iCrossing staff played friday afternoon host to Creative Director Jim McNiven from local viral specialists Kerb last Friday (check out their hugely popular viral games chart here).

Kerb and iCrossing UK have had a similar past, both originating in bedrooms in flats in Brighton! Jim and UK CEO Arjo Ghosh have rubbed shoulders at various Brighton events over the year. Both companies work with some great clients - Kerb’s list including E4 and Playstation (an upcoming pitch for this project is planned to be hosted inside the gameworld of a Playstation game).

Although Kerb are reknown for the Flash based games Jim describes what they do as ‘digital engagement’. Throughout Jim’s enormously entertaining presentation he was equally insightful - he stated enormous figures for engagement, and also conversion figures that DM would be proud of!

Jim demonstrated several Flash based creatives and talked about viral as an outcome rather than a concept. He also drew analogies between a traditional media buy for display creative and hosting for Flash-based client-commissioned games, both of which have brand as well as direct data capture input.

Check out there viral games chart here, and their latest launch - Locoroco 2 - here. Jim tells me this morning that since it’s launch on Friday Locoroco 2 has already had 200 unique users on this one site.

Getting a straight answer from Google on specific natural search optimisation practices has always been difficult. Matt Cutts has from time to time hinted at what should and shouldn’t be used in your on-site optimisation but apart from that they’ve been pretty quiet on any specifics up until now.

The release of Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide (PDF) marks the first time that Google have given such detailed and specific recommendations on all the major on-page and site accessibility topics. As it says this is just a starter guide, and doesn’t really contain anything that an experienced SEO wouldn’t already been putting into practice, however it’s always nice to see Google back up your on-site methodology with examples.

URL Structure

The guide discusses URL structures including the use of keywords within URLs to improve both click through from a Google results pages and also to help users remember URLs should they wish to visit directly from memory. Keyword stuffing URLs is added as something to avoid, as are session IDs and deep nesting of subdirectories. There’s no direct mention of whether any weighting is given to keywords within URLs, however there is talk of users linking using the URL as anchor text and this being a beneficial part of including keywords within URLs, they state that it

could inform a user or search engine what the target page is about

This is basically saying that you can increase keyword rich anchor text to your site through including keywords within the URL, something that most optimisation strategies will already include

Read more…

IAB chief executive Guy Phillipson is wearing his favoured combination of grey suit and coloured accessories so we must be ready for IAB Engage 2008! With a great big collective intake of breath we’re off, though we’re all still slightly confused about the dancers in scrubs in the foyer…

…Guy says Barack Obama won the election by harnessing the power of the web to connect, inspire and enable the people. Who’s in control? Brands like him who understand not just that a shift has taken place, but how to use it…

… Matt Mason author of The Pirate’s Dilemma and consultant to put-out Hollywood media moguls on what to do about the internet, explains how mainstream radio worked out a way to co-exist with pirate radio stations. They used it as a source for new music, new DJs and new ideas. Put-out Hollywood media moguls should do the same…

… the thing about economics, you see, is it’s predicated on scarcity. Digital is all about abundance and that means everything has changed, including the nature of storytelling. In fact, we should no longer seek to tell stories, but curate them…

…unfortunately, Jerry Yang’s story is a very dull one. He wants to talk about how we’re all in ‘the attention game’ but doesn’t really and also forgets to tell us his ideas on how to play it. Given he thinks Yahoo is strong because it is still a great ‘starting point’ on the web (which we’ll always need), we’re not sure he has any. But we are pretty certain that $33 per share was a very good offer…

…Mark Charkin, global VP of sales for Bebo, has got the attention game all worked out. What you need to do is sponsor a promotion through Bebo that generates lots of videos of young presenters running around and shouting, preferably to a guitar-led pop soundtrack…

…Matt Locke, commissioning editor for Channel 4 education, genuinely does have the attention game worked out. He’s hired an agency (okay, it’s iCrossing) to really measure how his audiences engage with his online content. As a result he tells his people to devote only a third of their budget to any launch. The rest should be used to react and adapt to what users think, say and do – because now you can know. It is the single most useful piece of insight to emerge from the whole day (really)…

COFFEE!

Read more…

Thanks to the IAB gang for putting on a top conference yesterday. If you missed it you can watch the presentations at www.iabengage2008.co.uk. I recommend everyone checks out the Orange presentation given by Justin Billingsley, Brand Director at Orange, in his socks! A truly inspirational session (thanks).  

Also worth a watch is our head of content and media, Antony Mayfield, presenting with Matt Locke from Channel 4 on our measuring engagement work for Channel 4 Education’s online game Bow Street Runner.

