klickdigital's first viral campaign

The team have been challenged with a serious viral campaign and are having some really interesting creative discussions, reviewing viral successes and failures of other agencies, and will I am promised, have a few killer ideas in the next 10 days.

Interesting to see in Revolution Magazine that YouTube are now allowing consumers to skip-thro pre-rolls in order to improve user experience. This will encourage agencies to work harder to achieve cut-thro in this new channel. This is great news as we will see the end of poor, product, product videos such as the VW Toureg and more innovation such as the Samsung LED viral film which is simply awesome – creating an interesting story that builds throughout and only at the end quietly mentions the brand and product. Full marks!

Will start to share what the team are up to over the next 8 weeks. Have a great weekend.

Social media - should you participate?

With Twitter getting another round of funding and continually in the media, many companies are asking if and how they should participate in social media to market their products and services.

Some brands such as Dell, Jet Blue and Comcast have twitter accounts and have a large following and focus on listening to their concerns and answering their questions.

One early adopter of online discussions was GM through their GM Fastlane Blog which gave owners and potential buyers access to the main decision makers with GM – from the charismatic Product Czar Bob Lutz to downstream engineers who were actually working on the products. The customer engagement is fantastic and really shows that the company is serious about turning their company around by making products the customers want.

Many brands are trying to use social media to generate marketing hype on their products but I believe that the momentum for generating media buzz usually comes from consumers as in the case of Cadbury’s Wispa Facebook campaign.

Trying to manufacture a grass roots up-swell is marketing utopia and often fails. Consumers quickly see through it and then the tide of opinion turns against the brand.

I feel that brands need to focus on using social media platforms such as Twitter as a research tool – listening for customer feedback and engaging with their customers. It is all about a genuine interest in consumer insight.

A good example I have experience of is BT. I got up one morning at the crack of dawn to finish off some work and then a few hours later at 06:30 the internet connection died.

I was really annoyed and after having re-set the router 3 times and called BT, I tweeted in sheer frustration about the lack of connectivity - partly in the hope that if it was a major network issue other BT broadband subscribers would tweet back and let me know.

To be fair to BT, the issue was resolved within 20 mins but really impressively BT picked up my tweet and tweeted back asking if the issue had been fixed and to tweet back if not fixed. Skype employ a specialist social media company – We Are Social – who monitor social sites for Skype and pick-up any customer comments, engage with the customer, investigate the issue and get a resolution for the customer.

So to answer the question of my post - Should you particpate in social media? The answer is YES as to continue to be successful in a fast changing world you need to listen to your customers and being able to listen and engage with thousands of online discussions is the most powerful marketing insight solution today.


So what should brands do?

• Understand that social media is not a panacea for your online marketing – it takes hard work and commitment.
• Listen to what your customers are saying about your brand online – visit 10 sites and search for terms about your company, industry and solutions you offer.
• Plan how you could engage in the online conversations – what value can you add to the discussion? Insight into a product upgrade/new innovations that are about to come to market? Apologise for a mistake and let your customers know that lessons have been learnt and new processes implemented
• Define what success looks like
  
• Allocate the resources and define the processes for engaging with your customers – then make it happen
• Measure against your success vision
  

Triton Ungetoutofable

The Triton Showers Ireland site is now live and delivers the same search and user friendly design that powers the award winning Triton Showers UK website. The home page currently features the Triton Ungetoutofable TV commercial. The site shares the same Umbraco CMS which allows the Triton team to easily manage content, copy across UK product content with a click of the mouse or create Irish specific content.

Both the UK and Irish sites have both migrated to the new and improved MultiMap store locator module

New Cobra website goes live

Great way to finish the week as the new Cobra (not the beer company - the leaders in vehicle security people) website went live yesterday afternoon. Cobra are delighted with the site and what really makes me happy is that the client has now become an Umbraco fan - they are finding managing content on the site is so easy.

Check out the site to view their stolen vehicle tracking products including trackers, alarms, immobilisers plus a host of other products including in-car entertainment.

New Adwords Interface now out of BETA Mode

Just thought I would write a little bit about the new Adwords Interface as it is has recently moved out from BETA Mode. I personally really like it, even though it did take me a few days to get used to how it functions.

So I thought why not list a few of the new interface features that I like and have found useful.

So here we go…

Account Navigation:
With the old interface you had to click on the campaign, then click on the ad group. But with the new interface it contains all the information in one pane on the page. This way you save a lot of waiting time – as you no longer have to switch between campaigns.

