It’s an age-old sci-fi prediction: robots will take our jobs. Well, it has not quite worked out that way. Instead of losing manual labour to machines, we are meeting them half way, consuming virtual goods that are easy for machines to produce. Not only that. We are increasingly consuming what we ourselves produce (using machines, of course) – like social media. But we do that – for free. The result? The middle classes are getting poorer.

Apple out to smash textbook publishing

Yesterday Apple announced two new services that are going to have a massive impact. First, there’s iTunes U, which will help teachers create full online courses. But what excites us in particular is iBooks Author, a tool that’s going to give the book publishing industry another reason to be very worried. It allows you to easily publish to existing templates and drag and drop images, video, audio and other content like 3-D models to your book. And yes, it can contain links, HTML5 and javascript, so it will be interactivity-ready. And here is the kicker: It’s free.

In a truly eye opening post, Trey Ratcliff gives a fascinating account into the life of an ebook-publisher. Two things stand out in particular. First: he reckons the consumption and market size of ebooks will be much bigger than books. Secondly: social media is a marketing multiplier.

“The best way to successfully market something is to have true believers with big followings talk about it on the Internet. Since we have many authors who are socially popular, a multiplier effect begins to take place.”

A thought experiment for you

A blog post about new considerations in SEO (after Google Plus) shines light on a can of worms. Should you hire a person that’s absolutely clueless about SEO, but in hundreds of people’s Circles – maybe a celebrity, like Russell Brand? Celebrity or SEO expert? Remember that if the celebrity Plus One‘s a page it will jump in Search Engine Rankings for anybody that has them in their Circles.

A big Audience is cool, until you have one

All prolific Twitter users seem to want to grow their audiences as large as possible, right? But do we ever think what life will be like when it happens? What made Ashton Kutcher want to stop using Twitter? And Stephen Fry? Gina Trapani shares her experience of passing 200,000 followers on Twitter, and what it does to the way you use Social Media. Hair-raising stuff!

The strength of weak ties

It’s uncanny how social networking theory, a sub discipline of sociology, has found validation in modern day social networking services. This week another example surfaced when Facebook published research. It showed that although we are more prone to share content from close friends (strong ties), we are more likely to find new content from people we only know tangentially (weak ties). Facebook’s whole user experience is designed for strong ties. No wonder they have introduced new features to make it more Twitter like – a network around interests rather than relations. This will make it better as a source of useful new information.

Facebook quietly incentivises linking back to Facebook

In recent research by TBG, they have found that linking Facebook ads back to Facebook costs 45% less than linking the same ad to a page outside of Facebook. To be clear, this is not an organic cost variation – this is a decision by Facebook. It makes sense, in a way. Facebook hasn’t quite convinced people that Facebook pages are a good place to send people to. We have yet to see FB-commerce kicking off properly, and there is no way to monetise content on Facebook through ads. So, maybe a little bribery will work for them?

On that note – Facebook is about to launch actions. Once it’s launched, we’ll check it out in detail, so you don’t have to – watch this space!

Twitter, now an early indicator for Scientific progress

Previously we’ve pointed to articles on Twitter’s correlation to the stock markets, and Twitter’s ability to predict epidemics. Add to that, the ability to predict the citation of scientific articles. In a study done by the Journal of Medical Internet Research on three years’ worth of articles, it was found that highly tweeted articles were 11 times more likely to be cited than others. This phenomenon even has a name now – The Twimpact Factor

Now Twimpact this: Twitter is currently adding 11 accounts per second, and will likely pass the 500 million user mark in February. Staggering!

Instagram: the Masses start flocking in

Instagram hit 16 million users at the end of last year, making it one of the best success stories of 2011. Since then, top brands seem to be flocking to it like … well, like brands to a hot new social network. Two things make Instagram especially interesting:

• It still only runs on Apple mobile devices. No desktop, no Android, no Windows phones. This makes their growth so much more remarkable.
• Instagram’s consistent photo aspect ratios and photo filters makes it a very interesting platform for visual campaigns. Have a look, for instance, at this campaign we built, with the Guided Collective, for Ted Baker last year. The visual consistency of the Instagram content made this kind of thing possible.

For the sociological viewpoint, The Wall blog has a very interesting post by Dirk Singer, analysing the subcultures on Instagram.

Creative of the Week – Andrew Emond

Oh yes, we do love Instagram here at RAAK HQ. And all of its offshoots. Take Mastergram for instance. Photographer and multimedia designer Andrew Emond has created a Tumblr where he ‘re-mixes’ classic photographs from the likes of Diane Arbus, Cartier-Bresson and Andreas Gursky by running them through an Instagram filter. Simple and beautiful, but as Emond says, it’s interesting to see how these amendments alter our perception.

We want to start the year with an admission. Silly us predicted that Google Plus could grow to over 100 million users this year. It's going to do much better than that, even if Google faces law suits because of it. The main reason? If you're interested in having your site rank optimally in Google Search, Google Plus is now a critical tool. That it would be key was already apparent before this weeks announcement of Google Search Plus your World. Now it is simply a must. Twitter is mad as hell, and as Danny Sullivan points out, Google is indeed favouring Google Plus over Relevancy. As Jeff Jarvis pointed out this is a case of the pot calling the kettle black. Twitter could be more open themselves.

