Andrew R H Girdwood

Digital Marketing 2011: Spatial Marketing

2010-07-28T11:21:00.000+01:00

Spatial marketing isn't anything new or revolutionary in the offline world. It's common sense. Book shops put their best sellers* in standup displays by the door and the checkout, supermarkets put their impulse buys right where you queue and every now and then whole shops change their interior design to encourage you to walk around and discover new products.

We've not really had this in the online world.

Sure, okay, we've had “above the line” style of commentary, taking the expression from the old fashioned style of advertising to refer to whether someone needs to scroll down or not to access content, review an ad or otherwise interact.

The truth, though, is that people are quite happy to scroll. Let's park the debate about the value of banner ads on parts of the website where people might not see them and label that as something else. I'm talking about a would-be shopper's ability to scroll down in order to look for reviews on an item.

Of course they can. As our Usability team often point out to me; people look where they expect things to be.

That's going to be increasingly important in digital marketing. We're going to go very far beyond the simple act of scrolling down a page too.

Let's start with Google. BumpTop is now part of Google and no one will be surprised to see it as a part of Chrome OS. BumpTop is a 3D desktop. It's not new. Their famous YouTube video, up since 2006, has had over 3 million views on YouTube.

Just a few seconds into video you'll be able to see how this would change how you store and save documents. Forget clicking through C: drives or networks. Instead you'll remember that your favourite templates are in the top left or that your favourite shortcuts to webpages are in the bottom right. Isn't that how you find things on your desk already? You can see it there and you know which direction to reach for your phone even if you're not looking at it.

This may seem a bit like future tech to you – but it really isn't. There are simpler, closer to the consumer, digital spatial technologies you should consider. Firefox, for example, is working on Tab Candy.

This is another much watch video. The implications for digital marketing are clear and profound.

Imagine the impact this will have on website loyalty? Once a shopaholic has created their panel of favourite retail websites they're going to go back there far more often. It'll be a challenge for any new retailer to win their way into that shopper's list of favourites.

We'll start to care much more about how and where people save the web sites and profiles we are promoting. We'll not want to be bottom of the pile. We'll want to have a dominant space in people's virtual internet homes.

You shouldn't imagine this technology will be restricted to the desktop, laptop or tablet either. With the likes of Google TV coming (with Sony PlayStation as a partner) and more content being available through Xbox Live even our 42” giant screens that dominate our living rooms will be included in the spatial marketing evolution.

* They're not really bestsellers, publishers pay good money to buy those advert slots.

The 2011 Ford Explorer - good for chasing traffic; web traffic

2010-07-26T14:09:00.001+01:00

For a second I thought there had been some great PR win. Both TechCrunch and Mashable published posts about the 2011 Ford Explorer at about the same time.

What's that got to do about social media or startup tech? I thought to myself. Not much.

Mashable has the fact that Ford is turning to the internet to do its adverts. In fact there's a Ford Explorer Facebook page to get people talking about the car.

I admit that the Reveal tab is pretty well done and there's over 45,000 people who like the Ford Explorer. Not sure this is new enough strategy to appeal to Mashable though.

TechCrunch go for the CrunchGear approach; passing the car off as tech and suggesting its greentech.

Call me cynical if you want; I supect both blogs have been approached by Ford, I suspect both blogs would love a relationship with Ford but both blogs are also predicting search surges for the face "Ford Explorer 2011" or "2011 Ford Explorer". Heck; once I worked out what they were up to; I just had to write this post.

It's just unfortunate that both blogs had back to back posts. I wonder if either one is now regretting it (or regretting that the competitor also took the same oppertunity).

The great advantage of being a popular blog is that you're given the traffic driving terms before everyone else. You have a chance to get that optimised content online before people even know to search for it.

The question is - does the blog suffer if it strays too far from its usual course? I can't have been the only one to wonder why I was looking at pictures of a Ford Explorer on TechCrunch.

Did Facebook just update the Like button widget?

2010-07-24T14:27:00.002+01:00

I think Facebook just updated their simple "Like" button widget.

This is the button that can be dropped into blog posts, news stories, Foursquare venue profiles, etc. It's spreading out across the web because it's easy to install and is a fantastic way to help surface your content. You'll have seen that F

acebook is capable of driving a very large amount of traffic to your site if you've taken advantage of this feature and have the right sort of content.

