Join the conversation, or else...

As a lot of brands have found out that their customers (current, lapsed, potential,, etc.) are a social bunch. They've also found that if you have a brand and don't give them a platform to vent their concerns as well as their praise, they go and create one anyway. And these days, given the ease with with anyone can create a Facebook fan page or similar place, there will be a dozen different conversations going on about the same topic in next to no time.

But several brands have found that it is wise to not just join the conversation, but to provide a central place where discussions about them can be had.

Toyota, following the recent recall troubles it has had, decided to team up with Techmeme.com to create: http://toyotaconversations.com/. This is a site where you can see all social media buzz about the ongoing issue as well as Toyota's own ongoing information.

Nokia have done a similar thing with their site http://conversations.nokia.com/ where they have turned a blog into an entire communication platform including video & podcasts as well as some fun applications.

However UK fashion retailer ASOS have taken this one step further with http://www.asosfollowsfashion.com/. Launched earlier this month, the site allows you to quickly see the aggregated Twitter messages from people and brands in the fashion industry, including ASOS's competition. This is a bold move to try and curate not just its own brand messages, but those of the entire online fashion communication space.

Politico interview

http://www.politico.com/ is a US-based political news website that shows how to combine old-school journalism with the always-on culture of the Internet.

Started by two ex-Washington Post reporters John Harris and Jimmy Vandehei, its not a lightweight journal, but gets into the serious subject of political reporting. However they have managed to 'own the morning' with their speedy turn-around of stories and understand that the life of a topic is no longer days but hours (or even minutes).

Does it work? Well they are in the top 10 US national newspaper websites according to Nielsen Netratings!

Here's the recent video interview they did for CNN:

The Times Online annouces its paywall

News International, owner of the The Times and Sunday Times newspapers has announced that its paywall in June, only a few months away.

Following a relaunch of both online properties in May and a period of free usage to registered customers (presumably to build up the potential user base) users will then pay £1 for a single day and £2 for weekly site access . However no further details of other site subscriptions have been main available as-yet (e.g. Quarterly or Yearly).

Further questions are obviously going to be answered as this date draws nearer, such as will the sites continue to support advertising alongside articles or do so in such an overt manner?

The fact remains that there are a number of other alternatives all watching to see: if Mr Murdoch's plan will work, if the same monetisation scheme is applied to other NewsCorp properties and if their own site traffic rises as a consequence.

Here's a link to the article on The Times Online, although please note that from June it will cost you a £1/$2/€1.5 to read it!
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/media/article7076987.ece

Search Patterns

A guest posting today from Mark Walsh, as I am in a dentist chair in West London having some extensive work done. I've asked Mark to provide a review of Search Patterns by Peter Morville and Jeffery Callender:

Search Patterns is definitely as book for those who have a genuine interest in the subject rather than just a curiosity as it is very specific on the one subject matter, and at times does require some concentration to digest the content.

The book initially covers how search plays a part in our lives regardless of whether we use the internet or not. Although it’s an eye opener and good background, this does seem to continue for too long and I was left wondering when the book would really get started.

The book comes to life more once different search terms and results are covered and at this stage I did feel I was either learning, or having things pointed out to me that I already knew but had not necessarily observed consciously.

Mobile phones are covered extensively throughout the book and importance is iterated regarding aspects such as how search fields need to have suggested search to minimise use of the keypad, and search result pages have to cater for the smaller screen.

I do find that now when I use search, I am not just looking at the results but thinking much more about the types of results I am being presented with, the content in the result, what images or social network links I am also being presented with, and the page layout presented to support the device I am using to search with.

Mark Walsh is consultant Retail Systems Business Analyst and Test Manager, who is currently working alongside me on an eCommerce project for a major high street retailer.
http://uk.linkedin.com/in/markwalsh99

Geotagging and location-based services, the businesses benefit

There's a great old TV announcement that says "Its 10pm and do you know where your children are?" [Wikipedia link] that was used as a Public Service Announcement in the USA from the 1950's. But these days, in the age of Foursquare and Gowalla applications, the question to companies should be "Its business hours and do you know where your customers are?"

A year on from their launch, the two location-based services are gaining significant numbers of users (me included) as people live their lives both in the physical world and the real-time web. This form of augmented reality means that people carry on their daily activities but 'check in' online to physical locations to tell their friends where the are and unlock badges or pins, or even virtual gifts in the case of Gowalla. Both also allow their users to provide hints and tips about that location (e.g. "the coffee here is really good" or "don't order a seat near the kitchen in the Summer", etc.). Foursquare (who I predict to win out in the end as the more popular service)also allows regular visitors to the same location to become 'The Mayor' of the establishment. With the majorship passing between the frequent users this creates a social-based competitive element to the application.


So that's how its used, what's the opportunity for business?


Well a major benefit of tapping into this application is the ability to get instant information on customer habits (e.g. which regulars are visiting and how often), as well as being able to get valuable feedback from the comments made.

This is also not just a thing popular with USA techies*, location-based services have now come to the UK where department store Debenhams and Dominos Pizza have recently joined up with Foursquare. Debenhams large store on London's Oxford Street now offers free coffee to anyone checking in there on a Friday and the ‘mayor' gets coffee all the time. Whilst Dominos now offers free weekly pizza to every 'major'.

*even though at the recent South-by-Southwest [SXSW] event in Austin USA, Foursquare worked with some companies to provide specialist badges & promotions for them.

In fact, Foursquare are now actively encouraging businesses to sign-up to provide a Foursquare "mayor specials" on their dedicated business page:
http://foursquare.com/businesses/

So although its early days, with usage still restricted to the early adopters, its likely that these services will grow in usage over the next year. Subseqent integration with Facebook, Twitter and other services (e.g. plancast.com where you say where you're going to be in the future) will only add to their quick adoption.

Google and brands - keyword trademarks are allowed

So, its official. Google have won the right for anyone to use brand names in their search placement advertising. (See Google's official blog posting)

Today the European Court of Justice has ended the long-running legal battle between Google and Louis Vuitton, ruling that the Internet's biggest search engine can continue to show adverts for brand names in search advertising keywords that are not put there by the brand owners or their agents (usually the case when the product is a fake and the counterfeiter is passing off the product as real). So following on from my previous posts, this overturns the 2005 decision of the French courts who rules in favour of LVMH.

So will the Brandjacking now commence?

