Habitat’s Tehran branch – how not to use Twitter

I've been watching the way that the situation in Iran has been unfolding on Twitter with a mixture of surprise and confusion for some time now.

Yes I can see the huge importance of getting first hand reports out of the country and the vital role that new media has played in the debate - although I'm not sure I agree whole heartedly with Gordon Brown's comments that as a result, “you cannot have Rwanda again”.

What has most surprised me most though is the string of messages that started appearing over a week ago asking tweeters to turn their avatar green to show support for the people of Iran. Is this really helping? Why would I do this? What’s more, once I have turned my avatar green, do I keep it have to keep it green forever?

As a result of all this activity, #Iran and #iranelection have been top trending topics for the last week or so. Enter Habitat…

As the news broke that Habitat had started adding inappropriate hashtags to its sales offers, it started to become clear that we were now being presented with a great case study on how not to use Twitter.

The story of the intern who added inappropriate hashtags to Habitat offers (and has since been fired) will no doubt be told again and again over the coming months. But it also helps to highlight another Twitter issue that emerged earlier this week - namely that the micro-blogging site is proving to be very effective at sending traffic to media websites, but not online retailers.

This is clearly a challenge for all online retailers. As the new Woolworths online only store launches today it’ll be interesting to see whether they can make Twitter work for them. Just stick to picknmix hashtags – and steer clear of politics.

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‘Who cares about self-regulation’?

The recent release of the full Digital Britain report was incredibly important for the IAB in many ways – the fact it acknowledges the role of self-regulation, emerging advertising models and even welcomed our behavioural targeting Good Practice Principles.

However, there remain some in the industry who question this, (see in particular the comments here) and refuse to see a role for bodies that promote self-regulation such as the IAB and of course IASH. In my opinion, this is a hugely irresponsible view that when at its most extreme could actually thwart the growth of the industry at a time when the spotlight is well and truly on online, as a marketing medium.

As an industry of publishers, agencies and networks, we can sometimes forget where our main responsibility lies – with the brand advertisers.

In terms of IASH and network advertising , we want to protect these brands and prevent them from appearing against content that contains hate, indecency, obscenity, guns, illegal spyware and worse. IASH Members which comprises of Networks and Sales Houses, go through stringent audits to show that they comply with the IASH Code and do not deliver ads against such content. 

Without such processes in place, we run the risk of even stricter regulation, that begins to move out of our control, straight into the hands of policy makers

‘But it’s all about money, surely?’ some may argue… I doubt very much if any agency wishes to tell their clients that they had the opportunity to trade safely and securely but turned it down because of a few pence off the CPM.

The majority of Media Agencies understand the importance of self-regulation models such as IASH. They understand the lengths the Members go to in order to ensure they can trade safely. They also understand that what they are buying is transparent – they know that the ad they booked will appear against the type of content they have agreed to.  Perhaps this is why the model is being adopted in Germany, and the US.

It’s this transparency that needs to remain intact, and the industry needs to be united in this objective.

In my opinion this needs to be understood, and appreciated by ALL, as online advertising moves into this next, very critical stage.

Statsaholics Anonymous

For years I’ve known about my addiction to site stats. Watching that trend line fluctuate, hoping for an upward curve. Now I’m willing to step forward and come clean. I’m not alone with this affliction; the world is covered with web statsaholics. Alisa Bowman, Jason Jaeger and Geoffrey Golden being some of the brave souls to admit their problem.

It made me think, is search the new crack cocaine? Could search’s success be largely thanks to the human race’s inherent need to see a graph with growing trend lines that continuously look better than they did the week before. Take the below week from one of my sites:

Check out the peaks on that! They’re growing and getting bigger. But wait, a week later and an influx of traffic from a social network caused a mega spike:

Suddenly those peaky peaks seem crappy and the mega peak is what I’m after in future. It’s a continual battle to up your own game. Don't even get me started on Ebay auctions.

Has anyone been able to go cold turkey?

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Not Citizen Journalism... but what is Crowd Sourcing exactly? Who cares, it's great.

