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31 July 2009
Twitter Tools-Twitter Bootcamp
Our very own SEO manager Kate Gamble recently spoke at the Sydney Twitter Boot-Camp on the subject "Twitter Tools" and by all accounts was a great success. Kate is speaking again at the Melbourne version of the event so while we can't give away all her delicious secrets we can put up her first slide entitled " The Butterfly Effect of Social Media". In addition I have selected a few of the more interesting tweets from the stream. The entire stream can be found here
• problogger 8 Lessons on Twitter from @markpollard 1 it does take effort. 2 there is a lot of recycling. 3 it can be addictive #tbcau• problogger cont... 4 anxiety does feed the beast. 5 one dimension-itis isn't cool. 6 Twitter thrives on appreciation. #tbcau
• problogger cont... 7 Rejection happens. 8 lifestyle change #tbcau
• michelle_falzon According to @markpollard Harvard survey shows people who are more connected online are 30% more creative! #tbau #tbcau
• switchedonmedia Time a big factor for Twitter for business, good reason for outsourcing, need to know what makes sense for biz. #tbcau - tamya baohm
• switchedonmedia RaboPlus secured a sponsorship deal with tour de france to get exclusive content thru their social networks. nice!! #tbcau
• michelle_falzon Cool tools for Twitter research Twist - awesome tweet trends analysis & Monitter - geo locate tweets thx @kategamble #tbcau
• switchedonmedia Twitter traffic not counted as referrer in analytics is counted as Direct. #tbcau good consideration from @kategamble
• web_goddess How does 'automate as much as possible' jibe with idea that good Twitter use is all about meaningful conversations? #tbcau
• switchedonmedia RT @PRIANational: Web signal = brand + key word - Great idea #tbcau
• chrisgander Top 3 things I took away from Twitter Boot Camp #tbcau. 1. "Web Signals" 2. "Be Human" 3. "Stay Active & Reactive"
Kate's full Twitter Tools presentation will be posted here once she has spoken at Twitter Boot-camp Melbourne, Have a great weekend everyone
Posted by Marc Elison on 07/31/09 at 3:37 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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27 July 2009
SEO Tips-ALT tags
Photo by fabio via Creative Commons |
An ALT tag is simply a HTML tag that renders alternative information when non-text elements, normally images, can't be rendered. In addition ALT tags provide more information for an image and give more information to people with text-only browsers; the "ALT" attribute tells the reader what they are missing on a page if the browser can't render images. The browser will then display the Alternate text instead of the image. The ALT tag text also pops up when you hover the mouse over the image in question, further providing you with more information about the image.
The ALT tag has important ramifications for SEO as the ALT tag is given consideration when crawled by the GoogleBot. The ALT tag also provides textual representation of your graphics and the ability to index more content about your website. ALT tags filled (but not stuffed) with relevant keywords can also be used to boost your keyword frequency and help you achieve better rankings. Your images will also be optimised for the search engines' image search if you place contextually relevant keywords inside their ALT tags, as well as good content surrounding the image on the page. Generally the image ALT tag looks like this
[IMG SRC="URL" ALT="Insert your alternative Text Here"]
Tips for writing ALT tags
• Be succinct
On occasion some web browsers will crash if the ALT text has too many characters. While completely detailing what is in the image might be ideal, this is not the purpose of the ALT tag. The reason for the ALT tag is to put the image in context with regard to the rest of the page. The longest ALT tag you use should not be longer than 64 words.
• Be Useful
On the opposite side of the scale; don't make the ALT tags so short that they are of no use at all. The ALT tags should contain enough information for people who can't see the images to understand what the particular image represents
• Be aware of the role ALT tags play in the search engine optimisation process
Use clear and concise ALT tags that relate to the keywords on the page to maximise the effectiveness of your ALT tags with regard to SEO
• Don't write ALT tags purely for search engine crawlers
ALT tags should be written for the user first, and the search engine second. Using ALT tags to keyword stuff could trigger a spam violation on your site by the search engines which could result in a rankings penalty
In conclusion, try to prepare and write ALT tags for all your images in your website. Image ALT tags also make your site more reachable for visually impaired people using text readers. Even if your site is content rich, the ALT tags allow you to reinforce what is really relevant. Although the ALT tags isn't as important as some other on-page seo factors (like a title tag), they should be used as a holistic approach to optimising your page.
Posted by Marc Elison on 07/27/09 at 1:37 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack (0)
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23 July 2009
HTML 5, Online Viewing Trends, Guest Blogging and the Twitter document leak - SEO Recap part 2
Last Friday, after a very busy week here at the BCA offices, the team finished the last of the emails saved the spreadsheets one last time, and cracked a few beers to sit around the virtual board room table (we are still missing a wall after our office relocation). This following post outlines the 2nd part of the best of our weekly sharing session. Topics covered include HTML 5, Online Viewing Trends, Guest Blogging and the Twitter document leak.
 Photo by tlindenbaum via Creative Commons |
IE8 Implementing Some HTML 5 Features
Microsoft IE8 will incorporate 4 features from the HTML 5 draft. This adoption is supposed to help the browser better deal with Web 2.0 apps.
