Well what i actually mean is how much does it cost to feed a bird? and the answer is in the case of the little twitter bird it is somewhere near $100 million. Although the exact amount has not been disclosed twitter released information on its blog on Friday (25/09/09) that it has 5 new investors (i won’t list them as you can see it first hand from the “birds mouth” on http://blog.twitter.com/). It was greatly publicised that they were looking for investment in the region of $100m and speculation is that they have achieved this or close to.
Now if you think of this in terms of the dragons den (which it isn’t), then twitter has no way of making money.....at present. There are all sorts of reports, speculation, blogs talking about how they intend to monetise twitter, obviously most of these involve some sort of advertising - from spam tweeting people, banner advertising right through to people selling their twitter followers through e-bay or in time twitter brokers. All twitter themselves have said “Do we hate advertising? Of course not” (reassuring to investors surely that they do want to make money). And in terms of how they intend to do this the only indication from twitter is.....
“The idea of taking money to run traditional banner ads on Twitter.com has always been low on our list of interesting ways to generate revenue. However, facilitating connections between businesses and individuals in meaningful and relevant ways is compelling. We're going to leave the door open for exploration in this area.” http://blog.twitter.com/
So what in the world does this have to do with news, Adfero, online news consumption, or any of the Adfero staff or products? well the fact that twitter can get that kind of investment with no way of making money just shows how much people value online as a communication and information tool. Especially when you consider in the last 12 months the Evening Standard was sold for £1 (and debts) and News Corp announced £4.4billion losses in Q4 2008. There is no wonder that online marketing spend has overtaken TV advertising spend (as reported yesterday in the BBC http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8280557.stm )
I wonder if once it matures the twitter bird will lay the golden egg.
Thursday, 1 October 2009
Friday, 18 September 2009
Well done to the Adfero Editorial teams.
This is a big thank you to all correspondents, lead correspondent, desk heads, sub editors, editors and everyone else involved in writing articles for our customers. For the third month running our “negative editorial actions” i.e. errors, are down.
They have reduced the percentage of errors from 0.645% of articles containing an error in July to 0.632% of articles containing an error in August. In real terms this means one error in every 158 articles, which is a great achievement.
Editorial quality is obviously key to any news agency and of course no one gets it perfect. How many of you see errors in the Metro on a daily basis? Or the BBC website, especially over the weekend? There is no industry standard for this and no agency ever seems to want to stick their head above the parapet and say we have ‘x’ or ’y’ error rate.
For example this article posted on the BBC I came across this morning about the London paper closing http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/8262303.stm. Im sure it should read “News International” not “New International” as published. I love the BBC but it is still run by humans.
So without this we can only go by our “rule of thumb” and I would be interested to see how many of you reading this truly believe they could read 158 articles on the BBC website, Metro, or just about any other publication without noticing an error?!
For the cynical people out there reading this blog and probably quite rightly pointing out a huge array of errors in it (it’s a good job I don’t work in our editorial department!), then I refer you back to the opening article and disclaimer in it. So to finish with one of my favourite quotes from Mark Twain “I despise a man who can only spell a word one way”.
They have reduced the percentage of errors from 0.645% of articles containing an error in July to 0.632% of articles containing an error in August. In real terms this means one error in every 158 articles, which is a great achievement.
Editorial quality is obviously key to any news agency and of course no one gets it perfect. How many of you see errors in the Metro on a daily basis? Or the BBC website, especially over the weekend? There is no industry standard for this and no agency ever seems to want to stick their head above the parapet and say we have ‘x’ or ’y’ error rate.
For example this article posted on the BBC I came across this morning about the London paper closing http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/8262303.stm. Im sure it should read “News International” not “New International” as published. I love the BBC but it is still run by humans.
So without this we can only go by our “rule of thumb” and I would be interested to see how many of you reading this truly believe they could read 158 articles on the BBC website, Metro, or just about any other publication without noticing an error?!
For the cynical people out there reading this blog and probably quite rightly pointing out a huge array of errors in it (it’s a good job I don’t work in our editorial department!), then I refer you back to the opening article and disclaimer in it. So to finish with one of my favourite quotes from Mark Twain “I despise a man who can only spell a word one way”.
Thursday, 17 September 2009
Adfero Autumn
Role on Autumn – This may not be a popular season for the masses but it’s an end to the summer slog for stories. As im sure your aware parliament shuts from July 22nd to the last week in August meaning real top level stories are rarer than rocking horse.... “footprints”. Sorry to everyone involved in stories over the summer but are A levels really getting so much easier each year they deserve front page headlines each and every year? Or is this just a media symptom of MP’s holidaying.
Like the Mp’s mentioned above I am back from my holidays and ready to Blog again! In fact straight back in to conference season. Adfero will be attending everything from Ad:tech to the conservative party conference, how will we keep track of everything happening all at once? Well reading about the CPC it came to light – through social media – especially Twitter.
