Very excited that renowned Australian search marketing event, Search Engine Room is coming to Auckland on 13th November 2007. This is a must for marketers interested in understanding more about search.

I’m even more excited that I’ve been asked to sit on a panel discussion in the afternoon.

4.45pm - 5.10pm … Search and The Online Marketing Budget: How fast should marketers shift their traditional advertising spend to the web? Where should that money go? How large a role should search play? This panel will discuss these and other key issues such as: what to look for in a search marketing company?
- John Schofield, Managing Director, The Internet Bureau
- Jon Beattie, Director, Marker

The short answer to these questions are:

• Very fast!
• Huge!
• A company that cares about performance and is prepared to base their remuneration on this

For the long answers, you’ll need to come to the session.

There are going to be some fantastic speakers and I urge you to come along if you can. If you are a client and would like to come as a guest of Marker, please let me know as we would love to have you there.

Technorati Tags: search, searchengineroom

I had posted about PayPerPost.com after I saw a presentation from their founder in New York earlier in the year. It seems they signed up TiVo for a campaign which was subsequently pulled.

PayPerPost is a marketplace where advertisers can pay bloggers to post up content allowing a marketer to seed a viral campaign. Bloggers who are paid to post must disclose that it is paid content, however, there is no shortage of critics who believe the concept of paid content will destroy the largely forthright nature of blogs in general.

It appears this is a similar issue to that which Microsoft faced when they gave Ferrari Acer laptops to bloggers when they launched Windows Vista. In that case, Microsoft was not very clear on what was expected of the blogger. It appeared to be a bribe when in fact all they really wanted to do was make it easy for bloggers to experience Vista without having to upgrade their own computer. They issued a statement later clarifying their position, but it was too late

TiVo paid for video clips to be posted on PayPerPost, but they didn’t make it explicit that this was essentially an ad.

The lesson for marketers is this:

You can not be disingenuous because you will get found out. If you are doing an advertising campaign, don’t try and dress it up as a consumer generated viral campaign, just be up front. Better yet, forget about trying to advertise and think about how you can truly engage with your customers in a conversation, not a campaign. That is the real opportunity online, not video ads.

For more on paid content read out Chad’s post “Why paid blogs will kill the blogosphere”

Technorati Tags: payperpost, tivo

Web 2.0 for financial services - yes it does apply to this industry. Thank you to everyone who attended our event this evening "Web 2.0 & Social Media – An overview for service &amp professional services marketers"

If you would like a copy of the presentation, please let me know.

Read more on Web 2.0

Web 2.0 Waipuna - manufacturers are major contributors to the economy especially when it comes to export. I am pleased to be presenting a breakfast workshop at Waipuna Hotel & Conference Centre this morning on Web 2.0 for consumer manufacturing marketers.

Thank you to everyone for getting up early and attending. If you would like a copy of the presentation, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Technorati Tags: web 2.0 waipuna

Yellow Pages in New Zealand is now just Yellow. They have recently relaunched their entire online offering.

To help you use their new search engine they have put together a handy online tutorial to give you step by step instructions.

It is very similar to the one Google had to explain to you how to use their search engine…..hold on a minute, I don’t think Google ever needed an interactive tutorial on how to use Google. This could be an issue Yellow, you have fundamentally missed what makes a good search engine from both a consumer and a business perspective:

1. You know how to use it instinctively.
2. Most of the time you find what you are looking for straight away.
3. You can buy advertising simply and easily online.

As my colleague Joel found out recently spending money as an advertiser is remarkably difficult for some reason?

Whilst there is no denying that Yellow is a substantial and long overdue enhancement of the previous offering, I can’t see why they didn’t prioritise using AJAX and actually getting the data right. I tried searching for “Sports Shoes” in “Auckland” and got Berton Automotive Ltd, an automotive repair shop, in my top 10 search results. They don’t sell shoes, sports or otherwise. Let’s try “Running Shoes” instead. One company in the biggest city in New Zealand that sell sports shoes apparently. Okay.

I did see that they had bought banner space on YouTube, which is quite a clever media buy. I have to say though, the idea of advertising a search engine is also fundamentally an issue. Ask.com is everywhere in the US at the moment and it will be very interesting to see if they can make any in roads at despite a seemingly huge advertising budget.

