Number 7 already. The RAAKonteur is getting old. Only kidding. We’re fresher than ever. Below are the stories from the world of social & digital that made us sit up this week.
Social Media Optimisation – from SEO to SMO
Search is down. Seriously. In the US the use of search engines has gone down by a whopping 16% year-on-year.
While SEO and Paid Search campaigns are certainly not dead (9 billion searches in July), it does confirm that a lot of web traffic is generated through social platforms, i.e. recommendation and word of mouth. Yet another argument to make your brand and online presence also Social Media Optimised.
Use your audience to market
Point in case: this piece of Nielsen data shows the power of social in online ads. Their research tested 3 kinds of ads on Facebook: a standard homepage ad, an ad with social context (where they show your friends that are already fans) and impressions that originated from the homepages of friends that have engaged with a brand.
While ads have of course a high reach, it found that combining an ad with earned media (i.e. the ‘organic impressions’ that originated from friends) made the campaign 3 to 4 times more effective.
Healthy society
Last week we wrote about how policy makers and government could use incentive systems from games and social media to ‘nudge’ for better behavior. Yesterday Foursquare announced their first cause-related badge in conjunction with MTV: STD testing.
All change at Brandspace
MySpace is – yet again – implementing a number of changes, including allowing users to post to Facebook. It also claims it is the place for brands to find traction on the net. Its chief revenue officer, told AdWeek this week:
“MySpace is a social-activation platform. We’re drop-dead amazing at getting consumers and creators to participate.”
But without a major redesign of its functionality it will keep haemorrhaging users. And without users we agree with eConsultancy – all this change will be blowing in the wind.
All change at Apple too
Actually, we wouldn’t want to be at MySpace HQ today. Apple’s announcement about Ping, its social network for music, must make a few people there nervous.
Even though the service is getting mixed reviews, it’s interesting to see that Apple is building on its strength (entertainment content) and is adding a social layer to it. Let’s see how good they are at it.
Email becomes a platform
In RAAKonteur 2 we told you how email was becoming more social with services like Rapportive. A number of other cool new services for Gmail has just been announced, prompting Read Write Web to enthuse that finally email is becoming a platform, much like the iPhone, Wordpress and Facebook.
Besides Rapportive we particularly like Wisestamp, which allows you to display your latest Tweets or Blog posts in your email signature.
Creatives of the week – Chris Milk, Arcade Fire & Google Chrome
Last week we complained about the lack of creativity in music videos and boom, this week we get The Wilderness Downtown, an interactive ‘project’ for The Arcade Fire.
To show off the HTML5 power of their Chrome browser, Google worked with director Chris Milk to make a super-engaging film that integrates Google Streetview in a rather impressive and very personal way.
Tech insight of the week – Under Twitter’s hood
The beauty of Twitter is its simplicity and atomicity. Very little of its technical complexity is hidden. This does not mean however that there might not be a lot of information in each tweet. To the contrary.
In this blogpost we explore how a bit of lateral thinking can get more out of Twitter.
