Newspapers and their pay walls

Is news really worth paying for?

Well, unsuprisingly one newspaper bosses think it is, but unfortunately readers and other journalists think otherwise.

Now, as many people know, hiding news content to readers (unless they are charged for it), is known as using a paywall and Mr Rupert Murdoch (who is some chap who owns a company called NewCorp - a company that took a $3.4 billion net loss in 2008, down from net income of $5.4 billion in 2007) thinks that this will make him some money. Well... he's correct.

So... how will they actually charge for this service? Well one way would be to have a subscription service such as the economist website and the other one is to use Micro-payments (e.g via a service such as http://bitcents.com/)

Putting up a pay wall for the New York Times or The (London) Times WILL make some money. But will it kill off his online readership (and therefore his small but constant advertising revenue) in the process? Quite possibly!

There are a lot of industry observers such as myself who think this will fail, most notable including Steve Outing, who shows statistical evidence from the USA that newspaper execs "remain delusional about how charging for online content"

But its not just observers who think this is a bad idea [bad joke: its also Observers]

Emily Bell from the Guardian, back in August said

No – we are not contemplating a pay wall, nor as far as I’m concerned would we ever….they are a stupid idea in that they restrict audiences for largely replicable content. Murdoch no doubt will find this out – even rudimentary maths suggests he will struggle with a completely free model to meet advertising revenue levels across the NI offerings.

And even Google CEO Eric Schmidt says that is is unlikely that a paywall model will work because news content is now so ubiquitous across the web.

Time will tell.....

Brandjacking

Brandjacking is the act of someone hijacking a brand, when a person (or body of people) are able to pass off to others that they are your brand by use of your name and trademark. But it also happens online:

Cyber-squatting
Also know as domain squatting, when a URL is obtained with the aim of pretending to be a brand:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybersquatting

PPC abuse
Although Google is doing nothing illegal by letting people purchase existing brand trade marks (see my previous post on the ongoing LV vs. Google battle) some people are passing off fakes as reputable products in their pay-per-click adverts.

Domain kiting
This is the rather complex process where someone registers a domain name the instant its current ownership expires. As it is now possible to use an 'Add Grace Period' for domain registrations (where within a period of 5 days the domain can be dropped and a full refund recieved), registrars don't even need to purchase domains to use them now.
Now, this wouldn't be too much of a problem, but:
1. Google takes a few days to recognise that the page has changed and re-index it correctly
2. The fraudulent registrar instantly put up a new site with lots of adverts (e.g. Google Ad Sense)
3. This now happens on a grand scale

Brandjacking now happens in a lot of different market sectors including the ones my company has been working in:

Travel:
Only last week Nucelus released a study which has found that in the last year 80% of the surveyed travel businesses suffered brand hijacking. These incidents have increased from 67% in 2008.

Financial Services:
MarkMonitor in its Spring 2009 report found that:

Brand abuse is increasing, but more important than the sheer volume is the increased sophistication and the opportunistic nature of brandjackers

And its not just domains and marketing efforts that are subject to brandjacking. Earlier this year on Twitter, an account called @exxonmobilcorp was set up and someone named Janet who claimed to work for Exxon answered questions about ExxonMobil.
This turned out not to be any employee of the company.

So, what are you doing to avoid being brandjacked?

Online advertising spend overtakes TV

It had to happen (but even I'm suprised by how quickly this has occurred) online advertising spending in the UK has overtaken television.

According to a study by the IAB , PWC & World Advertising Research Centre, online advertising now has a 23.5% market share, now making it the biggest ad media.

Unsuprisingly mainstream media is sticking its head in the sand on this one. Lindsey Clay from the TV marketing body Thinkbox says:

it’s interesting but meaningless to sweep all the money spent on every aspect of
online marketing into one big figure and celebrate it.

And apparently the World is still flat as well..... See the larger article in New Media Age

Technology in CRM

Its a twist an old humourous one-liner... You don't need technology to successfully implement and effective Customer Relationship Marketing programme, but it helps!


But this isn't just the latest and greatest technology, its good old integration between systems that semes to be the biggest stumbling block. In an eConsultancy report from earlier this year, there were considerable technical integation issues raised by lots of respondents

A focus on other business priorities is preventing organisations from successfully tying up their online and offline data, according to half to companies surveyed. It is alarming that so many companies are not prioritising an integrated approach to CRM.

Or to use another statistic from the same report...

Only a fifth of companies (20%) say that they are definitely able to link data from the online channel with back office systems

More Google trademarks issues

“Google has not committed a trademark infringement by allowing advertisers to select, in AdWords, keywords corresponding to trademarks.”

Those words from the Advocate General at the European Court of Justice is just another round in the ongoing legal battle between LVMH and Google. So although the final decision is not due until later in 2010, this does position the search giant favourably. It therefore looks to reverse the French courts' decision in 2005 where the Louis Vuitton owner successfully claimied Google had acted illegally and allowed competitor companies (or those that make fake copies) to buy keywords such as "Louis Vuitton" to be displayed for Pay Per Click advertising.

Click fraud

I've been watching the rates of click fraud rise and fall over the last year with some suprise. Back in the middle of last year there was an increase in click fraud to 17.1% in the fourth quarter of 2008 compared with the same period in 2007 having 16.6%.

But during 2009 click fraud rates (the percentage of clicks on your adverts that are not genuine customers) have dropped! In fact, they seem to have declined by about 25% over the last reported 6 months to a figure of 12.7%.

What does click fraud mean for the average company that uses Pay Per Click advertising?
It means you're more likely to spend more money for less real traffic!

But why does this happen?
Well there has apparently been an increase in the use of click farms. These are groups of people paid to click on your adverts by:

1. Site owners who want to make more money from their advertising inventory
2. Your competititors who want you to spend more money (or the same money for less real numbers of visitors/customers)

But why would click fraud rates drop in a recession? Are the less scrupulous companies also feeling the pinch and therefore are less likely to be able to afford click farm rates?

Meta tags mean nothing to Google

At last! Final proof of what we've all been assuming for ages... Google has ignored 'keyword' meta tags in its Internet search indexing service for years.

(Note: it does still use them when you buy their sealed yellow box to spider your internal network and it "sometimes" uses the 'Description' keyword for the text you see beneath the URL in its search results)

Here's the full article and video explaining:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html

Things that don't make sense part 1

There's an advert for gotomypc.com that has a bloke sat in a business presentation and realises he doesn't have the right files. To come to his rescue are several pidgeons who carry various parts of his computer hardware across town.
Now what doesn't get me annoyed is the fact that advertising people expect us to believe birds can carry PC's through the central business district, but that the chap who gets all this equipment delivered can moan that he doesn't have his keyboard.

Did he not think of either going into the next door office to grab a USB keyboard?or better still.... Use the mouse?

It is after all just a presentation he's giving....