The first Beta is using the following pieces of the HTML 5 draft specification:
• cross-document messaging
• a client-side storage API
• network connection awareness
• window location hash so apps can be accessed via back/forward.
The relevant part of this news to SEO is that the window location hash will make Web 2.0 applications more accessible from a user perspective - navigation becomes easier. IE8 will also support CSS 2.1 thanks to its new layout engine as well as some new productivity tools for its users. This makes Microsoft IE, Firefox and Safari all adopters of HTML 5.
Online Viewing Trends
Metacafe recently commissioned a study to find out who in America is watching online video, how much and what kinds. Some of the major facts and statistics that I thought were interesting are listed below:
• 77% of U.S. Internet users are watching online video and 43% viewing something online weekly.• 37% of users who watched video of a professional quality online (TV clips, movie trailers, sports highlights, music videos, short films, etc) found them as or more enjoyable than watching full length stuff on TV.
• 41% found them to be 'somewhat' as entertaining.
• The research was done in survey form and polled 1,927 people from age 12-64 this past April.
• The strongest demographic was males 18-24 where 70% said they watched something weekly.
• A full third of all respondents age 55-64 watched weekly online video.
• Over one-third (34%) watch TV and surf the web simultaneously more than half the time.
• 20% saying that they watch less TV because of online video.
• In regards to online video and ads, people have shown more accepting (52%) in online video than in TV shows.
• On the negative side 20% said they didn't like it (online video ads) and 28% weren't sure.
This research poses some interesting questions, like will Youtube look to boost the length of videos that generally appear on their site or are they happy to stay in the realm of shorter duration videos? As more information is being locked away in video file, it is becoming ever important for the search engines to figure a way to assess the quality and content of a video file. A bad video can ruin a good page and a good video can dramatically improve a poor quality page, so what are search engines doing to figure out the difference?
How to Steal Readers and Traffic through Guest Blogging
In this post Lisa Barone discusses how to increase exposure for your site by taking advantage of guest blogging. Here a key list of points to maximise the effectiveness of any guest blog post that you author
• Clean your own house first - sharpen the appearance of your blog.
• Use your best stuff - Don't hold back on ideas or content.
• Hit the sweet spot - pick something related to you both but your better at it.
• Include relevant links back to your site - Don't spam but include 1 or 2 relevant links back to your own site.
• Maximise your author information - Make sure you fill in all your details but create a call to action with your link. For example create a link to your RSS feed or email signup.
• Respond to every comment
Guest blogging is a great way of syndicating your content and getting links back to your own blog. [Anyone wanna borrow this awesome recap post? Go on, ya know you wanna! Special for you I give you good price - Kate] Therefore syndication is a pretty important activity in terms of search engine optimisation. If you can do this well, you can start to build up a broad following throughout the industry you are targeting as opposed to a narrow following on just your own blog.
Twitter Document Leak/hack
The first time I heard of this incident was from a blog post on TechCrunch. Apparently some hacker had got into Twitter's servers and downloaded a fair amount of confidential information. Listed below are some of the documents that the hacker managed to download:
• employment agreements
• calendars of the founders
• new employee interview schedules
• phone logs and bills
• alarm settings
• financial forecast
• a pitch for a Twitter TV show
• confidentiality agreements with companies such as :AOL, Dell, Ericsson and Nokia
• a list of employee dietary restrictions
• credit card numbers
• PayPal and Gmail screen shots
Guess this is a good lesson for those big companies who have confidential documents on their servers, don't behave like Twitter and leave your server password as "password".
Posted by Marc Elison on 07/23/09 at 11:29 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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20 July 2009
Search Engine Optimisation-Recap 20 July 2009
Not too much pure SEO in this week's recap, but for all those lovers of figures, today's recap will be a smorgasbord of delightful information. This is part 1 of the recap; part 2 will follow later in the week.
Social Media Statistics
Photo by $ydney via Creative Commons |
Some great statistics from this article that show the growth and activity of many of the most popular social media sites on the web right now. Some of the most illuminating stats were:
• Twitter grew a massive 1,928 percent in the US from June '08 to June '09, now reaching a total of 21 million monthly unique visitors.
• Facebook had 87.3 million unique visitors in June.
• MySpace leads all social media sites (excluding YouTube) in unique video viewers, with 12.9 million.
• Facebook is quickly growing its video reach - from 2.4 million unique viewers in June '08 to 12 million in June '09.
• Twitter users spent an average of 31 minutes, 17 seconds on the site in June. This excludes users of clients like TweetDeck.
Finding and Using Niche Blogs
This article had some great ideas in terms of why you want to find niche blogs; how to find niche blogs, how should you target the niche blogs and what you should do once you have located a niche blog that you want to interact with.
The main takeaways from this blog post is that the reason you want to find and use niche blogs is in order to get links, receive traffic and benefit from the niche blogger's expertise on the subject matter.
There is a good list and process for finding these niche blogs and an idea of what to do, once you have located the blogs.