Oh yes! .... with the only saving graces for brands being that it still constitutes an infringement of the trademark rights if the advert causes confusion over the origin of the goods and furthermore the ECJ stated:

companies that use trademarked brand keywords to push sales must be more
transparent about who the seller is

The last remaining ruling now is whether Google is responsible for the content of ads stored on their servers, apparently a matter that should be left to the French courts. Therefore should Google be found to have a "neutral" role in just "technical, automatic and passive pointing to a lack of knowledge or control of data" then the matter will be well and truly resolved.

Note:
My thoughts are that as the system for delivering this is automated, we'll see Google win this as well. But experience shows you can never really predict what the French courts will decide.

So what does this mean for brands?

Well it means that officially brands do not own the terms that people search for them on the web and cannot stop others (including the competition or counterfeiters) bidding on them - consequently this raises the amount that has to be spent getting top billing on the right hand side of search results - if that is the brand's policy.

Its worth mentioning that Google already has very clear policies to prevent the advertising of counterfeit goods in its pay-per-click advertising system, but his ruling has now confirmed the position.

However it also potentially means that brands now have to police their own brand search terms to ensure the fake makers aren't slipping the odd advert in now and then.

Where do you start?

Do you want to sell more via the Internet? Yes of course you do and why wouldn't you? This low cost, high availability medium is just great for selling packaged products and widgets of any size, flavour & specification!

But having an ecommerce / transactional website built and running for you isn't the end of the matter... In fact it's just the beginning! Oh yes!

The art of tuning your website into an optimised selling channel is a tricky one and sometimes a bit daunting. For example, if you've spent many months and thousands (or even millions) of £'s on a new online shopping presence, there can be the temptation to just leave it alone for a while and just watch it tick-over.

But to quote my friend Tristan Bailey's recent comment on the subject "if your site's not broke, you ain't looking hard enough". And I fully endorse this approach, as there is always something website managers can do improve their sites.

So when looking to optimise, what do you look at first?

Do you start moving imagery around on the homepage? Do you change the copy on those buttons in the checkout process? Or do you provide more content in the product section to improve Search Engine Optimisation efforts?

Well in my opinion it doesn't really matter, you need to do all three and everything else you can possibly think of as well. Doing nothing is not an option, you've got to test, test and test again... And each time with the scariest possibility that you will not improve your conversion rate but make it worse.

Just remember what you did, when you did it, try to find out why it caused the effect it did and always look harder.

Creating moving pictures on the iPad

Following up on my posting on Tuesday,about Video and iPad, the killer content for magazines? I've now found the featurette about the making of this content for Viv, an all digital magazine.

VIV Mag Featurette: A Digital Magazine Motion Cover and Feature for the iPad from Alexx Henry on Vimeo.

Of particular poignancy to me is Andrew Gant's narrated comments about the content on the iPad being "living art" and "This is not motion for motion's sake. This is still print in spirit. Motion allows us to enhance the story, just like photography, but gives us the ability to take it one step further".

Will iPad save books instead?

In a previous posting I discussed the hype around the potential saving of the publishing (newspaper & magazine) industry by the Apple iPad, which has yet to get an official UK launch date beyond "the end of April". This has led me to come around to considering another potential maket for the iPad, that of an ebook reader.

The iBook Store on the iPad has the potential to sell loads of books. Steve Jobs has already said that five of the six largest publishers — Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, Macmillan, Penguin and Simon & Schuster— have all signed on to provide ebook content for the new tablet. In fact Mr Jobs himself said at the iPad launch:

“We think iPad will be a terrific e-book reader for popular books and textbooks”

So will the iPad be a major revenue stream for books?

'Well, not anytime soon' is my prediction. That's because of two things:

1. Suitability
You can't read an eReader in the bath, when you don't have power, when you want something light and tangible to idle away the hours, etc.

2. Total market share and the cannibalisation of sales
If you already have the paper book, will you want to buy the electronic version as well? I doubt it and besides, we've been burnt like this before when CD's came out in the 1980's... as the record companies so lovingly suggested we'd like to re-purchase our collections one final time at the higher quality levels. Also what happens when another "even better" ebook format gets released in a year or so?

I personally don't actually see ebooks growing to become a significant part of the overall book market in the short term. According to the Association of American Publishers, book sales increased in the last year in the USA by about 4% ($11.2bn). However, only about $170m, equivalent to about 3%, of those were ebook sales. But although this is an incredibly small part of the overall amount of total sales, the industry should take some consolation from the 177% growth in this figure over the last year. This growth was fuelled by the increasing availability of the Amazon Kindle, which really has beome the major electronic book distribution platform until the iPad was created. (Yes, I know you have others, such as the Sony eBook Reader, but these really haven't been that popular). Its also no secret that Amazon are worried about the potential for the iPad to steal their market share.

However the one thing that is more likely... is that the price of ebooks themselves will soon reduce in price. Their cost of production and distribution is so low (almost zero thanks to no paper & printing costs and online delivery) that a price war for market share is likely
Note: For more information on this, take a look at the maths done by New York Times in its recent article on iPad prices.

It could therefore end up that the price of an ebook is the factor that most influences sales and therefore the market share of each device. The question for Apple will be whether it decides to first squeeze publishers for its proportion of each (commoditised) sale or just goes for its cut of the overall market by under-pricing Amazon.

Neither of these situations looks to be a good thing for the book industry.....

Video and iPad, the killer content for magazines?

It was almost 2 years ago I wrote a blog posting about how I saw video as the future of the Internet.

Now I've long believed that as the performance of viewing devices (from desktop PC's through to mobile devices) gets better and Internet bandwidth improves, then video will emerge as killer content for more than just TV stations and film makers. As the cost of production reduces, video will eventually come into far more popular usage for other media.

This video, showing the possibilities for new Viv magazine, gives some idea of the capabilities for linking copy and rich images & CGI together in the iPad:

Viv Magazine Interactive Feature Spread - iPad Demo from Alexx Henry on Vimeo.

Fortune 500's use of Social Media

Following on from my post a few days back about the sorry state of UK corporate blogging, I was slightly encouraged by a recent report from our US cousins about the use of Social Media in the top Global Companies.

The Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth has done one of the first proper studies of the Fortune 500’s adoption and usage of social media:
http://www.umassd.edu/cmr/studiesresearch/2009F500.pdf

One of the best-known forms of social media blogging was measured and analysed. The report found that only 22% of the primary corporations listed on the 2009 Fortune 500 have a public-facing corporate blog and have actually posted in the past 12 months. This was an increase from the 18% who did the same in 2008.

However (and suprisingly) 35% of the same companies had Twitter account that had one or more postings within the past thirty days.

UK ecommerce site availability

The person I felt most sorry for the other week was not myself (despite some pretty intensive dental treatment*), but the Head of Debenhams Website Operations or whatever the exact role is at the department store giant. You see for several hours their flagship site was down during the Sale period.

This issue has occurred again, despite assurances of site improvements in 2006, when there were site stability problems and also when there were similar issues in 2008.

(That holding page has certainly been getting more than its fair share of usage over the years)

So rather than put myself in the shoes of that person at Debenhams, who would probably have had a molar drilled instead, I took solace from a report from the AT Internet Institute that gave the good news that:

British e-commerce websites have an average availability rate higher than that of the French, German and Spanish

It is perhaps worth pointing out that http://www.debenhams.com/ were not one of the UK websites tested as part of this test!

*one that left me dribbling for a few hours and something called "an inert substance" packing out the inside one of my teeth for a few weeks

iPad, the false saviour of the publishing world

"Apple's iPad is the second coming", "iPad is the saviour of publishing", "it will change our lives like the printing press"

Its a frigging big iPhone without a camera and the phone bit.... 'tis all

But in the weeks since Apple announced its iPad computer tablet thingy, the news industry, its viewers and (in particular) the Apple fan boys have been falling over themselves to talk about the fantastic potential of a square computer reader device that will restore journalism and in particularly the fortunes of newspapers and magazines.

This is perhaps summed-up best by this article from the New York Times on the week of the iPad's launch: With Apple Tablet, Print Media Hope for a Payday. This piece stated:

Apple may be giving the media industry a kind of time machine — a chance to undo mistakes of the past.

Oh dear... its all going to end in tears. Big droplets of salty false expectations that a device will save the publishing world from faltering advertising revenues by giving users a device where they will pay money to read content. (Need I remind you that salty water and computer equipment don't mix?)

Now, I'm sure I'm not the first to point this out, but won't the iPad come with either a WiFi or 3G data capability and a browser? So why will iPad users then decide to pay for a newspaper via the Apple store when they can browse the Internet for free and read the article there?

Social CRM

Social CRM or Social Customer Relationship Management is a topic I've been aware for a while now, mainly in the content of those I follow on Twitter and their blogs. However its not something I have previosuly taken the time to dig into, until recently when I noticed more mentions of it by people such as http://twitter.com/jowyang and http://twitter.com/BrentLeary.
It therefore seemed to me that Social CRM is that hazy area where CRM meets the social web and it was therefore interesting to me to see what this means and how its helps companies.

Now 'traditional' CRM has its roots in the sales force automation and marketing automation (basically a bunch of rules about: when to contact a customer, what they have bought and what next to sell them) and wonderfully gives a 360 degree/holistic view of the customer (I've commented on this before back as far back as July 2008).

Whereas Social Media is a conversation with your customer - albeit this does follow a process - but one that can follow any number of outcome paths depending upon the situation, the customer and their sentiment towards the product and/or brand. So its kind of hard to see how this 'soft and touchy' approach combines with the rigorous processes of CRM.

To get to the bottom of this, there's a number of different definitions I found, including:

• Social customer relationship management is about joining the ongoing conversations in which your customers and prospects are already engaged.
  http://technology.inc.com/software/articles/200806/leary.html
  
• Social CRM, on the other hand, is your existing CRM that has the ability to leverage the social web and automate the conversation process
  http://www.socialmediamarketinguk.com/social-crm-the-next-big-thing

So, in my eventual view, I see Social CRM as the use of social media to listen and engage with customers and to link this feedback into a company CRM system to better understand customers general needs and identify & triggers specific opportunities for sale or reputation management.

Note: If you follow me on Twitter you will see that this definition led me to Tweet:

Realising that I've been talking about social crm #scrm for ages, but just never used that term....
http://twitter.com/haydens30/status/9770684766

Travel and Social Media - Part 2

It was over 3 weeks ago now that I attended to Tnooz Barcamp 2 following the Travel technology Show at Earls Court in London. It was then I promised in a short blog posting (written on the way home from that event) on the use of Social Media in the travel market.
This is that eventual article.

Now the main purpose of an company using social media must be to create a dialogue with customers (past, current and potential).

Top of all the social media use by travel companies must come blogs. The web log (hence 'blog) was meant as a living diary of things done, so it comes as no suprise that trabel and blogs go hand-in-hand. In fact blogs now contain thousands of travel commentaries and reports from travellers who provide open, eye-witness and contemporary review points.

I'll not try and list my own favourites, so here's travelblog's list of the Top 100 Travel Blogs this month:
http://travelblogsites.com/2010/03/03/travel-blog-top-100-march-03-2010/

Note:
Its therefore a little hard to understand why the Travel Social Nework 'Where are you Now?' (http://www.wayn.com/) isn't more popular than it is. However it seems that during 2009 new registrations to WAYN grew significantly and new registrations in the site reached nearly 10,000 in December.

And suprisingly some of the other social networks I would have expected to have been popular with travellers, such as Twitter and Flickr (the most popular photo sharing site, now owned by Yahoo). These two sites came comparatively low down the ranks of usage when compared to the giants of Facebook and video sharing YouTube in a recent Hotelworld survey;
http://www.tnooz.com/2010/02/23/news/twitter-way-down-list-of-social-media-sites-used-by-budget-travellers/

So what's next for Travel and Social Media? Well... I've a hunch its going to involve innovations such as real-time geolocation based services (e.g. foursquare.com, where you tell friends where you are right now) or even the new planning / event / location based service http://plancast.com/

Social Media and the News

Last month Peter Horrocks the new head of BBC Global News told his new journalists to to use social media as a primary source of information.

"This isn't just a kind of fad from someone who's an enthusiast of technology. I'm afraid you're not doing your job if you can't do those things. It's not discretionary"

In instructing his researchers to use Twitter and RSS readers as essential tools for gathering news, the BBC is accepting that technology is changing the way journalism works and Aunty is obviously keen to keep pace with developments. To ignore social media is to ignore some great online resources.

