Cuil may be able to “index a far larger portion of the web – faster and more cheaply – than Google” but that ain’t going to matter if there isn’t the relevance, or worse, as in my experience today, the backend to support the traffic.
But what are the real big issues Cuil? The bloggers that drive the early-adopter hype can’t find themselves in the search results. And that hurts them, they got to “cater to vanity”.
I think the standard Google search results page is worth challenging and that “Ten blue links is a simple concept which fails to reflect the huge diversity and variety of information available to you on the Web”, but while index numbers may outweigh Google, what Cuil decides is worthy of page one is the key, and for me that isn’t quite there.. yet.
And enough with the micro-sized search box. Enough with minimal, put a big fat search box on the homepage I can read nice and clearly.
In it’s second year, I like the concept of American Express Members Project, allowing it’s cardholders a say in how they distribute 2.5 million in Amex funding.It doesn’t lock users into pre-determined charities, and covers a wide range of user-defined projects from health to community development. It 2.0 consumer control, influence & involvement and good ol’ fashioned corporate philanthropy.
It reminds me of My Starbucks Idea, one of the best executions I’ve seen in consumer community engagement and idea generation. Open, honest, two way conversations with the consumer and the brand (ok, today it’s Brad from the strategy team), having a real influence on the Starbucks experience.
The key in all this is in the execution, the result, the ideas in action.It takes a long-term strategy and dedicated resources, but get it right and you can gain users credibility, loyalty and ownership and an opportunity for real feedback from real people.
OK, I signed up today for the Nike + Human Race today. Nothing like a bit of incentive to get me back running around the ‘tan in winter. I love the Nike + site, but there are some simple usability issues that require a few hurdles to be jumped before you can register.
Firstly, before you hit the site you select your language and country, rightfully it decides the capital city for you to run. But it then ‘tells’ you to select your city again from a list? I agree you never assume, but why not default the selection to Melbourne, or insert a simple button to confirm? Worse still, you need a some A-class mouse skillz to hit the Melbourne mark on the Flash scroller. No wonder they request a confirmation click.Madrid anyone?
So here’s my cut on the page (below). First up a clear header that Melbourne is the host city for the pre-selected country. The primary function of those visiting this site is to register, the user has already selected their country, so let’s make registering for their city a one-click confirmation process. Secondary options below this under the grouped title 'Can't be in Melbourne?' to run your own race with Nike +, or choose another city via a standardised drop-down. Both of these options simplified. This also introduces plenty of room to include a pic of Melbourne or the course map.
I figure a lot of this has to do with localisation, and those in the US that have multiple host cities. But it a simple solution for the .au users, that can potentially reduce confusion, reduce completion times, decrease drop-off rates.
Ninemsn putting it’s weight today behind the local launch of Grazia and grazia.com.au, dedicating some serious homepage pixels (see above) and 100k of prizes to boot.The site itself, like other sites in the fashion category, attempt to create the impact of a glossy magazine cover with big bold imagery and attention-grabbing headlines.The similarity of the logo and the black and white, give it a very vogue.com.au look and feel (Disclosure - I am an employee of NDM, Vogue.com.au is part of the NDM Network) . They even have their own GraziaTV ala VogueTV. With ‘Blogs’ second in the menu order, they’re keeping it very 2.0 and seems very The Vine in structure and appearance.
Overall it's a good looking, well-structured, content rich site. The strength in session time and frequency often comes through the community forums in these categories (at Grazia they call this the Chatroom), which Vogue does very well.Again I think this area will be interesting yardstick to measure the traction and loyalty of users over time.
They didn’t have to do it, but they did, and the ‘new’ Facebook is just around the corner.There’s a good write-up of the changes here.Once again, the changes focus on usability and user-centred design.Stronger filtering functionality, more customisation, it’s all about sharing and as Mark himself puts it to “simplify the user experience".
Strategically there seems to be a greater emphasis on media sharing, and with “more the 24 million photos uploaded daily” there’s little wonder why it has shifted to the forefront.
The biggest win here for most users is the de-emphasising/de-cluttering of applications, bundling them into a single drop-down menu item.What does it mean for advertisers?Well those in the business of applications will need to work even harder to fight for cut-through and distribution.Already app usage growth remains flat, despite growth off app’s available to now more than a staggering 32k, and it’s worth remembering "top 10% of apps account for 98% of total usage."
