Its official - Apple has now taken the lead in ‘cool’ consumer smart technology. Proclaimed an outright winner by the quick consumer test on the BBC technology website when pitted against the Archos and Dell Streak, the iPad could now become yet another iconic gadget from the ever expanding Apple empire who clearly have the pulse of the business and  consumer market.

A trio of slick new devices has now seen Apple overtake Microsoft as the Global leader – On Wednesday, Apple’s capitalisation closed at $222bn compared to Microsoft’s $219bn.

Other manufacturers are not giving up the fight however, with Archos tablet and Dell streak also performing admirably using Google’s much acclaimed Android OS.

Its fair to say also that there has always been a degree of scepticism around the launch of Apple’s  Smart tech hybrid – maybe their  risky ‘toe in the water’  approach to re-launching a tablet format device has allowed others to profit in the wake of their trail-blazing.

Apple have shown themselves to be adept in translating what is ‘cool’ and ‘hot’   into a ‘must have’- which is why they have become the clear market leaders.  But perhaps it wasn’t such a risky venture?  They do seem to have impeccable timing for getting it right.

I remember Bill Gates declaring a few years back that there would be a wholesale change in the future  in the way we work – from local applications where the computing power and data is localised towards what is now loosely termed Cloud computing.  - but this would also need wholesale changes in thinking and attitude to the way we work (and play!).  And as  our Global internet usage accelerates astronomically it was was only a matter of getting the product launch timing right.   Apple have shown that they can do this with consummate ease.

Gathering Clouds

But lets rewind for a minute and explore the ‘cloud topography’.  Currently  Blogs, social media and the like are ‘remote’  media applications we can access through a browser.

These applications  are essentially about quick communications but now include a range of media tools  for photos, music and video.  An opportunity was looming large to link all of this activity up to mobile devices – at the same time there has been a seismic shift from users to browsers, from the PC work station mentality to mobile connectivity.

Apple foresaw this and stepped up to the plate by providing the complete package –  slick  mobile devices + the apps to go with them .  Almost  at the same time Google adopted a more more open source philosophy by  releasing the Android operating system which could be run on a range of devices and thus liberating users from the shackles of Apple’s cash cow.

But will it stop there? Why not have all our applications and data outsourced ,i.e. in the cloud, rather than have everything reside inertly on our PC or laptop or smart device? After all, the cost of the hardware as well updating applications is tedious.  If its all taken care of  ‘in the cloud’ for us we’re left free to get on with the things we should be doing.

This is no longer a vision for the future but a reality for many businesses who now see outsourcing all their networking and IT administration requirements as the way forward rather than employ in-house expertise.

But maybe we’re all not comfortable with this concept just yet . I for one am still sceptical about uploading all my stuff to a remote centralised location with very little knowledge of where my bit of the cloud happens to be at any one time. Perhaps  we are rightly still  suspicious about the ‘cloud’ and view it as  a metaphor for ‘we really don’t know exactly where stuff  is or who can access it ‘.

Will this mindset change? I think it has to. Having recently emerged from a what was a almost a viral meltdown on my own home network, I now have to confess to a  false sense of security with all my data residing on my home and business PC network.

We have become so connected that perhaps we forget that we have now become  irrevocably interconnected.

So maybe its time to start handing over the reigns to the experts in the cloud…or maybe not just  yet.

                          

On Silver surfer day I’m proud to be one of the great greying masses whose web presence  (as well as the number of years on the biological clock)  is rapidly increasing daily.

As the hordes of those now web savvy get older and older  its a foregone conclusion that the proportion of wrinklies twittering and posting on Youtube will be doing this from a comfortable armchair armed only with a cup of tea and a hob nob.
Yet there still are and always will be , those who adamantly refuse to ‘get connected’ (hate that phrase).
Their loss really, and it also means we can blog and twitter to our hearts content about them because they will never read it anyway.

Lets face it, much of the innovation and technology it is no longer new; and as we all grow older we are becoming wiser anyway if not a bit doo-lally judging from the facebook comments I get.

There are still attempts to censure free speech – what we proudly call ours as a right in any democratic society. China’s filtering of Google searches and Pakistan’s banning of Youtube. But this only illustrates how  the internet has irrevocably engaged both Politics and Global Socialization

I am actually attempting to make a serious point about all of this, that is there is a paradigm change – not just in business which has been snowballing for a long time, but in all our social involvements.