Companies ignoring self-service

I'm sure there is a tenancy to try to work harder during difficult times. This manifests itself in various ways, such as:

1. Some people work longer hours
2. Some people put more effort into their work (or a seen to be doing so)
3. But some people innovate (new products, new markets, new technologies)

However, it seems that UK companies are still failing to incentivise lower cost-to-serve channels and falling back on their call centres, according to Global Contact Centre Benchmarking report by Dimension Data.

It is still amazing that with low customer interaction costs via channels such as online that companies are still trying to work longer and with more effort and failing to innovate (if you can actually call using the Internet as innovative these days).

However, this report also mentions that a third of respondents fail to actual monitor their cost to serve, thus not even measuring the cost of each customer interaction.

Company Reports - the next generation

Up until 2008 (and thanks to the Companies Act 2006) it was once a requirement for any UK listed company to send a printed copy of their annual report to every single shareholder. Luckily that is not the case now and a lot of companies have realised that providing their report online (in HTML format) has obvious benefits.

For example:

• It assists their overall Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)Efforts
• It facilitates viewing/downloading only part of the report (useful if the user is on a low bandwidth connection)
• It contributes to a more environmentally friendly company profile

Nexxar, a leader in providing online company reports, carry out an annual survey benchmarking international companies and their use of online reports.
http://www.nexxar.com/marketresearch.html

The report for 2009 which was released this month has found that almost half (48.7%) of those surveyed had a full HTML version of their site and according to them:

HTML is the only way to make full use of the Internet’s potential.

HTML has gradually increased in its usage, compared to just PDF's or images (usually in JPG format). And surprisingly it it UK companies that led the way, with 64% of the FTSE100 found to use HTML.


It is also interesting to note that in a piece of research focusing on Corporate Responsibility done by Radley Yeldar earlier this year, they found only 9% of those companies they surveyed (mainly FTSE 100 and FTSE 250's) used just HTML for their reports, with 47% using HTML and PDF combined.

Even US regulations now encourage company reporting in formats such as HTML, rather than just providing PDF's of the report pages. However using HTML is just the start of what you can achieve with your online company report. Animations and even audio & video (whilst remaining accessible to as many users as possible, so all sound media must have a transcript) add interactivity and help in the communication of company information to shareholders, employees, journalists and others.

So where's the future going for company reports? Well, depending upon who you ask, you get different answers....

• Those who have a CEO & board who are professionally media trained would say you should put as much (relevant) video into your online report
• Those who are standards based would say that you should make a lot of use of XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) or at least have sensible tagging of relevant content
• And those who are on a budget will wait and see what works or becomes legislation

To test or not to test? That shouldn’t be the question!

An other guest posting from my friend & Ideal Interface colleague Marc Ames:

One of the greatest advantages of online is the level of accountability it gives marketing people with their budgets. It can also be provide in near enough real-time with the analytic tools available in the market. So with this accountability comes the obvious conclusion that online also provides the advantage of being to conduct multivariate testing – whether it be on a web page, an e-mail, Pay Per Click copy or an online advert.

Yet, there are still many companies out that invest massively online and yet do not conduct even the simplest of A/B tests.

But A/B testing is nothing new for marketers. Direct marketing has embraced this for decades and if you want to read up more about this then I recommend you get Commonsense Direct and Digital Marketing from one of the Direct Marketing gurus – Drayton Bird. The “Direct” version was first published in 1982 and was and probably still is on the recommended reading lists for the CIM qualifications when I first came across this book back in the early 1990s.
It is still relevant, in fact probably even more so today, 27 years on, but despite the wealth of evidence that supports testing, then why do some marketers still not do it?

It is not as if all marketers have the insight to know what is the exact page on a web site to maximise response or sales as a survey by Maxymiser proved in May when only 21 out of 452 marketers correctly identified the best performing web content from an A/B/C/D test.

So what are the reasons for not doing this?

I think it comes down to one of the following reasons:

1) Resources – many think that simple A/B testing will involve increasing the time to develop the web page, or e-mail, or online advert. But the reality is that if you start off simple then A/B testing can be easily accommodated within the current processes. The change could be as simple as colour, or ordering, or a headline on an e-mail, or the time of day or actual day an e-mail is sent. How many times have you sat there and presented two or more options for the final sign-off? Why not test both?

2) Building the site for me and not the audience – despite the fact that you build a website or design an e-mail for your target audience, I can guarantee that in meeting rooms and offices across the world that websites and e-mails are being sign-off or changed because of the “gut feel” of the decision maker. For no better reason than that is what the decision maker likes most. The fact that they may not fit or understand their target audience is an irrelevance as long as it makes them happy. If you are in this position – bad luck, and good luck with the job search!

3) Can’t build the business case – perhaps you are stuck with the conundrum of how can you prove that it is worth testing unless you know what the results of the uplift are and go around in circles as you don’t want to make a prediction and the test fails? Well consider the lost opportunity if you don’t test. Look at elements that you know are not performing, perhaps a high drop-off page on a website, or copy for your PPC campaigns, or the fact that your competitors are sending e-mails out at different times to you. If you look hard enough there is certain to be some element of your online marketing that can be improved – and use a test to prove it – and that will help prove that testing works.

4) Marketers not knowing what real marketing is – coming from an engineering background I have to admit I have an axe to grind but unfortunately I have come across too many marketing people who talk about “creative” and not enough about the numbers. There would be a lot more marketers in the boardrooms of the UK if they got to grips with the numbers side of the business and unfortunately this does present an image problem for Marketing, which still has not been addressed.

In the current environment, it is easy to say that because you are so stretched that you need have so many priorities for “business as usual”, but my challenge to that is that this is exactly the sort of thing you must be doing in the current environment to prove your worth and ensure that you help your business through these tough times.

So if people in your organisation see multivariate testing as the equivalent to “How do you an eat an elephant?”

The answer is quite simple – “One bite at a time”.

Note;
You can still read Marc's previous guest post Did the BBC and not Video kill the Radio Star?

Budget airlines have falling online reputations

It comes as no real suprise to read that the budget airlines of Easyjet and Ryanair have declining reputations online, given PR own-goals such as ranting on blog that dare criticise their booking process.

The bi-annual Kaizo Advocacy Index (KAI), which is designed to provide a view on leading brands' online reputation and recommendations have the following recent report:

Kaizo Advocacy Index Winter 2009

View more presentations from guest542bc4.

For how long can some companies in the commoditised markets such as air travel continue to have arrogance?

Copying content

The very nature of web pages allows everyone to copy & paste content. This is therefore both very useful (as every kid doing their homework will tell you) and a nightmare (mainly for those who produce unique / copywrited content)

So what can you do about it?

Well the first response to this issue is usually "don't post what you can't afford to be copied" and this is a logical one. But as we know, content is given away all the time on the web and is a viable revenue model.... provided of course you can monetise your traffic effectively (e.g. by advertising) or get something back for it (e.g. this blog, which I do for free to keep me abreast of the latest online communication methods & technologies).

