The web has been growing at an amazing speed since it was first publically available – between 2005 and March 2011 the number of web users has doubled with a total number of more than two billion world wide, according to Internet World Stats with Europe being responsible for 22.7% of those users.

In the past two decades the web has evolved and the world has changed alongside it.  News travels faster than ever, with events being reported on in real time. People now have access to a platform to share their voice to vent frustrations or share their experiences. Politics have been forced to become more transparent and social interactions have been more varied and far-reaching.

I recently spent a long weekend in a reception black spot and for the first time in a long time, I got to experience life without web access.  It got me thinking about how much web access enriches our lives and how much we take it for granted every day.

Every morning when I wake up, I check the news sites as I have my morning cup of coffee – being able to read up on the world news without having to leave your duvet is a luxury I can’t imagine having to give up!

From a business sense, the web has thrown open a global market creating countless jobs throughout the world and given small business owners the opportunity to get their product or service in front of an ever expanding audience. Every business owner knows the importance of ensuring they have an online presence and are maximizing on the opportunities being afforded to companies through digital marketing.

The web has become a part of our everyday lives – something we access at home, on the move, on our phones and on TV. It’s changed the way we communicate and has been a key factor in shaping modern society and the global economy.

Even though it’s changed so much from what it first looked like, the web is still very much in the early stages and still evolving! So here’s to the next twenty years!

How do you think the web has changed? Please leave your comments below!

Their website is also really simple, fun to use and the steps are easy too. All users have to do is go online:

http://www.kaiserchiefs.com/album/create

There are 20 songs to choose from so simply follow the instructions and listen to each song. Once you have your top ten, then ‘ plug-in’ the audio jacks to the chosen songs in the order you want them. You can then move on to the album artwork where you drag and move shapes around the screen until you are happy with the cover.

Finally you pay the moderate £7.50 and download. What could be easier?!

The band hopes this innovative technique will discourage fans from downloading the album for free. You can even earn some money from this scheme by recommending your album creation to friends and every one you sell, you will receive £1!

Any one out there fancy being a record label affiliate?! If anyone has tried it, please leave your comments!

Well, at the moment it’s a multimedia search engine that’s very much in its infancy, using information and images from Wikipedia, Panoramio and Flickr. It has been designed as a postmodern way of presenting information – putting aside the typical text based knowledge resources to bring you a truly unique experience. It’s been in production for some time and was first showcased to the world last year, finally being released to the public in an alpha stage in January 2011.

How do you use it?

You enter a keyword or two on the home page and it will give you a list of best match results.

You choose the result that best matches your query, then sit back with the volume up and listen to a futuristic computer woman tell you everything ‘she’ knows about your query, while simultaneously showing you a visual presentation of related images.

Once you have received the information and have listened to it, you can view other related terms or forward your findings to friends via Facebook, Twitter or email. Furthermore, it gives you the ability to embed the search on your own website, like so:

The Future of Qwiki

To make a quick judgement about Qwiki in its current stage would be very naïve.  At the moment it’s hard to look past the fact that all it does is read out Wikipedia to you. We have to look beyond that and think about the potential of the idea. Would it be better to have a search engine that can gather all the information on the internet for you, and give it back in a more stimulating way? The simple answer is yes. However, the question is can they do it?

The current founders and backers of Qwiki have enough collective power and knowledge to drive Qwiki rather far. The biggest among them being Eduardo Saverin (Facebook co-founder), Jawed Karim (YouTube co-founder) and Louis Monier (Alta Vista co-founder) – the latter of which recently departed the project.

However, I can’t quite shake the feeling that in order to become one of the ultimate hubs of knowledge, they’re either going to need to partner with someone, or they’re going to need to be taken over completely. Brad McCarty of The Next Web shares my sentiment, believing that Qwiki is ripe for the picking for a company like Microsoft – the perfect companion to their already blossoming visually dynamic search engine, Bing.

So, give it a try and see what you think!

Geocaching is a high tech treasure hunt played using a GPS device. You are given coordinates and you have to find hidden containers called geocaches. You then share your experiences online.

The Geo Art Cache project is a series of trails created by artists across North Yorkshire. It aims to encourage people to explore the region and engage with new art interventions that have been placed along the way.

‘Hunter Gatherer’ caches will appear at different times throughout the summer. Once you find a cache you’ll be asked to text your colour, and you will get a password for a film about a creature which is made from the responses gathered from all the hunters. The Hunter Gatherer caches use sound, colour and text to gather information from the hunters.

‘Where Spheres Intersect Prize Series’ is a series of caches; visit eight of them to collect clues to a secret ninth cache. You can also claim parts of a limited-edition artist’s book that will be completed by finding the secret cache. Other caches will appear on the site throughout the summer.

Some of the caches have related iPhone apps and if you have a smart phone, the boxes contain QR codes to link to the website. You can also just take a picture with a camera and email it in.

The site also encourages people to set up art caches of their own and they will put the cache details on the site for people to find.

So grab a compass and a GPS and register on http://www.geocaching.com/ to take part!

The approach of summer has no doubt encouraged enthusiastic “geocachers” to embrace the outdoors and enjoy the sunshine, but what else lies behind the popularity of this worldwide phenomenon?

The magic of geocaching for me is that it’s going on everywhere around us. In fact, if you weren’t aware of the sensation before reading this, you’d be forgiven for walking past a cache without even realising. I heard about it through a friend – a friend who proudly showed-off the cheap-as-chips plastic bracelet on her wrist (her recent geocache treasure) as if it were a Tiffany exclusive. I want a taste of that child-like enthusiasm, I thought.

Geocaching, also known as Groundspeak, forms its base in its website – http://www.geocaching.com/ – where geocaches are registered and players can share their experiences online. Only when I took a look at the website did I realise just how big its community is. At the time of writing, there are 1,353,666 active geocaches around the world, and more than five million geocaches worldwide. A search facility is available on the site, which enables you to search for the nearest geocache in your location. Alternatively, you can search for a GC Code if you have a specific geocache in mind.

There’s a geocache for everyone

The first geocache was hidden back in 2000, after the US Department of Defence stopped scrambling signals and permitted members of the general public to pinpoint longitude and latitude locations. It was originally designed for experienced GPS holders with a love of the great outdoors, but has since expanded and is now enjoyed by people of all age groups and interests.

Adventure-seekers across the globe can choose from a diverse range of geocache trails, each with its own difficulty and terrain rating. Some can be technical and physically challenging, while others are much easier and are great for kids. Most of us want to keep (or in my case, get…) fit and healthy, and geocaching definitely taps into this. Anyone can get creative and make their own geocache, placing it wherever they like, as long as they register it on the website.

Caches come in a range of shapes and sizes, and some contain clues or a puzzle to get to the next one. Through doing a bit of research, I came across some brilliant caches. Some were hidden in home-made rocks, others up trees, while others were so small they could only be accessed using a pair of tweezers. At a minimum, players are expected to write about their experience in the logbook inside the cache, as well as leaving something of equal or greater value of anything they take from the container. A ‘trackable’ Travel Bug® can be attached to an item, which is then transferred from cache to cache by geocachers. The tracker is etched with a unique code which the finder can enter into the website to log its travels.

Here’s a little video from the movie Splinterheads to help show you what all the fuss is about: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FxrMY91jJU

A cult trend?

Geocaching offers a refreshing cocktail of the great outdoors mixed with state-of-the-art technology. What makes it particularly unique is its ability to offer members of the public an escape from their computers, televisions and video games, without completely prising them away from their beloved gadgets. But how much staying power does it actually have?

In my opinion, geocaching does have scope for development given the type of technology it is based on, and it quite clearly boasts a league of dedicated followers, a cult following of sorts. Despite this, critics claim that this new phenomenon is simply a one-off novelty, rather than the new favourite hobby of most of its player.

Bearing all this in mind, it is easy to see where this hype has come from, even if geocaching does end up being relatively short-lived – I fully intend to give it a go myself.

Have you discovered any hidden treasures? If so, please leave your comments!

From a working farm in Wimpole, Cambridgeshire, 10,000 people will be taking control of a 1200 acre. Throughout the year, subscribers will be asked to vote on farming decisions, including what crops to grow, what animals to buy and rear, and new enterprises. The winning choices will then be put into action by farm manager Richard Morris.

To help people decide on issues, there will be online discussions including live web chats from farming experts and National Trust tenant farmers.

The project aims to show people more of the realities of farming and how easily a good year can become unprofitable. It also hopes to provide more information about where our food actually comes from and the wider impacts of the farm on our environment and wildlife.

The first vote will go live on Thursday, 26 May 2011. To take part in the experiment you need to pay an annual subscription fee of £30 to help cover the experiment’s costs.

http://www.my-farm.org.uk/

Who Are Mumsnet you ask?

According to their site, “Mumsnet was conceived in early 2000 by Justine Roberts, a sports journalist, after a disastrous ‘family-friendly’ holiday with her one-year-old twins.

Justine found herself wishing, along with all the other disgruntled poolside parents, that she’d known about how un-child friendly this resort was prior to shelling out any dosh. She thought the internet would be a perfect place to swap this kind of info and roped in Carrie Longton, a TV producer and friend from antenatal class, to help set up a website where parents and parents-to-be could share their know-how on the net.”

I’ll be honest with you…as a 24-year-old, single, male (yes ladies!), I’m not exactly the Mumsnet target demographic, and I hadn’t heard of Mumsnet before I came across them while using our social media monitoring for a client.

Mumsnet is a parenting advice website by mums for mums, with an on-site community of more than 600,000 registered users and attracts 25,000 posts per day. Mumsnet also has more than 11,000 Twitter Followers and 6,000 Facebook Fans. Whilst these are impressive numbers in their own right, it could be said that Mumsnet haven’t fully grasped social media just yet but when they do, they will develop a huge community.

Campaigns

Apart from having a highly developed and engaged on-site community, Mumsnet has become well known for their campaigns which create awareness of issues they are passionate about. A quick look at the campaign section of the forum shows the wide range of issues raised and how passionate the ‘Mumsnetters’ are about these issues.

Let Girls Be Girls

In early 2010, Mumsnet began running a ‘Let Girls Be Girls’ campaign, which aimed to get retailers to stop selling products aimed at young girls which ‘play upon, emphasise or exploit their sexuality.’ Basically, Mumsnet want retailers to stop selling products to children which aren’t befitting of their age and let children grow up naturally.

This campaign has been a big success with many large retailers including Tesco, M&S, John Lewis and Next backing the campaign. However, the campaign is ongoing as many retailers are still to sign up and provocative products are still being added to stores all the time.

