Search Sense

In 2008 growth kickers go and as of January 1st 2009, Google Best Practice Funding is completely gone and in Spannerworks’ view about time too!

I’ve been having conversations with Dara Nasr (agency manager at Google) over the last few months, about a great many subjects, not least Best Practice Funding (BPF). When Google introduced the scheme as a replacement for straight forward agency commission, they had high hopes for it. They had recently launched the Google AdWords Professional (GAP) training and hoped that by setting minimum criteria of GAP qualified staff, spend levels and growth incentives it would encourage the industry to train, grow the search channel and generally improve their services and use a broad range of Google products.

It has however, been fraught with difficulties including:

* media planner/buyers back loading campaign spend, breaking the spirit of the scheme in order to sneakily obtain the growth incentives,
* search agencies using their best staff to retake the GAP exams on behalf of others in order to remain qualified or simply to brag,
* lazy media planners not really taking search seriously and fully rebating the BPF to clients, simply to hide poor performance,
* small agencies just about competing by using the rebate to maintain profit instead of creating and charging for added value.

Spannerworks welcomes the removal because we have diverse marketing programmes that make use of Social Media, Display, Paid Search, Natural Search, Usability, Web Development and more.

A strategic, value adding, global agency like Spannerworks doesn’t work with major brands like Coca Cola, Abbey, COSMOS, Sears, Travellocity, Hilton and more by being lazy. It’s hard work, joined-up thinking and powerful, integrated campaigns for us with amazing technology and service.

So even though Google has reduced the qualifying spend levels for 2008, which means there’ll be a little more rebate next year and although we have benefited from top tier rebates from Google for years now, we say thanks Google for helping create a level playing field that allows great service to shine.

It is the right thing to do, so Google folk, ride out the undoubted media storm, complaints, accusations of money making - you have our whole-hearted support. Hey, if Google went further and opened up by sharing data, research, search volumes, that’d be a truly level playing field and really quite something!

A colleague and I had the pleasure of hosting two panel sessions for the IMRG last week and it was an interesting barometer on thinking in the retail sector.

The great and good of retail (practically every high street brand) and online assembled at the plush offices of the Royal Bank of Scotland on Bishopgate to explore developments in comparison shopping and social media with speakers from Google, MSN, Kelkoo, ReVoo, Yahoo! and Berry Bros. & Rudd, a wine retailer.

Comparison shopping portals have become very successful businesses by being useful to online shoppers in a straight forward way – “help save me time and money”. They can dominate search results because of the breadth of inventory at their disposal, but the mood in the audience was how can they help my business upsell, showcase new products and compare like for like e.g. “I know my mp3 player is more expensive than my competitor, but I include 5 free tunes and no delivery charge”.

Most of the audience agreed that consolidation in the comparison market was going to happen and that pure price comparison will disappear. At the very least “User Generated” reviews of the retailer will be widespread and Kelkoo are trying a star rating system for their retail trade partners right now.

The social media session was fascinating because when my colleague Dean asked the question “who is making money out of social media” nobody raised their hands.

The audience acknowledged that conversations were going on all over the place about their products, but didn’t really know how to take that first step and join the conversation, but more surprisingly they didn’t know if it was worth it.

Some of this stemmed from the retail marketers assembled not being comfortable at taking forward a proposal in their company for a social media programme.

Some expressed the view that Online was so measurable it had made a rod for its own back by not being able to measure the effects of social media. I smiled to myself when I heard this because it struck a chord from objections I’d heard several years earlier from other sectors regarding blogging. All sorts of things can be measured for social media programmes including:

• reduction in complaints as one panel member explained as one airline’s CEO recently experienced by apologising for a mistake on YouTube
• brand sentiment can be measured (come and talk to us for more information about this)

and any other measure you wish to track.

The conversations about you happen - some are good, some are bad, some give you ideas for product or service development, some give you real insight into your customers needs and behaviour.

If your corporation doesn’t listen, doesn’t join in, won’t be useful and authentic, then one of your competitors will and you’ll miss out on those great business growth opportunities. Or worse still, face very damaging PR (Cillit Bang) or a $200m law suit (Kryptonite). Ignore them at your peril.

There’s still a huge amount of technical language surrounding web 2.0, including the phrase itself… This week I had to present my thoughts on the future of digital to a large group of senior executives at a European airline. I decided that APIs (application programming interfaces) really translate into the new Aggregators of Personal Information. Once viewed in this way we start to look at our own data assets in a different and more human way. I think that leads to excitement, engagement from the marketing mind, and ultimately engagement of people’s attention.

It’s been a long week, that’s it for today.

Recent announcement by Facebook to expose a cut-down public profile for search engines to index, has managed to stir up the search, brand and privacy advocates.

The Facebook blog stated that in a couple of weeks they will allow search engines to crawl public profiles. But, an interesting article on Search engine land claims that this is nothing new. Search engines have always been able to index a profile, providing they could find it – a point proven by Tom Critchlow at Distilled, who linked to his public profile and managed to find it by searching in Google.

So the main difference is likely to be the integration of a people directory within Facebook, which would allow search engines to index the profiles without needing to find them through external links. But, those profiles that are likely to get more links will have a greater reputation and will outrank others with the same name.

Things could get interesting if online authors used Facebook as a people reference, in the same way people refer to Wikipedia.

From an SEO perspective, there’s unlikely to be any real link benefit from a profile – though it’s difficult to gage until we can see the implementation. Any external links allowed on a profile page is likely to have the rel-nofollow tag added to prevent link spam.

For reputation managers, a Facebook profile will provide yet another way to occupy more space on the home page for a search on a name or brand.

dConstruct breaks out of talking about door handles (last year into a packed auditorium of web-savvy developers, designers and social media evangelists.

Tom Coates, a part of the Yahoo! Brickhouse team built his talk around the ‘web of data’ - data becoming more user-centric, more connected, and more useful… I am a fan of this way of understanding the rapid changes all around us in digital… Tom kept it fresh by declaring that ‘Your product is not your website’ - it’s anywhere where your brands reaches in the network. Network applications build instant connectivity via API’s, 90% of twitter activity is through APIs. Flickr is everywhere too. ‘The product… goes everywhere the network goes..‘

This fits well with how at Spannerworks we have been articulating how brands now live in networks and how they must adapt to a marketing world where we are fast moving away from channel control to evolving your brand in networks. Challenging big brands to make their data available, let their customers play with it and collaborate with other brands, for example to build a useful body of data needs scale, and lots of it.

Media owners should inherit the new world. Great content, data scale, ready built communities and recognisable brands (not always a positive thing) connected to networks in any way a user wants should make hay today. So, whoever your data curator is, promote them to head of interactive and the job’s a goodun..