I am starting to get fed up with the MPs expenses scandal, I mean who hasn’t put in a dodgy expenses claim (though I suspect a moat and a duck house are two of the most unusual... even a bunch of creatives with a Cannes Lion in mind couldn’t come up with gems like that).  But one thing that has happened since the full (or at least partly full seeing as how the juiciest bits have been blacked out) list of expenses was released last week has been the Guardian launching a ‘crowd sourcing’ project asking members of the public to look over the volumes of expenses data released last week and report anything they think may be worthy of further investigation.

As the Guardian says on its website, there is nearly half a million thousand pages of data of which over 21,000 people have reviewed a third of these so far. The Guardian is asking people to review these and then report back anything that might be of interest which they can then look into further and start to build a big picture of what has been going on. 

I couldn’t help myself but have a sneak at my local MP. For my local member of parliament, a Tory peer no less, there are 292 pages of expenses that are available to view from 2005 onwards. Each page you look at asks you to classify the type of page it is by clicking the relevant button (a claim, a receipt, a cover page etc.) and you can mark it as whether it’s interesting and needs investigation, interesting but already known, or not worth investigating. It’s good fun, I highly recommend it, though I doubt I'll ever get any answers as to why he has to have a weekly railcard as well as a monthly one (especially as his constituency is a ten minute bus ride away from Westminster and you couldn’t travel there by rail even if you wanted to) and why on earth our taxes should be funding the wholly partisan Kensington & Chelsea Conservatives Foundation (primary aim to support and sustain Conservative values in the area, though probably not much of a stretch in that part of town) – shame on Sir Rifkind for his expenses.

This kind of thing is fantastic. There is no way that a Guardian journalist could sift through all of this quickly enough to pick out any headlines that the Telegraph hasn’t yet thought of.  I can imagine many ways in which it could be used. Environmental groups could go crazy for this kind of thing, as would shareholders of public companies. It’s a great way to get interested members of the public to wade through pages and pages of detail at no cost to the media owner. There may not yet be an obvious commercial application for this kind of involvement however as the issue would have to be wide enough to attract interest, and the subject matter would have to involve hundreds of thousands of documents to make it worthwhile asking for help on this scale.

No matter if a large amount of the 21,000 people who have so far done this may be members of opposing parties looking to do some dirt-slinging of their own, or even MPs wondering if they really have done something dodgy when seeing it in black and white from the public’s point of view (answer yes: all of this stuff looks dodgy to me!), this is a great exercise and well done to the Guardian for setting this up. I look forward to seeing what they do with the cases that have been reported. Hopefully  despite expenses claims fatigue, they will find some way to take these crowd sourcing results and produce something interesting and engaging for their readers to benefit from. Fantastic idea, and a great way of using the net and bringing people in to a big story. Another great use of online from the Guardian.

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A BBC licence fee for a digital age?

The Government – pioneered by the departing Communications Minister, Lord Carter – today unveiled its final Digital Britain report.

There is welcome acknowledgement of the contribution digital advertising – in particular targeted advertising - will make in helping to monetise online content.  The Government also attaches significant importance to self-regulation and education in promoting transparency and protecting internet users’ online privacy, supporting the IAB’s Good Practice Principles for behavioural advertising, as well as www.youronlinechoices.co.uk, the new portal to help educate users.  There is also encouraging news in the appointment of Martha Lane-Fox, one of the pioneers of digital commerce, as the Government’s digital inclusion champion.

But all eyes are on two specific proposals contained in the 238 page report which will alter the digital landscape in the years to come:

1. A 50 pence per month levy on all fixed copper and cable lines (but not mobile infrastructure) from 2010 to fund the rollout of next generation broadband.  According to Lord Carter that’s £6 per year per household, although low income households would be exempt.  The fund would raise between £150-175m a year, allowing next generation rollout to be complete by 2017, a timescale specifically criticised by the Conservative Culture Spokesperson, Jeremy Hunt.

2. Ring-fencing the BBC’s underspend for the so-called Digital Switchover Help Scheme (ie money the BBC receives to help vulnerable people switch to digital TV services - over and above its existing licence fee settlement) to help finance the delivery of regional news, other than that provided by the BBC.  This ‘Contained Contestable Element of the Licence Fee’ idea is not the so-called ‘top-slicing (to you and me that’s ‘sharing out’) of the BBC’s licence fee, as has been widely reported in the media.

