one million mees

Swooped? IFTTT test please ignore

2014-06-19T07:55:00.001+00:00

Fly my pretty!

Dusting this off

2014-06-19T07:53:00.001+00:00

Quick test on IFTTT integration.

WIll online video kill the TV star?

2009-07-24T17:32:00.007+00:00

The Bloomberg Media Futures conference was a melting pot of trailblazing online entrepreneurs sharing ideas with an industry suffering at the hands of internet piracy. Frankly, I'm not sure if any of the 'old media guys' really get it – but one person they should be listening to is Avner Ronen, who I was lucky enough to interview and find out more about what he is doing at his internet startup, Boxee.

In this interview Avner Ronen discusses the vision behind Boxee and what he thinks the future of satellite channel bundling and pay TV may be. Crucially, he suggests that the internet is now a viable platform to support video content created exclusively for online distribution.

For me, the highlight of this interview is easy to miss. The psychological investment Boxee made in their user interface- not one line of code was committed until they had got the concept of the user interface exactly right. To my mind, it's a daring approach – and whilst old media croon about editorial content, programming & scheduling and the perils of timeshift TV – Boxee will be winning new fans from simply being easy to use.

Expect a major user interface war in next few years as the web becomes increasingly invisible to the user and the foundation for content delivery to every possible type of device.

Rebirth of Mythology: When fiction & movies collide with online

2009-07-24T12:05:00.009+00:00

Hot on the trail of Guillermo Del Toro, Dan Hon, CEO of SixToStart is building a single-platform story engine.

"In the next 10 years, we're going to see all the forms of entertainment—film, television, video, games, and print—melding into a single-platform "story engine." The Model T of this new platform is the PS3. The moment you connect creative output with a public story engine, a narrative can continue over a period of months or years. It's going to rewrite the rules of fiction."
Guillermo del Toro, in an interview with Wired

Recently I got a chance to interview Dan Hon from SixToStart at the Bloomberg Media Futures conference. It's a long video (30 mins) but this has to be one of my favourite conversations yet – so I have included a reference index below so you can lookout for the bits of the conversation you are most interested in.

However, if you are interested in movies, gaming, online PR or social networking, I defy you not to give the entire episode your complete attention as Dan is incredibly lucid on the subject of online storytelling and Alternate Reality Gaming.

"Think about the way oral tradition became written word—how what we know about Achilles was written many, many years after it made its way around the world with different names and different types of heroes. That can happen when you allow content to keep propagating itself through different kinds of platforms and engines—when you permit it to be retold with a promiscuous form of mythology. You see it when people create their own avatars in games and transfigure their game worlds."
Guillermo del Toro, in an interview with Wired

0 - 4:25
Can you tell us a bit about six to start?

4:26 – 6:30
Can you tell us a bit about your storytelling platform?

6:31- 9:20
Is there a natural evolution of stories in this format? Do stories no longer have a beginning middle and end?

9:20 – 11:15
How do writers respond to bringing 'play' into their novels? Do they have to give up control? Do other opportunities emerge?

11:15 – 14:55
What kind of experiences can someone have through stories told via SixToStarts storytelling platform?

14:55 – 17:25
Is it compulsory for the reader to move from medium to medium?

17:25 – 19:00
What is a typical session time for a story 'read' online?

19:00 – 22:20
Do people have to follow alternate reality stories as they are unfolding in real time?

22:30 – 24:20
Are these new kinds of online stories better with more people reading them?

24:20 – 25:40
How do readers gather around your story?

25:45 – 28:20
Can you tell me a bit more about your business model? What products and services does SixToStart sell?

28:30 – 29:25
What companies are you drawing inspiration from?

29:25 - 29:50
Does storytelling drive the technology or does technology drive the story?

29:50 – end
Can you point people who want to explore the concept of Alternate Reality Gaming in the right direction?

Thanks for the interview Mike!

2009-07-06T13:09:00.007+00:00

Had the great privilege of being able to interview Mike Butcher last friday at the Media Futures conference hosted by Bloomberg.

The editor of Techcunch UK is a tough nut to crack, if you ask me, and being poker faced on all subjects is his modus operandi. Add to that my enormous respect for the man, of whom i have been a fan of since the days of Mbites, and i would have to admit to being pretty nervous interviewing him and was terrified of failing to impress.

With that in mind i'm extremely pleased to see this interview with Mike Butcher posted on TechCrunch, and after re-watching the interview a couple of times i thought i would pick out the highlights. See below for timings:

Start - 1:26
What's going on with TechCrunch Europe?
Mike discusses the launch of awards event, TechCrunch Europas, covering startups from Europe, Israel & Africa.

1:26 - 2:25
What reasons are there to celebrate the European Startup scene?

2:25 - 3:50
What kind of successes & innovations are we seeing in Europe?
Mike discusses the current economic climate and how european attitudes are changing as young people make less traditional career choices.

3:50 - 5:20
Are European entrepreneurs getting younger?
Mike highlights a new trend towards serial entrepreurship.

5:20 - 6:40
Has the recession dampened the ambition of Europe's entrepreneurs?
Mike discusses how the blog has been growing via a strong active community.

7:00 - 11:40
How much if a role has TechCrunch played in cultivating a positive entrepreneurial culture in Europe?
Mike discusses the hunger to create a culture of 'go-getters', how he started to discover the community and what kind of reception he got when taking TechCrunch inot the heart of Europe.

11:40 - 13:20
Do European startups face problems such as language barriers and small domestic markets?
Mike provides a tip for budding European entrepreneurs who think globally and warms them off the clone markets.

13:20 - 14:15
What European startups would you bet on now?

14:15
When & where are the TechCrunch Europa Awards being held?

