Media Week

I'm still in the US for another 10 days, so am continuing the American theme with an article from USA Today, a paper my hotel is trying to ram down my throat every morning by having me trip up on it when I leave my room!

Apparently 45% of us have admitted peeking at other people's work while they work on their laptops on planes or in airports!

3M are selling screen filters which restrict the window of opportunity for spreadsheet snoopers and cost $50- $125!

So get online and buy a privacy filter now or......travel Business Class!

Supporting advertisers through blogs and forums means I have to know what other people are blogging about, so I often get asked which online marketing blogs I read.

The best source of SEM & SEO blogs has to be Lee Odden's BIGLIST - a well maintained collection of over 400 - yes 400! - blogs on all things online marketing.

I'm pleased to say DigiTales has made the grade but I have been warned, any blogs not updated or left to fester will be struck off...!

Now I'm going to cheat here as, other than seeing Marissa Mayer - VP of Search Products at Google - do a keynote chat with Danny Sullivan, I missed the rest of the sessions because of meetings and briefings we were holding for customers.

SEO Roundtable have done a spiffing job by blogging on 64 of the 74 sessions, so check them out here!

Analytics, click fraud and working the booth...
Allan Dick’s party last night at Hakone Gardens left most of us a little hazy this morning, so how better to clear away the cobwebs but with a 90 minute session on web analytics?!...

Actually it was pretty good, especially Matt Bailey from Site logic Marketing, whose presentation managed to shoehorn a Star Trek analogy and a picture of a rats arse (!?) into a compelling argument for us all to track and analyse our website’s traffic.

The premise was around defining your goals before you start measuring, set bench marks and don’t just report for reporting’s sake. Make sure you act on the data and use it to hit your success metrics.

“With SEO (Search Engine Optimization), if people can’t find you - then you don’t exist.

With usability, if they can’t find it - then it’s not there.

With analytics, it tells you what just happened so you can do something about it.”

Interesting that a straw poll of the 500-odd delegates showed about two thirds were using analytics, but a miserly fifth had no idea what to do with the data. A report called Web Analytics Demystified in June 2007 stated 82% of those surveyed poorly understood analytics and 56% found the whole process far too difficult and confusing to carry out.

Another great tip was to use analytics to understand the context of how people are talking about your company, product or service on blogs and social networks – track back and see whether you’re being set up well for a sale – it’s all about reputation management.

The click fraud session turned into a bit of a heated argument over third party’s reporting versus what Google reports as being the percentage of clicks it does not charge for and hands back to advertisers. Google said it was in a range of less than 10% and the 3rd party company (didn’t catch the name) was saying it was higher. It got a bit messy when it was insinuated that the 3rd party was making waves for its own benefit...............and so it rumbles on..........I’ll keep DigiTales updated with any new developments on the subject.

Kudos to the click fraud moderator, Jeffery K Rohrs, for being the only host so far that hasn’t introduced the speakers “without further ado!” – What does that mean????

The rest of the day was spent on our booth talking to customers and signing people up to our adExcellence accreditation program. The expo hall is huge, the biggest I’ve ever see at an SES conference.

Being Microsoft we get a lot of questions and sometimes even pitches at the booth – today I was approached by some guys wanting to sell us a new browser they’ve built.......mmmmm......think we might already have one of those...

Is Facebook the new Google? Can Microsoft Content Ads catch Google Adsense? Why you should use all three search engines?

All pertinent questions raised here today in California at Search Engine Strategies.

Read on if you want some answers from our US brethren!

At a session on the search landscape in the US we learned that Google, although hugely dominant, has just 50%-odd of market share rather than the 70+% share they enjoy in many countries in Europe. Yahoo! accounts for about 20% and Microsoft just above 10% depending on whose metrics you go for.

Bill Tancer from Hitwise asked the question about Facebook and Google, fielding the notion that social networking will continue to have a greater influence on pushing answers, data and information to users than the “serendipitous” nature of arriving at answers via search engines.

Why you should plan your ad buy across all three main search engines was spelled out well by Jeremy Crane from Compete.com, who shared a little research they recently conducted.

In July 07 they aggregated searches on airline type terms, and discovered 85% of Google users only used Google for this type of search, 75% of Yahoo! users only used Yahoo! and 66% of MSN/Live users only used MSN/Live.