For me it’s about Fan pages, if you’re good, people will want to link to you and the Mini-feed becomes your own automated viral edm. Already Flight of the Conchords have chalked up 125k fans which would put it in the same realms as the Top 100 applications of ‘active users’. Even SEEK has managed almost 9k fans, with some solid content, integrated applications, regular updates and competitions.Sure, for some brands it’s going to take a bit of work to get creative, but those who succeed open up a powerful channel to engage, interact and reward consumers.
I love this, Wordle, word cloud heaven. plenty of options, you can pull together some very U2 ala ZOO TV-style effects. Above is Pixel Paddock as a wordle. Online the clear winner here.
A nice moment, was playing a round of golf at Ranfurlie, Amstel on the weekend, was a little rough on the directions, so thought I’d throw in “Ranfurlie Amstel” into my Google mobile browser. In first position was the golf course, in the short summary the address. Thank you Google.The mobile version is optimised to show addresses and phone numbers in the search results, and as such I never need visit the Ranfurlie website to solve my problem.
Ranfurlie may never know about this little interaction.But with Google owning 62% of the mobile search market, and with continuing experiences like this, it’s one SME’s need to keep a close eye on beyond the classifieds.
p.s - To Google - a nice touch would have been hyperlinking that address to the Google Maps mobile app, and setting directions from my current GPS location. I'm sure this kind of link can't be too far away.
OK, a mobile post without mentioning a certain new release phone today, that's the plan. Bit of an undercurrent occurring around QR Codes.QR standing for “Quick Response”, anyone who’s been to Japan will know these things are everywhere. Telstra are starting to put their weight behind them (branded as Telstra Mobile Codes), making the back pages of their own latest catalogue, under the title ‘I am the future’.Caught Antony McGregor Dey, CEO ofQM Codes demonstrating at DigitalHarbour on Tuesday, including some case studies suggesting some experimenting going on in the space in the UK/US. If this is all new to you, worth checking how they work here.They’re a good opportunity to extend the print offering into the mobile realm, and once you see it work, there is a real viral element to want to try it again.Their unique appearance also provide a good signpost for repeat recognition.
Unless you got a handful of select phones (The N95 I own is one of them) with the required software, already there’s a hurdle to jump before consumers get behind these in full. And by the time they do, there’s a very good chance image recognition software will leapfrog it all together, certainly see some massive opportunities in this space.But for now I’m looking forward to seeing how advertisers and agencies take to QR Codes in innovative ways, let’s just hope it goes beyond ‘save x% if you click here’.
And for future reference - Pixel Paddock QR Code - print it, stick to a t-shirt, spread the love.
List #4, this one covers books I’ve read over the past couple of years and enjoyed. Cover a wide variety of topics, from innovation, to web apps to advertising, but thought they were all worthy of sharing.
It’s not how good you are, it’s how good you want to be - Paul Arden. This pocket sized read you could knock over in an hour, but I see myself referencing it again and again. Bold, too the point statements that just make sense.Paul has a long history in the ad industry, being Exec Creative Director at Sacchi & Saatchi for 14 years, so it’s very ad/sales focused, but would recommend to anyone.Also the author of Whatever you think, think the opposite.
Age of conversation – A joint project between Drew McLellan and Gavin Heaton (behind another great local blog Servants of Chaos), this is the result of asking 237 authors to submit a page of content with the overriding topic “The Conversation Age”. Great to pick up and read a few pages at a time, includes submissions from David Berkowitz and Neil Perkin.You can buy it in hard copy or soft.
Getting real – Ok, this one’s more for you web app creators, but an honest and upfront read that challenges the norm. If you know 37signals, you’ll know what to expect.Free to read online, or you can buy the PDF or paperback.
Small is the New Big - Seth Godin –This is champagne Seth. It’s easy to pick up and put down, with 183 riffs, rants and business ideas, but I could easily recommended any of Seth’s reads, starting with Purple Cow. If you haven’t heard of Seth, worth previewing his work over at his blog.
Making Innovation Work – by Tony Davila, Marc J. Epstein, Robert Shelton – One of my ex-boss’s gave me a copy of this before he left, it took me a while to getting round to reading it, maybe it was the cover that put me off, but I’m glad I did. The term ‘innovation’ get’s thrown around a lot, this puts some structure around it, and more importantly how you measure it.