With respect to Rod Drury, who I consider an extremely intelligent person, but he doesn’t get this social networking site. His post “Just say no to Facebook” suggests that because we are all busy people and don’t have time for our existing friends why would we want to join a website that is focused on meeting new people.

The latest research out of the US on reason for use of social networks is quite fascinating:

• 91% of respondents use social networking sites to stay in touch with friends they see.

• 72% of respondents use them to make plans with their friends.

Make new friends is way down the list of reasons.

When I was in the US last month a number of people said to me that their friends just didn’t respond to email or even text messaging. The only way they could stay in touch with them and make plans to meet was via MySpace or Facebook. When the first person told me this, I was astounded, then I started to think about my own email behaviour. I get up to 100 email messages per day almost all business related. I sometimes takes days to respond to a personal email. Facebook is a single interface where you can go and manage your social relationships quickly and efficiently. It’s CRM for your personal life! Facebook is the personal equivalent of Salesforce.com.

For me, most of my friends live in the UK and I’m there only every 3 months or so, and I find Facebook incredibly useful to stay in touch. I have to say that MySpace never really did it for me, but then I am fussy and have an aversion to websites that aren’t aesthetically pleasing to the eye. Rupert, you’re a gazzillionaire, get some decent designers to overhaul MySpace.

By the way, Facebook is growing at 4 times the rate of MySpace at the moment. I really hope News Corp didn’t buy the next Friendster.

Technorati Tags: facebook

Social scientist Danah Boyd has posted a draft of a paper entitled “Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace“. Essentially she is suggesting that MySpace represents the working class kids, whereas Facebook is the social network for the university grads and undergrads.

Danah observes that definitions of “class” in the US are incredibly complex. It is not like the old British system, it is much more tied to education and values rather than necessarily income and where you grew up.

Even in the military the officers are on Facebook, whereas the grunt soldiers are generally on MySpace. The military have now blocked access on their network to MySpace, but they can still access Facebook.

All I can say is that in the last 9-12 months nearly all my friends who are university educated have abandoned MySpace in favour of Facebook. I have also noticed a number of posts out there on the subject.

I originally found this via the eclectically brilliant Boing Boing.

Technorati Tags: facebook, myspace, myspace vs facebook

I haven’t seen this before. YouTube videos integrated with Google search results so you can actually view the video right there within the page:

I took these screenshots on Friday when I was in the US and now I can’t seem to replicate this, so maybe it is something they are only doing in the States at the moment. The concept of one search with video, images, RSS feed etc all in the results is very appealing in my opinion.

Technorati Tags: google, youtube

I’m at Gotham Hall in New York City attending the Future of Online Advertising conference. I’m going to post summaries of presentations and thoughts throughout the two days. Posts are going up on the Marker Blog.

Technorati Tags: fooa07nyc

It is a valid question. It is not inconceivable that there might be other search engines.

Ask.com (previously Ask Jeeves) has recently relaunched their site. They are advertising quite heavily (offline which is probably not a good sign, when did you last see a Google billboard?) in the US at the moment.

The user interface is very good and has a very slick Web 2.0 feel to it. I like it a lot and for someone who highly values the aesthetics of websites, it is a pleasant change to the decidedly basic look and feel of Google. I’m the number one search result for “Jon Beattie” (of course, there can be only one), but the rest of the results are quite different from Google. They have indexed my Linked-In profile, all my Flickr photos, and a whole bunch of links I’ve never seen before, including my submission to thisisbroken.com, which I didn’t even realise was posted until now. The key difference I think is that Google automatically assumes that you actually wanted to search for John Beattie (with an H) which is very annoying, as people continually put the unwanted H in my name. Sugarrae has recently posted about this issue. I think she has a point, is the “Did you mean” functionality of Google actually that clever?

Over in China, the leading search engine is not Google, but Baidu.com. This must be somewhat annoying for Google as they have basically just copied their interface design. Not sure about their search algorithm, it is apparently very old school according to the chatter on Webmaster World (only looks at meta tags and keyword content and doesn’t take into account incoming links). They have just announced that they intend to launch in Europe soon. This will be interesting to watch. Apparently it is very good for finding illegal MP3 and video downloads, perhaps that will be their niche.

I think I’ll stick with Google for now as my default search engine, but Ask.com is going into my Firefox Search Bar.