Search Sense

In September 2005 six Spannerworkers climbed the tallest free standing mountain in the world, and raised a lot of money for one of Spannerworks chosen charities – the Amani Kids home in Tanzania.

So this year…we are going back for more! On September 1st eight Spannerworkers are beginning the long climb. The team consists of Jonathan Stewart, Tom Morphy, Alex Asigno, and David Coats, all natural search strategists. The team also includes Tom Kingsley and Will Lockie, account managers, Doug Platts, a natural search analyst and David Hughes, a data strategist. David has yet to give us the exact excel formula to fully optimise our mountain route, but is working hard on it.

Our goal is to raise £10,000 for the children’s home – so they can buy a playground, and also help with their family reunification programme.

We’ve been up to all sorts to raise money – there have been 10K runs, half marathons, and an exceedingly long bike ride. There has been a steady supply of mouth watering food, baked and sold to co-workers. There was even a half time fancy dress race at Sussex county cricket ground.

To cap it all off, and for which we are eternally grateful, there have been incredibly generous donations from all of our clients. We are holding a raffle for some brilliant prizes, so if you fancy winning a holiday, a mountain bike, or some limited edition speakers for your stereo – head over to the official Kili climb site and enter!

So, before we go, we would just like to say thanks to everyone, everywhere, who have been kind enough to help us, sponsor us, donate gifts to take to the home or just plain put up with us while we bang on about cakes, climbing and the perils of altitude sickness.

Technology permitting, we’ll try and post live to the Kili climb site as we go, so check in to keep tabs on our progress..and we hope to see you back in the UK soon!

Asante!

Nilhan Jayasinghe, Spannerworks’ Head of Search and Natural Search Strategists Jonathan Stewart, Alex Asigno and Addam Hassan are currently at the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose, California. Here’s their thoughts on the conference so far…

The big thing that everyone is talking about this year is blended search – the incorporation of multimedia content within natural search results. Google call it Universal Search, Ask call it Ask 3d – whatever you want to call it, it’s making waves in terms of how search marketers need to react to vertical search. As can be attested by the number of people attending the multimedia seminars on podcast, image and video optimisation, and the standing room only in many of these talks, it seems everyone is eagerly rising to the challenge.

Some excellent examples are being played out in front of our eyes at the conference – the most notable being the search engine results for “hurricane dean”. On Monday, Greg Jarboe of SEO PR presented on Google Universal, and showed current search results for this query. He commented on the fact that at that point, the only extra content to be embedded within the natural search results were news articles, but that as the week progressed, we should expect to see more multimedia content appearing for that search result as people uploaded images and videos. Lo and behold, by Tuesday morning, images were showing up alongside news results within the search results:

This just goes to show the speed at which Google are seeking content from their vertical offerings to help keep their natural search results relevant and fresh.

This being the States, and with an impending presidential election looming, many presenters were using the examples of presidential candidates to highlight the importance of reputation management that blended search has now thrust upon search marketers. Googling Republican candidate Mitt Romney returns the following images befitting of a potential president, embedded within the natural search results:

However, try googling Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton, and it’s a different story:

Is this Google showing their political allegiance, or perhaps the Republicans actively trying to discredit Clinton – maybe she just doesn’t photograph well – either way, this highlights the importance of managing the first page of results for your name and/or brand.

You may have heard that the IAB and DMA have got together to create the first charter aimed at search marketing agencies. They hope to establish best practice for the industry. At Spannerworks we think it is about time that something like this is in place and welcome the compliance.

Striking the right balance can often determine the success of such charters. As a first step, the IAB and DMA seemed to have come in at the right level. The charter isn’t too detailed and criteria for compliance not too tough so it should be successful in gaining support from the search engines and industry.

I certainly hope that this will help make it easier for people to manage their search campaigns and report things like click fraud and trademarking issues. The only area there is likely to be hot debate around is search engine optimisation. While we don’t support the link-buying, it is normal practice for some markets so acceptance of certain codes of best practice may not be as straight forward.

On the whole, this move aligns the search marketing industry with standards accepted in other forms of marketing and can only help the industry progress as it should.

A colleague brought this morning’s Guardian to my attention and a story called “From Google to Gaggle”. The Guardian reported on one of Google’s experiments on the format of their news results. Google run many trials, but this one allows the subjects of a story appearing in Google news a “right of reply”.

Surely nobody would think this action is a bad idea – it will introduce balance, get alternative viewpoints, flesh out superficial quotes, etc? The latter strikes a chord with me as I can recall many occasions when a 15 minute interview with a journalist has led to two sentences completely out of context.

Well, would you believe it, some folks believe Google is attempting to hi-jack and own entire online conversations and all the space / media around it.. This comment was made by Mike Butcher, editor of MediaBites who as I’ve never met can’t really comment directly on his opinion.

I have met many journalists, media types, who appear to hold similar beliefs, in that they believe they have an intrinsic right to their copy, nobody else is allowed to hold an alternative view, comment on it, let alone have that view get equal public billing with the original story. It’s almost as if they are scared of criticism or good old fashioned open debate.

Google want to be useful to their network and enriching a news item by inviting comment is useful.

I think this criticism is a little unfair. Google don’t always get their experiments right, but in this case more viewpoints is more value.