Cooperstein, a vice president and practice lead serving CMOs and marketing leadership for Forrester, shared the TRUE framework, which stands for: Trusted, Remarkable, Unmistakable and Essential.  He then offered attendees struggling with a fast-changing technology landscape and increased consumer demand some great examples that clearly illustrate the TRUE elements:

-          Trusted (being more transparent and accountable): Visa’s Olympic campaign for London 2012, Flow Faster with Visa, provides a great example of a brand maximising their sponsorship opportunity but remaining true to their product offerings in a fun and relevant way with the help of a certain Usain Bolt and Team Visa athletes.

-          Remarkable (disrupting the market in a way that is worthy of conversation): Red Bull is continuously creating content that is pretty remarkable – from the Red Bull Flugtag to the extreme sports they showcase. But of course, the content that made the world stand still (as eight million people watched in real time) was Felix Baumgartner jumping out of his balloon four miles above the earth for Red Bull Stratos.

-          Unmistakable (creating unique experiences): Chanel No.5 is creating content and experiences that are unmistakably Chanel.  This YouTube video sums up No.5 perfectly as part of their ‘Inside Chanel’ series and is true content class.

-          Essential (being irreplaceable in the lives of your consumers):  Brands need to be essential to consumers, and sometimes they might not even realise that it is you aiding them. Cooperstein highlighted Cisco for been an essential brand, as they lead the market in networking that transforms how people connect, communicate and collaborate.

Cooperstein’s TRUE message was consistent with his recent keynote from iCrossing’s US CMO Summit, where he discussed “How to build a 21^st Century Brand.”   As marketers continue to build connected brands with today’s always-addressable consumer, it is increasingly important that they start with brand experiences that are connected.

Today, connectedness and being connected is more critical than ever, a theme that resonated throughout our UK Client Summit last week from industry leaders such as Forrester, Google and Microsoft. As the digital revolution continues, we’re seeing consumers “bi-” and “tri-screening,” searching on the go and expecting brands to be there for them when they need them and where they need them in that moment.

Welcome, to the world of the connected consumer.

For us as marketers, we must respond by building connected brands that are visible, useful, usable, desirable and engaging.  But, it’s no easy task.  So where do we start?

As with everything, we must start with the consumer.

With access to more data and channels than ever before, marketers can now learn more than ever before about what consumers want, where and when.  This is our moment of opportunity as marketers to deliver on the promise of connectedness, through content and experiences that are TRUE.

It’s not just about the volume or authority of the links your site attracts. The relevance and topicality of the context in which a link appears can make or break the value of that link. You can write the most entertaining or informative article of your career, but if it’s picked up by a site that Google deems irrelevant to your niche the link could be interpreted as spam.

The upshot is that you need to have a strong voice in your own market. You need to be getting featured on relevant, topical websites. And you need to ask writers to include links to the most relevant possible page on your website.

To get this right, it helps to understand how Google decides what is relevant to your website and niche. In all likelihood, Google is using something called Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) as part of its algorithm.

LSI helps to determine the meaning behind the text on a webpage by identifying groups of words and phrases that frequently appear in close proximity to one another all over the web, and are therefore likely to be semantically related. This is much more intelligent than simply finding any old webpage which has an exact match for your search query. It’s Google learning to think less like a machine and more like a person.

Here’s an example. If you own an office chair company your keyword portfolio will probably contain terms like:

chair
office chair
mesh back chair
ergonomic office chair
seat
leather seat

Because these are all different types of chair it’s pretty easy to conclude that the terms are semantically related. An LSI algorithm would take this a step further – it would know that all six of those key terms regularly appear on webpages that also contain a range of other words belonging to the wider semantic category of furniture (e.g. table, desk, stool, curtain, carpet, lamp etc.).

This allows the relevance of two interlinking sites to be determined based on the co-occurrence of semantically related concepts, rather than keywords alone. So if a website which is predominantly about desks links to your website from an article about office furniture, Google will be able to recognise the relevance of the link because its algorithm can see that both websites are talking about things which belong to the broader category of furniture – even though they each have a different overall focus.

