Search Sense

I presented at the WARC Advertising & Consumers conference yesterday on “Social Media: Innovation and Earning Attention”.

My theme was around the need for brands’ marketing teams and agency partners to invest  resources in innovation to find new ways to engage with people in social media

One of the bonuses of speaking was that I got to hear from other  speakers like Faris Yakob, Naked’s Digital Ninja (”what happens when geeks get to make up their own job titles”), DDB’s Andreas Moellmann and Mark Earls - a celebrity in adlan, appears, though I just know him through his book Herd and blog of the same name.

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No doubt there are a few hangovers today following last night’s NMA Effectiveness awards in London at the Grosvenor House Hotel, Park Lane. Having been shortlisted for the Best Use of Web category, the iCrossing team were extremely pleased to be commended for the Cosmos campaign. The commendation recognised our paid search campaign for UK tour operator Cosmos (now Monarch Holidays), which was judged against 500 entries and a criteria of the most imaginative, innovative and successful use of the Internet to build business, in any sector.

The campaign produced a significant increase in revenues and substantially reduced the cost per customer with increased conversions through more relevant page deliveries from search queries. After much hard work, the team were pleased to enjoy the evening with Trevor Inch, Marketing and Distribution Director at Cosmos, along with a few other clients.

We are also pleased to have sponsored the Entertainment category. Our chief client officer Mel Alcock presented the award to Line Industries who won the award for their Blog A Penguin Classic campaign…congratulations! 

A case study of the Cosmos campaign will be available on our website soon…watch this space!

We’re exhibiting at the NMA Online Marketing and Media show…and it’s getting busy!

Our Head of Business Development David Tradewell is taking the floor at 2pm this afternoon delivering a workshop  on our connected  approach to digital marketing using case examples from Channel 4, Lipsy and More Th>n.

There has also been much intrigue around our NetworkSense Maps we are offering visitors to our stand today and tomorrow at the show. Visualising your online network and understanding how your customers are engaging with
your brand online is essential. If you are planning on popping in to the show, please come and see us for a NetworkSense map of your brand.

There are also some interesting sessions to come this afternoon in the conference include Speakers from O2 and Lovefilm.com. You can also enjoy a cool glass of Pimms with us if you are quick!

The show is in Islington at the Business Design Centre in London…see you soon!

As mentioned in Joe’s previous blog post, Google last week announced changes to its pay-per-click trademark policy which for the first time will allow any company to buy keywords associated with a rival’s brand name.

We’ve had a great deal of interest from our clients and industry journalists, who are keen to understand the implications and effect of Google’s plans to allow any company to bid on competitor brand names.

So we asked Paul Doleman, our CTO and Head of Paid Search, to give his advice and opinion on:

• What has happened and why
• Google’s motivation behind the policy change
• How it might affect the market and businesses
• The likely impact to brand owners

Find out what Paul has to say…(advise using your headphones)

The policy comes into effect in May, ahead of which the debate will no doubt continue. For example, Travolution discussed the impact to travel brands in an article posted yesterday.

I’ve been reading a very interesting interview with Douglas Merrill, Google’s CTO, for those not familiar with the name. His goal is the same as mine - world domination - not really, I kid - it’s simply to give Google workers the technology they need and keep them safe. That’s what I try to do for iCrossing workers and hopefully without falling into the draconian “protection trap” that so many coporations end up in.

Like Google we have a very tech savvy group of employees at iCrossing which means everyone enjoys much more freedom than most organisations, but I’m thinking why can’t we take it further. Why not the complete freedom to do anything? Focus totally on choice - and let you guys choose from a bunch of different computers, different operating systems, different phones, different tools and support all of them (Jim don’t have a heart attack). It’s not cost-efficient, but on the other hand, wouldn’t productivity soar? OK, we don’t have the benefit of the cash filled pockets of Google and would have the odd financial constraint, but surely we could explore some unauthordox approaches.

Perhaps we could try the Google model of support. Massively more self-service from network hubs and ”tech stops” - take your laptop to a drop-in area in the office for instant ideas, instant solutions, instant kickings - a personal, informal drop in help desk - where solutions are handed out there and then and also get blogged about instantly which the iCrossing community is expected to refer to and self-serve.

Most CTOs would throw a wobbly at the security risks, but if you beef up perimeter protection, build security into the infrastructure as a feature, look for unusual journeys across the enterprise and look to the community to police it can work. Malcolm and I were talking about network audits - tedious, dull, time-consuming, authoritarian - the “unorthordox” alternative is to randomly stream what people are surfing, saying, doing onto community plasmas. Then the whole community can say “Hey, who’s surfing porn and putting my work at risk?” – it is also a pretty cool pictorial snapshot of the day.

Un “author” doxy is decentralised, agile IT, that’s why Scott, Shuo, and David are deeply embedded in business units and not locked away in a glass tower.

Un “author” doxy is looking at how IT supports an internal, enterprise relationship economy that will ebb and flow and change direction. Brand marketers don’t control brands – people do, IT doesn’t control organisations – we do. I intend to do a lot more thinking about the unusual, the unorthodox and I’d love to hear you views.

Google’s latest innovations in the way it displays search results in its natural listings has huge implications for user experience and the way we create websites.

