Marco Bertozzi:05:10
All the rumours suggest the Google Nexus One phone will launch today at 6pm. I think the hype is bigger than the phone to be honest but why not see for yourself. Engadget has done a topline review of the phone, click below to see what they think..if I had seen the phone, which of course I have not, I would say it is underwhelming..
The cost without contract will be pretty much on par with the iPhone so its not quite going to be the phone of the people but will challenge the iPhone, it will also be unlocked so accessible to all if you fancy splashing out.
Marco Bertozzi: 20.12.09
Only the other week I was writing about how Real Time search would impact a brand. I talked about the fact that real time negative PR would be presented on the first page of Google listings would make life difficult both for the company and for any attempts to carry out a PPC campaign alongside it.
Well Eurostar have done a brilliant job of bringing that to life for us over the last few days. Lets face it Eurostar has had a nightmare. Trains that are sensitive to the cold, people stranded, holidays and Christmas ruined, kids with no food, blacked out trains over night, it could not get any worse..or could it?
Yes it could if the company had no communications strategy in place, right from people on the ground to Twitter moderators or websites being updated frequently, they have broken every rule going, especially in the first day or so.
Twitter is filled to the brim with negative comments and no one has been in place to respond to them which just fuels the fire, how difficult is it? Answer a couple of questions, make an announcement or two. There is no excuse for how poor they have been. They do seem to have no paid for listings against the search term Eurostar tickets so someone remembered to pull all their advertising! Even here though, was there an opportunity to have put some notices of some sort? As it is a few random companies are wasting their budgets against paid for listings for the words Eurostar.
Marco Bertozzi 14.12.09
The new Google phone photos are now being leaked in every direction, there is a lot of discussion over what phone it actually is, the majority believe it to be an HTC.
The key things with this phone are:
1. It will be unlocked so open to all
2. It is Google born and bred software
It is meant to be very slick and better than the iPhone although time will tell! Click on photo below to see all the photos.
Marco Bertozzi 13.12.09
Well lets start with what Google says about its new search results, here is a video summing up the possibilities:
The summary of that provides these services:
• Ability to filter real-time results to only show updates from particular sources, such as Twitter, Friendfeed and others on new “Latest results” page;
• Latest results and new search options optimized for iPhone and Android devices “when you need them on the go, be it a quick glance at changing information like ski conditions or opening night chatter about a new movie — right when you’re in line to buy tickets”;
• “Hot topics” on Google Trends will now show most common topics being published to web in real-time.
SO what does that mean for advertisers and individuals?
There are two ways of looking at Real Time search. One is from the individual’s perspective and the other from an agency/advertiser’s.
An individual really just had the power put into their hands, an unbelievable position of prominence on the world’s most viewed ad placement. If you are unhappy you can make your point immediately. If you are raging at the latest piece of news, if a mouse just ran across your hotel room, whatever happens to you, you tweet or FB and its up and visible to all. It’s unbelievable, really.
Those tweeters and bloggers are now in a position to generate massive traffic for their sites or profiles, this will be the best thing ever for egomaniacs. It will of course also be amazingly useful. You are in a traffic jam and need to know what the hold up is, how is the weather in Balham right now, its all there, it will be so useful day-to-day. Of course its all there at the moment if you search on Twitter but I think this move will bring that knowledge to a far wider audience.
Part 2 however is much harder. If you are an advertiser and happily investing in PPC campaigns when suddenly your ad is now alongside someone who is destroying your brand or service, then you are going to have to come up with an active strategy. Areas such as Hotels, restaurants etc may have a nightmare if people do Tweet negatively about them while they are trying to buy ads encouraging them to book.
As an advertiser this will mean you have to consider a few actions;
1. Redouble your efforts to make sure your brand advertising is clear, eye-catching and able to draw people away before they start to soak up all the real-time results below which may not all be positive.
2. Advertisers will now be fighting over the top slots more fiercely so be prepared to invest further into the PPC budgets. You will not want your text ad half way down the page while some FF or Twitter updates are above you giving you what for!
3. If the reports are correct that only 26% of the top 500 superbrands seriously invest in Twitter then perhaps this move will spark them into action as they will need to have their own content in the real-time results as well as those of the users / customers / consumers. Thats probably a good thing as it will make more advertisers deal with social media, something that so many are still behind on.
