Marketing Pilgrim

The UK’s public service broadcasting behemoth, the BBC, has been going through some tough times the last few weeks. However a major announcement has been lost through all the talk of job loss, changes in programming and shifts in budget. Soon all the international visitors to the hugely popular BBC website will be served adverts. With such a huge audience it promises to sound the death knell for struggling portals like Netscape.

Ciaran Norris over at Altogether Digital highlighted the potential problems for the other portals and news sites.

The BBC site apparently attracts over 40 million foreign visitors every year, which is a significant number… certainly enough to seriously disrupt the advertising models of major commercial portals such as AOL & MSN.

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In-game advertising really seems to be gaining some traction at the moment, and British Government intelligence organization, GCHQ, have taken the step of buying in game billboards to try and attract computer savvy graduates to consider becoming spies.

While the move isn’t quite as bold and the US military’s ‘America’s Army’ where a whole game and community has been developed to aid recruitment, it definitely shows more companies & organizations exploring the possibilities of in-game advertising.

GCHQ are using advertisement mimicking real world billboards within Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell Double Agent on x-Box Live and across a number of other games including Rainbow Six: Vegas, Need for Speed Carbon & Enemy Territory: Quake Wars.

The campaign has been masterminded by digital recruitment strategists TMP who have also been plugging away on a secondlife recruitment fair which is going on as we speak.

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Yet another traditional media company has got money burning a hole in their pocket and bought an online web property. Discovery Communications, owner of the similarly titled television channel, has bought out the online knowledge depository site HowStuffWorks for an estimated 250 million dollars.

The website set up nearly a decade ago by Professor Marshall Brain of North Carolina State University fits well with other educational properties owned by the group.

Although many of their Television channels have comprehensive web presences the acquisition of the pure play online offering is quite a departure.

David Zaslav, CEO of the Discovery Communications group illustrated the strategic importance of the purchase “One of my early challenges at Discovery was determining how best to build a robust digital media portfolio. With HowStuffWorks, Discovery now has a solid platform for strengthening our digital businesses, leveraging our video assets to
create new experiences for users, advertisers and our distribution partners, and taking those opportunities around the globe.”

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We’ve not been having a great summer over here in the UK, but where-ever you are, the summer might be the ideal time to up the ante and make an extra push on your search marketing efforts.

Other SEOs are on Holiday – even the smallest niches, the chances are there are other websites competing for links and position in the rankings. If you can use the time, when they are off holidaying or enjoying longer lunch breaks to get extra links, you’ll gain a real competitive advantage. Similarly if you or your team are taking time off, don’t let your marketing efforts stop completely, delegate the work or find a friendly intern from your local college to help out.

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There has been plenty of chatter in the last couple of days about ways that people could be negatively affecting your search engine marketing strategy. People are right to be worried, you only have to look at your search referrals to see how many people are typing in your brand name into the search engines. If there’s some mud slinging going on in your SERPs; plenty of people could end up reading it.

The Google results aren’t the only battle ground for disgruntled customers or unethical competitors. Everyman and his dog are getting involved in social media, and it’s here where the next round of fights will take place. So it’s worth thinking about where and how your rivals could be doing damage to your business.

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The invites to Kevin Rose’s latest twitter-like project, Pownce, have been like hotcakes, and after 24 hours playing with the site I’ve come to the conclusion though it might not be the most creative web2.0 app out there, but it’s got a very good chance of becoming far more successful than any of it’s more innovative predecessors.

Figurehead – as much as we may like to believe that the web has made marketing a more level playing field, you only need to look at a couple of recent launches to see the power of having a ‘web celeb’ as a figure head. Jason Calacanis at Mahalo & Guy Kawasaki at Truemors have been able to harness the cult of their personalities to attract attention and hype to their latest ventures, even if they might not deserve it. With Digg’s Kevin Rose at the helm, it’s very likely the project will be able to punch well above its weight when it comes to press and social media coverage.

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After four months of work and cryptic blog posting, The Economist Group’s small development team have announced their latest project a socially motivated social networking site.