A recent report showed that we are now spending 65% more time online than we did three years ago. The driving force in this change has been social networking perhaps unsurprisingly -and the more familiar we get the less scarry it becomes and  the more we seem to be embracing it.

There is the other extreme  - take a look at sites like Chatroulette (or perhaps you shouldn’t) where webcam communication is randomly selected (via your IP) and peer to peer. Perhaps the lack of control is a bit scarry ( the only rules are to keep your clothes on – as if!).

Sites like these will have their place – and when they don’t they will quickly fold.  Its all part of our libertarian society and we do bang on about freedom of speech don’t we?

The web has always been said to mirror society closely- and the more sophisticated it becomes  the more inclusive it will become for us all.  John Lennon’s vision for a truly people powered global society coming of age  perhaps?

                          

What does it take to get to number one in Google? – its easy!- copy a unique string of  words on your site that nobody else has on theirs…paste it in a search… and you’ll  probably be top or thereabouts

Thats the end of my post-  job done.

If it were only that simple!  But thats what most people want after all  - to be No1  in Google . . I’m stating the obvious but actually by going through the above simple exercise highlights a few  important questions before we even start:

• Is that phrase ever going to be type into a search engine ever again?
• does it describe accurately what we are promoting?
• when users find us what do we want them to do next ?

I’m assuming the answer to the last question is not ‘leave as soon as possible’ although you may be surprised how many do  if you look at your home page stats.
You may have a site that is primarily for generating advertising revenue and so you will want to generate maximum through traffic, where ’success’ will be exiting your site via a ‘revenue juicy’ click through ad.

However if you have  an ecommerce site you will want to channel  attention to the right pages rather than allow them to leave straight away.  People in browsing mode have the attention span akin to a goldfish swimming in Jack Daniels, so plan how you can grab their attention pretty quickly before they exit without getting beyond your home page.

Either way the same formula applies: more traffic=more revenue. So the same general strategy to get them there in the first place should be the  same, i.e. choosing that all important search phrase for your pages.

Choosing the most effective search words

Wo we need to construct a search phrase that is  not too long and obscure (i.e., its never likely to be typed in a search) and not too short, otherwise the competition will leave you languishing in 10,000th position.

Ideally choose  2 or 3 words particularly relevant to the  page’s content on your website. Also  if the website address, page name (my-key-phrase.htm), page title and page content all have ‘related’ keywords then bingo! –  although its more than likely the web address will not be part of the key phrase.

Note of caution here – Google’s algorithmic nose can sniff out anything contrived, so always be cautious about overloading the page with the key phrase words etc. and start off your optimising by reading your page content first.  Check to make sure the content is relevant,  focused and high quality.

You can then start to tell the world about it by making  it more search engine  ‘friendly’  by providing the contextual cues (appropriate page title headings, subheadings, image names).  I always recommend viewing your page in  a text based browser as this is how search engines index pages. ( Lynx is a traditional  text based browser although www.textise.net allows you to do the same thing much more quickly)

External links

Google ranks the importance of your site not just by its content but also by the links to it from other sites on the Internet.  The more reputable these other sites are the more ‘cred’ they add to your site in Google’s eyes, particularly if they have the key phrase words in the link itself, (e.g. ‘my unique search phrase‘  rather than click here)

Job done? not quite – I’ve saved the best till last.

Do Your Homework

Just before you go key search phrase crazy, you have to bear in mind one  minor inconvenience – your supremely crafted key search terms may never be entered in a search – double doh!! And the only way to find this out is to do a quick check to see how often its typed in.

Lots of tools out there to help with this, but Google’s keyword tool is the quickest and easiest.  If you’re not sure what is the best phrase try Google’s suggestion tool.  The difference between the two is subtle but important- the latter helps you come up with a  phrase better matched to your page content. (i.e you may think you have found a great winning phrase that matches your page content perfectly  but Google may not agree so best to get it from the horse’s mouth)

That’s certainly enough to get started, but to summarize just a couple of closing thoughts

Your site will get found if:

• the content is worth looking for
• it has a definite market  niche
• there is a market for it in the first place!