Significantly, this second proposal fires the starting gun of the licence fee review (due in 2013) and the beginning of a wider discussion about how the BBC’s licence fee should apply (and in what form) in a digital age (eg we don’t pay the licence fee to access the BBC’s website or the iPlayer).  The report moots maintaining a ‘Contained Contestable Element’ of the licence fee after 2013 and, in his briefing to industry this afternoon, Carter did not rule out this money being used for (non-BBC) children’s content and programming. 

If there is to be a lasting legacy of this report then this is it.  The Government has effectively sounded the death knell on the BBC’s licence fee as we know it today and kicked-off the debate about how we fund public service content in a digital age.

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Have you implemented Facebook Connect yet?

Recently I wrote about the importance of Facebook Connect and how it will change the internet forever. Over the last month I’ve noticed more and more sites and online services implementing Facebook Connect and OpenID to their logins and site registrations. If you don’t know what these are, they basically allow users to login to your site using their Facebook, Google or Twitter accounts to name a few. By reducing the number of logins a user needs it solves one of the biggest usability issues the internet has had since it began: registration fatigue and forgetful memories.

A couple of recent big examples include Digg and Microsoft’s Xbox console using Facebook Connect to integrate user data into their services. It’s actually very simple to do, in my spare time I’ve been tinkering with it on my new blog, LoveClapham, and the API makes it all very straightforward for a developer to zip in and work their magic. Digg is one of the simplest yet best examples I’ve seen because it allows you to login to Digg in two steps using your Facebook account and then every time you Digg a webpage you can share it in your Facebook feed. This is a sensible and non-spammy method of promoting content within Facebook.

The benefits? Users hate registering every time they want to use a different site, this removes that hurdle increasing interaction and UGC. Users also tend to forget their logins if they don’t use a site very often, password reminders are ‘ok’ but they aren’t ‘good’ usability, this removes that problem too because people only have to remember one login. Then of course you have the benefits of promotion within the social networks. The negatives? You will be releasing certain amounts of data about your audience to organisations like Facebook and losing out on the ownership of those users, but you can still save additional demographic data and with the benefits it brings, Facebook Connect and OpenID are impossible to ignore.

It’s pretty obvious to me that by the end of the year the vast majority of websites will already have Facebook Connect integrated and the sites that haven’t yet added it will begin to suffer as the wave of users making use of it will be even less forgiving of additional logins. I’m sure most media owners will already be investigating this new technology so I won’t harp on any more about using it, but if you’ve seen some good examples, please share them in the below comments.

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Transparency, choice and education is the way forward for online privacy

A parliamentary body of MPs and Peers – the All Party Parliamentary Group on Communications – is to conduct an inquiry into internet traffic, including behavioural advertising and online privacy.  The Group asks whether the Government should intervene over behavioural advertising or whether it should leave it to users, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and websites.  The Group also asks whether there is a need for any new initiative to deal with online privacy.  The Group has sought ‘written evidence’ from interested parties and will be meeting with key stakeholders in mid-June.

The IAB has submitted a response to the Group specifically addressing these two questions.  You can read a copy of our response here.  Our response provides the Group with an introduction to behavioural advertising, how it works, how it differs to contextual and demographic online advertising, the different business models and the benefits to internet users, content producers and publishers, and advertisers. 

The IAB’s response argues that transparency, choice and education is the way forward for online privacy.  Its four key points are:
 
1. Government intervention over behavioural advertising services is not necessary at this time.  The current legal framework is sound and efforts should focus on transparency of what data are used and how and on securing user trust.

2. The parliamentary group should encourage self-regulatory initiatives to address privacy concerns relating behavioural advertising, in particular the IAB’s Good Practice Principles which seek to build greater transparency and user trust.

3. The UK Government should press for amendments to the Council of Europe’s draft Recommendation on ‘Profiling’ that seeks to extend the current EU data protection legal framework in areas such behavioural advertising, so that industry can have legal certainty and recommendations are not damaging to business.

4. The Group should welcome and support ongoing self-regulatory and educational efforts, rather than recommending a new approach or initiative on online privacy.

The IAB will be hoping to provide ‘oral evidence’ to the Group next month.  A final report is expected in the autumn.  