But there is also a serious reason for every site to worry about copied content and this is that search engines such as Google take a negative view of duplicated content. Therefore should someone copy large sections of your site for instant content on theirs, this may negatively affect your organic positioning (as the search engines could think you are trying to create duplicate sites to spoof them).
Note: This would have to be a lot of copy and Google actually tries to avoid this action:

In the rare cases in which Google perceives that duplicate content may be shown
with intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users, we'll also make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved.

One clever technology I heard about recently was Tynt. This uses some clever JavaScript to record what users copy on your site and then when they paste text back into a web page, email, etc. However this can be side-stepped if you copy content first of all into a text editor (e.g. Windows Notepad) and then copy & paste the content that does not content the tracking reference into your target source.

Note: other ways include..
1. Embed protected content in Flash :
But although Google can at least partially index this content now, doing this still sigificantly hampers your SEO efforts.
2. Utilise screen scraping avoidance techniques
If you wanted to completely stop any indexing of your content then you could get it placed within an image. This can be done using dynamic image render technologies
http://press20.blogspot.com/2009/04/preventing-screen-scraping.html

Where's the Twitter Press Release service?

Back in February last year I covered the topic of the Social Media News/Press Release (which had already been in existence for a year)

This was the evolution of the normal press release distributed online, that also included: URL's keywords, feeds, etc. (depending upon which verision you employed). I therefore thought it was therefore only a matter of time before the Twitter press release arose.

By this, I don't just mean that now companies have the chance to link to their own press releases in their organisation's 140 character tweets..... Many companies have now set up Twitter identities as part of their corporate communications strategies, in the same way that they did with corporate blogs in 2008 (or before).

And no I don't mean sites that are simply collections of tweet postings from journalists such as:
http://www.journalisttweets.com or http://muckrack.com

I mean a proper service that specifically aggregates just Press Releases that appear on Twitter and enables you to filter them by subject, market sector and other attributes.

To date, the best service I have used is http://twitterfall.com/ and I have then carried out searches for "press release xxxxxx", but with limited success.

Have I spotted a gap in the market or missed a key site out there?

Google preparing micropayments for newspapers?

Rumours are circulating that Google is planning a micropayment system over the course of the next year to help newspapers charge for their content.

As mentioned by the Nieman Journalism lab, Google has informed the Newspaper Association of America (see this PDF) that it will be launching an extension of Google Checkout, its competitor to PayPal.

"While currently in the early planning stages, micropayments will be a payment vehicle available to both Google and non-Google properties within the next year"

The idea is to allow payments of small amounts (e.g. pence and cents, not necessarilily pounds and dollars) to be charges for content over time, thus enabling newspapers to charge the user per read. what Google calls its

“vision of a premium content ecosystem”

Do friends really influence purchases?

The answer: It depends

Earlier this year the Harvard Business Review published a working paper entitled "Do Friends Influence Purchases in a Social Network?" They set out to examine the questions of :
1. do friends influence purchases of users in an online social network
2. which users are more influenced by this social pressure
3. and can we quantify this social influence in terms of increase in sales and revenue

The findings were that there was a range of revenue increases between three distinct groups of people categorised by status and interaction with others. The lower and middle groups had zero and 5% rise in purchases due to this social influence, but the revenue of the higher group actually declines by almost 14% .This has been explained as follows:

This finding is similar to work on characteristics of opinion leaders or the elite in the fashion industry, who tend to abandon one type of fashion and adopt the next in order to differentiate themselves from the masses

(in other words they seek to make themselves different from others by chosing / buying different things.. perhaps because they can afford to).

However, I'm not convinced. Maybe its because the sample size was quite small (Number of users = 208; Number of observations =2080) or because the figures used were from a Korean Social network (Cyworld), but I personally would like to see some further research done on this subject.

Top travel website for usability is 3 years old

Its not often that something on the web stands the test of time for longer than a year or so.New technologies, design influences, changing stakeholder opinions and a number of other factors all contribute significantly to change a website over time, so that it eventually morphs way beyond how it looked and possibly worked at launch.

So its actually good to see that over 3 years on, something I had a large hand in is still leading the pack in virtually the same guise it started out.

In a recent eDigital Research Travel Benchmark the P&O Ferries website still ranks as the most usable travel website:http://econsultancy.com/blog/4287-p-o-comes-top-of-travel-website-usability-study

Newspapers plus Google equals Jealousy

Sometimes I'm a little annoyed by what I read and other times I just put my head into my hands and sigh quietly. Today I had one of the latter moments.

Newspapers in that bastion of political sophistication that is Italy have decide to sue Google.

Why?

"Because Google does not disclose the criteria for ranking news articles or search results."

(Read the original article in the New York Times if you too want to cup your face into your palms and mutter under your breath as well)

Yes, that's right, the Italian Federation of Newspaper Publishers want to know the exact details of the Google algorythm so it can change its website so that it gets more value from its content.

Note: Forgive me for asking, but isn't this what SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) companies do for a living without knowing the exact specification of the worlds biggest search engine? If I ran a company that did SEO consultancy in Italy right now (rather than just in the UK) I would be watching this case with some concern.

However, I'm sure Google will fight (or possibly just ignore) this action and the Italian authorities will throw this out, possibly on the grounds of the comment made by Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land:

Finally, no newspaper editor of any quality would allow an external interest to walk into their newsroom and demand to know exactly how to guarantee a front page article about whatever they want. But that’s what the Italian papers seem to desire.

two ears, one mouth

Today in an online marketing forum, I answered a question about why company marketers are afraid of new methodologies such as measuring online conversations in social media.

My response was focused around the change of mindset that marketers need to have. There is a considerable difference from the traditional method of pushing your message (e.g. using television, radio, direct marketing, etc) and engaging with a target audience, not something that marketing departments have been used to.

Companies are now required to listen, understand and respond with relevance to what is being said online and responding inappropriately can create further issues.

I signed off with the suggestion:

perhaps the phrase "you have two ears and one mouth, use them in those proportions" needs to be adopted by online marketing now?

Socialnomics

Ignoring the Fatboy Slim soundtrack, this is a good summary of the current figures and impact of Social Media

How much Google WILL know about you

The other week I posted about Google and what it now knows about. At the end of this posting I signed off with the comment "What's next?".

Little did I know that Google, as well as knowing what you've done, it now has a pretty good idea what you're going to do. Yes, that's right, using its extensive index of what it knows already, Google can have a pretty good guess at what's going to be searched for.

So how does this help the company online marketer? Well, by predicting search trends, it gives you a pretty good idea what budget to set aside for paid search terms on errr.... Google Pay per Click.

Dammit, I should have seen it coming!

Palm Pre to challenge iPhone

No, I know I usually blog about corporate comms, newspapers and ecommerce strategy, but I couldn't let the launch of the Palm Pre go by without mentioning it.
"What do you mean by 'imminent'?" I hear you ask.

Ok, O2 in the UK are planning on a December launch of the 'iPhone challenger' but its already available across the Atlantic Pond and over here O2 are already turning on the buzz machine with this video:



So what does this video do?