Social media builds brand awareness, purchasing intent

A new study not only claims that exposure to social media boost brands, but that the effect also lasts. Very good. Just this week Facebook's PR agency Burson-Marstellar claimed our campaign was a brilliant example of bribing customers to be brand advocates. In case you missed it, we built a campaign for Miista, where products were discounted based on Klout weighted Tweets. In the same category perhaps, there's a new service called GoodBuzz. It encourages companies not to spend their marketing on ads, but rather to pay social media users to spread the message.

The networked computer in your pocket – that's where it's at

Last week keen mobile watcher Tomi Ahonen wrote an in-depth post on how everything is converging on mobile. It is far bigger than broadcast media (television and radio combined) and far bigger than the computer and IT industry. It's also far bigger than music, movies, videogaming, the print industry etc etc. Mobile accounts for "about 2% of the total GDP of the planet, and sits with a rare few other giant global industries like the automobile industry, housing/construction, food, military spending, banking etc". Yip. This chimes with what Martin Sorrel, head of media giant WPP said at CES this week. Media spend on digital is only about 17% while it should sit at 30%, but of that spend only 1% is going to mobile at present, while it should sit around 7%.

Kickstarter kicks up some dust

This week, DIY funding platform Kickstarter released some very, very impressive stats. Not only did they grow threefold from 2010 to 2011, but in that same period their project success rate went up by 3%! Given their growth, the project success rate should actually have dropped, so they are definitely doing something right. That's not all though … Robert Scoble points out that 99.999% of the products he's seen at this year's CES (which I'm sure, equates to zero), is not as useful as the clip-on iPad keyboard he's using – funded by Kickstarter. And to top this, three films – funded by Kickstarter - made it to Academy Awards short lists, and two Kickstarter films are short-listed for the Oscars. There can be no doubt that Kickstarter should be a serious consideration for first round funding.

QR – a debutant no more?

If you got a 25% response to a Tweet, status update, newsletter, let alone a banner add, you'd be pretty chuffed with yourself, right? How 'bout this: Glamour Magazine got that with QR codes placed inside their magazine! A trial within its 'social edition' produced 512,339 engagements among a circulation of 2m readers. Editorial explained that readers could 'Like' advertisers via QR codes, and that this could make them eligible for discounts. Voila!

On comments and why a little doubt is a great persuader

Is there a trend developing where websites switch off their comments due to the effort of managing them? Apparently sites with high traffic in particular are having trouble keeping up. Is this the best course of action? With comment technology evolving we do think this is the wrong course of action. But having no comments is better than not paying attention to them.

In a study about whether brands need to reply to questions put to them via social media it was found that only 11% said it did not make a negative impression if they came across an unanswered question.

All good is not err… all that good. Just like a shaky camera conveys authenticity, the odd negative remark can be reassuring. A study shows that consumers simply don't trust product reviews that are 100% effusive. Similarly, during the Arab Spring, reporter Andy Carvin mentioned that when re-tweeting, he gave precedence to users whose accounts were less emphatic.

Revenge is better served cold

It was bound to happen, a Facebook app that posts one or more scheduled status updates after you die.

Helping your customers take action

Another innovative social media effort – this time from a bank. Members of CitiBank's reward scheme can combine their points on Facebook to make a charitable donation. Users can promote the reward pool through their Facebook page or by inviting other Citibank customers to donate.

Everybody is talking about

We'd be remiss not to mention that there are two new hot social services out there that everybody is talking about. Firstly, Pinterest – kind of like Tumblr, organised around specific topics, and one sexy interface. Secondly, Path, the social net for your closest friends. We've mentioned Path before, but it's made a serious comeback. Since the launch of its newest version the growth has been impressive, and it has to be said, the mobile only social network has one of the slickest UX's in the business. Read @scobleizer's thoughts on why Path is nailing it.

Creative of the Week – Bruno Zamborlin

Banging your own drum may soon mean something a little different, because with Zamborlin's Mogees project that could happen quite literally. Mogees is a technology that turns any surface into a musical soundboard. How? Zamborlin and his team have developed gesture recognition techniques that enable a contact microphone to associate each of your gestures with different sounds. Which means you can play 'percussion' on a tree or a mirror or a balloon. The team are currently working on developing a live Mogees performance.

In the past we have explained why good content – so called Linkbait – is the best Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategy. This week we've seen a burst of – er … content – fly by our timelines announcing that content Marketing is now where it's at in more than just SEO.

Like this one by Entrepeneur mag:

When it comes to marketing strategies, content marketing has just been crowned king, far surpassing search engine marketing, public relations and even print, television and radio advertising as the preferred marketing tool for today's business-to-business entrepreneur.

They explain what content marketing is:

It's the creation and publication of original content — including blog posts, case studies, white papers, videos and photos — for the purpose of generating leads, enhancing a brand's visibility, and putting the company's subject matter expertise on display.

