Anyone familiar with this brief? “We’ve been working on this for nearly a year, but we’re not sure we’ve got anything good. You need to come up with a plan by next week that will save the world.” Alright, it’s not quite like that, but I was struck by the similarities between watching the Digital Britain Conference panel debates and the innumerable briefing meets I’ve been to over the years where the digital question has created an atmosphere of confusion, excitement, panic and opportunity amongst those charged with stewarding brands into the future. Everyone knows that a ‘lick of digital paint’ isn’t quite enough. But nobody knows quite enough to make a decision. And those that do know feel they haven’t been consulted.

In the case of Digital Britain, there are big unanswered questions. Defining ‘digital’ is problematic enough. Although the official consultation period was drawing to an end, it felt right to do something about these questions by posing them to a wider community of those who have been involved in the digital economy for rather longer than Lord Carter. From an original tweet by Bill Thompson on the backchannel at Gordon Brown’s Digital Conference, 12 unconferences were held (including London, Manchester, Glasgow and Cornwall) to discuss the interim report and provide useful feedback for the Digital Britain team at BERR. Most of the communication took place on twitter (unconference was, briefly, a trending topic). The outputs of these sessions were compiled and edited into a series of reports, and then edited into a single submission given in this week, which the Digital Britain team are reading ‘with interest’.

Will it make a difference? I hope so. Was it worth it? I guess so. As a whole new model of consultation it was an experience of our age, truly collaborative, intense, interested, bright people, with an interest in ‘doing something important’ and ‘doing the right thing.’  If only agencies could work this way.  

The full report is available here.  Other comments are available here, and here.

In the complicated and interconnected worlds of SEO and digital PR I find myself increasingly talking about the importance of “quality”. However, after a series of déjà vous inducing client meetings I realise what a contentious and subjective term it can be.

From a brand, customer engagement, marketing perspective quality is key to delivering the right content to the right audience and ensuring brands aligning themselves with appropriate partners. But, from a link equity perspective quality relies on Google page rank, deep linking anchor text to the right page and ensuring spiders are able to follow those links. So how can we as an industry ensure we deliver the best “quality” work to clients to create brand buzz and excitement fuelling demand whilst also appearing at the top of the search engine listings to increase visitors to the site? If digital PR is the new SEO, how can we ensure that the right people are defining what constitutes quality?

There is no question that digital PR managed correctly can be a key tool in the link building armoury. Optimised content distributed to sites and syndicated across the web all containing back links can help to provide the crucial “votes of confidence” Google uses to help position web pages in their index. It sounds great and allows brands to deliver improved SERPs as a side effect of distributing engaging content. But the skills and techniques of natural link cultivation should be not forgotten in this wave of enthusiasm and excitement around digital PR. Whilst generic back links to a brand from high “quality” sites which reach the right audience will provide some small degree of improvement in their SERPs, a focused link building campaign on key pages and terms will deliver far greater results from a positional perspective and allow brands to improve positions on key revenue driving pages.

Of course brands should be protective of the environments in which they appear but they must also be pragmatic about the methods required to improve their SERPs. While adopting a holistic approach to all parts of the digital spectrum is crucial, this should not be done to the detriment of the subtleties and specialist knowledge available. Perhaps the solution is the same as any other marketing campaign, setting clear objectives and realistic goals.

As you’ll know by now, I preach about the importance of bringing distinct disciplines closer together, to understand the interplay between them and take advantage of the wide and diverse skills within this industry. But to suggest SEO is dead and it’s all about the PR seems to be moving the task from one team to another rather than combing skills to deliver results which are fundamentally greater than the sum of the parts.

I had to lol at the radio this morning. They were screaming how the stressed out Susan Boyle story is all over the news. Well, it is everywhere because mainstream media loves singing the same tune. Old media’s own re-tweeting system means bits of sensationalized gossip gets relayed from outlet to outlet, building up an ephemeral thundercloud of noise.

But why the rush to judge and jump on the unlikely celebrity they helped build up? Why must everybody have an opinion? Amanda Holden — who has buffed, blonded and botoxed her own naturally beautiful body — even had the nerve to tell this less genetically blessed woman not to change a thing.

