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It seems only yes­ter­day that I wrote my last post on QR Codes, but just checked and it was last Novem­ber and my god has a lot hap­pened! Maybe, just maybe, they’re catch­ing on.

Despite encour­ag­ing signs in 2010, there were many who just believed that QR Codes, or mobile bar codes, were purely an interim tech­nol­ogy wait­ing for the newer, funkier tech­nolo­gies such as NFC and aug­mented real­ity to get their act together and take over. But, as is the way, this hasn’t hap­pened yet. Sure, things have pro­gressed, but they still do not yet offer com­pelling rea­sons for mobile manufacturers/networks to make the invest­ment to uni­ver­sally include them. This is due to, amongst other things, some inter­op­er­abil­ity issues between Wik­i­tude and Layar tech­nol­ogy, the debate over user inter­faces and the pros and cons of real-time ver­sus cached data.

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This week saw the launch of Google’s lat­est devel­op­ment to lever­age the social graph for their search results. While the com­pany has used social cues from Twit­ter and Flickr for more than a year to improve organic rank­ings, they are now cre­at­ing their own rec­om­men­da­tion func­tion and extend­ing it to both paid search and organic search.

The fea­ture is sim­ply called “plus one”. If you’re famil­iar with Face­book adverts and likes, the con­cept is not very dif­fer­ent. When users are logged into Google, they will be able to rate indi­vid­ual search results and adverts by click­ing the “plus one” sym­bol. Their friends will then see the endorse­ment.

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In 2010 we saw plenty of inno­va­tion from the search engines and social net­works, but what’s in store for 2011? I expect the inno­va­tion to con­tinue with a fur­ther push into real-time dis­play, AdWords automa­tion and, ulti­mately, less focus on key­words and more on mar­ket­ing objectives.

Keyword-less search mar­ket­ing and Google Boost

Google is hard at work gain­ing more adver­tis­ers by low­er­ing the bar­rier (i.e. cost) for AdWords self-service. Over the years we’ve seen new mod­els such as cost-per-lead for com­par­i­son — and prod­uct list­ing —  ads. These, in my view, are only the first few steps into the keyword-less search mar­ket­ing expe­ri­ence.

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This week, I’m tak­ing an intro­spec­tive glance at myself. This edi­tion is about search­ing, remem­ber­ing, acknowl­edg­ing and keep­ing safe. Wrap up warm, and read on…

G00Gl3 4 H4ck3r$

If you can read the above, then you should be using this ver­sion of Google for your daily search require­ments. If you didn’t under­stand the above, then click­ing on this link will be akin to chang­ing your smart­phone to Ara­bic and for­get­ting how to turn it back… 3nj0y!

Finally, a thank you.

It’s amaz­ing how quickly soci­ety moves on. The snow comes in and every­one acts sur­prised that they didn’t pre­pare for it. “We’ll be ready next year!” we all say, but then, 12 months later, we are all sur­prised again.

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2011 may very well be the year of mobile for mar­keters. A num­ber of fac­tors are com­bin­ing to make mobile as key and excit­ing a mar­ket­ing plat­form as online was in the early 2000’s.

Crit­i­cal mass

Dri­ving the rev­o­lu­tion is the fact that smart­phone pen­e­tra­tion has now reached crit­i­cal mass. Accord­ing to Comscore’s State of Mobile report pub­lished in June, 1 in 4 Euro­peans already have a smart­phone, so beyond SMS and pho­tos, web access and apps are now becom­ing key uses for  mobiles.

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Look­ing back on my youth, I used to pride myself on my abil­ity to remem­ber all of my friends’ tele­phone num­bers and every uni­ver­sity lec­ture that I had over the course of a week. Now, such feats of mem­ory are no longer required of my brain – my mobile devices and online ser­vices remem­ber and man­age these tasks for me.


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By now you’ve prob­a­bly heard of or even tried out Google’s lat­est search inno­va­tion — Google Instant. The new fea­ture lever­ages Google’s deep search insights and data crunch­ing abil­i­ties to try pre­dict what users are search­ing for and serve results even before they’ve fin­ished writ­ing. As users are typ­ing their query Google is con­stantly refresh­ing the web­site with pre­dicted results.

While it has just been rolled out in the UK and US to users logged into Google this week, and so empir­i­cal data is scarce, there are at least two early indi­ca­tions to how this will impact search mar­ket­ing:

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Google has announced that it is chang­ing its ad poli­cies to allow adver­tis­ers to use third party trade­marks in their ad copies, even with­out approval from the trade­mark owner. The change is aimed at allow­ing reseller and com­po­nent seller etc, to clearly com­mu­ni­cate the brands they sell or support.

The pol­icy is already in place in the US, and will soon extend to the UK, Ire­land and Canada.

Fur­ther­more, as a con­se­quence of Google’s recent win over Louis Vuit­ton in the Euro­pean Court of Jus­tice and also French High Court that allowed com­pet­i­tive trade­mark key­word bid­ding, this will now be opened up across the EU. This is already the case in most other mar­kets such as the UK.

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Just a quick post to point to an inter­est­ing arti­cle by Nate Elliott at For­rester that looks at tag­ging video to gain a high page rank­ing for organic blended results on Google.

This will cer­tainly be a case of get it while it’s hot. Once every­one is doing it, things will get a whole bunch tougher again.

We’re really excited about an upcom­ing event we’re co-hosting with a bunch of like-minded part­ners. On Novem­ber 4th we’re launch­ing the Euro­pean Demand Gen­er­a­tion Sum­mit in part­ner­ship with Google, Elo­qua, BrightTALK and Mar­ke­tOne. It’s going to be held in Lon­don at Alti­tude, which is on the very top floor of Mill­bank tower with views across Lon­don. Speak­ers include Amanda Job­bins, Omniture’s Neil Mor­gan, Jeremy Bevan from Nov­ell and Justin Gale, a senior online mar­keter from HP.

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