Why I Am Huffing Skittles Dong

2009-03-02T16:52:00.012+00:00

OK when i first saw it i just dismissed it instantaneously. I have PR stunt blindness, and am very effectively able to selectively ignore things and call them shite before engaging with them, and essentially apart from the floating twitter navbar, the new Skittles.com had PR stunt written all over it.

A fellow SEO, ciaranj tweeted that it was the 'emperors new clothes 2.0' which i thought was an excellent summary. Some agency had literally gone and sold Mars Corp an invisible website with a figleaf for a navbar.

I got my print screen trigger finger ready to capture every perversion, oversight and PR disaster i could find. Boy oh boy, i was going to have some real juice for my bosses about how NOT to do social media. The obscene title of this post was, at the very least, intended to get a screen grab of demonstrable filthy brand soiling and specifically inspired by silver-tongued moblogger richtard's tweet to subvert Skittles.com's risky manoeuvre. (...btw i really dont think of myself as an expert on this topic; perhaps the one eyed man in the land of the blind- but often those who shout loudest, win...)

Except i couldn't find anything really worth frothing about. The brains behind the execution seem to have hit every possible 2.0 marketing goal and corresponding buzz word.

"Join the conversation" - In an interwoven, permanently on, global communication network, brands are just a global conversation. Rather than worry about or censor what people are saying brands need only turn their ear towards it and connect it all together (that's the theory anyway). Mars Corp just went ahead and turned their corporate website into what any investor really needs to know- what does the market think of skittles - now they pretty much have that answer on tap.

"User generated content" - Every tweet including the word 'skittles' updates their homepage. That's a pretty simple content strategy! What is more i just talked about skittles again for the first time in 20 years.

"12 seconds of fame" - When the barrier to engagement is so low (i.e. post a tweet) the payoff is suprisingly high. You get the 'entire world' looking at you for 12 seconds. This is great for bloggers wanting to raise the profile (clearly i am on this bandwagon) or even just get more adsense revenue. OMG It's like a reverse digg or something :)

"Search Engine Friendly" - With blogs and twits going crazy about Skittles, it's pushing more content into Google and more links back to skittles.com. Ok so there is no site to optmise now, but who cares? Just point the domain at something else when ready.

"Be respectful of users" - They even have a notice that tells them how to escape the skittles site for confused users. Like, how nice & respectful is that?

However those things alone dont make the site totally groundbreaking - it's the corporate headshift it seems to demonstrate. Forget brand protection and 'control'. Invite engagement and dialogue.

The heads of state executed a corporate site strategy that answers the question for any potential investor - what do people think of skittles?

Some people may huff and puff about the PR disaster waiting to happen (from giving any user screen estate) or how nothing can be sold via twitter but marketing strategies are rarely aimed only at their 'actual' customer - often they are big shows and stories to bring in clients, partners & investors. Mars corp isn't selling sweets to little kids. Shopkeepers are. Mars' goal is actually to lower the cost of shelf space- their target market and undisclosed goal is shopkeepers choosing to stock skittles.

It's so effective. I would imagine most corporate bods & shopkeepers don't even have the time to find out anyway - but I think they know what a tweet every three seconds means.

Air raid over Colombo

2009-02-27T12:23:00.001+00:00

A few weeks ago i covered the Assassination of one of Sri Lanka's most controversial newspaper editors which happened amidst the army's 'final' confrontation with terrorism.

Anecdotal reports are that activity is still really intense. A friend recently had the army burst into their bedroom one morning as part of security checks on the whole building. They just sent me this video of an air raid near the Taj hotel.

2009-01-19T18:06:00.002+00:00

Agencies, bring your A-Game in-house

Inspired by discussions on Hugo Guzman's post and on sphinn submission, and frustrated by agencies that have pitched to me, I wanted to try and set a new ground zero for discussions on in-house SEO and agency co-operation. I hope this post offers some useful perspectives on the internal issues SEO face and some insight into how you can transform your approach to our businesses with existing SEM resources.

Resist the temptation to think that the reason we (or our bosses) have asked you to pitch to us is an admission of defeat. Here are some non-confrontational reasons why we may have invited you in:

Who dares, wins.
We're simply over stretched – we have absolutely hit the limits of our workload and would love to find a trustworthy outsource partner. The cost/benefit analysis of the saving we make by keeping the project internal, has actually been overshadowed by the unnecessary risks we are taking in under resourcing a project.

Courage doesn't always roar.
We have genuinely hit the limits of our knowledge – it's a curious fact that when you're completely dedicate to a cause, you can't see the wood for the trees anymore. We've been talking brand X for so long that we have completely lost the ability to audit ourselves against brand Y or take a wider view. The cost of your services, is outweighed by the futureproofing our strategy and we're probably in it for the duration. We're looking for a coach - someone who can help us to step up our game but not necessarily play for us - so don’t hold back in presenting your perspective.

Letting go makes you strong.
The new internal project that has recently cropped up just doesn't play to our skillset. If the company is big enough to require a full time SEO, the likelihood is that there are all kinds of new product launches and brand line extensions that require a more specialized knowledge. The cost/benefit analysis is much like scenario 1 except, we're probably quite happy for you to let you do your thing, with minimal interaction from us if you can keep us suitably upto date.

Knowledge talks, wisdom listens
We're bashing our heads against a brick wall – one issue has divided the company and we need an external point of view. This really does happen. SEO can be a real battle of diplomacy between internal departments and division heads. Just think about the average number of cosmetic, content and infrastructural changes that need to be made to a website to make it rank better on Google. Now imagine having to counter every possible objection with every possible stakeholder. Now ask me again if I need help??  Sometimes, businesses need a referee – and this is a chance for the agency to show how well they play with others and stamp their authority (hopefully without trampling anyone in the process). Nothing rallies the governing tendrils of a company like the prospect of external costs, but the benefit here is that frustration is so high, that we can no longer put a price on co-operation..

