Search Sense

We’ve been talking a lot about the increasing importance of people to search, both directly through networks of people actively recommending & exchanging sites, and indirectly through search engines’ efforts to ape human wants.

Obviously, the same social thing has been happening with news via sites like Digg, del.icio.us and so-on, but it’s interesting to see it happening with news prediction, which is a new one on me.

Yahoo’s applied to patent a way to index and retrieve information alongside a related date. Searching for ’space’ events might produce a list of future events by year.

An example they give for 2034 would return:

A human base on the moon in operation

A couple of things occur to me about the usefulness of the approach when it comes to forecasting near-future events. It’s fine to have 100 results for 2034, but there might be 100,000,000 results for 2014. How does that help the user?

Also, the two examples above were sound predictions in 2005. By 2030 they may be laughable - Voyager 2 might in fact have been eaten by a huge alien that takes up residence on the moon. Fear him, puny humans.

The results need to be nimble enough to respond quickly when reality fails to follow the amassed weight of earlier expectations.

Which makes me wonder if a better way to forecast near-term events is just to let people do it based on their own knowledge, prejudices and gut feeling, as Hubdub attempts. You can bet ‘play money’ on the outcome of news stories, and the most successful news-guessers are ranked accordingly.

If early promise translates to later success, expect to see socially-generated news predictions creating or informing news stories. A combination, perhaps, of the unnamed “analysts” or “commentators” beloved of the journalist, with the way that journos already use Facebook and other social networks.

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Before I begin I have a confession - I am a Google fan through-and-through. It’s natural results have become the benchmark of the search industry. The results are relevant, it’s intuitive and quick to use and I can’t find a better alternative. But I am also a fan of Wikipedia and Knol worries me.

It’s a no-brainer right? Let’s monetise, sorry ‘organise’, the world’s information.

Since the phenomenal success of the most effective new advertising system for a century, Google Adwords, search engines have been monetising every bit of real estate they can lay their hands on. Yahoo! decided that it’s ‘natural’ results could be bought by advertisers using it’s ‘feed’ system, and everyone tried placing CPC adverts in a variety of locations. Natural results in Google, however, have been left largely untouched and advert-free.

Hmm, well Google does place news, images and videos (via youtube) within the search results - all of which have differing degrees of Adwords penetration. Late last week our friends at Mountain View added a new way of getting into their own search results via Knol. Details as yet are thin on the ground, but we know that select authors are being invited to write articles within their area of expertise ‘to find a way to help people share their knowledge‘… Sounds like a more ivory tower like version of Wikipedia to me.. But with Adwords, and close to the top of the natural results guaranteed?

The guys are Techcrunch are debating this under the heading ‘Google knol a step too far?’ It’s worth a look.

Personally I think that Google will make Knol earn it’s place in natural results fairly but at a cost to commercially orientated websites, many of which have been forced to invest more into the Adwords campaigns over the past few years as a result of algorithm tweaks…

The process of organising the world’s information just got a bit more lucrative, I think.

We are collecting in excess of 65 million consumers’ data every day at iCrossing. This data includes indications on people’s needs and behaviours - it is a staggering mine of useful information.

We collect it from search marketing, display campaigns and user behaviour tracking in real-time and, when compared with how marketing has been historically measured, with amazing accuracy… We have tools and people who work everyday to mine this data to develop actionable insights, and clients who are building business strategy based on this bigger, better, and faster way of connecting with consumers.

I’m totally convinced digital is not only going to become the driver of marketing tomorrow, but is largely already there, we’re just getting our ducks in a row. As Herzog says, ‘digital at the centre’.

It’s easy for those of us looking at digital everyday to take it for granted. Some days I just have to pinch myself and say ‘wow’, this is groundbreaking stuff…

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about whether we are developing into an integrated agency and about the implications of this for innovation in digital marketing, and how this addresses the challenges of how brands communicate going forwards.

My take on the term ‘integrated’ is that it is normally used to refer to the combined offering of media planning, buying, and creative services. In digital marketing this often translates into: how much budget can we spend driving people to an award-winning platform we have created. I am obviously being deliberately simplistic in my definition but the point remains the same, how different is this approach from creating a 30-second TV spot?

For today’s marketing environment the integrated story is as tired as the 30 second slot it was built around.

Around the insanely stimulating work environment that is Spannerworks I think that we have settled on a way to articulate our view, and it’s been arrived at holistically and from a point of re-framing the question. Integration fails because people don’t act in an integrated way and some activities just don’t integrate because the thought process is different. People are connecting, traveling, and creating via networks - a concept that’s as people-centered as human history, the only difference today is that we can do it on a far bigger, faster and more complicated scale.

So we settle on a view that is more about connectedness than integration. Connected brands will win big because they interact with their environment. Ideas become the new network hubs of innovation, with the brilliant ones taking centre stage in people’s imaginations, earning attention and engagement in the process.

One thing is certain, changes to our communications environment are transformational they are complex, rapidly evolving and perpetually in motion. But I guess you cannot be involved with a revolution without getting a little stressed out can you? Back to the media plan? Press delete now…

In 2008 growth kickers go and as of January 1st 2009, Google Best Practice Funding is completely gone and in Spannerworks’ view about time too!

