School 1, Blogging 0.

Not much blogging at the moment and it is likely to remain so for the next week. I am working intensively on my second term exams (micro-economy, marketing and corporate strategy) and the pressure is mounting between group assignments and individual exams. As you can imagine, studying on top of working is eating most (all) my free time and unfortunately, blogging has been the first casualty.

Top tip to improve your search engine ranking: sue Google.

Parental advice website Kinderstart is suing Google because its search engine ranking dropped.

Reuters article Via Seth Godin.

Media consumption: surfing web officially overtakes watching TV

Brits spend 164 minutes online each day, equal to more than 41 days per year, compared to 148 minutes or 37 days for TV viewers. Government statistics shows that 64% of adults regularly go online. See article on Google survey from BBC.

I am going to ask one of my all time favourite question again: why is online media not getting a fair share of media budget compared to TV or newspapers? When will marketers get it? I ranted about this a while ago following an unofficial survey I gathered from Millward-Brown, one of our sister agency. There are no rational reasons.

Wal-Mart enlists bloggers for PR campaign

My colleague Niall pointed me to a NY Times article (dated 7th of March if you don’t have a subscription and look for the print version) revealing that Wal-Mart uses bloggers to push its communication agenda. How did the NY Times found out? Several bloggers enrolled in Wal-Mart’s PR program regurgitated almost verbatim most of the statements they received from Edelman, Wal-Mart’s agency. They did that often without naming their sources of their relationship with either company.

This excellent article raises some valid questions about bloggers’ “independence” and what they should disclose to their readers. It seems to me that on the long-term, bloggers who churn out press-releases or have affiliation with companies, but do not disclose them will loose their readers’ trust, thus deflating the very own reason why they were worth engaging with at the first place. From a PR standpoint, it provides an interesting challenge: how to drive communication agenda with bloggers while preserving their authenticity?

Disclaimer: Edelman is a respected competitor to Hill & Knowlton, my agency. This post does not cast any judgement of value but is aimed at stimulating discussion on relationships between PR professionals and bloggers.

Who needs RSS when web users 'only visit six websites'?

According to a research published by Diretgov, half of UK internet users regularly visit just 6 websites on average. 95% also say that they go online with a specific destination in mind (what happened to "web surfing"?).

Steve Rubel thinks that this could explain why RSS hasn't taken off yet. I agree, most people don't need to keep a watch on dozens of websites or blogs, so see little use for an aggregator or feed system. The fact that RSS feeds are not user-friendly enough for the average web users doesn't help either. This could confine RSS to innovators or professional usage for a while.

Via Steve Rubel

If Microsoft designed the iPod packaging...

What happen when you sit in a room full of marketers... or how to value simplicity.

I read about the clip via Seth Godin's blog but he linked to it through YouTube, which is down for maintenance. You can see it on Google video instead.

Steve Micropersuasion Rubel joins Edelman and Harold Burson launches blog

Today is a remarkable day for both the PR community and bloggers:

• Steve Rubel announced that he is joining Edelman as a Senior Vice President, based in NY. See Edelman's blog announcement.
• Harold Burson (Burson-Marsteller) launches his very own blog.

Google buys Measure Map to bring web analytics to blogs

It seems that Measure Map is not even live yet... but since they were bought by Google, we expect that their services will be good and probably available as a free tool like the excellent Google web analytics.

According to their site:

• Measure Map helps you understand what people do at your blog, and what influence you are having on the world.
• Easily navigate the numbers that matter
• Track links to see who sends you traffic
• Find out what people do at your site

See Google's blog announcement (is that the end of the press release?!)

McDonald's is open for discussion

I was so busy with work and study that I missed the launch of McDonald's corporate responsiblity blog. Shame on me! Shel Israel (the co-author of Naked Conversation) posted his recommendations on how to improve it, and in the same stroke, laid down the simplest and best communication rules for corporate blogs I’ve seen so far.

Yahoo! and AOL to charge for emails

It is fair to say that Yahoo! and AOL's plan to charge businesses for ensuring that their emails are not delivered to their subscribers' spam folders has not been as well received as it could have. The Red Herring summarises what is at stake quite well. And The Onion concurs: "this is going to drive small companies like info@jckibffydmh right out of business!"

Google Removes German BMW Site

According to Techworld, Google removed BMW's site from its index because of search results manipulation. The BMW page listed in the results was redirecting to another site, with different content (also called "cloaking"), which is a violation of Google's quality guidelines. That shows that Google means business when it comes to maintaining the integrity of its search engine listing. Story first broke on Matt Cutts' blog.

Seat guru: Is the future of flying experience pricing?

As mentioned in my last post, Valla Vakili from Yahoo! presented at our internal workshop on folksonomy. One website I found noteworthy was seatguru.