Lad’s Mags Campaign

On the back of the success of the Child’s Play campaign, Mumsnet decided to extend the ‘Let Girls Be Girls’ campaign to target lad’s mags and how they are displayed in shops. Mumsnet asked retailers to remove lad’s mags and their sexual imagery out of the sight of children, such as onto the top shelf, which when I was younger had been reserved for ‘adult’ magazines or to place these magazines behind ‘modesty covers.’ Mumsnet wrote to all major news retailers, including supermarkets, asking for them to sign up to the campaign.

Whilst not being a parent, I fully agree with the stance of Mumsnet. I always remember those awkward moments when my mam saw me reading my older brother’s copies of FHM, and I quickly put them down and did something else whilst nothing was said. I’m sure she felt the same.

Mumsnet has had great support from the retailers with this campaign. Sainsbury’s, Morrisons, Waitrose, BP, ASDA, Co-op and Tesco have also agreed to the request of Mumsnet. I’m sure if you haven’t already noticed, you will the next time you visit the news stand when you do your next weekly shop.

Whilst the campaign was targeted at lad’s mags and their sexual imagery of women, should the campaign be extended to include fitness magazines which show images of topless men?

I’d love to hear your views on Mumsnet and their campaigns.

Are there any other campaigns that you’d like to see Mumsnet take up or is there anyone else doing something similar to this?

Any suggestions on how Mumsnet could improve how they campaigning? Better use of social media?

In our own experience, digital marketing activity continues to be the focus of 2011 – and with the amount of content available publically, it’s hard for traditional agencies to argue with this fact. The spotlight (in particular) seems to be on social media and mobile advertising.

Digital marketing budgets are up from last year. The recent Econsultancy Budgets Report states that 72% of companies are increasing their digital marketing budgets this year. Of this 72%, the majority of companies are increasing digital budgets by a whopping 30% since 2010.

There is also a trend in the growth of usage of digital channels. The appeal here is because of the measurability and increasing effectiveness of digital channels for marketing departments. As an agency, we are seeing more reliance for agencies like ourselves to provide this measurement for clients, as the complexity of digital marketing, especially search, continues to grow.

Despite this vast increase in digital marketing spend, it does seem that marketing departments still investing in offline media (for now…)!

Clients are becoming more dependent on digital software such as analytics software for tracking purposes. This will provide a better understanding of the target audience or ‘community’ – where they’re going & what they’re doing, and typical search habits. This goes hand in hand with an increase in spend on technology, such as content management systems, CRM and analytics packages.

The Econsultancy report suggests that social media, corporate websites and SEO are some of the channels that will take the bulk of digital budgets. Spend in each of these channels has risen since last year.

In terms of the resource for agencies themselves, this means we’ll see a big push in recruitment to provide for this extra, (which indeed we are!). Epiphany have grown by 40% year on year due to bigger demand from clients.

Obviously I would love to hear your opinions on your own marketing budgets, and if this reflects your spend this year – feel free to comment below.

An elderly chap wandering around bookstores in search of Fly Fishing by J. R. Hartley. “It’s rather old,” he tells a shop keeper, as his search keeps drawing blanks. Upon arriving home disappointed, his daughter suggests he try looking in the Yellow Pages. After ringing up a shop and finding a copy of the illusive book, he asks if he can reserve it giving his name as ‘J R Hartley,’ revealing he was looking for his own book. The joy on his face at finding his book left viewers with a warm fuzzy feeling and the advert went down in folklore.

After catching the back end of this Day V Lately character, I utilised the greatest invention of the last 10 years – Sky Plus – to rewind and watch the ad from the start.

Yellow pages have rebooted an old classic advert for the digital age! Same concept – a chap wanders from record store to record store searching for a vinyl called Pulse and Thunder by Day V Lately. After being rebuffed in numerous shops, he chips in with ‘It’s very old..1992 I think,’ (the start of the golden age of house music). He arrives home disappointed to be greeted by his daughter who says, ‘Never mind Dad. Have a look on the Yell iPhone app.’ He subsequently finds a shop that has a copy and when leaving his name to reserve it – you guessed it – he is Day V Lately.

My first reaction was to smile, as it brought back nostalgic memories of my youth trying to understand the ‘J R Hartley’ ad, and having it explained to me by my Dad. My second reaction was one of curiosity as the 90’s house fan in me enjoyed the teaser section of Pulse & Thunder faded into the advert, so I opened up my laptop and realised the extent of this advertising campaign. Fundamentally, the old concept of paper directories such as Thompson Local and Yellow Pages has been gradually dying out as people looking for various services are now drawn to Google. They are then presented with local and place listings on a live map. Why would you need a half a foot thick book to find your nearest pizza shop, when you can Google it on your smart phone or laptop? However, Yell are trying to drag themselves into the digital age with their iPhone app, supported by Day V Lately’s own Twitter page. He is, judging by his tweets, amazed that his track is now high up in the iTunes dance charts. Supported by the YouTube channels playing ‘Pulse & Thunder,’ the viral aspect of this video is now seeing it rise to 40,000+ views. I have to hold my hands up and admit while he’s no Frankie Knuckles, Day V Lately’s track is decent and I found myself listening to it on YouTube then buying it on iTunes.

So I think the whole concept has worked in a sense. I was led round the marketing merry-go-round across various channels. However, while there was an honesty and purity to the ‘J R Hartley’ ad, this one smacks a touch of a Converse All-Stars wearing marketing bod over engineering it slightly. Besides if Mr. Lately was that keen to track down his old vinyl masterpiece, he should have just Googled ‘pulse & thunder, and ‘vinyl.’ He could have then bought it from the top organic listing www.discogs.com, and saved himself mild embarrassment at being met with blank faces at record stores, and his daughter’s iPhone battery. I suppose it would have made a slightly less interesting advert however…

In 2011 Asos are now much more than an online retailer. They launched their own fashion magazine which they post directly to customers in 2007 (Daisy Lowe’s on this month’s cover). They also have an online community and a marketplace which combines blogs with eBay-style selling. Add to this the launch of Asos mobile last year and in media terms, the presence of Asos appears near all-encompassing.

Asos are a brand who are adept at making social media work for them; over Christmas and New Year Asos customers eagerly awaited flash sale announcements released via Twitter and dutifully retweeted the ads for their friend’s attention. At the end of January Asos took their social media engagement one step further by turning their Facebook page into an online shop and allowing tie-ins on customers’ Facebook and Twitter updates so that they can let their friends know what they’ve been buying.

Ecommerce director James Hart is quoted by Marketing Week as saying: “After search, Facebook is the single biggest referrer of traffic to our site and is very important to us because it enables us to talk to our customers directly.”

So how is this new selling platform likely to perform? Asos know their customers use social media – you can already ‘like’ products on the existing retail site and as James Hart says after search – where Asos incidentally perform very well, Facebook is the single biggest referrer of traffic to the online store. Tweens to twenty-somethings across the nation post photos of themselves in new fashion purchases on their Facebook pages and a tie-in updating friends on purchases fast-forwards this process – although it does take away some of the fun.

In terms of buying directly through Facebook, other existing Facebook stores have a reputation of being clunky and slow so in some ways this move may seem to be an odd choice for the brand. With Asos sales up 23 per cent in the three months to December it’s clear Asos already have a strong selling platform with their online store. The new Facebook store operates independently of this original platform and as such the experience is fairly limited for customers who can access the retailer’s full product range but can’t access the full array of content and ecommerce which is on the original site.

While it is convenient for those who may already be on the social network to use – there is at the moment no real reason to buy through the Facebook store instead of the shinier, fuller online store. This is where Asos should be looking to apply their social media experience to maximum use by giving more incentives to their Facebook customers to shop on the network and in turn promote the brand for them through updates on purchases.  It will be very interesting to see what Asos produce on this front as the store moves forwards, particularly as the brand continues to remain app-focussed with plans to launch on both the iPhone and iPad this year.

(Photo: www.playgroup.com)

YouTube are trying to get users to engage with advertising again by giving them more control over the ads they watch. With their new TrueView video ads, users will have the option to skip ads after five seconds if they don’t want to watch the rest.

The benefit for advertisers is that they only pay for the advert if someone watches the whole ad. They can also view Insight data to see which keywords/audiences perform best and which of their adverts are most popular. Although advertisers could lose money if no one decides to watch their ads.

TrueView has two ad formats available, InStream and InSlate. InStream plays as a pre-or mid-roll against short- or long-form content and can be skipped after five seconds if the user chooses. The advertiser only pays for an InStream ad if the user watches the complete ad, or more than 30 seconds of it. InSlate ads play against long-form video content and the user gets the choice to choose which advert they would like to watch or to view a regular commercial break. Advertisers are charged when someone selects their ad to view.

So if an advertiser doesn’t grab your attention, you can just move on. It will be interesting to see if this leads to a few more creative adverts being made.

http://www.youtube.com/t/advertising_trueview

When I was in my teens I always turned to HMV and Waterstones for solid Christmas gift ideas as a book for Mum and CD for Dad were safe and easy bets. I still buy those kinds of gifts around Christmas time and this year was no exception however, Mum got a Kindle with £40 worth of electronic Amazon vouchers and Dad got electronic iTunes vouchers. So where did it all go wrong and what can other high street brands learn from the this.

These two brands were market leaders and occupied a position that meant they were ideally placed to dominate online retail and strengthen their grip on the market, but like so many large brands they failed to change quickly or intelligently enough to embrace shifting consumer behaviour.

Amazon has clearly stolen the hearts and minds of book readers in the UK. It wasn’t that they just started selling things online but they set out with the remit to constantly push the barriers of book selling. Firstly in online sales, then rapid delivery, then community reviews, then on demand book printing, then marketplace and more recently the Kindle. This progression shows the mindset of the Amazon executive team and is something that almost passed Waterstones by entirely.