Personally, I think the clever chaps behind Britain’s Got Talent have manipulated this whole song and dance. Rather than allow the Susan phenomenon to destroy the drama of the final show, they gushed about the other contestants. Anything to avoid viewer perception of a Ms. Boyle fait accompli win. So the new stars are an adorable little boy, then a darling little girl, then a lovable father and son. (Who strangely are allowed to celebrate flab and funny hair.) Now Susan is on the brink of quitting the show. Or so says Piers Morgan. Oooh noz.

OK, it is admittedly none of my business what Susan Boyle does. But as a fan and another person with an opinion, I hope she follows her Elaine Paige dream into musical theatre. She’d be perfect as Mother Superior in the Sound of Music, don’t you think? No need to dance around or act up. Just look good in black and sing your heart out. Climb ev’ry mountain, Susan. FTW.

Follow me on twitter as I root for #SusanBoyle

This week the mobile browser Skyfire released it’s long awaited 1.0 version, for use with smartphones, taking the company out of a hugely successful beta period that has seen 1 million people downoad the free service.

Skyfire is free to download at: www.get.skyfire.com

The service is currently available in the UK, USA and Canada, and runs on Windows Mobile (smartphones and PPC) and Nokia N and E Series (Symbian S60, 3rd Edition) phones. With its release yesterday, thousands of people lit up on fire with excitement for Skyfire and have been reporting their experiences on Twitter, with many tweeting that the service is the iPhone for other handsets. Skyfire is feeding the strong popularity and desire people have to get connected to the internet by their mobile phones, for instant access to social networking sites, viewing videos and reading their RSS feeds, among other features. Skyfire describes its service as bringing the full web experience to handsets, and it is the only mobile browser that supports Flash, Silverlight and Ajax, technologies that normally crash when attempting to access the internet from a handset. 

Skyfire’s 1.0 release means millions more people will be able to catch up on Facebook, Twitter and watch YouTube, BBC iPlayer from their mobile, and this rich-media content experience bodes well for brands who are increasingly using the mobile internet for advertising and marketing. The excitement for this new milestone in technology captured the attention of mainstream media and bloggers, who have given the service rave reviews. Here’s what some have said:

Normal
0

“You see, Skyfire isn’t a ‘proper’ browser, more of a
content viewer, with all the serious processing handled by the company’s proxy
servers, the pages then being ‘rendered’ onto your phone. Just like the Opera
browser in fact, but with more whistles, bells and streaming video.” – T3’s
David Walker

“The release
brings with it a host of improvements, such as improved navigation, zooming and
interaction and a faster launch, lower power consumption, and new search
functionality. Also, while the new version of the browser starts up, you can
begin typing URLs or search queries into the box at the top, saving time. The
company is operating a closed alpha for the BlackBerry platform, so that’ll
likely be next for release.” –Pocket-lint.com’s Duncan Geere

“Their browser is fast and responsive, and Skyfire’s goal is
to give a faithful representation of web pages that is equivalent to the
desktop browsing experience.  One
important focus for Skyfire is in the area of video rendering… Skyfire’s
approach is to introduce their own video-crunching servers between, say,
YouTube and your Nokia N95.  These
servers take full Flash (Flash 10) and then video transcode the signal in
real-time, giving a lower frame rate (8 frames per second), and a smaller
screen rendering for mobile.   The
result is that the Skyfire browser can render an original YouTube page or Vimeo
page, or even blogs with embedded video, so that you have access to the entire
video catalogue, live on line.” –Martyn Davies, The Really Mobile Project

Watch The Phones Show hosted by AllAboutSymbian.com’s Steve Litchfield, for an interview with Skyfire’s VP of
Business Development Raj Singh, who offers extra insight to the browser’s features
and hints of what’s to come.

Normal
0

CNET was among the first outlets to announce the news yesterday, and just prior to Skyfire’s 1.0
launch, The New York Times named the browser as “App of the Week”.

My consultancy the Hai Media Group handled the UK/EU media outreach for Skyfire, teaming up with our fantastic US media partners VSC Consulting to orchestrate this highly successful PR 2.0 outreach programme.

