Google+ set to be important for SEO ranking

On June 28th 2011, Google released Google +, Google’s social platform- turning the search giant into an all-encompassing social network. Google +, which is 12 months in the making, is still in beta mode with only a selection of invites being issued so far.

Overview

There are currently 6 elements to Google + which include:

Google+ Circles: This is essentially a friends list which allows users to drag and drop into ‘categories’ ie Friends, Family, Work Friends Users cannot see which circle they’ve been added to, or what another users circles are.

Google+ Spark: Content sharing platform & ‘discovery’ engine- this relies on information from Google Search and Google +1 & allows users to easily search and share content.

Google+ Hangout: Video chat with ‘buddies’ or entire circles. Allows you to join circles and also view Youtube videos together

Google+ Instant Upload: Automatically uploads images and videos from your mobile to a private album with the option of sharing.

Google+ Huddle: Allows you to text individuals or groups.

Stream: Similar to Facebook news feed, user’s share and see what friends are sharing.

Other News

Google + launched, and immediately Google Realtime ended.

The Google/Twitter agreement expired after 2 years, meaning Google are not currently including Twitter feeds into their listings.

Google Realtime search (displaying twitter and facebook listings) came down altogether as Google are ‘exploring how to incorporate our recently launched Google+’.

Starcom POV & Recommendations

Google’s first true venture into social is in no doubt direct competition to Facebook as the two online giants compete for audience and page views.

The question is, are consumer’s interested in another social platform and will this hit critical mass? There is no doubt that Google+ is very slick, like most of Google’s products it is intuitive and has some great features which make it both easy to use and share. However, privacy may be a concern with automatic upload and ‘add’ features which are unlikely to sit well with all.

Users so far rate the most appealing feature as circles allowing them to easily segment their contacts, and ‘share’ only with those relevant to the content. We can see this encouraging greater interaction with business colleagues, extending usage beyond friends.

Does it provide enough enticement to warrant using both a Google+ and Facebook account? Not yet from what we can tell, although it’s too early to call while Google continue to innovate.

The biggest impact for advertiser’s at this stage will occur within organic rankings. Google will continue to use social signals in their ranking algorithm so expect to see Google+ having an impact. For advertiser’s who have been optimising Twitter feeds & finding success in tweets ranking organically, the impact of a change in Realtime search could be substantial and lead to a new direction in social search.

Starcom recommend advertiser’s add the +1 code to their websites. If Google+ takes off, then advertiser’s will need to encourage user’s to +1 their content, as they do ‘like’. So, without a Google & Facebook partnership in sight, this small button could indeed be important.

Written by Sally Phelps, Search Director – Starcom MediaVest Group.

How many Australians use Twitter search?

Zuji have been active on Twitter since October 2008 here, so they are a bit of a pioneer - their Australian twitter feed currently has 2,073 followers, which is pretty significant for a branded feed. Their product offering works well in the space, as they have regular e-tail 'events' that are newsworthy to travel minded followers. Who doesn't want to go on a holiday at any given moment?!

I can understand why, leveraging promoted tweets appealed (mumbrella). Their primary motivation would most likely have been to grow their follower base through the ability to appear to a broader base (using twitter promoted tweets/search). Direct actions through to a purchase would be a huge bonus I expect. Actually their primary motivation could have been PR?!

In reality, category based search volumes within the twitter platform are likely to be minuscule when overlaid with Australian filters (eg 8%* regular usage, filtered by the no. who use the twitter search function and then by those who search relevant keywords). With twitter charging on a CPE (cost per engagement - re-tweet, reply, click, favorite etc), sounds like a couple of bucks a day to me for most categories. Having said that, if you try setting up a campaign, the minimum option is $5k to $10k per month (advertising). How much are those CPEs?!

Like Zuji, my over-riding thought is, worth trialing if you already have a considerable social twitter base and are looking for growth. As a keyword strategy competing with more traditional search $, I'm in the not at this stage camp.


*Source: Sensis Social Media Report

Australias first officially endorsed online audience measurement announced

IAB Australia today announced The Nielsen Company as the sole preferred provider of online audience measurement in Australia. This follows an 8 month tender period, amongst five competitors (Colmar Brunton with Gemius, ComScore, The Nielsen Company, Roy Morgan Research with Effective Measure and Vizisense).

Whilst the sceptics may wonder what’s changed (Nielsen were already the unofficial providers used by most agencies in market), we see this as a timely and important step forward.