In the early days they failed to offer online shopping. I remember struggling to find a book I wanted on Amazon and so I went across to the Waterstones site only to find that they had done some sort of partnership deal with Amazon to offer ordering through their site! I almost fell off my chair. But this didn’t mean the game was up, they still had and have a huge customer base and a high street presence and therefore opportunity for engagement, that Amazon simply cannot compete with. So with this huge advantage why could Waterstones still not react to this new e-challenge? I don’t know but in my opinion the strategy and fundamental thinking is wrong even to this day. Let’s look at what a quick appraisal of the Waterstones site reveals:

• Ebooks: they half-heartedly backed the Sony e-reader. In store promotion was minimal and normally behind cabinets, how do I engage with the technology like that? Kindle was not huge when they first launched this and they had a captive audience in store for whom they could have brought the ebook concept to life. Set up a large in store area where people can use secured e-readers to download, browse and read all the books available to purchase. Make it an experience and get promotional staff pushing people into that area. Make it a product I can’t leave store without because it will fundamentally change my life! Do an exclusive deal with Sony and subsidise the cost of the ereader so its a “no-brainer” purchase. Amazon did not have the luxury of putting the Kindle in peoples hands, it is a blind purchase, so how did they lose?
• Gift cards: as far as I can tell and I looked hard, there is no e-gift card functionality on the Waterstones site. Something which is ludicrous considering shifting consumer behaviour and would have given them an edge over Amazon. A gift card that is easy to purchase and can be used online and in store, again, another clear advantage over Amazon but it fails to be implemented. Unforgivable when you consider its sister Company HMV has e-gift cards!
• Community: there is no forum, blog or community of any kind on the Waterstones site. This giant brand that we loved and cherished is not allowing us to tell them what we want, discuss books, share experiences and deepen our loyalty to the brand. A huge mistake.
• Waterstones Marketplace: a great idea. Used, out of print and rare books available online. A great service that again fails to leverage the community side of online and underlines their misplaced strategy. When I first saw it, I thought “this must be like the eBay of used books” but again, this functionality does not exist here. Users cannot upload their own poducts for sale and there is no commenting, forum or community based functionality.

The biggest reason for me that Waterstones is struggling is that the decision makers either do not understand how online behaviour is changing the market or they are not allowed to embrace it. Building an online community where people can recommend, discuss, sell, share and engage with books and the brand could and would fundamentally change the face of Waterstones. Although Amazon has a large lead in this area, Waterstones still has the high street edge in terms of engagement. Amazon will always be restricted by the limitations of online experience in terms of how they build loyalty and bring things to life for their customers. It would not be difficult for Waterstones to match 80% of Amazons online functionality and then build an integrated on and offline community which would bring them back to the forefront of the consumers minds.

I could go into detail about how this thinking is not being implemented within HMV also but I dont want it to look like this is a character assassination because it is meant to be constructive. However, you only have to look at initiatives like pure.hmv.com (a service for music enthusiasts to get concert tickets and digital music) designed to build customer loyalty which fails to implement an online community and has about 5 testimonials on the entire site. HMV should be engaging online communities and from its position in the market should have spawned ideas like MySpace or Spotify or at very least be doing deals to help monetise these kinds of services because again with their high street presence and customer base, they are ideally placed to exploit these technological advances.

To sum up, you only have to think about what drives the offline world of books and music; recommendations, discussion and sharing. In short, community. It is not difficult to see how this can be translated to the online world and then integrated in store to offer a market leading proposition. Woolworths, WH Smiths, HMV and Waterstones alike, must have found it so easy to generate sales in the past. The strategy was simple, in the words of Kevin Costner “build it and they will come”. It was that easy because there was little choice and information could not be exchanged so quickly and easily. These brands show there fundamental misunderstanding of community through their failure to embrace it in store over the years. Virgin became so popular back when they launched because they built places where you could hang out on bean bags and listen to and talk about music, they were more like coffee shops than music stores. That ethos hasn’t changed, people want to hang out with friends and discuss which album/artist is the next big thing or which book they just cant put down. So therefore what should they do? well they need to modify their strategy to match my words “build a community online and they will come”!

About the Author:

Shane Quigley is the CEO of Epiphany Solutions Ltd and is responsible for the strategic direction of the business.

December is proving to be a super busy month for everyone at Epiphany.

• It was back to business as normal after the Christmas party, with some final preparation for a couple of really prominent new business pitches. With the recent arrival of our R&D team we are equipped to showcase a bigger skill set than ever, so fingers crossed we get some good news to end the year.

For those of you who know us as a classic search marketing agency, you can see an example of the creative stuff we can also do on home page of the Epiphany website – www.epiphanysolutions.co.uk.  Follow the READ MORE link to find out what we’ve been up to in 2010, and take a few minutes to appreciate the fun infographic – we love it!

• Seasonality does some crazy things to campaigns around the holiday season and the teams are keenly working to capitalise on/counteract the respective peaks/troughs we anticipate across the majority of projects.  We are helping our retail clients in particular to take advantage of the busiest month in their calendar, with targeted PPC campaigns aimed at clearing specific stock and generating revenue.

• In the big Epiphany re-shuffle the directors have sadly been demoted to the basement cupboard from their penthouse office. With the continued increase in head count, we have all been given new homes in 23 The Calls which will allow us to expand further in 2011.  I’m pleased to report that the Client Services team are now in the top spot on the top floor, along with Sales and Marketing, so expect even more motivation and enthusiasm from us.  As they say, ‘a change is as good as a rest’.

• We will be working up to 1pm on Friday 24 December and returning in full force on Tuesday 4 January, however we will be keeping an eye on your accounts over the holiday.  If you have an emergency please contact Client Services on cs@epiphanysolutions.co.uk and we will be in touch asap to resolve any issues.

That’s all folks.  More to come in 2011….

There are set to be massive changes in the world of online marketing in 2011, with many ‘game changers’ all on the horizon. Brands are going to have to pay attention to these changes if they want to retain the level of online visibility and conversion generation they currently hold.

So without further ado, let’s get out the crystal ball and delve into digital marketing in 2011.

Mobile Web & Device Diversification

Google has estimated that by 2011 mobile searches will be equal to the amount of desktop searches in 2007. That statistic might be a little optimistic for the UK alone, but there is no denying the fact that mobile web usage will continue to grow strongly during 2011. Next year will be when everyone has to take the mobile web and mobile search seriously if they want to (at least) maintain their current level of online exposure and conversions.

Increased mobile usage will change how users search through text, voice, and images; what they search (shorter searches, mobile/location-related searches), and how they view the content when they find it (limited screen real estate). Mobile websites, mobile SEO and mobile conversation rate optimisation will be essential for those wishing to prosper in this ‘new’ environment. Of course we’re not just talking smartphones here. The growth of tablets opens another whole new area of optimisation possibilities:

• Have you got mobile strategy?
• Have you got device strategy?

‘Appification’

The advantages that software-based Apps offer, both publishers and users, in terms of delivering and consuming content, and functionality, in an ever increasingly diverse device market, will ensure their strong growth during 2011.

In addition, the continued growth of cloud computing (websites as applications) means that for many, the line between what a website is and what a software application is will blur. Eventually many users may not know (or care!) the difference between the two.

It is my own personal belief that the continued growth of Apps will eventually lead to them being considered as a direct competitor to traditional websites.

Apps are already a Universal search option within Google Mobile Search, and this functionality will eventually make its way into the traditional desktop search results.  Have you got App Strategy?

Internet TV

Next year might not quite be when TV search explodes, but Google will look to grow this channel strongly during 2011. Early adopters here in TV SEO might gain themselves a march on their competitors.

Will we eventually see blended TV results in Google like we do with Google Mobile? How about blended tablet results? If Google is committed to delivering users the most relevant content for the device, then this would seem like a logical route to take.

Social Media Marketing

In 2010, both Google and Bing confirmed that Tweets and (possibly) other social media factors directly influence the traditional search engine ranking positions.

This comes as no real surprise. Search engines in many ways are a mirror of the environment in which they find themselves. Why would they not use this data to deliver ‘better’ results?

If your company is not present on Facebook and Twitter, and is having its content and URLs passed around on these and other networks, then your brand is in decline in the eyes of Google. These kind of social signals (and user ‘sentiments’) are going to become increasingly more important to search engines in assessing what is an authority website in any niche.

A well thought out social media strategy can lead to a number of pre-defined outcomes: the creation of brand champions, the generation of incoming links (traditional & social) to your website, and good reviews (for Google Places optimisation). Social Media Marketing, or Social Media Optimisation (SMO), increasingly becomes an integral part of everyone’s overall marketing strategy, as the lines between disciplines blur. During 2011 we are going to see much more campaign integration, not just with SEO and social media, but through utilising traditional off-line marketing to help drive both SEO and social media campaigns….. Have you got a Social Media Strategy?

Personalisation

Personalised results in search engines will continue to grow and become an important part of the listings, forcing organisations to think more intelligently about how to gain exposure. Local optimisation could play a big part for organisations in addressing this issue.

Personalisation won’t just be limited to the search engines though. Expect to see personalisation across more and more websites as universal logins (ie Facebook Connect) continue to proliferate. Users will get used to this and come to expect it. If you’re not making product suggestions based on your user’s social graph, expect your competitors to steal a march on you.

Personalisation in display advertising will also continue to grow strongly. After proving itself in 2010, this method of banner advertising will go truly main stream in 2011.

Web Analytics & Conversion Rate Optimisation

It’s been important to us as a specialist search agency, for Conversion Rate Optimisation to continue to grow strongly across the sector in 2011. As mentioned, this becomes even more important in an ever growing divergent device market. Expect new screen sizes, new interfaces, and new user needs.

I expect Facebook to ramp up their web analytics offerings, possibly even buying out a current supplier to quickly improve their offerings. No doubt Google will have some interesting things up their sleeve over the coming year, watch this space…. Have you got CRO?

Local, Location, & Places

If you are reading this post, no doubt you are probably aware of Google Places and the impact it’s had on the search results screen real estate.

Local search optimisation in Google Places, traditional SERPs and mobile search may well become crucial for many organisations during 2011…. Have you got local?

Semantic Data & the Rise of the Aggregator

The inclusion of semantic data on your own website will become increasingly important for websites wanting to send the right kind of signals to the search engines, in terms of their locality and topic niche. Specifically, all brands should look to include Micro formats and implement Facebook’s Open ID during 2011 (if they haven’t already). Appearing on other sites that also publish semantic data that Google utilises will also be important for many brands.

The Semantic Web and Web 3.0 are just around the corner. To stay visible in this new environment/‘platform’, brands need to start publishing semantic data today.

Those that adopt the use of semantic data across the board today may very well end up enjoying a significant advantage over their competitors, in terms of search engine visibility in the future.

The availability of all this new data and personalisation (from social graphs such as Facebook) will see a plethora of aggregator websites popping up. Some focused on specific niches (shoes perhaps) with others delivering completely unique content to each and every visitor that views the site.

Many predict user’s behaviour will change and switch away from the search engine to more targeted semantic aggregators. Think Amazon and its listing of others products, but on a much bigger scale across the web.