Change is as good as a rest.
We want to try something completely different – we've done well so far and now we lust to bust open the floodgates. At this point we tend to be at the mature stage of our SEO strategy and now we want to finesse it. There's nothing unique on the internal agenda, no project launches and pretty much everything else is humming along nicely. In fact, it's a little too quiet. We're asking you in because we have some unspent marketing budget floating around and we want to test our mettle and your skills. The cost is worth the new knowledge and you'll benefit from any astounding successes as, clearly, we could not achieve the same results alone.

This post has taken me longer to write than i had planned - there are so many topics in this area of how we can co-operate and collaborative which i would love to go into more detail on. Perhaps someone can kick off in the comments? And to all those who chimed in on Hugo's thread many thanks for your thoughts and getting me back into blogging about SEO!

2009-01-14T11:43:00.004+00:00

The Assassination will be Blogged

"When finally I am killed, it will be the government that kills me." - Lasantha Wickramatunga

Editor of the Sri Lankan broadsheet The Sunday Leader wrote his final and prescient blog post last Sunday night before being assassinated. He spoke of the troubles and corruption that grip the country and his death shows how dangerous it is to be an impartial Journalist in Sri Lanka.

His final blog post is both a balanced piece that is both inspiring and damning, but should act as a stark warning of the lengths that governments are prepared to go to in their own personal 'War on Terrorism'. Like the terrible acts in Gaza, both the Tamil Tigers and Sri Lankan government have committed terrible atrocities in the name of freedom. In his post, Lasantha Wickramatunga, denounces the President Rajapaksa (formerly his friend of 25 years) and reveals in no uncertain terms that the Singhalese government is sanctioning violence against peaceful opposition to the Government.

The BBC writes up this incident and the current situation in Sri Lanka better than i can, but what I wanted to highlight is the insight it sheds into the higher echelons and machinations of a Government at war. We take press freedom for granted in the west, but it's times like this that act as a chilling reminder of what opportunities blogging affords some people and the risks they take to get their message out there. Given we have just seen President Bush leave office, are watching an escalating war in Gaza, and news that the UK government want to outsource snooping of digital media i hope the highlighted passages provide food for thought on the kind of personalities required to maintain vigilance in this era of ubiquitous communication.

Extracts:

On political cover-ups
"In the wake of my death I know you will make all the usual sanctimonious noises and call upon the police to hold a swift and thorough inquiry. But like all the inquiries you have ordered in the past, nothing will come of this one, too. For truth be told, we both know who will be behind my death, but dare not call his name. Not just my life, but yours too, depends on it."

On presidency
" You have told me yourself that you were not greedy for the presidency. You did not have to hanker after it: it fell into your lap. You have told me that your sons are your greatest joy, and that you love spending time with them, leaving your brothers to operate the machinery of state. Now, it is clear to all who will see that that machinery has operated so well that my sons and daughter do not themselves have a father...

...Sadly, for all the dreams you had for our country in your younger days, in just three years you have reduced it to rubble. In the name of patriotism you have trampled on human rights, nurtured unbridled corruption and squandered public money like no other President before you.... Although you are now so drunk with power that you cannot see it, you will come to regret your sons having so rich an inheritance of blood. It can only bring tragedy. As for me, it is with a clear conscience that I go to meet my Maker. I wish, when your time finally comes, you could do the same. I wish."

On freedom of speech
"People often ask me why I take such risks and tell me it is a matter of time before I am bumped off. Of course I know that: it is inevitable. But if we do not speak out now, there will be no one left to speak for those who cannot, whether they be ethnic minorities, the disadvantaged or the persecuted. "

""

2008-09-15T13:35:00.003+00:00

The Widget Returns

Widgets & SEO: Fragmentation, transformation, distribution

"He's the hero that Gotham deserves, but not the one it needs right now…and so we'll hunt him…because he can take it…because he's not our hero… he's a silent guardian, a watchful protector… a Dark Knight."

The world of SEO is getting hairier & scarier. 10 years old, Google has appointed themselves judge & jury of ethical link building practices, causing 'Black hats' to set traps for their competitors whilst 'White hats' fight back via witch-hunt & committee. Everyone is watching each other watching each other. RSS feeds Splogs. Comment /is/ spam. Facebook in fighting. Social networks scam. Digg is a hole. Twitter tweets for crummy links.

Is there anyone, anything, we can turn to?

This session on SEO & Widgets will cover alliance building and standing up for yourself in an hostile economy.

I'm speakign at WidgetWebExpo next month on SEO & Widgets. Be There or Be Square.

2008-02-17T22:29:00.002+00:00

So it turns out MRirian, the girl who seems to be learning japanese and really wants to go to japan, is a fake profile setup for a viral marketing campaign for a new Japanese horror movie. Well, frankly it worked for me, definitely sparked my interest. I only just discovered the Magibon videos but watched a few as they are so weird and captivating. And there was something pretty spooky about them as evidenced by the millions of views and comments. In a lot of ways, in this case you just didn't know what you were watching - jailbait or genius? Certain videos did seem clever & candid but not knowing whether she was going to laugh or cry was plain eerie. Compared to all the lame rip offs and general hatin' going on youtube, magibon was surprisingly original. Deep down i actually hoped she would turn out to be some sort of artistic genius. And not 15 years old either.

Anyway - i guess you know a viral marketing campaign has really worked when you aggravate & frustrate so many people to such and extent that they post their own video responses, edits & tributes.

Valentine message

Video responses
valentine spoof (not actually funny)
muppet spoof
copycat girl
psycho
girl explains hoaxes and gets dumb comments on her profile... how unlike youtube!
hi from japan! GYAO was this part of the hoax? or did they really become fans?