                          

The old saying ‘Information is power’ has never been more true in the Online environment. With Search Engines and Social Media sites ratcheting up billions in advertising revenue simply by collating all the data that is freely available out there, its becoming quite a literally ‘a free for all’.

But where do they get all this free information and data  from, and who writes it all?  From Us.  Me and you. As the amount of personal information about us all is being voluntarily uploaded via Social networking media,  the web Megaliths like Google with its massive collating  and repository resources, consume it heartily as  its daily bread and butter.

All tends to sound a bit neurotic I know, but I often talk to cautious web users who are almost phobic about signing up to anything that snaps of social media irresponsibility.  And in many ways I can’t blame them.  I did think this was more down to a fear of the great ‘online unknown’ and a paranoia of all things technological.  But could there also be a smattering of our naivity and passiveness creeping in,  as Google street view cameras capture us and our homes in greater and greater detail (now 3D!).

We can so easily fall in love  with our online social media apps and tools. They’re free but for a good reason. Very large amounts of data  yield a  proportionately increasing commercial return when packaged and served up correctly.

For a moment let’s indulge the scenario that all you have ever published on the web doesn’t ever disappear, but is archived. Archiving does make it sound all respectable and safe but data is archived rather than deleted for a reason, i.e. for future reference.

A recent move by US Library of Congress to archive every tweet ever posted publicly perhaps has come as a bit of a surprise.  Its reasoning is that all our tweets will form a valuable  social commentary of historical events – including all its momentous and trivial moments as they unfold in our public and often our private lives.

Is it my inherent distrust of government tinkering in our webspace or their moves to archive ‘Our’ information without ‘Our’ consent that sets my paranoic alarm bells clanging?

Embed me

There is also a massive surge towards sharing and embedding our social media interactions outside of their current Social Media framework, perhaps as a way of unifying all our separate online social involvements rather than having to start again from scratch every time there is a new kid on the block.

All reputable Social media sites and others including Google invariably have API tools so that content can hooked up to and extracted, repurposed, mashed up and processed on other sites.

A n example of this that proked some online controversy  recently was  the API-mashing of the site foursquare.com.  This site leverages Twitter/Facebook live tweets to provide geographical local town movements we care to relay via mobiles etc in real time.

The site Pleaserobme.com then used Foursquare’s API to build its own site  to highlight how easy it was to take all this shared information about individuals who had given their own home address, and using their realtime tweeting about their whereabouts could then publish which homes would be empty at any given (real)time.

The site now seems to have removed this feature, but made very a serious point: how easy it is  to ‘pull’ in real-time social media data and for the wrong purposes, and also the fact that no-one is really regulating this type of embedded exploitation (self regulation aside).

The embedding of data is now becoming much easier and commonplace.  Twitter has now announced its @anywhere tweet option, which will allow  you to tweet  your comments via other media sites that have this facility, (rather than  via the SM bookmark icon)

There may well be virtuous  ‘drivers’ to develop a universally and socially coherent platform for us all to enjoy , although its more likely its do with a fear of a levelling off  in interest (as has happened in Twitter recently) and consequent financial freefall ( the demise of Bebo) which commercially motivates the drive for Social Media sharing  just to stay ahead of the competition.

And lets face it, their success and livelihood is built around how easy and  frequently we can post  our views and opinions,  including our most throwaway comments –  which of course aren’t actually thrown away.

Some web links:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8621297.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8570293.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8521598.stm

http://foursquare.com/

http://pleaserobme.com/

                          

Facebook DB architecture:

Development of youtube architecture vid:

                          

I mentioned in an earlier article about Google incorporating Hot topics and Hot search ‘feeds’ in its main search pages.  I Googled Jeff Bridges just as he was being interviewed by Jonathan Ross and I noticed Google was feeding in real time data to the search page asynchronously(without me refreshing the page).  While this method in itself is not in itself ground breaking, the fact that Google is paying more and more attention to what is happening in the Social Media networks came as a bit of asurprise.  It will be interesting to see how this develops in the coming weeks and months -if  this becomes more of a feature in the listings we will need to think seriously about the format of content, and as mentioned in previous posts, increasingly moving our focus to Social Media channels like Twitter, Facebook etc.