Visibility in the major engines alone may no longer be enough…. Have you got semantic data?

Battle of the Giants (to the death, with laser beams)

Google vs. Facebook, Google vs. Apple, Google vs. Microsoft, Google and Twitter vs. Facebook and Bing/Yahoo.

Whichever way you look at it, the battle to become the dominant player in the consumer computing industry, never mind just the web or just the most popular website/search engine, will intensify. This is a fight that crosses over devices, operating websites, search engines, and third party websites.

The ultimate prize here is us and our eyeballs, and the advertising dollars those eyeballs bring. This topic is huge and spans every aspect of the online world and consumers computing industry. There is however, a few key things we should look out for in 2011.

In the US, a combination of Bing & Yahoo could finally deliver a real challenge to the Google behemoth, clearing and increasing the importance of those engine(s) in terms of visibility.

If Facebook is (even partially) successful in ‘replacing the web,’ as it is currently attempting to do, we could expect to see search behaviours change significantly. Facebook already has Bing there ready and waiting to deliver search results…

Online Marketing takes a bigger bite of the budget
One thing every organisation can expect to do in 2011 is switch more of their marketing budget into digital marketing. The new opportunities, the conversions, the consumers, and more importantly the better ROI, are all there. Digital marketing will undoubtedly continue to grow.

If you’ve got this far into the post, I would love to hear your thoughts on what you think is going to be big in digital marketing in 2011. Fill out the little form below!!

However whilst more companies are putting a large tick in the online visibility check box,  far fewer companies are accurately measuring the profitability of their online campaigns.

Both regular and accurate measurement are crucial as this allows companies to plan and react to opportunities. However, according to a recent Trade Intelligence report, only 18% of companies are measuring on a daily or weekly basis, and just 4% of respondents are able to look at fully allocated spend when assessing the profitability of marketing activity.  Other statistics reveal that 25% measure return on advertising spend, 40% review cost per customer acquisition (CPA) and 19% measure cost per order. Most alarming is that 8% don’t analyse these metrics at all.

Therefore whilst optimising your online visibility is one piece of the two-piece Visibility/Profitability online marketing puzzle, being able to effectively measure, track and make the best strategic decisions and improvements from the data is the essential second piece. Many companies recognise the need for this, but have an internal resource and/or specific skill -set challenge, and this is why they’re outsourcing this area of their business to companies that have recognised industry accreditations such as Google’s’ Analytics Qualification.

Ultimately the best return on investment from your online marketing activities will always be derived from both optimised Visibility and optimised Profitability.

More information can be found at: http://www.epiphanysolutions.co.uk/services/google-analytics/

Baloney. Social Media? What the hell is social media? Another buzz word banded around amongst marketing execs wearing lumberjack shirts, skinny jeans and non prescription wayfarer glasses? Or a tangible useable marketing tool that can build brand equity and drive relevant traffic to a business?

Working at the sharp end of a fast paced agency such as Epiphany I get to meet a wide variety of marketing directors and brand managers from companies ranging from SMEs to blue chips. Inevitably our conversations will come on to the topic of ‘social media’, regardless of the industry – construction, finance, retail – they bring it up more out of obligation rather than actual desire or need.

Often the statement ‘yeah we do social media’ is followed up by ‘we’ve set up a Twitter account and facebook group’ and then ‘so that’s a tick in that box’. Clearly this is the wrong way to approach a marketing channel when it can be such a valuable way to communicate with your target demographic.

A successful social media strategy is one that allows a business to successfully and naturally interact with potential consumers. An informative interesting blog/forum on your site that acts as a resource of knowledge, advice and user generated content attracts lots of traffic to your site of the right nature and helps naturally build links. If you’re a DIY company selling tools have a blog that talks about home improvements, different techniques, people who hire tools can comment on the best way to use them. If you’re a mortgage lender talk about the house buying process, advice for first time buyers – make it easy to follow yet useful. You know your business, your agency doesn’t. Your agency should guide you in how you should be presenting yourself but you need to provide your own voice and relate to the people who acquire your products/services.

Once you build an online voice then you can start coordinating with other mediums such as Facebook and Twitter. You can’t fake social media – it has to be done organically or it simply won’t work. A lot of agencies talk the talk baffling clients with ridiculous buzz words; we help in a constructive manner helping brands use their own voice and words to reach out to consumers. After all who knows your business better than you? Social media need not be drowned in gobbledegook, cut through the waffle and maximise the returns from an avenue that can yield a very high ROI.

We’ve taken a look to see who the big players are when it comes to product brands and their fan pages.

10 – iPod

Followers: 6,208,636

Starting in at number 10 is the iPod. Every other person seems to have either an iPod or iPhone with an app for everything these days so the number of followers isn’t surprising.

The fan page is a simple one with updates on the most recent / popular apps released within iTunes.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/iPod/22592560949

9 – Victoria’s Secret Pink

Followers: 6,371,586

The sexy chic fashion of pyjamas and underwear designer keeps users involved though latest launches of clothes lines. Victoria’s Secret Pink also provide occasional competitions as well as the “Send Happy” messages which allows you to send bright happy messages to Facebook friends to make them feel… happy!

One for the girls I think.

http://www.facebook.com/vspink

8 – Pringles

Followers: 6,388,402

Pringles offer a range of engaging features. During the world cup they provided plenty of coverage plus football related YouTube videos. And remember the Pringoooals competition? Wayne Rooney, Didier Drogba, Cesc Fabrigas, Steven Gerrard – all backed by big name sporting brands. Peter Crouch decides to break the mould and back the “once you pop, you can’t stop” brand.

More recent initiatives include “Pringles Conga” allowing you add your face to a pringle, give it a dancing move and add it to a conga line. Also the “Overshare” button another new feature telling your friends they are posting too many dull or over-detailed posts on Facebook.

http://www.facebook.com/Pringles

7 – Windows Live Messenger

Followers: 7,370,285

MSN Messenger is still going strong it seems and with this fan page users can gain plenty of insight into the software.

There isn’t anything special about this fan page yet the Facebook integration within MSN messenger as well as useful tips, videos and expression packs on the fan page itself draw in the crowds.

http://www.facebook.com/WindowsLiveMessenger

6 – iTunes

Followers: 7,603,121

Aaah, iTunes. The revolutionary software product that revolutionised the revolution of downloadable music.

The page provides the latest chart toppers of songs, apps, movies and TV shows. There is plenty to do as well with frequent polls (obviously tied in with their promotions), pick your playlist (and share it with friends), Celebrity Podcasts as well as the latest promotional offers on the wall.

http://www.facebook.com/iTunes

5 – Converse All Star

Followers: 8,362,729

Yes a shoe brand has made it into the top 5 of the Facebook Fan pages for brand products. Personally I would have thought Adidas would be here with all their celebrity endorsements and funky features but hey, there you are.

The Converse All Star fan page has an very active user “Discussion” section along with the opportunity to upload photos of your very own Converse All Stars (Do I call them sneakers, trainers? I’m obviously not that fashionable).

http://www.facebook.com/ConverseAllStar

4 – Red Bull

Followers: 10,839,264

So does the Red Bull fan page give you wings? Well the first thing that stands out is their cheeky attempt to get users to instantly “Like” them with their in-your-face image.

Red Bull do a good job of their fan page actually with plenty of events and competitions. They also offer a games section which also includes a number where users can call and leave messages for other users to hear.

Red Bull also endorse a fair few sports and with that they have plenty of athletes. The athletes Twitter feeds have been directly imported to Facebook which you can filter by typical sporting categories.

Finally, Red Bull TV is streamed directly from the fan page allowing you to take a closer look at the Red Bull Athletes in all their sporting glory.

http://www.facebook.com/redbull

3 – Skittles

Followers: 12,080,857

Skittles are fully aware of the amount of fans they have (they even call them a legion!) and they were one of the first in the social media game. Anyone remember when they made the Skittles.com homepage a Twitter search for the term Skittles?

The main focus of this fan page is the “Mob the Rainbow” campaign. Every so often an event is set up. The most recent being the gate crash of an 85 year old woman’s party with photos, comments and videos. Another, way back on Valentine’s day, flooded a Parking Attendant with thousands of Valentine Cards. Random I know and it’s quirky enough to drag in the followers.

http://www.facebook.com/skittles

2 – Oreo

Followers: 12,805,065

The runner up is Oreo – you know, that biscuits you twist, lick and then dunk in milk? Sounds a bit Marmite to me.

The first thing that stands out is the “World’s Fan of the Week” giving a member of the public – ANYWHERE in the world – the opportunity to slap the mug in front of 12million facebook fans via a simple photo upload and weekly selection process.

The company are also successful at asking their fans engaging question and posts such as “Describe the taste of an Oreo in only one word…” as well as providing messages from athletes and giving out free Oreo related recipe tips.

http://www.facebook.com/oreo

1 – Coca Cola

Followers: 16,182,394

The leading product Brand is the world’s favourite drink, Coca Cola. The fan page is growing at an increasing rate and breaking away from the pack.

The fan page is easily the most active of the all the previous brands. Fronted by Dusty and Michael – the ‘creators’ of the fan page – through the power of YouTube, there are plenty of snappy and humorous videos to watch.

I’m not going to go into depth about all the features yet worth a mention is the way they present their custom pages. Each one is heavily branded yet well presented and feels as if it gives something to the all types of viewers, whether they want to upload photos and videos, send Coca Cola based messages to each other via the Polar Bear or check out the events and apps Coca Cola also offer.

http://www.facebook.com/coca-cola

*All follower data correct as of 4^th November 2010

WPP, one of the largest advertising groups in the world, if not the largest, has over the last two years reported revenue falls varying between 5-10%, lost 14000 employees and had to put a ban on hiring new people. I think this really represents what has been happening to businesses in the UK on a macro level.

Well you will be glad to know that they have reported a 3.1% growth in the first quarter of 2010. We can use this as a measure to suggest that businesses are spending on advertising again. We may well find throughout 2011, business will be even better than usual if the current trends continue.

I decided to ask the internet for tips on how to do that and found an extremely informative video on how to get excellent results on shirts in just 3 minutes.

http://community.tmlewin.co.uk/look-sharp/videos/iron-a-shirt

Up until now my best time is around 10 minutes (unbelievably slow still I know) and with the aid of this video I actually managed to get all five done within half an hour.

What’s more important, to the point of people who retail online, is that I went on to buy two shirts that I really liked the look of.  This handy video was by far one of the better guides to ironing and wasn’t pushing the brand too blatantly, but the fact that it really helped me out definitely improved my affection toward the brand.