‘Sitelinks’ emerged late last year. They are the links that appear under the number 1 search listing that enable you to click directly on a main navigational link that resides on the destination site - think of them as shortcuts. OK, so this helps us get from A-B better and extends the brand’s success at capturing search real estate - effectively pushing other sites lower down the results page.

This example for Woolworths illustrates the natural search navigation at work:

A good overview of Sitelinks can be found on the Google Webmastercentral blog here.

More recently Google has started presenting a ’secondary search’ box within the natural results. This allows people to search all pages that Google has from a site without leaving the search engine. Which means that the much of the huge usability investment you may have made can be by-passed in a click…

The implications are more clear than ever. Search friendly site design means taking into account the whole user journey, from search through to action. This extends the idea of usability from optimising e.g. a shopping cart process into the way people navigate through brand networks.

Now x this by every device and interface Google will interact with people in 3 years time. Wow.

Once we accept that we have lost control of the ‘home page’, and that every page on our site can now reside somewhere else before the click,we can start to put search at the heart of our creative planning. not an original idea, but one that I will keep repeating until someone tells me I am insane, and then I will not believe them.

Without a doubt, the big search news story so far this month is Microsoft’s $44.6 billion bid for Yahoo. Bloggers and industry analysts indulged in a little “will they, won’t they” speculation as the story dodged a warning shot from Google. Nilhan Jayasinghe was among those speculating, writing:

For many people in the advertising and marketing space, the partnership could provide a plausible contender for Google. And at least on paper the numbers add up. But if all we can expect is increased market share based purely on combining their current capital then I’m worried.

He needn’t have been; Yahoo cruelly spurned Microsoft’s advances. Still, there was even more excitement for the search engine on Valentine’s Day, as reports surfaced that Rupert Murdoch’s MySpace-owning News Corporation was considering a stronger bid. The story rumbles on.

The last fortnight has seen a few blows to openness on the web, with eBay silencing negative seller comments, the government wanting to unplug illegal downloaders, and a US court plugging Wikileaks.

Over on Open, meanwhile, Antony Mayfield was wowed by Gartner’s prediction that two years hence, social lending will account for 10% of the loans market:

Imagine ten percent of your market disappearing in a few years to social marketplace… Of course it’s happened (and then some) already for music, news, classified ads, movies etc - but there’s something thrilling about seeing the forces of change stirred up by the social web reaching the personal finance sector.

Antony’s also been discussing the technology of the US presidential campaigns, and the way that some of the most effective campaigning is being done by people outside of the campaign staff. He shows how wrong the approach can go with a “cringe-inducing” video from Hilary Clinton’s team:

Someone in the room knew it was an abysmal idea and stayed quiet. Let us remember that always, and swear never to be the person who didn’t say: ‘That completely sucks. People will laugh at us.’

I’m loving writing our news feed, for the simple reason that we now have the time to actually read about stuff that’s going on in and around journalism and marketing, and begin to make some sense out of the madness amid which we find ourselves.

Anyway, seen this in the Guardian. There’s another glimpse of the NUJ and where its thinking is at, and some relevance to us and what we’re doing.

Two interesting quotes:

“I don’t think most web users or Orange customers, for that matter, really want to get their news from Orange. They want established news brands.”

She may be right, and this is certainly one of the biggest challenges to overcome if we want the content we produce here to be successful…

“The news industry might not want to stoop to the lows of Hot or Not, but perhaps a little flexibility and creativity when it comes to new formats might just come up with some equally compelling - and underpin all that expensive journalism.”

…and this is our biggest opportunity.

Today, and after 10 years of building one of the UK’s most innovative and successful digital marketing companies in the UK, Spannerworks is taking on the iCrossing brand in the UK.

The integration will strengthen our position as we continue to provide our clients with global access to technology and agency-wide services, including natural and paid search, social media and content, display advertising and user experience. This does not diminish our heritage in search, but builds on it, by enabling us to continue promoting search as the common pathway to all digital marketing.

To mark the occasion, we are distributing a video release of global CEO Jeff Herzog, and CEO of iCrossing UK Arjo Ghosh, discussing the brand integration, and vision for iCrossing and digital marketing as a whole in 2008.

The above video is interactive, offering links to other sources of information on iCrossing, our spokespeople, and some of the work that we’ve been pioneering in integrated digital marketing. Hover over the logos as they appear throughout the short film to view a description of the additional resource they provide, and click on them to open-up the information in a new browser. A PDF transcript of the video is also available as a download.We hope you enjoy the video, and continue to support us under our new brand.

About iCrossing UK
iCrossing, formerly known as Spannerworks in the UK, is a global digital marketing company that combines talent and technology to help world-class brands attract, engage with and acquire customers.

The company connects digital marketing services – including paid and natural search marketing, social media and content, display and creative, user experience and web development – to create digital marketing strategies that deliver compelling brand experiences and unrivalled ROI.

iCrossing works with world-class brands including Coca Cola, HBOS, TUI and Virgin. Founded in 1997, the agency employs over 550 people worldwide with over 100 people in the UK.

Find out more at www.icrossing.co.uk or contact us on +44 (0)1273 828100 or results@icrossing.co.uk.