Mobile Media Consumption
Some great mobile consumption habits were listed here. It was the result of a Universal McCann-AOL study. Listed below are the important statistics from the study:
Why/where they use mobile:• 95% of respondents said they used mobile media to fill downtime
• 82% use it at work
• 81% while shopping
• 80% at home
• 65% while commuting to workContent/activities:
• 73% use maps and directions
• 55% said they participated in social networking or sought out restaurant and movie listings or reviews
• 44% read/consume national news and informationThe cross platform platform:
• 77% said they use mobile and TV at the same time (does this replace the laptop?)
• 55% of mobile users follow brands across multiple media
• 56% said they have been driven to mobile from other media
• 42% said they have been driven from mobile to other media
Acceptance of advertising:• 38% of respondents said they had taken action based on mobile ads
• Just under 30% said mobile ads had led them to share information
• 22% said mobile ads had influenced a purchase decision
Part 2 of the Search Engine Optimisation recap will follow later on the week.
Posted by Marc Elison on 07/20/09 at 4:30 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
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17 July 2009
Bruce Clay Australia-July News
Upcoming Events
From the creators of the highly successful Search Engine Boot-Camp, comes a new half day event, appropriately titled, Twitter Boot-Camp. This workshop is where you'll learn how to get the most out of Twitter as a marketing tool. The event will be held on July 30, 2009.
 Photo by carrotcreative via Creative Commons |
Not only that but Bruce Clay Australia's very own, the one and only @KateGamble will be presenting a session titled "Tools of the trade". Her presentation will concentrate on the various tools that a twitter user can employ that will help you manage and optimise your Twitter experience. Kate's session begins at 3:15 the presentation will be packed with insightful and productivity enhancing tools that you can use to maximise your Twitter understanding. If you can keep it our little secret, you can use the promotional code of VRTWBC2 to get in for only $195 + GST.
Bruce Clay Australia Blog
The last month has been somewhat of a watershed for the Bruce Clay Australia blog with several significant milestones being reached. Three of the most notable being:
• Multiple mentions in the SEO section of Search Engine Land's well read content aggregator SearchCap
• Listing in the illustrious SEO section of Alltop
• Record visitors to the blog
The Big Move
Bruce Clay Australia has recently moved offices, two blocks down George Street, Sydney. The day of the move dawned and we all came prepared, fully equipped with rolls of tape, permanent markers and Stanley knives. Friday started out as per usual, with a 20 minute heated discussion over the pronunciation of the word "router". [This is the only time when you will see the English and the French analysts join sides - Kate] After being treated to a lovely team lunch at the swanky Ivy, it was time for the blood, sweat and jeers.
For some reason the packing and moving brought out the pre-school in all of us and it wasn't long before the sounds of boxes being taped was punctuated with the sound of laughter prompted by the cheesy kindergarten joke that preceded it. After much hard work [most of which by me... but no one remembers that because it was Saturday morning at 7am and you lot weren't around... - Kate] the move was completed and we are loving the bigger space and open plan offices [that's a nice way of putting our one still MIA wall - Kate] of our new pad. At the bottom of the post you can find some pictures of the new office.
Training
Bruce Clay Australia delivered its groundbreaking one day training course recently in Tasmania. This course is based on the same one day format delivered in the United States in conjunction with SMX West and other Search conferences. Due to the changing economic climate, and the fact that so many people who want to attend training are having difficulty getting 3 full days off work, we have decided to take the 1 day format SEO training course national.
The one day SEO training sessions have been scheduled for 5 locations across Australia. Dates and venues are currently being confirmed and these details will be released once they are ratified. If you want to be included on future SEO training email updates please contact us.
Posted by Marc Elison on 07/17/09 at 2:50 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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15 July 2009
Link Building-Where is the personal touch?
Link building is one of the cornerstones of search engine optimisation and significant amounts of time and resources should be dedicated to this endeavour. Using the information below should significantly increase your link building ability and therefore, your seo effectiveness.
Photo by Search Engine People via Creative Commons |
Everybody knows that the link building process is a long, tedious and never ending process. Agreed? Wrong, the link building process should be seen as a one-off chance to promote your website to likeminded people in your area of expertise. This process will repeat itself every time you contact a different webmaster in your pursuit of links.
That's why it's important to have link-worthy content on your website. If you can't answer "Why would anyone want to link to this?" then you should revise the content you're trying to promote. If you can answer the question, then the link building process won't seem like "begging" but more like "promoting" and when you get e-mails back from webmasters confirming that your content is indeed interesting and link-worthy it will make the link building process a lot more enjoyable.
Being a webmaster myself, I am bombarded daily with link request e-mails of which 99% will be doomed to my spam box, mostly because the majority has exactly the same subject line, so why should I waste my time if you haven't taken the effort to address me personally.
People think of link building as a dreadful process which they HAVE to do, rather than seeing it as an opportunity to create a relationship with likeminded people in your niche and like networking, link requests are very personal.
This inspired me to address these issues by explaining what I would like to see from a link request.
Subject Line:
The very first thing I see when I open my mail box is the subject lines of the e-mails. When I see e-mails with the following phrases, "link request" or "link exchange", rest assured, they will be forwarded to my spam box.
If you want me to invest time in reading your e-mail, the least you can do is change your subject line from the standard ones offered in hundreds of automated link request software packages. Be more personal when writing your subject lines. Brainstorm a few different ideas and then ask yourself, "If I got this e-mail, would I open it?"