Now if there was a company looking to show me how to vacuum the house in less than three minutes, I might really start spending big.

However, in the run up to its release, there will be plenty of opportunities to become engaged in the magic.  From trailers and interviews, to merchandising and the premiere, young wannabe wizards will be able to let their imaginations run wild and get so excited about the film you’d think they saw a Boggart.

There is a fantastic opportunity for marketers to engage with this buzz and increase their holdings at Gringotts.  A website offering plenty of great content around Harry Potter would be very popular and things like interviews, games and discussions would get a lot of attention.

With a high level of interest in your website, you could then begin turning Knuts into Sickles and Galleons.  How about selling merchandise and costumes, affiliating with cinemas, advertising space, online games and more?

Advertising short term on a film like Harry Potter requires a creative and fast paced campaign.  PPC is ideal for promoting a website, and there will be a huge surge in traffic in the run up to the film.

You can see in this chart, first “harry potter trailer” becomes a popular search term, then “Daniel Radcliffe” and “harry potter film” follows.  Guess what is about to happen this November??!!

The versatility of PPC means you can target trending keywords and add and remove keywords as they become relevant – think about terms like “Harry Potter premiere” and “Daniel Radcliffe interview” too.

Remarketing could be used to target previous website visitors with updates on cinema times and latest interviews.  This encourages return visits and promotes the website as a place to go for all things Non-Muggle. Banner and display advertising would also suit this type of advertising very well as visuals are hugely important to the target audience.

Youtube advertising is an excellent opportunity to profit from the thousands of wizardly clips being watched, and you can have straight text ads, or go further and offer unique content promoting the website as a video ad.  Why not promote lessons on how to cast spells – lesson #1: Expelliarmus. Visit the website for full wizard training!

There are also massive opportunities on Social Websites such as Facebook and Twitter, where groups and conversations will be rife.  You will have great success in promoting the website by targeting Harry Potter fan groups and their audience, as well as sending out regular tweets (from Hedwig himself!) promoting the URL.

Initium est dimidium facti.

So without further ado, I offer my Top 5 (5 being a special number for me) tips for ecommerce SEO success. 1. Human readable structured URLs.

In the past I have hacked together workarounds using static pages or 302 redirects but in the end nothing comes close in terms of sustainability, to good clean human readable URLs with minimal parameters. They get indexed better, they add context and they are so much easier to control.

So if your potential new ecommerce system can’t spit out URLs in the form /category/sub-category/product or similar consider looking elsewhere.

2. Content.

If you want your site to be a success you are going to need to put some time and thought into content. A page with 30 product images and 30 prices just doesn’t cut it anymore. Nor does a page only containing the same stock product description and image as every other competitor.

Brand pages need some form of introductory content as do category and sub-category pages. Product pages need to sell the product through reviews, enhanced features and related products. And the golden nugget…. THIS MUST ALL BE BESPOKE.

Getting a piece of stock copy from a brand representative and sticking that on your page isn’t going to help. Get it rewritten, be creative, spin it to be more about the brand at your store, just don’t take shortcuts.

For inspiration on how to do this well at product level, look no further than http://www.amazon.co.uk. Amazon’s product pages tell users everything they could ever want to know about a product and the search engines love it.

3. Page Titles and Descriptions.

It can’t be stressed enough just how important these 2 things are if you want to succeed in natural search. At the end of the day being number 1 doesn’t guarantee a click, it simply puts you in the best possible position to get the click. If you search listing (advert) alienates the searcher then chances are your competition is getting the click even if they rank below you.

Page titles need to be well written and bespoke. Yes this is stock SEO advice but for ecommerce sites it can be a complete nightmare to achieve. “Our ecommerce platform allows us to enter bespoke titles for all our pages”, really and what army are you planning on employing to write titles for your 40,000 products? “Our ecommerce platform pulls key information from the database to create page titles dynamically”, a good start but likely to lead to a lot to garbage titles and titles the same as competitors.

The best solution? A hybrid. Auto population is a great way to get bespoke titles in for a start. Let’s face it nobody wants to wait 4 months to launch while you craft nice titles for every page. Even here though you need to be creative and if your ecommerce platform allows you to specify what elements are pulled in or you can hack around this functionality all the better.

Once auto populated, start crafting. Begin with your homepage and main categories (really you should have done these before launch). With titles, keywords need to be in there but think about how you can stand out from the crowd. Move through your site as you get time from categories to sub categories to best selling products to most profitable products and beyond.

Descriptions may not hold any value for the Google algorithm but they can and do impact click through rates. Think about your sales message. Are you the leading stockist? Do you stock products only found on your site? Do you have a price promise? Do you offer free delivery? USPs USPs USPs. Oh and if the price is stable, consider getting the price in there, you may be surprised at how much more traffic you get from your top 3 listing.

4. One URL to rule them all.

You content should only be reachable via a single URL. Another piece of stock SEO advice that is a nightmare on ecommerce sites. Filtering options, navigation options, tracking, products in multiple categories and more can all lead to multiple URLs all having the same content.

Yes we have the rel=”canonical” tag to play with (if your ecommerce site allows it) but ideally it shouldn’t even be needed if you plan from the offset.

If your products feature in multiple categories, make their URLs more generic such as /belstaff-mens-pathfinder-jacket-tan rather than /mens/jackets/belstaff/pathfinder-tan and /belstaff/pathfinder-tan.

Code your filtering using AJAX so you don’t generate new URLs or page loads. Do you really need to rank for “black men’s shoes under £30”?

5. Discount / Promo Codes

Not really something that needs fixing but more something that needs to be there from the offset. Having a little box that allows you to gain a discount is a god send when it comes to real creative out of the box link building. You can run competitions, offer discounts to elite groups and more all through having the ability to apply promos online. Links like these do not grow on trees.

So, there is my top 5. Feel free to comment on any of the above or add any tips, advice or experiences. Happy SEOing.

There are numerous Internet TV options currently rearing their head, such as Apple TV, Boxee and ‘official’ platforms, such as the UKs YouView. In this article though I am going to focus more specifically on the imminent Google TV (GTV), its potential for market penetration and what that could mean for both digital marketing, and marketing in general.

You can find out more about Google TV by watching the following video.

If you build it, they will come (?)

A large number of us already use media in the way Google TV is suggesting, be it selective DVD box sets, the BBC iPlayer on a laptop, a Media PC hooked up to the TV,  illegal torrents through a DIY home media setup or a closed garden platform such as Virgin and Sky.

It’s a natural progression for TV and the Internet (& the PC for that matter) to converge. This has been a long held assumption by many ‘futurists’.’

• Television is increasingly becoming more interactive and digitised; phone voting, the red button, web tie ins et al.
• The Internet has increasingly become the place we go for video content; YouTube dancing cats, catch-up services, content purchases, illegal torrents.

The market is crying out for a simple, functional, off-the-shelf, affordable device that ties all these uses together in one place. Oh, and it needs a remote.

The consumer market for the right product already exists, Google doesn’t need to invent the market, it just needs to deliver the right product to it.

Television Vs Mobile Phone

The move into the mobile market for Google, both to create advertising space and to sell units (handsets), also makes sense for Television as well, if not more so.

As Google highlighted at GTVs announcement, the current Worldwide TV audience is 4 billion. Personally I’m still waiting for the widespread Mobile Ad revolution, and widespread consumer adoption of Internet TV may also be slow at first, but the potential is certainly there – and it’s huge.

• Which Internet enabled device would you place your money on for ‘universal’ consumer penetration first, your mobile, or your TV?
• Which do you think will end up with the largest consumer market?

The answer maybe mobile for both, but I think these questions raise some interesting and important thoughts. Whilst the attention and hype of many digital marketing agencies is focused on the mobile phone IMHO the sector is overlooking the huge impact Internet TV could have on all of us.

One distinct, and interesting, advantage that TV does have over the mobile is screen eyeball time. The average American spends 5 hours a day watching TV. The Mobile Web can’t get anywhere to close to TVs current consumer market or eyeball time.

Smart PC TVs

Comparisons with the mobile market also remind us that Internet TV, or specifically Google TV, isn’t just a single purpose device. Whilst offering video content, GTV will be based on the Android OS allowing the use of a Web Browser and the installation of Apps.

Welcome to the world of Smart TVs.

Based on the blurb from Google so far, the GTV devices will in essence be ‘mini’ media PCs. The added functionality this offers means your average user could abandon the traditional PC desktop for their Internet and home computing needs entirely. After making do with poor quality devices, or hobbyist Internet TV devices (XBMC) for the past few years the geeks are crying out for a decent TV device with the capabilities of a modern PC, if only to more easily watch all that illegal content they’ve downloaded on a standard TV.

Whilst Google’s deal with Sony may ensure that GTV makes its way into many living rooms ‘by default’,’ Google are going to have to battle hard and release a good quality product to ensure mass consumer adoption.

The user interface

The user interface here is key, if Google can get this right and offer the functionality of a PC, with on demand video content, tied into a universal TV guide, in an easily usable and unified interface, then they are onto a winner. The winning Internet TV device will appeal to both normal & geek users alike. It needs to be cool, sexy and convenient.

Google though doesn’t exactly have a great track record in this area; it took HTC to make a decent interface for Android. If GTV is to become a mainstream success, Google needs to get this right. In fact, this thought makes Apples still half hearted stab at the whole Internet TV thing even more perplexing; Apple TV still offers no App support and other advance functionality.

Internet Television though will kill the iPad, dead. Forever.

Okay, okay so I’m exaggerating for effect and to get the attention of the Apple Fanboys out there (including my company directors!) but I just don’t see consumers watching video at home on an iPad when there’s a big screen TV with Internet in the corner. More interestingly, I also don’t see people getting off their bums and walking over to the PC when they can search right there from their sofa.

A New Advertising Platform

The potential for Internet TV and specifically Google TV is there, and so is the potential to make a lot of money, be it through paid search advertising revenue or the selling of video content.

The consumer market is there, consumers are used to the technology, and the opportunity to possibly make a lot of money is also present. So what could possibly get in the way?

Content is always king

So far I’ve waxed lyrically about the need for, and potential, of Internet TV. There is of course one massive hurdle to all of this, and that is content.

Google’s (and my) worst fears in regards came true recently with multiple US broadcasters stating they will block their traditional broadcasts, and its content, from Google TV. This isn’t surprising, if Google TV became the one of the defacto ways to access TV they could (eventually) capture the entire TV advertising revenue market. TV companies could become merely content producers rather than advertising space sellers.

