According to Econsultancy, that date can't be too far in the future anymore. Semantic search will see Google doing their best to provide direct answers to users' search queries, instead of supplying them with a list of links. This means you'll have to provide answers to questions in your field of expertise in your content's markup, to keep scoring high in Google's eyes. This will see a complete revolution in SEO, where SEO will mean turning your content into perfectly 'minable' data. And this, at last, might finally sign in the dawn of Sir Tim Berners-Lee's big idea for the web: the ability for machines to 'understand' content.

Does Klout measure your social capital, or something else?

Brian Solis has just published a paper on Influence. He rightly points out that we'd be silly not to take services like Klout and PeerIndex seriously, despite their flaws. Solis also points out that they don't really measure Influence, but rather "social capital". We think he is right and wrong.

A public Chatroulette

The Internet is interactive, but broadcasting tends to be one-directional. So whither internet TV? Brand new startup OnTheAir has a novel approach. They will enable conversations to be broadcasted: Ideal for celebrities, bloggers and the like, looking to include their audience members in their broadcasts.

Kickstarter's funding dollars have a lasting effect

Kickstarter has an amazing case study on their blog. In short, before the 3.3 million dollar breakaway success of the game Double Fine Adventure on Kickstarter, the Video Games category averaged 629 pledges per week. After Double Fine, the category boasts an average of 9755 pledges per week. This behaviour was mirrored in the Web Comics category. This means, instead of having an exhaustive effect on the available pledges, a surge in pledges seems to attract even more.

The problems of popularity beset Pinterest

A few weeks after Tumblr banned content that promotes self-harm, like bulimia and anorexia, Pinterest has done the same. However, the so-called Thinspiration content is still freely available. In other news, pointing to how tough life can be at the top, Pinterest has been infiltrated by spammers who are making as much as $1000 per day from their spam bots. They claim Pinterest is by far the easiest network to spam these days.

Does Tumblr have an SEO problem?

It would seem so. In a detailed blog post Dan Zambonini details why he moved his websites from Tumblr to WordPress. He reckons that if the simplicity of Tumblr is not key, WordPress's SEO makes it the 'must have' choice.

Creatives of the week – Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg

Take one designer, one mathematician, a desire to invent new ways for people to think about data and you get Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg. The pair have been working on data visualisations since 2003 and currently lead Google's Big Picture environmental initiative. But in their spare time they make nice things too, like this gorgeous map of wind patterns in the US.

Last night the US Senate approved legislation that will make it possible to give ownership in return for small amateur investments – equity for crowdfunding. Up to now that is the one thing platforms like Kickstarter could not offer. In the UK equity for amateur funding has had no such issues. And there's two kids quick out the blocks: Crowdcube and Seedr (who won the recent LWS start-up competition). This news, coupled with the just announced tax breaks for start-up investment (SEIS) means it's a great time to be looking for funding.

In unrelated news, we’re very excited by the Digital Bolex, a high sexy quality digital camera – funded by Kickstarter.

Only 9% of people get their news from social networks

…very often. While 36% go to news organisations very often for their news. That bit of news from US based Pew was much repeated this week. Excluding folks that don't get their news from digital sources, 52% of people got 'some' of their news from Facebook or Twitter. And although almost twice as many got news from Facebook than Twitter, those that did said they would probably have gotten the news they got from Facebook elsewhere anyway.

Twitter users thought their news experience was more unique and irreplaceable. Twitter users also said they were less inclided to get their news on Twitter from friends, but still more so than from journos. And what we find striking, they were more often unsure of the source. This chimes with what sociologists would say. Twitter is a weak tie network, and information travels better in weak tie networks.

Social media gets serious

Brian Solis has been one of the first marketers to call for a more social scientific approach to marketing. No wonder then that Solis, who joined the star studded Altimeter recently, would publish a report on the Rise of Influencers and uses sociology to try and see the wood from the trees. The report pours cold water on the claims of Peerindex and Klout that they measure influence, but adds – they do measure 'social capital' – the potential to influence. Now we have one or two bones to pick with how he uses that term (watch our blog for more soon). But broadly what he says is bang on: everybody can now be media, but some us are more media than others.

Is Pinterest the new Facebook?

Insurrectionary talk is in the air, as new figures show that Pinterest drove more traffic to websites than any other site bar Facebook. The answer however is no. Pinterest's strength is that its a weak tie network. Facebook's strength and size lies in the fact that it’s for your close friends (strong ties). And everybody has friends. That's not to say that Pinterest won’t be big. But it’s more likely that they will co-exist as they have quite different rolls. On a side note – Peugeot's Pinterest competition is worth checking out.

