Search Sense

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..

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…