Mashable – a blog that is in itself an example of effective content marketing – carries on in the same vein explaining new more sophisticated forms of content marketing:

Lately we’ve witnessed the intersection of content and commerce, an emerging breed of retail site that features magazine-like editorials, photo spreads and inspiring video, all designed to instruct and, ultimately, sell a product.
 

If content is king, why are newspapers struggling?

Good question. General news (should The Telegraph write about rugby at all if there exists specialist vertical sites like Planet Rugby?), the high costs of print and distribution, the rise of expert amateur content and the erosion of cash cows like classified advertising to sites like Craigslist, have all contributed to the malaise.

The UK Guardian has been at the forefront of attempts to arrest this decline, first by launching an API a year ago (We explained what an API is here). And now USA today are following suit. This is the platform play. Open up so others can build on your content or service.

But yesterday the smarts at King's Cross fired another shot across the bow of the Grim Reaper. Reports Nieman Lab:

But it doesn’t follow that, in 2011, Craigslist has completely cornered the market on classified advertising — or, for that matter, on community messaging overall. Today, a major paper is getting into the community messaging game: The Guardian is launching n0tice, a social news platform that draws a little from Craigslist, a little from Foursquare, a little from Ning.

 

Put the Hacker into the Hack

N0tice is a platform play (the content is user generated) which also neatly encompasses a ready made business model newspapers know – classified advertising. But to conceptualise and build this kind of tool you need a different kind of journalist, the hacker journo. Explains Poynter:

The process of becoming a hacker journalist is different for everyone, but the pattern is common. Eventually the tools of writers cease to be enough: Microsoft Word gives way to Excel, which gives way to MySQL. And then, almost without knowing it, you’re creating the tools yourself.

And just to show their hacking credits The Guardian also launched a little bot this week that runs on their API. Tweet it a search term and it will scour the Guardian for content based on that term and bring it to you.
 

Content comes in many forms

Apps can be content. Content that can be particularly useful even as a customer support tool. Apple's Stores have just launched a location aware one which most stores could emulate to provide in store updates. Reports TNW:

…it looks like the app knows exactly what store you’ve walked into, what workshops are coming up, lets you ask for help, tells you how many people are in line ahead of you, and gives you the opportunity to set up a Genius appointment for your Apple devices.
 

Crowds with thin skines

Two cautionary tales to note this week. Moleskine thought it a good idea to crowdsource a new logo. But designers baulked at the prospect at spending hours working on a project where they stood little chance of getting rewarded. And a US brand Chapstick committed a basic but grave sin: Deleting critical comments from Fans on their Facebook page. This generated loads of 'content', but of the negative kind.
 

No shortcuts – Content is hard

One of the most clicked-on Tweets we posted on Twitter this week is this study that shows that links one third into a Tweet, gets more clicks. (Notice where our link is.) If only doing content was that easy as following a few rules. Far more important is curating good content. Like we mentioned last week, you'd probably need to change the skills of the people in your business. Hire journalists, bloggers, programmers or other creatives that make or build compelling … you guessed it.
 

Creative of the Week – Matt Reed

Alcohol has inspired many a great conversation. How many great ideas have we all scribbled on beermats? But developer Matt Reed has taken the beer-bull by the horns and developed a Siri-controlled, Twitter-activated beer-pouring system. You say "pour me a beer", the robot does the job. Nuff said; watch the video.

Something to mull over

Is there a difference between content marketing and social media marketing? Or are they flipsides of the same coin?
 

Keith Urbahn wasn't the first person to speculate about Osama Bin Laden's death last week. Neither did he have a particularly big Twitter following (1000). Yet his Tweet spread across Twitter like wildfire. In a fantastic analysis, SocialFlow looks at millions of Tweets and shows how an idea spreads. 

They say that even though Urbahn is not considered influential by typical Twitter metrics (he had a Klout Score of 37):

"…the right network effects came into play, and enabled his post to generate enough trust amongst his followers, their followers, and so on. (…) Authority, trust and persuasiveness play an important role in influencing others, but are only part of a complex set of dynamics that affect people’s perception. Connections are another important factor, along with timing and a dash of pure luck."

Urbahn's Klout score now stands at 71 (see graph below).

Much ado about nothing?

Reading the above you might think that Twitter is a major driver of traffic to news sites. Apparently not so. The PEW Research Center conducted a study that shows that Twitter is a relatively small contributor of traffic to news sites.

The New York Times gets around 25% of its visitors via Google Search, while it gets just over 6% from Facebook and just over 1% from Twitter. Equally interesting is that generic news sites such as Yahoo News and AOL News get even less traffic from social media referrers, supporting our view that people tend to share quality content.

So why the buzz amongst journalist about the power of Twitter? There's no denying news breaks first on Twitter. But it's becoming apparent that it's harder to drive traffic via it.

One other comment: this study showed overall traffic, including long tail traffic. If one were to make an analyis of breaking news, these numbers would look somewhat different.
 

Lynx

Last week we talked about Heineken's Star Player, this week it's Lynx that launches their own branded mobile app. Quite timely, given the announcement that Social Media usage on the mobile is up a staggering 80%.

