Media Week

Facebook Ads thinks I'm in Bristol for some reason, even when I've been in the US for two weeks!

But even so this guy called Yian has been advertising at me for days now!

Check out his site: http://www.yianthehandyman.co.uk

It's awesome for a small business:

- Pictures explaing what he can do

- A friendly and personable tone

- Easy "does what it says on the tin" navigation

- A video of him tiling too!

It's clean and simple and he's even got a Facebook page of which I think we should all become a fan!

Wish more small businesses would get online like Yian does!

I got a lot out of last week’s conference in San Jose. There was a huge amount of content. Anyone who was anyone from the search world, UK included, was there. The discussions and debates over the future of search and what kind of developments we will see in the coming years were fast and furious.

We send account managers on a rotation basis to attend these “get togethers” as it can be very limiting sitting in your office unaware of many of the other things that are going on in such a vibrant, fast-moving and ever-changing industry.

Aside from learning from the digerati who are mostly very generous with their advice, tips and tricks, very often on a 1-1 basis, I think what makes these conferences work is the amount of networking you can do.

If you’re an agency there are thousands of like minds who are only too willing to let you in on a few strategies. If you’re a tech vendor then there are thousands of potential customers who’ll not be backward in coming forward to either patronise you with their custom or let you know where your opportunities lie.

I thoroughly recommend you attend one of these events at least once a year and there are a load in the UK too so you don't have to travel – although sunny California more preferable to the Docklands right?

Next stop SMX London!

SES San Jose has been great so far!

The one take home I have after day one is that search is getting more and more complicated.

I’ve sat in on sessions on Universal Search, where all the search engines are starting to populate search results with video, newsfeeds, pictures and other stuff and Semantic Search where technology providers are trying to understand the meaning and context of the data on web pages in order to return much more relevant and intuitive results.

The conference speakers are really good at helping the delegates keep up with all this evolution.

By way of an antidote there are web analytics sessions as well that help marketers make sense of the diverse amount of data and take action.

The Search Engine Watch Blog has a great recap of day one so check it out and follow me on Twitter as too: http://twitter.com/MelCarson

.......according to The Time's Media Analysis on Friday.

Tell that to those savvy marketers who spent well over £2 billion last year and 57% of that on search marketing!

Having a pop at Google too eh? And how exactly do you research your articles?

Two steps forward with the mainstream media, three steps back!

I’m off to Seattle tonight and then San Jose for the 10th Anniversary Search Engine Strategies conference on Sunday.

Looking forward to catching up on all the latest news and views on the search industry at what is billed as the biggest search marketing conference ever.

I will of course be blogging for Media Week about some of the insight I gather, and I’ll also be Twittering, so follow me at http://twitter.com/MelCarson for my updates from a very sunny California.

If you’re going to be there then let me know and we can hook up over a beer or three!

With The Ashes less than a year away I hope our cousins from down under won't mind me expressing my mirth at a story from Australia about Google's Street View technology!

I've written here and here about the fact that Street View was coming under some fire from privacy watchdogs not happy that the public could become unwittingly caught with its pants down.

Seems this Australian reveller kept his pants on.......but only just!

Google have been good to their word about protecting privacy and removed the image now.

I'm still of the opinion that if you have nothing to hide - what's the problem?

Some bloggers blog to make money. They either get paid per post or are encouraging impressions on display ads on their pages or hoping someone clicks on their contextual ads – AdSense and the like...

Us Media Week Bloggers do it for nothing. After all it’s an honour to have been asked and an privilege to appear on your RSS readers and in your inboxes everyday.

My remit was to “collect stories and insight from the digital media space and brings them back down to earth...!”

Sometimes though, there’s nothing that takes my fancy to talk about or comment on! In the early days I’d struggle on a given day and stick up any old rubbish - maybe a quote or a link to someone else’s blog claiming they’d said something “interesting!”

I don’t do that anymore as I figured you’d notice I was flannelling.

For me it’s about writing good solid content when there is something I can add some value to.

So this blogging lark isn’t always easy.

Sometimes I simply have nothing to say........unless I have something to say about simply having nothing to say!

I think I’ll leave it there :-)

I got an email from the British Airways Executive Club last week telling me “The Real News About Terminal 5”!

Laden with “facts” about take-off times and average times through check-in and flight arrivals, I felt the tone a bit defensive.