Magi go bye bye

Tributes

Personally i think the whole Magibon, genius or jailbait question is summed up best in this video

ok, and now time to get scared and very freaked out
magibon website

2007-03-28T23:30:00.000+00:00

Chinwag’s PPC earthquake event on tuesday night was entertaining. Hosted by Mike Butcher, as per his usual style, discussions cut to the chase immediately. This was a welcome break from the normal sanitized chat on PPC that occurs at these types of events. Panellists included three agencies, Blue Barracuda, Latitude and Neutralize and Nigel Leggat from Microsoft Adcenter. (names updated)Firstly, i liked to say that most PPC events tend to be pretty dull for anyone who knows about the industry becuase typically what happens is the agencies tow the line and refuse to get drawn into opinionated discussions whilst the search engines play a game of diplomacy. Which all leads to a rather luke warm discussion on what is now a more mature industry. Nonetheless, there were lots of things to nod at or mumble under your breath about.Highlights were:Microsoft’s complete frankness regarding the launch of AdcenterThey scored themselves a schoolmark of “B/B : room for improvement” on the success of their launch of their new pay-per-click marketing product, Adcenter. I would have given them an “A” for openness in their evaluation on how much the launch met advertisers expectations. Basically to sum up:Launch went ok - in that they got a fair amount of avertisers on board.Service & support USP was a winner. Telephone support for all advertisers regardless of size of customer was working well and not met any crisis. In my opinion, lowering the barrier to entry is A Great Thing for such a big player like MSN to offer. Certainly in my experience, telephone support helped me to get on board quickly. As an agency this would spell good news too as it’s a great story to tell your smaller advertisers and make them feel loved. PPC was the most fun 5 years ago when you could use Adwords to propel a tiny cottage industry into the stratosphere - so for a second i got the tingle of a rennaisance of old fashioned values. None of this “what is your budget” snobbery that is rife among google and other agencies now.Quality traffic is present on the MSN network. This was backed up by Latitude who had discovered great conversion for some of their advertisers. They tend to work on a CPA busines model so they probably know what they’re talking about.Distribution & Traffic volume has still got a long way to go but is clearly outshined by Google. Ho hum.Demographic targeting - their most touted USP - does work but unfortuanately not a lot of advertisers are not really using it. This makes perfect sense to me and not something to worry about; until the volume and competition reaches a critical mass, there is no real need to target demographically, as current traffic volume are no where near most medium and large advertisers spending power. At this stage most of us are quite happy with cheaper traffic than Google!User Interface is tricky to use. Wow - amazed and glad they admitted that! Apologies to the guys at Adcenter, but in my opinion it truly is a dog. However if they acknowledge it then i’ll suffer in silence in the hope that it will get overhauled.The house tended to agree that Yahoo panama hardly had earthquake potential but was a step in the right directionNeutralize felt that the close resemblance of the new Yahoo Panama interface to Google AdWords was going to make account management easier and that they would probably attract a few more current advertisers on Google as it is now so easy to import the latter into the former. The quality score was more of the same, but was ultimately a fairer system and teh fact that you can separate Content and Search ads was a definite improvement. Blue Barracuda felt that clients were aware of the impending shift to Panama and that it would improve their image of Yahoo Search, especially if the new quality score helped them to improve clickthrough rates.Frankly there is not much to say about Yahoo Panama except that it is very very welcome. Personally i would have added that Panama should bring back a lot of small business and niche advertisers who have been burnt by overtures particularly unwieldy and inflexible bidding engine. Everyone acts like these advertisers are not worth bothering with, they’re just small fry, but clearly they have not been reading enough Chris Anderson“A big hit is required”No one felt that any of these developments from MSN Adcenter or Yahoo Panama was going to bite into Google’s market share. Although this was obvious - i was slightly disappointed at the overall lack of fighting talk from MSN or details of any strategy remotely resembling disruptive innovation. Mobile Search, Local Search and Pay-per-call were all word dropped which made me groan. Not just becuase all three make up the PPC grail trinity that everyone has been wishing on for years. Or the fact that it is universally acknowledged by the panel that mobile search is too low volume at this stage - but becuase clearly Google is already winning the mobile search battle with mobile sitemaps and auto-optimising websites for mobile browsers/screens. Furthermore MIVA are abandoning Pay-per-call this month not for lack of advertisers but for lack of response from consumers and local search is just not that interesting without a social element. Personally i think it’s the companies experimenting with microformats, like Upcoming and Technorati, that have anything interesting to offer this area. Obviously if anyone wants to debate this with me or just tell me i’m wrong - please do so!So seemingly no big hitters were really on the horizon, although we did get one interesting insight into MSN’s skunkworks. They plan to roll out their search engine onto Xbox Live - which clearly presents a huge demographic targeting opportunity for advertisers.Yet it’s hardly what i’d call disruptive innovation. What i really wanted to hear was that MSN would come to the rallying cry of publishers all over the country, replace their useless on site search facilities, and deliver a revenue strategy to supply PPC ads from highly targeted and desired demographics like the b2b sector. But maybe the market is more complicated than i think - Google has got most of the publishers tied up becuase they are willing to spend money on them. For the richest company in the world - microsoft have missed a great land grab and a chance to bite into the market share of search queries.Sod talking about the big 3 anymore - Yahoo and MSN are fighting a losing battle by refusing to innovate or respond to the crisis traditional publishers are facing. The only search orientated companies that seem to value the publisher in the UK, the niche content producers, in my opinion are MIVA and AdPrecision, the latter whom spoke up at the event. Those smaller players are the ones recognising the demand from advertisers for genuinely better demographic targeting through branded partnerships and see the desperate struggle that traditional publishers face to avoid being completely dominated by the disruptive power of Google.So that’s my roundup of the PPC earthquake - any food for thought? I don’t claim to be a journalist or anything, just an online ranter. An alternative view and interesting discussion is taking place here.

