Google Chrome - most visited

Just playing with Google chrome, it as a most visited page function, which will eventually show the most visited web sites in thumbnails, similar i guess to speed dial

Main difference is this most visited function is based on history not choice....

Now lets think for a second, this could be very embarrasing for shared household computers Youporn, redtube etc....

But a possible great work place function to keep easy tabs on your staff habits....ie Monster, total jobs....

Think that is one setting some people should be turning off

Download and play http://www.google.com/chrome

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Social media research – Universal Mccann

As a result of Jeremiah's web strategy blog i have just spent the last 20 minute digesting an 80 slide presentation of global social media participation. It's the 3^rd report produced by UM, and it is very insightful.

The first of UM wave report was 2006 Sept, the 2^nd wave report June 07 and the 3^rd wave report was March 08.

It covers blogging, Social networks, content sharing, and content consumption. I would recommend spending the time looking through the slides, which can be found here.

http://www.slideshare.net/mickstravellin/universal-mccann-international-social-media-research-wave-3?src=embed

A couple of interesting facts from this presentation that really triggered by interest is the adoption of RSS.

During the period of all 3 wave reports, RSS adoption / awareness has grown from 11%, 15% to 39%. RSS feeds are key way to remain socially connected online, and it would seem global understanding is starting to catch up those who heralded RSS as a worthy contented to emails dominance in messaging, and customer connection. RSS potential may be finally being realised, understood and appreciated.

Pod casts also follows a similar route with its adoption trend mirroring that of RSS.

Take a look and digest, you will notice social media penetration in Asia is "Truly Massive", but keep in mind this will be related to demographic trends and economical realities.

Also check out the rise in social networking profile creation in Russia – slide 37, a leap from 41.7% to 74.2% between wave 2 and 3 reports. In regards of penetration of active users that is impressive!

Without be privy to UM full methodology, the fact that there exists 3 reports means as long as the methodology as been the same for all three, the trends reported are valid.

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Cuil.com Struggling

Well looks as though Cuil.com as launched with loads of coverage, the former Google employees are striving to topple their old pay masters.

Well looks like its been a success, well with regards popularity. 8 searches before i eventually got results, looks like the servers are too hot...one of boast is they don't need as many computers as Google....looks like they will have to correct that one pretty sharpish.

Me like millions of other have been doing what Jeremiah calls "ego searches" and Cuil.com, (pronounced cool apparently) fledgling engine has been toppled.....

That said i have now tried a few searches on the site and i am reasonable impressed, more so with it top navigation. i have typed in the word Wednesday and along with the categories Ash Wednesday and big Wednesday, i get Sheffield Wednesday!! -Top Results in my book.

Still most common message today....

No results because of high load...

Due to excessive load, our servers didn't return results. Please try your search again.

Still give it a chance, the results layout make a change and make SEO option for cuil a real interesting challenge. Results make full use of the onscreen real estate, optimal for widescreens, no obvious leader of the pack.

www.cuil.com


I also have a serious question with regards the images attached to the listing having done my ego search for the company i work for i was suitable unimpressed with the images associated with my term, no relevance, and images i have never seen on our site!!!!
Plus cuil.com seems to be ignoring the "no index no follow" text judging by some results....

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You Tube a land of Brand Opportunity

You Tube marketing is not new, but the potential of you tube is massive. If you sell a product that lends itself to being on film then why not give it go? The ease of setting up an account and promoting your video makes it accessible to all.

I recently revisited an experiment I ran over year ago with my team at a old company and was pleasantly surprised that 1.52 min short video of the LG Shine had received in excess of 225,000 views, a rating of 4, 195 comments and more importantly comments had been made within 11 hours of me checking, over a year since it was posted!!

This video had a brief post and pre roll of the company logo, not a bad piece of cost free branding. But of course it was not free, as there was an opportunity cost involved along with the time and effort taken.

From a marketing perspective though the key consideration is what return on investment will this action take. And it is there where expectations should be set up front.

So here is some advice on winning approval for a You tube marketing action plan.

1. Don't go trying to convince your boss that You tube is a free marketing channel, it's not, it will requires time – your time, a designers time to edit the film and possibly the right kind of software. The very least appreciate this fact, but explain how your time will be repaid.
   