No content – BUT high listing

The second surprise in My Googling  this week came right out of the blue, and it was one I should have perhaps been aware of. The scenario : when you can actually do a search for a key word/phrase and you’re ousted in the position listings by a site that not only does not have the key word or phrase on their page, they don’t even have their site indexed by Google.  Please feel free to contradict me at this point because  (in the words of V. Meldrew) I didn’t really believe it either. There was no actual site page content in the Google listings excerpt either.

The person that actually came across this was scratching his head over this one as well. Could Adword keywords perhaps be affecting the natural rankings perhaps?

If you haven’t already guessed the answer by now here it is – backlinks or inbound links, external links or whatever other terms are used to describe a link to your site coming from an external site’s page.

More surprisingly perhaps was the ‘potency’ of the anchor text, i.e., the textual key word/phrase being used in the  link itself.  Further investigation revealed that the external links pointing to the site numbered in their thousands.

Now two  interesting implications follow:

• A site content doesn’t even have to be actually indexed to be ranked highly in the natural listings, furthermore:
• A site can have its robots text file configured to ‘no index, no follow’   – in other words specifically telling the search engines NOT to list the site, and yet it still appears in searches, (albeit minus any content)

Mmm…. is  there something discrete in the Google algorithm that enables sites to be ranked regardless of page content? Is it configured in such a way to place to simply ignore content and carry on regardless and use the backlink anchor text instead? The example in my next post should hopefully go some way to restoring my confidence in natural listings.

Am I stating the obvious?..  in the meantime feel free to add your pearls of wisdom

(all comments are moderated BTW)

                          

Social Networking Logos

If businesses haven’t yet woken up to the potential of SN they certainly need to.  To quote Bill Gates, its the way we are all communicating with each other these days…

We can all think of 1001 reasons why we could well do without the extra hassle of yet another foray into the mysteries of online marketing.
But if all you do is take a  moment to read some of the stats below, then maybe it might be convince you its time to ask your kids for a few tips on where to start.

Facebook Example…

So lets have  a look at some stats first of all. If we take a look at one of the fastest growing SN sites Facebook and have a look at their stats for a moment:

• they claim to have 350 million active users.
• Each user has on average has 130 friends and is a member of 12 groups.
• 700,000 local businesses have active pages on Facebook.
• Facebook’s average of 55 mins for each user visit

The trivia argument often levelled at SN sites now starts looking a bit weak in business terms. If you have have ever taken the time to look at the stats for your own site to see how long visitors are staying on pages, compare this to Facebook’s average of 55 mins for each user visit and you begin to see the  potential.

Sharing Vs Selling

The one thing that is radically different is in the way users interact with content. Perhaps our own carefully crafted websites were built on the assumption that we should simply present information as  a ‘one off’ without necesarily elliciting users responses (after all, it took us long enough to write the content in the first place).  But if we want to really engage potential consumers we have to allow them opportunities to express their thoughts, opinions etc., in a way a static page of text on a website cannot hope to do.  In so doing we are gathering valuable market research and feedback; our web pages are also ‘enriched’ by the extra (free) generated page content, which is all good news when MR Google pays our site a visit .

Content for free?

Businesses are certainly getting the message and eager to tap into the huge potential. Facebook  are actually keen for businesses to leverage content within own sites if we want to do this via their integration tools like Facebook connect . facebook also does all the hard work by actively prompting and encouraging members to join groups and add friends with similar interests. And not forgetting all this generates all important extra  content +  backlinks to our site – and its free! . (cf. Huffington Post -a news aggregator website which actually thrives on ‘pulling’ the majority of its content from other sites)

The youtube example:

Youtube stats? Oh just watch the clip!

Suffice it to say that user numbers are now in  billions and still growing (14.5 at the last estimate.)   You tube also enables us to test out the market very quickly and efficiently – whether you want to publish your own movie, slideshow or even embed the content on your own site, Youtube has  to be dream come true in terms of free advertising –  the tools are all there free to use for you to make it happen i.e., creating engaging user content easily without having the overhead costs. (e.g.,check out Capri Sun’s channel on Youtube )

Summary thoughts about Youtube:

• … is available universally and is free
• …frequently outperforms conventional media channels
• …provides feedback via viewer stats and comments
• … offers (free)embedding/agreggating  of content
• rapid and easy publishing and editing for more flexible marketing strategy
• huge viral marketing possibilities

A word of caution

Yep -there’s no such thing as a free lunch.  We can’t just think of SN sites as free advertising. They do have to be engaging (c.f. Facebook page visit time of 55 mins) so be prepared to offer something that is of real interest and benefits to the user – don’t just think of this as one way traffic.  Put yourself in the place of somone who is  SN savvy – they will very see through any sales ploys (however subliminal) to market your product.