2007-03-13T23:36:00.000+00:00

To bid or not to bid, that is not the question
A short time ago in a city not so far away (from Leeds anyway) i came up with what i felt was the Killer App for AdWords. This was a long time before i’d come across the long tail concept, chris anderson’s blog and my favourite Keyword Research tool of 2007, Hittail. Basically, the Killer App was a log file analyser that primarily focussed on the search terms that delivered traffic to your website. This tool would look at exactly what query delivered traffic to your website and tell you how unique it was.Why would i build a tool solely to do that? Simply becuase with the help of other pay-per-click bid management tools you can report on the ROI per keyword. Google, and now Yahoo and MSN, allow you to choose exactly what keywords and search term combinations you are bidding on and the ROI that each one, individually, is delivering.Looking for answers in the wrong placesWhat i frequently found, managing some very high spending campaigns, was that it was nigh on impossible to generate more traffic for a keyword without raising the bid price. Yet inevitably when a campaign was delivering a strong ROI, my client would always ask me if I could deliver more converting traffic to them, “Why don’t you just bid a bit higher?” In theory i could by raising the bid price, but in reality that strategy could be potentially disastrous, as not only would i be raising the ad position, to get more clicks, I was paying more for each click, so suddenly I might be in the position of kissing goodbye to that great ROI I’d helped deliver. Clients found my answer, that it was simply impossible to deliver better results simply by messing around with bids (after i’d found the sweet spot), difficult to stomach.Which left me with something to chew over. How could i squeeze a better ROI, whilst engaged in a bidding war with my competitors, without blowing my spend? I felt like i had to develop the art of zen non-competing.The PreambleThe idea of non-doing in Zen buddhism centers around a double denial of existence. Essentially it is the logic, “life is empty and meaningless, and it’s empty and meaningless that it is empty and meaningless”. Basically the logic posits that the statement itself is neither true nor untrue becuase the statement is a component part of reality that only holds a mirror up to what is actually going on. Put another way, the statement itself is only a reflection of what is going on, a description, not actually what is happening.Pure PPC strategies are just speculative at bestBelieve it or not, Pay-per-click bidding is exactly like that. Pure speculation. Most SEMs will push the idea of never before seen levels of campaign control and targeting, yet they are wilfully overlooking that fact that they are overseeing what is essentially a blind auction. When you choose to bid on the term, say ‘jobs in charities’ you can select that to be a broad, a phrase or an exact match, and your bid management engine will deliver an ROI value for each permutation. It’s great becuase it gives the feeling of confidence (especially when you see your exact match is delivering a great ROI), but it’s not necessarily true that the term jobs in charities is the best converter. This is especially clear when you notice your broad match is consistently delivering strong ROI too. A more savvy PPC manager should find cause for concern regarding the long term health of their campaign, simply becuase they cannot say with the same level of certainty what terms are driving conversion. And therein lies the opportunity.Finding answers in the right placesTypically, although this does vary from market to market, you’ll find that your exact matched term delivers the best ROI but fairly quickly you’ll start to see that drain away as your competitors start competing aggresively and driving your bid prices up. A typical response by most agencies i’ve worked with is to add more keywords and variations to fill out the bottom end of the market with search terms that have lower cost-per-clicks (CPCs). Frequently this strategy works, but it does not solve the problem of what to do about rapidly diminishing ROI from your super-converting term. Furthermore, in most cases, these ads deploy ineffectively because the click-thru rate on your broad match, out performs your new untested and unserved keywords. So you we’re back to square one, becuase the broad matched ad was served in their place and we have no new data.So how do you solve this problem?Firstly, optimise your clickthrough rate (CTR) rather than your bidding strategy by blocking certain terms.Find all the irrelevant matches that are coming in and delete, delete, delete! Set up negative matches on your campaigns so that your ads don’t serve for any irrelevant phrase or broad matches. This should reduce the number of impressions you get on irrelevant terms, pushing your CTR up and furthermore, becuase you are not getting clicks from terms that are unlikely to convert (hey, you know what useful content is and is not on your site), you are optimising your ROI.Secondly, optimise your CTR rather than your bidding strategy by adding new terms.Discover what relevant variations are still coming in. Log all of the long tail combinations and variations that are coming and see what juicy stuff you can learn about your market and where you are failing to serve them effectively. You will honestly be amazed at the granularity of search terms clicking through to your website in the hope of finding something relevant. For instance, in the broad matched example of ‘jobs in charities’, I was amazed to find how much volume there was to the term ‘jobs working in animal charities’ and variations to that effect. Yet, if you think about it for a second, with a global database and the ability to search it at 0.11 seconds, it stands to reason that the more inquisitive user knows exactly what they want and is going to set about finding it!Thirdly, optimise your CTR rather than your bidding strategy by restructuring your campaign.Re-structure your entire campaign to accomodate new learnings, in such a way that you can learn from the new initiatives you are taking. PPC data should be seen as source of response data about your audience. Aside from having some assurances as to what search terms deliver business, clickthru rate metrics give you some pretty good assurances as to what your audience really reponds to. A lot of AdWords accounts that i’ve taken under my wing to optimise basically fail to deliver more becuase of the way they are structured. High traffic terms are under the same budget control as low traffic terms and in many many cases one generic ad is serving a multitude of different search requests. This is really problematic because you are unable to get a clear overview of what keywords and ads your audience responds to. Restructuring your campaign really allows you to know at a glance how relevant your ads and website your website is in general to the market your targeting. People find themselves in different terms. for instance I principally think of myself as an SEO and PPC expert, rather than an SEM expert. Yeah, i may be quibbling over definitions, but frankly if I am, then your audience probably are too.Even if you don’t bother with steps 1 and 2, a campaign restructuring will deliver more impressions, have a much less volatile cost-per-click (CPC) and higher CTRs. A solid account structure will give you far more control over your budget on a long term basis to engage in or opt out of particular bidding wars. On a daily basis you can switch on and switch off campaigns and adgroups whilst your competitors bid aggressively, until they burn out and you can slide back in.Fourthly, optimise your CTR rather than your bidding strategy by writing more specific ads.Serve your audience better by serving better ads that meet their specific requirements. Until you re-structure your campaign to accomodate the new keywords, you’re going to be under the impression that your broad matched campaign delivers you a fairly standard number of impressions at a fairly standard 3% CTR at whatever CPC. When you restructure your campaign, and serve a relevant ad (and please don’t forget a relavant destination webpage) to that query, you’ll discover that in fact that particular term, say ‘jobs in animal charities’, drives over 500 impressions a month and delivers a 25% clickthru rate when targeted with relevant ad text and landing page. Sit back and watch your ad sail above your competition without you ever adjusting your bid price.Fifthly (is that a word?), optimise your CTR rather than your bidding strategy by continuously improving your account.Repeat the whole process on your new campaigns and adgroups. Each new campaign and adgroup you target will deliver more opportunities to discover how you can compete in the marketplace with your current budget and where to best position your spend.Search terms ARE NOT markets in their own right, only reflections and sources of insightsSo where is this killer APP now? Well the long and the short was i was too young and inexperienced in the SEM business at that time to really win the funding i needed to develop it beyond it’s neo-natal stages. In the end the business died (archived site here) because i still needed to support myself - but hey, it’s totally OK to fail at setting up your first company! (Seriously, the UK needs to realise this and learn from our bigger brothers across the pond). Anyway, the most important thing is, as the dalai lama is alleged to have said, “when you lose, don’t lose the lesson”. And I can safely say that i didn’t. Instead i put a similar tool, Hittail, into action with some splendid results. So when you think you are losing the bidding wars (and the ROI), remember not to lose the lesson - ask yourselves or your agency how far you are going to improve clickthrough rates.And btw, Hittail have just upgraded their service. Isn’t that nice!