Greeting:
"Dear Sir/Madam" look familiar to anyone? Could that greeting be anymore impersonal? You haven't taken the time to see who I am, what my name is, or whether I'm male or female.
Especially in Australia, where we like to pride ourselves on being "friendly" and "sociable", would you ever greet anybody like this, unless you know who the person is?
If you are going to contact a complete stranger take the effort to learn who they are and their name, again the personal touch could make or break your email!
Continuing on from the pleasantries, don't get straight to the point. You are trying to establish (at least I hope) a relationship with the webmaster. Establishing a relationship is hard when I don't know who you are.
Adding just a one line introducing yourself and who you are a lot more personal and professional when you're approaching complete strangers.
Showing Interest:
Now that you've greeted me and introduced yourself, I kind of know who I am dealing with. The next part is why you should be showing interest in the website.
Always consider that webmasters could run multiple sites, so be sure to include the site name, and what you found interesting/relevant and provide the URL. Explain why you think that article/blog post is interesting because we webmasters enjoy a good attempt at ingratiation.
Reason for contacting:
This is possibly the most important part of the e-mail. This is your chance where you tell the webmaster that your content is valuable to him, and that it's worth publishing or linking to. Don't blatantly ask for a link request but explain why linking to your content would benefit his website and his visitors.
Your contact details:
Don't abruptly finish the e-mail by not publishing a personal message to the webmaster. Instead of "thank you for your time" let the webmaster know that if he or she has any concerns or further questions that you are available to be contacted. Give your personal e-mail address, or in-case of the prospective link being very beneficial to your site, add your phone number.
Ending:
When ending your e-mail, use a variety of different ways to thank the webmaster, don't stick to "thank you for your time" or "kind regards", try to be more personal in your greeting. Unless your prospect is a large corporate, personal messages tend to be more effective to the everyday webmaster.
Signature:
Your signature should be seen as your business card. This is most likely where the webmaster will get your contact information from, when they decide that they are interested in what you have to offer. Make sure you include your full name, company name, company address, telephone number and personal e-mail address at the very least.
Finally, if you're trying to establish a long term relationship with this webmaster, which you should be aiming for, do not include any HTML code or asking for a reciprocal link within your first e-mail. This comes later in the process when the webmaster has decided whether or not they are interested in pursuing a professional relationship with you.
Posted by Mike van der Heijden on 07/15/09 at 12:42 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
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14 July 2009
SEO Elements-Title Tags
The World Wide Web Consortium describes the Title Tag as a required element in an HTML document. Title Tags are a very significant guide for all search engines in determining what is in the content of a specific web page.
 Photo by TheAlieness GiselaGiardino via Creative Commons |
Creating a relevant Title Tag is one of the most important variables in achieving high search engine positioning. Therefore, the Title Tag is one of the most important factors used in the search engine optimisation process.
In HTML code, the Title Tag specifies the title of your Web page. It is code which is inserted into the header of your web page and looks like this:
{head}
{title} Creating Title Tags for Search Engine Optimisation {/title}
{/head}
The Title Tag should be used to express the SEO goals for that page. Great care must be exercised in choosing the keywords that will be used for the tag. You can't put in every keyword that you'd like to optimise for, so it's recommended that you choose the select few that will give you the biggest bang for your buck and are most relevant to the page. The Title Tag must reflect the content of the page, a Title Tag that contains words not included in the page is likely to be unused by search engines. Our SEO best practice guidelines recommend that a typical site use a page title of between 6 and 12 words. Every page must have unique and relevant Title Tags, this means no duplicating across lower levels in the site.
Common Title Tag mistakes include:
- Do not leave your Title Tag empty, ever!
- Do not use 'Untitled' or default text in your Title Tag.
- Do not write Title Tags that are not relevant to the content on the page.
Title Tags of the HTML page appear in the search results for search engines, making it even more important. If you can make your title more attractive than the web sites, which are above your site in the search results, visitor may click on your site simply due to the effectiveness of the Title Tag. It is important to optimise the Title Tag for the keywords most likely to drive searches, that way you have a good chance of achieving a high click through rate for your site.
Using powerful words in your Title Tag will draw the user into your site. You may sometimes try to use the power of questions when creating Title Tags. When you ask a question, you force the reader to stop and mentally answer that question, which encourages the visitor to click on your web site and visit it. Not only is it one of your strongest chances to impact rankings, it is undoubtedly your best chance to convert a searcher to a visitor within the SERPs.
In summary, if you have only limited time and resources to dedicate to search engine optimisation and you wish to concentrate on on-page seo, then a substantial amount of your time and effort should go towards creating unique, attention grabbing and effective Title Tags for each page you wish to rank highly for.
Posted by Marc Elison on 07/14/09 at 10:19 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack (0)
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10 July 2009
AIMIA Connect 2009 Recap-Part 3
This is the 3rd and final part of the AIMIA 2009 Connect Workshop
Managing Your Online Presence and Online Opportunity Conversion
Peter Crowe, CEO
Corvus Consulting
Steve Beger Photography (Beger.com Productions) in Homage to Nikola Tesla |
The question Peter asks to start off his presentation is how to leverage the consumer uptake in location-based services?