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The power of mobile

At the IAB we're always talking about mobile's ability to influence - our newly launched Mobile Handbook is a good example of this.

A recent example shows just how powerful the medium can be...

Last Sunday was the final day of the Scottish Premier League. Celtic were playing Hearts while Rangers were playing Dundee United. Midway through the first half, a huge roar rang out around Celtic Park as news spread of a goal for Dundee United (see the video below). This was particularly baffling for anyone watching the match in a pub equipped with screens showing both games simultaneously as the rumours of a goal against Rangers were completely unfounded.

So what happened?

It turns out that Rangers supporters are fans of mobile too and that the rumours were the result of something called “Operation Tango”.

According to Rangers supporters' forums, Operation Tango was a mass texting initiative which saw a group of Rangers supporters texting false information to their Celtic supporting friends. As a result of these text messages, Operation Tango managed to convince nearly 60,000 Celtic fans that they were in pole position to win the league.

Even as a Celtic fan I have to acknowledge that this was a top prank. Let's just hope they don't get to repeat it next season...

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Bing-bong - anyone home?!

Microsoft has unveiled its new search product, Bing, and no doubt search marketers and commentators around the world are creating as many puns as possible. The name Bing may seem a little unusual, but choosing this name certainly creates attention and hype.

Perhaps Microsoft is taking a lesson out of Nintendo’s book. Does anyone remember when Nintendo unveiled the name “Wii” (pronounced wee) for the home console? It had a similar reaction that created massive buzz and in the end, the name became memorable white noise because the product was of such high quality it spoke for itself.

What will be interesting now is whether Microsoft Live’s rebranding also introduces further improvements to the search product. According to Ashley Highfield, Microsoft’s Consumer Vice President, “Our search engine knows what it is you enter into that search box. If you enter Nikon D80, it will know that you are looking for a camera.” Otherwise known as semantic search, using technology that understands the meaning behind the text. Looking at the demo, the "decision engine" seems to become the world's biggest price comparison site too, among other features.

For marketers these could be interesting times indeed as Microsoft makes a major bid for a larger share of the search market, and if the semantic product is as powerful as it is claimed to be, it could turn the world of SEO on its head. Microsoft has gone on record that it intends to differentiate their search product from others like Google and Yahoo!, and with a multimillion pound marketing budget we’re all about to find out how.

In terms of Bing's introduction to the UK, I spoke to Microsoft advertising community manager Mel Carson to confirm what was happening, "Bing.com is a crucial part of Microsoft’s commitment to succeed in the search space. We’ve built a search experience which will help consumers find what they’re looking for faster and more intuitively. Bing was built to address the current frustration of internet users towards search results."

"With the same consumer-focus, we preferred to launch Bing.com as a Beta in the UK, so our London-based Search Technology Center (STC) could further enrich the global experience with more local input throughout, from the front end to the User Experience, not to mention the algorithm and the relevancy. The knock-on effect is that advertisers will connect with more engaged consumers who are even more likely to convert. The ROI from Microsoft adCenter is second to none, so with more users coming back time and time again that’s all the more opportunity to tap into our engaged and diverse audience."

My thoughts on the name “Bing”? I like it, but I like odd things.

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The demise of the music press

While music magazines have been struggling for a long time, the news last week that independent titles Plan B and The Knowledge were closing still came as a blow to the industry.

Plan B’s fifth anniversary issue, due out on 1st June, will be its last. The title was launched in 2004 by former Vox editor Everett True as an alternative to the mainstream music press and claims an unaudited circulation of 11,000. Despite this, publisher Frances Morgan was forced to call time on the title stating: “The current economic climate, combined with the situation of the music industry - to which, whether we like it or not, the fortunes of a commercial monthly music mag are inextricably linked - has made it ever harder for us to continue producing the magazine the way we want to.”

Meanwhile, the last issue of drum and bass magazine The Knowledge will be published on 12th June. After more than a decade in print the title is now focusing its energies online. In a statement to Press Gazette the editorial team said: “We've been busy building our new website for some months now and we were initially planning to run it alongside the magazine but the further down the road we've gone with the site, the more potential we have seen for the magazine online. There is so much more we can do and it makes the paper version seem so dated, so we have decided to move the magazine over to the web.”