In Line Editing:
If you want to make changes to ads, keywords, bids or placements – you can do it with In Line Editing with total simplicity and speed. No longer do you have to wait for extra pages to load for a simple change.

Campaign Level Views:
Before this if you only wanted to analyze your top performing keywords and ads – you’d have to run a report, go back and navigate through all of the campaigns & ad groups. But now you can just do everything at an Account or campaign level, I find this much quicker.

Reports Look Like Analytics:
We all know that Google Analytics produces nice-looking looking reports. Now Adwords seems to be using the same graph library. The reports do look nicely presented, and are very intuitive.

Create an Ad:
It has a much cleaner look and feel, and better lay out from that of the old interface.



Filtering:
If you just need to look at all the keywords that have a certain CPC or a
Conversion Rate, you can instantly set-up a filter and then you can quickly see your data change in front of you. But this in not like filters in Google Analytics, it’s closer to Advanced Segments.

Placements – Managed/Automatic
Placements with the old interface would show up in the same place. But with the new interface it shows separate results for managed placements - these are the sites that you choose to be displayed on. Automatic placements show on sites that Google chose because of chosen keywords etc.

Final thoughts:
It will take a few days for you to get familiar with the new interface, but there are decent tutorials to help you along the way. Overall a much improved user experience. I certainly give it thumbs up.

Video is now an integral element of search

80% of internet sessions begin with search and video and image search are becoming increasingly important. Video is now being brought into the main search results with Google pulling in videos from YouTube because it is relevant to the search.

There is a lot of activity around video now with TV channels being delivered via the internet, brands experimenting with YouTube brand channels, YouTube in the US taking video ads in the top right hand corner and now the ability to create videos on the fly from a library of video elements and post them to YouTube, websites and even export them in HD format for regional TV ads.

I am currently consulting for Code, part of the Omnicom Group and an extension of their core marketing automation service includes the ability to create video online and flight it to YouTube, cinema or local TV stations. Was presenting the video builder application to a prospective new client in the Midlands earlier this week and they really get how important video will be in the next 12 months.

Search engines will soon be able to identify scenes within video and even specific terms within images. Teenagers have grown up with YouTube and see it as mainstream and core to their internet experience. Brands need to take video seriously, establish a marketing strategy to exploit their video assets and get a first mover advantage.

Search Engine Optimisation - 80/20 rule

Wow, first few months of setting the new company up have been busy – am making time for my blog postings by writing them whilst on the train in the morning. Just not finding time during the working day!

Was discussing search engine optimisation with a potential new client the other day and was amazed that there are still loads of agencies and consultants out there who still position search engine optimisation as a ‘black art’. Having played in this space for the past 4 years I would not call myself an expert but have found that the usual 80/20 rule applies to search engine optimisation as it does to most things in life. Just a few key things drive 80% of the impact and if companies focus on these few items and do them well, then they will see major improvements in their natural search engine ranking.

Although each search engine has its own algorithm in determining natural search rankings and is a closely guarded secret, there are 3 high impact areas to focus on for Google and Yahoo that will help improve a company’s search engine ranking.

For Google these are:

1. Page Title
2. Page Rank
3. Page Reputation (back-links)

And for Yahoo:

1. Page Title
2. Link popularity
3. Keyword density

Over the next few weeks I will post some of my top tips for writing better page titles, how to improve page rank and building a great page reputation. Search engine optimisation success for us has been to follow some founding principles and continuously tweak and test different ideas. Would be great to hear from anyone on their experiences / issues on search engine optimisation.

Always happy to discuss, share my experiences and try to help anyone. So please post your comments or thoughts - or get in touch with Mark or myself @ klickdigital

Microsoft Bing has arrived

Well Microsoft’s Bing is finally here! And is it going to be Microsoft’s challenge to beat Google in the search arena.

Here are my thoughts after using Bing for most of the day:

Visual
I really like the look of the Bing homepage. It has pleasant wallpapers that are easy on the eye and they also change daily, some users may, or may not like this and see it as unnecessary.

Search
Forget about all the frills - the most important part of any search engine is the results that are returned to a user. With Bing, when you type in a keyword you not only get your results down the centre of the page but on the left hand side you also receive “Related Searches” similar go Google, but I think that they are more accessible. And as for the results that are returned, it does seem to come up with what I was actually searching for – so far.