We all know the opening of the multi-billion pound behemoth was a monumental ***-up and sorting out the problems would have taken time, but I’m not sure telling customers that “Terminal 5 is working” is the best way to restore confidence.

Personally, unless I’m flying on the business, it’s not how long I have to stand in line, or how quickly my bags turn up on the carousel that determines my choice of airline, it’s the price of the ticket. Air travel becoming more expensive, especially out of this country. When I see prices for flights booked in the US they’re very often considerably less than if booked in the UK – anyone know why that is?

Their campaign, both print and online, simply didn’t resonate with me, especially as I’ve had so much trouble with their service – video on demand system to be exact – I’ve been to Terminal 5 and it’s OK, but as I’ve said it’s not a deal-breaker when booking my ticket.

To add to their problems it transpires in a Sunday Times article that they got some of the facts wrong in their ads!

Richard Branson is also wading in as Virgin Atlantic is “expected to complain to the Advertising Standards Authority about the campaign. Virgin claims that BA is making misleading claims about the time taken to clear security at T5 and that the period over which it measures the punctuality of flights avoids the evening peak.”

BA commented, “we are so annoyed because we knew we had to be spot-on with the wording, but someone at the agency changed it. We should have picked it up.”

No kidding!
 

In Hitwise's July newsletter, its featured article talks about how visits to blogs and personal websites hit 1.9% of all internet activity in June.

Now that might not sound a lot, but the fact that the growth of blog traffic is outpacing that of "traditional" news sites is the main takeaway for me from the piece.

Over the last three years visits to blogs have grown 171% compared to 70% for news and media sites.

The newsletter reads, "Interestingly, blogs have a greater market share of visits in the UK than in the US. Blogs accounted for 1.09% of all Internet visits in Britain during May, but only 0.73% in the US."

Google's Blogger platform is the most popular platform with an awful lot of traffic going to The BBC and The Guardian blog networks.

So why is this?

Well I think there are a number of factors at play here:

- Sites like Brand Republic and Media Week have embraced the medium realising there's a place for both community driven as well as traditional "reporting" of events and issues.

- Blogging is immediate. Something happens and it can be live on a blog within seconds. No editorial process needed. News and views are being pumped out like sausages!

- Search plays a huge part. Because there are so many blogs, blog posts are appearing more and more in search results. This Google search for information on Tradedoubler's acquisition of The Search Works shows my post from this blog just below their own press releases. Another post on Google's Best Practice Funding also appears prominently.

- People see blogging as an outlet for creative thought and, in some cases, egotism. In this day and age of reality TV, how more realistic can you get than bearing your soul on line where millions can read your musings.

Do you read blogs? Do you write for a blog?

If so................why?

I like the Money Section of The Sunday Times. I’m always a bit nosey about the financial affairs of the “celebrities” they interview on the back page, but also love to read about the customer service faux pas that crop up on the second page. I’m always amazed how banks and building societies “lose” people's money or how old folk suddenly decide to get around to finding out how many pounds, shillings and pence are left in a building society account that they last paid into 60 years ago.

Yesterday it was Intelligent Finance who got a bit of a shoeing for asking a customer why they wanted to withdraw a load of cash from their savings. Staff at the bank murmured something about money laundering monitoring but as it turns out it is a marketing ploy. If their marketing team know you’re spending cash on an extension to your home for instance, they can tailor and target you with other financial products that might "just so happen" to fit in with your new circumstances.

Clever stuff but you don’t actually have to tell them diddly squat!

Made me think about behavioural targeting on the web. Similar kind of thing?

Just think how online advertising could be targeted if we could cross reference a user with their bank statements and financial records!

Although I fear I would be served with far too many ads for beer and tickets to international cricket matches as well as.....erm....credit cards!

Yesterday I got an email with video through from some digital marketing folks in the US who had held a speed conferences to get people up to speed with online advertising, widgets, social media etc.

Each speaker had just FIVE minutes to present on their given topic using timed Powerpoint, so they didn't have a clicker, and were cut off if they went over.

Actually no one did go over their time because they had had to rehearse to save them the embarrassment of getting caught short.

I thought it was an excellent way to get information across quickly and succinctly. Too often we go to conferences and people have 45  minutes to drone on about stuff they could well get across in 15 minutes.

The other thing about this mini conference was it left more time to have breakout groups where people could probe the speaker further, asking questions that related to their challenges rather than having to adapt the speaker's examples to their own business-issues.

Who thinks Media Week should hold some mini-speed conferences on digital marketing? :-)