The Lynx Stream allows friends to create a shared timeline of a night out, gathering everyone's Tweets, check-ins, videos,… It's a lovely idea and taps into people's social behaviour. Still, because all the content has to be generated in-app (rather than pull in content from people's existing accounts on FB, Twitter, Instagram,…), we're curious to see how big the take-up will be.

Nevertheless, why is this important? Because here's another brand that realises the potential of a good branded product over advertising. As this Contagious article describes:

"The experience had to keep a rough-and-ready, functional style of design, and feel like a web service created by a startup rather than a piece of advertising."

Location, whatevah!

This week Groupon announced that they are entering the location market with Groupon Now; a major move to react to Facebook Places, which they see as a major threat. 

But this useful bit of research from Dubit in the UK puts a reality check on the issue of location. They found that teens find most location-based check-in services a turn off. The reason? Teens are more concerned about privacy than adults. Neither is game elements drawing them in, with many saying they can't see the point of location services. The teens that do see value consider the status of associating yourself with being at a certain venue as the main reason to share your location.

Facebook Places was recognised more than any other service, with 44 per cent being aware of it, compared to 27 per cent who had heard of Foursquare. Gowalla recognition was less than 1%.
 

QR vs NFC

GigaOm reported this week that the Summer of 2011 may finally be the breakthrough moment for the QR code. And if it doesn't happen now, it may well be RIP QR. And hello there NFC!

As the article points out, Google dropped their QR activity in 2009 to focus more on Near-Field-Communication technology. Point in case: this week they collaborated with Foursquare on integrating NFC technology into the act of checking in at their annual Google I/O developer conference.

What's NFC all about and how does it work? We'll dig a little deeper in next week's Tech Insight.

UK retailers that thrive on Social Media

If you pay attention to your Social Media theory, you know that Forrester Research recommends Facebook as thé place for sexy brands, like fashion. This week eDigital published a report on the Social Media success of UK retailers. Two main take-aways: fashion brands dominate the market. And only 9 out of 20 give their visitors the opportunity to shop in or from the Facebook Page.

But we think the interesting question gets asked at the end of the article. With mobile usage of Social Media expanding rapidly, how will brands translate their fancy Facebook activity and landing pages onto the small screen? At the moment neither the mobile site nor the Facebook iPhone app gives you easy access to the apps.
 

BMW opens up Ebay shop

It doesn't always have to Facebook or Twitter. Car manufacturer BMW has chosen Ebay as the platform of choice for its first venture into e-commerce. Not for cars, mind you, but for spare parts. As  eConsultancy points out:

"The fact that there are 600,000 searches a month on eBay UK for BMW shows the size of the potential customer base for the car maker."

Get Bits or Die Trying

The banks, we can agree, are not in vogue. So how about this: Bitcoin, a peer-to-peer currency that bypasses the banks, even the central bank. No central authority issues money.

Users can mine Bitcoins by installing software on their machines that crunch difficult encryption algorithms. The more coins in circulation the harder to mine more – thus solving inflation. They have a list of participating retailers and services excepting Bitcoins as well as a currency exchange. An interesting experiment? For sure. Will it take off? Facebook Credits are a better bet.

Creative of the week – Clement Valla

In his own words, Clement Valla is an artist and programmer interested in processes that produce unfamiliar artifacts and skew reality. In other words: he's an interesting chap that explores technology to do interesting things.

For example: he's used the labour market platform Mechanical Turk to co-create drawings (old followers may remember we did the same with our first RAAK logo experiment). And what caught our attention this week were his Postcards from Google Earth, a series of images where Valla alters and manipulates Google Earth screengrabs of bridges to create surreal and intriguing images.

Exciting news from the Facebook camp, as they have revamped the Pages. Main thing: they're bringing them more in line with how personal pages work. Which means you no longer will use Tabs to navigate; instead these different sections will sit on the side. And you will also be able to integrate the Like button on individual sections (i.e. the ex-tabs).

And what strikes us a major one: as an administrator, you can start interacting as the Page on content outside of your page. That's big news for brands.

As always with Facebook, the changes are extensive and finicky. These 2 blogposts on Econsultancy and Dose Of Digital give some good detailed info on the ins and outs of the changes.
 

Does social media create & sustain flat hierarchies?

Sociology prof Zeynep Tufekci – watch out for her – does a brilliant analysis in a post titled Can “Leaderless Revolutions” Stay Leaderless? She argues that while social media might have made the Egyptian movement more flat, networks are not designed to stay non-hierarchical. She outlines a few reasons, one could be users that some users are better at stuff:

…how will people know your tweets are so good? One mechanism, of course, is retweets. The number of retweets, however, may depend on how many followers you have to catch and retweet your posts in the first place. This means that those who have a large number of followers end up with an advantage even in terms of being recognized as meritorious.

Or what she calls preferential attachment:

Multiple mechanisms can facilitate preferential attachment — this need not be a mere exposure effect but will likely be confounded by a popularity effect. In almost all human processes, already having a high status makes it easier to claim and re-entrench that high-status. Thus, not only will more people see your tweets, they will see you as having the mark of approval of the community as expressed in your follower count.

