Digital Marketing

I spent the weekend before last searching the internet for news about the well-being of members of my extended family who live just outside Concepcion - the epicentre of the huge earthquake that rocked Chile on 26 February. I was surprised to find that Google quickly became completely irrelevant to my search for information. It just wasn’t fast, micro or specific enough for my needs. At some point, they’ll get their social search fine tuned and consistent, and they’ll kick the spam merchants out of Google News, but until then Google fails big time when it comes to meeting an immediate, urgent need for micro-level information about something that has just happened. Read on to find out how social media networks succeeded where Google failed.

The urgent need for news

In January I wrote about the way that social media was helping with the aid efforts in the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti. I had no way of knowing at the time that just a few short weeks later I’d be using my personal social networks to try and track members of my own extended family caught up in an earthquake elsewhere in the world. But on Saturday morning I opened my eyes at about 8am and had a conversation with my husband (who was checking his crackberry - an early morning habit) that went something like this:

Him: “There’s just been a big earthquake in Chile - 8.8 on the Richter scale.”

Me: “Oh no.”

Him: “Epicentre in somewhere called . . . Concepcion?”

Me: “Oh god no. That’s where the family are!”

To cut a long story short, part of my extended family is Chilean: four generations - grandparents, children, grandchildren and great grandchildren who all live in Chiguayante, just outside Concepcion. Fourteen family members in total.

I spent the rest of the weekend glued to my computer as I took on the task of “social media monitoring” and quite a lot of “outreach” on Facebook and Twitter on behalf of the family, whilst others desperately tried the “direct marketing” approach of phoning and emailing.
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London Fashion Week kicks off on Friday (19th February) and as well as the traditional fashion press and the front row celebrities, fashion bloggers will be among the influencers taking their seats at the top catwalk shows. But while agencies, marketing managers and PRs are climbing over each other to get a piece of the new IT girls, has anyone stopped to ask what fashion bloggers want from brands? Laetitia Wajnapel of top fashion blog MademoiselleRobot.com explains how she sees it working.

I created MademoiselleRobot.com in November 2007 as a personal endeavour. Having worked as a journalist/editor for many years before relocating from Paris to London, I needed an outlet for my writing, and what started off as a hobby has since become my job.

I currently get an average of 150,000 page views a month and in the past two years have been both a witness and a protagonist in the rise of online fashion.

Why should brands reach out to bloggers?

The rise of online fashion means that bloggers are now firmly on people’s radars. User recommendations and reviews are the flavour of the moment. Bloggers can be seen as ’super reviewers’ - they are everyday people talking to an engaged audience.

Blog readers are more likely to go and buy something they have seen on their favourite blog than in a magazine for example. Very often, people will buy something online straight away after seeing it on a blog, because bloggers are trusted by their readers most of the time.

If brands want to boost their online sales, I believe the best way of doing so is through an efficient blogger outreach campaign.
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I thought I’d share this video that my colleague in the US, Alisa Leonard-Hansen, brought to my attention via her blog. The video is produced by Xplane (a visual thinking company) and is brilliant.

It  excellently explains the way that social media and new technologies are radically changing the media landscape, along with the impact this is having upon consumer behaviour.

Not much more to be said, the video speaks for itself. 4:45 of visually beautiful stats. Enjoy!

This map shows the popularity of different mobile browsing platforms country by country, with some interesting results.

Apple’s dominance can clearly be seen, with the iPhone and iTouch accounting for over half the market in the US, Canada, UK, France, Germany and Japan.

The Android platform has its largest share in the US and the UK, but has a much weaker share in other countries. This could change in the near future as new phones emerge that run Android, such as the Nexus One.

Docomo and KDDI are the largest mobile phone operators in Japan, and account for 12% of the mobile browser share platforms.

Canada seems to like the iPhone and iTouch, with 86% of mobile internet users using this platform to access the internet.