Well, it provides what the UK version of Palm's website doesn't... it provides we with enough UK-specific information to still want one! We know its been out in the USA for over 2 months and some of us over here think its could be the answer (the question being "why doesn't my iPhone work when I wear gloves?")

Sure, you can browse along to http://www.facebook.com/palm (which is just a re-hash of their US-centric blog) but come on Palm... if the Pre is to be any good, you've got to get the market primed & ready for the anticipated Xmas launch... and that means starting very very soon doesn't it? Of else i'll have to face another winter without gloves........

Tweeting in the name of the law

Its not just companies that can benefit from the use of social media, other organisations and bodies can participate in the conversation. Take for example this list of UK charities on Twitter compiled by eConsultancy, from Amnesty International to http://twitter.com/unicef_uk.

Now even the Public Order department of the London Metropolitan Police has got in on the Twitter act: http://twitter.com/CO11MetPolice
There are no further tweets from this unit at New Scotland Yard* than their intial one yesterday, but lets see what they say.

*(who I may have had some positive dealings with in the past)

How much Google knows about you

In a lot of ways you've got to admire Google. They're a clever bunch of people who delivered a simple search engine that took pay per click advertising to the next level.

But they're so much more than just a search engine now, they are a personalised portal, an application provider, a map & street guide and so much more.

Just think...

• It knows what you look for (Google [personalised] search)
• It knows who you are (Google Profiles)
• It knows what you write (Google docs)
• It knows what you buy (Google Checkout)
• It now knows where you are (with Google Latitude if you have an Android mobile phone)

What's next?

Business as usual

I was recently asked what 'BAU' meant on some documentation I produced and had to explain how an online project took some resources away from their day job, whilst it left others to continue with their usual work.

However, this got me thinking about how web projects and all things digital have now become the standard thing to do, rather than the latest & greatest they were several years back. No longer do people raise a suspicious eyebrow when you say "I'm working on a great new website for a High Street retailer" or "We're delivering a online application that makes it easier for customers to contact a holiday company"

The web has become business as usual.

It the newspaper was a new idea

What if the newspaper didn't exist?

What if just recently someone came up with concept of printing the latest information on paper and making it available in local shops, street stalls and via subscription?

Would in succeed?
Would anyone buy it?
Would be the 'killer' analogue app?
Would anyone invest in the infrastructure to support it across towns, counties and countries?

I guess not. Which does raises the question of why the press now has the distinguished position it does..

Has Brand Measurement got any better?

A year or so ago i blogged about brand and sentiment monitoring tools I had experience of. The market back then was just starting really, but you would have hoped that things would have moved on somewhat and products would have matured (atleast a bit)

A recent piece of research (from Insight Express) has found that:

“Other than the economy, brand measurement is the single biggest obstacle
holding back the growth of online advertising.”

So I asked a few large company contacts recently what they were doing about brand measurement and most said "err... nothing really" or words to that effect. Now, I undertsand that this wasn't a representative sample of the entire UK business world, but given that some of these people were at least considering brand buzz monitoring tools or services last year., I do have to ask...

Has Brand measurement got any better?

Symbian joins the application goldrush

Making a very late entry into the mobile applications market comes Symbian.

The operating system for almost 50% of the smartphones around the world has had a development platform (called Horizon) in Alpha release for a while now, but this has now moved into Beta and they are encouraging developers to sign-up and build apps.
http://developer.symbian.org/main/horizon/faq/index.php

This move means that a significant proportion of Nokia phones which use the Symbian OS will now be able to have the same sort of functionality that devices such as the Apple iPhone have had for ages. In fact, Apple announced only earlier this week that its own App Store has had 1.5 billion downloads in the last year.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2350194,00.asp

Has Symbian arrived too late to the party?

Don't index my newspaper site

I've been following the growing fight by some newspapers against Google indexing their site. They are angry that google spiders them & gets their traffic.

However now Google has responded by politely re-stating the very simple way any site can stop all search engines indexing them, by using the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP).

Could it be that newspapers don't actually want Google to stop providing their content, they just want a share of Google's revenue? Perhaps.

Business Week to be sold?

Keith Fox said today “We all know that the media industry is facing unprecedented challenges. The growth of digital innovation has created new entrants, new challenges and entirely new business models for media companies."

Apparently it is considering it's "strategic options"

Blogging from my iPhone

I've started blogging today from my mobile. It's actually a strange feeling to blog from my mobile device, when the most I've done before is tweet http://twitter.com/haydens30

For me it blurs the line between personal life streaming and my blog, which is for me the intersection between my business and my private life & opinions.

Therefore expect shorter (as it's harder to type on my iPhone) and more personal postings in the future.

Viral feedback

I've read and re-read the article 'The Age of Viral Feedback' by Umair Haque at Harvard Business.

Here he asks how companies are feeding the system to generate the correct feedback in today's modern connected world.

So here's a fundamental question every decision-maker should ask: what are you feeding feedback with? The same old toxic industrial era junk? Or stuff that makes people, communities, and society better? Are you feeding viral effects with stuff that enriches, or stuff that impoverishes?

My thoughts are that a lot of companies still haven't learnt to listen yet, let alone deal with the feedback. What do I mean by this? Well a lot of them are still living by the 20th Century method of communication (e.g. focus on the message and ignore the feedback, hoping that the signal-to-noise ration you can generate is greater than those who are complaining).

But this works less and less in a world where news isn't just around until people eat their chips*, it now stays out in the public domain far longer! Today (negative & positve) feedback can have a greater and longer-lasting effect of the brand and finances of an organisation than ever before. Blogs stay written, reviews link to products for their lifetime and customer support forums keep the postings of their members far longer than the problem persists.

So, has feedback (or links from feedback) become the longer lasting currency of the new economy?

*This is a reference to when people used to eat their fish & chips off of newspaper, before they started printing them with water-soluble inks. However, I'm sure the inks back then used toxic substances, but it doesn't seem to have done anyone any harm right?

Has Internet Journalism finally become mainstream

Iran has been subject to scrutiny, not just from Western Governments but by new media (as well as its mainstream counterpart). Everyone's favourite UK inquisitor asks Arianna Huffington about using unverified news sources versus traditional journalism.

I love this clip because it seems the concept of crowdsourcing news (posting then correcting, not correcting then posting) is lost on Mr Paxman and Ms Elvoy of London's Evening Standard newspaper.

Yes, unverified news should not be knowingly published, but if taking time to verify it would delay this news being distributed (and potentially not keep those most affected updated about things), then as long as the unverified news source is disclosed as this.... then to the reader beware!

Online retail, growth ahead

The good news:
Online retail is still estimated to grow, despite the global economic crash-landing the financial markets performed last year.

The bad news:
The growth from previous years is not sustainable, so you'll have to put up with single digital growth very soon!

This all kinda makes sense as its not possible to grow a market beyond the total possible number of potential customers. (See http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007142 for some US-centric info.) However, its obvious that the mad days of the eCommerce teenage years are now changing into something more like maturity.

Hurrah!

