Digital Marketing

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

This is a really useful infographic (found via Fast Company blog) mapping the social networking, free marketing ecosystem. Designed by Chris Watson at Visualization Magazine it shows 30 different web 2.0 services offering free sites, feeds or embeds.

It fits nicely into the networked architecture approach, the idea that your brand lives in many more places than simply the domain that you own. There’s now a whole wealth of free content management systems, social networks, bookmarking tools that you can use to promote a brand, product or service. This is something that I believe all companies should map as part of their distributed content strategy.

The map shows places that you can create content, along with icons as to how you can publish (RSS, Print) and the connecting lines show where you could potentially re-publish that content again.

The map also illustrates which of these services provides stats so that you can measure more than your own  on-site analytics.  Stats from the other 3rd party sites  can potentially give clearer insight into the ‘network value’ of your content. For instance; Youtube shows how many times your video has been embedded and shared else-where, other than just views of the video on-site.

People absorb content on the web in more ways than ever, there’s an opportunity for brands/people to produce ultra- shareable content  very cost effectively. The more ways the merrier I think, but keep in mind that its probably better to do fewer well than do lots badly. To simply use many of these platforms as a broadcast medium would not be wise, the true value lies in the engagement and feedback that you can potentially receive from each of the individual audiences around the network.

Image Credit: Flickr User visual think map (If, like me, your a fan of infographs there’s lots there! )

LeapFish gives real time updates on news, shopping, images and video. While searching, it also gives you suggestions underneath the search bar.

The benefit of having a search engine like this is that it gives all your results on one very easy to read page. You can also tailor the homepage to suit your needs by adding widgets with applications like Facebook and Twitter. For those people who like to see everything on one page.

This search engine is great because you can add as much or as little as you like in the way of feeds and applications. You can move the homepage around and drag your widgets around the page to suit your needs.

The Facebook Widget streams live updates from your homepage, so you can keep up to date on everything while you search. The same applies to your Twitter Widget you can interact as you would on your normal Twitter account. LeapFish also has a social sharing feature, which allows you to share a link on Facebook , Twitter and Delicious!
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Google Image Swirl is a new way of searching for similar images and is built on “technologies developed for Similar Images and Picasa Face Recognition to discern how images should be grouped together and build hierarchies out of these groups”. It wasn’t too long ago when Google released an update relating to its image search back in October. Again it was based on “similar searching”. Here is a “Find similar images” search in it’s now classic form for Big Ben.

Now Google have “…launched an experimental feature in Labs called Google Image Swirl, which builds on new computer vision research to cluster similar images into representative groups in a fun, exploratory interface.”

When looking for Big Ben we have a new interface that shows 12 thumbnail images which represent the group of images behind it:

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