Still finding more and more coverage results for Skyfire,

-Lisa

My WARC conference presentation stressed that the best way to market
to women is to be inclusive rather than to simply overtly exclude men.
Nevertheless, most marketing activities aimed at women do so simply by
shutting-out the other gender. It’s a mirror-image of the current
marketing worst-practice. Della, the new netbook sales portal from dell
is a pastel-pink feminized counterpart to the unapologetically
ultra-masculine Dell.com. It’s a perfect example of the current trend
of exclusion marketing.

I remember interviewing one Lady Geek who told me in no uncertain terms that the ‘Dixons Women’s Only night’ was her idea of hell.

“What are they going to do, give me cheese and pineapple on a stick and tell me how to turn the telly on?”

Not exactly the response that Dixons were looking for, and in my
experience a strategy which never works quite as well as the men who
invented it might expect.

Marketing to women should not feel like “an initiative” i.e that a
group of 40 something balding marketing men have been sitting in the
boardroom and some bright spark says ‘We need to appeal to women. I know, lets create a portal for women, pink up and dumb down our products…we could even call it Della…(guffaw guffaw)

I admire Dell’s intent. Its brave. It shows that they recognizes
that in the current environment, its a smart strategy to improve your
bottom line by targeting women. I’m skeptical that Dell will achieve
their objectives for two reasons:

Firstly,  do they really have a long-term commitment to growing the female market?
Dell has a history of superficial and short-term business strategies
such last year’s half-hearted flirtation with Linux . Is there any
commitment to go beyond the shell of rebranding and create something
which will profoundly appeal to this new market? As Elisabeth Kelan
states, when you open the Inspiron artistic shell, its just an ordinary
dull Dell laptop underneath.  How much of the products and community
parts of the site have been specifically developed with women in mind
rather than been re-skinned to appeal to women?

Secondly, I do not think that Dell have achieved a depth of understanding of their new female audience.
Evidence of this is the handy lifestyle tips which state the
excessively obvious. We also find the usual marketing copy cliches such
as ‘giving extension to your digital life’ (I don’t want a digital
life, I want a life with technology in it) and ‘enhance your life with
technology’ and the ‘giving’ section – it’s the kind of vacuous text
that means absolutely nothing.

From a product perspective, the site makes a big deal of their
pretty new Inspiron Netbooks, however there’s not a whole lot else on
the site – yet another echo of Dell’s failed Linux strategy which also
presented an absurdly limited subset of Dell’s quite massive portfolio
of products.

My research conducted with Jupiter found that a third of British women are frustrated, alienated and bored by the way tech companies market to them.
Despite this most tech marketers are in denial about what must be done:
There is plenty which can be done- it just needs to be executed and
approached in the right way.

Strategies tech brands need to apply;

1) Go for an implicit strategy appealing to women rather than
creating an overt exclusive ‘silo’. Overt branding such as Della,
Dixon’s Women’s Only nights and Comets Angels give out wrong signals.
Nintendo spent hundreds of dollars understanding women and their
fitness regimes but never overtly positioned Wii Fit as ‘gaming for
girls.’

2) Make women the heart of your strategy not the icing on the cake.
Nike Women has invested millions and is part of a strategy which
demonstrates Nike’s long term commitment to women. It goes beyong
flogging products and starts to offer real benefits.

3) Develop an authentic understanding of women and what they want before
you embark on women only strategies. Employ experts such as the Lady
Geeks (shameless plug) who will help you go beyond the superficial and
can deliver your proposition in a way that is not going to get women
irritated. Dell have lost touch with the reality of those women its
trying to sell to.

4) Position technology as entertainment rather than a female or male pursuit.
Jeremy Clarkson, has equal appeal and ratings amongst both sexes.
Rather than talk about the technical aspects of a car in a dry way, he
has used humour and entertainment as a way to make cars appealing.

Della is a somewhat superficial step in the right direction. Lets
just hope Dell listen to their customers and radically overhaul Della
the concept before it becomes yet another of Dell’s six-month
flirtations.

Fellow Cow Ella forwarded me on this piece by Fuat Kircaali from Web 2.0 all about how PR people and consultancies are marketing dinosaurs due for extinction.