I've been "Like" button pressing for a while. I'm pretty sure I would have noticed the "add a comment" option before if it had been around. That said; it's a little awkward. If you return to hover the button, after you've pressed it, then you're given the option to share with a comment.

You can try it for yourself with this Baidu profit surge story. It makes sense that Facebook has done this. I hope their Insights package starts to include snapshots of the comments these buttons produce... ah, but there we find privacy concerns.

New dictionary Onebox from Google

2010-07-19T13:58:00.002+01:00

When I say "new" I mean; new to me.

I used to use Google for spell-checking a lot. It did two things great;

Suggested the right spelling for my poor attempt
Linked to dictionary.com or answers.com in the top right

Google's been monkeying around with those top right links for a while. Answers.com took a traffic splat when Google removed the link.

When it comes to the spell checking; Google seems to try too hard to work out what could be matched with my typo. It's not always so easy to get the right spelling back.

I noticed this today; a dictionary entry as an onebox. Clearly a lot of people do the same "spell check search".

Is there anything there? Calvin Klein's QR code bravery - and challenge

2010-07-14T10:00:00.004+01:00

I really do think that last year was the year of the mobile - at least in the UK. It was just a soft pop rather than big bang. Last year, most people become happy with smartphones.

This year is the year people will stop blaming their mobile for a bad experience of a brand's website or mobile app and start blaming the brand.

Despite that and despite the steady progress w

e're making in mobile - it's still early days yet. For example, there's still a debate as to whether QR codes will really take off in the West. I think they well.

Over at Mashable the always-good-to-read Lauren Indvik has posted this crystal clear picture of a new billboard by Calvin Klein. This time it's not a racy picture to set minds wandering and bloggers blogging. This time it's a QR code.

I think this is really clever. We'll see more billboards with QR codes on them (if I have my way anyway; listen to me clients, listen to me! :) ).

There is a problem though. This doesn't work.

You can scan that picture yourself. If you're lucky you'll get to a 40 second video advert with model-people-types Lara Stone, “A.J.,” Sid Ellisdon, Grayson Vaughan and Eric Anderson in it.

If you're like me then you'll make your way to ckj.mobi/pr/ and a blank screen.

I like how they've called it /pr/. Makes me think this may be a PR stunt.

It's not as if I'm using low tech. I've an HTC Desire (that's Android 2.1). I used Google Goggles (latest) to scan the image.

It's just that the video doesn't run.

If Calvin Klein hadn't reached for the video and had gone with just a "mobile poster" then I'm sure it would have worked.

I don't think CK have done anything wrong here. It's just the challenge we face. There's a huge amount of fragmentation within the mobile space (especially people like Android and RIM) in a way that we never ever got to in the bad day of browsers.

What do you think?

Update: Some time later, a lot later, a video still appeared. It won't play. But a better experience and more likely to have me blame my phone.

www.facebook.com/ceop

2010-07-12T08:49:00.002+01:00

Image via Wikipedia

CEOP stands for Child Exploitation and Online Protection. It's a UK police/government group that does its best to look after children online. Pretty obvious, huh?

They're the folk who kicked up a fuss when Facebook wouldn't install a "panic button" for kids to press should they find themselves talking to someone dodgy online. They kicked up a PR story when Bebo, I think, added it.

I caught on the BBC news today that Facebook would install the button. Odd, I thought, and listened in.

Firstly, the BBC reporter was apologising for calling it a panic button. Good. It clearly isn't. It's just a link to some resources. The suggestion that pressing it keeps you safe is a dangerous one. It doesn't. In fact, I think some people could argue that the button is dangerous in itself just because of that.

This strikes me as a victory for Facebook. This is just a standard Facebook Application - albeit with the backing of some big players already. CEOP's spokes person Julian Gamble said that Facebook would be putting it on their page themselves.

As I watched the report I just couldn't shake the feeling that neither CEOP nor the BBC were really confident on the subject. Shouldn't CEOP have been asked why it's taken them this long to create the Application. After all, they've dragged this on and on by going about this the slow way.