At 7am Beijing time Google released a statement yesterday stating that they had a “highly sophisticated and targeted attack on their (our) corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google.”

Google included in their statement that other US companies had been under attack too. It’s no surprise to Google being under attack from hackers. However Google’s Chief Legal Officer David Drummond wrote that the attacks were aimed at identifying advocates for human rights in China.

Google entered the Chinese market and took the decision to censor itself back in 2006. However Google have now decided to change its policy of censoring itself as a result of these attacks and fully open its doors to China.

“We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all.”

Back of Google Logo at Beijing - Will Google be forced to turn it's back on China?

There are some fantastic articles on this subject from Search Engine Land and the BBC but we’d love your views on this subject. Do you think Google are doing the right thing? Will Google be forced to turn it’s back on China?

Image Credit: Creative Commons Attribution:  by andreweland

At iCrossing we often talk to our clients (and prospective clients) about the possible benefits of getting their staff blogging and engaging with customers via a “corporate blog”. Of course, it’s not the right move for every organisation - but for those with an open culture with a high level of trust in their people, blogging can be a very effective way of showing your customers (and anyone who is curious about what your organisation is all about) just exactly who you are and why you’re better than your competitors.

I was struck this week by a sad example of this in an unexpected format when I happened to find the Borders Insider blog on The Bookseller website. This is an unofficial, anonymous blog written by a member of staff about what is happening inside the shops now that they’ve gone into liquidation. At first glance, you might think that the post entitled “Running on empty” is a very good example of why so many organisations are scared stiff of the idea of letting their people connect directly with the world via a corporate blog.  At first sight this might not be the best advert for corporate blogging - for starters it’s hosted by another site altogether, and the quotes like the one below are a PR’s nightmare aren’t they?

“We are running on empty, all we do is tidy. Everyday we feel less and less like booksellers and more and more like caretakers. The massive jolt that is administration, which was at first in a strange way energising, feels more and more like a dead weight. There’s only so many times you can explain the gift card redemption rule to angry people, without it getting extremely wearying.”

And yet, if you read a bit further, and then go on to read the comments below this post, what you’re left with is a very strong impression of the knowledge and passion of the Borders’ staff. And the very strong connection they had with their loyal customers.

“Please remember the peope who are treating you so poorly are not your customers. We are still here, devastated by what has happened, and what is happening, but you will see less of us now and more of the bargain hunters only dimly aware that this was once a book shop. My famiy and I have been going to Borders nearly every week since it opened. My wife and I found and decided on our childrens names, planned our wedding and rewarded our children at Borders. The failures have not been yours. If you were to think from scratch of how to compete with Supermarkets and the internet, you would come up with Borders. All the events, especially for children, and your enthusiasm contributed to an overall positive experience with books. You are not booksellers but ambassadors for literature. There are a lot of children who will never forget you and will benefit from your efforts.”

And this isn’t just limited to the store that this commentator frequented. I went into the Brighton branch of Borders this morning and was able to witness for myself the dedicated team of staff there still helping their customers find what they want amongst the jumble sale piles of books. That’s the kind of genuine customer advocacy that no PR stunt or press release can fake. And that’s why, I would argue, if you think your organisation has a special kind of chemistry with its customers and stakeholders, and a unique kind of engagement amongst its employees, a corporate blog is an excellent way of sharing it with the world.

IMAGE by Flickr user markhillary published under CC licence

Staying Competitive in 2010 is the next in the series of iCrossing hosted events attracting many clients wanting to hear from our search specialists on how to stay ahead of the game in 2010.   Doug Platts, Head of Natural Search and Tom Jones, Head of Media gave a snapshot of this year followed by a compelling look at 2010, highlighting these 3 key areas to ensure 2010 is successful for your brand:

• Integrate your marketing including aligning your goals, sharing data, paid and natural search synergy, consistent messaging and measurement
• Flexibility to change and adapt when necessary including real time marketing, contingency planning and response time
• Try one new thing including measurement, engagement, tools, brand recognition, and creating advocates

Here’s the presentation with accompanying notes for your own use.