This year there will be a special squad of 'Twit ambassadors' whose job is to provide the discussions in real-time to attendee’s who sign-up to the service, meaning you, I or David Cameron won’t miss a moment of Alan Duncan’s verbal eloquence.
I think it will be very interesting to see how the parties use social networking during these events, especially with the sound bite nature of twitter allowing only 140 characters. It should allow parties to transfer more policies to a wider audience.
Will this catch on? Will Lobby groups etc produce twitifesto’s – kind of twitter friendly manifesto that are no more than 140 characters? At Adfero we have been working with our opinion makers to produce 3 minute video manifesto’s and it seems really effective in gaining public backing. What we are finding is it seems a lot less “intimidating” to watch a 3 min video rather than wade through a full manifesto and the consensus is that this is making their manifestos available to a wider audience.
As a nation we are experiencing a collective decreasing span of attention? We want the info we want, when we want it, and summarised. Perhaps readers digest should get ready for a boom!
Like the Mp’s mentioned above I am back from my holidays and ready to Blog again! In fact straight back in to conference season. Adfero will be attending everything from Ad:tech to the conservative party conference, how will we keep track of everything happening all at once? Well reading about the CPC it came to light – through social media – especially Twitter.
This year there will be a special squad of 'Twit ambassadors' whose job is to provide the discussions in real-time to attendee’s who sign-up to the service, meaning you, I or David Cameron won’t miss a moment of Alan Duncan’s verbal eloquence.
I think it will be very interesting to see how the parties use social networking during these events, especially with the sound bite nature of twitter allowing only 140 characters. It should allow parties to transfer more policies to a wider audience.
Will this catch on? Will Lobby groups etc produce twitifesto’s – kind of twitter friendly manifesto that are no more than 140 characters? At Adfero we have been working with our opinion makers to produce 3 minute video manifesto’s and it seems really effective in gaining public backing. What we are finding is it seems a lot less “intimidating” to watch a 3 min video rather than wade through a full manifesto and the consensus is that this is making their manifestos available to a wider audience.
As a nation we are experiencing a collective decreasing span of attention? We want the info we want, when we want it, and summarised. Perhaps readers digest should get ready for a boom!
Wednesday, 15 July 2009
Adfero’s Dress Down Friday – pullovers for politics?
Firstly let me apologise to anyone who is reading this blog, as this post is totally off topic. I am not even going to mention online media consumption in this post - it truly is about dress down Fridays.
As you can probably guess, last Friday Adfero had a dress down day across the Manchester and London offices. The outcome was brilliant and over £300 was donated in total across two charities. Worth saying a thank you here to any Adfero employees taking part and especially those who made a donation (those of you who dodged the collection box should be ashamed). So clearly this is an excellent way of raising money for charity and in fact helped me raise money a few months ago for a charity London marathon run.
Personally i dread the idea of DDF not partially because of memories of school where “own choice day” was just an excuse for the older children to take the Michael out of you for wearing Nick trainers from the market rather than Nikes. That said on Friday i was shocked at how good DDF is for getting to know your colleagues. I saw people talking to each other about bands on each other's T shirts, people asking where they could get a particular “top”, people shocked that they were wearing the same clothes and people trying on each other’s hats. From a personal experience I found colleagues asking me how me how old I was when my clothes had given away the secret that despite being bald I’m not just a few years away from drawing my pension.
So an excellent success all round and a good fun day at Adfero but this did start me thinking that if wearing your own clothes can break down barriers and shyness with colleagues, will wearing your own clothes ever be political vote winner? Clearly people want to empathise with celebrities and politicians and seeing them out of their made up appearance makes them seem more normal. Taking this one step further, will this ever catch on with politics? Would you relate more to your local politician if they were wearing jeans and a jumper except on special occasions? Would seeing Gordon Brown in an AC/DC T-shirt make you realise he is still a person not a senseless face?
I think it would take brave politician to be the first to find out but i would admire them for it.
As you can probably guess, last Friday Adfero had a dress down day across the Manchester and London offices. The outcome was brilliant and over £300 was donated in total across two charities. Worth saying a thank you here to any Adfero employees taking part and especially those who made a donation (those of you who dodged the collection box should be ashamed). So clearly this is an excellent way of raising money for charity and in fact helped me raise money a few months ago for a charity London marathon run.
Personally i dread the idea of DDF not partially because of memories of school where “own choice day” was just an excuse for the older children to take the Michael out of you for wearing Nick trainers from the market rather than Nikes. That said on Friday i was shocked at how good DDF is for getting to know your colleagues. I saw people talking to each other about bands on each other's T shirts, people asking where they could get a particular “top”, people shocked that they were wearing the same clothes and people trying on each other’s hats. From a personal experience I found colleagues asking me how me how old I was when my clothes had given away the secret that despite being bald I’m not just a few years away from drawing my pension.
