Last year, Virgin Atlantic found employees slagging off customers on Facebook. Last week it was Tesco’s turn. Now, Waitrose has found their staff making nasty noises in the online world.

The insults aren’t particularly great – with comments calling customers pikeys, ugly, mad and smelly – which could be extremely damaging to the brand and its connotations.

Waitrose response was that it is “completely unacceptable behaviour. It goes against our codes of conduct which make it very clear that partners who post this type of material are in breach of their terms of employment….The nature of the internet makes it difficult to get content removed once posted, however we do have teams that monitor website activity and will be conducting an immediate investigation.”

Personally, I think responding favorably offline in this way is a great way of ensuring something online can be brought under control. Social media is notoriously difficult to reign in if negative views are floating around – and by reassuring customers that they’re taking the matter seriously, as well as giving off signs to staff that it won’t be tolerated, Waitrose seem to be dealing with this quite well.

Short post: New user-interactive site from Lynx, which supports their new TV campaign.

How loud can you shout at your computer?! Great stuff from the deodorant giants.

Big brands are being stalked by MySpace to attract support for its ad-funded music service, MySpace Music, which will apparently be the social network’s biggest launch to date.

MySpace has joined forces with four major record labels, offering millions of UK consumers the opportunity to stream their entire back catalogues for free.

The site is also topped to be the biggest ad-funded music service in the UK, when it goes it goes live next year… The likes of McDonald’s, Toyota and Sony Pictures are all being hassled by the social network giant, as it offers them a variety of ad spots including a skinned player, pre-roll and in-video ads, playlist sponsorship and old-school display.

Agencies seem to be making little worried noises about the fact that the rates are likelyto  rise – but I’m more bothered about the fact you can’t download anything. On top of this, especially with Amazon’s new MP3 download service, online music seems to be getting increasingly competitive. Which hopefully means either cheap, or free…

Just a random Saturday thought: Why is it that sometimes good websites have such terrible online copy?

It’s not always about what the copy says… Although bad grammar and spelling mistakes on anything except certain types of blogs drives me nuts…. But also the what the content is about. A while back I worked on an audit for an extremely large, well-known, well respected British brand. It amazed me to see, on their home page, offers for certain products that were out of date by months. What better way to reinforce public confidence than by proving you can’t even manage your website and your general organisational skills properly?

Next time anyone’s just browsing around the ‘net, have a good look at what’s being said, and who’s saying it. I think you’ll be surprised how many mistakes you’ll uncover.

Ok, lets talk viral videos.

To me, a great viral video is simplistic and direct – the content should be orginal, to the point of being infectious… I should want to tag it, email it, stick it on Twitter, tell everyone about it, whatever.
Equally, what I also love about viral videos, is the fact that amazing marketing campaigns can be runnning, but often, you won’t realise it. They sneak up on you like stealth bombers… a perfect example would be the following:

It looks brilliantly authentic; the real McCoy, so to speak. The fact that it’s also backed up by a second angle that’s been filmed on a mobile phone makes it look like this guy really has gone nuts:

It’s flawless, but fake. I admit now, it had me completely fooled, until I did a bit of digging around – it actually seems  that it was created by Timur Bekmambetov as a promotion for the film Wanted. I realise this might be old news to some people, but somehow this video completely bypassed me, (despite getting thousands of downloads), and I feel it perfectly illustrates my point.

There seems to be a fine line between reality and fantasy with viral videos; I’m under the impression that they’re a modern version of the Victorian sensation theatre, where a mixture of illusion, grandeur, entertainment and promotion captured the audience. Viral can easily captivate a user and often influence them strongly, leaving them shaking their heads in wonder at what they’ve just seen and going off to tell their friends about it; branding at it’s best.

Unruly Media are an agency specialising in this area and have helpfully set up the Viral Video Chart, where the most powerful videos doing the rounds on the internet are recorded and reported. It’s a great site for seeing what’s popular, what’s working and what’s not, but it doesn’t separate the wheat from the chaff for me, as it includes a mix of both marketing videos, shameless self-promotion, music and content submitted by the general public at large. This is both a curse and blessing; I’m of the opinion that decent marketing virals should not stand out obviously as marketing campaigns – they need to be subtle and select in order to reach the user and be spread around the net.

Great examples for me include GuitarMasterPro, where an amazing guitar player has recieved over 50m impressionson YouTube alone, accompanied by the message that he learnt to play through their website.

Quicksilver’s viral apparently did more for the brand than the rest of their advertising combined, with a supposed 10m impression in the first few months alone.