Why would you bother with this?
• Customers are buying local
• Customers are supporting local
• Customers are engaging with local media
• Local customers deliver higher profits
Local search is growing, this is because more people are searching for local listings in contrast to broad, generic searches. The search engines are trying to leverage that fact, evidence of this is the '10 pack that Google offers', that even appears for some searches that don't contain any local information. The 10 pack occupies key real estate and search engines are increasingly aware of your location.
Three main players in the local landscape, namely: Yellow Pages, Google and True Local. In order to get listed correctly several things need to be done:
• Make sure all your locations are listed with the Yellow Pages / Google / True Local
• Identify and update any relevant vertical directories
• Create a content page for every branch location on your website
• Develop an inbound link strategy around the content page / location
• Don't forget regions. E.g. 'Inner West', 'North Shore'
• Standardise your location data
The Power of Ratings & Reviews
• 84 percent of Americans say online customer evaluations have an influence on their decision to purchase a product or service
• 66 percent of respondents checked some type of online review forum when looking to purchase a particular brand of product or service.
• 50 percent relied on online reviews in the first stage of their buying cycle.
• Ask your known happy customers for feedback and give incentives
The important lesson I took away from this presentation was the vital importance of local search and how it impacts on both the quality and amount of visitors you get to your site. You need to dedicate resources in order to make sure your local listings are accurate and appear in the Google 10 box for the search phrases you are targeting.
Cracking the Quantum Code
Tim Cheng, Digital Creative Director
Euro RSCG Australia
Euro RSCG needed to create a promotional tie-in with the 007 movie, Quantum of Solace, generate deep engagement with the Sony Australia brand and to position Sony as a market leader in the consumer electronics category. The challenge was to recreate a 'best ever' promotion by driving double-digit incremental volume. The target market was:
• Active technophiles
• Early adopters of new technology and influence the opinions of their less tech-savvy friends
• The target market also enjoys high-involvement entertainment experiences
• James Bond fans
The strategy was to recruit thousands of ordinary people as "spies" and to use Sony products in order to save MI6 agent, Constance Newlove, crack a mysterious code, save the world and win untold riches and SONY/007 prizes in doing so. To live the intriguing double life of a secret service agent, players scanned QR codes to receive video mission briefings on their mobile phones.
Their missions took place on mobile, online, and in the real world. Players collaborated (and competed) using social networking platforms including blogs, forums and Facebook. The final mission was a live event at Sony's flagship store in Sydney.
The campaign was a massive success has achieved the following milestones:
• Over 8,000 unique mobile players
• Over 23,500 mobile views from 35 countries
• Over 10,000 You Tube views
• Generated total sales valued at 33% over target
• Engaged individual customer registrations measured at 42% over target
Learning's included; the intelligence of communities far exceeds that of one person, updates need to be made in real time to keep the game organic and fluid, create multiple entry points, players are part of the game and finally everyone wants to be Bond . A very well presented module supported by a great video supporting the case study, thoroughly enjoyable.
Like your high school librarian
Julian Cole, Digital Strategist
The Population
Why use case studies to convince people to use social media:• Case studies build confidence
• Australian case studies build even more confidence
• They also help stimulate new ideas
FMCG Case study
• Listerine-Listerine earlier in the year had an academic report linking the product to cancer, Listerine wanted to find out the real impact of the report.
• KFC-they set up a Facebook page for their Australian audience, they amassed over 20,000 fans in 1 week from a Cayan burger promotion. Use a promotional kick-start to get this rolling.
Fashion Case Study
• For the release of the new Dosh wallets range, they targeted a number of influential blogs, they managed to get presence on many style blogs and they achieved this by getting straight to the point with publishers.
• Billabong Lil Weeds-aligned with stab magazine to create a talent scout community, much better results than MySpace.
Television Case Study
• Needed to get people interested and engaged in the second season of Football Superstars, so they created a Facebook fan page with 3000+ fans, in summary, reality TV is perfect for social media.
• Last Ride-director set up a blog talking about the production of the movie, this gave an insight into creating a film, this worked as the blog targeted passionate people.
The importance of case studies was the main take away from Julian's presentation. If a case study is researched thoroughly and well written it can prove to be a valuable marketing tool in the arsenal of any company. The information Julian shared from the case studies was very fascinating and showed how social media can work across a wide variety of industries.
I thoroughly enjoyed this workshop, it had a little bit of everything, the vast majority of the presentations were well thought out and delivered with much enthusiasm and gusto. Kudos must also go to AIMIA for hosting an event that ran like clockwork and from what I can tell was very well received. This was a digital conference and being in the search industry I would have liked to have seen some more emphasis on search engine optimisation, let's hope next year SEO gets its own dedicated session
Have a good weekend everyone
Posted by Marc Elison on 07/10/09 at 3:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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9 July 2009
AIMIA Connect 2009-Part 2
This is part 2 of the recap of AIMIA Connect 2009
Future of digital advertising
Mike Williams, Interactive Advertising Manager
MCN Connect
Photo by earcos via Creative Commons |
Online technology is becoming very fragmented and user media consumption behaviour is changing from year to year, offering many different opportunities to advertise on a multitude of mediums.