Being aware of LSI can relieve some of the pressure on writers and creative folk to feel like they have to stuff keywords into text in order to meet the SEO objectives of their business. Researching the wider semantic categories that are relevant to your website and overall niche is an important step towards understanding how you can write for both your audience and for Google without compromising the integrity or quality of your content.

Anyone who creates content for your business should be aware of the potential SEO benefits their work could provide, and optimising that content for search should be an integral part of the content creation process. In the future it is likely that we will see relevance become an increasingly important signal for Google to determine the value of a link, so getting to grips with how the algorithm works will help you to stay ahead of the game and make your content work even harder.

I am, I hate to say, one of ‘those people’ who, at times, can be seen to run for my Google safety blanket and dive into my handbag for my beloved phone to settle a factoid discussion – the height of the Scottish lock in the 2013 6 nations? Did Larsson live to see the publication of his first book? The capital of Hungary? You get the picture. I am not proud of it but I am of the generation where instant access to a vast wealth of information has been readily, and easily, available. To consider something ‘ungoogleable’ – preposterous!

But it exists! And some people do it on purpose! *Queue gasp!*

Further reading into this ‘ungoogleable’ phenomenon lead me to discover a so called ‘ungoogleable’ band called –isq (nope, I’ve never heard of them either). Band member, Irene Serre explained that,

“We didn’t want to give everything away straightaway. If you want to hear about us you’ll need to try just a little bit harder. And then when you do actually find us online we have lots in place.”

I couldn’t resist! A quick search for –isq – true, nothing come up due to the structure of the search term. Insert some speech marks with “ –isq” and the brand is brought up, in 0.25 seconds no less. On Amazon and iTunes it’s an instant search result, minus the speech marks. I can understand Serre’s view, as we proceed throughout the digital revolution the world is increasingly becoming smaller, content is shared more freely, easily and we are able to get it 24/7. Would a little bit of anonymity and secrecy online be a good thing? We’ve all heard the horror stories of job seekers going for the job of their dreams and then the potential employer doing a little bit of a Google search and finding that their perfect candidate has had a shady past, the current misfortune of Paris Brown illustrating that point clearly. I can completely understand this from a personal point of view but what about brands? Surely, ‘hiding’ your online presence seriously limits the commercial return from your actions or do certain brands feel that being harder to find increases their desirability by being exclusive?

A quick search through the Superbrands list seems to prove this false; all have very active online presences. Quick searches for exclusive, luxury brands such as Breitling, Rolls Royce and Chanel again proves this not to be the case as all of these brands show that they have heavily invested in their online identities, ensuring that their websites and content instantly reflect the quality of the brand and its value. Whilst the idea that there could be luxury brands, restaurants, clubs that have no presence on Google is an interesting concept, commercially today, it’s not a concept that I could fathom.

So, could something actually be ‘ungoogleable’? As in the case of –isq, the minute that you have a presence online, search engines can find you – such is life. True, you may have to be a little bit more of a savvy searcher but you can find the band and their related content, and it’s pretty straightforward on the leading commerce site which of course will influence search results too. From my view, you’re shooting yourself in the foot commercially speaking if you are not utilising the power and opportunity that search engines provide you and I doubt that there are many brands going down this route. There may be incidents where you are at a disadvantage, for example a brand name with a broad context. Sticking to the music theme, one of my favourite bands, The National, are battling in an obvious competitive landscape with a multitude of newspapers, horse races, theatres and venues to stave off. But clever optimisation, engaging content and most likely an influence from my search history and social data, brings them up to top spot for me! Search bliss! Indeed, the Urban Dictionary’s definition of ‘ungoogleable’ recognises it not only as failing to return results from a search query on a search engine but also for producing an overwhelmingly high return of results which effectively renders search anonymity. It’s all about the first page!