Most surprisingly, and the reason for this blog post, the address of the application is not www.facebook.com/ceop. No. It's www.facebook.com/clickceop.

There's a huge irony there. How many kids are going to get lost on Facebook looking for this application? Which enterprising so-and-so is going to grab www.facebook.com/ceop first and what will they put on it?

Andrew Girdwood on digital marketing (today)

2010-07-08T14:51:00.003+01:00

It seemed like a good idea at the time - we talk about the importance of video - but do we do it? One cheap video camera later and some of the muckymucks in our internal marketing department did this to me:

What did we learn? I can't sit still. A radio microphone would be a good idea.

What's debated: I think the best way to make this work are quick, easy and unofficial videos? I'd much rather sneak the camera to one of the offices and half-ambush an SEO Account Manager, or an Affiliate Account Manager, etc, and ask them some questions. It'll take a few minutes. It'll be noisy and crowded - but isn't that half the point? A real insight into a busy digital agency.

That's debated from those people who'd rather set up a controlled environment and concentrate more on quality.

I'll be happy if I can just replace that evil AdSense video in the SERPs. Hence the share in this blog post!

Should foursquare...

2010-07-01T13:52:00.001+01:00

I'm writing this on blogger-droid, using a swype keyboard and thinking about foursquare. Its a sign of the times.

I'm a level 1 super user on foursquare. I can edit address details and I've made many corrections to their UGC.

I don't know if there are any level 2 users. They need to be more active if they're or foursquare needs to create some more. The database is riddled with duplicates and errors. They persist weeks after reporting them.

Foursquare has rolled out a sort of venue classification system - you can mark places as fast food or trains, etc. I think more is needed.

In particular, busy places like Padington Station in London are a mess. You have to scroll through dozens of micro locations in Paddington - like platforms - before you can find the generic paddington to check in to. The same for airports and to a lesser extent shopping malls.

I think foursquare needs a way to classify. Macro locations, or container locations, or holding locations.

Then we wonder about locations that move: mainly trains. Trains like the Gatwick Express are popular on foursquare but fragmented. On my Android geo-location device I have a Gatwick (and Heathrow) express for the airport end of the trip and on other for the station end. I could check into both.

Things get crazy when people start adding times to locations: "the 13:55 to York".

Should foursquare now start to think about more robust location rules to protect the user experience?

I think so.

Don't even get me started on the cheats. A report odd check-in pattern button would be nice.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.3.9

Dear Flickr, what the RSS hell?

2010-06-30T12:18:00.005+01:00

I tweeted about my disappointment with Flickr's integration with Facebook. It gave me nothing that Friendfeed didn't already do. I wanted a single upload that would sort things so the nice hi-res pictures appeared on Flickr and an adapted set appeared on Facebook so I could tag friends doing embarrassing things.

I'm even more disappointment with their (lack of) RSS strategy.

One of my Flickr feeds updated to say it wasn't going to update any more. Okay; 301 redirect it then like the rest of the world and we'll all carry on as normal. No. Looks like Flickr expects everyone to manually transfer.

But where should we manually transfer too? The link they provided is this one.

Here's what it looks like:

The problem seems straight forward. The URL ends with ?user_id=me. In other words; they expect me to be signed in (not that Google Reader can sign in for me).

If I do sign in and try that URL again I get redirected. However, the URL I get contains a secret variable and I'm sure it's not wise to share its value. Maybe it's safe. Maybe it isn't. I've no idea.

What Flickr need to do is simply and automatically upgrade the old public RSS addresses to the new public RSS addresses. It should be faff free.

Ask Jeeves - the search engine that tweets ads

2010-06-28T10:02:00.007+01:00

I followed the Ask Jeeves Twitter account back during the search engine's second, third, or perhaps eighth return. Never really managed to get into any promotional banter with the account... shame.

It's not unusual for Mr Jeeves to use Twitter to ask questions. After all; that's the search engine's thang. You ask a question and it'll answer it.

Question of the Day: How many mobiles are stolen every hour in the UK? A: An average of 228 phones! Get protected here: http://bit.ly/bFy4kgless than a minute ago via webAsk Jeeves
askjeevesdotcom

embed this tweet

I was surprised to see the butler offer a direction though. If I wanted protection I should visit this link. It was all bit.ly'd, of course.