There are similarities here to both the music & movie industry. Both have tried to hold on to their traditional business models and been reluctant to switch to new digital business models, to their detriment. Eventually though I don’t think the networks will have any choice, Google TV will become so popular that they will have to unlock their traditional channels to the platform for fear of losing even more advertising revenue.

Search Engine Optimisation for Television

Beyond searching for video content, will we see a specific Google for Television users in the same way we have seen a Google Mobile Search? It would make sense for video content, or websites containing video content, to rank highly on such a platform. Clearly the value of viral video expands significantly if there exists a broad user base of people interacting with the web through their televisions. Internet TV though, could, see a fall in the amount of people performing traditional searches from within Google, due to Appification, an increase in users switching from the web for solutions to Apps. That though is an argument for an entirely different blog post.

Clearly,  to perform well in future GTV user keyword searches is to increase video content and optimise it to perform well both in YouTube searches and within Google Universal search, be it hosted on YouTube or your own website, or both.

GTV & Google Adwords

A new facet to their search service gives Google the opportunity to further spread its primary revenue generator, Google Adwords. The conventional text based ads, and their associated web-pages, will still work in GTV due to the built-in Google Chrome web browser.

IMHO as an SEO-er, Google Video Ads haven’t been a huge success for Google to date, could be the widespread adoption of GTV be the thing that finally changes that for good?

The re-invention of TV advertising/ Demographically Targeted TV ads

I’m no Harry Crane (from Mad Men), but as I understand it, TV ads are often placed with specific TV shows in order to reach a certain demographic. Or rather TV shows are often designed to attract a certain demographic in order to show targeted ads.

With access to a user’s account, and its details and history, GTV could give advertisers the potential opportunity to directly access an individual users demographic, rather than a sweeping statement based on the type of TV show they are watching.

• Why do we all need to see the same adverts when we watch TV?
• Would the implementation of the model above actually result in better TV shows?

Is this not the holy grail of advertising, the most effective media with perfectly targeted demographics?
Of course, this simplistic example assumes that the provider has both a users graph and content to deliver around the ads, but it’s a tantalising prospect.

A new type of advertising & a new type of television

Clearly the built-in web browser and ability to install Apps offers the chance for more viewer & advertiser interaction. Arguably the effectiveness of this is yet unproven, but it opens up a huge area for possible innovation both in television and advertising.

How exactly do companies and their agencies currently track the effectiveness and the direct ROI for TVs currently? Ultimately, I imagine, this comes down to sales figures and brand awareness ‘tests’ but like most forms of traditional advertising it’s probably all a little fuzzy and crude in nature.

Internet TV could change the paradigm of TV advertising forever.

Why can’t a TV ad drop the equivalent of a cookie, either attaching to the TV  itself or more interestingly to an individual user account?

With Internet TV, the potential to give clients tangible and direct ROI figures on their TV Ads becomes a possibility.

TV ads could also now have direct calls to action embedded within them, taking the user to the client’s website, or to install a related App. If advertisers can figure out the right incentives for consumers to interact with their TV ads then this data could become extremely useful.

Could we begin to see the process of TV Ad optimisation in the same way we currently do with Google Adwords? With computer generated graphics, could changing a TV Ad become as simple as changing the text on a PPC advert? Why not?

The very nature of TV Ads themselves can also change with Internet (or rather PC) TV. TV advertisers can finally go beyond the static video ad and become more creative and innovative with their ideas.

I can see the possibility of sponsored social games, based on the theme of the TV show, being available during ad breaks for mass audience participation, as just one example.

Internet kills TV ad revenue, Internet re-invents TV advertising

The Web has been cited by many as responsible for dwindling TV ad revenue. This is primarily due to the ROI figures Web Advertising offers and the relative cheap nature of it as a marketing model. The Internet has also been blamed for drawing users from their TV screen. The multitude of channels and dwindling mass audience figures is also cited.

If television adopts the tangible ROI approach the Web has, through Internet TV, this could save the format of TV from further dwindling advertising revenue. Advertisers may no longer have to book their advert for a particular program but simply state they want a specific demographic regardless of the TV show being watched. If users are leaving the sofa to ‘surf the web’ then put the Web in front of them on their TV, and keep them watching those Ads whilst interacting on Facebook at the same time.

Of course if a vision similar to this comes to light it will be Google, not the TV companies, who will gain the majority of this revenue.

Your Thoughts

A lot of what I talk about in this article, at the moment at least, is potential. The innovations I allude to are based on the assumption that the TV content is being fed over the Internet, rather than traditional broadcast methods, so the ads aren’t ‘static’ in nature and can change in line with the user. Even without this though, Internet TV could have a huge impact on us all. If Google TV, or one of its competitors, is a mainstream success it will change how we watch TV, how we advertise on TV and how we use the Web forever.

If you’ve got to the end of this article I would love to hear your opinion on Internet Television and Google TV specifically. Are we witnessing the birth of an advertising and television revolution? Or will ‘open’ Internet TV pass by as a limited user base fad, with most users sticking to closed garden broadcasters such as Sky and Virgin? Add your thoughts in the comments box below!

Apparently I had been lied to…… all these cutting edge marketing models and theories, which had been so enthusiastically taught to us, proved to be a little redundant and dated when it came to digital marketing, and when I say a little, I mean totally. (In hindsight I should probably have thought it was a little suspicious that our most recent text book was published in 1986 and definitely raised my concerns when we watched a BBC video entitled “The Future of Online Marketing”, filmed in 2000!)

Not once in my role as an SEO Analyst, have I been asked to carry out a SWOT analysis for a new client’s site or a PESTLE analysis of the external environment of a client’s marketplace. Surely my intimate knowledge of Porters 5 force model would come in handy?! Apparently not. All that time memorizing the 7P’s of the Marketing Mix – wasted – I could have been down the pub or watching Come Dine With Me…. or could I?

Because the thing is, although these traditional marketing models are rarely mentioned by name in the world of SEO and search marketing, we inherently carry them out, or at least aspects of them, almost constantly, without even realizing it. And they are in fact, as relevant today as they were when they were first thought up, 20, 30 or even 40 years ago.

Don’t believe me? Well take a look at the following couple of examples. Just because you don’t call it a SWOT analysis, doesn’t mean it isn’t one!

SWOT Analysis or New Client Site Review

So, as an SEO Analyst one of the first tasks with a new client, or perhaps even earlier during the sales phase, is to carry out an initial review of the site with the aim of highlighting potential strengths and weakness, reviewing the competiveness of the niche and ultimately finding potential opportunities for improvement – be it quick wins or a long term strategy. This, believe it or not, is a classic SWOT analysis and would look something like this:

S: Strengths
W: Weaknesses
O: Opportunities
T: Threats

Still have your doubts? Well how about this………………

7 P’s of the Marketing Mix for Link Building

Love it or hate it, link building is an integral component of search marketing. Backlinks remain the most influential factor used by the major search engines when ranking your webpages and as such, developing a powerful backlink profile is of the upmost importance. However, doing this is not an easy task. Link building is time consuming, resource heavy and often monotonous. To be a truly good link builder takes time and experience and to achieve that powerful backlink profile, you need to ensure you have the perfect backlink mix.

And that brings me on to my next old school marketing model: The 7 P’s of the Marketing Mix. A term first coined in 1953 to describe the fundamental elements necessary for a successful marketing campaign. The then Four P’s has grown over the years to become seven; Product, Price, Place, Promotion, People, Process and Physical Evidence.

So can this 57 year old methodology really still be relevant in today’s digital marketing world, and even more so in the often difficult and murky world of link building? Well let’s see.

The 7 P’s of Successful Link Building

Product: Understand your product. So for link building, your product is going to be the site you are link building for. Ask yourself ‘why would somebody want to link to this site? What features, services, information or benefits does my product offer? What value would linking to my product add to somebody’s website or customers?’ If you can’t answer these questions, then neither will the people you are approaching to build links so why would they link to you? When you can answer these, questions use this information in your sales pitch.

Price: Buying Links. So everybody knows that search engines don’t like people to buy links, (unless you’re buying them off Google of course!) and recently Google seems to be clamping down extra hard on webmasters who do. However, everybody also knows that buying links can still work, as was highlighted in a recent experiment over at SEOMOZ. So the question is do you or don’t you? If you decide to be whiter than white then you’re going to have to work extra hard on your organic and creative link building strategies, and if you do, then you’re going to have to be extremely careful about the paid link footprint you create.

Place: Where are you going to place your link? The placement of your link on a page is an extremely important factor used by search engines to determine the importance and thus power of the link. This is becoming increasingly important with Google’s recent development from Random to Reasonable Surfer (if you have no idea what I’m talking about this post by our Director of Search, Andy Heaps, should explain it). Also, don’t just think about the on-page position but the website as a whole. Ask yourself ‘is this website really relevant to my site and my visitors?’ If not, the link is probably of little value. With search engines becoming more and more capable at semantic search, relevancy and placement are ever important factors.

Promotion: Link Bait. What incentives are you offering people to link back to you? Is it funny? Is it newsworthy? Is it groundbreaking? Is it an exclusive? Is it controversial? Are you offering free products for a competition or gift vouchers? Are you going to pay them? These are all things you need to consider when you are promoting your site for links. If your site is none of the above, maybe you need to think about creating some new content?

Also when promoting your site you need to consider how you are contacting people. Are you sending bland, generic, non-personal emails? Well maybe you shouldn’t. Promotion is all about adding value – work out what value you can add to someone else’s site and tell them about it!

People: We are currently in the midst of the Social Media revolution, so get out there and be sociable! Join forums and communities, comment on blogs, use Twitter and Facebook. These are all ways of reaching out and forming real relationships with people which you can use not only to gain direct links, but to spread the word about your link worthy product.

Process: Managing Your Link Building. Managing and monitoring a link building campaign can be a fairly complex process, especially for agencies that have many campaigns running in parallel. However, it remains an essential element of achieving a successful link building campaign. Although I could write a whole other post on this topic here are a few things to consider.

• Monitoring links: Are they still live?
• Tools and Methods: Sourcing Links
• Backlink Analysis: Tools and Records
• Finance
• Metrics: Valuing Links
• Making Contact
• Contacts/ Link Database
• Testing and Feedback

So whether you use a bespoke in-house tool like we do at Epiphany or an off –the-shelf tool such as Buzz Stream, successfully managing the link building process is vital!

Physical Evidence: Okay…. so 6 out of 7 wasn’t bad!

