Diesel Cam – the first “mirror on the wall’ that works with Social Networks
Posted by Reggie James | Filed under Social Media
As the cultural shift toward sharing gathers pace, Brands have to put their social strategy at the centre of their marketing plan. Watch the video here:
http://bit.ly/c5XXnl
Tags: Diesel Cam, Reggie James, Social Media
Measuring Social Media
Posted by Reggie James | Filed under Social Media
Please feel free to read my post on Measuring Social Media on the Digital Clarity Blog
See it here: http://www.digital-clarity.com/blog/social-media/measuring-social-media
Tags: Digital Clarity, Measuring Social Media, Reggie James
Great New Google Tool – Search Stories
Posted by Reggie James | Filed under Google
Great new tool from google allows users to create 20 second video using search results.
Tags: lordreginald99, Reggie James, UGC, Video, YouTube
How Seth Stevenson used Google to run an ad on national TV for a $100
Posted by Reggie James | Filed under Advertising Agencies, Google, Television Advertising
TV has changed for sure. Adding the powerhouse Google into the mix can only shake things up.
This is an original Re Tweet from the excellent BBH LABS (http://bbh-labs.com/) which itself cam from SlateV http://bit.ly/ayNber.
Tags: BBH Labs, Google, Reggie James, SlateV, TV Ad
Bing & Decide: Microsoft's new Ad for search engine
Posted by Reggie James | Filed under Bing, Television Advertising
Microsoft went live with it’s new push of its Bing Search Engine. The first spot running in the half-time Manchester United versus AC Milan match.
The tag-line, ‘Bing and Decide’, is looking to differentiate the search engine as a ‘decision engine’ that makes sense of today’s information overload.
This is part of a multi-million pound campaign that will also see the company sponsoring the Simpson’s in future episodes.
Tags: Bing, Bing and decide, Microsoft, Reggie James, Search Engine
Implications of Google's use of RDFa could have on SEO practices
Posted by Reggie James | Filed under Google, SEO, Search Advertising
RDFa Could Play an Increasingly Big Role in Search
A big thanks to Chris Crum of the excellent Web Pro News who has highlighted Google’s view on a debate that has been raging on a few forums recently. Mainly that you should only use an image that you’ve the license rights to.
The full article can be found here on Web Pro News http://bit.ly/7UmMSs
Peter Linsley from Google describes how to let Google know which licenses your images are released under using RDFa.
Tags: Chris Crum, Microformat Tagging, RDFa, Reggie James, Resource Description Framework in attributes, Rich Snippets, Search Engine Optimisation, SEO, W3C, Web Pro News, XHTML
Social Media for Business: Dell shows the way
Posted by Reggie James | Filed under Social Media, twitter
Dell Laptops commercial use of Twitter and how to make money out of Social Media.
One of the most frequently asked questions when companies are looking at the commercial use of Social Media is, “How can my company use Social Media to win new business”? Fear not my hunters of this elusive Holy Grail; the answer is to be found at the offices of the computer behemoth, Dell. After pioneering the use of the internet first time round and using paid search advertising to its full potential, the company has done it again by using Twitter to sell its equipment round the world.
Dell has announced that it has more than doubled the amount of money it is making via its Twitter accounts around the world to $6.5m. Of that $2m was made directly and another $1m was accounted for when traffic to Dell.com was factored in.
The $3m included both 2007 and 2008 when there was minimal Twitter activity, but the 2009 figure shows real growth that has come during the year the number of people using Twitter within the Dell organisation has increased to somewhere between 100-200.
Some of the strongest growth Dell is seeing is coming from emerging markets. It highlighted Brazil as one area it was doing particularly well.
Dell’s operation in Brazil via its @DellnoBrasil Twitter account has generated $800,000 in eight months of activity.
Richard Binhammer a spokesman for Dell, said the growth in Brazil showed the social web was not just a European or US phenomenon, but a global one.
“That’s interesting not only from an emerging market perspective, but from a social web perspective as well as it shows the spread of services like Twitter.”
Another market Dell highlighted was its @Delloutlet operation in Canada.
“DellHomeSalesCA went onto Twitter because a number of Canadian Twitter users and bloggers were asking us why isn’t Dell on Twitter in Canada. Now it is,” Binhammer said.