MP's Expenses and crowdsourcing

It struck me that a particularly good example of using crowdsourcing techniques in journalism is the publishing and subsequent Questions & Answers of UK MP's expenses claims.

Having published the details of each MP's claims online [you can find yours by postcode, geographic region or political leaning here] , the BBC has subsequently asked the relevant MP to explain their potential mis-use of public money [here].

Why is 'word of mouth' gaining interest?

WOM, or Word-of-mouth used to be the old method of spreading information. Then along came technology...

.... and I don't mean the Internet. I mean the printing press, then everything else afterward (which has been accepted by consumers in increasingly quicker timescales)

But now, with social media, we are seeing a shift back to WOM and WOMM (Word of Mouth Marketing). But just who do consumers listen to for references and recommendations? Well suprisingly its not just their online friends.. its their real ones!

According to a Mintel report this month, 34% of US Internet users who bought a product or service based on a recommendation got the information from a friend or relative, and a quarter got it from a spouse or partner. However only 5% of respondents bought something based on the recommendation of a blogger or someone from an Internet chat room.

Chris Haack, senior analyst at Mintel said

“Young adults are somewhat more likely to turn to the Internet for advice and referrals, but even they listen to their peers first.

So whilst the modern methods of Word of Mouth via social media are rapidly gaining interest, we shouldn't forget how powerful human-to-human contact is.

Do you have your Facebook vanity URL yet?

This weekend Facebook started accepting requests for personalised/vanity URLs. This allows a user to add their name to the end of the Facebook URL to allow them to be found directly (e.g. http://www.facebook.com/haydensutherland). Its thought that this feature is the next step along Facebook's plan to become more Twitter-like.

However, it is also possible to set up a vanity URL for a company group / page if you have more than 1000 fans.

Have you got yours yet?

Note:
The way to obtain yours is to go to http://www.facebook.com/username and register the one most suitable that is still available.

Ignore social media at your peril

Brand Republic today have a nice little article on how some companies are still shying away from Social Media.
http://www.brandrepublic.com/News/912481/Companies-ignore-social-media-digital-consumer-peril/

Whilst it seems quite strange (to those of us that use & work around the online social space) that some organisations would still chose not to venture into this area... we still have to remember that we are (including our clients) still all relatively early adopters in understanding and using social media for business purposes.

Measuring online friendships

As part of my ongoing facination with the Corporate Social Graph and its personal equivalent, I've been researching the range of online friendships a person can have (with the aim of seeing if this matches the organisation ones).

After reading the work of Mike Arauz on his 'Spectrum of friendship', I'm tempted to suggest that the range he gives may be similar to the 'friendship' customers have for companies.

Here's how I think it works (and the difference):

Passive Interest:
A person is aware of a company and has visited the website

Active Interest:
They have been to the website several times and interacted with it (e.g. engaged with the content, bought something, been encouraged to do something in an offline channel, etc.)

Sharing:
An individaul has linked to the company website (e.g. via Twitter) or joined a group (e.g. become a fan of them on Facebook)


Public Dialogue AND Advocacy:
I've participated online with or about the organisation (e.g. posted a product review, sent a page/link to friend, contributed to a discussion forum, etc.)

Investment:
Now here's where I get stuck. I can't actually make up my mind if this is a capital investment (e.g. stocks & shares), an emotional investment (in that case its mixed in with Public Dialogue and Advocacy) or another....

Any thoughts?

Turn your site map upside down

We've been working with a client on redeveloping their website from its present incarnation. This current site has a homepage with an introduction animation and some navigation. This in-turn leads you to further pages (with even more under that).

Creating a site map of the pages you get a typical tree structure, with the homepage at the top and all the content on the lower 'branches'.

However, does this actually meet the needs of the orgainsation's (potential and existing) customers and search engines?

Customers want instant information about the organisation. They want to know some of the stuff on the lower levels and don't necessarily want to have to forrage for it through the navigation to find it.

Search engines also want content to spider and understand the site. The more this content is relevant and updated, the more likely the spiders are to return.

This therefore means exposing the content as quickly and effectively as possible and dispensing with conventional information hierarchy... or in other words turning your site map upside down! Content rightly therefore becomes the empowering factor.

When mentioning this to an Information Architect friend of mine he did questions whether this would necessarily work for all sites, especially those that have significant content and functionality.

However, is this not what the BBC news homepage and other such resources try to do?

The future of search?

For the last few weeks there has been a lot said (both positively & negatively) about the new Wolfram Alpha service, a 'computational knowledge engine from egghead Stephen Wolfram.

Initally labelled a 'Google Killer' it is nothing of the sort. What Google does - very well - is make it easy to search through as much of the world wide web as possible for specific search terms. What Wolfram Alpha does is make information computable. But what does that actually mean?

It means that Woolfram Alpha is building up resources of data that can have calculations run against it. This means that whilst Google can tell you every single page it has found where the number 1970 appears (http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=1970), Wolfram Alpha will recognise it as; an integer, a year, an even number, etc.)

However, Google can also do basic mathematics (e.g. if we type 1970 - 1960 into both, they give the correct value of 10), but will struggle when things get more complex (e.g. typing 1970-1960x into WA will actually plot you the value of 'x' http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1970-1960x)

So is this a cuase for concern for Google? Well not really, despite there being a lot made of the alledged rivalry between the two) as Google has its own version of Wolfram Alpha up its sleeve in the form of Google Squared, a product from its labs project that it showed off last month.

Interesting note:
If you type in 'Google Squared' into Wolfram Alpha, rather than get a long mathematical answer to a very large number multiplied by itself, you get the message:

"Wolfram Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input."

Ooooh... Nice touch!

Tweet this!

We're currently investigating for a couple of clients the best way for a user to post a Tweet via a link or button on their website .

I've come to the conclusion that a simple 'Tweet This' button can do this by posting an automatically generated update via a user'sr Twitter account, removing the need for them to type the whole message.

What benefit can this provide?

Well, it could help promote news and updates on you site, by making it easier for users to tell their friends what they are reading or find interesting.

Click on the link below to see what I mean:

Media trust, why newspapers are still worthy

Something that may suprise a few of you... newspapers are still a trusted source of information

The recent eMarketer survey on media trust (http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007067) found that a surprisingly high number of people trust the news. But the more suprising finding is that online news scores higher than traditional newspapers in a lot of countries including us here in the UK!

The survey found that online news is trusted in the UK by 40% of those asked, compared with 23% trusting their paper.

Is this a false trust in modern digital news or a cynical perspective of our current celebrity & scandal - filled broadsheets & tabloids?

Enabling inter-company communication

Imagine the situation... you want to find out what's happening in your own company (e.g. strategic moves, etc.) but because of communication / management / location issues, you don't always get to find out the official news. On top of this, you also want to find out what is 'really' happening, in a Twitter-like status feed that is only seen by those who work at your company.

Well, this is exactly what Yammer provides as is an instant way to tell your colleagues "what am I working on?"

Yammer (www.yammer.com) addresses the issue of using your Twitter status for updates that are really only relevant to others in your company and offers a restricted area (and therefore hopefully a more open conversation).