Digital audience measurement has long been flawed in Australia, with different planning tools offering either inflated or deflated numbers, due to methodology challenges. The overriding outcome of the official appointment will be improved accuracy of planning data, meaning our planners will be better equipped to assess site performance against our clients target audiences.
It is understood, Nielsen will use a hybrid methodology, favoring people based metrics as opposed to browser based. This is an important differentiator, as cookie deletion is a significant problem, when browser based methodologies are utilised. This has historically resulted in huge inflation of stats (great win for publishers but not accurate).

Challenges with people based metrics have previously existed around panel recruitment (consider that this requires your computer/s and other digital devices to be monitored 24/7). Recruiting work based panels has been particularly challenging. With the Nielsen announcement today centering on people-based metrics, we can only assume that this challenge has been over-come.

Other benefits associated with the new appointment include the ability to measure audiences across all digital platforms (extending to mobile, tablets etc). This likely will have been cost of entry, in an environment that is rapidly fragmenting device wise.

Finally, it’s been announced there will be improvements in our ability to compare digital numbers to other media, along with new capabilities in multi -media reach and frequency. Nielsen will have had significant advantage in this space off the back of their heritage in media research.

Changes to expect as a result of the Nielsen tender win:

• website statistics will improve in accuracy and numbers are likely to be higher than we currently estimate (as they extend to cover more devices and through work panel improvements)
• better targeting options (target audiences available via NetView are broad and lack flexibility)
• very importantly, we will move on from UBs (unique browsers) as an industry metric to people based numbers

In the coming weeks we will gain more granular information in relation to the panel make up. We will also be introduced to Nielsens new data release, which is to be know as 'Nielsen Online Ratings (hybrid)'. As this evolves, you can expect to see our team presenting you with more detailed implication's.

AdTech Melbourne, 2011 the low down

From David Trovell, Starcom Melbourne Strategy Director:

ICANN is about to change the internet forever, there are no digital gurus, Microsoft Kinect is the fastest selling consumer device in history and other things I learnt at Ad:Tech Melbourne. #atmelb

The day1 keynotes at AdTech Melbourne had thrown up some great content, could the rest of the conference match up? I hoped so seeing as I was one of the speakers!

Before I get to Day2 keynotes here are a few nuggets that caught my eye from other presentations.

• There are now over 208m domain names; the .com or .org world as we know it is nearly full. So from Dec 2011 get ready for shoes.nike, barina.car and fifa.football. That’s right, TLDs (Top Level Domain names) are opening up. If you are not preparing for this change get on it quick. More info at http://mashable.com/2011/03/28/new-era-top-level-domains/
• “Think Mobile First” was a key message from many speakers. When designing online experiences make them great on mobile first. ¼ of all internet traffic, 1/3 of Facebook use and ½ of all tweets are mobile; and by 2013, 93% of phones sold will be smartphones (up from 54% in 2010).
• Better access to video content looks set to massively increase the amount we view. In the 70’s the average US TV viewer watched 17 hours of video (TV) a week, for the last decade viewing has been stable at 35 hrs, in 3yrs this figure is expected to hit 50hrs per week!
• Australians are the fastest adopters of iPads in the world. 8% of homes have one already.
• Communities like GoMiso and GetGlue are making TV viewing more social; will this save ‘appointment to view’ TV? Certainly it’s a growing trend and will only get bigger with GoogleTV.

Day2 keynote presentations summed up the good and bad of Ad:Tech.

First up was the kind of presentation that I had most feared from AdTech; a social media expert who judged success by the number of likes on facebook. In fairness, Jesse Ringham, digital manager from Tate Gallery in London, did have some good examples of social media. I like the way Tate use guest editors of their FB page, and their rule of, “reward, don’t broadcast” is a wise one. But his myopic view of digital was at odds with most speakers who stressed the importance of judging digital based on real business goals. He can be summed up by the quote, “well everyone is on Twitter now so…”.

However, the day was saved by Haresh Khoobchandani, CMO of Microsoft Asia Pacific. Luckily I did not have to introduce him (!). Haresh was full of good quotes,
“In the future no one will believe your brand”. Already, 90% of people trust peer recommendation but only 14% trust advertising.
“the future is here, it’s just not widely distributed yet” – nice quote!
“there are no digital gurus, we are all just students learning everyday”
“social media should be a feature not a destination of marketing strategy”
“marketing has moved from communications to conversations”
“Kinect is the fastest selling consumer device in history, with 8m units sold in 2-months”
Haresh was an excellent speaker and to hear the CMO of Microsoft say that there are no digital gurus was quite refreshing. He also admitted to being nervous about speaking these days because of the rise instant feedback via Twitter.