The move online makes a lot of sense - especially for a title aimed at a web-savvy audience of drum and bass fans. But curiously as all this doom and gloom was happening, an alternative model for music publishing was unveiled by a fairly unlikely source. 

Book publisher Faber has joined together with Domino Records (home to the Arctic Monkeys, Four Tet, Franz Ferdinand, Tricky and others) to launch a twice yearly journal which promises “an opportunity for writers to stretch out and go off-map to share their thoughts and ideas, and a canvas for artists and photographers to exhibit beautiful, unusual and diverse works.”

Retailing at £12, the first issue will be launched on 24th June, will feature an extract from Nick Cave’s new novel The Death Of Bunny Munro and will be “backed by high spec production and design values, and showcased within lush, desirable packaging.”

As traditional music magazines continue to drop like flies then, these three examples illustrate that publishers are faced with a clear choice – close, go online, or go premium. So which option is the most sensible? Obviously we at the IAB would argue that investing in online is the best way to go – the example of NME’s continuing online expansion in the face of a 24.3 per cent drop in circulation year-on-year is a good case in point. Watch this space…

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The demise of the US press

There's been plenty of debate recently about the demise of the regional newspaper in the US. The Observer's Paul Harris wrote on the subject at the weekend, arguing that Philadelphia is likely to be the first US city to lose all of its daily papers.

I spent last week in Boston where I was stunned to see this headline from the Boston Herald on a news stand (see picture, right). Suprisingly enough Boston is also looking likely to lose all of its daily papers. With high journalistic standards like this, is this really such a surprise?

PS - just to explain - the headline does in fact relate to the Boston Celtics' defeat at the hands of the Orlando Magic which caused much mourning in the city.

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Why 27,586 people probably love Marks and Spencer a little bit more.

For a while now I’ve been trying to avoid Twitter like the plague.  Not because it offends me in any way but purely just to make a point, to myself, that I’m not the kind of person to be dragged along by the bandwagon, mile after mile,  knees furiously grazing, clothes ripping on the gravelly floor and the air filled with my cries of ‘but it’s cooooooool! Everyone is dooooing iiiiiiiiiit!’   

But alas, a certain gentleman has relentlessly captured my twittention (YES!), and that gentleman is Calvin Harris.  For those of you unfamiliar with his work, he’s a musician, had a few big hits in the UK including ‘Acceptable in the 80s’ which was my ringtone for a while and he recently released a single with Dizzee Rascal.  For those of you who are unfamiliar of the work of Dizzee Rascal we could be here all day... 

Calvin Harris has 27,586 followers, is incredibly funny and likes his food.  He also talks about M&S the WHOLE time, amongst other brands (simply because he loves food so much).   In fact, just yesterday he tweeted:  “Sainsbury's chicken + pasta salad is very rubbery I'm having a complete nightmare by the way”.  I actually started following him because a friend of mine said ‘you should follow Calvin Harris, he’s really funny and he loves Marks and Spencer’.  So I did, and over the past few weeks and have been entertained by his many musings, regularly aimed at one of Britain’s best loved food retailers...

Obviously Harris hasn’t been paid for any of this activity or influenced by the brand in any way, he’s just a fan and this activity is simply wonderful, organic word of mouth. But because he’s a fan, now I’m even more of a fan, and I walked an extra ten minutes yesterday to go to an M&S Food Hall as opposed to my local Tesco, probably because Calvin Harris inadvertently told me to, and for some reason I really fancied a 3 bean salad. 

Online traditionally hasn’t been a great mixing ground for celebrities and brands, with ad campaigns involving the rich, famous and iconic often being confined to the realms of big budget TV and print ads (or small budget ones, namely anything involving Leslie Ash).  But maybe now is THE time for the digital celebrity endorsement, and even better – social celebrity endorsement, the ultimate fickle product placement, instantly broadcast to many, more authentic and significantly cheaper than a six sheet poster featuring David Beckham in small pants.  