So there you have it; two old school, traditional marketing techniques that work perfectly for two common search marketing processes. And it doesn’t stop there. Next time you are carrying out an analysis of the competitor landscape, perhaps you should take a moment to consider Porters 5 Force Model or a PESTLE Analysis?

I know as search marketers we like to think we are at the cutting edge of innovation and technology, but perhaps we should take a step back and show a little respect to our marketing forefathers. After all, there is little point in reinventing the wheel.

The past few weeks prove that, as it has been rather eventful for the four main players in the world of search: Google, Yahoo, Bing and Baidu. Let’s look at some of the main headlines the last two weeks:

1) The YaBing merger:

It all started back in mid-2009 when Yahoo announced that it was joining forces with Microsoft’s Bing to take on Google. As explained in the Yahoo Search Marketing Blog, in short, Microsoft is powering Yahoo’s search with the Bing engine. This affects only the Yahoo organic listings for now, although some algorithmic testing for paid and unpaid listings have started in the beginning of July (please refer to Yahoo! begins testing with Microsoft for more details). For all SEO-ers, the main question is what does that change from an optimisation point of view? Well, Nothing really. Who optimises for Bing or Yahoo nowadays? But it’s still a good idea to do it anyway. Good tips can be found on this Search Engine Land article.

2) Yahoo! Japan says ‘Arigato’ to Google

Yahoo strikes again, this time from Japan. Indeed, a new deal sees Yahoo! Japan employ Google technology to power its search engine and online advertising systems.

This can be regarded as one of the best deals in the Search Engine Market share war as they are now both covering almost all of the search market in second largest economy.

Although Microsoft made a bid for Yahoo back in February 2008, the announcement was made on the 27^th July 2010 leaving Microsoft feeling a bit lonely.

3) Baidu, the international Search player!

This week saw a rather interesting statement from Robin Li, CEO of the Chinese player Baidu, released on the 9^th August. Li commented on Baidu’s international expansion plans as follows:

“Going forward I think we should make this kind of move as early as possible,” Li said. “During the next five to 15 years we should see some meaningful revenue outside of China.” Bloomberg published the interview with Li portraying him as ‘increasingly keen’ on acquisitions.

With 70% of the Chinese search market, one thing is for sure, Baidu is definitely hunting for more market share on the Google territory.

4) Final announcement and no later than a few days ago, Google is dropping its old keyword tool and this by the end of August 2010. The New keyword tool has been available on beta for quite a while. The new tool apparently offers more features (such as removing duplicate keywords, adding negatives to the list). The old version can still be found here.

The latest bi-annual report from the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) shows that UK online ad spend has risen 4.9% in the first half of 2009 up to £1.75 billon and equates to 23.5% of total UK ad spend. Television advertising now consumes 21.9% of UK ad spend, press display consumes 18.5% and direct mail 11.5%.

This was of course, an inevitable event although few would have predicted that it would occur during a time of recession. The return on investment and measurability of online channels has driven budgets from traditional mediums to their online counterparts with budgets moving from conventional classified ads to online classifieds and a rise on budgets allocated to PPC advertising channels (£1.06 billion) such as Google AdWords.

This report puts the UK as a world leader in terms of market share for online advertising with growth expected to continue through 2010 and 11. Television on the other hand, has seen a sharp decline in spend but with the new product placement rules and a possible end to the recession it is difficult to predict what 2010 has in store.

SEO and Social Media have now become intrinsically linked. If you want to achieve maximum success in one, you can’t do it without the other, as the lines between Social Media and SEO are becoming increasingly blurred. Let me explain…

SEO Relevance and Authority

At its core, SEO is primarily concerned with relevance and authority. If you want success in the most competitive SEO niches, your website needs both authority and relevance in the eyes of the search engines to achieve the rankings your company wants. In today’s often confusing digital marketing mix Social Media has become integral to generating both of these aspects for your website.

Link Generation through Social Media

When we refer to having authority in search engines, in essence we are talking about links.

• How many incoming links does your website have?
• What types of links are pointing at it?
• What links does the webpage linking to you have pointing at it?

Social media has become a crucial aspect of generating ‘natural’ links for your SEO campaign. Let’s take a quick look at some practical examples of how social media can generate one of the crucial aspects of success for today’s search engines, links.

Social Media Directory Link Building

At its simplest level, submitting your website to all the available social media websites will generate a relatively small amount of incoming links to your site, in the same way that submitting to a range of low quality free directories would. A worthwhile base link building technique, good for your link profile mix, but there’s nothing earth shattering here, this practice in many ways is similar to free directory submissions (DMOZ, Best of the Web et al).

Link Bait, the Old Fashioned Way

Link bait – the creation of content to appeal to a specific audience to order to generate incoming links, was all the rage when Digg, Reddit, Newsvine etc all burst onto the scene as new social networks. Achieving a front page position on Digg, as well as driving large amounts of (possibly irrelevant) traffic, would also generate a large amount of incoming links to your website. If your content is great, and targeted at the right audience, they will link to it.

Networking and Public Relations to generate links

Through the use of the likes of Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn it’s now possible to use information sharing and networking techniques to build high quality incoming links to your website. If done correctly, these emerging Public Relations processes can yield huge returns in terms of incoming links from high quality and/or relevant websites.

Generating ‘free’ content and gaining customer insights through Social Media

Relevancy comes from text, be it on page or off page. If you want your website to be relevant to your niche then you’re going to need content (text) on your website!

Quite simply the more content your website has, the bigger chance you have for your website to appear in search engine results for a wide variety of long tail terms. Spread that content out across many SEO friendly pages and you’re onto a winner in the Google search results (and your bottom line).

Of course generating content takes time and resource, and this is where Social Media can come into play. Putting the effort into initially building a following or community around your site can wield massive long term gains in terms of generating free content, increased SEO traffic and more conversions.

Blog comment forms, ‘Ask The Expert’ platforms, forum discussion boards, story submissions, and social platforms are all great ways for your visitors to generate this keyword rich content for you, and for you to get a unique insight into what customers think about your brand and products.

Fail to participate and offer your visitors the ability to interact with your website and your brand means you’re failing to maximise the potential of your websites traffic, your brands exposure and your bottom line.

Social Media signals as a ranking factor

For a long time links have been the most important ranking factor for search engines, and they still are today. However there is a widely held belief in the SEO community that social media signals will become an important part of how Google ranks websites.

This train of thought is logical, search marketers understand how the current link algorithm works, and they know how to game it. One way the search engines can combat this threat is by introducing social media as a ranking factor, to maintain the quality of their search engine results.

Why not use the indicators of a good website left by the web as a whole participating on social networks rather than just those (relative) few who own and run websites?

If you want to future proof your website against these likely future changes, then the time to engage in Social Media is today. Be proactive rather than reactive, otherwise in a few years you may find the top rankings you hold today have disappeared and you’ll be left playing catch-up with your competitors.

Personally, I view Google as a mirror of the environment in which it operates. It uses the variables available in that environment to produce the best search results for its customers. This environment, the landscape of the web, has changed dramatically since the inception of the search engine. At its core, the Google algorithm is still very much a Web 1.0 search engine, operating in a Web 2.0 environment.

I would also argue that in many ways Google always was a social search engine. What are links if not a machine readable indication of the relationship between two human parties? For me this ‘social measure’ playing a part in ranking websites will only continue to grow.

Raising brand awareness through Social Media

Achieving a front a page Digg story, having a popular Facebook app, spreading your widget across the web, driving traffic via Stumble upon, appearing in many Google search results across many terms are all going to push your brand out, increase the amount of people searching for your company online (and hopefully your products offline too) and visiting your site from a link on a Social Media site. Ultimately this increase in traffic and exposure will affect your bottom line.

Social Media can’t work without SEO

How do people find your blog? How do people find the comments left on your blog? How will people discover all that fantastic content created in your forum? Through the search engines of course! Without a search engine friendly website you’re not maximising the potential of the content being created on your domain through your Social Media platform.

If you’re spreading your brands name fair and wide via Social Media it is crucial that you have a SEO campaign to back it up when people remember aspects of that campaign and subsequently search for them in Google.

Having multiple Social Media accounts is also a fantastic way to help with brand protection, fill up that first page of Google SEO search results with profiles you’ve created and control; and push that negative publicity out of the spot light.

SEO and Social Media – bed fellows for life

SEO needs Social Media, and Social Media needs SEO. In today’s digital marketing environment one cannot operate successfully, to its full extent, without the other.

So if you haven’t begun to think about it before, now is the time to integrate both your SEO and Social Media strategies to ensure you’re maximising the potential of your website and your sales, future proofing yourself today.

About Think Visibility

Think Visibility September 2009 (the second Think Visibility conference) hosted and organised by Dom ‘The Hodge’ Hodgson, brought together 200+ attendees and 13 speakers (not including the panel) to discuss and learn about a broad range of subjects from Universal Search to Corporate Blogging.

The Speakers and Talks

The first speaker of the day was Joost de Valk discussing WordPress SEO. Now a few of us had heard Joost speak before on the subject of WordPress SEO and we were all familiar with his blog over at Yoast.com, so we were slightly worried that he might cover old ground. The amazing thing was that Joost had anticipated this himself and addressed this issue at the start of his presentation. He then went on to cover some pretty exciting stuff including optimising images, distributing page elements to get the most out of progressive rendering, caching and a whole lot more.

The next speaker was Julian Sambles from the Telegraph talking about the challenges he faced in bringing online to the forefront of the Telegraph. This subject could have been very dry and corporate but Julian did a fantastic job of bringing the subject to life and gave a great commentary on what, when you think about it, must have been a really difficult job. One thing he highlighted was the need to consider how much time people actually have to do what you need of them with regard to SEO and give them options based on this or a priority list so they can do as much as they can in the time they have.

The final speaker before lunch was Judith Lewis talking about Universal Search. Judith did a fantastic job of stressing the importance of universal search and gave some great ideas for getting the most out of video content, news, images, Google Base and Google Local listings. Oh and Judith gave out chocolate which always goes down well at conferences!

The lunch break saw the unveiling of a mystery and very entertaining panel consisting of Chris Garrett, Al Carlton, Kieran Donoghue and Pa.. Dom with Tim Nash as the host. After witnessing someone nearly being decapitated by a flying t-shirt, the main room was split into 3 separate rooms and we dispersed.

The first of the 3 split sessions saw;

Elaine Forth and her husband give a very honest and informative talk on how they had gone from being the owners of a simple parenting website (http://www.allkids.co.uk) with a whole load of good content, through the affiliate channel and ended up running a business that is looking to turn over £1 million this year.

