Search Sense

It was a simple choice for me. Do we hold on to Spannerworks as a name, or embrace what everyone is trying to create at iCrossing and work together to develop a great international organisation?

As the past few weeks have gone by, however, I have been really touched by the positive comments from so many people, clients, suppliers and journalists. I somehow expected indifference but what I got was what so many people have been telling us for a long time - we have a special team of people and a reputation that, over ten years, is very positive. As one journalist put it to me ‘Spannerworks have become synonymous with search and digital marketing‘.

I’ve felt quite emotional at times.

When I set out to start the company in 1997 I wanted to carve a specialist niche out for Spannerworks. We grew organically and embraced the opportunity that was presented to us in search dynamically. That ’start-up’ mentality is one that I believe we still have. Our people are still very much a close team and it’s been interesting to see the debate unfold about what we individually now call ourselves, are we iCrossingers, iCrossings?

People obviously need feel an identity related to the organisation where they spend so much time. If the values can combine in mutually beneficial ways a brand becomes live, robust and authentic.

I look forward to a renewed sense of everything that Spannerworks stood for and a revitalised vision that now encompasses Brighton, London and the USA from where I write today.

A heartfelt thanks to all who helped us get this far, I really look forward to building iCrossing in the UK and beyond.

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.

Even if Spannerworks’ bloggers took a few days off over Christmas, the festive season wasn’t short of news on the subjects dear to our hearts.

Silly season set in not long after the last roundup, with a rash of Christmas-themed stories around search and the internet. Search queries after the big day revealed a lack of appetite for leftovers, but our favourite was the Google Maps mashup that let kids of all ages track Santa on his rounds. The fun was over in the new year, though, with Yahoo! announcing the demise of its 12-year internet veteran Yahoo! Picks.

Computing Which? announced that Bebo is the best-performing social networking site, with the magazine narrowly rating its security above arch-rival Facebook. As if to prove the point, Facebook users have since been warned about an application that may be a ’social worm’.

Potentially the most important story of the last couple of weeks is the much-anticipated launch of the Wikia Search alpha, though it caused widespread disappointment. Writing on Kocchi Kade after some of the dust had settled, Nilhan Jayasinghe explained that his feelings had turned to apathy.

“I’m no longer angry at the crappy results or the fact that their crawler had managed to completely miss my site,” he wrote, going on to explain how the infant search engine lacked sophistication when it came to attempts to manipulate results that other search engines had kicked out years ago: “On a search for ‘cheap flights’ it even pulls in a picture of some bloke, just cos he said he’s interested in cheap space flights,” he lamented.

However, there may be light on the horizon for Wikia, as Nilhan explains: “The clever bit comes once the user base start to provide their expertise.

“This may yet do something useful or at least vaguely interesting… I love the idea of using social signals to drive search, but this is not going to fly anytime soon and I’m guessing never.”

Open source

Antony Mayfield took a break over Christmas, and managed to hold out for 17 days between 2007’s last post to Open and the first of 2008. He’s back bigger than ever, though, racking up ten posts in the five days to 9 January.

Picking up on the Facebook social worm scare, Antony says that for most users this is likely to be far more important than Facebook’s newfound enthusiasm for data portability. He warns: “It’s… confirmation of every IT department’s fears / warnings about why people shouldn’t be using FB at work (any by extension, any other social media applications). A setback, then, for advocates of giving employees access to social computing tools freely in the workplace…”

Antony also discusses the use of Twitter as a peer-reviewing platform. In a follow up post on the Tweet Scan search tool for Twitter, he reflects: “Have to say that if you’re working with an entertainment brand especially, searching Twitter for reviews / mentions must be one of the best most instant ways of getting feedback…”

Feedback was all the rage on Hackbash, after student journalist Dave Lee picked up on the wording used in Spannerworks’ advertisements for its current journalist vacancy: “I have no problem with people wanting to enter the world of PR,” he wrote. “What I have a problem with is when jobs such as this are advertised as journalism. Journalism it is certainly not.”

We agreed with Dave’s assessment: the wording didn’t sound like journalism to us either, so we pulled the advert and rewrote it to better describe what we do.

The position is still open, so please get in touch if you’re interested.

Christmas is upon us all, but you’d be hard-pressed to tell it from the rate that various Spannerworkers are cranking out blog entries.