Ultimately, I am a lazy searcher – there I have said it. I genuinely get frustrated when I do not get the results that I want through a search.  I love it when a brand understands me; my search behaviour; what I want, when I want it. I love it when they take the time to invest in long tail search terms, provide engaging content that I am genuinely interested in across a number of channels and react to real time events.  It took ages to find out how tall the Scottish lock was whilst watching the game down the pub with mates – 6ft 9in in case you were interested! I would have been over the moon if the national teams had made easily available key stats on their players, and optimised this, or a quick fact sheet around the 6 nations for pub based discussions. It’s simple content but shows a clear understanding of your customers – we don’t always want to revert to Wikipedia!

Today, search has evolved. It’s become second nature. We’re good at it and we want the results straight away, in the right context. As Amol Rajan puts it in his recent Guardian article, ‘It used to be that Google was constantly in the news; now Google constantly is the news.’ Search is marketing! Brands need to advance beyond just simple optimisation in order to reap rewards and remain connected with their customers. Being ‘ungoogleable’ just isn’t an option.

The idea of being ‘ungoogleable’ really jumped out to me as an interesting concept that I would love to get your feedback on below, what do you think?

I was recently asked, “do people still use RSS feeds?”. After performing some online research, I realised there wasn’t a great deal of up to date information to confidently give an answer. Therefore, I decided to generate my own data by conducting a survey; the results were as follows:

Around 44% of people did not know what an RSS feed was, so maybe I should have begun the post by explaining what they are. RSS (Rich Site Summary, or alternatively known as; Really Simple Syndication) is a type of web feed which involves automatically publishing and updating articles and content which can be read by a ‘feed reader’. It means that instead of visiting all the websites you are interested in; you can subscribe to their feeds and see all their new content in one place.

According to the survey; only 7% of people currently use RSS feeds, whilst 8% of people used to but now no longer do. This indicates that more than half of those who have ever used an RSS feed do not anymore. So the number of users has fallen, but there appears to be a loyal group of RSS feed users, albeit a small one.

A further finding from the survey is that almost half of those who used to subscribe to RSS feeds now get that content by directly visiting the feed provider’s website.  This is particularly surprising as a key use of RSS feeds is to avoid visiting websites directly and being able to get all the content you want in one place. This may be due to developments in technology surrounding browsing websites over the past few years; including advancements in internet connection speeds, web browsers performance and computer processing speeds.

Over a quarter now get the content they used to get from RSS feeds from Facebook, and more people use Google+ than twitter to get this information. However as this question was only served to 8% of the 500 respondents; this sample size is quite small, so a survey to a larger audience may have produced different and more accurate results.

If you would like the raw data from the survey to see the full results and carry out your own analysis please get in touch.

The survey was conducted to 500 respondents using Usurv. Usurv is an online self-service survey provider where you can ask personalised questions to a wide audience in the United Kingdom.

To help answer these questions, we thought it best to go straight to the horse’s mouth, surveying fashion bloggers for their advice and insight.

The web of influence

The 55 fashion bloggers who responded to our survey, of which 85% were 30 or younger, ranged from leisure bloggers to those who blog full-time, but all were agreed on one thing: they had made purchases influenced by items they’d seen on other fashion blogs.

The question “who do fashion bloggers influence?” is one commonly asked by our clients – at the very least it would seem that they hold strong sway within their own network. And with fashion bloggers regularly writing about, styling and photographing their purchases, their influence has legs.

“Many micro-trends start on blogs,” says Kristabel Plummer of www.iwantyoutoknow.com, naming statement studded Jeffery Campbell ‘Lita’ shoes, detachable collars and ‘dip-dyed’ ombre hair as just a few.

The influence top fashion bloggers hold now extends beyond their corner of the web, with many appearing among celebrities and models in the street style, fashion inspiration and advice pages of glossy magazines and being paid to create content for brands. Indeed, one third of bloggers we asked had appeared in traditional press over the past year, with 29% having been commissioned to write for a third-party site.