2007-03-02T23:34:00.000+00:00

Backlinks backfire
I’ve been hit by it. You may have been too. February 2007 saw a massive index change as far as a lot of SEOs are concerned. Personally I lost 4 really competitive positions (top 3 on high traffic terms) on one website. These positions were literally buried in the results. Another was totally unaffected. Others are complaining too in the discussion forumsReally takes the wind out of your sails… You work and work and then it feels like Google just takes the rug right from under your feet.Personally I’d been working a year on my site, and almost feel like i’m back to square one.If you know about the importance of backlinks already, then hark back to the time when miserable failure made George Bush’s CV on the white house page pop up as the number one result. Because it ain’t they’re anymore sonny.Did Google lose their sense of humour? To be fair it was an old joke.The basic trick of googlebombing was to exploit the ‘authority’ algorithm thatattampts to find sites that point the user to a useful resource. You get as many sites to link to a target site with the same anchor text and in theory the target site should appear top of the results. In the case of miserable failure, thousands of webmasters and bloggers all linked to George Bush’s CV on the whitehouse.gov website with the words ‘miserable failure’ causing that page to be seen by Google as the most authoritative page on miserable failures.Google’s latest (February 2007) algorithm change (known as the Google Dance) seems to have heavily penalised sites benefitting from that type of link strategy. It seems like a lot of backlinks (those links from external sites that point to you), from directories for example, have been devalued massively. I suspect this because the site that i lost major ground on one was the one that had recieved the most link love from a recent directory submission. Furthermore a major event happened earlier this year that was bound to shakeup the Google index. A hitherto major source of high quality authoritative back links was Wikipedia. In a response to search engine spammers and general critics, wikipedia introduced a robots “no follow” tag, and so blocking the search engines from indexing their external links. This meant that the page rank benefit of wikipedia would not carry over to sites it linked to. Perhaps this can also explain the ‘burying’ of sites that myself and others have experienced.If your top rankings have been affected by the latest algorithm change, do not despair - there are loads of others out there affected too and soon advice will be on hand as to how to claw back lost ground.

2006-02-03T15:14:00.000+00:00

Mbites

Web 2.0 just seems to be a fancy name for a virtual world shaped by architecture rather than the elements.

In the beginning there was online and some people realised that it was good. On the second day there was search engines and people realised they needed traffic to make their business work. On the third day there was communities and business realised that people mainly bought on basis of referrals. On the fourth day there was RSS/AJAX/ATOMZ and people realised that shopping was an experience they had preferences about.

my reply which couldn;t get thru to mbites server:
For all the talk of self policing, self-organising web 2.0 enlightened community experience and this 'new world' that we're all destined for.. I can't help feeling it's going to induce a herd mentality that is no more or less free than the 'world' we currently live in - and one that PR and marketing have been able to tap for aeons. The only difference being that this time in our 'new' world we will derive our sense of freedom from being able to do everything remotely without ever having to leave our house or the people we're closest to (whether they be on or offline). At the end of the day marketing works most effectively on the oxy moron taht "you're /such/ an individual, so clearly conscious of your individuality, and your self defining nature" that you can buy this iPod "for yourself" despite the fact that everyone else has a near-identical version (at some other undefined point of obsolescence).

The rabidness for web 2.0 and the promise of every person being an island unto themselves (yet deeply connected at the same time) seems just to reinforce the fact that all our needs are really quite similar, and if that is the case, then marketing and PR are hardly running out of raw material(ism).