With a 51/34/14 split of share in that vertical (G/Y/M), it’s compelling evidence that, although Google may be the biggest player, marketers are losing out on swathes of audience if they don’t run search activity on Yahoo! and Microsoft adCenter.

Contextual advertising had another surprise today when my colleagues from Microsoft in the US announced the full launch of the Content Ads Beta in the US next week on the 29th August.

In the same session, I was very impressed by Google’s Product Marketing Manager for AdSense – Gopi Kallayil.

Without a presentation, he just stood and talked for 12 minutes on why contextual advertising is a viable option for advertisers wanting to reach consumers in the browsing stage of the buying cycle, and how the medium can also throw up surprising ways to educate users as to new products and services that they may not know existed.

He used the example of Bird Diapers appearing alongside pet related content, which has to go down as one of the most bizarre point-illustrations I’ve yet to see at a conference - but a very powerful one nonetheless!

I’m off to the US this afternoon to join colleagues and peers from all over the world at Search Engine Strategies San Jose.

It’s pretty much the biggest search conference there is, so with 4 days and 4 tracks of sessions there’ll be plenty to write about over the next week................so watch this space!

Erm.........does anyone know the way?

As promised last week, DigiTalia will attempt bring you a short, sharp intro into new, and nearly new sites, applications and digital marketing paraphernalia that have created some sort of a buzz on the web.

Some may have fairly apparent commercial use - others may just be downright quirky!

Which leads me nicely into talking about Twitter.com...

Obvious, the company that gave birth to Twitter in March 2006, say their goal is...

“ ...to create interesting things that matter to the world—and a great place for creative, smart people to work.”

Although creative and smart, I’m not sure Twitter matters to the whole world, but from their blog they have numerous stories where it has mattered greatly to some people.

In a nutshell - you sign up, tap in where you are or what you’re up to and you’re away!

Obviously if you want anyone to know your every movement you have to invite some friends to “follow” you, or you can choose to bare all to the web on the Public Timeline which updates every 4 minutes with all sorts of musings and gobbledygook from around the world.

Add your mobile number and instant messenger address and you can text or ping your whereabouts or what you’re thinking from just about anywhere.

Add it to your blog for stickiness and ubiquity too!

Even the guys at The Guardian and Sky News have jumped on it as a great way to get news or discussion out there via a hip distribution channel.

Nice little app – good for social networkers..........great for burglars!

Search Engine Strategies London 2008 sees Mike Grehan - A “Godfather” of search engine marketing in the UK - take the helm as chairperson and host.

In this interview by Lee Odden at TopRank's Online Marketing Blog, Mike gives his thoughts on the ever-changing search landscape, insight on how he thinks relationships between webmasters and search engines should be, and a hilarious diatribe on social networking sites.

Not for the faint hearted.......

Saw a great article in The Sunday Times yesterday encouraging the use of online data to drive research efforts when setting up a small business...

I had said last week that I was surprised that the Facebook/BNP row had got so much airtime in the mainstream press, especially the BBC, but this piece - Don’t start up without research – took me by surprise as well.

A great advocate for using tools like Google Trends, Microsoft’s demographic adLab tool and Overture’s (Yahoo Search Marketing!) keyword inventory widget, the article backs up what a lot of us have been trying to hammer home for a long while.

Online consumer activity, and especially search patterns, can give great insight into how offline businesses might fair or in which direction they should be pointing.

They can also demonstrate how offline advertising campaigns are doing or show gaps between the campaign’s aims and objectives and stark reality - as anyone who’s seen the famous “Bleach Case Study” are only too well aware...

Great to see this kind of advocacy of digital marketing in the Sunday papers...

Ever been in a meeting, at a conference, sitting at an awards ceremony or supping in the pub, and some bright spark’s mentioned something related to new media and you've not had the faintest idea what they’re on about?

As you nod enthusiastically, hoping to change topic as soon as you get a chance, you wonder if your eyes are giving away your apparently gargantuan ignorance on the subject.

Well DigiTales hopes to fill a gap or two with a weekly dose of DigiTalia – a short, sharp expose explaining the what, who, whys and wherefores currently taking hold in the digital media space.