We were up next (Shannon Curtis from Target, Jamie Silver from ClearLight Digital and I) and the topic we had been given was, “what should a digital strategy look like?” Our three different view points worked well, Shannon’s inside view of getting different functions to work together, Jamie’s practical guide to digital strategy and my broader view of how digital fits into communications strategy.

Opening with the line, “I don’t believe in digital” did open a few eyes, but closing with “digital is the oxygen of marketing” (stolen from John Sintras) meant I did not get lynched on the way out. Also, it was interesting to see which parts of my presentation attracted tweets.

Overall Ad:Tech’s first appearance in Melbourne was a good one, a broad range of topics and lots of good speakers (IE Media’s Justin Wilden was excellent) but Bonin Bough from Pepsi stole the day. One final quote from Bonin, “multi-tasking is as addictive as heroin”!

High time for real time print measurement

The world continues to develop at a breakneck speed and nowhere is this more true than marketing and advertising. Every day marketers and their agencies make communications decisions. The old days of long term planning and buying are well behind us. Ongoing planning and optimisation in real time is increasingly the order of the day, and many clients now employ marketing dashboards to analyse marketing initiatives in real time.

The print medium, particularly newspapers, should be well placed in such an environment. Never have people interacted more with the content generated by our major mastheads, and yet the only story marketers get to hear is that newspaper and magazine circulations continue to decline. Yes that may be true of the print only version, but is it true of total circulation and readership across both print and digital content? Unlikely.

Unfortunately, the global development of print metrics to meet the requirements of a real time world has been positively glacial. In Australia, I started the discussions as then head of the MFA some seven years ago. Fortunately we have had some significant movement since then, but there is still a way to go.

It must be said that many people are now keen to make our print measurement as relevant as possible, and I feel more confident that real change is possible now more than ever before. The ABC executive and committee are enthusiastic and willing. The AANA and MFA both have dedicated teams prepared to help. The Newspaper Works has already moved forward with The Readership Works which will provide competition in Australia for the first time in a generation through the successful tenderer Ipsos. And at a meeting last week with The Newspaper Works’ new Chairman Greg Hywood and the board seemed keen to take on the challenge of more frequent circulation data for major newspapers.

We have already seen the introduction of quarterly circulation audit data for major newspapers and weekly magazines. Last week, The Newspaper Works also announced that newspaper publishers will start to report Monday to Friday day of week sales as part of their quarterly audits from July; another step in the right direction. A framework for the reporting of all digital sales has also been developed and will hopefully be voted on favourably by the ABC members for adoption later this year.

What is required now is the final move to circulation data for each publication, whether daily, monthly or quarterly. There may well be technical and cost difficulties with such a move, but a road map must be created now. No one is keen to impose unreasonable costs on publishers, so perhaps a combination of audits and voluntary reporting, co-ordinated through the ABC, might provide an answer.

The magazine publishers though are hesitant. In addition to cost and technical concerns, they argue that cover information is sensitive and publishing sales data for each issue dilutes competitive advantage. But is this really an argument? Surely they must already have a reasonable idea of competitors’ sales through their own tracking mechanisms. And don’t advertisers deserve to know how much each issue is circulating? Further, publishers could leverage more frequent data and move to a more dynamic pricing model based around higher selling issues.

More frequent readership reporting is also warranted. It is a nonsense to be using six monthly data for publications that are sold daily and weekly. New digital methodologies should allow us to start moving towards a more useable interval such as monthly reporting, hopefully something that The Readership Works and Ipsos is thinking through in addition to the incumbent Morgan.

Arguably newspaper and magazine content is as dynamic now as it ever was. You only need to witness the huge appetite for news around the extraordinary number of recent world disasters. What a shame that the print industry has not been able to capitalise on this upswing in news interest with real time measurement data. Yes, it’s high time that print measurement got real time.

Written by John Sintras for afr.com and published 17.03.11

Why buy ad space when you can create it?

Pop band Weezer’s latest album, Hurley, launched earlier this week (Sept 14), and rather than simply buying ad space to promote the launch they have enlisted the help of ‘Youtube celebrities’ to help get the word out.

With the help of music distribution and marketing specialist DashGo, Weezer reached out to 75 popular YouTube creators and invited them to include the band in their videos.

“To facilitate this free-form taping, they set aside two days in a Los Angeles studio with instructions that read, “We’re up for just about anything that can be filmed in the studio. The finished clip will be yours to release and distribute on Sept. 14, 2010. […] It was then up to the YouTubers-whose channels have millions of subscribers and aggregated well over a billion total video views-to write and produce the segments with the band.” The creators were also encouraged to include copy which promoted the album release, but weren’t required to.
http://www.musicreview.co.za/2010/09/15/weezer-invades-youtube-on-hurley-release-date/

On Tuesdays YouTube regularly promotes ‘Music Tuesday’ on their homepage, allowing many of these videos to be promoted in front of a global audience of 24 million plus people in one day (Comscore, July 2010).

