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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?

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.

Add to this the diminishing numbers of eyeballs for television compared to that of online, and you may be thinking I’m about to point out the bleeding obvious.

But, I’m not really interested in the move from TV to online. Well I am, but, this conversation is already maturing and the data is all there for everyone to see.

I’m more interested in how TV could be used to seed an online experience- a push pull approach that’s more effective and makes much more economic sense.

Returning back to my short pseudo scientific study of the Kevin Bacon YouTube phenomenon [YouTube has since removed that video], where Graham Norton’s TV program increased the number of views for that particular Kevin Bacon video by 600+ overnight – and then WOM increased it by another 30,00 views over the following week – it was clear that the diffusion of the information through online and offline WOM plaid the bigger role in spreading the video. But, TV definitely plaid its part in getting the ball rolling.

More importantly this was not an expensive TV ad, but a mention on a TV program which was targeted at an audience that was more likely to find it funny and have friends who also shared their sense of humour.

If we translate this to TV advertising – let’s not spend all the marketing budget on the TV ad experience, which most people are not going to see it and out of those that do, few will act on it. Instead use TV as a cheap trigger to a more satisfying online experience. Kind of make TV not the main course which is a very expensive main course, but a targeted entrée – that’s cheaper to produce and aired on a cheaper slot which is more focussed to an audience that’s more likely to watch it and spread the message.

Spend the lion’s share of the budget on hte product and creating a useful engaging online experience which is more likely to spread and gain attention for a longer period.

With Google universal on natural listings, recent tests on video adwords, and hte introduction of display into image search the days of the text link may really be numbered

At first glance seems like another useful addition by Google. Except on closer inspection this is not a search box for products or holidays in this case provided by Virgin, but a search box for other pages on the site. Same as the one in the Google toolbar – quite handy if the search functionality of the website is a bit crap. But for specialist vertical searches like travel where Google has managed to fail so far, I’m not sure.

When it’s bought out into the results like this, I start to question the motive. On the one hand it’s great that a user can search deeper into the site, but the problem I have is the way these new results are displayed, back into a normal results page, but this time you have to compete against all the paid search ads.

To demonstrate –
If you wanted to find a holiday in Antigua from Virgin, you’d ordinarily search for Virgin Holidays, and then go to the site and search for Antigua using their holiday search functionality. The chances are you’d find one.

But now, instead of going to the site, you could be persuaded to search for Antigua using the additional search box provided by Google. And this is what you’d get

So now virgin has to compete with all the paid search ads from competitors and if they’re lucky the user may click on their own PPC ad. You may be able protect your trademark for a brand search, but not for the generic term.

Let’s hope this never comes out properly without the option to turn it off from your Google webmaster tools console.

This should be a regular monthly, so look out for the dates on the project wiki. see you next time…

Marissa Mayer explained this was in response to the impact of blended results. When video, news and images are included in regular results, the eye scans to the images first and ignores the ads.

“With universal search, something is getting shaken up a bit on the bottom part of the page,” she said. “The ads on the top part of the page should match.”

The screenshot of an Enquiro eye-tracking study shows clearly the traditional golden triangle being displaced by a very different scan when an image is introduced to the results page. The eye scans first to the image, and then to the text alongside the image before continuing at the top left hand corner of the page.

Using the same argument we could question what happens when a multimedia ad is included in a results page where there are no universal results – will advertisers have an advantage over natural results? Also does this mean all advertisers use MM in order to compete for attention? Guess we’ll need to see how this evolves.

One of the most advance technologies deployed with Google universal search was the ability to compare relevance of ordinary text documents with video, images and news. This ability to compare apples with pairs and position them on the same page based on user needs – promoted an important question ‘Will Google blend advertising with regular listing?” Marissa Mayer’s answer then was characteristically vague –

“I do think that this opens the door for the introduction of richer mediums into the result page,” she said, adding, that search results in any form should encompass the best answer no matter the medium. “For us, ads are answers as well…. And so I was hoping that we could bring some of these same advances in terms of the richness of media to ads.”

Well now they have.

Search as direct response to brand
Traditionally, search has been used strictly for direct marketing – selling boxes. The branding benefits have been an added value thrown in but rarely paid for.

With MM ad formats on search results, Google may protest about being seen as a media company, but, the migration of traditional display dollars to search is inevitable. The introduction of multimedia ads will be a real threat to the current dominance of search by DM. At the very least the lines will blur between brand and DM or we’ll see a more severe displacement of DM as a result of higher click costs driven by the budgets available for brand.

With the slowing economy and advertisers increasingly moving to online channels, Google for the first time in the last two years saw a decline in share of online ad-spend. John Battelle argued this was due to brand advertisers preferring to spend their money on display ads distributed on content sites, as oppose to search properties. So it’s not entirely surprising that Google would try to make their search space more attractive to brand advertisers.

When Google Universal launched everyone knew this was a big deal, but we’re only just starting to see it playing out. For advertisers there’s a real opportunity to combine targeting synonymous with the pull marketing power of search with the capabilities of multimedia display advertising.

I’d be extremely surprised if Yahoo! turns this down, though in some ways I hope they do.

For many people in the advertising and marketing space, the partnership could provide a plausible contender for Google. And at least on paper the numbers add up. But if all we can expect is increased market share based purely on combining their current capital then I’m worried.

Capitalising trough integration is a big job, and I really hope at least Yahoo’s resent plans get some airtime. I had little faith in Microsoft’s search engine or their advertising product, and apart from the maps and video, I wasn’t sure if they really should have bothered entering this space in the first place.

Yahoo! is a different story, no one could deny their heritage and while they may have been spanked by Google, they have a strong userbase and social assets including flikr and delicious. It was a matter of bringing all this together – and over the last few months I believe they’ve making all the right noises for a comeback. I really hope we still get to see some of their ideas come to fruition.

Anything that reduces choice for the end user is got to be a bad thing unless we get some real innovation. I’m not holding my breath for that.

Next generation shopping trolley to trial. I don’t know why this is making me feel uneasy. I mean all the technology has been available for many years and it all seems obvious – meant to happen – what took them so long?

An online shopping list accessible from the trolley. Nutritional information and possibly the eco credentials of my sausages. And of course, offers based on my shopping history…and my movements in the store – yes they can track you down the aisle using an RFID tag.

So, two people walking down the same aisles could be shown different offers, more expensive brands for the bigger spender and the unsecured personal loan deals for those on the shopbrand money savers.

I think the benefits will outweigh the potentially endlessly cynical ways marketers could use this technology – and most shoppers will be pushing around one of these before too long