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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.

Brands have now established themselves in the space, especially comparison brands like Expedia and Lastminute.com – partly helped by search engines also having evolved to favour big brands. The inevitability of both link based and user driven algorithms leading to the rich get richer.

I think there’s something else equally as significant at play – Travel choice is something that is hugely influenced by the conversations in the network (TripAdvisor anyone?) – So, we may be seeing the influence of social media on the research and discovery phase in travel, which would naturally increase the navigational use of search.

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.

I’ve been convinced for some time that all financial services will be transformed to some degree by the network.

I’m not convinced by Jeff’s argument that insurance is somehow immune to the network because of the inherent fraud and mistrust in this industry. Yes it exists when both sides stand to gain so much, but in a co-operative system only one side can gain. And that person is up against a network of highly connected individuals who collectively has something to lose. Getting caught cheating the community is a much worse than losing to a corporation.

Regulations governing financial products are considered another nail in the coffin to a co-operative utopia. But, much of the regulations governing Financial Services have evolved to protect both customer and profits. How will things change in a non profit scenario where regulation are there to protect the one entity?

Even if the insurance industry will not benefit from the network inputs driving MyStarbucks, I can see Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) principals embedding into the insurance industry very easily. OK it’s not going to be ani-insurance or necessarily replace insurance companies as we know em. But enabling the customer to control their data and allowing multiple quotes from a single data feed has obvious advantages. Insurance aggregators currently fill this space, but they take their cut which doesn’t particularly help providers compete on price – one of the biggest drivers in motor insurance.

A big shout out to all the talented folk at DailyBlogTips for creating this theme. Really love it – easy to use and lots of useful features – and SEO ready

I also wanted integrate Twitter so my tweets were published here and my blog posts are alerted over there. Twitter is deffintely more conversation, something I find difficult to do with the blog, so this seemed perfect. I’m using Alex King’s Twitter Tools for this – there’s the added bonus of a Twitter digest published on my blog for those really lazy blogging days.

It feels more like new house more than just a paint job.

Let’s play!

Now five days later it has just under 30,000 views. We can assume that the first jump was mainly just from the TV show. Old school push media to kick-start the viral effect. Usually the impact of TV on online after a few hours is very limited. So the biggest growth must have come from the WOM effect – people recommending the video either in conversation in the pub or online through, IM, email and social networks

None of this is going to surprise any marketers connecting their online and offline strategies – for those that haven’t I think this provides a fairly compelling argument. While TV viewers may have a short attention span, if you use TV to drive an online exploration you can get more bang for your buck.

As the TV program ended there were 1800 views. Today there’s over 8000. Was expecting more from TV, but not bad

On Friday, Google announced the launch of their Social graph API , which promises to take us another step closer to portability. They plan to crawl our connections across social networks where profiles are public. This data can then be ported by social application developers to provide users with the choice of picking their friends from a list presented to them, instead of having to build their network from scratch every time.

But the closer we step towards fully automated approaches to portability the more the ownership of this data becomes an issue. But that’s a discussion for another time. When I get my head around Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) and finally write about it.

But for now, I like where Google’s heading with this API

I’m not expecting a prosecution. But, it does beg the question, could you be judged by your link network. Can the Law and potential employers use this data to discriminate against you? Let’s hope not. After all there’s only sex degrees of separation amongst all of us.