Thanks to the web, we can now compare prices easily and quickly before any purchase (think kelkoo) so consumers can find out whether they are being ripped-off or not. This took a lot of power out of travel agents and airlines who could charge pretty much what they wanted before and gave consumers the upper-hand in negotiation.

Seatguru doesn't compare prices but passengers' experiences flying in different aircrafts, from different airlines. I found out that if I flight Lufthansa on an A333, seats 45 A, B,H and K don't recline as much as other seats and get all the traffic from the gallery.

Now that I am armed with that knowledge, can I negotiate a better seat or a cheaper price since my flying experience won't be as pleasant as others?

Despite all odds, I survived food poisoning, corporate finance and NY last week.

The last 2 weeks have been pretty hectic for me. I started my 2nd term at school and the workload increased massively... especially corporate finance. Playing with figures is not my forte and I am struggling to keep pace. I had a busy time at work with a large pitch and preparing for an internal workshop on social media in NY. I was hoping to spend a few days there but came down with food poisoning (culprit: prawns) just before leaving so had to postpone my flight and shorten my trip. I couldn't do much while ill. I am now back in London, tired and slimmer.

Nonetheless, my time in NY was put to good use. First, we had the opportunity to hear from Jeff Jarvis at Acquavit (great food, great service). Jeff shared with us his views on how blogs are impacting traditional media. When talking about bloggers, his advice to PR agencies was to get out of the way, which we will of course not take :-) On the second day, we had three other external speakers:

• Nick Desai from Juice Wireless on mobile communication in the US. Although I am not a specialist in mobile communication, I realised that Europe was a few years ahead of the US in terms of brands using mobile phones in their marketing. It must be a frustrating situation for Nick, to see cool stuff happening here while having to go through a lengthy educational process with clients in the US. This is the situation we face in Europe with social media :-)
• Elizabeth Talerman from Campfire talked about branded entertainment. This is the team behind the Sega Beta-7 campaign with Wieden+Kennedy so I listened. They presented the art of heist campaign they ran for Audi. Pretty good stuff, very guerilla, seamlessly integrated and the experience they create is very compelling for consumers because it provides a lot of fun. And it delivers ROI too.
• Valla Vakili from Yahoo! showed us how Yahoo! is embracing social media and gave us a great overview of what folksonomy is about and what it means for brands. With loads of cool examples. So cool that they will be promptly recycled, with credits due in my future presentations.

I will try to share some of these insights and these examples over the next few days, when I will digest them, now that I can.

Need extra money? become an iPod coach!

Department store Selfridges is to offer lessons on how to use an iPod for technologically challenged customers. £65 for a 40 mins session (that's $115)... That beats giving French lessons for a living!

Via The Register.

Blair, Cameron: The Podcasts War

Tony Blair urges The Sun readers to "shop a yob" in the first ever podcast by a British Prime Minister. Not wanting to be outdone, David Cameron (newly elected leader of the conservative party) recorded an exclusive seven-minute podcast for the Daily Telegraph's readers, criticising the plan.

I'd love this product even if I weren't a stealth marketer!

I stumbled across this funny article in the Onion via the WOMMA blog about a stealth marketer really fired up (for once) about the product he is supposed to pretend to like. A short extract: "Normally, if I were hired to viral market a new beverage I wasn't particularly passionate about—for example, that new Coca-Cola drink, whatever it's called—I would just subliminally insert favorable comments in two dozen or so high-traffic chat rooms and be done with it. Only a very special product could make me devote a week of evenings to surfing literally hundreds of chat rooms, gaining the confidence of unwitting users by establishing a base of common interests before casually mentioning how I recently tried the most hardcore, carbonated pick-me-up the world has ever seen." As the WOMMA rightly puts it in their cover article, "you know you made it once you are in the Onion" but these are not the practices we will endorse.

Google Video Future of Movie Distribution?

Google is selling movies, NBA fixtures and TV series on download. Time to sell these Netflix shares.

Tell-a-pal incentivises referrals

Tell-a-pal has put in place a neat system to manage customer referrals and incentive programs on your behalf. They take a 5% commission on rewards value.

Netomat brings mobile phones and PCs together

Netomat is a new social network (another one) but worth mentioning since it allows sharing messages and feeds on both PCs and mobile phones, seamlessly.

Sun acknowledges blogging's positive effect

Sally Falkow runs a piece on Sun and how blogging helped the company moved from the 99th to the 6th most popular server company. Jonathan Schwartz is quoted: “Companies need to speak with one voice and be authentic. Blogging allows you to speak out authentically on your own behalf, and in the long run people will recognize that. Do it consistently and they trust you.”

via Micropersuasion