A match made in heaven

Champagne glasses pinged from Williamsburg to London Fields, as Hipstamatic – the advanced photo app – became the first service to deeply integrate with Instagram – everybody’s favourite photosharing network. It's never been a better time to be a Hipster.

Google Analytics goes social

For some time now, data geeks have been worried as an increasing number of traffic to websites returned no source – often because they were social shares. With a new update Google Analytics hopes to solve that problem. It includes reporting from niche sites such as Slideshare. For a good run-down as to what's incuded and what not, see this blog post. But as an Adobe report out this week makes clear, even then, the impact of social is bound to be under reported because of the problem of last click attribution.

Promoted Tweets go mobile

Yip, in the week that Twitter turned 6, Twitter now not only allows you to advertise to users on mobile, it even includes new targeting metrics. So now you can target users with an iPhone only.

Report-tastic

We do like reports, three others that caught our eye this week: Google now rakes in more money in the US than all the US newspapers combined. Ad spend on mobile jumped by 157% in the UK in 2011. And the person destined to spend the most on tech inside companies in the future will be the CMO, not the CTO or CIO.

The Empire strikes back – for us

Hardly had reports appreared that companies are asking job seekers for their Facebook username and passwords, and Facebook threatened to fight our corner. Facebook will take action to "protect the privacy and security of its users". Ironic, but very welcome news.

Is the internet of things upon us?

First it was Raspberry Pi, and now Twine (a product funded by Kickstarter) that enables you to make your toilet tweet and your tumble-drier err… tumble. And all that power "without a nerd degree". The little box has Wifi, sensors, and there's no programming required.

No! An internet of…

Drones! There's been a few posts doing the round this week that illegal file sharers like Pirate Bay will load their servers onto drones and fly them around – to escape detection. We don't believe that will be very cost effective…

Creative of the week – Stamen

The San Francisco-based design studio Stamen have combined their love for maps and their technological know-how into a lovely Watercolor Map Project. They used vector map data from OpenStreetMap and layered them with scanned watercolor textures that render automatically. Truly beautiful.

Growing like a weed: Pinterest is a wildly popular social network, that we know. But what is it exactly, and why could it be so significant? Well, this post argues that it can enable hyper-optimised supply chain management, how it has created a new particular interest graph (like Twitter) and why bricks and mortar shops have another existencial threat to cope with. All of which rings true. To top that, news just in that at present Pinterest drives more traffic than Google Plus (but less than Twitter). We know that the majority of Pinterest users are female, but what is it's ethos? Well, a huge spat on the network over a rather mild picture, is rather revealing.

The rising importance of the audience with an audience

Twitter has just switched on the ability to see exactly how many Retweets a tweet has received, via their API (the website still only shows up to 50). This of course, is facinating for marketers, social scientists and anybody interested in the new ways information travels. We did a few quick tests via the API on momentous tweets from the last year. Interestingly the tweet that first ignited speculation that Osama Bin Laden had been killed was 'only' retweeted 1776 times, while this Lady Gaga tweet sent yesterday got 8550.

Some tweets are more equal than others

Lady Gaga is about to become the first Twitter user that breaks through the 20 million follower mark. A new top 20 Twitter user list is out and it is dominated by female celebrities. Keith Urbahn who sent the Osama Tweet, on the other hand had just less than a thousand followers (at the time). Voila: Banal tweets by popular celebrities travel further than the hottest news on the planet. Brian Solis identified marketing to users with influence as one the major trends for 2012. But there are pitfalls. Was last week's Jordon and Rio Fernand Tweets not only poorly executed but illegal?

When will I, I be famous?

So you're an ordinary mortal like most of us. How do you build a Twitter following? New data driven research is actually rather spot on. People want to be informed and entertained. The best Tweets do both simultaneously. And a study on what posts work on Facebook for journalists have found much the same.

Did Twitter, Tumblr and Pinterest kill the blogging star?

Tired of studies yet? Hope not. Another new study shows that corportate blogging is down – by quite a margin – all over the Fortune 500 list of companies. Blogging is notoriously hard and time-consuming to do well. Curation of other's content on the other hand can drive as much traffic and takes less time. Our take: For professional services, tech and other companies with complex products it's still a must. But make sure your blog is easy to update.

Brands struggle to get people to engage with them

Psst pssst… we have a err… another new study that shows that most brands only average a 1% 'Engagement' rate on their Facebook pages (you get that simply by deviding the Likes by the Talking about figure). Fashion and Lifestyle brands, and brands that have hired tallented content creators, tend to do much better than that.