She made a fascinating graph of the ten most popular Egyptian bloggers / Twitter users; while they start out on more or less the same level, Ghonim, the Google marketing exec, and the seasoned Elbaradei, rise dramatically.

Another infographic of note is this one on the Egyptian influence network, which is a snapshot of about a week ago. Try and spot Ghonim.

The dirty secrets of search

In another piece of fantastic investigative journalism, the New York Times caught out a large American retailer, JCPenny, whose website suddenly rose in search rankings. As they say:

But even links that have nothing to do with Chinese cooking can bolster your profile if your site is barnacled with enough of them. And here’s where the strategy that aided Penney comes in. Someone paid to have thousands of links placed on hundreds of sites scattered around the Web, all of which lead directly to JCPenney.com.

Perhaps you remember our description of how search engines like Google work. But paying for links is cheating. Google promptly demoted JCPenny to several pages down the search ranking.
 

Social is the answer to content farms

A much bigger problem for Google for some time now has been the so-called content farms. These are websites that scrape content from other sites like Wikipedia or Quora or pay people to create mediocre but keyword-rich pages. The key though is that they rank highly in search, generating lots of traffic and earning their owners advertising dollars.

A few weeks ago we suggested that Google should go the social way and allow users to report these sites. Interestingly enough Google announced a plugin for Chrome this week that does exactly that, it allows you to join the battle and report the content farms.
 

Porsche's Social Media thank you

As far as symbolic gestures go, this is a strong one. To celebrate the fact that they got 1 million Facebook Fans, Porsche decorated one of their cars with the names of their fans. Not all 1 million of them, but the 27,000 who indicated on the Facebook Page that they would like to be part of it.

Cute idea. Shame it's built in Flash, which means all those Porsche lovers can't see it on their iPads. And shame that the find-your-name-on-the-car function doesn't really work. Still, it's the gesture that matters.

Demographics are so old-school-Marketing

While keeping our eye on interesting new influence measuring tools, we stumbled upon this excellent post on Traackr's blog.

The point being made is that, because of increasingly sophisticated ways of measuring people's interests, marketing is entering an era where demographic becomes meaningless. Demographic is essentially a way to make crude statistical assumptions about users' interests, given that they fall within certain social parameters, like age, gender, and geographical location. Once it is possible to search for users by topic of interest, demographic becomes almost useless.
 

Burning platforms & mobiles at dawn

Nokia's new CEO, Stephen Elop – an ex Microsoft man – has exhorted his company to jump off a burning platform to save themselves. In other words: ditch Symbian and partner with Microsoft. It must rank as one of the most emotive corporate memos ever.

But many people are not having it. A few young ex-employees wrote a memo to Nokia shareholders, asking to be elected on the board. They agree that Symbian has to go, but they feel Nokia should speed up development of its own operating system Meebo. And ditch Elop.

But today the wildly popular Facebook page they had created to gather support, vanished along with their Plan B manifesto. It turns out it was a hoax from a bored engineer, that "really likes his iPhone". Or was it?
 

Stream that music, baby!

This week the Virtual Music website released their yearly 'heat map', a visualisation of web-based music consumption in the US. The first graph shows that a lot of services are green, i.e. online music consumption is up.

But what made us sit up is the second graph, which shows that YouTube as a platform for music consumption is 3 times as big as all of the other Pandoras, Last.FMs and Groovesharks combined.

We want more!

The Guardian reports the operators around the world are running out of bandwidth because of the hogging of new smart phones. Smartphones are the fastest-growing sector of the information technology market, growing 74% last year. And the problem will only get worse:

The ITU forecasts in a forthcoming report that the number of smartphones in use will rise from today's global estimate of 500m handsets to almost two billion by 2015.
 

Creative of the week – Jordi Parra

Jordi Parra is an interaction designer who manages to seamlessly blend technology and aesthetics. The project that travelled the Twitter waves this week was his Spotify player, which he developed to explore a the ways we interact with digital music. Read More >>

Tech insight of the week – Facebook, the Mobile Operating System

Disruptive technology never fails to excite us here at RAAK. When that technology is applicable to social, it makes us dance. You can just image what happened when the following morsel of news hit our timelines:

Gemalto, a company that brands themselves as world leaders in Digital Security, has just managed to get Facebook to run on a SIM chip.

Random? Not at all >>
 

Just before the holidays we called out 2011 as the year when the importance of mobile technology will force many companies to reconsider their use of media. Well here is more evidence.

The global mobile broadband count passed 500 million last year, and the forecast is that it will double this year and shoot past the 1 billion mark. And while last year’s CES was all about 3D TVs, this year saw a plethora of tablets (think iPad-me-too’s – but cheaper) running mostly on Android, Google’s new OS.

Scan that code

Talking about mobile. The ever-inspiring PSFK have just published a report on The Future of Mobile Tagging, the technology that includes the likes of QR codes and Microsoft Tags (who sponsored the document).

It contains a number of creative case-studies that show how you can use the technology to raise awareness, provide customers with information and help make the sale. One to bookmark.

