Search Sense

Smart folks are already gearing up their PR and comment opportunities for the end of the year review articles and blog posts, so I had one of those questionnaires through from a friendly agency the other day. The questions got me thinking, so I thought I’d share my answers here too…

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BT recently announced that they would be trialling the Phorm ad network on their ISP backend, and join the ranks of Virgin Media and ‘Talk Talk’ from Carphone Warehouse.

Put simply, Phorm is an ad network that works by recording the pages that ISP customers visit and then serving ads that are more relevant to that user. They use a sophisticated system of unique code numbers as opposed to identifiable consumer data, and will categorise the sites visited in pre-determined buckets.

But there has been consumer backlash, most recently highlighted in a New Media Age survey. It states that 65% of UK adults would leave their ISP if it adopted ISP-based behavioural targeting, and 81% wanted the ability to opt-out.

But I think consumers have got this wrong.

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Back in May, I reported Google was testing green backgrounds above and below the search results. This test happened on a weekday. As far as I can remember most of the tests have always been noticed on a weekday. I guess Google do not really need too much attention to their SERP tests so they decided to trial a new design at the weekend.

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Did you read my post about Amazon? Well here’s one about a company I hadn’t heard of. Zappos sell shoes on the web. Stupid idea. I remember when it all went down at boo.com during the dot com bubble! No one thinks buying shoes online is a good idea. What if they don’t fit? You need to go to a shop to try them on to make sure you like them. The fact a shop has a really limited selection is just something you have to accept.

Zappos storefront is so-so… but they do have 133 pairs of etnies to choose from. I notice across the top that shipping is free… and returns are free too… for 365 days! A whole year! Oh, and the reviews from their customers aren’t simply good, they’re outstanding:

Customer service heaven

Zappos.com: 3 steps to great customer service

Zappos has otherworldly customer service

Check the comments:

” Zappos really does go above and beyond, and I’m just as comfortable there shoe shopping as I am in the store.”

It seems they have the problems I thought existed sorted by getting products out to people very quickly, very efficiently and by making returns easy and free. They do in fact have a giant warehouse next to a UPS depot and phone-based customer service is available 24 hours a day. Their philosophy is explained on their site.

So far, not bad. What makes them so interesting? How about the fact that they pay their new employees to leave? Employees get four weeks training at full salary and then are offered $1,000 to quit. Why?

“Because if you’re willing to take the company up on the offer, you obviously don’t have the sense of commitment they are looking for… and it’s willing to pay to learn sooner rather than later.”

Here’s a great quote:

“Companies don’t engage emotionally with their customers—people do. If you want to create a memorable company, you have to fill your company with memorable people.”

… and this is making them money. In 1999 gross profit was next to nothing. In 2002 it was $32m. In 2005 $370m and they have a target of $1bn in 2008. Tony Hsieh, the CEO, says that:

“Our business is based on repeat customers and word of mouth. We view the money that we spend on customer service as marketing money that improves our brand.”

Why I am interested in this? Because here is a company that not only could not have existed a few years ago but is making the network work for its customers, both on and off-line. How on it are they? Out of 1,600 employees 327 are on twitter. They’re that social; this article explains it well. Each one of those employees is a public expression of commonly held values and creates a palpable feel that people make this organisation.

Every year each employee is asked to write a few words for a book that describes the company’s culture to better express what they do and who they are as a group. You can buy a copy here. I remember doing this for myself back in October 2005 shortly after joining what was then Spannerworks; if you want to see what I wrote then let me know. It would interesting for us all to do a similar thing to see how we understand ourselves. ‘Know thyself’ as the old quote goes….

Oops. Forgot to post the link to the Zappos blog.

Here’s a top tip when you’re posting pictures in HTML - expect many of you know it already. Sometimes, if the original image is too big, it won’t fit properly on the screen. With the iCrossing internal blog, for example, it ends up overlapping the middle column.

If this happens, you don’t need to manually resize the picture itself - particularly handy if you’re linking to one hosted elsewhere. If you use the visual editor on Wordpress or a similar platform, you can simply drag a corner of the image outline to resize it.

If you use an HTML editor, check the line of code that embeds the image, which might normally look something like “img src=’path to image goes here/image.jpg’”. It may also specify “height=’number in pixels’” and/or “width=’number in pixels’”. Take out the height bit altogether, and change the width bit to “width=’100%’”.

This should scale the picture to the full width of your post, keeping the height in the correct proportion. Obviously, choosing a lower percentage will make the picture smaller still.

As an agency with its roots in search, we are very aware of the capabilities of the major engines across all aspects of search but also their growing offerings in display. In fact, we have tremendous success by buying on a CPC basis through Google for our clients, especially in North America.

There is an ongoing discussion within the industry and within our agency as to the direction media buying will take.

On one hand, the growth of Google et al in this sector is likely to increase CPC and even CPA traffic, something that will happen exponentially with the acquisition of DoubleClick and the launch of Google Ad Manager.

However, from another perspective, ‘good’ publishers are in a position of strength and can choose the way in which they sell the first 60-80% of their inventory. What they do with the remaining 20-40% is up to them, but we don’t necessarily want to focus on buying this remnant inventory anyway.

Last week though a major publisher took a big step in one of these directions; ESPN.com has announced it is cancelling its arrangements with its media house and also the ad networks it does business with. Instead they are moving more to a direct model selling what is likely to be more premium custom packages.

Google et al will continue to grow in this sector, but if publishers like this decide not to fuel the ad networks growth then we won’t be seeing an entire CPC marketplace anytime soon.

And it makes sense for publishers to do this. They own the product and if ad networks continue to grow they will hold too much of the power and could lower the overall effective CPM rate that a publisher can achieve.

We finally have the ultimate tool in the search marketing industry…

Yesterday our London office was scaled by the internationally famous human spiderman, Alain Robert. Robert defied the cold to climb the 27 storeys of Victoria’s most ugly office tower, sans cordes, in protest at climate change.

Insane videos galore at http://www.alainrobert.com/en/video.htm.

Spiders, search engines, world-wide-web… forget it!  ‘Tis the season to be silly.

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.

If you’re thinking about how advertising is changing at the moment, can I recommend a little light reading for this Friday?

First off, social network academic Danah Boyd of Stanford kicked off a fascinating discussion earlier this week when she posted a typically provocative and insightful piece entitled: “Who clicks on ads? And what might this mean?”.

Her hypothesis is disturbing.

I suspect that heavy ad clickers in social network sites and other social media are more likely to trend lower in both economic and social capital than the average user. Unfortunately, I don’t have the data to test these hypotheses at all. (Does anyone? Are there any studies on class dynamics and ad clicking?)

A week on and the comments debate on her blog has not yielded any strong evidence to counter her idea. I find this surprising: is there really no study of the demographics of people who click on ads?

Anyway, once you’ve chewed that over, I would direct you to IBM’s recent study, based on surveys of 2,400 consumers and 80 advertising experts, breezily headlined “The end of advertising as we know it”.

The study predicts “greater disruption for the advertising industry in the next five years than occurred in the previous 50″. In itself that’s not news: the only certainty for the industry in the near term is profound change.

Happy reading - and thinking…

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.