Some interesting online video facts:
• UK Internet traffic to video websites up to 40.7% in a year and 1 in 35 Internet visits is to a dedicated video site
• In Australia, video viewing time on PCs has increased from 2.5 hours/week in 2007 to 4.6 hours in 2008
• In the US in 2008 99% of video viewing was done through the TV; YouTube, Hulu, iPhone and all other web and mobile phone media combined accounted for less than 1% of total video viewing [Amazing! - Kate]
• In 1995, there were 225 shows across British television that delivered audiences of more than 15 million. By 2005 there was none, this shows the extreme fragmentation taking place.
The new mantra is create once, publish often. This should be done through interactive TV advertising, which drives sales leads and can be used as a brand building activity. Enhanced TV can offer the viewer interesting tips and facts whilst still watching the shows. Personal Digital Recorders (PDRs) change the TV landscapes and does not ( as is the common view) eliminate TV ads, in fact, when a household obtains a PDR, television watched within the household is increased by 17%, in essence, 4% more live ads are shown . PDR's allow video on demand advertising, which entails reaching people when they are interested.
Addressable ads are the next frontier where ads can be tailored to the market, i.e. dog food ads to households with dogs. When TV + online ads are used together, the average uplift across all brand metrics for all tested categories was 18%. Purchase consideration was raised an average of 21% points, by exposure to both TV + online ads.
In summary, measurement and accountability will become vital with new measurement tools and techniques becoming available. Let the idea lead the medium while the same rules apply - content is still king. Need to advertise to where the eyeballs are and where the opportunity exists to make ads more targeted and more accountable.
A New approach to online news
Richard Slatter, GM
Wotnews.com.au
Richard starts his talk about the different approach to news that wotnews.com.au takes and how they won the AIMIA news and reference prize. They were the complete underdog and managed to come out on top. There is a shift going on within the news industry.
Wotnews.com.au is a news search engine that uses semantic search to analyse aggregate and organise the news. They are expanding into the UK and the US. News comes from so many diverse sources and their mandate is to try to bring the relevant news to the right audience.
Print media is on the decline, advertising and audiences are connecting elsewhere; traditional publishers no longer own the agenda. Hyper local news is now a possibility where you can get news on a neighbourhood based level. Citizen journalism on sites such as topix is experiencing a massive growth. Wotnews mines the news for business intelligence to track, monitor and understand what is going on in the world today. [The citizen journalism website on youtube is really cool too, check it out if you have not already - Kate]
In summary, people are reading more news than ever before, systems are consuming more news than ever while people are interacting with the news more than ever before. Rapid media innovation is everywhere and media organisations are being forced to innovate and improve.
A global and local view of the online video and internet broadcasting industry
Nick Bolton, Head of Sales & Marketing
Viocorp
3 billion videos are watched online every day, in 1 minute you can learn so much more from video than you can from a picture and text. The average US home will consume over 1 terabyte of digital content per month by 2010. This is because every plasma TV is the US is sold with Ethernet and internet connections and as a result of this newspapers are in big trouble, 2 major cities in the US already don't have a major newspaper.
4 different on-line video business models
1. Free-You tube
Free to view, advertising supported, its content is generally short, it's tough to monetise and control.
2. Corporate-Viocorp, governments etc
Content viewers won't pay for this content, content owners will pay to have content delivered, mostly corporate, governments and sports clubs are involved in this, very good for brand building.
3. Premium-Sydney Opera House
Niche content, content is more easily monetised i.e. viewers are prepared to pay for content.
4. Broadcasters-ABC, Seven etc
Multiple revenue sources, probably a traditional broadcast model sitting behind this.
Viocorp has had previous success with various clients, using video to reach millions of people on the web, the clients profiled were:
• Tourism Queensland
• Palm Sunday Mass
• QBE
• CyclingMasters.tv
• Obama's inauguration
• March Madness
Hulu, BBC, ABC and Facebook are the current leaders in this field. The future is HD, however bandwidth and processing power are major issues. Main tech landscape is dominated by Adobe, Microsoft, Akami and Boxee. Challenges are infrastructure, behavioural and cultural.
Photo by William Hook via Creative Commons |
EA Mobile Case study
Anton Sher, Director
Front Foot Media
Front Foot has successfully created and managed some of the most successful mobile content products and services in Australia. Front Foot's mobile technology is featured in the Australian Technology Showcase. The case study that Anton presented was regarding the relationship between Front Foot and the electronic game maker Electronic Arts.
Front Foot had several objectives while working with EA, including:
• Direct‐to‐consumer destination
• Customer insight & relationship
• Integrate with other sales and marketing departments
• Focus on mass‐market mobile handsets
• Generate revenue
To reach these objectives several elements of the gaming market needed to be understood including:
• What do we already know?
• What do we want to know?
• Would existing and new customers use it?
• Would we use it?
A complete mobile solution was developed and included the following elements:
• Content management
• Content vending
• Mobile payments
• Integration across EA business
• Reporting
It seems the close relationship that was formed between Front foot an EA resulted in a solid and effective product that was marketed, sold and backed up with expertise and ultimately garnered success.