We’re particularly intrigued by Likify, a Beta service by Belgian agency Boondoggle Lifelabs that links the QR code to a Facebook Like, enabling you to Like real-life objects, shops,…

And do give the below code a scan to try it.

It’s gotta be big – the Internet 2010 in numbers

For every Tweet sent in the world in 2010 (there were 27 billion), there were over 4000 emails (there were 107 Trillion). Just proving that older forms of social media are not going away soon. For that and other incredible stats see this post.

Does Reputation equal Influence?

If you have been reading our newsletter you know that we have been putting influence systems like Klout and PeerIndex through their paces. But what about reputation? If you understand a person’s reputation, could that be a way to define influence?

Before Quora, the current network du jour, came to dominate our inboxes, there was already a very similar service for tech people called Stack Overflow. So do Q&A services like Stack Overflow and Quora hold the key to getting to the bottom of influence – in a topic-specific way – in a way that Klout does not?

Robert Scoble mused this week: “After all, you don’t get reputation on Stack Overflow unless you can actually answer technical questions and have other people verify you are right most of the time.” Stack Overflow has actually made a list of those with the highest rankings and Robert reckons this would be gold dust for recruiters. Interesting times.

Is the Google algorithm becoming weak?

SEO is an important part of any online communication. And we’ve written before about how creating good content is a powerful means to make your way up the Google search results.

But this intriguing article talks about how ‘content farms’ are spamming the Google algorithm and effectively making search less likely to be relevant.

Companies that use social media make more money

So says the global management consulting firm McKinsey, who base this statement on a 4-year study on the impact of ‘collaborative Web 2.0 technologies’. Cue lively discussion about correlation and causality.

Tech insight of the week – The Gospel according to Javascript

In the beginning, when the web was created, Javascript was a language scoffed at by ‘real’ developers. It was the domain of pop-ups, banner ads and tacky cursor effects. This is not at all the case anymore. Read More >>

Creative of the Week – Koos Kombuis

There’s no doubting that the publishing world is currently in a flux. A great example of authors doing their own thing is Twitterdawn, a Twitter novel by renowned South African author and musician Koos Kombuis. Read More >>

Earlier this year Dominos Pizza reported a 29% rise in profits, a feat they ascribed to Foursquare and other social media tools. RAAK contacted them to find out more and they happily obliged. 
 

Social Media for teenagers? Think again.

The average age of a Facebook user is 38! And more than 61% of Facebook users are over 35. The average age of Twitter users is 39, Linkedin 44 and MySpace 31. See this infographic for more.
 

The SEO implications of Google Instant

Last week Google launched Google Instant. User can now get instant feedback – as they type – on whether their search queries are correct. Cool. But what about the impact on websites and SEO? Econsultancy featured some educated guesses by SEO experts that are worth considering.
 

Android on the rise

While Nokia has a new boss, trendspotters predict that the Android will be the world's second biggest mobile operating system, pushing Blackberry as well as Apple down the pecking order.
 

MyFry

Whatever mobile platform will become most popular, the app culture will somehow be part of its success. Early adaptor Stephen Fry has just launched his autobiography The Fry Chronicles in app form. And not just as an eBook. The MyFry app comes with a nice-looking visual interface and content tagging, which cleverly enables people to read it in a non-linear way.

Are URLs the new cookies?

Twitter's yearly traffic is up 400%. But the traffic on their own website is up by only 100%, with users preferring the use of clients like Tweetdeck and Hootsuite. Twitter has now announced a redesign of their .com site, which they hope will make it a far more popular destination. Techcrunch did a good appraisal.

But Twitter's real power may lie in the humble URL shortener. Alistair Croll points out that:

Web marketers obsess over the "funnel" — the steps from first contact to purchase. They try to optimize it constantly, tweaking an offer or moving an image. They want to know everything about a buyer or a visitor.

Web analytics is a huge industry, but the tools marketers rely on to understand visitors are breaking. Cookies, long the basis for tracking users, need web browsers to store them. In a world where we share URLs via email and social networks, those cookies get lost along the way, and with them the ability to track viral spread of a message.

And when we're talking apps this problem becomes worse. However, because Twitter controls the core of its service it does not have this problem. Croll again:

This is why short URLs are so important. URLs survive the share. Because the interested reader is forced to go to the URL shortener to map the short URL to the real one, whoever owns the shortener sees the engagement between the audience and the content, no matter where it happens. That's why URLs are the new cookies.
 

Spot the pig

A South African is being hunted by police for his reporting of police road blocks on Twitter. A debate over circumvention of the law versus citizens organising against corrupt police has eschewed.

Is this evidence of the malevolence of the crowd or another Ushahidi? At first @pigspotter reported road blocks himself. Now his 'crowd' are sending him reports and he Retweets it. Read an interview with him here. Thanks to @Kuberkoos for the informing us.
 

Creative of the week – Evan Roth

Remember those GIF animations? Those were the days. Now, artist/researcher and founder of the Graffiti Research Lab Evan Roth has edited his archive of his old school animations into a 10-minute GIF-fest.
 

Tech insight of the week – Death of RSS? Or Death of XML?