Also, in a very Twitter-esque way, you can add hashtags (themes or subjects preceeded by the # symbol that you want to subsequently track, e.g. #takeover)

Here was their intial introduction at Techcrunch last year:
http://www.techcrunch50.com/2008/conference/presenter.php?presenter=53

So, to answer the question "Is it any good?", my answer is a resounding "Yes". We at Ideal Interface have now been using it for a few weeks and are finding it a very useful way to share: thoughts, status updates, useful links and other info. It particularly suits our business as we are mainly out of the office (myslef on client sites most of the time and others working from their home offices, etc.)

Expect further updates on this useful business tool.

Growth predicted in Interactive Advertising

Despite all the doom and gloom of the current recession, Forrester Research are predicting that interactive marketing spending will hit $25.6 billion in 2009. This will be an increase on the 2008 total of $23.1 billion by 11%

Even better news that Shar VanBoskirk predicts:

We expect marketer spend on display media, search, email, mobile and social media to reach nearly $55 billion by 2014.

However, this growth witll not come without casualties, mainly from direct mail and print advertising.

The full article is here:

http://blogs.forrester.com/marketing/2009/05/interactive-budgets-are-growing-at-the-expense-of-offline.html

Google relaxing trademarks now?

Ok, its not usual for me to keep on about a subject for too long (especially when there's so much out there to blog about), but following on from last weeks postings [Monday and Wednesday]about Google and trademarks, there have been further developments in this area....

Last week, it announced that will ease its restrictions on trademarked terms in adverts in Google. Now brands can both positively and negatively mention each other in their PPC activity. Some see this as an opportunity to communicate their exact product offerings, others just see it as Google trying to squeeze more revenue out of their search marketing service.

Either way this is yet another blow for those companies who are trying to prevent their competitors marketing to their customers on the popular search engine. Where previously some brands avoided the crowded (and potentially monopolistic) search engine, they now may not have any choice but to out-bid others to protect their own trademarks and revenue.

Is Google a Monopoly?

Surely any company that has a 70% - 90% share of any market could be seen as having a monopoly?

Well Google currently has the following shares of the search market in these countries:

• USA: 72% [source]
• France 91% [source - in French]
• UK 90% [source]

However, I can't help feel that a lot of this hype about Google's monopoly has been based upon fear from its competition (e.g. Microsoft's multi-million pound lobbying of Washington to block the Google & Yahoo advertising partnership last October) or worry from those who have old business models.... newspapers please take a step forward. And talking about Microsoft, weren't they themsleves found guilty of all sorts of anti-competitive activity several years ago? It therefore makes it all the more hypocritical that they "wolf" now.

But even though Google may have power in the search market, it doesn't necessarily mean that this has corrupted them does it? Well according to Jon Leibowitz ,the new Chair of the Federal Trade Commission, when asked last week if he saw Google abusing its power, said:

"I certainly don't see Google as abusing its power right now, no. And also it's brought many benefits to consumers."

But nevertheless Google has gone on the defensive, readying itself with information such as this presentation to potentially defend itself against the Anti-Googlers.

One thing is for sure, there's a lot of jealous companies out there who would love even a fraction of Google's wealth... and they show no signs of letting up in the current market conditions.

Google PPC trademark and the Class Action Lawsuit

Sometimes I write about relevant things, usually a little time after they happen (this tends to be after I've either used it, read about it or listened to a podcast that mentions it), but rarely do I write about somehting and then the following day or so something significant happens... however, following on from my posting on Monday...

...there is an article in today's Register by online legal firm out-law.com. This gives details about a sales software company called Firepond who have sued Google in a Texan court, because the Google AdWords system apparently infringes their trade marks.

"Google has improperly infringed [Firepond's] 'Firepond' Marks by selling, for example, [its] trademark 'Firepond' to [its] competitors as a keyword so that when an Internet User searches for 'Firepond' on...Google's Internet search engine, the competitor's advertisement hyperlink will appear at the very top and/or on the right side of the first page of search results…thereby confusing Internet Users and diverting a percentage of such Users from [Firepond] and enjoying and benefitting from all the goodwill and 'buyer's momentum' associated with [its] valuable trademark,"

However, by hopefully teaming up with other companies who are also upset by this activity, Firepond hopes to create a Class Action which will prevent Google from profiting from competitive trademark keyword buying.

This will certainly be an interesting case to watch, especially I more companies join in.
Further information is available at outlaw.com

blog sentiment for retailers

There's no doubt that bloggers opinions count these days. But if you're a retailer, is the blogosphere a good or bad place for opinions?

If you believe the Mainstream Media (MSM), you'd be fooled into believing that bloggers only post about the negative things in life and seek to destroy reputations rather than say posisitve things. Well, research agency Carma has found the opposite!

In their report on whether Negativity does prevail in Consumer Generated Media, they found that..

the blogosphere was unfavorable in less than 28 percent of posts, while it was favorable in more than 41 percent of posts. Based on this data alone, it is not accurate to say that the blogosphere is pervasively negative. Perhaps the blogosphere is negative in other ways . . .

Or to put it in diagram form (from eMarketer):













If you're a retailer, are you monitoring blog postings or even tracking the collective sentiment of this influential group of commenters? Even if you start now... you may be suprised by what you find.

Google PPC & Trademarks

Since May 2008, Google UK has allowed companies to bid on other trademarks (although it claims it doesn't 'encourage' it). This was a reversing of their previous policy, where this was prevented by providing proof of your company trademark directly to them. This brought Google UK's policy into line with that of Google USA and Canada.

Now, this did start an intial flurry of Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising last Spring, with British companies suddenly fearing that their competitors would buy placements for their trademarks. However this paranoid has subsided somewhat, especially when Google stated that they would not allow trademarks to be displayed in the ad text.

But that's not the full story... 'Yes', you can bid on a competitors trademark term and 'no' you may not stick their trademark in the advert copy you display. But you can put the competitors name into your URL and display that at the bottom of your advert.

Therefore, the following PPC advert is NOT allowed:

competitor trademark
competitor trademark
competitor trademark
www.your_company_url.com

...but the following one IS:

Advert copy
More advert copy
Even more copy
www.your_company_url.com/competitor

T-Mobile takes over Trafalgar Square

T-Mobile, in a reprisal of their famous Liverpool Street flash mob dancing advert, took over Trafalgar Square in the middle of London on Friday evening and the actual advert screened last night on UK TV.



Although this didn't perhaps have the impact of the previous one, it continues the "Life's for sharing" theme.

The Customer is now Social

Hasn't you customer grown up? Haven't they learnt to ask each other for opinion and to trust each other?

Yup!

Never before have people started trusting each other and I'll once-again refer to the Universal Mccanns study on' When did we start trusting strangers?'

Universal Mccanns When Did We Start Trusting Strangers

View more presentations from mickstravellin.

And as customers get more social, they need new ways of interacting with companies.
So, just like CRM, that gave companies a segmented view of their customer-base, VRM (Vendor Relationship Management) allows customers the tools for engaging with vendors.