Since it began operating on Twitter @DellHomeSalesCA has generated $150,000 in sales. As has happened in other markets where the social web is used, the market itself has helped inform a business what its customers want as much as what they don’t want.
In addition to generating $6.5m in sales revenues via Twitter, social networking in a wider sense has allowed Dell to make what it says are 3.5 million social connections from sites such as Facebook, Google’s Okut, Slideshare, Flickr, YouTube as well as Twitter, Dell’s own Direct2Dell online community forum and its crowdsourcing project IdeaStorm, which has 60,000 members.
“These are people who are fans or followers of Dell on social networks. There are more besides this as we are not counting the many bloggers we listen to and engage with,” Binahmmer said.
The crowdsourcing of IdeaStorm is proving to be a valuable part of Dell’s social media operation. Thousands of ideas come to Dell via this site from users suggesting changes and modifications. Hundreds of these have been acted upon.
Binhammer cited Dell’s launch of a product for aids charity (Red) that came from user suggestions; expansion of its Linux product offering for consumer PC and laptops; and a change to keyboard design for its Dell Mini netbook range as another.
“Users had a problem with where the apostrophe key was located on the Dell Mini’s keyboard. They were finding it hard to use because of the reduced size and so we changed it. That was a crowdsourced idea.
In a post on the Dell blog, Lionel Menchaca, chief blogger at Dell, said that looking to the future Dell would be taking steps to tackle what he described as “the big issues on the horizon like profile collaboration”.
He said for Dell (or any company), isolated social media efforts would not lead to long-term success and said the PC maker would be focusing on three key areas:
1. Streamlining its presence in social media networks and creating meaningful content for customers and continue to increase its connections in those places.
2. Focus on building a tighter integration between Dell.com, Support.Dell.com, its Dell Community sites with its presence in social networks.
3. Continue its focus on scaling support of social media initiatives into the Dell business units.
This article was first published by Brand Republic in December 2009 and certain extracts have been taken from this original article
Reggie James
Tags: commercial use of Social Media, commercial use of Twitter, crowdsourcing, Dell Laptops, Direct2Dell, Facebook, Google's Okut, IdeaStorm, Reggie James, Slideshare, Social Media for Business, YouTube
Beautiful new Google Nexus One Phone
Posted by Reggie James | Filed under Google, Nexus One
After much huffing and puffing the beautiful looking Google phone, Nexus One is finally out. Not only out but available to buy at Google http://bit.ly/5JTF96
Named after the replicants in the film Blade Runner, Nexus One runs the Google Android Software. See more at the Google, Nexus One website http://bit.ly/8
Fb3Bh
Tags: Android, Google Nexus One, Nexus One, Reggie James
David Shrigley, The Show at the ICA
Posted by Reggie James | Filed under Art, Contemporary Art, David Shrigley, Uncategorized
Profile of the illustrator David Shrigley taken from ICA: The Show.
David sees the absurd in the everyday, capturing and rendering it in a variety of different media. His work is provocative, quirky and at times disturbing. More importantly I find his work darkly humorous. A wonderful anecdote to the X factor generation.
Reggie James
Tags: Artist David Shrigley, David Shrigley, Glasgow School of Art, Reggie James, Ronnie James, The ICA
Microsoft and Yahoo! Finalise Search Deal
Posted by Reggie James | Filed under Uncategorized
Microsoft and Yahoo! have finalised the terms of its search and advertising agreement, four months after the deal was announced.
Tags: BingHoo, Microsoft, PPC, Reggie James, Search Advertising, SEO, Yahoo!
TweetDeck v0.32 – the best way to use Twitter
Posted by Reggie James | Filed under Social Media, twitter
New version of TweetDeck, rocks! Here is a video outlining the best bits of the upgrade.
Tags: Reggie James, Social Media, TweetDeck, TweetDeck v0.32, twitter
Google Caffeine Now Live On One Google Data Center
Posted by Reggie James | Filed under SEO
According to the excellent Web Pro News the IP 209.85.225.103 is hitting the data center that is running the Caffeine index at about 50% of the time.
Here is a video prior to this news (about a week ago) with Google’s Matt Cutts on Site Speed and the Caffeine Update
Tags: Caffeine, Caffiene, Google, Google Caffeine, Google Caffiene, IP 209.85.225.103, Matt Cutts, Reggie James, Search Engine Ranking, SEO, Web Pro News
Twitter Whore
Posted by Reggie James | Filed under Social Media, twitter
A rather annoying YouTube starlet going on about her obsession with Twitter. Sadly the underlying addiction to twitter is something we can all relate to – go gal!