Blue Ocean Strategy is another one which almost made the cut. I think the idea behind it is strong, just the execution for me doesn’t get me excited about picking it up.Be interested to hear your favourites.
Well maybe the Googlers heard me, maybe not, but we’ve got a new addition to Google Labs in the form of Google Lively. A second life-esque social ecosystem, defined by ‘rooms’. The line is ‘create an avatar and chat with your friends in a room you design’, which on it’s own doesn’t sell it for me, I already have enough IM conversation to keep me satisfied.
But I see this as potentially good half-way house between jumping into world Linden, and static emoticonversation. And you can already see some users getting creative with these rooms. As with most modern day web-apps, 3rd party user development will drive this, personally I think there's enough going on in this space that Lively will struggle to become a staple in peoples social networking diet.
Here are 7 events I think are worth keeping on the agenda. Some of these are monthly, some annually, all of them well worth getting too if you can.
Web Directions South (Sydney) – This is the big one, an opportunity to hear from some of the biggest names in the industry on the big topics. Last year included some killer presentations with locals Cameron Adams and Mark Pesce stealing the spotlight. Next one is Sep 23-26.
Future of Media Summit (Sydney) – Held simultaneously in Sydney and Silicon Valley, a great opportunity to for great minds to converse across the planet. Speaker locally include MD at ABC Mark Scott and Ross Dawson. Rare opportunity to hear from guys like Scoble and Loic Le Meur. The 3rd annual summit occurs in Sydney next Monday 15 July.
Advertising & Marketing Summit (Sydney) – Good all-rounder, the next one kicking off on July 21, over 2 days, featuring Mark D’Arcy, Chief Creative Officer at Time Warner and Steve Simpson from Goodby Silverstein & Partners. Also well represented locally with Google MD Karim Temsamani and all the major publishers speaking.
MODM – (Melbourne) Created by passionate podcaster Cameron Reilly, a good opportunity for quality conversation with local Melbournites in the business of digital. You’ll need to join the Facebook group to keep up to date on when and where the next one is.
Digital Harbour (Melbourne) – Semi-regular free talks, check the site for topics and registration, caught a Mobile Marketing seminar on Tuesday which included a preview on Sensis mobile geotargeting products, and Mostyles, very cool mobile site creator. Well worth checking out.
Clickaholics (Melbourne, Sydney) – Living up to the name, these events are a great opportunity to knock down a drink or few with the digital crew. Regular sponsors usually front the drinks so there’s no excuse not to get down. Next one is Sydney Aug 14.
Pubcamp (Melbourne, Sydney) - One I look forward to catching next time round, pitched as a web2.0 media day, they're free and split into a formal and 'unconference' discussion format.
If you want to keep up to date on other events, there’s handy calendars of events at Digital Ministry and for the more tech-inclined at TechEvents.
List #2, here are my most-read marketing/digital/web2.0esque blogs. There's a lot that goes into Google Reader these days, but these guys always rise to the top, providing consistently good, honest reads.
6 Local Bloggers worth subscribing to -
Ben Barren – Ben’s been RSS’ing down under for longer than most, his blogs often read like a brain dump of constant thought.. brilliant.
Duncan Riley – ex-Techcruncher, now Inquisitr, one of Australia’s biggest names in the digital game, I still find his personal blog the preferred read.
Dave King’s The Royals – ex-Net-X’r, now king of The Royals, this new blog picks up where hit St Edmonds contributions left off. Smart thinking from a smart man.
Ben Shepherd – DJ Ben Shepherdeu’s Blog about Digital Media tells it how it is on the local scene. Arriving at a good time when Pascoe's Under the Rotunda headed UK way, great analysis from the man from Mindshare.
Laurel Papworth – This Sydney lecturer has also been in the game a long time, her blog focuses on social networks but there’s tangents all over the place making for an entertaining read.
Julian Cole – Naked Comm’s digital guru, Marketing mag contributor, blogger and behind his own 4 dimensions of social media marketing, he's a busy man.
5 O/S Bloggers worth subscribing to -
Talent imitates, genious steals – Another Naked guru, Faris pulls on some excellent resources, worth it for his presentations alone.
Seth Godin – Like an extension of his books, Seth makes you think about obvious things differently.