Two steps backward, three steps forward?  

Last week we were in a bit of a tiz about Twitter's new censorship policy. Zeynep Tufekci has however made an excellent argument that we were misguided. Says Tufekci: "Twitter has done everything it can do to help free-speech advocates around the world except deliver coffee and bagels in the morning." Importantly, in the past when Twitter did receive take down notices, the impact was universal. Now it will be only in the territory in which the request was made.

Creative of the Week – Scott Garner  

Simple, but cute. That's how we would describe Scott Garner's Still Life project. Referring to the noble art of still life painting, Garner developed an interactive image fit in a motion-sensitive frame, which gives a tongue-in-cheek new meaning to the term 'still life'. In short, a not so still life.

Social Media spend is set to double

So says Brian Solis quoting a study of marketing spend in the US this year. If anybody has seen similar figures for the UK, let us know.

“Social Media offers tremendous growth potential and as such, budgets are multiplying. As reported in the research, social media budgets will spring from 5.6% to 9.9% this year. However, over the next five years, social media budgets will swell to 17.7% of the total marketing spend.”

Newspapers show further decline as source of info

A further study (again in the US) showed that newspapers have declined further as both a source of information and entertainment.

“Only 56 percent of Internet users surveyed agreed with the statement that newspapers were an important or very important source of information, while 68 percent said that television was, and 78 percent said that the Internet was.”

Pay with a Tweet

The value of Word Of Mouth in the online world is enormous. A recent UK survey stated that 70% of people trust online recommendations from strangers. And a visitor coming from a Social Media site is 10 times more like to make a purchase.

This simple tool taps brilliantly into that distribution potential. It’s called Pay With A Tweet and does exactly that. In exchange for downloading a bit of content for free, you have to tweet about it.

Zed is dead & flip-flopping Anderson?

Remember Chris Anderson? He of Wired Magazine, ‘The Long Tail’ & ‘Free – The Future Of A Revolutionary Price’ fame? Rumour has it that he is preparing a Wired magazine front page declaring the open Web dead. It’s been killed by apps and platforms like the iPad.

“Anderson is much less glowing about the web and Wired’s place on it in particular. In June local newspaper, the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, reported a talk that Anderson gave around Wired’s $4.99 iPad app, which sold 80,000 copies in 10 days.

He said that reading Wired on a tablet is fundamentally different than going to Wired.com, which he said looks like many media websites and “carries little content from the magazine”.

He added that while reading any magazine is supposed to be an immersive experience, with the design and long pieces keeping readers’ attentions for prolonged sittings, none of those aspects translates well to the web.”

It looks like the web is under assault from all sides. Just this week another post appeared about how Facebook is killing web sites. A lot of the content on Facebook is not readable by Google. And even the bits that are, are ‘social objects’. Little bits of text and video, and not pages – the unit that Google likes (see RAAKonteur 2).

But at RAAK we’ve never seen content, social objects or pages as the epicenter of the web. People are. People have never been more easy to connect to. Flipbook, the social iPad magazine which we wrote about last week refutes Anderson’s new ideological trajectory. SEO research shows that long form web content is most successful as so called ‘Linkbait’. And open API’s, which enable apps like Flipbook, have never been more ubiquitous.

Collaborating for Social Good

We’ve been thinking a lot about creative collaboration platforms and crowdsourcing (see what we did with Guided Collective). So we were intrigued when innovation agency IDEO this week launched OpenIDEO, a platform that enables people to collaboratively design solutions for social good.

They’ve made a nice video that explains how it all works. You can get involved on different levels (important), but what struck us most is how they developed a ‘Digital Quotient’, a badge of honour that is defined by your activity on the platform. Glory plays a major part in Social Media (as it does in real life), so we’ll definitely keep a close eye on how this creative reputation score pans out.

Respect my Authority!

Speaking of reputation. Last week Robert Scoble broke the story of Flipbook. This week he interviewed (video) Azeem Azhar of PeerIndex, an authority system similar to Klout (see RAAKonteur 1). But PeerIndex claims to be different from Klout in some ways.

Firstly it only tracks people and not brands. And it differentiates on topics. This means that you can have a high score for the topic of Sustainability, but score low on Cloud Computing.

Do check out the video, they touch on a number of important issues, including how smart people who don’t use social media will eventually lose out.