Its therefore only a further mind-step away to consider what the next phase of social media and news is and one such step would be the Social Media Newsroom. By this, I don't mean the same dozen hacks all sat around re-inventing stories and perspectives (or a Pulitzer for the best Tweet), I mean a constant quorum of independent writers, freelancers and bloggers who are loosely attached to a central hub that curates content and provides greater impact than the individuals alone. This content is then pushed out via the same channels it is collected by, but with: views, additional information, further context, insight and other integrated data (e.g. linked government statistics, etc.). This is then all published to a central source (e.g. the newspaper's website) where it is further enhanced by comments, updates and feedback.

The Internet is now the only real distribution channel for a lot of newspapers who can no longer afford to publish their paper-based version. Peter Horrocks is correct to adopt this approach for his journalists now. Those that don't follow the best practices of social media may see their brands further marginalized online.

Politicalist moves forward

We're getting more excited about the prospective launch of the online social media political listening service we have called http://www.politicalist.com

Ben, our designer, has produced a great logo for the service and you can see it uploaded here:
http://idealinterface.posterous.com/bens-produced-our-logo-for-politicalistcom-al

As always, all feedback is gratefully received.

My delicious.com tag cloud

Publishing & social media

With the recent announcement that Condé Nast Digital Britain (their UK New Media division) has hired a Social Media strategist to elevate its digital brands online, I've got to conclude that glossy publishing seems to be taking social media more seriously these days.

Now you might say that with online forums and the ability to comment on all manner of articles in different Condé Nast digital titles, that they have been "embracing social media since the beginning" or other such stuff. But this is clearly an obvious step for them towards embracing the conversation online.

Yes other publishing areas have been getting into the benefits of social media for a while back. One obvious approach that takes the two to in a new direction is True/Slant, run by a former news executive at America Online who worked at a variety of publications, including The Wall Street Journal. It covers a wide range of topics, such as politics, culture, sports, business, health, science and food.

It launched with 65 journalists, or "knowledge experts," assigned to specific topics who are only paid a small amount, but the aim is that they each become a "minipublisher" under the True/Slant brand. However they are also offered a share of advertising and sponsorship revenues generated from their individual pages (and even equity has been mentioned).

The site has been running since April last year, but has been criticised for being boring (by Paul Boutin at The Industry Standard) but it has provided some insight such as when Facebook changes their account privacy settings, therefore exposing the profiles of Facebook's executive team. In itself a great piece of opportunist journalism...

Has blogging really made a difference

It was a few years ago now that I picked up my copy of "The New Rules of Marketing & PR" by David Meerman Scott, which really enthused me to keep writing this blog and maintain it's focus on new company communication methods and the open & competitive digital landscape they faced.

I dreamed of a transparent and constant blogging corporation that embraced dialogue with it's customers and avoided the Dell Hell situation with a crowd sourced team of company advocates and social media evangelists.

I realised that this new communication method had created a hybrid from the once separated silos of: PR, CRM, marketing and 1-2-1 digital interaction. I also realised that our American chums were more likely to get buy-in from their senior execs because... Well we're British and we don't do this open stuff with our closest family members, let alone the general public, but I still had hope that we'd get there eventually.

And now, several years down the line (and hundreds of blog posts later) how have we fared???
Well not very well it seems as 18 of the FTSE 100 companies had a blog and only eight of these are apparently proper blogs in the truest sense (allowing comments).
(Via research from The Group)

Oh dear... Is that progress?

Bad product reviews

I've recently submitted a bad review of a product I purchased online from Amazon.co.uk

This was after a product I ordered from a company called Vanguard Tech failed to be delivered (I ordered a USB wireless adaptor and a USB CD Rom drive turned up in error. I then returned this, but my wireless adaptor never materialised).

You can read my review here:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/review/R3R3TCNMU01R3M/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm

Now its not often that I give bad reviews, believing that its better to praise a company or person for doing something well, rather than the criticise an individual or organisation. However, in this case I feel quite justified in criticising Vanguard Tech for their failure to deliver or even answer my emails.

And this claim of justification has got me thinking about why others such as myself post bad product reviews in user generated content areas such as the one I used on Amazon.... Its not just because we have a personal gripe against the company (sure, I lost about £10 which I would have preferred not to have done), its because I don't want others to suffer the same fate and would like them to order the right thing.... and perhaps actually get their product.

I therefore see bad reviews as contributing to the social sentiment about a product, in-turn shaping the greater view of the supplier or seller.

Following me on Twitter - what you can expect

I've been a Twitter user now for over two years, clocking up over 1,300 tweets so far (and counting). I've therefore seen it grow from a niche 'early adopter' service to a huge real-time trending tool in that time. In fact I even now use it when watching popular live TV programmes to get the 'back channel' on opinions and buzz (just don't tell my Ideal Interface colleagues that I'm a secret X-Factor viewer).

I've more or less settled into a pattern of using the same account for personal and work stuff, meaning there's a blend of:

• Hyperlinks of stuff I have read and find useful


• Personal replies to people I know


• Retweets that I find useful or just plain relevant to me (and want my followers to see)


• Trivial thoughts or comments that get me through the day


• and more recently status updates from other services (e.g. Foursquare)

I therefore have a question (or two):

Does anybody find this balance right or wrong? Should I use my personal Twitter account http://twitter.com/haydens30 just for personal stuff such as replies & thoughts and use the company one http://twitter.com/idealinterface just for business tweets?

Let me know

When More Website Visitors Hurt Your Business

There's a well-used phase that states "More is less" and this is very true with websites that cannot handle their peak traffic. Once your website reaches the limit of the number of users, connections, bandwidth or other constraint, the more after that you get... the worse the experience is for all of them.

And since these peak periods for websites are usually the time they want to communicate or sell the most... this actually does more to harm their business than at other times. In fact according to a recent piece of reaserch by Gomez... with 51% of eCommerce customers usually shopping at peak times, you really don't have a choice if you're the website manager, but to make sure your site can handle any level of usage.

The SlideShare Presentation giving the report highlights is below:

When More Website Visitors Hurt Your Business - Are You Ready For Peak Traffic

View more presentations from Samantha McGarry.

Could Foursquare be the next news application?