2. Consider the best option of in video advertising for your product. Is it pre-roll, post-roll or both? Continuous scrolling or placement. Decide which option complements your film, and which option will not put off your audience.
   
3. In film advertising is acceptable, but remember the person watching the video you have posted will in all likelihood be interested in what's in the film and not who it belongs to, being over aggressive will provoke a negative response or worse still abandoned views – make this point to prevent over aggressive advertsing
   
4. Set out KPI's for the activity and benchmark it accordingly – believe me unless your product is completely new there will already be film out there on the subject.
   
5. Key metrics to consider should be:
   Number of views /videos watched
   Frequency of views – Trend
   Video Ratings
   Number of comments (if feasible why not think about measure the negative / positive ratio of comments?
   Comment recency
   Connections
   
   
6. Benchmark these by looking at the level achieved by your competitors, actual or in film on You Tube
   
7. Further to this check out site referrals from you tube and monitor any improvement, and of course track sales if you are tacitly asking or not by using the most appropriate source available.
   
8. But set out that this in effect is a branding exercise. If you have the information set it against the cost of achieving your predicted level of views to that achieved through a TV campaign
   
9. Monitor brand searches before and after, see if there is any growth – obviously be sensible and be aware that not every increase can be easily squared with your You Tube campaign.
   
10. Don't forget to mention the Community marketing opportunities and generation of back links and new traffic to your site!
    

Looking at setting up a you tube channel, check out this post by Masternewmedia.org or this You Tube Marketing forum

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Call Me Crazy, but is something not working on Google Adwords or being Tested?

Ok today, I typed in a popular keyword on Google to see who was competing on the terms, only to be presented with a google search result with no Adwords on it! I took a double look at the page and pressed search again to see to the result reappear. Then I started out again and pressed search a few times sure enough every 4^th or 5^th refresh no adword results. I asked a colleague to do the same and on the 3^rd refresh no adword results. I tried a few keywords with similar results.

I flagged this up to our agencies and to Google themselves with associated screen shots. So far only explanation was maybe some click fraud feature etc....Which to be honest I can quite believe. By the way no one got the same view on the computers, maybe a data centre thing?. I am still waiting to hear back any official confirmation that it is in fact just me being stupid. But then I come home and within two clicks I get the same results, and again on another keyword I get the same. See screen shots below for evidence.

The first response I did get from Google is the recommendation to use the adword preview tool to see my ads, to which I responded, it not my ads I was asking about it was everyone's ads.! My concern was the fact that when i first came across this it was my first SERP rotation...one for the X files?

I will post if there is indeed something spooky going on!

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Blatantly Talking To Myself

Wow slowly getting to a nice pace on this blog, still not many visitors though, but for the moment i don't care. Just enjoying publishing ramblings......

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IAB New Search Centre

So the IAB have finally launched their search help center. It is an interesting online centre that gives a good basic introduction into a number of core areas in search marketing. The IAB is aiming for this "centre" to become the number one source in the UK for search marketing. I must admit is it a welcome tool for those recruiting new staff who are either converting from traditional marketing to online, or are very fresh to the intricacy on online marketing.

The new search centre can be found here

Of course along with the IAB centre there is of course the great resaerch papers and guides produce by e-consultancy.

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Facebook Stats Part 2 – Demographics UK – More Females are on Facebook

Did you know that the makeup of the UK Facebookers was in fact dominated by Females? Females represent almost 55% of all users located in the UK over 18!

Actually delving deeper into this stat if you look at age group in blocks of 4 years after the age of 21 more female profiles are recorded on Facebook...but then here comes the shock, this rule changes when you look at the 61 to 65 age group, and 65+, the only segments in my analysis where Males out rank females, with nearly 53% of that age group being Male in the 61 – 65 group and 54% in the 65+ group.

It is not quite a ratio of 2 to 1 females to every male but it close, 1.8 females to every male online, the ratio is at its highest between the age groups of 36-40.

Marketing in the social media space is still a new medium, with many companies only dipping their toes in the water. Facebook gives you access to an absolute goldmine of information, but it is an arena where a marketer MUST respect the users. It is also a medium in which you can hyper target to the extreme, as you will see from later posts, but this does lead to some important question to be asked and answered in your marketing departments.