This week saw a flood of Death of RSS posts, tweets, and statuses. Most of these came in the wake of the announcement that Bloglines, the web-based RSS reader, will be shutting down on the 1st of October. It made Adriaan think about the Death of XML.

Yet there are still many that are oblivious as to how Google’s Pagerank works. In this video I explain how PageRank works.

Google themselves defines their ranking system, called PageRank like this:

‘PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important”.’

Note Google does not talk about domain rank. It largely ignores domains – like wewillraakyou.com – but looks at the value of individual pages like wewillraakyou.com/hoes-does-google-page-rank-work/

Every page has a value merely for existing on the world wide web. When a page links to this page it transfers Pagerank to it. If a page has two links it splits the value it can transfer between these two links.

Google's PageRank formula - makes the web a meritocracy

In other words, links are like votes. But not all voters are equal. Voters that have received many links themselves can transfer more voting power.

Therefor the BBC site, which has a lot of amazing content and to which many people link, has pages with tremendous PageRank. If one of these pages link to your webpage, you are guaranteed to get a major Pagerank boost.

This system has meant that web search acts largely in a meritocratic fashion. If somebody does something remarkable, it tends to rise to the top.

It also means that if you have a mediocre website, content, service or product you will have to spend top dollar to get eyeballs. In other words, just as with social sharing the rule applies for search: advertising is a tax on an unremarkable product.

But not only that, PR is not countering. The industry has not moved into doing lucrative SEO either. Philip Sheldrake put it eloquently:

Has the PR industry missed the boat on the optimisation of web content to attract the attention of Google, more commonly known as search engine optimisation? The emergence of the multi-million pound search industry during the last decade suggests that may be the case.

Search agencies are increasingly packaging planning, content development and analytics, into a payment-by-results model. It’s a compelling proposition for a marketing director that is seeking guaranteed outcomes.

Now search agencies are starting to use PR tactics such as press releases, bylined content and wire distribution to drive their campaigns prompting the scrutiny of the role of PR versus SEO.

Are PR and the SEO industry in fact playing the same field?

A distinction was made by Kelvin Newman, Creative Director at SiteVisibility (an SEO company), between technical SEO and link building SEO. The former, I have argued on this blog, is actually dying a slow death. When I repeated this assertion yesterday, it was greeted with nods and disagreement in equal measure.

The point was made that SEO is the science and PR the art of using content to build reputation. And as such, said Wilson McInnes, Managing Director of NixonMcInnes, they come from two very different perspectives and even appeal to different kinds of people. PR was strategic, while SEO was merely tactical. PR was concerned with brand, SEO was not.

Good and small agencies are starting to offer an integrated solution. But all this was academic, was a consensus of sorts. Clients, particularly big ones, still have separate budgets for PR, advertising, SEO, digital. And until this changes, agencies will have to pitch specific services, even if there is a lot of overlap.

Still, it was felt that SEO in particular was moving in to eat PR’s lunch.

In that respect social media and PR are much closer related than PR and the SEO industry me thinks. Social media is about brand too. It is strategic, not just tactical. Because good integration of social media into a business is likely to fundamentally change the way the business operates.

But for some time now I have wondered about the added value of traditional SEO practices, and whether in fact SEO as a discipline is not in terminal decline.

SEO is being being replaced by another practice. Let me explain why SEO is in decline and what will replace it.

The SEOBOOK blog also recently wondered about the future of SEO:

SEO came about soon after the advent of the web crawler. The commercial imperative was obvious – where there was web traffic, there was money to be made. Positioning a page first in the engines was pretty much a licence to print money.

Still is, of course.

But they continued:

“In 2009, SEO plays fall into three distinct categories.

* Agency model: people offer services to others for a fee.
* Affiliate model: people gather traffic and funnel it somewhere else for a performance fee.
* Content model: people generate content and make money off advertising.

The last model is, I’m guessing, is one a lot of SEOs will pursue. Many do so now. “

That most SEOs will make their money from content may come as a startling prediction. But not if you consider these three developments killing traditional SEO:

1. Many platforms and frameworks for web development currently come out of the box SEO primed;
2. Some activity does not happen on the open web – take Facebook – and when it does, the page and the link is not its primary unit (yet). Take Twitter as another example.
3. The most successful long term SEO technique is called Linkbait and it’s got little to do with SEO.

Many platforms and frameworks for web development currently come out of the box SEO primed

Are you doing eCommerce? Magento is one of the great new eCommerce platforms and it does what you would want SEO wise. Each product has its own page and link and the Title, Headings,… tags are sorted in accordance with SEO best practise.

Matt Cutts, head of search quality at Google reckons WordPress is the best search engine optimised blog platform and in a video he tells exactly why it is a fantastic SEO choice. WordPress is of course now the platform of choice for much more than just blogs.

What about other web publishing platforms? I’m no Joomla expert, but as far as I can tell it is also SEO-ready without too much additional effort.

Put frankly, anybody building such a CMS, blogging or eCommerce platform that does not integrate SEO best practice is foolish. See how the mighty Flash is struggling for survival today. There’s only one reason. Search engines can’t make sense of Flash in spite of lots of people trying to make it SEO friendly.