Those of you who follow me on Twitter will know I'm a user of www.foursquare.com
. For the uninitiated this is a location-based game / service where you can 'check-in' at a physical location to:

• tell your fellow friends in the game where you are (e.g. "I'm in my local pub")
• read and write tips to help fellow users (e.g. "The best beer here is xxxxxx")
• become the major of the locations (a reward for frequenting each place the most)
• unlock 'badges' that show progress and status

However, It struck me today that what would be an incredibly useful addition to Foursquare is the addition of local news articles.

The only problem with this idea is.... someone has had it already! .

Last month Canada's free daily paper The Metro News teamed up with Foursquare to deliver specific local content to users.

"Foursquare players who follow Metro and check-in near where they pick up Metro will unlock a special Metro Foursquare badge and be automatically entered to win. The contest is being promoted through in-paper ads across all 7 editions of Metro"

And a couple of weeks ago, The new York Times partnered with Foursquare in a winter Olympics tie-up that provides local recommendations on: restaurants, attractions, shopping and nightlife in the resorts of Vancouver, Whistler, and Squamish (where?). You can even check in to two recommended venues and unlock a special Olympics badge.

So.... is this the future of hyperlocal news? Has a game provided the right delivery mechanism for targeted and relevant content?

Don't call it a pay wall

Its funny how cyclical things are in the Internet industry, as old ideas come back into fashion and what's new becomes old very quickly. To some, this typifies the ever-changing way that ideas evolve now that 1.7 billion people all have access to the same information online. To others, this is just an example of how some people never learn by their own mistakes, let alone by those made by other people.

The topic of paying for digital news content is one such subject that has come full circle. As the mainstream media either tries to embrace the digital switch, change its business models or just try to ignorantly and arrogantly force the Internet to bow to its ways (mentioning no names), its is economically squeezed on all sides as the world recovers from the financial binge of the last decade or so, hungover from what some are now calling "The Great Recession".

So last week the great and good of the "Paid Content Industry" all got together in New York to discuss this. What's quite surprising is that it seems that this wasn't the usual Google-bashing conference that mainstream media middle management still seem to still engage in, but was apparently a quite sensible discussions on the future business models for digital news.

Obviously the topic of paywalls was high on the agenda (funny that) and the announcement by the New York Times that it would be creating a 'metered pay system' sometime in the as-yet-to-be-determined future (possibly by the end of this year) was apparently a hot topic.

Its therefore worth asking the question of whether the NYT will be able to afford to send any management to next year's conference, as a consequence of losing money on this proposed venture. Or if, by then, they will all be blaming the lack of advertising spend for not putting more free content online, as the cycle repeats itself in an ever-decreasing timeframe.

More info from Meghan Keane at eConsultancy is available here.

Quoted by Blogging to Drive Business book

Arriving in cardboard and plastic wrapping this weekend just gone was my copy of 'Blogging to Drive Business' book by Eric Butow and Rebecca Bollwitt.

I was lucky enough to review a preview version of this book a few months ago after I was asked to write a review of it.

Upon opening it, there are a number of quotes about the book on the inside pages, including mine :-)

"Blogging to Drive Business is a no-nonsense and practical guide for who have yet to embark on the road to enhanced corporate communications. It explains why, who, what & how to start and maintain a valuable connection with your customers via this engaging medium. "

Flash... ahhhhh

OK, it was just a very flimsy excuse to use a Queen-orientated blog heading, but I'm going to use it anyway.

It's also not a sin to pay homage to a copywrited document or published work, despite what music companies would like. It also pales into insignificance when compared to what Mr Steve Jobs said last week to the Wall Street Journal about Adobe's flagship interaactive software... Flash (see there was a relevance in the headline somewhere).

Apparently everyone's favourite poloneck wearer took time while at the WSJ to accuse Flash of being a "CPU hog," having "security holes" and a dying technology. Even better he claimed that the task of moving from Flash (perhaps to a much more iPad-friendly HTML5) would be 'trivial'.

There's currently no news on whether the creative and technical folks over that 'The Journal' have stopped laughing yet.....

More details via ValleyWag:
http://valleywag.gawker.com/5474900/what-steve-jobs-said-during-his-wall-street-journal-ipad-demo

In store multi-channel

The words multi-channel and cross-channel appear in online/ecommerce market literature more often than nearly any other.

And with good reason. Customers are no longer channel specific in their shopping habits, so neither should retailers.

In a recent report from eMarketer, they found that:

Despite the adverse sales and margin impact due to down market conditions on non-food retail categories, the cross-channel retailing experience continues to gain momentum as 53% of retailers indicate that the need to address rapid changes in customer channel preferences is a key business pressure.

So what are retailers doing about this then?

Well, the crossing from the online channel to the store is an obvious one. This is supported by basic features such as 'store locators' on retailer websites, through to the increasing use of 'order online & collect from store' functionality offered by the likes of Halfords & Argos.

But what about crossing the other way, how is the in-store sales process helping to support the online one? Well... apart from the sale assistant providing the supportive line "we don't have it in stick right now, have you tried our website?"... what cross-over is there?

(Clue: How many terminals providing free access to the retailer's website do you actually see in a store?)

Are you an SEO Warrior?

I've recently been sent O'Reilly's SEO Warrior book to review. However, due to my current work load, I've not been able to spend the time to fully read and digest the book to be able to review it. I've also been spending a fair amount of time reading up on SEO recently, so wanted to take a fresh approach to this book that would give it a fair chance.

I therefore asked James Cole, an eCommerce analyst looking to expand his knowledge in the Search Engine Optimisation arena, to read and review it (and in return I would publish it here and let him keep the book).

SEO Warrior sets out to be a comprehensive guide to all the facets of modern SEO, from which search engines matter and why, to Robots Exclusion Protocol and the minutia of XML sitemaps.

To do this it covers a lot of very in depth technical details about site design, construction and code which requires a very good grasp of these areas, but this knowledge is rewarded with plenty of examples and large appendices of scripts to show how to create what is being described.

However, rather than just dealing with the site technicalities of SEO, where SEO Warrior really sets itself apart is by taking a much wider view of the subject. It does this by including chapters on best practice from the first realisation of the need for a site, long before any code is written (and also long after, as it heavily emphasises the long term benefits of good SEO). Covering themes like domain name and hosting options, site structuring, keyword research, competitor analysis, guidelines for content, search engine spam and the latest SEO issues gives the reader an idea of the bigger picture and where their site can fit into it.