The infamous Cadbury’s Gorilla. Need I say more?

One of the most successful campaigns of 2008, the Awareness Test from TFL, got nearly 4m views just in the first few months alone.

Viral video marketing can be infectious amongst users if done properly. It can raise brand awareness and promote products whilst being relatively cheap and with an almost minimal amount of work once it’s online. My last example of this is from Nike, who usually pull off great advertisements anyway. They certainly didn’t disappoint a few years ago, with their amateurish-looking Touch of Gold, which to date has recieved over 25.5m impressions on YouTube, let alone the other sites it’s spread to. That said, however, viral videos can also go badly. Examples of poor campaigns include Malibu, where they celebrated the release of a new product with this:

Shocking. Unsurprisingly, it recieved only a few thousand hits.
 

My final example of a terrible viral video(s) come from the genuis marketing guys a Chevrolet a couple of years ago. The idea was good: A micro-site would allow users to create their own advertisement for the Chevy Tahoe, allowing them to take stock footage and insert their own captions. Guess what happened when environmentalists got hold of the concept?

What amuses me the most is that these ads went live without anyone reviewing them. Although they had massive amounts of views, it’s done some serious damage. Even funnier, is the fact that Chevy’s amazingly professional marketing team left the videos running on the website until the PR team told them to pull them down. Happily for the rest of us though, they were leaked into other areas of the internet and still remain there now.

Once again, I return to an issue I’ve already mentioned before… The importance of websites realising that in order to be competitive, they have to move forward with user’s needs.

So, it’s with no great surprise that Ask, an old-school search engine, has opted for a total facelift and new approach to dealing with user searches. If you happen to be as old as me, you’ll remember that they did this before, back in 2006, when they gave their butler-image the sack. Now, after alread intoducing new applications, they’re going to be focusing upon being the search engine of choice for users who are asking direct questons. (eg. Is there no end to the talents of DigitalGeekUK? Will he ever be the next Bill Gates? Why have I read this far?!) Recent data from ComScore support this, as they found that Ask is more often used by people searching for specific answers to questions… (The clue is in the name)… Search Queries that use questions make up around 5% of searches on Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Live, but accounts for 15% of Ask’s searches. Sounds like a lot, but remember that Ask only has a 2% market share in online search!

So, it seems that Ask will be restructuring themselves around this as we well know that rivals are increasingly looking at ways to set themselves apart from Google in the competitive world of search. The new Ask site will be launched in the UK on October 20th, but is already live in the US. Sneak preview here, guys.

It looks a lot like Google, and doesn’t try to hide this fact, openly claiming to have “borrowed” design ideas from the mighty search leader. Ask also claim that the re-designed site will be faster, improve search results and produce more relevant results for the user.

Whilst they undoubtably have a challenging task ahead, it’s not all bad news. Even with such a small UK marketshare, the lastest figures from Neilson show that during August, 46m searches were conducted on Ask, which is roughly one in five of all people using a search engine. Maybe the figures will be even better this time next year?

Right, well, it’s not often I get confused online – being a total geek, I can practically see binary code as a oil painting. However, I’m not fully understanding the concept behind The Second Web.

It says it will be launching in November and seems to be, at it’s most basic, a web-browser within a web-browser. Fundamentally, not a bad idea – especially considering it’s apparently been dreamed up and built by a 16-year old – but huge problems come with it. Second Web has been built with the intention to find a new way of selling advertising space online, and already it’s become a nice little earner: With the option to buy .com-domain names (that already are being used in the REAL internet) for only $5, more than $25,000 has been made before Second Web is even online. This causes a real headache legally, as it can easily break copyright laws and potentially damage brands. For example, if you put www.google.com in the Second Web browser, you’re faced with a page that says nothing but “REMOVED FOR COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT”. What I can see here relates to an earlier post on this blog, where I commented about the ludricous amounts of money domain names can bring to their owners if they ever sell them on. It’s very likely that users have been snapping up big internet brands the (Myspace’s, Ebay’s and MSN’s of the digital world) in the hope that they can sell them back to these companies at an inflated rate.

I might have this totally wrong – maybe companies are happily buy up their domains for a second time in order to re-serve them on this second-level internet browser. In my opinion, it seems unlikely, as all sorts of issues arise; the fact that I doubt the sites will be indexed very well by search engines; the fact that to access this second-level, you need to have the browser-in-a-browser open; the fact that you could possibly be hounded by commerical lawyers for using someone else’s legally owned name. 