2006-01-13T14:07:00.001+00:00

Tomi Ahonen: "Mobile blogging is perhaps the biggest new opportunity I see now."

mobile TV unimpressed... radio more interesting according to BT test

Over A Third Of UK Mobile Users Send Picture Messages

2006-01-13T14:07:00.000+00:00

2005-10-17T23:12:00.000+00:00

http://www.netimperative.com/2005/10/11/Blogger_traffic/view?searchterm=blogger

2005-10-11T03:07:00.000+00:00

It’s not terrorism that the highstreet stores have to worry about, it’s people looking for them.

To blame the fall in profits from high street retail stores on July 7th seems pretty narrow minded if you ask me. When I hear people say it, I immediately hear a subtext, like they’re saying something they don’t really mean. What I hear is: The Internet. Blame the internet- blame unlimited shelf space, blame comparison shopping, blame local warehouses, blame cheaper overseas competitors and the commercial prowess of every man and his kitten with a website.

Out of interest, I recently conducted some ‘candle burning’ (my term) research into 20 major highstreet shops from famous landmarks of London. I didn’t find one shop which was using pay-per-click advertising on all major search portals to boost their revenues and protect their brand.

What I did find was Ebay ads. No matter how much bricks and mortar went into building those stores, according to the search engine ads, they could be bought and sold on Ebay. Search just about any keyword and you can find it on Ebay. Old rope really can be bought and sold on Ebay, even ‘warts and all’. And every other major high street brand can seemingly be bought secondhand.

We (“the search experts”) like to laugh and joke about the ubiquity of Ebay ads, but in light of their mega-bucks acquisition of Skype, presumably just for it’s userbase, you’d be right to thinks it is not so funny anymore. Ebay is clearly doing something right and chances are they’ve been doing something right for a very long time.

So what are they doing right? They’re bidding on ‘undiscovered’ high traffic searches for major retail shop and supermarket names. What I’m really telling you is that they’ve identified Huge Gaps In The Market. And I don’t just mean huge. I mean Mega. “Hundreds of thousands of searches a month”, huge. Ebay have identified Mega Gaps In The Market. This surely cannot be purely coincidence.

Am I right in thinking that every company director would like to identify similar gaps in the market? Even if it were online? And am I alone in thinking that no brand manager, marketing manager or even sales director, of world famous retails outlets would want to be associated with second hand goods, let alone second or third in the search listings, when people come looking for them?

Evidently not. If Ebay are able to bid on these terms, then we can say that these trademarks have not been fully protected by law, and they are fair game. By now every important company executive must know that you can pay 10 or 20 pence for every click from the search engines and you’re guaranteed a first place position in the search results. Don’t you?

Maybe everyone is thinking that they are saving themselves a tonne of money by optimising their site to naturally appear in search listings or working through affiliates. “Cos all that stuff is free or I just pay out on commissions. I win either way.”

Perhaps, but my take on this is that you’re search marketing agency just hasn’t sold you on the real benefits of paid search advertising. There’s no easy way to say this, so I’m just going to say it straight.

WAKE UP!

Pay-per-click is another word for low risk, fast turnaround, high reward marketing.

Natural search is an absurdly competitive environment that has lengthy development cycles and no guaranteed results. Investment in SEO is speculative at best and ROI does not show up until months into a deploying a website. If it doesn’t work, well that’s just it. It didn’t work. Back to the drawing board.

Add to that, the fact that natural search listings appear two listings lower- under the sponsored listings. That means everytime someone searches famous computer and electricals store, the first thing they see is Ebay.

Affiliate marketing may increase your ‘real estate’ on the page but ultimately it follows that the people searching for you by name are looking for your website specifically. Sending people to your site via affiliates is not search marketing… It’s an easter egg hunt (Incidentally, we are only 75 days away from Christmas)!

All the time that users are being sent from search engines to your brand by “I made this in dreamweaver” string and sealing wax channels, you are losing valuable marketing data about your customers online behaviour and interaction with your brand. God forbid they might shop elsewhere if you carry on like that.

Now compare and contrast that strategy with pay-per-click.

New paid search ads can be uploaded in 90 minutes to five days (depending on your provider) and directed to any website. And you still get that guaranteed top spot. Kiss goodbye to SEO development cycles. Say hello to next day ROI stats.

Paid search ads are positioned higher on the page than natural listings. They really are the first result a user is likely to see. And that traffic can be directed to ANY page you want. Kiss goodbye to random entry pages, say hello to offer testing.

Paid search ads are easy to adapt and co-ordinate in real time. Setting up Ads on search engines is so simple, they can be changed week by week or month by month. Kiss goodbye to offer updates propagating through your affiliate network. Say hello to time sensitive online marketing drives.

Let your affiliates focus on the hard stuff like getting you traffic from high traffic generic terms such as ‘christmas’. Let your SEOs focus on the hard stuff like improving the architecture and building links to your site. Whilst you Mr Marketing Manager, concentrate on what you do best, squeezing ROI from every channel. Create time sensitive offers, targeted incentives and reasons to stick to buying from you through what has been (until now) a difficult time. Get your product out there now. Put funds into pay-per-click and you’ll still be paying on delivery, even when Santa arrives.

2005-09-16T17:56:00.000+00:00

Totallly aside from the photo, I've just had an interesting chat about metadata with a mate and now it occurrs to me that there is some *potentially* interesting contextual data to this pic.

Bear with me... :-)

My dad actually took the picture and asked me to post it on Moblog. He just thought it was funny and wanted to get it online to show people.

Then everyone comments on it - which I'm really chuffed about - but also make a whole new connection to it, that is meaningful to this group (which Joe's fiance's nickname is Shoes), and serendipitously it is also Joe's stag night before he goes off to marry her!