I Tweet therefor I am

“I came late to Twitter. I might have skipped the phenomenon altogether, but I have a book coming out this winter, and publishers, scrambling to promote 360,000-character tomes in a 140-character world, push authors to rally their “tweeps” to the cause. Leaving aside the question of whether that actually boosts sales, I felt pressure to produce. I quickly mastered the Twitterati’s unnatural self-consciousness: processing my experience instantaneously, packaging life as I lived it.”

The New York Times had an fascinating piece this week by author Peggy Orenstein on how Twitter changes who we are and how we express ourselves (note: NYT sign up required).

Another cool tool – you dork

The other day we saw a Social Media course that sold social media as an alternative to email. No kidding. Email is social too! Social Media isn’t an alternative!

Which brings us to Rapportive, a service that pulls in data from your contacts’ social profiles into your Gmail. Outlook already has a similar service in Xobni, all making the inbox more social.

Creative of the week – Meet Saga

Our pick of the week is Icelandic photographer Saga Sigurdardottir, who’s an example that proves that Social Media allows talent to shine.

East London Blogger Suzie Bubble is one of the UK’s most influential fashionistas. Her blog is so big that she regularly ranks higher in Google Trends than Dazed & Confused, the magazine she once helped edit.

So when Suzie started enthusing about Saga Sigurdardottir’s photography, we took notice. This young Icelandic creative – now resident in East London herself – does not only take other-worldly fashion pictures, she paints and makes haunting films, collaborating with fashion illustrator Hildur Yeoman.

Follow Saga on Twitter.

Tech insight of the week

Ever since Facebook’s implementation of the Open Graph Protocol, the Facebook Like button has been spreading like wildfire.

In this week’s tech column we write about the downside of the Like Button for users, and the upside for thrifty Marketeers.

London Blogger Katie

But in the current media climate – do you know how to get it? Ah yes, bloggers are a sure fire way to get good targeted eyeballs. But have you tried approaching them?

RAAK built a social media ready SEO enhanced website for fashion brand WHERE (Full disclosure: Their designer Laura Villasenin is my partner). It’s a new fashion brand that needs all the exposure – awareness and word of mouth – it can get.

But we knew we wanted it to be featured in one of the huge fashion blogs. They can drive massive amounts of traffic, increase your Google Pagerank, and a blog recommendation carries a lot of weight.

A blog like Stylebubble would be perfect. But Susie of Stylebubble is a very busy lady these days.

But then we read Brian Solis’s piece on the so called magic middle bloggers:

The best communications strategies will encompass not only authorities in new and traditional media but also those voices in the “Magic Middle” of the attention curve, because they help carry information and discussions among your customers directly, in a true peer-to-peer approach. The Magic Middle is defined as the bloggers who have from 20-1,000 other people linking to them. It is this group that enables PR people to reach The Long Tail, and its effects on the bottom line are measurable.

Brian made the point that the star bloggers of this world – are so busy, so famous – that they are no longer approachable. And even if they feature your product its often a once off. This is because they are also hard to build a relationship with. And building a relationship with a blogger can take you so much further. Especially if it’s a blogger on the up.

So we went for a magic middle blogger – and it worked big time.

Now I have to confess that RAAK actually did very little in this instance than provide some good advice. Laura did the rest herself. Here is how she got blogger relations spot on:

1. She did her research and found an up and coming fashion blogger – Katie that writes What Katie Wore.

Katie’s blog is popular, she routinely gets 20 plus comments on each post – times that by at least 100 to get an idea of how many visitors she gets to a post. But she’s not in the league of Fashion Toast (yet).

2. She followed Katies’s blog and Twitter account – and listened.

She liked what Katie did, and thought her sense of style was a good fit with her designs. she found out they lived around the corner from each other. Match!

3. She contacted Katie herself. There was no agent involved.

Bloggers don’t want to be approached by marketing and PR types that are far removed from a brand. They want the real deal. If you’re a fashion company the designer is as good as it gets. If you’re a company like Hewlett Packard that make electronics goods, and you’re blogging about photocopiers – it’s probably the photocopier product manager that you want to speak to. Why? Bloggers want knowledgeable people that are close to a product or service. They wan’t a marketese free environment. This is supposed to be a conversation remember.

4. Laura had a good product which she sent to Katie to check out.

A nice face and a great personality might get you far, but if your product is a lemon, don’t waste your time. This is word of mouth media, and the recommender’s (In this case Katie) reputation is on the line.

5. She had a website that could cater for the inevitable traffic rise that a blog would send, and we tried to maximise the viral effect – a social home base.

The site had WordPress’s Super Cache installed, just in case it was hit my a Tsunami of crazed shoppers. And we installed Tweetmemes Tweet this button. Ride the social wave.

And hey presto, look at the result!