It’s all about the win-win

Brand partnerships on blogger sites have become even more common, with 64% of respondents saying they had worked with a brand directly or through a PR representative over the past year: 45% creating sponsored posts, 38% hosting adverts and 12% being commissioned to write on a freelance basis. Some 3% had also been employed as consultants and 2% as freelance photographers.

This all supports blogger Jen Holmes’ assertion that “in the last six months brands have started thinking more creatively about how to work with fashion bloggers and how it can be beneficial for both parties”.

When working with the top fashion bloggers, promises of “exposure” just won’t cut it – after all, it’s the exposure that they can award your brand that should be weighted more heavily – and the appetite for more creative partnerships is there. A significant proportion of bloggers we surveyed expressed an interest in working with brands above and beyond reviews and straight sponsorship.

Yet with 27% saying that they’d had a bad experience with a PR representative or agency over the past year, it seems that basic ways of working still need to be ironed out. Common blogger complaints included being sent generic releases bearing no relevance to their site, favouritism of a few bloggers, lack of flexibility and short deadlines for projects, empty promises and being expected to produce work for a brand for free.

The future of fashion blogging

So what does the future hold for fashion bloggers? Going on their answers, it looks like it’s full steam ahead. Many envisage their blog growing as they do, to reflect their interests at different life stages, and most are keen to increase their readerships.

Many fashion bloggers are also prolific social networkers. Of those we asked, 86% were supporting their blog through Twitter, 61% with Facebook and 45% via Instagram. Nearly half (43%) were also on Pinterest, which given that the platform has been touted as a top traffic driver for retailers, opens up opportunities for new ways of working with bloggers.

Building meaningful relationships with fashion bloggers could secure long-term brand and SEO benefits, with the right project affording access to their social networks, where much of the engagement and sharing of content takes place. Just be sure to ask ‘what’s in it for them?’.

To find out more about how brands can work with fashion bloggers, request your free copy of the iCrossing eBook now.

Several local agencies are running workshops as part of the event and our Content Director, Charlie Peverett, is holding a workshop called ‘ban the blog’.

‘It’s 2012. There’s a dizzying new world of possibilities for creating and distributing content. We have the technology – but we also have some bad habits and emotional baggage getting in the way.

In this workshop, Charlie Peverett will take you on an entertaining journey through the evolution of online content that will give you a fresh and inspiring perspective on what really matters.  

You’ll leave with great ideas for how to kick your content strategy into gear, and find out why your first action could be to ban the blog.’

The workshop takes place at 1pm and 2pm in Fabrica, Brighton on the 13th September. If you’re interested in attending for some advice on developing a successful content strategy get in touch.

They head to the shiny LED-lit surface of the bar and are faced with a familiar sight – 4 or 5 standard brand lagers 4-5% in strength, each indistinguishable from the last with the ale option limited to a sickly smooth slop from a rarely broached barrel. The fridges are neatly stocked, but hold no bottles that would intrigue you enough to enquire as to their contents.

Which is lucky, as rather than acknowledging the presence of paying customers, the bar staff seem to be holding a private chat. This conversation doesn’t cease even when the Googlebots manage to distract someone for long enough to get in their order; money changes hands without eye-contact, let alone a thank you.

With transaction complete and pints in hand they head to a high table near the window, after declining the option of paying £1.20 per game of pool. There’s a wall of books next to them, or what seems like a wall of books until they reach for one and have their Great Expectations replaced with an empty cardboard sleeve. The trinkets on the shelves also seem somewhat out of place, and would all surely have “Made in Taiwan” on their base, although it’s impossible to check as they’re securely glued in place.

They discuss the latest algorithm changes and make a sportsman’s bet about which animal the next major ranking release will be named after. It’s actually quite hard to hear themselves think with the grindingly catchy pop tunes creeping out from background into the fore.

They grab one of the laminated menus in the hope of fulfilling their appetites – crawling millions of websites a day is hungry work. A scan of the vast menu suggests that everything will have been pre-prepared in a warehouse in the Midlands then shipped to freezer compartments in pub kitchens across the country. It’s simply not profitable to produce “2 burgers for £8″ by any other means. To the left of the bar is a counter brimming with cutlery and condiments to which you can help yourself – these prove very popular as people attempt to mask the taste of their meal.