So, all in all, the picture became more than just a funny picture, it also happened to link to a specific moment. Like a twist of fate in the system. Tagging would actually allow me to capture that moment in a different way- in a way similar to how i might remember that picture - not necessarily by how I would describe it's content but by how i might describe it's relevance.

It's purpose sort of evolved to potentially more than just a funny picture, but an event online that signalled to a group of people, "Joe and Shoes are getting married!"

It's something I'd probably remember anyway, as the image "spoke to" a deeper context, but now I could also tag the picture to associate that personal association. I could also tag it so that others could remember it, or use the same tags as somebody else to help compile a communal gallery of associated images. In this case it might be images for Joe, for Joe from me, for Shoes from me, for Joe and Shoes, for Joe's stag night, or simply a mark of the occasion.

Tagging is also an action until itself so it's not like i'd have to record the metadata actually true to it's original intention for posting. In hindsight the purpose of the image has grown and a matrix of intentions to recall it have expanded from it, so now I could remeber it as such and share that connection with others.

So, in that sense, what's ultimately important is my intentions when I tag it. What's more, I can make up new intentions just by adding a new tag.

In a sense the tag allows me to compile multiple stories of what happened immediately surrounding that image. I could associate words with my dad's story, my story, Joe's story, and even Moblog's story. It's like tags allow me to signature experiences from posting something to the internet.

Maybe I need that... given I'm plugged in all day. (My Metadiary)

Nonetheless, this all still proves to me that you could do some incredible things with tags. A communal awareness for tagging could mean one could essentially search their own or others interepretations of web pages, construct narratives of online events and create historical significace. They'll call it 'tagged browsing'. Just search "Eureka"!

2005-09-02T15:34:00.000+00:00

Chris Anderson talking on ITConversations

2005-09-02T02:19:00.000+00:00

Bollywood's distributed demand

I've often pointed to the Indian film industry as a perfect Long Tail candidate. Each year Bollywood makes at least 800 films. In American alone, there are 1.7m people who are first or second generation Indians, most of whom can speak Hindi (the main language of Bollywood films)."

USA Today, Longtailing bigtime

There's a start-up called Akimbo that's about to ship a product. Its initial programming will be soccer from Europe. It'll have things from India and from other cultures that have never been available because they don't have large-enough audiences to go on satellite or cable, but they have a plenty large-enough, and certainly devoted-enough, audience to go over the Internet."

"Last fall, Wired magazine identified a trend it dubbed "the long tail," and the term has since caught fire in tech and media circles. Basically, it says that in an era of almost limitless choice, many consumers will gravitate toward the most popular mass-market items, but just as many will move toward items that only a few, niche-market people want.

Take music in an age of Amazon.com and iTunes. A lot of music buyers want the hot new releases. But just as many buy music by lesser-known artists or older music — songs that record stores never would be able to carry but that can be offered online. All that small-market, niche music makes up the long tail.

Until the past few years, mass-market entertainment ruled the industry. In this new digital era, the long tail is becoming at least as powerful a force."

Eric Schmidt, Longtailer

How Google serves the longtail.

The origins of "The Long Tail"

"To be precise, what I coined was the notion of looking at the tail itself as a new market. The use of the proper noun (including "The") is not incidental, but is intrinsic to the observation that we have historically looked at the market at the head of the curve in isolation, and we can now shift our gaze to the right and see that the tail is another market."

The Economist does the Long Tail

"Perhaps the most profound implication of the long tail, however, is its impact on popular culture. As choice expands and people can more easily find niche content that particularly interests them, hits will be less important: so what will people talk about when gathered around the water cooler? In fact, says Mr Anderson, the idea of a shared popular culture is a relatively recent phenomenon: before radio and television, he notes, countries did not operate in "cultural lockstep". And the notion of shared culture is already in decline, thanks to the rise of cable television and other forms of market fragmentation. The long tail will merely accelerate the effect. There will still be blockbuster movies, albums and books, but there will be fewer of them. The companies that will prosper, says Mr Anderson, will be "those that switch out of lowest-common-denominator mode and figure out how to address niches."

2005-08-27T18:02:00.000+00:00

Crazy frog becomes less annoying

The utterly evil combination of banner ads and crazy frog took me by surprise today on hotmail. The top banner had mouseover activated sound. So I could switch crazy frog on and off. Suddenly the day seemed brighter.

Click Z guide to local SEO - Part1

"One of the most distinctive local search engine characteristics is a reliance on user-generated content. User-generated content is provided to search engines directly by the public. User-generated content is, by nature, biased."

Click Z guide to local SEO - Part2

"Maybe bringing small businesses online isn't as difficult as we thought. True, starting a Web site design conversation with a small business is like opening Pandora's box. But it's much easier and more effective to talk to businesses about structured, distributed business data."

Yellow pages are dead, well internet yellow pages are anyway

"The IYPs' lineage is a natural barrier to their evolution. IYPs as a destination will die. To survive and flourish in today's interactive environment, Yellow Pages must narrow their focus and concentrate on their historical strength: sales."

Social Networking Meets Local Search

It's is all about who you know.

"Local search is about augmenting the local behavior and consumption patterns that are virally manifested in our everyday lives. It's with our local circle of friends, family, coworkers, and acquaintances that we share our experience and opinions. Whether you're talking about finding the best sushi, this weekend's street fair, or a reliable handyman, local consumption and communication are personal and, in many cases, originate from trusted sources."

2005-08-25T03:15:00.000+00:00

Pizza, SW11

Pretty darn good I gotta admit- I recognise all the listings and some I didn't expect to be there.

2005-08-25T03:12:00.000+00:00

Yahoo Local
So to perform a local search basically requires one wild keyword, and then state,city or postcode.

Hmmm...

Restaurant London
Restaurant Clapham
Restaurant SW11

Easy!