48ers

This is quite a nice real time search engine that trawls all the major social networks. Really useful if you want to see what conversations are taking place for a certain product or brand or if you want to respond to people and join in the conversation.

http://www.48ers.com/

Using, managing and leveraging digital stuff

I was asked to have a think about what  we had done over the past twelve months or so  that either used digital technologies, leveraged or managed the social impact created by them and came up with the following...

Our Consumer Co-Creation Approach led to the DMA Grand Prix winning work Mystery Packages for RNLI this year. We use Intuitive Intervention Maps to help understand consumer touchpoints across physical and digital landscapes. We have created an award winning smart knowledge base to help customers self serve online to cut costs by reducing customer support calls. We have created permanent digital platforms that (a) develop customer value over time, and (b) build influential relationships with online influencer communities. This year we have also used real-time digital printing to create personalised physical components of integrated digital campaigns, location based messaging in display advertising, personalised URL and content to create compelling experiences, and 3d video online to dramatise product benefits. Our configuable dashboards mean we have replaced costly manual performance measurement reports with realtime measurement tools that combine web analytics, traditional data sources and social media into simple online interfaces.

Wave goodbye to Wave!!

I remember sitting at my desk one sunny Friday afternoon, having just received my Google Wave invite, and excitedly chatting to Albert, sharing videos and images and pretending to be writing one thing (mostly vulgarities) and then changing my mind and writing something else - the character by character live typing was pretty cool!

It was brilliant for about half an hour (the beer at lunch may have helped as well).

But despite the numerous features it got really boring really quickly and I haven't used it since (although I've thought about it on at least 2 occasions since that day)!! Maybe it was just ahead of its time... or maybe it was just bloody confusing... but in any case, it is now dead.

Bye bye Wave.

Search and social are lovers not competitors

There's been a lot of big words and circular rhetoric put out about whether ‘search will be replaced by social media’ lately.  This one smacks of ‘too much free time’ if you ask me:  It’s a bit like wondering whether social events will replace research.

If I need to decide whether argon filled double glazing is the right answer for a loft conversion I will do research and take expert advice (content I can trust). 

When I need to find a builder that won't rip me off to fit that double glazing, I switch to friend’s recommendations (people I can trust). 

From my perspective these are both tricky problems to solve that demand different approaches, the first is more of a research project, the second more of a social one.

A Nielson report from October 2009) seems to have helped fuel the debate around whether search will replace social by asserting that "roughly 18% of users see social media as a core navigation and information discovery tool".  But if you look more closely at their research this 18% breaks down as 9% Wikipedia, 5% Blogs and 4% Facebook/Myspace/Twitter etc.  So 14 of those 18 percentage points are actually content sources (Wiki and Blog) that work closely with search and meet a ‘research role’, whereas only 4 of those points relate to inherently ‘social’ media that fills more of the ‘social role’.

So the search/social debate isn’t quite what it seems at face value. 

Where search and social meet is a fascinating place.  By reducing it to a fatuous ‘replacement’ discussion diminishes it, and ignores the opportunities it presents for consumers and brands, especially if you start to think of search and social as “search friendly content informed by data from social media”.   

Now that really starts to fry my hamburger. 

We are drowning in content these days.  Anything that helps seperate the wheat from the chaffe is a boon.  I’ve always found websites that rely on recommendations for big ticket items (like a holiday or a new TV) are not useful when it comes to ‘making a buy’ because I don’t have confidence that recommendations come from ‘people like me’.  Comments are more useful, but inconvenient and time consuming.   Rave seeking hedonists and I (family man) differ when it comes to what would make an ideal place to stay in Ibiza.  A website like Tripadvisor would be transformed if I was confident the recommendations it showed me took me into careful, intelligent consideration.  That personalised experience would be incredibly valuable to me, and delivering on this boils down to using great data well.

Making search and social bed partners by better qualifying and presenting content using the rich data available from digital social interaction is an incredibly exciting area for innovation that offers the potential of real benefit to consumers and brands.

When this has been cracked in a way that safeguards privacy, it will leave us looking back at our current Web 2.0 world with dull contempt, when we compare it to the utility and convenience the successful union of search and social can offer us.

NMA Opinion Piece, Sep 2010