It might be a new website, channel, ad product, widget or application. It might even be an old one with some hidden gem of history or quirky anecdote surrounding it.

So check back next week when we’ll take a look at Twitter.com....

Looking to go on holiday in October, I asked for some accommodation suggestions at a forum on Tripadvisor.com

One response caught my eye, not because of the advice, but because I noticed the guy had posted over TEN THOUSAND times to forums dedicated to just two places.

Keen to know more, I emailed him to ask what exactly led him to spend so much time giving advice to other travellers, and doing it up to FIVE times a day.

This is his reply....

"Regarding the frequency of my postings, you're not the only one who spends a large portion of their time working at a computer.

Dropping in on a couple of travel message boards are simply diversions...breaks from the regular grind. I don't have a water cooler or coffee machine in my office to get up and gossip around. As for why X and X, both are places that we love and have visited as often as we can and know a bit about....and have done a LOT of research on over the years in planning our trips.

A great deal of what I know now has come from others who knew more and were generous enough to share that knowledge with me. So I'm simply passing along what I've been fortunate enough to have learned from them and some of what I've learned from our own experiences....as a sort of repayment for generosity others have shown me.

As for any "social networking", while I recognize that for many, the internet is a form of social 'interaction', I see it mainly as an 'informational tool'. The only internet forums that I participate on are two for X and X...and then most usually only for the exchange of purpose-specific information. I don't usually 'chat”!

As for the number of posts credited to my screen name, this number is the cumulative total of several years of participation on these TA forums. If I must be “scored' for anything, I'd prefer it to be for the substance and quality of the information, advice and experience generated.....rather than a meaningless number.

As for what drives me to get involved, I know there are some who believe that the internet is just one big free-wheeling opportunity to exchange personal information, beliefs and feelings ...but I ain't one of 'em.

The fact is that given the relative anonymity of the medium, one never really knows who one is interacting with. The commonly accepted synonym for 'screen name' is 'alias', which says a lot about the nature of the medium in a single word.

So, for all you know, I could be a pudgy, lonely, 14 year old junior high school girl with under-developed breasts and acne....and you could be an in-patient with internet privileges, at a minimum-security, state mental health institution.”

When I’m out and about I always get questions about the validity of reviews and advice on such sites. Much of it is genuine and you can normally spot the “advertising” a mile off.

He has a good point about anonymity, although security around here is actually pretty good...

Just seen an ad for the mobile giant when I went to check the situation with the BNP.

As I said last week, technical solutions can always be applied, and in this case Facebook have simply taken the ad tags off any BNP profiles - so no ads at all!

Foot and mouth kept this row off the front pages today.

I couldn't quite believe the coverage it got on the BBC on Friday - News 24, their website and their mobile portal were all carrying the story.

BTW - When I checked the BNP's profile on Facebook yesterday, the only ad I could see was by Ultralase.

Was that not a little short sighted of them?

Spoke at a Marketing Society event last night on search and the future of search. One particular comment from the audience stood out...

...a guy suggested with Microsoft adCenter offering demographic targeting and Google now using a kind of behavioural algorithm to help advertisers reach their target audience, that consumers would find this kind of technology to be “creepy.”

When I talk to consumers about how we can target them, there is an initial reaction of concern, but when you explain that all these great services like search engines, email, instant messaging and rich portal content comes free because it’s ad-funded, the mood does change to one of acceptance.

As long as we’re responsible with any data, and communicate that it helps enrich the web and their internet experience, they do get it....

Have a nice weekend!

Oh! And thanks to Jon Myers from Latitude for helping out last night...

Every day my offline world is being physically attacked by a dreadful adware program...

In the 300 yards from our offices at Cardinal Place to Victoria Station I regularly have my personal space invaded by up to 12 viruses that pop up and block my path. They prevent me from navigating where I want to go and thrust their un-targeted, us-solicited messages in the form of paper, images and colourful ink at me, registering a disdainful frown when I respectfully decline.

Does anyone know of some add-in, tool-bar or widget that I can install to block such unwelcome advances?

In recent years the digital industry has gone a long way to make online advertising less intrusive, more targeted and better aligned to users interests and behaviour so how long before these newspapers catch up?