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..

The latest Forrester report, Europe’s Search Engine Marketing Investment Exceeds €8 Billion In 2012, on paints a very healthy picture of the European search market. With the sector set to grow from a current €4.5 billion to well beyond €8 billion by 2012 and taking half of all online marketing investment all search marketers should be overjoyed shouldn’t they?

In fact the UK’s increase over the period is the slowest of all European markets researched. There are a number of good reasons for this: we’re still by far the largest market, followed by Germany and France and have enjoyed the biggest growth over the past five years and UK companies still invest heavily in search and online.

I wonder, however, whether a slowing market at home combined with media agencies becoming specialists in their own right, and *everyone* joining the search bandwagon, and some clients taking paid search in-house, whether we will start to see some casualties? The 101 search business plan remains: invest in skills, technology and training or be damned.

Last week was pretty exciting for Spannerworks’ Content & Media team, with the launch of the first Social Space for one of our clients. It was also announced to the world that Spannerworks has recruited two journalists, a fact that has caused a small ripple of discussion. (more…)

It’s ten years today since the Labour Party won the 1997 general election ending 18 years of rule by the Conservative Party.

As Tony Blair walked into Downing Street the party’s victory was credited in part to the powerful and effective spin doctors within the party who managed its image and message in the media as never before.

In this map, created using our Network Sense web mapping tool, we can see a snapshot of the new online influencers which Labour’s next generation must learn to come to grips with. It gives a view of some of the websites linking to Labour’s home page - its online neighbourhood, as it were.

Alongside the traditional media that Labour worked so hard to influence - CNN and BBC - we now see the rise of a new breed of influencers, political bloggers, and activists who use the web as a key part of their campaigning work.

It’s also interesting to see the prominence of Wikipedia in the network - it features large for so many brands: political and otherwise…

Earlier this year Google acquired dMarc Broadcasting an advertising platform which connects advertisers direct to radio stations. Accordign to Google, they’ve been working on the integration of dMark into AdWords, which is now complete. They’ve started the beta test with a select group of US advertisers, and expect to rollout soon.

Through an online interface, advertisers will have the opportunity to target specific audiences by location, station type (taste) and by day and time.

 They’ll also have access to comprehensive reporting which will be a first for radio.