On Wednesday, Arjo Ghosh heralded the arrival of Spannerworks’ very own spider, as ‘Spiderman’ Alain Robert scaled the outside of our 27-floor London building. The weekend before, however, he was wondering whether the Knol project meant he would be forced to take sides between Wikipedia and Google in a battle for the world’s information.

“Personally I think that Google will make Knol earn its place in natural results fairly,” he concluded, “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.”

Such thoughts haven’t been troubling Antony Mayfield, who many of us in Content & Media suspect of knowing the world’s information in the first place. As if to underline the point, he’s produced a impressive 11 posts on Open in the last fortnight, covering topics as diverse as Channel 4’s education programming, a military influence on the language of marketing, and, er, dining in Didcot.

Nilhan Jayasinghe has been a little quieter than Antony, but he notes a subtle but important change to the way Google regards subdomains, now treating them in the same way as subfolders on the main domain.

Antony’s also been covering a topic dear to the hearts of Spannerworks’ journalists: the ongoing rumblings at the NUJ as it struggles to keep pace with the changes in the trade. He explains that, in his lecture to a post-graduate class at the Cardiff School of Journalism:

“One of the things I hope I got across was the amazing opportunities that the web presents for doing things differently and for going direct to (attention) market with interesting ideas and approaches.

“Makes me wonder what the role of a union is in this age for journalists. Should it be to focus on employers and policies or ways of encouraging journalistic enterprise?”

Still on the subject of journalism, Charlie Peverett has been taking corporations to task for hijacking the language of environmentalism. He wonders on Hackbash whether it’s time that journalists got a little “strict with the terminology”:

“Organisations are falling over themselves to say that they’re ‘going green’. They may mean that they’re carbon-offsetting their transatlantic travel or sourcing their food locally or have recently insulated their loft space.

“But when organisations that have taken a few small steps to modify their own profoundly unsustainable behaviour are labelled ‘green’, by themselves or others, we should put our feet down.”

So, with many Spannerworkers looking forward to a week off after an amazing year, we bid you a happy Christmas - at least Dax Hammond has entered into the festive spirit, although we’re not sure Raymond Briggs would approve of IRN-BRU’s take on his Snowman classic.

We did it! On the 7th of September 2007, 8 Spannerworker’s successfully reached the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro, the worlds tallest free standing mountain. We have been raising money for a Children’s Home in Moshi, Tanzania, The Amani Kids Home, which is run on donations.

So, we want to say a massive thank you to everyone who has supported us along the way - our clients, our colleagues, and our friends and family. You have all been absolutely wonderful and we could not have done this without you, so thank you again. Notes and from the team and pictures of our journey are here.

The total amount raised currently stands at £12,402.72. Our target was £10,000.00.

Valerie Todd, Director of the Amani Home, says:

“Spannerworks’ dedicated support of Amani Children’s Home over the years is unparalleled.

The Spannerworks’ team’s climb up Mt. Kilimanjaro will make it possible for Amani to build a playground. For children who had been living on the streets, the chance to play and explore will be a wonderful gift for them, and an important part of how Amani restores hope and joy to their lives.”

In summary, we are totally chuffed that we all managed to climb Kilimanjaro, nobody got hurt or really ill, and we raised a shedload of money for a dedicated charity. Being able to visit the Amani Home and see how the money will help was really important to us, and we are even more pleased that we smashed our fundraising target.

Asanta sana!

Another busy month in the Spannerworks blogosphere: Dax Hamman has been coveting the iPod Touch, Antony Mayfield has been buying an iPod touch, and Nilhan Jayasinghe has been keeping us up to date with the latest from Google.

Last month, Nilhan blogged about the Google update penalising those who have been paying for links rather than earning them – the latest is that there seems to have been a cleanup of AdWords listings for link sellers. Nilhan says:

“Now all Google has to do is to stop bought links from working and we should see them out of the organic results”

Meanwhile, Dax has been to the ABTA travel convention, where he saw a preview of Microsoft’s new Photosynth software.

The software “allows hugely complex 3D, dynamic environments to be created automatically from a set of simple rules.”

There’s a preview of Photosynth on YouTube which Dax urges everybody to take a look at. The preview was created in part by using images sourced from Flickr, and Dax talks about the impact the software may have on social media:

“Social media has changed the way users interact and communicate with each other, tools such as Photosynth are taking this to a whole new level, and add a layer of applications that generate solutions from simple components.”