This is the second post in the ‘decade in search’ series. We’ll probbaly  see a whole host of predictions being made for 2010, but before making ours we thought we’d the take time to  review the major events that have shaped the search industry over the last 10 years.

2001 was a hugely successful year for Google, despite the dot-com bust of the time. Eric Schmidt was appointed as the chairman in March, the man who would later announce for the very first time that Google was profitable. In the cautious world following the dot-com bust, Wall Street analysts valued the company at $250 million. In other search news:

As part of Google’s aim is to provide more relevant and useful results, on Friday Google announced on their blog that they are now personalising results based upon 180 days of a users search activity. This has been the case for some time for Google users signed into their accounts, who have ‘Web History’ enabled, but this has now been rolled out to user’s results whether a user is signed in or not and has not specifically opted out of ‘Personalized Results’.

Using a cookie placed on users’ machines to track their search behavior Google uses web history to artificially inflate a sites ranking depending on a users previous preference to use that site in previous searches. You can opt out of personalised results, but it is unlikely the majority of users will.

Although this change will go relatively unnoticed to the average Google user, this has an impact on SEO. Traditional ‘ranking reports’ will be less representative of what users will see in the SERPs and the importance of regular, new, interesting and relevant onsite content and distribution of this online will be more key to help increase a sites ranking.

Ranking reports ensuring that there is no previous web history on the machine to skew results will show a snapshot of the SERPs at a basic level of a where sites rank in relation to one another prior to a user having any web history.

Providing more content on a site and attracting visitors to it regularly could help the site to rank higher in a Google users personalised SERP. If for example a hotel company provides regular and interesting content which a user regularly visits, when the user comes to search for ‘hotels’, they are more than likely to see the site they regularly visit for information ranking higher than it naturally ranks in a SERP where there is no previous web history of having visited that site.

Personalised search results is another one of Google’s ways to provide relevant content to the user and is in addition to other recent changes made by Google to improve relevancy in their results, such as Social Search, Twitter inclusion and the use of search query patterns & click through data to order results.

The use of Google Analytics is currently subject to a heated debate in Germany, dealing with web analytics and data protection. On Friday, November 27th the “Düsseldorfer Kreis”, a panel of the German supreme supervisory authorities for data protection, said that the collection of IP addresses violates current law. In particular, the creation of user profiles is caught in the line of fire. What will this mean for digital marketing?

For the storage of personal data there are strict requirements in Germany. They may be collected only with the consent of the user. For Internet Service Providers it’s possible to identify a user on the basis of the IP address. Advertisers who use web analytics software possibly store IP addresses; however, as long as the user is not logged in to in to a web service, it is not possible to retrieve any information about the person behind the IP address.

Special attention is currently devoted to Google Analytics. The German data protection commissioners worry that Google uses web analytics data to create user profiles. In the terms of service  (TOS) (1) Google assured they won’t link the IP address to other Google data, but they also retain the right to change the TOS at any time. Millions of websites are affected. According to a recent article of Zeit online(2) more than 13 percent of all German websites use Google Analytics.

The controversial question still is: Are IP addresses personal data? Now the German courts have to decide. The legal situation is still unclear.

For digital marketing agencies like iCrossing, web analytics are very important. We use tools like Google Analytics to measure visits, page views, bounce rates and other performance indicators. The behaviour of an individual user is not relevant for us, so we have no interest in storing the user’s personal data.

I personally consider IP addresses no personal data. An IP address can change at any time, it can be shared and you never really know who the person behind the screen is.

Nevertheless: If the Germans courts decide that IP addresses are personal data this would be a slap in the face for the whole online industry.

(1) http://www.google.com/intl/de/analytics/tos.html
(2) http://www.zeit.de/digital/datenschutz/2009-11/google-analytics-datenschutz