Fiona Thomson talk about how the F-Pattern is pretty out of date and backed this up with several examples of data from eye tracking studies from major brand sites such as House of Fraser.

And Paul Robinson discussed advanced user analysis techniques and how available data could be used to drive recommendations, cross selling opportunities and user adaptive websites.

The second of the split sessions saw;

Tim Nash talk about Links. Not link building, not analytics but methods of evaluating links and his experiences while researching this subject. Tim’s was one of the more technical talks with discussion around page segmentation techniques and how someone might create various tools. Tim showed and discussed an image from a segmentation tool he had created (the only slide of his with any colour on it) and explained how page segmentation could be used to create a link footprint for a site and could potentially be used by search engines to further granulate the value of links based on their position on a page.

Chris Clarkson’s talk on his trials and tribulations during his affiliate journey; this was a great session telling not only the highs of being an affiliate but also how bad things can get.

And Tom Smith gave an interesting and entertaining presentation (with amusing doodle slides) on where social media websites may be going wrong and how to overcome the mistakes to turn a website into a success.

Tom’s theory on succeeding in social media was to promote ‘selfish media’ first. Promote the benefits and rewards of the user and the social aspects of the website will naturally promote themselves, providing a thriving website. The core of his presentation revolved around explaining several methods of identifying where website interactions were “making you do things you didn’t know you wanted to do” and included methods of improving these interactions by mapping “process beads”(a flow chart of knock on effects of an initial action).

The last of the split sessions, prior to the 3 rooms becoming 1 again saw;

Karyn Fleeting talk about Corporate Blogging. Karyn gave some good advice on what corporate blogs are often missing, the need to breathe life into corporate blogs via a face and humour and the need to assemble processes for handling the issues that sometimes arise such as negative comments, legal issues etc.

Zoe Piper talking about how to win on the content network, in which she provided tips on how to get the most out of the content network aided by cats.
And Rob Manuel provided an insight into his experiences from running what he calls his personal hell, Sickopedia.

With the rooms opened back up the final talk of the day (if you don’t count drunken rants during Drink Visibility) was from Yahoo’s Artur Ortega on the impact of accessibility on the modern office. It was interesting to see how research into disability had lead to so many of the tools and systems we now take for granted and also just how much Bell Laboratories played a part in it all.

Think Visibility as a whole

Think Visibility September 2009 was a success. Dom ‘The Hodge’ Hodgson and his team pulled off a blinding conference, managing to keep it intimate and fun. The only real issue I heard about all day was the printer breaking which slowed down the lanyard production at the start of the day.

The food at the lunch interval was very nice although I would have liked to have known what was in the sandwiches mainly because some of them were amazing and I have it in my head I was eating tuna, mayo and sweet chilli. I would also like to know what was in the Firebox boxes that the lunchtime panel walked out with (looking very shifty). Oh and there is a rumour (probably started by one of my guys) that the cookie area had a sign saying 1 each. If this is true, I’m truly sorry for depriving 4 people of their cookies which incidentally, were cracking.

The next Think Visibility conference will be in March 2010. Hopefully we will see you there.

Deirdre, whose time is much in demand as a corporate motivational speaker and business mentor, is using the website as a gateway for new projects and Leeds-based agency Epiphany Solutions has been contracted to enhance the site’s online visibility.

It was in the 1990s that the self-proclaimed ‘drop-out’ set up ethical travel company i-to-i from her Leeds bedsit it was bought ten years later by a FTSE-100 company for an eight-figure sum.

Now she is carving successful new careers on the speaker circuit, as a mentor to businesses and most recently as a successful author, Epiphany is creating an online pay per click campaign to ensure the website appears in more relevant and appropriate searches, which will ultimately drive more business enquiries.

She said:

• I launched my website 18 months ago to help with my new projects, but it has become even more critical for my business now I no longer have a link to i-to-i as I’m more difficult to track down.

• As well as making it easier for businesses to find me, I’m broadening my speaker role beyond the travel sector which I was predominantly known for. So it’s important that my website appears in search results around other sectors and subjects.

• I’m also using my site to promote and sell my new book, Fulfilled, so all-in-all it’s critical my website is visible in all the right places.

• Epiphany is an experienced digital agency and their critique of my site in relation to where it should be appearing will not just increase traffic volume, but crucially improve the quality of that traffic, too.

Rob Shaw, Managing Director of Epiphany, said:

• Regardless of whether you’re a small business, a global organisation, a start-up, or an entrepreneur like Deirdre, your company website is a gateway to sales.

• Deirdre’s shop window is the internet so it’s critical that potential customers can quickly and easily find her website. Therefore, weâ’ve devised a paid search campaign that will enhance the site’s visibility and drive the right sort of customers to it.

*Deirdre’s first book, Fulfilled: A Personal Revolution in Seven Steps, is currently top of the Amazon UK bestseller list of self-help books visit http://www.deirdrebounds.com for more details.

Over the last 3 weeks I have been using the site since its re-launch, but the more I visit the more disappointed I am by how our beloved former high street brand has been launched online.

SEO

As an SEO analyst I have tried to keep my eyes closed about the complete lack of content throughout the important pages within the site, I mean the only text on the homepage that isn’t a link is the statement about who owns the website and their offline address. The URLs make my eyes bleed, I mean what is the below URL really telling users and search engines about the page it is linking to?? I don’t see it saying much, if anything, about paddling pools.

http://www.woolworths.co.uk/rf/wlo/s.do/toys-games/outdoor-toys/pools-waterplay?N=159+4294484527+85+4294483400&Np=1&Nu=this_product&seo=t&pageSize=12&Ns=prod_in_stock%7C1%7C%7Cprod_min_base_price%7C0%7C%7Cscu_id%7C1&Nao=0&cmEvent=product_order&cm_re=Homepage-_-Text+Links-_-Pools

I’ve not followed that link as I find it quite offensive.

I could go on for hours and days about the lack of input from someone with SEO knowledge into the project, mentioning the very poor page titles, the Meta descriptions, the page code and how this site doesn’t really stand a chance in Organic search. But then i remembered it was one of the most loved high street stores and, since it does manage to rank for its own brand, it is most likely going to receive a fair amount of traffic. With that in mind I am going to try and consider the site from another point of view.

Design

I must admit, the jquery added to the site is quite funky and the different carousels kept me entertained for about 5 minutes, clicking through the various products, and the pick and mix section is simply outstanding. It should be nominated for a set of web application awards – it would get my vote. Once you overcome the jquery and pick and mix section you start to reflect on the look and feel of the site and to be honest I am not a fan. It looks similar to my very first website but with a lot of rounded corners.

This image shows how the navigation on the Woolworths party site looks in Firefox, or the latest version at least, not a pretty site for up to 20% of the sites visitors. (This appears to have been fixed since I wrote this post)

Large chunks of whitespace appears down the left hand sub navigation on the entertainment site as can be seen in the image below. Nobody can tell me that this was a pre-meditated design decision, that it had some purpose or that it would affect conversion rates in any positive way.

Usability

I have always been sceptical about sites built across multiple domains, not necessarily from an SEO point of view because the benefits are obvious (especially when built by a large brand), but from a usability point of view it can become a large issue that puts users off or, at the very least, reduces the amount of sales.

Woolworths has been split over 3 websites, one being party/pick and mix, the other being entertainment items such as computer games and DVDs, the third comprising of everything else Woolworths traditionally sold.

Visitors have to individually log into each of the sites and go through a separate checkout process for each site; which could get extremely tedious should a visitor wish to purchase an item from each section.

Overall

Considering the resurrection plans were put in place early February 2009 and the site launched in June 2009, I believe the site has been both rushed and not thought through properly. Although I have seen improvements occurring across the sites over the last 3 weeks both in terms of SEO and design, I feel that Woolworths Online is nowhere near 100% polished compared to competition such as Amazon, EBay, Play, ASDA and ASOS. This could potentially lose them a lot of the visitors that would have flocked to the sites brand on launch.

After reading over the study I decided to pick out a few nuggets of information that web designers can often overlook.

1. Visitors read in the shape of an F. Visitors were found to generally scan WebPages in the shape of an F. Make sure important elements of your content are in these key areas to keep readers engaged. Place headers, sub headers, bullet points, and highlighted text along these lines so readers will be enticed to read more
2. Headings draw the eye. In the majority of cases the first things readers have been found to look at on a webpage are the headlines. Make sure your headlines are not obstructed by other items on the page and that they are engaging enough to draw the reader into looking further through your site.
3. Text before Graphic. Contrary to popular belief, the first thing visitors look at on a webpage isn’t the images. Most casual visitors will be arriving on your site looking for information, not images, so make sure your website is designed so that your text is most prominent.
4. White space isn’t a bad thing. Whilst it may be tempting to put something in every corner of your webpage, it’s often better to leave some of your site free of any text as sites with too much going on tend to overwhelm users. Try to keep things simple and allow some open space for readers to rest their eyes.
5. One-column formats perform better in eye-fixation than multi-column formats. Overwhelming visitors with too much information is easy. Simplicity is better in some cases.
6. Readers ignore banners Ads. Ads may be the bread and butter of your site, but studies have shown that readers largely ignore banner ads, often focusing for only a fraction of a second. If you’re trying to make money from ads, you need to be creative in your ad placement or in the types of ads you have on your site.
7. Visitors only look at a sub heading if it is of interests them. Don’t put in sub headings just to stick to a particular format make sure that they are relevant and interesting.
8. Visitors generally scan lower portions of a webpage. Use this to your advantage by giving readers something to latch onto when they’re scanning your page. Highlight certain sections or create bulleted lists so information is easy to find and read on your page.
9. Short paragraphs perform better than longer ones. Information on your webpage should be designed for the short attention span of most Internet users. Keep paragraphs and sentences short unless context influences otherwise, such as descriptions of products on a e-commerce sites.
10. Navigation works better when placed at the top of the webpage. You don’t want readers to look just at the initial page they arrive at on your site, you want them to stick around and explore their way around it. You can help send them in the right direction by making sure your navigation is easy to find and use by placing it at the top of the page.
11. Visitors spend a lot of time looking at menus and buttons. Because of this, you’ll want to put in some extra time making sure that yours are well-designed. After all, they not only draw a lot of eye fixation, they are one of the most important elements of your site.
12. Lists hold reader attention. One way to break up the paragraphs in your content and keep visitors looking through your site is to make frequent use of a list format in your articles. Use numbers or bullet points to highlight important information within your content.