Brand Republic talked to a few industry experts about how they see social media and marketing working together…watch it here.  

iCrossing were pleased to support the conference as sponsors and look forward to next year!

We’re creating destination guides for a major UK airline. So I’ve been looking at the content on other airline websites. Here’s a page I came across on KLM’s site. It’s the first paragraph of the country guide to The Netherlands.

Book airline tickets to The Netherlands for the laidback lifestyle of its canal-strewn capital Amsterdam or the bustle of port town Rotterdam. Countryside enthusiasts catch a flight to The Netherlands for the beauty of prime tulip-growing region Haarlem. Travel to The Netherlands to visit historic Utrecht, famous for its canals and restaurants. Airline tickets to The Netherlands open up a diverse world, from international affairs at The Hague to windmill-spotting in Kinderdijk. A ticket to The Netherlands takes travellers to Amsterdam’s Anne Frank House and Van Gogh Museum. In Rotterdam, take a flight up The Netherlands’ Euromast for far-reaching views from the city’s highest tower.

It’s not the most flowing piece of prose is it?

Of course, those of us in the know can see why the phrases I’ve highlighted are there. It’s a classic example of what’s known in the trade as SEO content. SEO (if you didn’t know!) stands for Search Engine Optimisation. By ensuring phrases like ‘airline tickets to The Netherlands’ and ‘flight to The Netherlands’ appear frequently, the writer is trying to make sure that Google and other search engines rank the page highly when people looking for flights to The Netherlands type these phrases into the search engine.

But it reads like something a 12 year old would write - stuff that if we’re honest does no good for the brand of the company using it. Does KLM want us to think it employs school kids to write its content?

Here’s another page of content. It’s a similar piece of introductory content from tour operator Sunvil.

Read more…

There’s been a few mentions in the recent blog posts about Google readying “Searchwiki”.  It appears this may now be either live, or gradually being rolled out to users.

Searchwiki is a feature that allows searchers to comment, promote and remove results from search engine results pages.

For example, take a look at the search engine results page below:

Read more…

We’ve been invited to share our Channel 4 story with hundred’s of brand advetisers attending this year’s IAB Engage 2008 conference on 12th November in London.

Matt Locke, Commissioning  Editor at Channel 4 Education will take the stage with Antony Mayfield and Jason Ryan to talk about how we helped Channel 4 measure online audience engagement with recent projects. These inlcude their new online game Bow Street Runner and Disarming Britain, a series produced to raise public awareness of the increasing gun and knife crime in the UK.

We join a great line up of speakers from Yahoo, Orange, Bebo and Sky. Going on previous years (check out Antony and others speaking at last years IAB Engage), the IAB guys and girls do a top job at producing an conference that leaves you with lots to think about and a sneak preview in to the future. It’s free for advertisers so book now and we’ll see you there…

I noticed yesterday that Google are testing post code search boxes when searching for location specific terms such as hotels, restaurants, bars, cinemas and banks.

Google aren’t yet altering the organic results based on the post code entered but is returning the same results but with a Google map with the relevant hotels etc on.

Not sure how this will effect the traffic to the top ranking organic listings but I’m more than positive that when this appears it will significantly reduce their traffic.

Radiohead have become one of the real digital pioneers when it comes to music and the web. Firstly releasing their new album in 2007 ‘in Rainbow’s’. After fulfilling their contract with EMI they held onto rights of the tracks and compositions for the new album themselves,  snubbing the decaying industry business model and instead letting their fans decide what price they wanted to pay for the record.

People may not have paid the ‘going rate’ (I hear the average was about £5) but we can almost be certain that they made this potential loss back in a shear numbers game, off the back of the extra offline and online PR that the move stired up. A number of other bands have made similar moves too.

The web has radically changed the shape of the industry with the introduction of myspace, Last FM and a number of other legal and illegal music sharing sites. The Times Online has summed it up quite nicely. Whilst there seems to be good money to be made in concert ticket sales, record sales themselves have suffered as a result of music being cheaper and more freely available on the web.

The innovative band has recently released their new music video ‘House of Cards’ which is a digital masterpiece produced using some really advanced data visualisation technologies.

According to Google’s blog outlining how the video was made, two technologies were used to capture 3D images: Geometric Informatics and Velodyne LIDAR.

Here’s the techy bit…

Geometric Informatics scanning systems produce structured light to capture 3D images at close proximity, while a Velodyne Lidar system that uses multiple lasers is used to capture large environments such as landscapes. In this video, 64 lasers rotating and shooting in a 360 degree radius 900 times per minute produced all the exterior scenes.”

You can see how the video was made as well as learn more about the data visualisation process all on the Google’s blog here.