Weezer were able to capitalise on the built-in audience of these content creators (often in the hundreds of thousands) as well as the millions who visit youtube.com everyday. These videos will undoubtedly be shared around the net as the band continues to grow their connection with YouTube from their video for Pork and Beans which featured many YouTube stars and has generated 2 million plus views.

For Weezer, who are known for their quirkiness, this is a perfect fit for their fans who are more than likely already fans of the various YouTube channels who promoted the band. It also allows the band to reach new audiences as people seek out the videos.

For many, there is a grey area around blogger outreach and what constitutes as ‘cash for comment’. If you pick your audiences and channels correctly and are able to work collaboratively on the creative development, then these programs can work much more effectively than a standard media buy.

More Info on Weezer's Hurley launch:
USA Today
AdWeek Blog
Clickz Marketing News

There’s a cloud on the horizon, and it has a silver lining

There’s a cloud on the horizon, and it has a silver lining

Written by John Sintras for afr.com

I was lucky enough to visit Microsoft HQ in Seattle last month, where I had the rare opportunity to look under the bonnet of this transformational organisation. To say I was impressed by what I saw would be an understatement. I’ve been to the future and back - and it is incredible and reassuringly human.

Most people don’t immediately think of Microsoft as a human-centric organisation, and yet all the technology and development I saw is being developed against a very real understanding of human needs. There is a focus on enhancing the way we live, with access to faster and cheaper devices that will enable a better lifestyle and more personalised essential information and entertainment. And there is an interconnectedness of data and devices that is both breathtakingly exciting and sinister in its Big Brother-like scope.

This all comes together in the Microsoft ‘Home of the Future’, built to demonstrate likely technological advances that will be available to the average person in developed economies over next five to 10 years.

Interestingly, it doesn’t look like a set from The Jetsons. It seems like any modern home at first glance, but it comes alive with simple interaction from the residents.

At the heart of all is cloud computing and services, which have been around for years, but are rarely talked about in marketing circles. Simply put cloud computing refers to the “services and applications hosted on and accessed through the internet. The cloud can connect people to the experiences they want, need and love – anytime, anywhere and on any device”. Some examples of current cloud services from Microsoft include Hotmail, Bing, and XBOX Live.

The cloud is the next big phase of digital transformation, and ultimately all platforms, data and applications can live there, serviced by giant global data centres that negate the need to store information and applications on hard drives and servers in the home and office. Behavior and preferences will also live in the cloud, assuming you access each application with a consistent user ID across all platforms and devices. So it will be able to constantly learn about you and offer up tailored content and experiences wherever you are.

Imagine the following possibilities;
- Access to any of your data and content on any device, anywhere, anytime
- Gesture and voice-based activation for everything
- Microchips in everything you purchase, scanned in real time so that your pantry or office can be replenished automatically and your preferences remembered
- Health data, collected by watches or worn devices, downloaded to your health profile in real time and virtually connected to your medical professional network – medications can then be ordered virtually based on your daily results
- Your environments and entertainment preferences automatically adjusted when you enter rooms and places
- Ongoing optimization of your preferences which can be accessed by authorised people, partners, suppliers, etc;
- Cheap digital screens and projectors everywhere, embedded in everyday items such as light bulbs and paper that can be projected onto any surface
- Virtual reality applications for everything from shopping to arm chair travel

It all sounds a bit incredible and you might think it’s unlikely to happen in your lifetime. But when you see it demonstrated in the Microsoft Home of the Future, it seems natural and inevitable. In fact much of the technology has already been invented. Gesture activation, for example, will start to become commonplace with the launch of XBox Connect in November, and we are already seeing virtual reality and 3D applications.

The implications for marketing and advertising are huge. It’s the ultimate in CRM and loyalty programs - optimization in real time based on your behavioural patterns and preferences. This will offer the opportunity to communicate to specific individuals in market for specific things in real time, anywhere they are, supported by digital tags on every purchase that can create an inventory of purchases in the home or office. Scary? Definitely. Exciting? Absolutely! It will create new markets and new winners and losers. And it will happen faster than you think.

If you think the pace of change is going to slow down, think again. Get ready to embrace the cloud services marketing opportunity, it will be the next massive digital transformation that will affect the way we way we live, communicate, market, distribute and advertise products and services.