So whilst it has fairly high prerequisites to get the most out of its depth, it’s the breadth of topics covered that makes SEO Warrior an invaluable resource for anyone looking to improve their understanding of what can be an arcane subject at times.

Thanks James

I like The Pope, the Pope Blogs!

In a rather amusing story, that could create a thousand wonderful news headlines, the Pope at the recent Roman Catholic Church's World Day of Communications told his priests to blog.

Is nothing sacred?

:-)

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUKTRE60M15H20100123

Politicalist

I'm a great fan of the TV Programme 'The Mentalist' where an advisor to the police uses his uncanny ability to read situations and people to understand the situation and solve crimes.

With the General Election only a few months away, we here at Ideal Interface have been busy developing a tool to read the political online situation and to understand what's being said. The main reason for building this service is to provide a social media early warning system of the political landscape leading up the UK General Election on 5th May.

We have called this tool 'Politicalist.com' and have put a holding page up on the URL for now. If you would like more details about this service and would like to be a possible Beta tester, then just leave me a request in the comments below.

Travel and Social Media

We've been speaking to quite a few companies in the Travel space recently about their Social Media plans for 2010.

I've actually been struck by the openness and transparency of their efforts. Its not just been a case of 'Damage 'Limitation' but what they can learn about this evolving communication medium, but also how they can leverage it for brand value and even sales... Hurrah!

Subsequent note on 10 Feb 2010:
I will be writing a longer post some time soon on my attendance at Tnooz barcamp last night;
http://www.tnooz.com/tnooz-tcamp2/

Why I blog

I was recently asked by a friend (thanks Debs) how I managed to blog so often, given the time it takes to do it - and that I don't get paid to do it either.

Now I've recently had to stop blogging because of so many other things going on and not because my employer, 'Pulled a Forrester' on me :-)

This time off, as well making me feel guilty for not keeping up my near-daily blogging routine, was also a tiring time where I didn't have time to composed my thoughts. I believe this lack of blogging actually contributed to more disruption in thoughts, making my day more and more confused, which meant that I got into a bit of a vicious circle.

So, you see it now, I blog to compose my thoughts, to make things easier, so I have more time to blog. Now that's not another vicious circle... Is it?

Follow your dreams. Don Draper style

I've spoken to a few friends & digital industry people who've not had the best start to 2010. For whatever the reason they haven't had their fair share of luck recently...

Although digital is still growing in it's importance as a communication, engagement and application platform... We're still seen either as the new upstart on the block (perhaps hoped that we'll eventually go away or disappear in another millennium-style dot-com bubble bursting puff of ether) or an immature media that "could possibly compare with the golden age".

Now, like many people I'm a fan of MadMen the TV series based on 1950s Madison Avenue marketing agency types, who swaggered and drank themselves through the day (and night). And taking a leaf out of the principle character's metaphorical book, I say to my down-but-not-defeated friends...

Do what Don Draper would have done!..
Enjoy the moment, savour the digital bourbon of web communications, smoke the nicotine of Social Media just a little too much and walk like you own the place. 'cos one day you will!

Thinking time

I've been very busy over the last week, mainly focusing on personal stuff, and it's given me a chance to reflect on my blog and Tweets.

I've therefore decided to focus my postings a little more on the strategic side of digital media, rather than the more technical or specific.

This also ties with our plan at Ideal Interface to showcase our three different areas of specilisation : website delivery, online marketing and digital strategy.

As always, feedback on how I cover all three is greatfully recieved.

Funnels

I'm a believer in the use of diagrams to depict complex situations (or just those where a picture paints a thousand words). And the diagrammatic use of funnels to show a development, progress or evolution is something I've come across quite a lot in my work.

Here's a few that have caught my eye:

1. The ecommerce Funnel:

Also known as the conversion funnel, this diagram shows the visitor drop-off at each stage along the online purchasing process, from homepage to sale confirmation.

2. The marketing funnel:
Also known as the 'advocacy' funnel, this plots user relationship along reducing path of engagement. There are numerous different versions of this funnel and each roughly follows the AIDA(s) marketing steps.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIDA_(marketing)

Thanks to http://www.relationship-economy.com/ for image

3. The Twitter Funnel

In an interesting article recently on Mashable, Tim Trefren covers the Twitter sign up funnel and plots the 5 stages of initial usage:
1. Hit homepage

2. Go to signup page, fill out registration form

3. Browse suggested topics

4. Add e-mail friends

5. Search for someone

4. The Social Media Funnel:

Taking this to a higher-level, John Bell from Ogilvy360 has created his version of the Social Media Funnel.

The greatest SEO mistakes

In my continued efforts to understand more about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), I've been learning about what is current best practice (mainly from my colleague Marc, but also from OReilly's great book 'The Art of SEO' that I've even gone to the effort of writing a review of on Amazon ).

However, I have been quite surprised by the efforts of some people to try to negatively affect their search engine placement. Often these are not completely Internet amateurs, but professional web designers / developers who either ignore established thinking or decide that they will 'try something unique this time'.

I've therefore made a list of what I think are some of the biggest mistakes in SEO:

• Build a site with no / very little content
• Build your website in Flash
• Fail to update your content regularly
• Build a site full of JavaScript
• Give all your pages the same / bad title tag

Please feel free to add to these as you see fit.

Thinking time

I've been very busy over the last week, mainly focusing on personal stuff, and it's given me a chance to reflect on my blog and Tweets.

I've therefore decided to focus my postings a little more on the strategic side of digital media, rather than the more technical or specific.

This also ties with our plan at Ideal Interface to showcase our three different areas of specilisation : website delivery, online marketing and digital strategy.

As always, feedback on how I cover all three is greatfully recieved.

Journalists use of Social Media

If you have read Malcolm Gladwell's book The Tipping Point, you know that there is a point at which a rolling snowball of an idea becomes an avalanche of thought and majority in its target user-base. And now, if a recent study is to be believed then the use of social media for news gathering has reached tipping point in journalism.
http://www.journalism.co.uk/2/articles/537316.php

The report from a survey of 371 journalists and editors in the USA states that for their research:

• 55% use micro blogging sites (e.g. Twitter)
• 65% use social networks
• 89% use blogs

However one of the report's authors is keen to make the points that using these sources does not replace a journalist or an editor's function. 49% of respondents also cite social media's "Lack of fact-checking, verification or reporting standards" as the primary reason to question the reliability of news from these site.