Sure, the guy was trying to push his Utilizer news publishing platform with a fairly up-front plug in the article. However, it’s this quote that caught my attention:

“Companies
with the Largest Number of Professional Bloggers will win. Tomorrow’s
(and I mean tomorrow, not the next decade) marketing game will be
played on professional corporate blogging platforms. The companies with
the largest number of well-read and respected corporate bloggers will
win the marketing and propaganda games.”

Will the PR
people of tomorrow simply be glorified bloggers with brands employing
an army of scribes to send pearls of wisdom into the online ether?

I can see some logic in this argument. News is
increasingly online first and in print a distant second, everyone is
connected, and blogs directly help your search engine rankings.  Nevertheless,
I would have thought that the need to disseminate more news online and
engage with people means professional (and trained) communicators are
more and not less necessary.

So - “The new job description of “professional corporate blogger” will be a very popular one”? Well that depends. Companies like Kodak
do have people present in this sphere, but what they do works as they
actually add value to customers (in Kodak’s case via a photo blog).

Assembly line blogging where announcements are blasted out however is just online noise, something we have plenty of already.

Image – Barely Fitz

 I’m seriously thinking about attending this year’s TED Conference in Oxford. In case you don’t know, TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conferences bring together an eclectic mix of speakers and attendees, questioning perceptions and encouraging discussion of new ideas. Whilst looking through videos of past speakers I came across Joseph Pine, who has an interesting take on customer experience and the search for authenticity.

In short, Josephs proposition (as I understand it) is that in economic history we kicked off by trading commodities like wheat, meat and cotton, we then progressed by processing the commodities to make goods that enabled us to achieve added value. Over the last twenty years we have seen the commoditisation of goods that has lead to greater price competition over and above other product attributes. In order to achieve competitive advantage organisations need to now rely on customer experience as the primary differentiator, but importantly what prospective customers are looking for is authenticity.

So what does Joseph mean by authenticity? Essentially it is that what customers get is what they’ve been promised, however, importantly it is necessary for the organisation to be fully aligned with the delivery of the experience in order for the maximum effect to be garnered. Joseph cites the example of Disney Land as a great example of the delivery of authenticity, because the experience delivered is exactly what’s been promised and the employees and organisation are all pointing in the same direction.

What does this mean for online experience? By focusing on the holistic experience of the website and less on individual experiential items an organisation can achieve greater success. For many websites, it’s recognising that online is a step on the customer journey and not the end destination, if a website can help a customer on their journey and encourage more of them to stay than go with a competitor then it can say that it has helped the experience achieve authenticity.

The thoughts expressed here are my own and do not have anything to do with Joseph Pine who I am sure will have his own take on what’s been written. If you’d like to find out more about TED please visit www.ted.com

This week’s viral of the week in Media Week is BP Ultimate’s latest campaign “Takes you further”.  Some might question why a viral video campaign for a big brand like BP is worthy of such an accolade and I’d argue it’s based on the appreciation of the matching of well thought out planning with strong creative.

BP’s creative team (Ogilvy) recognised that they (apologies for the pun) needed to take their viral further than most, and rather than simply produce a one off viral hit, create some kind of online narrative around the campaign over a lengthier period.

The strategy behind this was based around rolling out a range of unbranded teaser clips, to generate an initial buzz and general feeling of “what’s going on” (or in YouTube land WTF!), followed by a main “reveal” viral clip – to help make sense of the campaign, and hit home the key messages of the campaign.

The campaign so far seems to be bubbling away nicely.  The initial teaser clips have had 50,000+ views, and the main viral clip is starting to pick up nicely too – with some nice comments too.  Importantly if you look at the comments and conversations they seem to be largely positive, which is largely linked (I’d argue) to the seeding strategy – as existing communities had been warmed to the campaign by the teasers, with the reveal then helping make sense of what had gone before.

These days Google can’t step out of the front door without upsetting someone and it’s become somewhat de rigueur for agencies to slag them off left, right and centre despite the fact that a lot of us, myself included, generate some profit from the existence of their services.

As such when the news broke last week that Google are further relaxing their trademark policy in the US you could already here agencies across the land downing spreadsheets and sharpening pitchforks in protest.  In case you missed the screams of anguish the first time around (last year in the UK following a ‘test’ in the US), the first stage of Google’s evil plan was to allow advertisers to appear against users’ searches for trademarked terms they don’t own, although the advertising copy itself could only refer to the brand if it was run by the trademark owner or an authorised party.

