Search Sense

In support of Groundswell, a new book written by Forrester analysts on the phenomenon of social media, Forrester launched the Groundswell awards inviting entries that demonstrated ‘excellent and effective use of social technologies to advance an organizational or corporate goal’. As a search and social media-led agency, we of course didn’t miss the opportunity to highlight the exciting pilot project the team here have been working on for Channel 4.

Chosen by Channel 4 Eductaion to understand how their users were engaging with their education content online, outside of Channel 4’s online properties, we developed a unique way of measuring online behaviours and assessing the impact of different types of content. The insights gained were used to inform Channel 4 Educations’ new online game, Bow Street Runner, as well as future content strategies.

We’ve entered our Measuring Engagement project to the ‘Listening’ category which looks at campaigns that aim to find out what customers are really saying in order to understand them better.  You can read our campaign entry and add your comments on the awards site. We are always interested in feedback and would really welcome support if you are interested in what we have done for Channel 4 Education and would like to comment. You can also read the full case study on our site.  

Photo Credit: Flickr userB D Solis

I’ve just completed the second of our client briefing podcasts around social media trends.

For me it’s already serving a useful exercise in pausing and thinking about the broader sweep of things going on over the month and collate some of the interesting thoughts and links I may not have had the time to blog about.

Twitter, Twitter, Twitter…

There have been so many Twitter-related items over the last month. The service is going through an exciting phase where it has enough members (2 million) to experience powerful network effects.

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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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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.

VIA SEO by the Sea
IMAGE by Flickr user emdot, republished under a Creative Commons Attribution license.

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Technopedia has a round up of the top marketing articles of 2007. With over 250 articles, this is an extremely comprehensive and useful resource. There are articles covering all the various online marketing services we offer such as SEO, paid search, social media, web development, and content.

Best Internet Marketing Blog Posts of 2007

I came across Lijit today - a social search widget that allows people to search using individuals as filters for information. It claims to search content, posted items, bookmarks etc. associated with an individual and their network.

The widget regards individuals as a trusted sources of information, and leverages their network for further sources. Could this work for brands too?

It will be interesting to see how this takes off in terms of uptake and sentiment.

www.lijit.com

Our What is Social Media?: now available in Chinese thanks to three strangers who met via a social network and went on to create an eBook publishing platform.

In September last year Jia Liu, an MA student of marketing in Boston put out a call on an incredible communtiy site Yeeyan.com for people to collaborate on a project to translate the eBook into Chinese. Zhifeng Sun from Shanghai and Xinyu Mao from Qingdao answered and over about a month they created a Chinese version of the What is Social Media?, complete with illustrations of Chinese blogs and social networks where it was appropriate.

So far there have been 2,000 downloads and following the project the three have created an eBook publishing venture/platform called Innobook and have published five freely available eBooks, by authors including Seth Godin and Richard Adler.

The translation and adaption of the eBook is possible for anyone in any language without permission from Spannerworks because we released it under a Creative Commons licence.

Everyone on the team that worked on the eBook are delighted to see it spread even further. It’s also added extra impetus to our work on its sequel - watch this space…

Finding out if pages on your site have been tagged on del.icio.us provides an excellent metric for measuring how useful your site is to your users. With the assumption being if they are tagging it, they are loving it!

You can check if a webpage has been tagged in delicious by visiting del.icio.us/url and typing in the webpage you want to check. The results show which pages have been tagged, by which users and using what tags. A RSS feed is also provided so that you can get notifications of when a particular page is tagged.

This information is great as it allows you to understand which pages are being useful to your website’s audience, but it’s only possible to manually check whether individual pages have been tagged. Del.icio.us provides no way to automatically check every page on a website.

Using Yahoo Pipes, however, we have created a tool that can check an entire site for del.iou.us tags, and provide an RSS feed to alert when new pages are tagged.

The pipe can be found here. Due to some of the limitations of yahoo pipes it will only work on sites that have fewer than 1,000 tags. For example it won’t work on bbc.co.uk.

We hope you find the tool useful - if you have any questions on how it works please send us an email or leave a comment below.

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.

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…