Search Sense

Here’s a top tip when you’re posting pictures in HTML - expect many of you know it already. Sometimes, if the original image is too big, it won’t fit properly on the screen. With the iCrossing internal blog, for example, it ends up overlapping the middle column.

If this happens, you don’t need to manually resize the picture itself - particularly handy if you’re linking to one hosted elsewhere. If you use the visual editor on Wordpress or a similar platform, you can simply drag a corner of the image outline to resize it.

If you use an HTML editor, check the line of code that embeds the image, which might normally look something like “img src=’path to image goes here/image.jpg’”. It may also specify “height=’number in pixels’” and/or “width=’number in pixels’”. Take out the height bit altogether, and change the width bit to “width=’100%’”.

This should scale the picture to the full width of your post, keeping the height in the correct proportion. Obviously, choosing a lower percentage will make the picture smaller still.

A colleague and I had the pleasure of hosting two panel sessions for the IMRG last week and it was an interesting barometer on thinking in the retail sector.

The great and good of retail (practically every high street brand) and online assembled at the plush offices of the Royal Bank of Scotland on Bishopgate to explore developments in comparison shopping and social media with speakers from Google, MSN, Kelkoo, ReVoo, Yahoo! and Berry Bros. & Rudd, a wine retailer.

Comparison shopping portals have become very successful businesses by being useful to online shoppers in a straight forward way – “help save me time and money”. They can dominate search results because of the breadth of inventory at their disposal, but the mood in the audience was how can they help my business upsell, showcase new products and compare like for like e.g. “I know my mp3 player is more expensive than my competitor, but I include 5 free tunes and no delivery charge”.

Most of the audience agreed that consolidation in the comparison market was going to happen and that pure price comparison will disappear. At the very least “User Generated” reviews of the retailer will be widespread and Kelkoo are trying a star rating system for their retail trade partners right now.

The social media session was fascinating because when my colleague Dean asked the question “who is making money out of social media” nobody raised their hands.

The audience acknowledged that conversations were going on all over the place about their products, but didn’t really know how to take that first step and join the conversation, but more surprisingly they didn’t know if it was worth it.

Some of this stemmed from the retail marketers assembled not being comfortable at taking forward a proposal in their company for a social media programme.

Some expressed the view that Online was so measurable it had made a rod for its own back by not being able to measure the effects of social media. I smiled to myself when I heard this because it struck a chord from objections I’d heard several years earlier from other sectors regarding blogging. All sorts of things can be measured for social media programmes including:

• reduction in complaints as one panel member explained as one airline’s CEO recently experienced by apologising for a mistake on YouTube
• brand sentiment can be measured (come and talk to us for more information about this)

and any other measure you wish to track.

The conversations about you happen - some are good, some are bad, some give you ideas for product or service development, some give you real insight into your customers needs and behaviour.

If your corporation doesn’t listen, doesn’t join in, won’t be useful and authentic, then one of your competitors will and you’ll miss out on those great business growth opportunities. Or worse still, face very damaging PR (Cillit Bang) or a $200m law suit (Kryptonite). Ignore them at your peril.

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..

In the early days at Google, company executives would occasionally receive an email addressed to their ‘comments’ inbox. The text in these emails consisted only of a two digit number. It took a while to work out, but they eventually realised that these emails were only sent when the word count on the Google homepage increased, as a warning it was getting too cluttered.

The moral of the story, and one of the reasons for Google’s success is its simplicity. Users found it easy to understand; in other words Google has good usability.

How else does search and usability match up? Pretty well in fact; Google takes active steps to try to direct users to useful and usable content. Web spam is bad for usability and bad for search. The guidelines for search copywriting are virtually the same for clear, understandable and user-friendly writing.

Indeed, with the advent of the Google Quality score in paid advertising, how long before there are usability and engagement metrics in search engine algorithms?