1. The ROI of such actions to explore the potential of Facebook as an advertising opportunity
   
2. The scalability of such niche targeting
   
3. The range of your product and does it fit to this type of marketing
   
4. Potential negative impact from your targeting
   
5. Over CPA, Revenue and profit expectations
   

Here is a great piece of research from Forrester from back in October well worth flicking through

| View | Upload your own

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Giving Speed Dial another Go!

Right I was reading a pals blog ... Chewie.co.uk and he blogged about Speed dial a great Firefox plug-in...well I thought it looked a good online tool and I went ahead and downloaded...

Well my first few weeks to be honest I hated it, then I decided to give it another go and believe me I am addicted. It is perfect for my habits I always go online to and forget the sites I wanted to check in the first place, but now there slap bang in front of me... and it grown on me...

Basically speed dial allows you snapshot 10 of your most visited website on your homepage and then you can click into them you can also have them updated whilst listed...you can set up tabs to group sites accordingly plus a few other cool features... but take a look at the original article that alerted me to this great feature...Speed dial for Firefox

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Fascinating Post Regards DPI

There is a fascinating post with regards Deep Packet Inspection and the ability to monitor the lines of internet users as opposed to their software?

The advertising benefits are intriguing, but it really is blurring the lines of acceptable targeting and pure targeting.

Permission based marketing is an ethically sound marketing tactic, online cookies is a controllable method of targeting to a degree. This method though has highly questionable legitimacy as a marketing tactic?

I'll be watching this development with interest!

Read the article here

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Facebook Stats Part 1 - 17% of UK on Facebook???

Well what is the level of penetration of Facebook in the UK?

Well according to Facebook there are 10, 378,460 18+ adults on the site who are located in the UK, and as of July 07 there were 60,766,238 people living in the UK, so a potential 17% of the UK population is on Facebook.

Of course this does not take into account the duplicate and false profiles which litter facebook.

That said If you consider all age groups on Facebook the figure goes up to 11,218,260!!!

When I first looked into the Facebook stats a year ago the number was just over 6,000,000 and as of May this year according to ALEXA Facebook finally overtook Myspace online.

That said, an interesting post on Ilovedata back in Feb discussed the possibility of seasonal patterns developing on facebook, whats great about this article is the impressive growth graphs...take a look

I will delve into more Facebook stats later on....oh the excitement.......

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Firefox 3 is here!

Downloaded Firefox 3 and slowly getting used to it.

Love the new url bar "awesome bar". But even better is the flexibility to revert back to the old feature.

There's a great article about other firefox 3 features here at Lifehacker.com

Or just download it here

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The key to blogging is keeping it up to date, and fresh. Well here i go, wish me luck!

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Wow just got a sniff of Google Health over at Search Land. Talk about Google going into all areas of your life. Distinctly aimed at the US market, but i must admit that this online development really intrigues me. Self diagnosis is at an all time high, not always accurate i might add, but the idea of a Google algorithm giving possible outcomes really does intrigue me.

Hope the NHS here are looking into this in detail!!

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Cookies

I recently read that 42% of people clean their computers of cookies at least once a week. This piece of information came from a survey run byTRUSTe .

What’s fascinating about this survey is the statement that only 15% of people never cleaned cookies, opting for the cookie to time out or be over written. Cookies are a vital ingredient for any online business which is seeking to improve their targeting and understanding of conversion, campaigns and not least the user journey among a mirad of other many things......

Now I doubt personally if this survey could be regarded as representative of the whole online world, but with security and privacy being the main drivers for all online users - cookie awareness will continue to grow. Consider the outcries from Facebook’s Beacon initiative?

I think it is a major indicator of the decline in cookie adoption and more importantly it raises big questions with regards to our chosen methods of improving targeting online.

Behavioural targeting is a powerful proposition for any online marketer but can its effectiveness be trusted, if user clean out cookies so regularly?

Perhaps it is time for us O M's to think about how to engage our visitors more transparently in the future. Online user are willing to share key information, their likes and dislikes, just take a look at MySpace or Facebook - but only when they want to or they think it will benefit them. So let’s think how we can explain the benefits of cookie tracking for a user?

A cookie category system could be developed, whereby the key components of the cookie are easily understood, not hidden away.

Imagine if when deleting cookies, the cookie contained a read me explaining its purpose, its limitations.

A universal cookie standard could be developed which would enable an easy opt in opt out solution integrated into all browser, so user could easily choose and more important tell the difference between the different cookies and their purpose?

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