Mobile - More Consumers, more Response
Jennifer Wilson, Chair
AIMIA Mobile industry Group
Some great stats were announced by Jennifer, many of these figures are taken from industry reports while some were best guesses from some very smart people:
• 23.2m mobile handsets in Australia (111.4% penetration)
• 3G handsets in Australia - est. 9m
• 30m iPhone sold world-wide (25m 3G)
• iPhone represents about 1.5% of all handsets Worldwide
• 650,000 iPhones in Australia
• Mobile internet use (Australia) : 5m active monthly users
• Telstra 2.3m; Optus 0.6m; Vodafone 0.5m; Hutchison/3 Mobile 1.6m
Key reasons to go mobile:
• Responded to very quickly (96% SMS read in <20 mins)
• On 24 x 7, nearby and accessed often
• Response to mobile advertising incredible:
• 3% - 7% response rate
• 10% - 20% conversation rate
• 6 times the ROI on mobile compared to other forms
Audience Measurement:
• On TV, the total audience data that can be captured is 1%
• On the web, the audience data that can be captured is 10%
• On mobile, the audience data that can be captured is 90%
If you are a brand:
• Mobile is a consumer touch point, not just an advertising or marketing channel
• Consumers will expect to transact through this channel
If you are a marketer:
• Use mobile as part of you strategy (integrated with others)
• If you want to do something new/different - mobile can help
• Consumers are sophisticated - clever concepts are better
If you are an advertiser:
• Be patient. The market is coming (and can be counted)
• Be aware of the context. Popular might not be appropriate
In summary mobile is the ultimate interactive media consumer device - in your pocket.
Part 3 of the AIMIA Connect 2009 recap will follow on Friday.
Posted by Marc Elison on 07/ 9/09 at 4:11 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
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6 July 2009
AIMIA Connect 2009
AIMIA Connect was marketed as "A one day Digital Media Industry Conference designed to educate and entertain you with a selection of case studies on recent AIMIA Award winning Australian digital media projects and campaigns. It will also bring you the latest forecasts and trends by some of the most prominent thought leaders in the industry" and I have to say this description was pretty apt.
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The speakers were chosen from winners of the specific AIMIA sector award, i.e. Front Foot Media won the AIMIA Award 2009 Best Mobile Product and by virtue of this was chosen to speak at the event.
Most of the speakers were enthusiastic, captivating and entertaining, therefore making a whole day slip by as if it were a hour. For me "mobile" seemed to be the topic of the day, even invading presentations that have very little to do with the mobile industry. There was so much great content provided that the AIMIA Connect 2009 recap will be spread into three posts.
Paul McCarthy - What does it mean to win a AIMIA Award?
Paul is the Chair of Judging of the 15th Annual AIMIA Awards. After a short introduction to the awards he gave a quick recap regarding the AIMIA awards and what can result if you win one of these prestigious prizes, this means:
• More business
• More clients
• Opening doors to developing alliances
• Corporate recognition
Paul then went on to introduce the first speaker, Jennifer Hiley.
United Nations Voices Project
Jennifer Hiley - Mobile Integration Specialist
The Hyperfactory
Jennifer starts out with a slide showing how much noise is the marketing environment in today. How do companies get through all the spam out there? Irrelevant of channel or platform, all the public wants is to be given a voice and heard.
The United Nations Voices campaign was started to give people who are not normally heard a voice. Using mobot (an image recognition technology) you (member of the target audience) would photograph the person's mouth with your mobile phone (from an outdoor display unit) and MMS the picture to a specified number.
The person whose picture you captured would call you back shortly after you sent the picture and tell you their unique story. Each call lasts about two minutes and the revenue generated is donated to the relevant UN charity. Extracts of these conversations were played and were very emotive and seemed to carry the theme of the campaign excellently.
Over three months an awareness increase of 82% was recorded and 76% of participants who listened to the end of the conversation made additional donations. Another interesting fact was that the average engagement time was four minutes, which is incredibly long for this type of campaign.
Jennifer also came out with some impressive statistics, especially how mobile traffic has tripled in the past year, in May, with 32% of people reaching the mobile world was done through Wi-Fi networks.
One underlying messages to come out of this presentation is " mobile is the conduit to all digital platforms, this is the one device we all lean on, we should utilise it." This was a really effective emotive presentation and was a great way to open the workshop.
Retail Spaces: Who's hurting Who?
Andrew Apostola, Creative director
Portable Content
Why would anyone shop online when the real world shopping environment is so much more tangible and socially enjoyable? Only 3.57% of people who visit online retailers purchase products online. Conventional retail is an expensive proposition, rent, wages, overheads etc. Mortar and bricks retail is now just window dressing and used to enhance the brand for online products.
Apple redefined the retail environment from taking products that used to be behind closed glass to being out in the open available for anyone to use and interact with.
Online retail will eat into physical consumer space, you have to look to start migrating your offerings online now!
"Jump the Web" Project
Joshua Hunt, Digital Producer
Soap Creative
This was a web campaign was for the Jumper motion picture. The objective for the campaign was to drive hype for the movie launch online and create a rich digital experience without a website destination. The idea was to utilise online portals to recreate a scenario from the movie. Put simply characters would be able to fight and teleport in and out of online content.