But it’s not just these subtle brand mentions, via our most-loved celebs that can grow brand affinity, it’s the way in which brands can react to it that can make all the difference.   Cadbury and HSBC aside (there’s plenty more case studies out there!)  a number of brands are monitoring online conversations or announcements and are responding in wonderful ways – including Cafe Nero which is a story I’ll save for another post later this week.  But if M&S wanted to really get with the diggerati, they’d be actively ‘listening’, and then acting if they really want to amplify that word of mouth... maybe start sending Calvin Harris free food, offer him a role in product development, and what the hell, even create a brand new sandwich called ‘The Calvin’ and enjoy even more great coverage from being associated with this rapidly rising UK star.    Sometimes, you should just milk it!  Not everything online has to be commercial, but it’s a lot more fun (for us) when it is.  And if it’s good, consumers don’t mind at all.

In my opinion every brand should have people dedicated to monitoring this type of online commentary, and it’s disappointing that not everybody does.  Or if they do, they’re certainly not doing a whole host about the internet chatter, particularly when it’s negative. Not only should you be listening and responding, but you should also be changing things, as a result of what real people (famous or ‘civilian’) are saying about you...  However, the fact remains is that if a famous person makes a statement about your brand, more people are likely to hear it and with social networking easy enough for even the simplest of celebs to use, this won’t be a voice amplifier that they’ll be willing to give up any time soon.   So Sainsbury’s – maybe think about making your pasta salad less rubbery, and Ribena – it’s a fair point, the cartons do taste better than the bottles. Not every status update or blog post will be relevant, but sometimes it makes sense to let people know you’ve heard them. And by the way, based on some extensive Twesearch (maybe that doesn’t work so well) Miley Cyrus likes Macdonalds milkshakes, in the past few days Katy Perry has moaned about T-mobile and Dita Vin Teese is currently using Twitter to heavily promote Cointreau.     

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Online lead generation is well sexy!

Ok, well maybe not in the traditional sense, but it’s a massive market, and growing all the time! Last week the IAB released its first guide to online lead generation, our first step into this important tool for digital marketers. My colleague Amit Kotecha runs the Lead Generation Taskforce responsible for the guide and discusses the background to the project below...

Amit: "Working at the IAB there is always a strong emphasis on alternative digital marketing methods and being the trade body for digital marketing we have to be masters of them all. But last year, when we were approached by some of the UK’s biggest lead generation companies, we were faced with an area that was totally new to us all.

When I started researching online lead generation a while ago I began to find a massive gap in the market for an easy to understand definition. There were various Wikipedia and dictionary definitions however I still was unable to understand the basics (how are leads generated, and what is the purpose of it?) From reading recent news articles, blogs and company profiles I found that some areas of OLG had fallen victim to bad press over the past year… some companies in the U.S. were fined in 2008 for deceiving consumers with ads and emails for 'free' gift offers and for not using data encryption. Most of what I found was either too generic or negative. Online lead generation had a low profile, an issue we have recently set out to remedy.

This low profile has been down to a few things. Online Lead Generation didn’t seem to have one, united voice. There are a lot of companies out there that seem to be shouting about what they do, however in the UK there has (up until now) been no collaboration. This has led to advertisers being slightly confused about what they all do, as each company seems to have different methods of collecting and delivering leads. The truth is, as advertisers begin to embrace online in their comms strategies, there is an attraction to use different methods to attract consumers, especially if those methods are accountable. This is precisely why online lead generation has become a topic of interest to the industry because its main focus is on accountable customer acquisition.

The IAB has recently developed an Online Lead Generation Taskforce, including all of the biggest players in the OLG industry, to try and solve this issue and give the industry the commendation that it truly deserves. The Taskforce has just launched a comprehensive white paper the topic, the first in our ‘Online Lead Generation Library’ series. This paper is aimed at advertisers to remove any remaining confusion about OLG. The paper defines the key terms, makes clear statements about the benefits, discusses processes, explains how to optimise the effectiveness of campaigns and finally discusses what advertisers need to do on their side to produce the best results.

With companies like Clash Media and Lead Point listed in the top 15 fastest growing digital media companies (GPBullhound, 2009) this is clearly growing into a massive industry, with such growth expected to continue. So although it may not be (technically) sexy, online lead generation is definitely something all of us in digital advertising should be excited about."

Google Options and Wolfram Alpha are significant, but for what reasons?

Google Options and WolframAlpha are two significant announcements from the search world this week… kinda.

