Search Sense

I really like this post from the Logic + Emotion blog by David Armano that discusses the growing link between offline and online engagement (or touch points) with brands.

This chimes with an approach that I think really helps to communicate to clients how the modern web works. Put simply, we are finding ways to explain interaction to our clients, and there is no reason why the rules of interaction should be any different online than they are offline. Using offline behaviours as metaphors to help businesses understand their online behaviours sets the conversation very firmly in the context of people and not promotion. Put simply, forget that you are a business for a minute and think about treating people how you would want to be treated yourself.

As David’s post says, when it comes to brand interactions, the two worlds are already becoming indistinguishable. Already it is nigh on impossible to pin someone’s brand perception to one particular interaction or channel. However, as he also says in the post, brands themselves aren’t necessarily joining up these experiences. That’s the first challenge. The second is doing it in a way that works for people first and foremost.

Our What is Social Media?: now available in Chinese thanks to three strangers who met via a social network and went on to create an eBook publishing platform.

In September last year Jia Liu, an MA student of marketing in Boston put out a call on an incredible communtiy site Yeeyan.com for people to collaborate on a project to translate the eBook into Chinese. Zhifeng Sun from Shanghai and Xinyu Mao from Qingdao answered and over about a month they created a Chinese version of the What is Social Media?, complete with illustrations of Chinese blogs and social networks where it was appropriate.

So far there have been 2,000 downloads and following the project the three have created an eBook publishing venture/platform called Innobook and have published five freely available eBooks, by authors including Seth Godin and Richard Adler.

The translation and adaption of the eBook is possible for anyone in any language without permission from Spannerworks because we released it under a Creative Commons licence.

Everyone on the team that worked on the eBook are delighted to see it spread even further. It’s also added extra impetus to our work on its sequel - watch this space…

Finding out if pages on your site have been tagged on del.icio.us provides an excellent metric for measuring how useful your site is to your users. With the assumption being if they are tagging it, they are loving it!

You can check if a webpage has been tagged in delicious by visiting del.icio.us/url and typing in the webpage you want to check. The results show which pages have been tagged, by which users and using what tags. A RSS feed is also provided so that you can get notifications of when a particular page is tagged.

This information is great as it allows you to understand which pages are being useful to your website’s audience, but it’s only possible to manually check whether individual pages have been tagged. Del.icio.us provides no way to automatically check every page on a website.

Using Yahoo Pipes, however, we have created a tool that can check an entire site for del.iou.us tags, and provide an RSS feed to alert when new pages are tagged.

The pipe can be found here. Due to some of the limitations of yahoo pipes it will only work on sites that have fewer than 1,000 tags. For example it won’t work on bbc.co.uk.

We hope you find the tool useful - if you have any questions on how it works please send us an email or leave a comment below.

A busy month - not only did the Spannerworks brand gently sail into the horizon, but an IKEA’s-worth of timber crashed onto Brighton beach. It was an event nimbly recorded by a number of iCrossing photographers, including Dean Harvey, who took this striking shot of the ‘wood slick’ near the pier.

As usual, there were diverse insights from the company’s regular bloggers. On Open, Antony Mayfield considered the fog of revolution in which we find ourselves, and how hard it is to imagine our way into the future even as we understand the technological advances of the past.

Revolutions are sudden changes, but they are also things which take place over time and the effect of which increase as time passes. The web is a revolution that will continue to bring incredible undreamt of changes to our lives for as long as we live and for some time afterwards, I expect.

However, for those wanting to try and understand the current media revolution through those of the past, Antony suggests some good starting points.

Should we be judged on our link networks? Nilhan Jayasinghe hopes not, after a school cop was put under investigation for linking to a MySpace profile that in turn linked to a porn site.

Nilhan wonders whether lawmakers and employers will be able to interpret proximity in networks, given that virtually anything is a mere click away from Google. Although he may of course just have been winding up to the punchline:

After all there’s only sex degrees of separation amongst all of us.

Nilhan’s also been enthusing about lijit, a form of social search engine that pulls in content that you or your blog network has posted elsewhere.

The principle is based on ask a friend or friend of a friend – and relies on mutual trust within these mini circles….. And unlike the doomed Wikia search launched last month, this doesn’t require me to do anything different, other than install it and carry on with business as usual.

Meanwhile, at Hackbash, Simon Handby noted an Experian report that predicts the rise of the ’super-advocate’ this year. Simon applauded the way that it described “how companies are losing the power to dictate how they’re represented online”, and how they will increasingly have to earn good relationships within their networks. However, he also noted that the accompanying press release apparently failed to run with the report’s insight.

The language of the release itself is an interesting contrast. It talks of the importance of super advocates and their “huge online following”, and gushes that they represent “citizen journalism at its most powerful”, yet it also says that they can be among a company’s harshest critics “if handled badly” - a jarring, old-school PR phrase if ever there was one.

IMAGE: Brighton Daily Photo