Could companies be realising that their customers' view of them is not the same as their own? Surely not?

unofficial blogs and their effect

Having read about the blog of http://ebayinkblog.com/, an unoffical blog of an Ebay staff member, it got me thinking about how unofficial company blogs can end up being the most useful source of company information to customers and employees alike.

So today, I found it quite strange to hear of reports that Carphone Warehouse has blocked access for some its staff to an unofficial blog. Now, this isn't just any old blog. Its one set up by the Communication Workers Union to update its members who work for Charles Dunstone (note to other unions: it also acts as a PR tool for the union and a source of useful information for journalists).

It seems that a few CPW sites (e.g. Preston & Irlam in Manchester) around the UK have had their access to the site blocked, as well as several others including Argos.com and Tesco.com.

From: http://carphoneworker.wordpress.com/

Once again, we have not been contacted by the company to explain why this might be. Indeed, we still have not received any written communication from the company explaining why they censored the site at Irlam, or why they decided to uncensor it.

Now, I know that the Carphone Warehouse doesn't particularly like blogs, but isn't this going a bit too far?

A license to nil

From Press 2.0 - Communications in a digital world

This is a warning I found some months ago above the photocopier in a client's office. Yes, you read that correctly, you can't photocopy anything from a newspaper of you will breach copyright of the Newspaper Licensing Agency:

http://www.nla.co.uk/

So, what do the NLA do?

Note:
Is it me, or does that 'TLA' [three letter acronym] make them sound like a terrorist organisation?

Well, the NLA was set up in 1996 in the UK to manage and collect revenue from those who want to copy newspaper articles (or impose fines for those that have already done it).

However, if you read the article, understand it and rewrite the article in your own words, then that's ok isn't it?....

Hint: That's what one newspaper does when it reads an article its competitor has written and wants to make it seem like it also knew about the same story.

Why newspapers block Google

Newspapers are stopping their sites being indexed by Google in an effort to preserve their 'unique content'.

Yes, that's correct. They believe they have the monopoly on the facts they find & report and don't want the 'Big G' to find it, display it and link to them.

So why are they doing this? Well, they believe that a hyperlink from Google's news site isn't the same value as a user finding the content themselves..... http://thenoisychannel.com/2009/04/18/is-differentiated-content-enough-to-save-newspapers/

Note:
The arguement about what constitutes 'screen-scraping' and what is proper 'spidering & indexing' gets a little blurred here. But its not as if Google passes this information off as its own, instead it links to the newspaper site (albeit it does put up relevant paid adverts and make money from this)

Link value

Following on from my post last week about hyperlinks being the new currency, I read with part-amusement and part-interest this article from Mike Masnick on TechDirt about calculating the value of a hyperlink.
http://techdirt.com/articles/20090418/1715314550.shtml

Mike explains how some links are more valuable than others (agreed) but then references Fred Wilson's article that personally passed links are more valuable than others.

Whilst I've no arguement that we need to look at the whole value of a hyperlink, I'm not convinced that the only difference is if ahyperlink has been referred between two people. What about: authority, SEO, immediate value, lifetime value, etc?

However, the link source (where people obtain their links from) could be an additonal parameter to measure, if that information is available.... food for thought thought?

What does your grammar say about you?

Its quite funny that the BBC, in trying to encourage collaboration & community on bbc.co.uk, made a grammatical mistake today

Believe your eyes - digital media influences

You hear so may stories these days about huge brands and life-changing things being influenced by digital media. However even the more mundane stuff is now being affected by online advertising.

In a report just published by 'Ad-ology Research', 42 per cent of US customers said they wereaffected by influences such as Internet sites and web search results

A significant minority of people are influenced by online marketing when they purchase contact lenses or spectacles,

Further information is available here: http://contactlenses.co.uk/contactlensesnews/article10598/digital-media-influences-contact-lens-buyers.html?catid=4&pageNo=1

Hyperlinks are the new currency

The WWW was created to link from one document to another. Its no longer a case of "I link, therefore I am".

Now those links have a different purpose:

1. To help your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) efforts
For example, Google measures in-bound links to your site as a good indication of your site's authority and therefore it ranks it accordingly. And the better the site linking to you, the greater its authority and therefore.... well, you get the picture.

2. To bring in revenue.
In this situation, there's no such thing as a bad hyperlink.
Yes, I know that initially seems like madness... but the more links that bring paying users/customers to your site, the better your revenue will be.
(Yes, I know that if they are in suspect places it affects your brand, but one hyperlink to enable a purchase does the same job as another... even Google has a hard job determining which links are paid ones...)
This is not something lost on (some of) the affiliate market... who, if left uncontrolled would plaster their hyperlinks anywhere that brought in money I'm sure.

Mr John Straw explains this in more detail here:
http://www.freshbusinessthinking.com/video.php?PID=155&Title=Identifying+Online+Partnerships,+John+Straw+-+Hit+Me!+An+Introduction+to+Internet+Marketing

Preventing screen scraping

Following my recent posts on screen scraping, I've had various email discussions on the prevention of screen scraping. In other words how can sites prevent users or automated scripts taking their data, without punishing real users at the same time?

CAPTCHA's (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart) are used to stop automated scripts pretending to be real people. Before anyone comments.. yes I am aware that CAPTCHAS can be broken/beaten, even ones by Google & Yahoo!

Rendering is a newer approach that is being used to defeat scripts/bots and is being used online e.g. by financial institutions, coupon and ticketing industries. By creating an image of the data a site can display the information which is easily readable by a user, but much harder by a machine....

Wired magazine UK launch

If you read The Register's review of the magazine that makes a long awaited (well, by me for 2 months at least) re-appearance after 12 years you'd think again about buying the print copy.
Note:
It seems that at least some of the content in the taster edition is taken from past US issues.

But at least the new website seems well done, doesn't it? http://www.wired.co.uk/
Errrr... maybe, although I assume the blogs and other additonal content that the US version has are on their way soon? I hope so!

Brand fragmentation

Shouldn’t brands actually be fragmented?

This was the questions was apparently posed of ‘The Business Week Guru’ Bruce Nussbaum by David Armano over dinner (Its nice to know that some people can still afford that luxury)

The question is relevant when you have the same product used by different customer segments. Wouldn’t it be better to have two different marketing approaches? This means: Two different media strategies, voices, etc.

As with everything about communication, it comes down to relevance. In other words speaking (and listening) to people in the way they want.

Government removes PM email

In this modern world of always-on communition, you can contact the great leaders of today's society if you want to. The most obvious example is the ability to watch/support/respond to 'Mr President' on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/barackobama
(But personally I'd rather watch him on Jay Leno)

So I guessed I was initally dishearted when I read the recent story about Gordon Brown removing the link from his Number 10 official website for everyone to email him.
On face value this reduces the number of communication channels the UK populous has with its leader. However, most people don't really believe that he personally will respond do they? I don't think so
In reality a group of several 'voter/electorate/media/interaction/facilitation/operatives/etc.' are most likey employed to reply on his behalf. (Its ok, you call them 'Customer Service Representatives' if you want). Its like when you go into KFC, you don't expect Colonel Sanders to be behind the counter.

