Should CSR extend to your digital supply chain?
The recent twitter exploits by the UK furniture retailer Habitat got me thinking again about corporate responsibility in a digital age. Habitat made a public apology for piggybacking on the current popularity of Twitter searches for Iran. One of the more unforgivable keywords their twitter promotion had targeted. I can only imagine this was an automated system judging by some of the tweets.
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I’m not convinced that digital ignorance should be accepted as an excuse. This all should come under the ethical and responsible behaviour we expect from our suppliers whether they are delivering, products services or customers.
While it is unclear if Habitat’s error was by one of their employees or a third party, more often, unethical marketing tactics are deployed by third party lead generators. Commonly referred to as affiliates, they are paid commission for generating customers. Not all affiliates practice unethical tactics, but a significant proportion of all online spam from emails to, now Twitter are usually conducted by third party affiliates. Where the vendor can deny knowledge of any malpractice.
In the offline world, many companies have been accused over the years of dodging responsibility through the use of offshore subcontractors with dubious labour practices. In 2007 the ethical credentials of the fashion giant Gap was brought into question, when an investigation by The Observer uncovered the use of child labour in an Indian sweatshop. Gap claimed that the Indian subcontractor had managed to escape their rigorous factory monitoring program designed to keep tabs on their supply chain.
Shouldn’t the same sense of responsibility apply to a company’s online supply chain?
Using your behaviour and social connections to identify you
Coca Cola’s recent social media campaign Green Eyed World is rightfully attracting a lot of attention from the marketing community. The campaign uses the Facebook Connect facility to port user data to YouTube. Fans can interact with the show singer star Katie Vogel as well as with each other leaving comments and votes using their real identity.
Porting the social functionality of FB provides a powerful connectivity layer which YouTube has so far lacked. The Fan base can be grown through the personal newsfeed, while privacy can be controlled and propagates through to YouTube or any other platform.
The thing I find really interesting is the idea of using your social connections and behaviour to validate who you really are.
Google recently introduced a feature which enables users who are logged into a Google account to leave comments. This looks very much like a move towards at least the possibility of social search. By analysing the search and browsing behaviour as well as your email/talk network, it shouldn’t be too difficult to identify a real user from a auto-generated fake account.
The SEO community have argued that social search (i.e. taking social signals to influence organic search results) is unlikely to happen until you can trust those signals.
I’m looking forward to seeing how Coke’s Green Eyed World benefits from the authenticity provided by FB connect.
If you want to understand a bit more about traditional login based identity compared to what it may look like in a network, I’d recommend reading Adriana’s post ‘Bringing identity home a VRM view.
Google related searches influenced by auto queries?
Outdated knowledge or automated queries set-up back in the day
Google brand update - better trust or just semantics and user data?
There’s been a lot of talk about Google favouring brands in search results. For me this is not new, they’ve always tried to do this. They just got better at aligning search results with public opinion as oppose to SEO’d opinion. General search results have always been about ‘trying‘ to rank the brands for commercial queries. This makes sense as Brands are defined by public perception – we expect to see them.
The issue for Google has been the way it tried to identify those brands. Essentially the Google algorithm relied almost entirely on the published web to define relevance and credibility/reputation. This was easy to manipulate and doesn’t always represent relevance defined by the searcher. My favourite search query for ‘table’ is a good example of this misalignment.
With this new update still to roll out for Google UK, I’m seeing more brands ranking for terms they are not specifically optimised for.
Now for the pseudo science bit -
Searching for ‘flights’ British Airways are now in the top 10 from a previous position outside the top 30.
Searching on a pure anchor text search using ‘allinanchor:flights’ they are still outside the top 30. But on a synonymous search using ‘~flights’ they are in the top 10.
So BA has been identified as
The tilde (~) query returns results based on not just the pages matching the exact query words but those that are synonyms of the query words using something similar to Latent Semantic Analysis. I say something similar because we are seeing something more than just statistical analysis of on-page content. If this was the case, we’d be seeing BMW ranking for ‘car’ (we still may).
Looks to me like user data is being incorporated to identify those instances where the synonym matches searcher expectation.
Note ‘BA flights’ in the related queries section at the bottom of the result page for ‘flights’.
So we may be seeing brands that haven’t bothered to optimise for searches gaining a few positions for core terms. Though this is all a bit hit and miss and is no substitute for proper keyword analysis and content optimisation. At least not yet.
KLM doesn’t like Google Chrome - big mistake
Google layoffs - oh the irony
Previous query refinement rolled out in the US
Google personalised search was ramped up over a year ago and for anyone logged into Google, personalisation based on web and search history is the norm. If you want to opt out of personalisation you can either log out or turn off your history (This is turned on by default when you sign up for an account).