I’ve been having conversations with Dara Nasr (agency manager at Google) over the last few months, about a great many subjects, not least Best Practice Funding (BPF). When Google introduced the scheme as a replacement for straight forward agency commission, they had high hopes for it. They had recently launched the Google AdWords Professional (GAP) training and hoped that by setting minimum criteria of GAP qualified staff, spend levels and growth incentives it would encourage the industry to train, grow the search channel and generally improve their services and use a broad range of Google products.

It has however, been fraught with difficulties including:

* media planner/buyers back loading campaign spend, breaking the spirit of the scheme in order to sneakily obtain the growth incentives,
* search agencies using their best staff to retake the GAP exams on behalf of others in order to remain qualified or simply to brag,
* lazy media planners not really taking search seriously and fully rebating the BPF to clients, simply to hide poor performance,
* small agencies just about competing by using the rebate to maintain profit instead of creating and charging for added value.

Spannerworks welcomes the removal because we have diverse marketing programmes that make use of Social Media, Display, Paid Search, Natural Search, Usability, Web Development and more.

A strategic, value adding, global agency like Spannerworks doesn’t work with major brands like Coca Cola, Abbey, COSMOS, Sears, Travellocity, Hilton and more by being lazy. It’s hard work, joined-up thinking and powerful, integrated campaigns for us with amazing technology and service.

So even though Google has reduced the qualifying spend levels for 2008, which means there’ll be a little more rebate next year and although we have benefited from top tier rebates from Google for years now, we say thanks Google for helping create a level playing field that allows great service to shine.

It is the right thing to do, so Google folk, ride out the undoubted media storm, complaints, accusations of money making - you have our whole-hearted support. Hey, if Google went further and opened up by sharing data, research, search volumes, that’d be a truly level playing field and really quite something!

dConstruct breaks out of talking about door handles (last year into a packed auditorium of web-savvy developers, designers and social media evangelists.

Tom Coates, a part of the Yahoo! Brickhouse team built his talk around the ‘web of data’ - data becoming more user-centric, more connected, and more useful… I am a fan of this way of understanding the rapid changes all around us in digital… Tom kept it fresh by declaring that ‘Your product is not your website’ - it’s anywhere where your brands reaches in the network. Network applications build instant connectivity via API’s, 90% of twitter activity is through APIs. Flickr is everywhere too. ‘The product… goes everywhere the network goes..‘

This fits well with how at Spannerworks we have been articulating how brands now live in networks and how they must adapt to a marketing world where we are fast moving away from channel control to evolving your brand in networks. Challenging big brands to make their data available, let their customers play with it and collaborate with other brands, for example to build a useful body of data needs scale, and lots of it.

Media owners should inherit the new world. Great content, data scale, ready built communities and recognisable brands (not always a positive thing) connected to networks in any way a user wants should make hay today. So, whoever your data curator is, promote them to head of interactive and the job’s a goodun..

The latest Forrester report, Europe’s Search Engine Marketing Investment Exceeds €8 Billion In 2012, on paints a very healthy picture of the European search market. With the sector set to grow from a current €4.5 billion to well beyond €8 billion by 2012 and taking half of all online marketing investment all search marketers should be overjoyed shouldn’t they?

In fact the UK’s increase over the period is the slowest of all European markets researched. There are a number of good reasons for this: we’re still by far the largest market, followed by Germany and France and have enjoyed the biggest growth over the past five years and UK companies still invest heavily in search and online.

I wonder, however, whether a slowing market at home combined with media agencies becoming specialists in their own right, and *everyone* joining the search bandwagon, and some clients taking paid search in-house, whether we will start to see some casualties? The 101 search business plan remains: invest in skills, technology and training or be damned.

Last week was pretty exciting for Spannerworks’ Content & Media team, with the launch of the first Social Space for one of our clients. It was also announced to the world that Spannerworks has recruited two journalists, a fact that has caused a small ripple of discussion. (more…)

It’s ten years today since the Labour Party won the 1997 general election ending 18 years of rule by the Conservative Party.

As Tony Blair walked into Downing Street the party’s victory was credited in part to the powerful and effective spin doctors within the party who managed its image and message in the media as never before.

In this map, created using our Network Sense web mapping tool, we can see a snapshot of the new online influencers which Labour’s next generation must learn to come to grips with. It gives a view of some of the websites linking to Labour’s home page - its online neighbourhood, as it were.

Alongside the traditional media that Labour worked so hard to influence - CNN and BBC - we now see the rise of a new breed of influencers, political bloggers, and activists who use the web as a key part of their campaigning work.

It’s also interesting to see the prominence of Wikipedia in the network - it features large for so many brands: political and otherwise…

Earlier this year Google acquired dMarc Broadcasting an advertising platform which connects advertisers direct to radio stations. Accordign to Google, they’ve been working on the integration of dMark into AdWords, which is now complete. They’ve started the beta test with a select group of US advertisers, and expect to rollout soon.

Through an online interface, advertisers will have the opportunity to target specific audiences by location, station type (taste) and by day and time.

 They’ll also have access to comprehensive reporting which will be a first for radio.