Tags: Reggie James, twitter, Twitter Whore, You Tube
Twitter Search in Plain English
Posted by Reggie James | Filed under Social Media, twitter
A nice video tha that highlights twitter search. Thanks to Jon, Head of Digital at Space & Time Media – a true MediaStarz
Tags: MediaStarz, Reggie James, Tweet, twitter, Twitter Search
Google | New Website Optimiser features just launched
Posted by Reggie James | Filed under Uncategorized
The Google Website Optimiser team have been busy introducing an Experiment API which includes new reporting feature called over time charts.
Like otherGoogle APIs, the Experiment Management API allows for the creation and management of experiments outside of the Website Optimiser interface. Creating and launching a Website Optimiser experiment involves a series of steps. Depending on the design of your website, the content you want to test, and how technical you are, these steps can be easy and quick or potentially difficult.
Google Website Optimiser
Learn more at: Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Google AdWords, Google Website Optimiser, Over time charts, Reggie James
Main points from Google's latest Qtrly results
Posted by Reggie James | Filed under Uncategorized
- Total revenues grew 7% to $5.9bn, the fastest growth seen this year.
- Net income jumped 27% to $1.64bn.
- In search, the amount of paid clicks rose 14% year on year, with evidence of a recovery in search pricing, with cost per click up 5% from the second quarter, though it is still down 6% year on year.
- Money in bank $22bn.
Tags: Google results, Paid Search, PPC, Reggie James, revenues up
Posted by Reggie James | Filed under Uncategorized
Twitter Logo
An excellent peice from Chris Crum at Web Pro News
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/09/29/an-equation-for-getting-retweets-and-traffic
Tags: Chris Crum, Reggie James, twitter
Collaborative Messaging from Google – Wave – is this the future?
Posted by Reggie James | Filed under Uncategorized
Collaborative Messaging from Google – Wave – is this the future?
Interesting developments today regarding the new open platform – WAVE from Google. Early days but interesting.
Google WAVE
Tags: Google, Google Wave, Reggie James
BingHoo vs. Google: A battle of the Titans or 1st round KO?
Posted by Reggie James | Filed under Uncategorized
BingHoo vs. Google: A battle of the Titans or 1st round KO?
The news that Yahoo and Microsoft have finally tied the knot and will provide advertisers with a combined search offering has been a long time coming. The dominant partner in the relationship — Microsoft, has been trying to drag Yahoo kicking and screaming down the aisle for the best part of a year and the on going saga has claimed many an exec along the way; not least founder and former CEO, Jerry Yang.
In essence, the fait accompli was almost inevitable given Google’s dominance in the search space. Alongside the worsening search ad revenues of the respective number two and three in the market, the Seattle giant really had to push this deal to appease shareholders. With both companies announcing poor recent results, the deal will also help boost morale and confidence at Microsoft, whose staff are probably sick and tired of playing 2nd (and 3rd) fiddle to the incumbent leader.
So why is Google so dominant and what’s it going to take the new ‘BingHoo’ to grab a slice of the Google pie? To answer this, lets take a quick look back to remember how we got here and how two major areas lie at the heart of this question –technology and reach.
Technology
Yahoo today is the combination of a variety of acquisitions, namely GoTo — the original pay-per-click auction-based engine that started the whole journey. This engine changed its name to Overture and then acquired AltaVista — the first text -based search engine — this was then all bolted together and has evolved to the Yahoo Search Marketing (YSM) platform we have today. Google’s AdWords AJAX based software technology sitting on the open source Linux platform allowed the Mountain View Company to create a lighter front end and kept the process simple. It shared its vision with the development community and created an API allowing for large scale ad uploads and changes. Google also built its platform from scratch.
Yahoo, in essence didn’t. Along the way, YSM has desperately tried to update, change and integrate all the various technical platforms it had acquired and then had to overhaul all over again (via the Panama platform) when Google’s AdWords engine introduced a more intuitive and blind bidding based platform.
Reach
Augmented to this challenge of technology delivery for the Yahoo/Bing partnership is one of reach. The key question for advertisers is how can they justify running on any advertising platform which is clearly costing them more to facilitate than the return achievable as well as the volumes available.
