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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?

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.

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.

‘Life as media’ is truly inspired coinage.

But during this year, one thing that seemed to have stayed stagnant is search. At a time when people power dominated and shaped everything from how we communicate to make purchase decisions, to most people search engines seem to be lagging behind – leading some ‘experts’ to declare the death of Google.

So did Google stand still? Well I’m confident they didn’t. But before we can look at where Google is at and where they’ll likely end up – it’s worth looking at some Google history and some of the barriers to social search.

Most people think that Google’s primary contribution to search was the use of linkage data to judge reputation. But a bigger contribution, the one I believe is the reason that I’ll still be Googling to my grave is the technology and methods they developed to scale and efficiently deliver information to where ever you are. Add to this a ranking method which can be swapped in and out like a removable hard disk – and you have the infrastructure for longevity. Oh and let’s not forget Spam – not something to be taken lightly.

What’s up with the algorithm
Link reputation has served us well, but letting the published community define reputation and relevance over the people that consume that content has limited appeal. More about that here – From link spam o user data

As reputation dominates other factors in the ranking game – Is Google constantly pointing us into the ‘head’ of content on a given topic. As Chris Anderson pointed out in his groundbreaking book The Long Tail, what’s the point in having a tail if you can’t get to it?

User driven recommendation engines like Amazon and Last FM do this very well but can Google really reach those parts – or maybe that’s not what we want out of our reputation system? A navigation aid and nothing more.

Developments this year
People write search algorithms not computers. So you could argue that Google like all search engines were already influenced by people. It’s just that those people worked with the data available to them.

Personalisation ramped up
Using search history and other signals from user data such as bookmarks and content saved in your Google home page is a move towards employing more user data to judge relevance and more importantly query context or intention. But the use of data is confined to the individual.

Blended results – Google universal
On the face of it blended results seem more an aid to navigation than anything else. I.e. save people having to explore vertical indices to find what they’re looking for by attempting to understand and deliver vertical results into regular Google. Danny Sullivan introduced this concept more than five years ago and called it invisible tabs.
But the really interesting development her e was the ability to use popularity data in verticals in order to be able to identify when a vertical result is relevant for the masses. Google can identify if a news story is relevant for regular result in less than an hour of publication.

So we’re starting to see the use of user data in quite a big way already within Google.
Search 3.0 – blended and vertical http://searchengineland.com/071127-091128.php

Google Knol

http://searchengineland.com/071213-213400.php

Of course, Manber did say that Google could better tell which of the Knol pages were of high quality by looking at signals such as ratings.

Going all the way
So what stops Google from using user data to refine search results in a more direct way – Spam (remember the Direct Hit Algorithm) trust in everyone’s opinion is just one of the issues.
However Google is already using popularity data to determine search quality. All clicks on a results page are tracked and high recall rate can be used for further tweaking.

Toolbar data and even ISP data could be used to determine the relevance of a site to a given query. But if Open standards like OpenSocial and OpenID are adopted on mass then many of the Spam and trust issues could be overcome through the use of personal reputation scores like personal Pagerank. APML will no doubt play role in enabling people, content and behaviour to be connected in one seamless network or as Tim Burners Lee refers to as The Graph.

One thing is for certain, we are unlikely to see a set of open standards designed by committee and adopted by everyone to take us to the next generation of the web (Semantic web). We are more likely to see adoption based on the need for attention and economic growth. Until one day we’ll find that we’ve arrived. Just like when O’Rilley coined the phrase web 2.0 – no one planned it or named it – things just emerged that way.

2008 will be one of the most interesting years, not just for search but for the internet. Technology was never the limitation – people will ultimately decide how, why and who they wish to connect and engage with – marketing can only follow.

guns don’t kill people, rappers do

The programme was making just $10M a year, compared what they could make, if they were to allow search engines to crawl this content, acquire links and generate a lot more traffic, which they could monetise through advertising.

For medial owners the future seems clear – let Google in and sell ad-space.

For anyone who missed the debate Dave Dugdale managed to video it:

Much of the anger on the part of the link buyers, sellers and brokers revolved not so much on the issue of Google’s stance on link buying, but on their right to dictate how a publisher essentially selling advertising space should code the link (with a rel=nofollow), so Google can recognize that the link was a paid vote. Google is not the Government, internet police, nor a moral guardian for the web so the argument went. Feelings were further compounded as Matt Cutts referred to an FTC finding which stated that even word of mouth marketing which does not state that it is paid for, illegal.
To me the title of the discussion ‘Are paid links evil?’ asked the wrong question. Paid link debate is about Google’s reliance on link data and more importantly the text contained within links when defining relevance, and their inability to distinguish between real votes and bought ones.
The stakes are too high not to exploit a marketing loophole if it is there. Asking marketers to unilaterally disarm because of some ethical principle or publishers to add a tag which would see their income drop while competitors profited is a bit naïve from Google, who is arguably the largest ad-broker in the world.
I’m a big fan of the ‘Kill the anchor’ club, and I strongly believe that reducing the weight of anchor text would also reduce the impact of bought links. Having looked at millions of links to large brand sites, I’ve rarely seen any natural anchors containing competitive search terms. There’re plenty of other better ways to determine relevance.
Having had the opportunity to continue the link discussion with Matt at the Google dance, I’m inclined to believe that changes are on its way, but may be not any time too soon.

BTW for anyone wondering how you should build links without paying. The guy who made the above manged to do it. Is that better or worse for the web than buying links?

As Google continues to rollout Google Universal, the search industry is starting to wake up to major shake up. The placement of content from other Google products within the main natural search results creates a host of issues – all of which is yet to unfold.
So, what are the main concerns

• For commercial queries, insertion of media and image listing will push your rankings further down the page. And if the searcher was really looking for ‘shoes’ and not the YouTube video, the top results are likely to get even more clicks.

• Google get’s to push more Google content.

• Increase adwords revenue

• For a brand – a brand search is going to expose a lot more about your brand than the affiliate listings. Having a search strategy which looks to owning your brand space across the Google network becomes even more important.

• Affiliates and anyone bottom feeding on brand traffic is going to find the going getting tougher.

So what about the end user? Depending on the type of query which triggers Google universal, you could have a great user experience or a very poor one. Many of the other engines do offer related content for specific queries, but these are generally kept out of the way. This is a very bold move by Google, and guess we’re all going to have to wait and see till it’s fully rolled out.