Summary:

Remember any good viral marketing has to be user- driven also  so:

• Be prepared to share information, even offer free services or benefits(go on – dangle the odd carrot!) give feedback and encourage comments about products/services.
• Get up to speed – draw on your staff expertise and knowledge of blogging twittering etc discuss which are the best SN sites for your business and how they could be best utilised
• Get involved/become members of other related groups(e.g. follow in Twitter)
• Don’t be afraid to fail – review  and discuss your strategy as you would any other marketing campaign
• Don’t forget to switch on your Stats (Google analytics preferably) to monitor popularity of product/service/topic interest

Perhaps next time you are reviewing your marketing strategy perhaps Social Networking will move high up your ‘must do’ marketing agenda.

                          

Following on from a previous post about the way Google is responding to social networking, Google has included hot topics and hot searches as part of  its  trends service  at: http://google.co.uk/trends , although only hot topics is available at the moment in the UK.

Trends

If  you’re not familiar with Google trends, its a powerful tool that gives  a graphical rep of most popular search topics and terms over a 5 year period.  So if you wanted to compare market growth for example between companies, brands etc you can quickly generate a 5 year graph based on their related search terms.  OK,  as a data mining tool it could be argued that using Google’s search entries might return flakey results but it cannot be ignored mainly because of the sheer volume of the empirical data that has been indexed.  Add in the ability to quickly analyse by region, sector and be be able to include Boolean searches for up to 5 terms then this becomes very powerful  market research tool. (There is also Google Insights for more in-depth analysis.) If  its used in conjuction with Google’s keyword tool to identify exactlywhich terms are being typed in the most its not difficult to envisage the benefits for online businesses.  The issue is how this information will influence what we do and how quickly we can respond.

Now add into this mix Hot topics and Hot searches. The emphasis here is identifying the fastest growing trends (rather than the volume of searches overall) However the main difference is in the speed of search data being compiled- hot topics/hot searches  results are compiled daily and hourly respectively whereas  a standard Google search compiles results over a longer period. So essentially Google trends is showing what people are looking for now (i.e., sudden peaks in interest) . (The difference between hot topics and hot searches – the former focuses on the news orientated trends whilst the latter algorithm reflects actual searches)

Google’s  HOT  Topics and Hot Searches

As mentioned in a previous post this  is a response by Google  to the immediacy of social networking ,while keeping the distinction with overall longer term search trends.  Hot topics trawls the social networks etc looking for the ‘most buzz’ i.e. keywords and phrases that are on the ‘up’ in terms of popularity. Its probably best to think about these like the pop charts – for example no 1 in the top 10 Hot topics is ‘haiti telethon’ which reflects what is a happening now.  How does this work? very crudely the data is ‘normalised’ so that figures are not actual search numbers but compared against an average of current searches (a bit like stand dev).  So if there is a sudden peak in interest the height of the peak moves the topic  up the charts

Hot searches by contrast reference the number of Google searches for those topics.  Both of these indexing services operate over a very short time frame (hours rather rather than the ussual weeks or months) making them a very rich data mining resource for businesses. E.g.,  e-commerce sites could make use of the latest Hot topics and searches for latest fashion trends,  music music realtime (well, almost) .

If you try and keep ahead of the game its probably having a play with some of the advanced tools also. While they are kept as a  separate  service from Google’s main web searching  tools it will be interesting to see if they remain that way as other services have  now crept into the listings on to the main search page (shopping, news etc)

What are the opposition doing? Well Yahoo is calling it ‘Buzz’ and Bing has created what appears to be clone –  its actually a ‘mashup’ pulling its data from Google trends and spits out its top results using its own algorithm.  Inevitably results differ considerably as you would expect, although Google as the NO 1 search engine continues to be  the trail blazer.

Remember to log in to your  Google  account to get the most out of Google’s tools. Go have a look and play at:

Google trends

trendy!bing

Yahoo Buzz