Disillusioned with their experience, they quickly sink their drinks, leaving quietly past the sign advertising the weekly pub quiz, sponsored by a Sports TV channel that distributes the same set of questions en masse to countless other establishments. With their thirst not quite quenched, the stumble upon another pub down a side alley heading towards the riverbank. The outside is subtly confident in its appearance, having only had minor refurbishments since it was built sometime a few centuries ago.

Stepping inside, the experience is immediately more welcoming. Behind the bar is a man with sideburns that only a diehard CAMRA member could sport, and his Cheshire cat grin and bellowing “Hello!” make the Googlebots feel like they’ve found somewhere they can spend a few hours – potentially more if they want to work their way through the enticing range of ales on offer.

Each comes with an enthusiastic explanation from the knowledgeable landlord, and a small taster glass is offered to help them decide on which tickles their tastebuds. Settling on one from a local micro-brewery, they pull up two stools to the bar next to a man furiously scribbling in a well-worn notebook. They learn he’s putting the questions together for tonight’s quiz – he has been running it for years in return for his glass to be kept full over the course of the evening; attracting teams from all across the region, questions are pitched at just the right level to make them challenging, but not totally ungettable.

With stomachs rumbling, they request a menu prompting the barkeeper to point towards the sizable blackboard on the opposite wall, surrounded by collectables from all over the world that passing punters have donated to a good home. There’s a decent variety of meal options on offer, with a few choices crossed off due to their popularity during the lunchtime rush – it’s all cooked fresh with a focus on seasonal ingredients sourced locally and the salad garnishes are plucked from the allotment in the pub garden.

After killing some time with the board games provided at the side of the bar, two rustic burgers in freshly baked buns arrive in front of them, accompanied by thick cut chips (with the skin left on) and ramekins of homemade relish to complete the dish. Wolfed down in a matter of minutes, it’s time to sample another of the beers that sit before them, and for a message to be put on Facebook inviting their friends to join the party.

Things start to get a little hazy from here, with the pumps pouring, people imbibing, and the stories from the band of irregular regulars getting competitively more outrageous. After the quiz questions cease (the Googlebots team came in a respectable 7^th out of 12) and a few free games of darts have finished, the ivories begin to tinkle and rousing renditions of popular hits spanning the decades ring out into the wee hours.

Weaving their way back to HQ, the Googlebots agree wholeheartedly; a top evening.

There’s nothing to stop you making a big splash with your new business. You may have a genuinely life-changing proposition, but success ultimately relies on getting the attention of people likely to benefit from your site, and hopefully compelling them to spread the word far and wide.

Developing a content strategy for start-ups differs massively from an established organisation. You don’t have legacy content to consider revising or retiring, you don’t have multiple layers of management to deal with to make decisions, you don’t have reams of data to trawl through and analyse, and you don’t have time to be sat around in meeting rooms discussing how a content feature might impact your PR activities.

All you need to worry about is getting noticed, and these seven tips will set you on your way:

1. Believe what you say

This isn’t a time to be timid or apologetic. If you don’t have faith in your business, nobody else will give you the time of day.

The benefits your audience will get from using or buying your service – actual benefits that you’ve identified, researched, tested and verified, not ones that you’ve plucked out of thin air – can be used to create a memorable message that everything you subsequently create refers back to.

2. Tweak your tagline

The overall mission of your business should be neatly wrapped up in a concise statement to re-emphasise people’s perception of your business.

On your website, bolster this tagline with a relevant search friendly term and place it within your meta data. This makes it more likely that people will find your site and discover what you have to offer.

3. Be selectively social

Head to any new start-up’s website and they’re likely to have performed the obligatory social sweep, setting up Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest and YouTube accounts to sit alongside their blog. Building meaningful communities on these networks is a huge task and each requires a distinct communications approach and uniquely tailored content that will attract the right kind of people who hang out there.