Now known as “Lughenjo” the group have been working on a project who’s aim is to harness the knowledge and skills of The Economist’s readers to help NGOs, Charities & other organizations.

Lughenjo users will be able to answer questions that are posed by accredited international development organizations. Think Yahoo! Answers for good.

It’s an interesting idea, there definitely seems a desire amongst much of society for more ethical businesses. Aid & debt relief certainly has a part to play in international development but by using business skills & acumen, many in the developed world have in spades, we can make a small amount of individual effort which can collectively accumulate into a huge positive influence on the developing world.

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It seems like its been planned for a best part of a decade but today finally saw Tony Blair hand over the keys to Ten Downing Street to Gordon Brown. This of course gives us the perfect opportunity to have a quick look into how well Brown and his spin doctors are getting on in the social media space.

Youtube – not surprisingly there are plenty of clips of the new PM delivering speeches on the video sharing site. Most tend to be straight forward footage of Gordon delivering the oratory, but it’s the comments where it gets nasty. If you think some of the digg comments can get mean its worth seeing the bile spilled on this video though there does seem to be a few supporters of GB helping fight his corner. Still better to let the discussion take place; even if it isn’t entirely flattering. The nose picking clip is a little cringe-worthy though. 2/5

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Everyone’s favourite hype fiend Jason Calacanis has announced a scheme to have Mahalo scale its human edited search engine results. Following a similar model to the former Weblogs Inc. re-launch of Netscape.com they are hoping to recruit prevalent social media users to help create their hand-made search results, for the internet’s most searched 10,000 terms, by paying the researchers between $10-15 per results page.

In my previous article about Mahalo I discussed some of the reasons why the engine might take off, despite many people’s belief that the model won’t scale, and was generally quite positive about the venture’s prospects, however the new “greenhouse” initiative has raised a number of questions in my mind about the future of the project.

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It seems everyday a search engine is launched or relaunched and today it seems we’ve got one expanding. Baidu the hugely popular Chinese Engine is attempting to make the move into the European search arena.

e-consultancy thinks the move is bold and pretty naive, given their search technology is built around the Chinese languages. Similarly their somewhat vague distinction between natural and paid search might prove unpopular in certain quarters.

However they have set up an office in continental Europe and following their expansion into Japan, are hoping they can make a dent in Google’s strangle-hold on the European searchers.

It’s easy to write off the attempt to move across cultures as ill advised, though Google & Yahoo have tried to move in the opposite direction, with different levels of success. But with 57% of the huge & expanding Chinese search market, they must have a good idea of how to knock a good search engine.

Ask have used Danny Sulivan’s new event SMX as an opportunity to unlease their new Ask 3D user interface. And like Mahalo and Google’s Universal Search it’s a brave attempt to introduce multimedia like video and maps into their SERPs.

Andy has already had an extensive video demo of the new UI in use, and it’s up for everyone to play with at ask.com. So far there new algo seems to have done a good job of integrating local and video listings into their results, which seems in part down to a strategic relationship with recently stock market listed Blinkx.

NMA quotes Blinkx founder, Suranga Chandratillake

This relationship further demonstrates our technology leadership in the video search space and is an exciting development for our 130 or so media partners whose content can now be accessed through Ask.com

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It seems the SEO community isn’t too impressed with Jason Calacanis’ new search engine Mahalo. It’s not at all hugely surprising given his somewhat antagonistic relationship with the industry. However unlike some people I don’t think the project is destined to fail.

I agree with a lot of the faults that have been pointed out with the idea; but I’m going to play devil’s advocate for a minute and point out five ways in which Mahalo will succeed.

People Search – it seems the manual editors have spent plenty of time creating listings for the rich and famous. A few quick searches on actors, musicians and even bloggers and you’ll see results which generally are as good if not better than Google’s first page of results. They’ve done a good job of getting lots of valuable information and links all in one single page. You only need to look at the top searches for 2006 to see how being the search engine for celebrities could be a clever move by JC & Co.

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