I’m also failing to see any solid advertising opportunity, due similar reasons that relate to what I’ve already mentioned – How would paid-search ads for a second-level-site be displayed in the top-level internet?! How (if at all) would top-level sites be advertised, second-level?! It seems to suddenly have a lot of issues and get very confusing when we start to talk about advertising. I’m also worried, it seems to have no relationship to any of the relevent monitoring bodies – eg. the IAB - nor does it appear to be a registered online business.

I might have this totally incorrect (can anyone enlighten me?) and I’m categorically NOT stating solid facts or making accusations. I honestly admire the thought and effort behind this project; there’s no denying it’s in the entrepreneurial spirit, but I can just see so many potential problems and pitfalls with the idea. It seems quite likely to me that established internet users, companies and advertisers will want to protect themselves as much as possible - probably through legal means and actively avoiding the site, but I’m happy to say that I could be totally wrong. All I can really say at this point is, let’s see what happens?

I find it quite surprising the number of people who still get their E-terminologies mixed up. I’m talking here about the difference between E-business, E-commerce and E-marketing. Three very different things.  

Yet despite this, I meet people every day of the week who either genuinely don’t know the difference, or pretend that they do, use it in an incorrect way whilst talking to me and then get exceedingly embarrassed when I correct them. The latter often irrates me, because I’m very much of the opinion that unless you understand what you’re saying, most of the time you shouldn’t be trying to say it… It’s like watching some politicians trying to seem intelligent. There’s no shame in not understanding an increasingly complex area, which is why specialist agencies, consultants and companies successfully exist, actively helping to place businesses and the commerical world in general into cyberspace. That in itself is a seperate issue, so to return to the basis of my rant; to define some of the big “E’s” of the internet world:

E-commerce
Generally seen by most to be the term related to selling a product or service online. This includes online banking and online shopping – although some view the term to encompass online transactions; eg. user’s responses to an online equiry (or a search) that results in either an online or offline sale. E-commerce does NOT include any aspect of online marketing or administration/usabilty processes.

E-business
Exactly like the dictionary definition of “Business”, except in an online sense. The term encompasses all aspects of business processes, from purchasing stock to producing a service. It covers a vast range of business fundamentals: sales, marketing, distibution, logistics, customer service etc. E-business defines the entire platform needed to run a business online and uses E-commerce and E-marketing within it’s structure.

E-marketing
This is at the very heart of any successful E-business. It is about being closer to the user and understanding them, as well as understanding how a product or service sits within the marketplace and the best means to successfully sell online. As a whole, E-marketing can easily add value to a company by boosting sales and widening distribution channels. It is constantly evolving, as technology advances and user-trends shift; profitable online companies or agencies recognise this and quickly adapt their strategies to meet these challenges.

Great, hopefully no more confusion. (Except possibly from people who aren’t reading this blog).

In case it’s escaped anybody’s attention – possibly those without a computer or any form of intelligence – Google are celebrating their tenth birthday.

So, from humble beginnings a decade ago, Google turns double-digits and simultaneously is recognised as the worlds most powerful global brand, as charted by research-consultancy firm, Millward Brown. Interestingly, out of the top-ten brands on this list, four are computing-based: Alongside Google (1), there sits Microsoft (3), IBM (6) and Apple (7). Furthermore, China Mobile (5) and Nokia (9) bulk up this techno-team. Unquestionably, this is a reflection on the importance of technology in modern everyday life, but perhaps any questions should be directed towards Google and the massive monopoly they’re building for themselves?

There are hundreds of articles and blogs floating around surrounding the ethics of Google, particularly in their data-collecting/retaining methods. Whilst I’m totally for companies being allowed to make profits, no matter how big the amounts involved, I like to try and understand the motivation behind the cash. When Google bought DoubleClick, I was worried – and partly, I still am – that the biggest search engine on earth was buying one of the biggest measurers of ad-trafficking and measurement. Not only does this possibly stamp out competition, but the issues raised surrounding data and the fact that Google will soon be Big-Brother-esque in their knowledge of users. (Therefore able to increase revenue even further). It just seemed to be a bit bullying when it happened, and a far cry from the informal Google “Don’t be evil” slogan. Other stuff happened this year, such as Brand-protection no longer being allowed on PPC-ads, so competitors could appear on each other’s terms; another money-maker for the company.

Whilst Google undeniably do a great deal of good, both online and off, (from free source coding and decent email through to setting up a $1bn charity fund and uniting knowledge-sharing), it nevertheless remains that some of it’s business practices can be viewed to sway slightly away from what the company preaches.