Looks pretty clear to me that Ask has an ad deal with F-Secure. Nothing wrong with having an ad deal. Just didn't expect Ask to be tweeting about it.

Just a little bit digging also shows that today's question also appears on the search engine's homepage and link straight through to the the specially created landing page too. Doesn't do much in the way of showing me Ask's ability to answer the questions I ask.

Oh well. Times are tough. There's nothing wrong in Ask mixing in a little ads into the search profile and I'm fairly sure not no one's going to mistake this for a search result! However, I wonder what brand concerns they had around this tactic.

Google refreshes the rules on low quality landing pages

2010-06-22T16:50:00.002+01:00

Google has a page that discusses which types of websites may merit low landing page quality score. It was updated in the early hours of this morning.

One of the biggest changes to the documentation was the opening paragraph. Why would Google give any type of site a low quality score? Google says;

Users have consistently provided negative feedback on several types of websites.

So, what are those sites?

Those that offer free items for data collection.
Arbitrage sites that are designed for the purpose of displaying ads.
Low quality affiliate sites – such as poor comparison shopping or aggregation sites.
Get-rich quick sites
Sites that go against Google’s Software Principles
Sites that feature false of misdealing claims – this includes competitive claims and generic superlatives
Sites that go against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, use cloaking or other inappropriate technologies.

So, let’s take a look at that.

Sites that breach Google’s Webmaster Guidelines can harm their PPC quality score. Link buying can push your PPC costs up. That’s an interesting fact to bring out in a pitch. I think I’ll do that in the future.

It’s interesting that the rules about generic superlatives and competitive claims are cited. They’re well known for being risky in the ad creative; but for the landing page too? One to watch.

It’s also interesting to consider Google explicitly calls out “poor comparison shopping” or “aggregation” sites as a low quality score risk because there certainly is legal action brewing in EUland for Google from some shopping and aggregation sites who claim they’ve been treated unfairly, in general, by Google.

The iPhone 4 will change how we think about phone sex

2010-06-18T16:56:00.000+01:00

I've had an iPhone 3G. I don't think I'll be getting the iPhone 4 as I'm content with my HTC and Android (give me Froyo or I'll delete this post!).

I'm still very much watching the market though. Perhaps the iPhone 4G will be more impressive. Perhaps it'll have three cameras.

Did you know there are designers who wanted the iPhone 4 to have 3 cameras? This video explains all

Chrome is now so fast that web sites break. Check yours.

2010-06-10T13:48:00.004+01:00

Chrome has become my default browser. I still use Firefox when I'm examining the site; those plugins are so handy but the rest of the time I'm on Chrome.

I use Chrome because it's fast and sleek. I'm often on a laptop and sometimes on a 3G mobile connection. Chrome helps then.

In fact, Chrome is so fast that I've noticed some websites aren't coping. I've an example from bigmouthmedia. I was checking out our coverage of social sites out-pacing search which was doing fairly well on Twitter when I noticed this...

What's this? An error on our new website. The footer appearing before the content finished?

Turns out there's nothing wrong with the code (although; yeah, there's an IE6 error we can live with (actually; I wanted the site to explode in the face of IE6 users - but I was overruled)). What's happening is that Chrome completes the JavaScript function correctFooter() before the images have finished loading. This only happens with Chrome 5.0.375 and up.

In our case the fix was simple - delay the JS a little bit.

Going forward - I suspect this will become a growing issue, especially with HTML5, and more sites will have to manage the time/order of loading - especially in relation to relative positions.

It's also worth being aware this is Google's tech. This is a suggestion at how quickly Google could parse JavaScript. I'm not saying this is what Googlebot will always see but it's certainly a suggestion of the sort of rendering Googlebot could see.

Stage Invasion for Spain and Twitter - two Eurovision enhancements

2010-05-29T22:01:00.003+01:00

I'm still amazed at just how much Twitter transforms the Eurovision experience. If you've any doubt there is a future in interactive social media TV then track #eurovision next year in Twitter. Get someone in the room to read out the best tweets.

In case you didn't know about this new media cheese secret - here's a video of the stage invasion of the Spainish entry. A man in a silly hat runs on the stage, larks around before politely escorted off by polite Norweign security.

