Education, education, education (part three...and final)

I’ve banged the drum in previous weeks about the importance of consumer education about behavioural advertising, and the IAB's recent research has highlighted the need for this.

Today the IAB has published a guide on behavioural advertising specifically for industry, our first step in helping educate the market about this practice (although you’ll be glad to know that this will be my last blog – for now - talking about education). The guide explains how behavioural advertising works, how it differs to other types of targeted advertising on the internet, its benefits to web publishers and advertisers, consumer attitudes as well as online privacy and industry good practice.

It may not make the Amazon bestsellers list (its free after all) but for anyone who wants to know a little more about behavioural advertising, this one’s for you. Enjoy!

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Game Changer

Er, did we all just miss something phenomenal? Hold your thoughts on iPhones and Twitter for a second, a number of the biggest leaps in media and technology in 2009 happened this month and it's tied to one thing: gaming. Let's recap for a second...

1. The biggest media launch in the world. EVER!

2. Massive audience

There are almost 12 million games consoles in the UK from this generation (Wii, XBox 360, PS3) with the ability to connect TVs to the internet in various ways. This is a large chunk of the population and it’s growing fast. My concern is that people that don’t play games don’t appreciate how much time is spent by people that do. Let's not forget the portable/mobile market either, with the Sony PSP and Nintendo DS handheld consoles and of course iPhone apps, the number of gaming devices is double at over 24 million. Interestingly, advertisers are creating very successful branded iPhone game apps too, like Dare's waterslide app for Barclays, now downloaded over 6.7 million times around the world since July.

3. On-demand video has ARRIVED on your TV

4. The first market to effectively tackle piracy

5. Online gaming is social media

Conclusions

Adverts around Computer Games

If it wasn’t already abundantly clear, I’m a technology addict. I’ve had a Wii and Xbox 360 for a couple of years now, and last week I was given a Playstation 3 for my birthday. I’m not the only person that loves games, millions of people spend hours every week playing them. Hours that are therefore taken away from online, watching TV, reading magazines, cinema etc etc. Traditionally these platforms haven’t been heavily used as an advertising platform but that has changed. While playing the Playstation 3, I came across a couple of interesting uses of computer games for advertising.

First was in the game WipEout HD which has short dynamic video adverts that play during the loading screens (dodgy, blurred photo below). I know this is nothing new and many other games do this, but this was the first time I’d seen them. I was particularly struck at how engaged I was during this 10 sec loading screen ad – it’s not like I can leave to make a cup of tea in that time, I have to sit and watch. Shame the only ad I’ve seen so far has been for the DVD of “Rocky Balboa”. Still…



The second thing I found interesting, albeit utterly flawed, was the recently released game Uncharted 2’s use of Twitter. In the game you can sync up your Twitter account so that it automatically updates your feed every time you make certain achievements. One of the aims, I guess, being to publicise the game’s release to all of your Twitter followers. While it was flexible, it is ultimately pointless and I’ll switch if off because it removes all personality from updates (plus, horror of horrors, it blocked me from my Twitter account).



There are lots of ways to use games for advertising and consoles have been online for years now. The potential however comes from advancements in integrating the gaming world with the online world. While the Uncharted 2 Twitter example is far from perfect, it’s a nice step toward a single ‘joined-up’ approach to platforms which developers can only improve on and marketers use to reach this hard to reach audience.

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Effects of social media on search

The relationship between search and social media is the subject I get asked the most about by advertisers and agencies at the moment. It’s a hugely complex area because both search and social media mean so many different things and work together in so many different ways.

To make matters worse, the last 18 months have seen radical developments in both. However, the two have an undeniably positive effect on each other and I believe that the secret to the most effective, integrated online campaigns lies at the heart of this relationship.

The IAB will be looking into this in far more detail in the future, but right now I wanted to share my own experience below and to gather some of yours. If you feel I’ve missed something, please email me or leave a comment below so that I can adapt it.

What is search and social media?

1. Search = a website where the primary function is to search content including video, image, blog articles etc (e.g. Bing, Google, Yahoo!)
2. Social media = a website or tool that allows for user interaction and content creation, whether that's a blog, forum, picture upload site, social network etc (e.g. blogs, forums, review sites, Facebook, Flickr, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube)
3. Social search = the search function on a social media website, e.g. Twitter search, Facebook search, Digg search.
   (NB: Digg, Technorati etc can be classified as search engines, but because their content is primarily user generated or user rated, for the purpose of this article, they are classified as social media)

Table showing the effects of social media on search

Explanation of the effects

1. Direct improvement on own website search rank (via links)
   Major social bookmarking sites and networks include ‘nofollow’ script which currently reduces the effect a link has to different degrees across each search engine. However, search engines still follow and record these links and of course there are many other benefits of receiving links from the sites, e.g. gaining traffic and raising visibility of an article to help bloggers pick it up. That said, blog articles tend not to have 'nofollow', so receiving a link within an actual blog article is currently the most effective direct use of social media for improving your own website's rank. The reason a blog, forum or review section on your own site can help is because of a technique known as 'pagerank sculpting' that allows you to raise the importance of your own pages - but this is an advanced and perhaps changing technique so I won't elaborate here! :)
   
   
2. Significantly improves reach in search
   While you can optimise your search campaign to target lots of relevant key terms, it’s not always possible to cover the thousands of key terms that attract smaller - but once combined equally important - amounts of traffic. This is known as the ‘long tail’ and where the power of Forums and Reviews created by users come into their own. Users can create thousands of new articles, allowing you to reach the thousands of search terms that may only attract one or two people each but that you'd otherwise have missed.
   
   
3. Improves brand visibility in search
   Pages of content that you run in social networks like Facebook, MySpace and YouTube are all part of your own web presence, they also tend to rank highly in search engines. Use this to your advantage to help control the top 10 search results for your key terms.
   
   
4. Includes visuals or special placement to help visibility in search
   Search engines now show more than just links and text results, they also show images, videos, stars for review scores and even author details. Some social media can help you make the most of these, e.g. it’s easier to include a video in Google’s results if it’s on a well optimised YouTube page, and once integrated, Twitter results may be separated out in a special part of the page in the same way that News and Blog articles are.
   
   
5. Improves control of brand reputation in search
   Linked to 2., by extending your web presence in search and social media using social media tools, it also means you have more control over your own reputation. This doesn’t mean you can control what people say about you online, it means you can attract comments to your own properties rather than on some random ‘hate’ forum, then you can learn from it and do something about it!
   
   
6. Drives significant traffic to your site without search
   It’s not all about search of course, social media can drive traffic to your website directly via links.
   
   
7. Extends brand presence into ‘social search’
   By conducting the specified social media activities highlighted with green in the table above, you can ensure your brand will appear in various social network searches, e.g. Twitter, Facebook etc.
   
   
8. Indirectly increase searches for brand or brand phrases
   You don’t always need a link, sometimes an interesting article or advert can spark a consumer to search for your brand, product or service in a search engine.This however is harder to track and measure in social media.
   

Conclusions… for now

This article is a whistle-stop tour of search and social media, trying to squeeze a very big subject into very few words. I’ve left a lot out here but I hope this has helped you think about the relationship between these two important marketing channels.

For me, the major breakthrough for advertisers will be the continued realisation that your web presence no longer means just your website. In fact, it’s interesting that actually, only links from other people’s blog articles will offer a significant direct improvement to your own website’s search ranking when talking about social media, while everything else is indirect word of mouth and branding.

However – and it’s a big ‘HOWEVER’ - by using social media in its many different forms, you can significantly increase the overall search ranking and visibility of your brand’s web presence in search engines in ways that no other media can.

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