Bing is making good headway and is very slowly chipping away at the vast Google search monopoly. Over the course of June and July, the site has jumped up 1 per cent to 8.9 per cent market share. Sadly, Bing’s 8.9 per cent market share still has a long way to go if it will dent Google’s dominant 64.7 per cent, but the seed has been sown and the fruits of this hard toil should start to show nearer the early part of next year when the combined force of the companies goes live.
Is this a good time for the combined Bing and Yahoo to make a wholesale dent in the Google traffic armoury? It would seem so. Google is currently looking to move a little further from search and into the more traditional areas of Microsoft’s domain — operating system software, programmes and ad serving as well as Yahoo’s old area of expertise: display advertising.
The reach question goes hand in hand with the technology question though in this case, not technology for the advertiser but technology for the end user of their platform — the consumer and business buyer — the basis on which the whole growth platform was built.
So what does the future hold?
Well, if the recent uptake of Bing and the ongoing rebrand of Yahoo, with its user-generated facility is anything to go by, the folks at Mountain View may want to re-examine where their focus lies. Mass investment in Android, Chrome OS, Maps/Street View etc., may be reviewed if the momentum in the tie-up gathers pace. Augmented to all the hoo-ha is the recent news that after three years, a $1billion investment made by Google for 5 per cent of AOL was finally bought back by AOL’s parent, Time Warner for a mere $283 million.
There is no doubt that if you use paid search as a part of your online marketing strategy, Google has been front and centre and an obvious choice for the past few years. On the other hand, Microsoft’s search engine has all-too-often been viewed by marketers as a peripheral option and a non-essential media buy with not enough traffic to justify the time you would have to spend implementing and managing it. Because of this, it was common to simply be left off of the schedule entirely.
Since the new deal could deliver Bing as much as 28 per cent of the U.S. search market share (according to comScore in June 2009), or around 4.1 billion monthly searches, from the perspective as a marketer, the question is this: is Bing now a must-have on the PPC media schedule?
Although the partnership will leave Bing far behind Google in terms of market share, Microsoft has eliminated a competitor and now has a fairly compelling argument to take to advertisers.
Assuming that Google does have to share the paid search media schedule with Bing, this perhaps leads to a more concerning question for the search giant; where is the budget going to come from?
Tags: BingHoo, Digital Clarity, Google, Interent, Reggie James
Digital Clarity launches New York office with leading Google executive at helm
Posted by Reggie James | Filed under Reggie James Digital Clarity
For Immediate Release
London 13th July 2009
Digital Clarity, a leading Search and Digital Marketing agency announced today that Darren Hughes, a veteran in the Search Advertising space, will be heading their US operations with the launch of an office in New York.
Darren Hughes, who was formerly 3 years with the original Google team in its UK launch back in 2003 under the steer ship of Kate Burns said, “I have seen the growth of an integrated approach to online advertising over the years and felt that Digital Clarity were at the forefront of this approach both in their deep understating as well as delivery”. He added, “Having been in New York, working on various digital projects, it made sense for me to augment my skill base with the team at Digital Clarity and take their successful methodology to the US, with New York being a natural choice”.
The New York launch office will be based at 100 Park Avenue, Manhattan and start trading with immediate effect. It was rumored earlier in the year that Digital Clarity would launch the office after a similar and successful launch with a Digital Clarity office in Sydney, Australia last year.
Digital Clarity CEO, Reggie James added, “I have known Darren since the inception of Search Advertising back at AltaVista almost 9 years ago. The need for skilled and seasoned professionals in this ever complex arena is now crucial to any digital campaign success. Using search user and analytics data to reverse engineer client campaigns is crucial to creating up-lift in online advertising as well as fully understating a customer journey to completion”.
Digital Clarity has already generated interest in New York with new wins that will be announced shortly.
About Digital Clarity
Digital Clarity is a leading Search and Digital Marketing agency that has been at the forefront of online advertising for the last six years. With offices, in London & Guildford, Surrey in the UK as well as Sydney, Australia – Digital Clarity look after major brands and niche advertisers across Europe and the Asia Pacific sector.
For further information please contact: Reggie James on Tel: +44 (0)845 388 4072
Tags: Darren Hughes, Digital Advertising, Digital Clarity, Digital Clarity London, London, New York, Reggie James, Search Engine Marketing, SEO