You thought Wolfram|Alpha was scientific and neutral?

2010-05-27T08:37:00.001+01:00

There's a surprise for any digital marketer or geek who searches Wolfram|Alpha for the word meme.

If you're in social media then you should be talking about memes a lot. Many of the most powerful social media campaigns are memes or wrapped around a meme.

So; what does Wolfram|Alpha say about it?

Testy!

Boy falls from escalator in Turkey; caught by shop keeper

2010-05-26T22:02:00.002+01:00

This 4 year old toddler falls from an escalator in a shopping mall in Turkey.

He was playing on the stairs and quickly found himself too high. Luckily, a shop keeper had been made aware of the problem and was able to catch the boy.

This video of the boy falling from the escalator looks like its been ripped from the news so apologies in advance if it has been YouTube yanked.

I think this falling toddler video is a classic example of local news that will go global because of social media.

If we could plot news stories by type across interest then I would suspect we'll continue to plot an increase in both mega news and in these human stories. It's the national news in the middle that gets caught out. Perhaps that's something newspapers will begin to factor in as they battle with paywalls and loyal readership issues.

Is this the most dodgy link on the BBC ever?

2010-05-18T12:26:00.004+01:00

SEOs always aspire to get client links on the BBC. It's worth it but it's not easy.

First off; you need the BBC to write about your client or write about a story in which your client is involved. Then the BBC has a strong tendency to link to the clients corporate site - many people say that's the BBC's policy, but I can't find that written down anyway.

I give you this story about a UK-based test of super fast broadband.

The companies involved in the story are: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), BT and Virgin Media.

It might come as a surprise that the BBC is linking to Opal (part of Talk Talk) in the related links section. It might come as even a greater surprise that the BBC is linking to a product page within Opal. It's linking to the product page using the money term keywords.

What do you think? Is this an extremely curious choice of link by the BBC? Or is my SEO-addled mind seeing phantoms in shadows?

Update: It's the day after this post first went live; less than 24 hours later, and the link has been removed.

SMX Advanced?

2010-05-17T21:58:00.003+01:00

Image by BrentDPayne via Flickr

Day one of SMX Advanced London has finished. You’ll find far less live blog coverage or even write ups than in previous years as Twitter coverage is stepping in to replace this.

I’m certainly aware that many people are questioning whether this was really an advanced seminar at all.

I guess the important background piece is that no search conference is particularly advanced. Not in comparison to the US. The reason for this is that we’re far less “My friend X” and “My friend Y” here in the UK than in the US. In the UK speakers really don’t bring their good stuff to the panel. They just don’t. This is combined with the fact that the UK search market is incredibly advanced. That’s why so many foreign agencies have simply failed to import themselves over here. Given, then, that the audience is advanced and speakers are unwilling to do share the good stuff it’s perhaps not surprising to find a disjoint.

It’s also true, I think, that the pitches for SMX started off as pitches for SMX London and the process was then evolved into SMX Advanced.

I’m hopeful but worried for day #2 (I’ll be there for most of it) as the social media presentations in past years (and not just at SMX) have typically been the most 101 of them all.

There are a few stand outs from today, though.

Chris Sherman, of course, does a good job at introducing speakers, sessions and then keeping them going. Experience matters.

Sam Crocker from the internet marketing company Distilled did very well. Not only was his presentation engaging but it also happily revealed some techniques Sam had found useful; including some tools the audience hadn’t seen before. He added value. The audience, and I, thanked him.

I thought Jonathan Beeston from Efficient Frontier added value in the Amazing New PPC tactics. Not because we really got any amazing new PPC tactics but because he flexed the brief enough to actually be useful – and talk about the importance of building PPC accounts that can scale. I bet many in the audience just let that insight roll over them but they’ll regret it as they attempt to grow their campaigns and their own companies.

In the morning session Rand Fishkin was able to present some statistical data. This wasn’t data that had been shared in London before and so it added value. It may have just confirmed what the advanced players in the audience knew, but it was fresh data and so it added value.