Scobleizer – Between him and Mike Arrington, probably accumulate more time behind the keyboard (and now the camera) than most in the industry.
Signal vs Noise – The 37 Signals Blog, inspiring stuff from the hit-makers. If you’ve got more time and into web-based app creation, their book, free to browse online, is a must read.
Greg Verdino – Chief strategy officer at crayon, he manages to pick up on things other marketing bloggers don’t.
A lot of talk around ninemsn’s Secret Search, the latest promotion to encourage usage of Live Search, offering instant win prizes just for completing a search. Credit for the execution, it looks clean, consistent, nice use of poker-style prize reveal.
If the objective of such a promotion is user trial, then this will work. The problem however, rewarding users for ‘searching’, as opposed to ‘finding’, is fundamentally wrong in the context of a search engine. It needs to be about task completion, adoption and loyalty. The focus is wrong - it’s the results that are important.
It's about providing the most relevant results, more relevant than the competition, and it is in this area they still have a long way to go. For example, typing ‘jobs’ into ninemsn secret search, the top 3 local players (SEEK, careerone and mycareer) are positioned 4th, 8th and 10th. In Google they’re 1st, 2nd and 3rd.
Yep, it’s going to boost search numbers during the promotion, you only need to look over at Whirlpool to see what users are doing to try and win - “150 cracks and got nothing.”
But as an alternative perhaps ninemsn should focus on those users that completed a successful Live Search, re-target them next time they use their search engine and reward them for their loyalty.
Even better, for each millisecond Live Search shave off the time it takes the average user to find a result, the jackpot goes up. Focus on the improving the product, improving the user experience, and everyone’s a winner.
I love a good list. The Age are currently running the AFL’s Top 50 legends at the moment. It puts a stake in the ground, they’re subjective, and usually trigger some good conversation. So this week I’m presenting 5 lists in 5 days related to digital advertising resources. I’m going to focus specifically on those resources I use consistently in the digital space. I figure if you really want to know what music people are listening to, don’t ask them, look into their iPod most-played list. So think of this as my most-played list.
Top 5 – Digital tools of the trade
The top 5 things that keep me updated in the online media space -
1. RSS – (Frequent News) Forget the terminology, and think of this as the easiest way to get pre-determined channels (sites/pages/sections) of content delivered to one location – the RSS Reader. My choice of reader is Google Reader, which also now has a tweaked-up mobile app version. If you find a website, a blog, that provides a consistent flow of useful content, look for the orange square (there’s one on this blog to the right), and click on it to subscribe it to your reader. If you’re using Google Reader, it’s usually only a 2 click process and you’re there. I’ll provide a separate list on my favourite feeds later in the week.
2. Email Alerts (Keywords specific news). Get customised emails of articles related to predefined keywords delivered to your inbox. I find alerts particularly useful for specific competitors/clients/people in the industry. These are two I use - Plugger – Fast becoming one of my favourite sites, they offer News Alerts with plenty of customisation. Tick the boxes for Media Industry, Web Maketing Industry, Marketing and Advertising Industry, as well as your key clients and key competitors. They’ll even let you turn this into an RSS feed so you don’t have to wait for the email to arrive. Google Alerts – Tried and trusted, very good at delivering o/s industry news from reputable sources.
3. Email Newsletters (Daily/Weekly updates) – Every site seems to have one, some better than others. The trick is to find those that provide good, relevant content, rather than those that rely on subscriber lists to drive ad spend. Mediapost, B&T, AdNews are good starters.
4. del.ici.ous (Reference) – Ok, this one requires you to contribute, but is an excellent resource to store your own news references. If you stumble upon an article or particular quote of interest ‘tag’ the page with relevant keywords. Use these keyword tags to easily find this content again. The del.ici.ous site itself is also a good reference to see what other people are tagging.
5. Twitter (Instant news bites) – 140 characters of goodness. Create an account, download a desktop or mobile app, such as Twirl, and starting ‘following’, ie, search for people of interest in the industry, Mark Pesce, Duncan Riley, Ben Barren, Dave King, they’re all fairly regular ‘tweeters’. Summize is a great Twitter search tool, if you want to know what people are twittering about across the planet on a particular subject.