A more recent development has been query refinement based on your immediate search history. This has been rolled out on paid search where some of the ads reflect you previous query. A few months ago Google announced a similar approach to their organic search results, and we’re starting to see it over in the US. Note the ‘wording on the right’
I’ve yet to see this in the UK but based on the reports from my iCrossing colleagues in the US, this looks more like a rollout than a test. There’s no mechanism for turning it off either other than may be to turn off cookies (seems unlikely that Google is using IP to track users).
From a search marketing perspective, these developments pose a number of challenges not least to traditional metrics like search engine positions. There’s no point in looking at search engine positions when what you see could bear little correlations to what your customers see.
Understanding user behaviour for various task based search sessions will be fundamental to delivering the right traffic. Those sites that are narrow focussed will find it harder to appear in personalised or refined results. I.e. the travel site with just the search form a thin destination guide and a bunch of dodgy links is unlikely to create enough engagement to appear in personalisation.
The sites that are informative, covering the full spectrum of touch points will engage searches early in their session and is more likely to rank higher when they are ready to buy.
New Google killer Cuil goes public – Why?
Monday is never a good day to be looking into new search engine algorithms, but Cuil seems to be getting a bit of attention. I’ve seen the video interview and demo and have had a chance to have a short play with it during lunch.
First thing to say about it, I hope the reason it keeps breaking down on me is due to the huge volumes of traffic interest it is already generating.
Next – I’m not a fan of the look and feel and general interface – It feels like a destination than a search tool, but that may just be me.
First thing I notice, is the claim of a 120+ billion pages index – wonder how many of them are spam
Next I’m reading the About Us page try to ignore the rock circle to the left and this line grabs me
‘Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance.’
Ok, so Google beat Altavista by using popularity to judge credibility, but these guys have found away to judge the quality of content based on the content…interesting.
Then I read this line -
‘We believe that analyzing the Web rather than our users is a more useful approach, so we don’t collect data about you and your habits, lest we are tempted to peek.’
How could Google have gotten it so utterly wrong?
Time to search – first my favourite search, especially useful for the claim the web can define relevance better than users. Search for ‘table’ and sure enough, lots of tables from HTML, to table tennis and the periodic table. Must admit there’s more of choice of table than with Google, but like Google a distinct lack of plain old furniture. But in the Explore by category box, they do have what most people were looking for.
So categorisation of content is a big part of Cuil and I kind of like it.
Actually I lie – my first search was for me ‘Nilhan’ where I’m number one in Google and at least 6 of the top 10 refer to me. Cuil is not a fan ;) In the top 20 the closest I get is an SEOMoz profile – hmmm not using links for authority??
Next i’m thinking of stop words – Google likes to ignore stop words (it, the, from, to etc..) – Search for ‘flights from paris’ using Cuil, and you get pages containing the exact phrase and ‘from’ is included not ignored. Same search in Google, will return anything with ‘flights’ and ‘paris’ – ‘from’ is ignored or treated as a wild card. So again Cuil does well here
Next that other puzzle search engines have had to solve – when are two words a phrase and not just two words? So I search for ‘holidays to new york’ and Google brings back the usual suspects. Same search in Cuil and the first site talk about New Zealand, the next about apartments in Argelès-sur-Mer – Malaga, Disneyland Paris and self catering in France and there’s just one site referring to the big apple.
Then I search for ‘holidays in york’ and as expected, lots of listings about New York – Wrong!
Not having any geo-targeting capabilities makes it a real pain to use. Most of my results tended to be from the US (hmmm not using links at all?).
Must get back to some real work. First impressions, not a Google killer and not entirely sure what the fuss is. Some of the features like categorisation is cool, but doesn’t feel new. May be I’m really missing something here
Rio Lagoon
Awesome view of the lagoon from the Corcovado- the famoust statue of Christ which overlooks the entier city
Is the future of search Digg like feedback?
There have been a few different Google trials on user feedback - including up and down buttons on the toolbar, but this latest looks the more similar to Digg than previous attempts.
You can vote up listings you like and leave comments, and vote up or down other peoples comments. All your edits can be tied to an account profile, which provides some level of protection against the Bot-people.
I think the biggest flaw in this type of system is the need for the user to stop what they are doing and then do something else. So most people will not be providing feedback. Google really need to collect that data as people are going about their business, and with personalisation that is happening.
Having said that, like Digg, there will be certain community experts who will take it upon themselves to police their areas of expertise, and you don’t need many of these to provide another valuable signal.