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Spark Something - Driving Search Demand... and Ignoring SEO

As companies become more and more comfortable with search as a marketing medium, we've seen increasing numbers of ATL (above the line, or TV, radio, press, outdoor or cinema) advertising campaigns utilising a search based call to action either instead of or in addition to a web address. The attraction of this approach is obvious; telling people what to search for is a lot more memorable than having them remember a web address - even a short "vanity URL" - and makes the marketing approach more interactive ("pull" rather than "push" marketing). Obviously this only works well if you can be sure of capturing as much of the resulting search traffic as possible. That means bidding for position using PPC and ranking naturally as well - something which is very easy given the long lead times that these ATL campaigns have and the (usually) uncompetitive nature of the terms in... Read full article

Experts Vs Crowds: The battle defining our relationship with information (Part 2)

Experts fighting back The current balance of power between crowds and experts hugely favours crowds, largely because the social media and networking movement of recent years has given the crowd the tools and mechanisms it needs to build efficient methods of collaboration and communication, and this has naturally been focused on the lowest common denominator. Experts absolutely have a role to play and now that the crowd has benefitted from practically all recent internet innovations, attention appears to have shifted towards providing the same for experts, essentially intentionally or unintentionally correcting the balance. This is predictably being advanced principally in the two fields of search media and social media. Within the realm of the search engines, today’s prevailing algorithms have focused on harnessing the crowd to determine where a site should rank in a search engine results page. Loosely, this works by looking at the number and quality of sites... Read full article

Twittle & Twing - Why Google and Bing need Twitter data.

First it was Microsoft, followed a day later by Google. At the end of last week both giants have signed deals with "micro blogging" phenomenon Twitter to reuse its vast repository of data for their own purposes. The terms of the deal aren’t known, but it probably represents the first time Twitter has managed to leverage its user base – around 5.1 million strong, if you go by publicly accessible profiles – as a major source of income. This has proved a stumbling block for other Social Media favourites such as YouTube and Facebook, but by acting as a single gathering point for the type of information that search engines can’t typically get at, Twitter has made itself extremely attractive to Google and Microsoft. Time Sensitive Queries Search engines exist in part to satisfy a need for what might be termed “static” search; informational or transactional searches where the user... Read full article

Experts Vs Crowds: The battle defining our relationship with information (Part 1)

Since time immemorial, information has been created and propagated by experts and crowds alike, each contributing to our collective store of knowledge, and therefore human development, in their own unique ways. However, experts and crowds aren’t necessarily happy bedfellows and the conflict between these two sources of knowledge and information is now being fought out online at an astonishing pace. This conflict is one of the driving forces in the Internet’s evolution and may in fact be the key determinant of our entire relationship with information going into the next decade. As the sources of most knowledge, experts and crowds are responsible for a lot of what’s good, but also a lot of what’s bad. Crowds for example have given us Amazon product ratings, Wikipedia, and a multitude of cultural and political movements harnessing the web. However, crowds have also been responsible for the persistence of irrational superstitions, financial borrowing... Read full article

Online ad spend has finally overtaken TV - It was bound to happen

This week saw widespread news coverage of the IAB Online Adspend Study, which found that spending on online advertising has finally overtaken TV adspend. It’s not surprising given the current economic climate. It’s certainly in keeping with the trend we have observed in working with our clients and the online market space this year. ROI is king in this environment. One of the fundamental differences between online and above the line [TV] activity is that online has the ability to track the entire process from beginning to end, whereas with TV it can be very difficult to understand the process from first impression/view to conversion - therefore not really knowing how much of an impact your advertising has had on the consumer. Using search as an example, it is possible to create a whole image of the consumer: who they are, their thought process when buying, the keywords they use,... Read full article