What I really liked about the search results is the “Also On This Page” feature - which displays information in a subtle pop-up when you hover over the thin line, it brings up a description and further links within the page – a really nice touch.


Images
Bing also has the usual Image and Video search functions etc. But what really is cool is that you are able to personalise your image search by choosing from categories such as Size, Layout, Colour, Style and people. Also, if you click on an image it opens up the image and it also it shows rest of the images in a preview pane on the left hand side, which makes life a little easier rather than going back and searching through again.

Videos
A Nice touch on the videos is when you hover over a video it previews it – so no need to open up the whole video. Again, with videos you can choose from options Video Length, Screen size, Resolution and Source, which is excellent, to filter out the videos.

Overall
Bing is not going to conquer the search market straight away, but in the future who knows. It really is a great start and will no doubt extending on the already great features. Microsoft still has work to do, but is heading in the right direction with Bing.

Personally - I’m not yet confident to make that permanent switch from Google, but I will be using Bing.

Google Wave

In my eyes Google never fail to come out with something special. With the imminent launch of Microsoft’s Bing - Google go and announce Wave which is due for launch later this year.

So what is Google Wave? Well to quickly sum it up, it’s a real-time communication platform. It cleverly unites all aspects of email, instant messaging, social networking, wikis, chat and project management into one browser communication client.

Just a few of the benefits Google Wave:

• You have the ability to respond to a certain sentence within an e-mail or ‘wave’, not just the standard reply to the e-mail itself.
• Real-time instant messaging conversations - you will no longer see the ‘your friend is typing’ message, you see characters on your screen as they are being typed.
• Easily drag and drop files directly into Wave and upload them ready for download from other Wave friends or work colleagues.
• Real-time interaction with your blog – upload text and photographs to your wave and they will instantly appear on your blog
  

If you want to be notified when it is first released and receive further news, you can do an early sign up, and also watch their 1.1/2 hr developer preview at Google I/O below:



Google Wave wants to change the way we use email and communicate by making it completely dynamic (real-time). The tag line is “What would email look like if it were invented today?” I would not be at all surprised if Google Wave revolutionises the way people and companies communicate with each other. I’m really looking forward to this one.

Why not Flock to Social Media

This is my first posting on the klickdigital blog, so I thought I would cover a social media Internet browser that you may or may not be aware of.

Flock which is now on release 2.5 is a Mozilla powered Internet browser that is targeted towards social media. Flock is excellent to keep up to date with your contacts on social media websites such as Facebook, Twitter Flickr and MySpace all in one place.

It has a nice stylish and easy to use interface and plenty of tools available and the standard browser features like tabbed browsing and an integrated search engine.

Flock is a secure browser with pop-ups, viruses, and spyware being blocked. Although it can sometimes be a bit slower to load, Flock does an excellent job.

Overall Flock is a fantastic browser for keeping you up to date with all aspects of your social media, and would imagine this to be a hit with the teenagers, but for daily surfing it may be better to use one of the other high level browsers. Possibly use Flock as a secondary browser? I do, and have now being using it since 2008 to quickly and easily update my social sites.

A new alternative to Wikipedia?

My first blog posting on the klickdigital blog and I thought I would blog about a new competitor to Wikipedia - Wolframalpha. Some recent press reports are citing it as a Google beater but it is not a search engine - it delivers answers to your questions based on its database of knowledge. The way it does this is through a 'computational knowledge engine'.

You ask it a question and the computational knowledge engine actually understands your question and computes the answer for you. It doesn't simply search questions and answers / documents for matching text, it really does try to understand the question and build an answer from its knowledge database.

Wolframalpha is launching this weekend and is still building its database of knowledge but for an early release I am impressed and I think it has a big role to play as it starts to become established.

What I really like about it is the way it presents the answer/information - the answers are presented in an easy to read format and it only deals with facts, not opinion. The links in the sidebars to relevant Wikipedia entries and web links give the user important supporting information from other leading sources. These supporting information reference points are powerful tools and I think it makes sense to move these up to the top of the right hand side of the screen - instead of having to scroll down the page to see them at the bottom right - and move the 'New to Wolframalpha' section to the left hand side of the page.

It is going to be a great source for students - from solving equations to pulling key facts together and might soon become a key business tool - especially if they integrate Google and Wikipedia.

Overall I like it and will certainly be watching how it develops over the next 3 months