’t ever watched an episode before, but was alerted to this wonderful clip that aired between minutes 1 and 2 of the show last night, which you can watch on – http://www.cbs.com/primetime/the_good_wife/video/?vs=Full Episodes – if you’re in the US at least.  If you are in the UK, you’ll just have to wait for the episode, as it will likely air there soon.

For those with less patience, this is the synopsis of the episode: When Will fears his client is not getting a fair trial because the judge is biased toward him, the law firm hires a jury consultant.

And here’s the scene I enjoyed:

The Good Wife - TV Show

- Lawyer 1: “But the judge will see your job as irrelevant to the crime”
- Client: “Its just, people hate what I do”
- Laywer 2: “Spam”
- Client: (interrupts) “Search engine optimization”
- Lawyer 1: “Don’t worry prosecution will be too busy….”

Yes, in this episode they try to cover up the evil that he does, so that the jury doesn’t align that up with a guilty verdict. For a bit more background, the client is an SEO consultant who dresses up as a Nazi in war re-enactments on the side (which of course, he’s not nearly as ashamed about). Oh, and he’s on trial for murdering his dad.  But as long as they don’t know he does any Search Engine Optimization, all will be fine.

Have to admit, this was disturbing and yet amusing at the same time. Don’t get me wrong, loads of people still get puzzled when one tells others that they do SEO (every SEO I’ve ever worked with says something along those lines to me at some point in their early days), but this is a bit out of hand.  Anyway, next time someone asks what SEO is, send them here.  We’ll be glad to tell you how it all works. No costumes or crimes either.

Is It Good To Be Bad In SEO?

December 2nd, 2010

There’s an old saying that all publicity, even bad publicity, is good publicity. In a recent article from The New York Times, Search Engine Optimization through search juggernaut Google proves that the old saying may be the current truth in ecommerce.

The story details a consumer who purchased a pair of Lafont sunglasses from DecorMyEyes.com, a website ranked at the top of Google’s search results. While she believed that the high Google ranking and the look of the site brought assurances, she had no idea of the nightmare to follow.

Within a few weeks, she received the glasses in the mail, but, a loyal follower to the brand, she immediately spotted them as counterfeit. In investigating the purchase, she discovered that she was also overcharged by 125 dollars. When she called the website support to inquire about the purchase and ask for a refund, she was berated by the owner of the site, who called her a bitch and threatened her with graphic sexual violence. He also told her he knew where she lived and sent her a picture of her front door.

The consumer immediately called her credit card company but unfortunately, they also gave her trouble in investigating the matter and getting a refund.  Her requests for refunds landed her more harassment from the owner of the site, including calls at three in the morning and e-mail threats against her.

How then did this website get such high status from Google? The answer, according to the article, is simple. Many times consumers expect a smooth transaction and when they receive it, they don’t leave feedback. But when they get a horrible transaction, they need a place to vent their frustrations and the jilted consumer will go a review based website to describe their experience, throw caution to other consumers and link to the website to show where to consumers must avoid. The problem: This actually helps them.

DecorMyEyes saw that while consumers left feedback and provided links to their site on reputable sites on Google’s augustness scale, their Google ranking would increase… and so their sales would follow. They realized that bad publicity is not only good publicity, it’s also free publicity.

Since the Google algorithm may not be able to discern sentimentality, the search engine looks at the added content on a reputable as a benefit and gives DecorMyEyes a greater ranking. The website, seeing the potential, has taken the SEO philosophy and run with it, spurring on more comments by frustrating reviewers on websites into even more action. According to the article, their goal is “NEGATIVE advertisement” and that goal is garnering SEO great dividends.

A Google ranking leading to productivity of the site, even with bad reviews and now a scathing New York Times article about it, reaffirms the great power that SEO has on ecommerce business. Getting a high Google ranking, DecorMyEyes has built an ecommerce site that the owner claims to be “fantastically profitable.” Yet his completely unethical and terrifying business practices show that, in the wrong hands, SEO could be a powerful tool for unlawful sites intending on trapping consumers.

As of Tuesday night, Google was yet to comment on the article but many replies commented on how the search engine algorithm should be altered to punish sites receiving bad reviews, protecting consumers from sites that use SEO to prey on them. Google have now responded on their official blog, announcing that they have developed an algorithmic solution in an initial response to this problem, but they can’t guarantee that people won’t find further loopholes in the algorithm.

The outcry over the site has spread significantly throughout the week and one may wonder if the owner of DecorMyEyes is already relishing the profits of getting his website in the very prominent online version of The New York Times.

Read the full article at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/business/28borker.html

How do clients value a professional service and how does a professional services business grow?

September 10th, 2010

Many professionals will argue that their work is undervalued by their clients. For example, a recent article in “In Practice” highlighted the problems that accountants face in differentiating themselves, that project managers face commanding premium rates, that marketing managers endure identifying their added value and that poor old lawyers face as they bounce from caseload feast to famine. The article goes on to blame the lack of ‘visibility’ of the services for the predicament in which the providers find themselves and claims that the issue for accountants is exacerbated because so much of their work is ‘compliance’ driven.