It is fair to say that only when building a completely bespoke website or when significant mods to existing frameworks are done that SEO expertise needs to be on hand.

Some activity does not happen on the open web and when it does, the page and the link is not its primary unit (yet)

Facebook is huge. Facebook wants its members to be more open and expose their users’ Walls, Status Updates and Photo Albums to the open Web.

But it is a tall order to get users to change their habits when part of Facebook’s success was the exclusivity of interacting only with your crowd.

The majority of activity on Facebook is still hidden from Google and despite Facebook’s best intentions this is unlikely to change soon.

And outside Facebook there are other problems for search engines. Says the SEOBOOK:

Consider social media. Is a page the basic unit of Twitter? No, it’s the sentence. How about Youtube? The video. Social networks? The person. All can be extracted, re-purposed and dis-intermediated without losing meaning.

And then there’s the problem of the real time web.

When Michael Jackson died, Google was beaten to the punch by Twitter and Wikipedia for a couple of hours. So far the real time web remains out of SEO’s reach. Yes, Google now integrates Tweets into its results, but are they ranked? No. Then it’s outside the domain of SEO.

Conclusion? SEO is still very important but its reach does no longer cover everything.

The success of Linkbait – Linkbait is not SEO

The highly respected SEOMoz blog recently evaluated the continued significance of Linkbait as an SEO strategy even when other techniques are failing or changing.

“There have been more than a few debates and suppositions over the years about the potential value of linkbait/viral content strategies and whether search engines will always reward these practices. Today (actually, it’s late at night here in Oslo), I wanted to tackle this debate and succinctly present reasons why I believe this methodology will remain powerful and effective in the long run.”

But hang on – what the hell is Linkbait? If you’re thinking it’s some uber-complicated strategy requiring sophisticated technical know-how you’re very wrong.

British SEO expert Patrick Altoft explains what Linkbait is:

Linkbait is the practise of adding content to websites with the aim of attracting links from other sites. The content can take various forms, from a unique tool, or a breaking news story, to a well written article to a controversial image.

This simple definition should send bells ringing. No, the definition is not wrong. But what kind of people do you want to hire to create so-called Linkbait? SEO experts?

A good journalist smells of Linkbait. A film director reeks of it. Calling Linkbait an SEO strategy is like calling war a kind of politics. Perhaps it is a kind of politics, but it does not describe the kind of things that happen in a war effectively. In a war you need a different set of skills and mindset than in vanilla politics.

Why does Google like Linkbait?

Because it follows the model of how Google’s search works. Namely that it’s a meritocratic selection engine, which treats links likes votes. Not unlike Digg if you think about it. In short, search is a social form of voting and good Linkbait respects that model.

In this video – which we have posted before – Matt Cutts, head of Search Quality at Google explains Linkbait and how effective and cheap it can be to use.

Linkbait encourages creativity

What kind of Linkbait has proven to be successful? A recent SEOMoz study asked this question in the context of blogs. This is what they found:

* Content is the most important thing to a post, but posts with extra visual content attract extra links.
* Adding simple visual content, like lists and images, can increase the number of (Independent Linking Domains) ILDs by good percent.
* Posts with videos will attract almost 3 times more ILDs than a plain text post.
* Posts with all three media types (videos, images, and lists) will attract almost 6 times more ILDs than a plain text post.
* Contrary to common beliefs, large posts seem to attract more links than posts with 900 words or less.
* Posts with between 1800 and 3000 words will attract more than 15 times more ILDs than a post with less than 600 words.

To summarise it. Content attracts links. And content that’s well organized attracts even more links.

If you want to play the Linkbait game really well you’re going to look to hire copywriters, journalists, photographers, editors, animators, videographers and yes even media-savvy programmers – the so-called creative technologists. (The New York Times recently laid off staff and hired two dozen programmers.)

In short, Linkbait requires content skills, not search engine optimization skills.

But is SEO’d content itself really all it is cracked up to be?

I’m going to – reluctantly – drive one more stake through SEO’s heart. Pay special attention if you are in the business of publishing.

The Guardian recently featured an interesting article on why SEO should not be the only driver in site design. It featured the opinion of Matt Kelly, the associate editor of the Mirror, responsible for their recent successful forays online.

According to Kelly, “users” are people who discover content through Google, devour it, and then return to their search engine to look for more elsewhere.

“Often they have no idea which website it was they found the content on. Result? Users don’t care about the websites they visit, and as a consequence, advertisers are less willing to spend their cash to be associated with our content.
–
“We are to blame for allowing ourselves to be talked into believing that search engine optimisation is the be-all and end-all of successful website design.”

But, said Kelly, accumulating increasing numbers of unique users is of no long-term value. It is an “absurd metric that values one visit from one random Google News user as highly as daily visits, for an hour a time, from someone who treasures the content we produce.”

He argued that the “quest for a gazillion unique users from wherever, and for however little engagement, has been responsible for denuding many of our newspaper sites of the great brand and value and character that actually differentiates what we do, from all the aggregators and cheap, worthless news sites out there.”

Yes, an SEO’d site can drive users that don’t know your service or business. But you need to make sure they love what they find.