Search Sense

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..

We’re so used to the US being ahead of the UK in web technology and marketing, that to hear US executives say it’s the other way around is a bit of a shock. But that’s exactly what Yahoo!’s boss has been saying in the New York Times:

There are big differences between the advertising markets in Britain and the Unites States. In Britain, much of the advertising is national, while there are strong local and regional ad markets in America. Still, some believe that online advertising in Britain provides somewhat of a roadmap for where online ads in the United States and elsewhere may be heading. “The U.S. is so behind,” said Terry S. Semel, the chief executive of Yahoo, in a recent speech in London. “It’s certainly lagging the U.K. by at least a year or two.”

As well as a national advertising market, the UK has surged ahead in broadband adoption too. 47.4% of UK households now have broadband compared with 43.9% in the US, thanks to cut-throat competition in the ISP market here.

Part of the US “lag” is about legacy, according the article, about commitments both financial and psychological to TV as the lead-medium for advertising. That’s understandable - it is genuinely difficult to understand how far and fast people’s media consumption has changed and still is changing unless you keep a close eye on the figures.

I was impressed by simple slide someone from Google used at a recent meeting comparing the percentages of media spend in the average blue chip company with people’s consumption of media. While about a fifth of the average person’s media consumption is now web-based, spend on internet ad spend is only just over 6%.

And that’s just ad spend - think about the other, non-advertising-based marketing and communications opportunities for brands online. Creating better content, engaging with customers direct via social media, making sure that they are optimised in natural search…

According to Brand Week in the US, Yahoo! is rolling out “brand universes” for “passion brands” including Nintendo’s new Wii console.

The sites aggregate social media content from Yahoo! owned social media communities including del.icio.us and Flickr as well as hosting their own message boards and news.

Interestingly, Yahoo! is not charging the brands for the privilege - presumably it expects to make the money back on advertising.

The Wii site attracted 250,000 visitors in its first 24 hours, showing that the idea may have some longevity. Markets like video games are already extremely well served by fan sites and other dedicated social media communities, but Yahoo!’s massive audience may help it to grab a slice of the audience attention with this innovative approach.

Some say Google is right to object to becoming a verb… (more…)

Google doesn’t want to be a verb. Really? (more…)