The result of such a change is that competitors could suddenly appear against each other’s results, reducing the cheap brand traffic that paid search advertisers love so whilst competition also forced up the cost of buying clicks due to the auction model Google uses.  Whilst there was an impact the reality is simply that Google’s algorithm for paid search, whilst dictates which position advertisers appear in and how much they pay, meant that legitimate advertisers almost always still get to the top spot for a fraction of the cost of a competitor due to increased ‘relevance’ – itself a function of copy and proportion of users that click.

The next step in Google’s master plan?  To allow advertisers to use whatever trademarks they like in an ad.  Advertiser frustration may seem understandable – advertisers using your trademark now appear more relevant to both Google and the consumer and therefore you end up getting less clicks for more money.  Yet before you go and start collecting rocks to throw at our little search friend it’s worth considering a couple of points.

Firstly you can only include a trademark if you have a legitimate justifiable reason, e.g. you offer information on or sell the trademarked product.  Which, it’s worth pointing out, pretty much puts Google where Yahoo! have been for years (so they DID get something right obviously, huh?!) and also… Kind of makes sense.  Especially when supplier and affiliate terms will enable brands to police this space themselves anyway.

The second thing to consider is Google’s justification.  I’m paraphrasing (see their reasoning in full here), but ultimately their rationale is that you’ve been able to do it through other media for years.  You run Joe Blogg’s car showroom and want to run a press ad telling the world you are now giving away an iPod to your one billionth customer?  Not a problem… Yet on search?  Not on your nelly.  Until now (in the US at least… the UK soon no doubt).

And this is what the complainants overlook – paid search is probably the only form of advertising where the media owner tries to police the advertisements.  If you run an advert that breaks the law on TV then it is your responsibility and sure, if you passed yourself off as another brand you can bet your bottom dollar someone’s going to get sued, but it won’t be the TV channel.  Google’s latest change merely shows the medium is growing up.

More and more popular among business gatherings is effort by organizers to create a new approach to the traditional format of bringing an industry together. Instead of trade show display booths filling a venue, and a roster of lectures from industry leaders being the standard highlights, the new business generation is seeking out events that offer more interaction, collaboration and fun.

Last week in London at The Hub in Kings Cross, social entrepreneurs attended Shine 09, billed as an “unconference” that offered up one-to-one mentoring, creative brainstorming, a social collaboration game, and a party where the British Urban Collective performed. Over the unconference’s two day run, participants joined in on workshops that aimed to cultivate new ideas, and help steer these concepts to execution. *Note, definitely better to refer to everyone as a participant than just a passive attendant, as everyone got invovled!

“The difference here is that last year’s event was a very
urban-guerrilla, anarchist feel to it and this year it is business,
with a focused switch from pre- to post- recession and a real display
of determination of people who want to make real world change happen,”
said Cliff Prior, Chief Executive of UnLtd.

Shine joins a number of creative conferences coming up, both in the UK and USA, that are styled after predecessor’s BarCamp , Foo Camp, and SXSW, all which take inspiration from the unconference concept.
While there is still a market for, and a majority expectation, for the traditional business conference, which is a billion-pound industry, new thinkers are mixing things up and attracting a diverse combination of brand-name sponsors, high-profile participants, and entrepreneurial micro-businesses that seem to all benefit from exchanging energy and ideas with each other.

“Our aim with Shine is to never have talented people sit in a room and
just clap, we need to give interaction, space and structure to fill out
the event with ideas and see inspiration turn to perspiration,” Prior
said.
 

Upcoming untraditional conferences include:

bTWEEN (11-12 June 2009, Liverpool), an interactive digital media forum.

2gether09, a
London summer conference run in festival style, that aims to explore and
celebrate how technology can be used to promote social progress.

Over The Air,
a September London mobile development gathering spaced over two days of
fun, learning, hacking and socializing with participants camping over
night.

Fees for the events are affordable and range from £30-£100, often free for students.

I’ve also written about Shine09 on DigitalJournal.com, please see my post here.

Shine on,

-Lisa

PS: Have you attended a non-traditional conference recently, what did you think? Are you going to a creative conference? Which one? Comments about creative conferencing welcome.