Google Options

First up is Google Options which joins the ranks of images, maps, video, blogs and more channels for finding content. To clarify, I don’t think search is too complicated for consumers – consumers get it. What this post is referring to is the other side, the complexities that website owners now face.

While there is no point trying to fool the search engines, there are lots of legitimate technical improvements you can make to your website to enhance your natural search results. There are now so many techniques, it can be overwhelming for search marketers and developers, let alone people new to search, to even begin to understand. Good luck trying to get video content on your site to consistently rank highly.

The search engines do offer lots of help and of course there are agencies for larger companies, but what about the average Joe? Every company is so dependent on the search engines that they can’t ignore the ways search engines want your sites to be structured. For instance, to make the most of Google Options or Yahoo!’s Search Monkey you have to add another few lines of code to your site. It’s not hard, but it is another thing to do – another step to insuring you do best in search results.

It will be interesting to see if this trend continues or if the engines will find new ways to rank the best content. If you don’t want to wait, you can try your luck with the likes of Digg and StumbleUpon.

Wolfram Alpha

WolframAlpha is being labelled as a new search engine, but actually, it’s not a search engine at all. It’s a website with an internal search engine as its primary means of navigation that is used to calculate, offer information on stocks, shares, towns etc. As it says in the top right hand corner, WolframAlpha is a “Web resource”, an incredibly useful and usable website that places search at the forefront of accessing its content.

However, despite mislabelling as irritating as “web 2.0” from the media, it is an interesting shift in acknowledgement of the general public’s now inherent ability to see a box, type in it and expect to get something useful in return. The announcement should really be “here’s an amazing new website for people to use to access complicated and mind-bending information.”

All of the content and tools on WolframAlpha are produced and managed by professional employees of the company. Personally I see this as a much needed breath of fresh air from the barrage of Wiki sites that can’t guarantee the quality or accuracy of their content. Scientists and geeks the world over should be giggling with joy.

Complications

On the one hand we have search engines trying to index the world’s online content – a job they do amazingly well – and on the other we have a website that scraps all of the rubbish and presents a clear, professional way of displaying content. Both are in the same boat of figuring out how to deliver the most accurate and relevant information to the person tapping away at a keyboard.

What these two examples really highlight is the now oftentimes overwhelming technical barrier that keeps getting raised for website owners. Search engines introduce more tools for people to add to their sites, while sites like WolframAlpha highlight the mammoth task it actually takes to produce a professional site to rival the dirge of Wiki sites.

It’s a sign of the internet growing up, but is it also a sign of technical elitism?

This is definitely the week of mobile

For me this has been the most exciting week in mobile for some time. We unveiled, for the first time, ad spend figures measuring the size of the UK market, the results and the response have both been better than I think anyone expected and at last we also have a stake in the ground to measure mobile going forwards.

Advertising revenue grew by 99.2% in 2008 to £28.6m with an almost exactly 50/50 split between display and search. The fact mobile continued to grow, whilst every other media stuttered (baring online) is very encouraging. Obviously at £28.6m mobile is still a small medium, but the signs are encouraging. Ever quarter saw growth in '08, so even when the economy went pair shaped in H2, mobile still grew by 27.4%.

Why did mobile grow? As Mel from Microsoft blogged earlier, several reasons. Mobile internet usage grew for the first time in 3 years, due to better handsets, better content and clearer, cheaper, pricing. The effect of each of those has been massive, for example users with 'all you can eat' internet bundles are 340% more likely to use social networks daily on their phones. Also the advertising industry is slowly starting to take mobile seriously, agencies are starting to have dedicated mobile people / teams and clients are pushing for mobile to be included in briefs.

We also launched a new mobile section on our site this week, and we launched our new mobile advertising handbook written by our mobile council, which tells you everything you need to know about mobile advertising.

This week also saw Vodafone announce a range of exciting developments for mobile advertising across 18 countries, and Orange announced they had seen massive surge in mobile handset data usage, up 108% amongst a range of other increases in mobile usage.

So good times all round and a good week. Thankfully next week is looking good too! We've got our first mobile innovators award which should be a lot of fun. It's also heartening to think the rest of the weeks in 2009 will actually be exciting as mobile advertising continues its growth, something no other media is can say at the moment.