So, if you can follow the real GB on Trendy Twitter (along with the load of others who pretend to be him) how much of a loss is this feature?

A big step I think. Even if those emails aren't from the actually the strange and sanitised man with a foreign accent you see on TV (which one I mean here.... you'll have to decide), there's still a change in communication approach and I wonder what channel is next.

Some good news

A personal posting today...

For those who I don't know (or who don't follow me on Twitter @haydens30).. as of 8am this morning, Gabriella May Sutherland was born. Weighing 7 pounds & 3 ounces, she has brown hair, blue eyes and a knowing smile (or is that wind?)

Expect my postings to be somewhat erratic for the next few weeks and my life to be changed forever.

Ryanair comes under more criticsm

Following my recent posts about Ryanair's PR suicide of insulting a blogger and then going on to insult the whole blogosphere, I couldn't help but laugh when I saw this mock Ryanair Safety Card: http://www.lowcarbontravel.com/2009/03/new-ryanair-safety-card.html

However, it does beg the question as to what stunt they will pull next.

BTW: Happy St Patrick's Day everyone

CRM - Data, a fundamental

"Without data, you have no knowledge and without this you cannot manage your customers"

This was a pretty obvious statement from a potential client the other day and one that go me thinking.

Remember that quantity without quality is no use to you. By quantity I obviously mean the amount of data you store about a customer. But data quality is a far more variable factor.

• A successful future communication could hinge on a single character (e.g. in their name, email address or postcode) and all the effort you put into collecting the data would be wasted.


• Duplicated records could mean that you send the same (or different) communications to the same person twice or more. This would not only confuse but may-well create a negative impression of your brand

Google News Adverts

It may not have escaped your notice that a week or so ago Google started placing PPC adverts alongside its newpaper links in the USA. I'm yet to see this put into use on the UK version of the site, but its probably just a matter of time before it starts.

Next they'll be serving adverts based on your own browsing habits.... doh!

The communication media mix

I hear different perspectives more & more about the best channels to talk to and engage with users. From Nielsen online's recent research that Social Media is the new email, through to Google's Eric Schmidt claiming Twitter is the Poor Man's email system. This was also a subject brought up by Shel & Neville's FIR conversation at the end of last week and is one I'd like to enter.

So, what's my perspective? What's the best channel? Is it....

• Posts to MyBeboFaceSpace?
• Email bulletins
• RSS feeds
• Regular Blog posts
• etc.?

Well my view is... (as is often the case)... it depends. To use one particular online communication channel is no longer the right approach. If your customers are using multiple channels, why aren't you?

This goes for Marketing departments through to PR teams and even further afield. If your customer demographic (or just particular segments) communicates via two main channels (e.g. Email & RSS), then you need to as well. Also, don't forget that as nothing stays the same for very long, you will need to monitor your customer / channel mix and perhaps change this over-time.

Sesame Street explains the Madoff Problem

The complex world of the Ponzi scheme explained:

customer service and social media

What use have customer contact centres for social media?

Datamonitor predicts that websites such as Twitter and Google search will become more integrated into contact centres, customer service and customer relationship management (CRM) strategies.

Why? Because its good business sense, that's why!

Twitter is an immediate feedback tool that is currently only used by a handful of companies out there. Google’s search (and particularly its Blog Search capabilities) can be used for mining positive and negative mentions of your brand(s). Good and bad Customer Service gets blogged about, take for example the experience of Amber at Radian6!

But just how many customer services department actually monitor and use the social media space? Well, aside from the obvious cases (e.g. Comcast Cares, which I've mentioned in the past) And how many of those are UK ones?... well not many that I can find....

Digital Newspapers

Loads of people I have spoken to (and listened to) recently are talking about the pure-play digital newspaper. This is even more relevant today as the Seattle Post-Intelligencer goes belly-up today and moves to an online-only news offering. This makes it the world's largest daily newspaper to shift to an entirely digital (although mainly because it lost $14m last year and nobody wanted to buy it!)

But rather than just simply convert the print version into HTML, the company plans a new business model for the site

"Seattlepi.com isn't a newspaper online -- it's an effort to craft a new type of digital business with a robust, community news and information Web site at its core"
Steven Swartz, the President at Hearst Newspapers (their owners).

So... what will be the first large UK newspaper to go digital?

Creativity and Science

Having watched & listened to Elizabeth Gilbert give her recent TED presentation on creative genius, I was led to blog about the difference between: logic & emotion (hat-tip to David Armano), science & creativity, left brain & right brain, nerds & artists, and also tortured souls & society's saviours.
Note:
If you can spare 18 minutes, I strongly suggest you view the video


So why does there have to be this polarity? Why does there have to be such a divide between the two, that means successful people are either in white coats & suits or straight jackets?

Perhaps now with Social Technologies there is now a place for people who have both skills (or at least a place where it will stimulate both lobes now) ?
Then we'll be able to trap our creative daemon and technical genius in the same place... and use them both for good.

Perhaps....

Video and eCommerce, a revolution

My company Ideal Interface are currently managing the implemention of a Scene7 (now owned by Adobe) image-on-demand solution for a High Street retail client. I've therefore started reading the Scene7 blog and I think this posting form Doug Mack hits the spot about how video is going to shape the future of ecommerce.

It then reminded about the words I said to Doug's Scene7 colleagues last summer:

This time around, the revolution WILL be televised!

Will you be part of the revolution? I hope to be!

Social Pangaea

Are you still trying to make sense of the social media landscape? Is you company looking out over a World of engagement opportunity and having trouble making the first step forward? Do all the tools and technologies seem like a different language to you?

Then you sound like you need someone to join them all together in a coherent way and map the way forward. You therefore need Social Pangaea.

Pangea was the idea of the SuperContinent, a land mass that joined all the continents of the world together into one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangaea

Some light reading

Here are a bunch of things I haven't had time to fully digest and comment on today:

• The 10 major (US) newspapers under threat:
  http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1883785,00.html
  
• Touching story from Steven Levitt's blog about children
  http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/10/one-more-reason-to-be-nice-to-your-children/
  
• Business Week's Twitter-sourced reasons for the decline of print media
  http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/mar2009/db2009039_236056.htm
  
• The digital plan of Lord Carter
  http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7934990.stm
  (Note: I happen to think in the PRS vs YouTube battle that "Big You" will win eventually, perhaps once the artists realise they're getting b****r all money now and even less chance of it in the future)

Telegraph URL shows political bias

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/gordon-brown/4961897/Gordon-Brown-is-a-cunt.html

Yes, you read that correctly...

Podcasting hits the big time

http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?id=1006937

• By 2013, 17 percent of U.S. Internet users, or 37.6 million people, will download a podcast at least once per month

That's a lot of people and a lot of time isn't it?