Snapping up the usernames early on is a must, but you don’t necessarily have to use and publicise the platforms just because you own them; focus on one area in particular to begin with, then expand as you learn about your audience and discover what resonates with them.

4. Scale content production

Many start-ups create masses of content from the get-go. Invariably, things quickly tail off as other business priorities, development needs or marketing ventures take precedence, meaning the river of content becomes a trickle.

A sustainable and scalable approach to content takes into account the dedicated resources required for creation, and puts emphasis on continued learning of what works and what doesn’t.

5. Create signature content

A single idea executed well is better than 100 implemented badly. By creating useful content that’s indisputably yours, you’re producing a calling card – something for your audience to remember you by that they’ll keep coming back for.

Not every business can come up with a willitblend.com, but if you can produce something of use, value or interest at manageable intervals, you’ll start to develop real affinity with your customers. Whether it’s a weekly quiz or a quarterly ‘state of the industry’ infographic, build it, brand it and persist with it.

6. Plan ahead

During your launch period you’ll hopefully be very busy; fulfilling orders, conducting countless media interviews and ironing out the inevitable bugs in your website. How are you going to find time to create good content?

If you’ve analysed your target audience – and if you’re launching a new business you certainly should have done – then you can make certain assumptions about the kind of content that will be of interest to them.

Populating a 12 month content plan based on this research and your marketing plan will save you from having to constantly be thinking of new ideas on newsletter deadline day, and you may even be able to prepare some of this content in advance so it’s ready to be released according to your schedule.

7. Encourage content creators

In every business, each member of staff has a unique story to tell, and giving them an outlet is good practice. Make content development everybody’s responsibility as part of their job spec, with the necessary quality checks in place of course.

The content you produce defines the personality of your business, acting as the middleman between your products and your customers. Setting the right content foundations from the outset will result in many benefits further down the line as your business expands, helping you to share your on-going success story.

Going beyond the flat image format, our content and design team produced an interactive animation that encapsulates the European Championships since 1996. We worked with John Lewis to turn their juicy TV sales data into something spectacular, dropping in various other cultural references to give a flavour of the various tournaments and the host countries.

See it in all its glory on the John Lewis website.

Euro 2012 - the tournament to watch

Those returning after a classic sun-drenched Brighton lunch hour were treated to a presentation from iCrossing’s very own Charlie Peverett. He told a tale of innocence, how he spent his days as an editor blissfully oblivious to the intricacies of SEO. However, when the curtain was pulled back he peered into a murky world that revealed the true reason why nobody was reading his content

The presentation is now available to view in all its glory, where you’ll discover why ‘great content’ is more than just a check box on a SEO to do list (an issue discussed in greater depth in our latest ebook, How to Plan a Content Strategy).

If you pay attention you may spot a random satsuma.

Now in the world of content, there is no such thing as a random satsuma. Everything produced has a specific place and purpose, whether you’re creating content to feature on a high-traffic homepage, or choosing imagery to include in a presentation to a rowdy group of internet boffins. As a well versed content strategist, Charlie knows this full well and the subtlety and swiftness with which he moved on from this citrussy slide hinted at a more cryptic meaning:

• Was he referring to the segmented nature of organisations and how content allows the pieces to come together under a single unifying skin?
• Was it a Christmas stocking analogy, suggesting that good content is expensive, as opposed to cheap and dirty (like a piece of coal)
• Was it satsuma at all, or had he tricked us with an image of a tangerine, mandarin or clementine?

Even if the only real purpose was to raise a chuckle from the audience, then it certainly achieved its goal. This is a lesson to heed for all website owners and content producers; you can’t just plonk content into your site and hope that it will do the job. You need to go through a thorough process to determine the right content messages, languages and formats to portray your brand, whilst testing that what you say is helping your audience achieve their reason for being on your site.

In short, if your satsuma isn’t achieving the right results, it might be time to replace it with a guava.