Perhaps someone should point out to them the growing story from yesterday's Irish Mail on Sunday newspaper, which apparently took selected quotes from Air Traffic Controller Melanie Dawn's blog to sensationalise a story about sexism in her work place.

This was all done without her consent, which is why Melanie is apparently now seeking legal advice (and probably why the story cannot be found anywhere on the Mail's site.... funny that!

Perhaps before declaring the lack of standards of social media, journalist should look at little closer to home first?

Thanks to the following for the photo:
http://twitter.com/jangles/status/8190153290

New York Times and its paywall

OK, I've not blogged in a few days, mainly because we've been busy here at Ideal Interface Towers on a bunch of new business. But I couldn't let one piece of news go past without commenting on it...that the New York Times is more than just ready to stick up its paywall its going to 'meter' users for reading its content:

Starting in January 2011, a visitor to NYTimes.com will be allowed to view a certain number of articles free each month; to read more, the reader must pay a flat fee for unlimited access.

Now I could be wrong here, but haven't they tried this before in 2005?

BTW: yes they did and then they shot it down in 2007:
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSWEN101120070918

Putting a new site live

We've just put our new company website together (www.idealinterface.co.uk) and its been fun to get back to what we do best... building sites that do what they should.

A bit thanks to the following people for their hard work (in no particular order):

• Sarah (design)
• Tony (site and CMS development, hosting, last minute changes, putting up with my late night phone calls, etc.)
• Marc (Information Architecture and copy writing)
• Ben (design, asset production, content changes, learning Kentico from scratch, etc.)
• Tim (feedback)

and if I've missed anyone, then thanks to you to!

The iSlate and newspaper distribution

Allan Biggar in his blog posting over the weekend says that the new Apple iSlate is set to be a gamechanger for newspapers and publishers.

Yes, Apple’s proposed introduction of the iSlate (or whatever they call it) is hoped to do for newspapers and magazines what the iPhone did for pocket applications… it gives them a new platform for distribution. However, that may end up being the only similarity between them.

You see the iPhone allowed bedroom developers and small digital agencies to easily innovate. They quickly built new things they thought people might want, need and buy, as well as allowing them to utilise the ‘Freemium’ business model (download and use the basic functionality for free, then pay a small price for an upgraded or full-featured version id you want).

I wonder (and seriously doubt) if the traditional publishers are approaching the iSlate with the same innovation that the iPhone application developers have done or are just thinking they can replicate their existing print offering on a digital device. iPhone applications are not exact replicas of large websites (in fact many don’t even have links to websites at all), they are something that suits the pocket device’s format and portability... they are popular because they are different, not because they are the same as what has gone before. That is part of their appeal and one reason why so many have been downloaded.

I also wonder if mainstream media will have the same approach to revenue generation and consider things such as a ‘Freemium’ version of their product with the option of charging for all of it.

More News International sites block aggregator

Following on from my post last Friday explaining how News International started blocking the news aggregation site www.newsnow.com, word is now out that other Murdoch-owned sites are following suit.

As revealed yesterday by PaidContent, The Sun and News Of The World were planning to block the search spider of NewsNow. However this has already started and The Sun's site has already implemented this change (Hat tip to Malcolm Coles for checking the robots.txt file on thesun.co.uk and getting proof)

There is still no reason given by NewsCorp on why NewsNow has been singled out for this treatment. Perhaps this is just the proof-of-concept before more search engines are excluded from their sites. NewsCorp may be looking at the effects on their organic search results and traffic as a consequence of excluding just one player in the news aggregation space......

Tesco thanks its staff and suppliers

The trend towards quicker and more reactive newspaper advertising continues, with this 'Thanks You' ad that appeared today in the Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, The Sun, The Times and The Daily Telegraph.

Its also interesting to note the store locator URL put at the bottom of this advert, which makes me think that it will also be appearing as an online ad anytime soon (if not already).

URL shorteners and search engine optimisation

I've just upgraded my Google Toolbar on Internet Explorer 8 and have found the Google URL shortener http://goog.le/ integrated within the 'Share' functionality.

So, does the Internet need another URL shortener? Possibly not.
But is there any harm in Google doing one? Possibly not. It was likely cheaper developing their own one than buying up http://tinyurl.com/ or http://bit.ly/ (the default URL shortener for Twitter), but not that Google needs to worry about money.
Here's Google's blog post from December on the launch of this service:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/making-urls-shorter-for-google-toolbar.html

Coincidentally I was having an interesting conversation with one of my clients yesterday about the SEO (search engine optimisation) implications of URL shorteners. A check with this URL shortener article by Danny Sullivan does corroborate the fact that a lot of these services allow shortened links to add to your SEO efforts (by correctly using 301 redirects) .

On top of this, its my belief that creating a bespoke URL (e.g. http://www.tinyurl.com/keyword+linkid) could further add to your SEO efforts by including your required keyword(s) into the URL as we know that keywords in hyperlinks can increase the relevance and therefore the value of each link.

France wants to tax online

This world gets crazier & crazier the more you read ("so read less" I hear you say), but those daft Frenchies have taken things to a whole new level by commissioning a report that proposes a tax on online business. Aready being called the "Google tax", this report suggests that each time an ad is clicked, online firms should be charged a between one to two percent of the revenue generated, thereby raising between €10m and €20m a year.

Said Olivier Esper, senior policy manager for Google France "

We don't think introducing an additional tax on internet advertising is the right way forward as it could slow down innovation"

So what worthy cause will benefit from this taxation? A college, a hospital or some other public-spirited initiative that will improve the quality of life in France?

Errr... no! .The report suggests that this money would be used to compensate media and content owners such as recorded music or print media. So... those mainstream media companies who have not fully found a way to benefit from the Internet are to be compensated by those that have?

And which level-headed and informed individuals did they find to author this report? Why none other than Guillaume Cerruti (president of Sotheby's auction house in France), Jacques Toubon (former French Minister of Culture) and Patrick Zelnik (owner of the Naive record label, which could end up being the very beneficiary of this tax revenue).

Now far be it from me to criticize a government of bias, but I can't help but wonder if Carla Bruni-Sarkozy being signed to the Naive record creates some conflict of interest here.....?

News International starts blocking search engine spiders....

.... but only the ones it can afford to set its lawyers on.

Today we have had a further development in the ongoing battle between news aggregators and Rupert Murdoch's News International company. In fact its one that aggregator NewsNow has felt strongly enough to issue a Press Release about today.