Antony Mayfield has been to a few conferences too. He spoke at the IAB’s annual Engage conference, and attended the Marketing Society conference where he overheard someone asking “Why does everyone keep pussyfooting around and not just tell us what brands should do?” – So that’s exactly what he’s done, with a list of things he thinks brands should be doing now.

Antony’s also been interviewed by Daryl Willcox Publishing. In the first of two videos, Antony talks about why he chose to ‘ditch’ a successful PR career to join Spannerworks, while in the second he is “banging on again about things PR people might do to take advantage of the digital revolution,” ending with a “nice rallying call to arms for PR people to take over the marketing world”.

Antony has also been busy putting together an update to Spannerworks’ What is Social Media? eBook, with which Chris Eden and journalists Charlie Peverett and Simon Handby were also involved.

Antony also comments on Arjo Ghosh’s recent Search Sense post on integrated media planning and connected thinking. Arjo’s 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.”

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 September 2005 six Spannerworkers climbed the tallest free standing mountain in the world, and raised a lot of money for one of Spannerworks chosen charities – the Amani Kids home in Tanzania.

So this year…we are going back for more! On September 1st eight Spannerworkers are beginning the long climb. The team consists of Jonathan Stewart, Tom Morphy, Alex Asigno, and David Coats, all natural search strategists. The team also includes Tom Kingsley and Will Lockie, account managers, Doug Platts, a natural search analyst and David Hughes, a data strategist. David has yet to give us the exact excel formula to fully optimise our mountain route, but is working hard on it.

Our goal is to raise £10,000 for the children’s home – so they can buy a playground, and also help with their family reunification programme.

We’ve been up to all sorts to raise money – there have been 10K runs, half marathons, and an exceedingly long bike ride. There has been a steady supply of mouth watering food, baked and sold to co-workers. There was even a half time fancy dress race at Sussex county cricket ground.

To cap it all off, and for which we are eternally grateful, there have been incredibly generous donations from all of our clients. We are holding a raffle for some brilliant prizes, so if you fancy winning a holiday, a mountain bike, or some limited edition speakers for your stereo – head over to the official Kili climb site and enter!

So, before we go, we would just like to say thanks to everyone, everywhere, who have been kind enough to help us, sponsor us, donate gifts to take to the home or just plain put up with us while we bang on about cakes, climbing and the perils of altitude sickness.

Technology permitting, we’ll try and post live to the Kili climb site as we go, so check in to keep tabs on our progress..and we hope to see you back in the UK soon!

Asante!

Nilhan Jayasinghe, Spannerworks’ Head of Search and Natural Search Strategists Jonathan Stewart, Alex Asigno and Addam Hassan are currently at the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose, California. Here’s their thoughts on the conference so far…

The big thing that everyone is talking about this year is blended search – the incorporation of multimedia content within natural search results. Google call it Universal Search, Ask call it Ask 3d – whatever you want to call it, it’s making waves in terms of how search marketers need to react to vertical search. As can be attested by the number of people attending the multimedia seminars on podcast, image and video optimisation, and the standing room only in many of these talks, it seems everyone is eagerly rising to the challenge.

Some excellent examples are being played out in front of our eyes at the conference – the most notable being the search engine results for “hurricane dean”. On Monday, Greg Jarboe of SEO PR presented on Google Universal, and showed current search results for this query. He commented on the fact that at that point, the only extra content to be embedded within the natural search results were news articles, but that as the week progressed, we should expect to see more multimedia content appearing for that search result as people uploaded images and videos. Lo and behold, by Tuesday morning, images were showing up alongside news results within the search results:

This just goes to show the speed at which Google are seeking content from their vertical offerings to help keep their natural search results relevant and fresh.

This being the States, and with an impending presidential election looming, many presenters were using the examples of presidential candidates to highlight the importance of reputation management that blended search has now thrust upon search marketers. Googling Republican candidate Mitt Romney returns the following images befitting of a potential president, embedded within the natural search results:

However, try googling Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton, and it’s a different story:

Is this Google showing their political allegiance, or perhaps the Republicans actively trying to discredit Clinton – maybe she just doesn’t photograph well – either way, this highlights the importance of managing the first page of results for your name and/or brand.