Friendfeed would probably scrape in 6th, but for me probably too much noise, not enough good stuff, will see if that changes. So that’s it, List #1. Keen to hear what your top tools of trade are.
Tomorrow - My Top 10 digital advertising websites/blogs.
From the king of the Top 10 lists – David Letterman. Here’s one of my favourites –
Truelocal.com.au relaunched today placing their user ratings smack bang into the spotlight (disclosure - I work for NDM, Truelocal is part of the NDM network). It places a lot more of the control in priority and preference with the user, but on the flipside, it also opens up an opportunity for advertisers to garner real feedback from real users. In the social-networking evo/revolution this is happening more and more, and it means marketer are going to have to spend less talking, more time in the crowd and start to become really good listeners.
I was watching a presentation recently by Google of product management, Joe Kraus, on Three Trends for Social Networking. It’s a lead in to their launch of Google Friend Connect enabling users to ‘share’ their networks and profile information. Leveraging the OpenSocial API and attempting to forge additional open partnerships. Facebook Connect also have their own flavour, and it appears now that the destinations – Myspace, Facebook, Orkut, etc. - are playing the social networking game themselves, starting to knock down those walled gardens and have a conversation.
What does that mean? Well like a Persian Rug sale, they’re practically giving away networks, everywhere networks, you got a site? You need a network! With some clever API’s, they’re making it dead easy for any site to become it’s own ‘social network’.
Social networks become more micro, there’s more of them, conversations more targeted, and people no longer have distinct ‘myspace’ vs ‘linked in’ profiles, they have ‘a’ profile, of which they decide what and where they share it.
There’s more contribution, more sharing, more noise. If you’re a marketer you’re going to learn more about your users, you’re going to need to know what information is important and why. You’re going to have to have a very good filter and more importantly, your going to have to be a damn good listener.
Good to see Mahalo (mentioned in my post Users are number one), gaining search traction, #1 with a bullet here on a Google search for Jaz-stick-it-to Noel-Z’s Wonderwall performance at Glastonbury.
As mentioned, I’m a big fan of Mahalo, human-based search engine, providing pre-qualified relevant content. But what’s interesting here is that it becomes the destination, not the search. Google know Mahalo are doing the good work on the content front and weight their search to the Mahalo site accordingly. And here’s the kicker, Mahalo’s rev source is heavily weighted to the Google Ads they serve on each of these pages. Sooo.. It’s in Google’s best interest to support them, Google still win. They own the biggest market in town and Maholo are invited. If you keep the punters happy, you’ll get a nice prominent stall at their market, plenty of exposure. But because what you’re selling is free, they’ll let you sell some of their goods on your table, as long as they get a cut. Google do no evil, but Google find a way to get paid.
For the record, here’s the performance. You miss the lead-in quoting Oasis' Noel ‘Sorry, but I’m not f---king having him at Glastonbury’, and it’s pretty clear the man’s a rapper, not a singer, but much respect to the man -
So Google and Creator of ‘Family Guy’ Strike a Deal. Got to love The Family Guy, got to love Seth and Co. So he’s giving us 50x2 minute clips, exclusively online via ad units. What is clever is the Google take, it ain’t “AdSense for Advertisers”, it’s the “Google Content Network” for content creators, with ad revenue to boot. This wonderful ad network they’ve created, no longer is just about ads, it’s about content, it becomes the channel.
This could easily be YouTube bread and butter, a custom content channel, it's content that's short, frequent and oh so viral. It's pull content, so why the push? Well, it starts edging some of the control back to the creators, they control the push, they decide the audience, they optimise to suit, and with these factors in mind it starts becoming a lot stronger proposition for advertisers who want to be associated with that content.
At it’s root though, it still doesn’t address the current issues I see in video advertising online, they’re still resorting to the pre-roll, still expecting the advertisers are going to come to the party with relevant snappy pre-roll worthy content, this is always the hard part. Seth’s put out his hand and agreed to help certain advertisers animate their ads, this is a great, but there ain’t many clients that can foot the coin for the Seth bill.
So it will take some clever thinking on the content creators behalf to work out how best to monetize the content and the distribution. But there is some extraordinary potential in what these networks offer - targeted, always on, mass-media channels where you're in control, you control the push. “We feel that we have recreated the mass media,” said Kim Malone Scott, director of sales and operations for AdSense. Damn straight you have.