The timings were very tight so everything had to be right first time. There were three key stages in the production. The script, the shoot and the animation. Before the main shoot a test shoot was done to trial the script and the footage required to execute the animation.
This campaign had great results with the jumper animation seeing 365,000 visits with an average interaction time spent of four minutes. The after affects of the campaign included a significant shift of most of Soap's clients towards high impact, entertaining rich media creative.
Part two of the AIMIA Connect 2009 recap will follow during the week.
Posted by Marc Elison on 07/ 6/09 at 3:23 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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3 July 2009
Facebook Search
Last Wednesday, I was reading this article on Mashable about Facebook publisher when I thought it looked more and more like Twitter. No surprise then, when after two days, I was reading a second article on Facebook's fan revealing the new Twitter-like features that Facebook will be unveiling for its publisher status bar. Facebook already had a Twitter application allowing its users to tweet without leaving their site, but this new step shows how Facebook is concerned about the recent traffic growth on Twitter (+40% between March and May 2009 according to compete.com). The imminent release of Facebook Search brings a whole new perspective in the search market, where people will be able to search real-time information on news, major events, and among the massive amount of data available on Facebook.
Real-time information
The publisher bar allows Facebook users to share pretty much anything with their friends, but the new bar will feature an innovative option allowing them to expand the audience from a select group of friends to "everyone".
Publisher status bar now:
Future publisher status bar:
Looking deeper into this, I went to check on the Facebook Q&A page to understand what they actually mean by "everyone", and it confirmed that "everyone" means "anyone on the Internet". In other words, you will soon be able to tweet to your "fans" on Facebook. By the way, I find "fans" quite awkward as a term for "followers", so please Facebook, try to come up with something a little bit less intense.
It is now clear that Facebook is trying to counter-attack by enabling its users to have the same real-time feature offered by Twitter.
The question is how this new feature is going to impact Twitter?
Even if Twitter is a trendy topic on the Internet, its traffic is nowhere close to Facebook's. Actually, a recent article on TechCrunch revealed how Facebook's traffic is getting nearer to Google's and even exceeded MSN's. Besides, MySpace attracts more than twice as much unique visitors than Twitter! This reveals what people are really using, and if Twitter has experienced a fair growth in traffic recently, people don't use it as much as its main competitors.
TechCrunch has used compete.com as a reference, and so I did to forecast the future traffic for Facebook and Twitter using a simple linear rule - and it doesn't look very promising for Twitter. It appears that Twitter has doubled its traffic between February and March, so it could probably happen again, but Twitter would need to see its present traffic multiplied by 6 to reach Facebook.
But what I found really interesting was seeing the difference in impact for a major event like the recent death of Michael Jackson. You would assume in the first place that Twitter really is the best way to get real-time information and you would be right in a way, since the first information is said to have been tweeted, and not shared on Facebook. However according to this other article on Mashable about the web impact of Michael Jackson's death, you can see on this graph how massive the impact has been on Facebook, and if you have a very good sight, you will be able to see the relatively minor impact of this event on Twitter (in purple).
Facebook Search
Facebook has recently announced the test of their brand new Facebook Search feature, allowing users to find content amongst the world's largest online social media website. According to their statistics, more than 900 million photos are uploaded to the site each month, and more than 1 billion pieces of content are shared each week. Facebook has officially more than 200 million users, and if just 10% of these users choose to publish their status updates to "everyone", it means that 20 million users will generate fresh search engine indexable content.
Facebook couldn't buy Twitter and is about to launch a service nearly identical, but based on a much bigger community. So will users who currently utilise both social networks consolidate their users? Given this, what will be the future of Twitter?
Either way, from a SEO perspective, it will be interesting to see how the major companies react to these two real-time search engines. These 200 millions+ users are obviously quite tempting for the marketers, especially considering the amount of data Facebook has on each user. But so many questions remain regarding Facebook Search: Are the Facebook users really going to use Facebook Search? What is it going to index? Will it differentiate real-time results with static results in its SERPs? And why not Facebook Webmaster Tools, hey?
Regarding spamming, how are Facebook and Twitter going to filter their SERPs? Search Engine Land has recently posted an article about real-time spam on Twitter, and offered recommendations such as:
• "Accounts less than a day old don't get to show up in Twitter Search and/or show up for trending topics
• Figure a reputation score for accounts and only let those appear in for trending topics
• Partner with a service for malware detection, so that any links Twitter puts out are analyzed to be safe"
The impact of such a potentially powerful tool for online marketing hot shots everywhere could bring a whole new perspective to the Search market. How much of the blue chip advertising budget is going to be spent on these new means of promotion? SEO firms might soon optimise companies' pages and content for Facebook Search or even give recommendation on the right keywords to use for tweet copywriting. Now let's see what impact such new features will have on the major search engines like Google considering that Facebook is attracting nearly as much traffic as Google.
Posted by Martin Orliac on 07/ 3/09 at 8:23 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)
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Marc Elison
Kate Gamble
Martin Orliac