The morning’s key note; by Barak Berkowitz of Wolfram|Alpha, had value towards the end as he was able to share some of WA’s plans for the future. He’s a brand new MD so perhaps might not have expected the audience to be so aware of WA’s capabilities as we where.

And me?

I went to SMX Advanced to try and pitch a progressive way of link development. I’m really worried that cowboys in this business – there are still agencies who convince their clients they can link buy without being noticed – will ruin SEO’s image for everyone.

What do you call the letters that get pushed through your door in the morning’s mail? Junk mail? I call it junk mail. That represents the damage done to the direct mail industry. Can you imagine how much better off direct mail companies would be if the world didn’t refer to their marketing medium as ‘junk mail’? They’d be in a much better place. SEO runs the same risk. We won’t die because of the barrel scrapers but we will be held back.

My presentation was in two parts;

I wanted to argue that links were once a trusted way to suggest a site had value. That things have changed. Now links are worth far less and, in fact, it is just as easy to harm a new site with poor links then help it.
I also wanted to show how SEO agencies and in-house teams could combat this. The future of link development, I think, is through social media-like relationship building. However, it’s also possible to engage in some agency activity such as being able to produce the sort of content that people are about to search and link to before anyone else does and some easy ways to show linkworthy content to people likely to link.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing. As it turns out the panel agreed with me; the future of link development is through relationship building. If I had known that then I would have spent less time on the first point and more on examples from the second.

That said; I’ve enjoyed my chats with people during the event and am pleased that people are willing to shake things up and push for a better, more advanced, industry.

Quick Post: SMX Advanced London

2010-05-13T23:11:00.002+01:00

I think the title pretty much says it all. I'm going to SMX Advanced London. I'll be there to talk about link building - how I think if you're "building links" that you're doing it wrong.

Foursquare adds check-in trends

2010-05-12T10:48:00.003+01:00

File this one in the "new to me" bucket. I went to check into Sloe in Paddington Station on Foursquare on my HTC Desire - and was told that Paddington itself was trending.

What does this mean? Aside from making flashmobs and swarm badges easier it will help surface popular venues to Foursquare users.

For example, bigmouthmedia took a stand to Internet World (London) this year. I noticed people checking into "Internet World" and (perhaps more correctly) Earl's Court 2. A marketing idea would have been to get the bigmouthmedia crew and visitors to check into a sub-venue, our stand number, as that would likely encourage more visitors (the social savvy sort of visitors I like too).

SMX London is up in a few weeks. I should very much hope we get the 50 or so check ins required there for us to unlock the swarm badge. If not we should certainly get a trending topic.

Unofficial Labour Twitter campaign confuses many

2010-05-08T16:59:00.002+01:00

As it turns out this wasn't the General Election that was dominated by social media.

I'm aware that most of the voices saying it was traditional media that was most effective in the 2010 campaign are voices from the traditional media camp fighting for a much needed "told you so" but I do admit there wasn't as much volume in social media as I expected.

It certainly wasn't the Mumsnet election, either.

It may turn out, however, to be the social media hung parliament.

Right now, there's a growing volume of tweets asking (begging) for a Labour and Liberal Democrat coalition. They're trying to whisk up a large number of retweets.

The catch? These tweets were not started by the official Labour Party Twitter account. The official account doesn't have a Verified Badge (it would have been good of both Twitter and the UK parties to have got that right) but the official Labour website makes it easier to find which Twitter account is legit.

Mind you; that's a heck of a lot of work. There might be something to be said for marking "verified" in Twitter's new and native retweet functionality.

Lynx paying to show Jessica Jane Clement's bum on Facebook

2010-05-03T21:37:00.004+01:00

This is one part clever and two parts risky. It might even be one part luck.

Rightnow, Lynx are promoting a new shower product called Lynx Rise. The angle is that it'll help your brain wake up in the morning. It's also a Lynx product so they're making sure the ads ooze sex appeal which is why famous names like Jessica Jane Clement are being used. Okay, I only found out her name was Jessica Jane Clement for this post... but let's move on from that.

I'm a geek. A gaming geek. My favourite type of game is the RPG. So it comes as no surprise to discover that I'm playing Wizards of the Coast's famous D&D Tiny Adventures on Facebook. Roleplaying games in chapters.