For those who aren't familiar with NewsNow's service, it spiders news sites in a similar way to other search sites such a Yahoo and Google News. It then builds links to these articles from its own site, thereby sending traffic off to the content it finds (helping them build visitor traffic, which sells more adverts, which makes the sites more money).

News International has previously stated that it will delist itself from search engines in 2010. We're all watching for them to make themselves invisible to the search spiders of Google and others (but not Bing.com, assuming News International and Microsoft get into bed together as rumoured).

So as I've stated before, the easy way to do this is to make changes to a simple file called a robots.txt which sits on the server displaying the content. If you use this file to tell the spider not to index the specific site it won't, its as simple as that. You can even go so far as to tell the spider (e.g. Google's Googlebot) that you specifically don't want it to look through all or part of your site.
I have done this in the past when I've had a particularly fragile site that could not take all its pages being indexed at once and some site owners do this when they don't want their content read & stolen... which is fair enough.

So what have The Time Online done? Well, if you look at their robots.txt file you will see that they have entered the line:

#Agent Specific Disallowed Sections
User-agent: NewsNow
Disallow: /

Now for those who don't speak fluent search engine spider, I'll translate...

"Dear NewsNow spider, go away"

I'll leave you to decide if The Times are playing fair in this matter. However NewsNow's boss Struan Bartlett is fairly clear on the matter:

“The question remains whether News International, in arbitrarily blocking individual search engines, is trying to use its muscle to gain unreasonable control over the public’s freedom to choose the way they access information and news online."

I personally want to know why The Times has not done the same to block the Googlebot. Could it be it brings in far too much reveue for them right now?

The battle continues!

Amazon's Kindle DX to ship to the UK

The new Kindle DX is now available to pre-order from Amazon.com and is scheduled to start shipping from January 19.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8443804.stm

This larger eReader costs $489 and apparently comes with global wireless, which makes it possible for people in more than 100 countries to download books, magazines & newspapers.

But... the device still has to be ordered from the US site and will no-doubt come with an American power adaptor. In addition, that $489 / £305 price tag will then be subject to 17.5% UK VAT (Value Added Tax) plus whatever duties are due.

There is also no word yet on whether the International Kindle DX will suffer the same issue as affected the International Kindle released in October 2009. This had images from subscriptions (such as daily newspapers or lovely photo-rich magazines ) deliberately restricted to keep Amazon's roaming costs down.

Newspapers are biting the Google hand that feeds them

Newspapers continue to blame Google for stealing their business, despite the fact that it is driving visitors to their sites.

John A. Byrne, the ex-editor-in-chief of BusinessWeek.com has now gone on record as stating that:

Search--largely Google--now accounts for some 45% of the traffic at BW.com, up from less than 20% in 2006. That simple little box is driving vast amounts of advertising inventory (and therefore revenue) to the site and it's no coincidence. In common with every other media brand, we did lots of things to make our site search friendly. We rewrote headlines, simplified URLs, hired an on-staff SEO expert to lead seminars in search optimization. In other words, we courted Google and the search traffic we achieved. It's a similar story everywhere else.

He claims that publishers, in now blaming Google are biting the very hand that feeds them. The fact that these newspaper sites cannot monetise these visitors is not Google's fault, its the responsibility of the publishers to create a place where visitors will want to stay and return to(perhaps by fostering communities and creating a dialogue, rather than just putting words on a page?).

£1 million prize for crowdsourcing voters website

In a move to capture the crowdsourcing Zeitgeist of current popular web applications, the Conservative party last week proposed a competition for the development of an online tool to harness the knowledge the collective wisdom of the UK population.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/21/20091230/ttc-tories-offer-1m-for-voters-website-e1d36ba.html

Quite what the tool will be used for, nobody really knows; as its just an idea as-yet until they most-likely get into power later this year. But then, perhaps that's what the first task for the tool should be... agreeing what it should be used for next!

Given the Christmas success story of social media stopping Simon Cowell's latest X-Factor protege getting to the top of the UK charts, and Mr Cowell's next planned move into Reality Politics... perhaps he should invest in such a service too.....

The most Social Brands of 2009

2009 was really the year that marketers from mainstream brands adopted social media and the percentage of companies not using social media has dropped significantly (apparently eMarketer state that this has gone from 43% to only 9% now, but I can't the link when putting this posting together).

So who were the most social brands of 2009?

Vitrue's survey of over 2000 brands in 2009 showed iPhone, Disney and CNN to be the top 3 (the rest are here on the Vitue blog, with some interesting purposeful omissions such as Google and Facebook).

The monthly social radar by Infegy / Buzzstudy in November 2009 (December should be compiled very soon) includes some personal brands missed from Vitrue's, such as 'Obama'.

I'm not sure I agree with either of these, but its interesting to see brands such as Adidas significantly increasing their social media activity over the last year, probably due to activity such as Adidas.tv, a global hub for sportswear video content on Hulu.com

Anti Twitter Tsar campaign gains traction

In my posting yesterday, I mentioned about how Labour MP for Bristol West Kerry McCarthy now has a site set up to campaign against her at http://www.kerryout.net/.

This site seems to be gaining popularity in both the mainstream media and online, with Kerry McCarthy even telling her local Bristol paper The Evening Post:

These people are deeply unpleasant and misogynistic

(Perhaps in reaction to the description about her on kerryout.net that "She constantly mischaracterises her opponents, throws tantrums and when backed into a corner resorts to accusing her opponents of racism or sexism")

Politics and Social Media

The UK over the next few months will be in electioneering mode as we work up to a general election (thought to be most likely in May). We're also currently in political mode as we're working on a social media tool for politicians and as a consequence we've been seeing a growing number of political social media tools and websites emerging.

Thanks to my colleague Marc Ames for pointing http://www.kerryout.net/ to me today. This newly-launched site is an online campaign to remove the Labour Party's self appointed ‘Twitter Tsar’, Kerry McCarthy from her Bristol East seat.

The site has already caused a bit of a stir in Westminster, with an apparent threat (via Twitter) from Mrs Kerry herself to Harry Cole, the editor of Conservative political blog http://www.torybear.com/ who set the kerryout.net site up.

There's even been a video posted to YouTube to back the campaign:


Is this the future of online campaigning or just the first signs of a dirty battle between the two major British political parties?