Compared to the sales person that wins the big order, or the production engineer that saves thousands through a design change, it is easy to see how professionals can struggle to make their contribution seem more tangible, but the compliance argument is more difficult to swallow. Although there may be external commercial codes that drive some ‘compliance’ issues, basic professional services are no more or less than basic sales or manufacturing processes. A sales person needs to identify potential clients, communicate with these clients, and hopefully secure business. An accountant needs to identify financial data, organise the data, and hopefully report it in a cogent format.

You can’t really ‘value’ the sales process or the accounting process as such, but you can differentiate between a successful process and a less successful one. In the same way you can’t value the heart or the brain as more important, but you can identify a more efficient heart. So the question professionals should ask themselves is not “how do I value my services?” but “what makes my services more valuable?” or put another way “how can my services add value?”. For the generic professional service provider this question is largely redundant, you simply “do the bookkeeping”. For the more ambitious professional the question becomes much more relevant but it immediately raises the further question of relevant to who?

A sports team would on balance like a player with a more efficient heart, a nuclear facility on balance would like a scientist with a more efficient brain. An FMCG client may value getting management reports within 24 hours of the month end because it helps to optimise working capital requirements while a hotel may require a neat macro that cross correlates marketing spend with occupancy levels. Global service providers can overcome these challenges by employing thousands of practitioners, in many disciplines, that ‘exercise’ accumulated intellectual property for a vast array of clients.

For a smaller professional services business like Reform this ‘all things to all people’ option is not viable. For these businesses specialisation is the key. If hearts is your speciality then find the strongest hearts and don’t try to provide them to nuclear facilities, focus on the sports teams. Sadly this is easier said than done because (1) a nuclear facility will call you with a very lucrative contract , (2) the market for hearts to sports teams is too small to justify, or most likely (3) sports teams don’t know how to differentiate the value of different hearts.

So while the basic processes that professionals provide may be less tangible they are at least understood, and understood to be required. Low value added businesses can be scaled by providing more mundane services reliably and efficiently over the long term – think utilities. But for more aggressive businesses the key is not in the knowledge base or the process of utilising that knowledge base, scalability comes from perceptive ‘exception management’, in large enough specialist markets where clients can be made aware that the services are indeed ‘most valuable’.

The winds of change…

May 14th, 2010

Have you found it strange that so many commentators have been aghast as the new UK government formation has emerged over the last few days? Only a week ago we were off casting our votes at school halls up and down the country – did we realize what momentous change we were about to make at the time? Our vote appears to have delivered a completely new and surprising shape and flavour of government; only time will tell if it will pass the collective taste test.

‘Sense-making’ and ‘sense-guiding’ are how we join up the dots of change, giving meaning to ourselves and others when situations need order. It’s a rather retrospective endeavour, and I’ll give you odds now that future explanations of how our coalition government came to exist will have Gordon’s ‘bigot’ comment woven in somewhere central to the story. We all use it, and as participants in a knowledge-based economy, probably more frequently than most. Our digital world thrives on innovative thinking, surprises, and what can appear like chaos eventually emerging as opportunity. However, the temporal nature of this world throws up anomalies and uncertainties; what is robust and proven today can lost by the wayside tomorrow.

Change is everywhere, and it is no surprise that we seek out some certainties. We need to be able to make informed decisions that can guarantee us at least medium-term stability… don’t we? Whether we are aware of it or not, transformational changes such as our new government are not simply the result of our vote on the day, but a combination of small emergent changes effecting and affecting our environment, social and cultural world views, the economy and even technologies. These changes impact our perception, our ‘sense-making’, of how the shape shifts, with occasionally surprising outcomes.

Reform is in the business of making sense in real time of those incremental changes, whether emergent or planned. We can help realize our clients’ value, potential business development, and increased profitability. Through our process of exploring the business, utilising data, looking at search behaviours and so forth, we develop and deliver planning tools and action plans that enable truly transformational change outcomes, without causing a revolutionary shake down.

Blog post by Mary Keane-Dawson, non-Executive Director of Reform

Are clients right to be doing it for themselves?

November 3rd, 2009

The agency vs. in-house debate for Search is, to an extent a red herring. It shouldn’t be a debate about who does it, but how it is done. Even if an agency is appointed, brands are not devoid of responsibility for the strategic planning piece. Though sadly, many brands absolve themselves of this responsibility, to the detriment of their campaign results.

Whether in-house or via an agency, there are some common considerations for the brand; e.g. who owns the PPC account data (agency or client)? Who owns the third party technology license? Are the business goals and sales targets being shared with the campaign manager (whether in-house or agency)? Who will manage the information flow between the business and the online marketing team? Are campaign management techniques up to date or tired? Who handles the budget modelling? Can the agency influence changes to the website to improve conversion? Who will feed the search marketing (and behavioural) insight into the broader integrated comms planning piece?

We find that there isn’t necessarily a one size fits all approach to managing Search. Many retailers and large ecommerce / online brands derive such a high volume of sales and revenue from search marketing, that it is simply far too business critical to be managed out-of-house.

And all is never as it seems in that many agencies – including search pure plays – subcontract PPC to cheaper suppliers (who tend to be based abroad). Again, this can be both very cost effective and disastrous if the supplier relationship isn’t carefully managed and the strategic goals communicated by the primary agent.

Paid search has become a media for the masses, largely thanks to Google’s sales strategy for AdWords, so agencies definitely have to work extra hard with Search to demonstrate to their clients why their clients shouldn’t simply DIY.