Check out the bum advert. It does catch the attention. I'm a little surprised Facebook approved it. Not much. Just a little.

If you're curious, the add then goes to www.facebook.com/lynxeffectuk.

So, other than grabbing male attention with bums and suspenders - how is this clever?

It's a simple case of interest based targeting. The Lynx ad the bum photograph is taken from is a roleplaying joke (not that you get to enjoy that if you click on the bum). So it's clever in so far its targeting gamers. It's not clever in so far as gamers (who've not seen the ad) won't actually get the joke.

As it happens I've got the ad to show below (via Unruly Media; a pay-to-play video ad company).

Brian Bremner is the face of Amazon UK support

2010-05-03T15:35:00.003+01:00

Okay, the title of this blog post is misleading so let me explain.

I'm trying out Rapportive. Rapportive integrates with your Gmail to show you the social network status/presence of the people you're emailing.

It taught me that a large percentage of the emails in by inbox these days are from no-reply addresses at social networks and e-tailers. It's great for reverse blogger outreach though. When I get an email from a PR company or digital agency (generally in relation to another blog; not this one) I can see a little bit about the person emailing me and it helps me quickly workt out whether they're established or not (in one case; whether they're real or not).

Rather amusingly one e-tailer in particular doens't come up blank. As it turns out Amazon UK is on Bebo. Brian Bremner, in particular, is the kindly man asking me about my order.

Oops.

I do see a growing problem with people using publicly known / corporate email aliases in relation to social media profiles. Sometimes you can't verify these addresses. Sometimes that doens't matter.

There's also the risk of false positive in with services like Rapportive. I'e used Xobni, for Outlook, in the past (unstalled because my Outlook is slow enough) and it would run the similar risk.

Sony announce Android OS TV sets

2010-04-30T20:20:00.001+01:00

Image by Jon Åslund via Flickr

Just a quick post for Friday night. Sony have said they'll be launching a set of TV that'll run on Android (with Intel chips).

Intel are putting together a new set of Atom chips to run Android. They'll be called Dragonpoint.

We might wonder why the TVs aren't using Chrome OS. I guess it's because Chrome OS is neither here nor proven where Android is. In my mind it suggests Google may have to hurry to merge the two; as I'm sure they will.

Yet another party; Logitech, is likely to come on board and help out with accessories for the TV sets. I imagine they mean pointers and keyboards, etc.

Bloomberg has the full story.

Hotmail: The New Busy

2010-04-29T19:32:00.008+01:00

I thought Microsoft had retired the Hotmail brand.

As it turns out; no. Not quite. Wikipedia says;

The Hotmail brand was planned to be phased-out when Microsoft announced that the new mail system would be called Windows Live Mail, but the developers soon backtracked after beta-testers were confused with the name change and preferred the already well-known Hotmail name, and decided on Windows Live Hotmail. After a period of beta testing, it was officially released to new and existing users in the Netherlands on November 9, 2006, as a pilot market. Development of the beta was finished in April 2007, Windows Live Hotmail was released to new registrations on May 7, 2007, as the 260 million MSN Hotmail accounts worldwide gained access to the new system. The old MSN Hotmail interface was accessible only by users who registered before the Windows Live Hotmail release date and had not chosen to update to the new service. The roll-out to all existing users was completed in October 2007.

Now, it looks like, the "Windows Live" part is being dropped. I was in London this week for Internet World and the tube trains all had Hotmail: TheNewBusy ads decorating the poster boxes.

Maybe this is a cheeky call from Microsoft UK but there's no sign of the "Windows Live" logo/brand anywhere.

Hotmail has impressive brand strength. It's so old! It's not had its own domain for years, many years, and yet people still talk about Hotmail. It was such a good buy by Microsoft.

Of course, there is the new busy site from Microsoft. It's part of WindowsLive.co.uk (so, no, not Hotmail.co.uk) ... And yes, this site still talks about Windows Live Hotmail.

From an SEO point of view the new busy site is interesting. What percentage of the site's text, would you say, is not visible to users on loading? Quite a lot. How do you think Google would react to this?

The PPC campaign is also interesting. Once again we see no sign of "Windows Live". It's clearly Hotmail.

Microsoft are using Atlas to track the campaign. Good on them.