Search systems which may only optimise a few times a day are also going to appear slow in comparision to these kind of results, at the moment as people monitor their search ROI it may be optimised infrequently, this will need to be accelerated. Bad real-time feeds may be ruining your PPC and you should know about it and react. It will make search a lot more labour intensive as if it needed to be anymore complicated.
So what do I think overall. Great for the individual, very useful, very informative. For the advertiser, well its going to need a lot more work and thought both in SEO, PPC and social strategies.
Marco Bertozzi 10.12.09
As we leave 2009 we start to see the endless list of predictions for 2010, some interesting, some very topline some very specific but all worth having a read if you want to see how 2010 is going to be shaped. It is only a selection, if you want to add yours then leave a comment at the end. I have researched a fair few of them and listed out the main issues for 2010.
As I am keen to make it clear that I have used other people’s musings I have listed them below for you to have a look through as well, but my suggestions may speed things up!
1. Status updates and Tweet burn out will result in a little more culling / blocking of ‘friends’, reducing the social element of social media.
2. Real time search, recently launched by Google will mean brands need to work much harder to stay on top of the sentiments being expressed around them. People will be able to complain in an instant and have it up on the web. It will also make SEO and PPC far more complicated and require very frequent reviews of price and position vs the content around it.
3. Facebook and direct Tweets will replace personal email as the preferred route to reach people.
4. Mobile commerce taking off through a more Apple App store approach to paying for goods, anyone who buys apps on the iphone knows just how easy it is to buy loads of things that you wouldn’t if you had to put your card in every time.
5. As many companies ban social media sites at work, the mobile will be the guilty pleasure and escape from work shackles.
6. Commercialisation of the Twitter audience, I am sure it will come with a vengeance and hopefully some innovative new ad approaches.
7. Less of a prediction, more of an interesting thing to watch, the battle of online news content, to pay for or not? My view is still an Ad funded model as the victor.
8. Convergeance of video and TV. youtube and Hulu and the like taking ever more film / TV content online.
9. The rise of commercial applications as a route to making the most of the social phenomenon where shouting at your audience while they are ‘hanging out’ does not work.
10. Media agencies making some genuinely large structural, technological and commercial changes to future proof themselves in a market where the 2% margin model does not pay.
Below are a few of the links, there are many more, would be great if you added your predictions in the comments section.
Marco Bertozzi: 08.12.09
Bing is out there telling the world that they are reinventing search and we must all Bing. I can’t put my finger on it but the ads somehow dont seem right to me, is it because I am used to finding a search engine without being told about it? I guess Ask did a lot of advertising, but then I never used that site either.
But thats not why I am writing, Bing actually does do some very interesting things and I think has moved things on a bit, so it seems a little irrelevant that Google is now touting its fading in homepage, it made me think when I first saw it that they were having problems loading the page! I dont see it, even from a design perspective it fades in as soon as you do anything which is normally immediately, not sure how many people sit back and admire the page for too long, so what’s the point? I want to see some major improvements at Google that really create some buzz, maybe real time search will do that, although I will be interested to see how much babble that pulls up.
That said, can I ever see myself defaulting to Bing, not really, thats one habit that I would need rehab to get over.
Marco Bertozzi:11.09.09
What am I on about? News Corp is talking about a) charging for content and b) pulling it from Google. Many people have used the analogy of the little boy with his finger stuck in the dam to demonstrate that Murdoch can’t hold back the tide of open access of content. Actually if you read the story it makes the point that if you act quickly you can hold back a bigger disaster such as a dam breaking, everyone assumes the dam breaks..it doesnt.
Where does that leave Murduch? Has he acted quickly and everyone else will follow and before you know the tide of paid for content will be stopped, or is he just a little bit too late? That is now what everyone is waiting to find out but I do think that perhaps he should have stuck his finger in the dam about 8-10 years ago. The world has evolved and people are able to aggregate so much content that paying for it seems strange, albeit very fair.
People are also a little more fickle than in the past, often when searching for news online, its to fulfil an immediate thirst for information, I would be intrigued to see how many people when searching for news care whether they get it from Sky news, Telegraph, BBC or The Guardian. Take 911, the largest event in news for a lifetime, people immediately started to search for information, does Murdoch really not want to be found in those circumstances? I think the key take out for me is that in an age of open access and such volumes of available content available this decision seems to be moving against the tide.
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