So an excellent success all round and a good fun day at Adfero but this did start me thinking that if wearing your own clothes can break down barriers and shyness with colleagues, will wearing your own clothes ever be political vote winner? Clearly people want to empathise with celebrities and politicians and seeing them out of their made up appearance makes them seem more normal. Taking this one step further, will this ever catch on with politics? Would you relate more to your local politician if they were wearing jeans and a jumper except on special occasions? Would seeing Gordon Brown in an AC/DC T-shirt make you realise he is still a person not a senseless face?
I think it would take brave politician to be the first to find out but i would admire them for it.
Friday, 26 June 2009
Habithash...tag
Meaning the huge habitat hashtag twitter fiasco. The basics of this “huge story” that “rocked the nation” was that those commercially-minded folks down at Habitat UK (which automatically makes them evil according to some reports I have read) fooled Twitter followers into viewing their tweets by inserting hashtags (keywords) so that the tweets would feature highly in the “trending topics” (a list of current hot topics).
Now Habitat clearly went about it in the wrong way and the tweets were just sales promotions about “20% off summer range” with “ipod” or “Iran elections” inserted randomly which has angered some, well a lot of, Twitter users. No doubt we will be hearing about this faux pas in social media talks and conferences until the cows come home but it did make me think two things immediately which were:
1. They went about it all wrong, that is not in dispute, but what if they were making an actual comment on the current affairs issue? Would their comments or tweets be less valuable to other users because they are an organisation rather than an individual? Would the public like to know the opinions of organisations where they spend their cash? And if so could this be used to the benefit of the organisation (like Benetton, crap clothes but they stood for something = enough money to run a F1 team).
3. Apparently the offending employee at Habitat who came up with the idea was an intern. No, my final idea was not actually why were they letting an intern loose on the company Twitter account, but what advert did they use to get the intern. Was it Twit wanted? Summer twit positions available? Want to be twit? How about a twit internship??
Now Habitat clearly went about it in the wrong way and the tweets were just sales promotions about “20% off summer range” with “ipod” or “Iran elections” inserted randomly which has angered some, well a lot of, Twitter users. No doubt we will be hearing about this faux pas in social media talks and conferences until the cows come home but it did make me think two things immediately which were:
1. They went about it all wrong, that is not in dispute, but what if they were making an actual comment on the current affairs issue? Would their comments or tweets be less valuable to other users because they are an organisation rather than an individual? Would the public like to know the opinions of organisations where they spend their cash? And if so could this be used to the benefit of the organisation (like Benetton, crap clothes but they stood for something = enough money to run a F1 team).
3. Apparently the offending employee at Habitat who came up with the idea was an intern. No, my final idea was not actually why were they letting an intern loose on the company Twitter account, but what advert did they use to get the intern. Was it Twit wanted? Summer twit positions available? Want to be twit? How about a twit internship??
Wednesday, 17 June 2009
Nofollow links, Matt Cutts, Google, content, evolution, Adfero and a long rant by me.
Apologies for a disjointed title but it sums up very well what this post is about. Whilst this post may sound like a shameless plug for one of Adfero’s products, DirectNews, it is not. Yes, it is more proof that in online marketing content is king (which Adfero has known for many years) but I’m going to talk about how this relates to evolution because, well it has been bothering me for years and i think even OM can learn from mother nature!
Ever since learning about search engines, SEO agencies and how they work, I am constantly reminded about my undergrad developmental biology course. The course was based around the constant battle between predator (or parasite) and prey and how it drives the evolution of both species (through selection pressures to eat and not be eaten). For example, amphibians were the first land-inhabiting creatures who evolved from sea creatures and flourished because they could escape the predators of the sea. This process is called a co-evolutionary arms race, with each species evolving to better catch prey and in turn the prey evolving to evade the predator.
Effectively it has always seemed that Google wants to direct users to relevant information available on the web. Google’s mission is “to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible” (whilst picking up some advertising cash along the way). Information is expensive as it is difficult to find and report and more costly to create (especially legally if you get it wrong). This means many organisations who want to rank highly try to fiddle Google. Google then works out how this is happening and changes its algorithm to pick up on these cheats. Can you now start to see the basis for a co-evolutionary arms race?
Following a recent appearance at SMX advance in the US, Matt Cutts (Google associate in Search Quality) brought up this issue of nofollow links and how they affect page ranks. http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ and the title of the post is PageRank sculpting.
Over the years SEO agencies have been trying to sculpt page rank through their site. The basic premise behind this stems from the idea that the page rank “carried over” in the page rank flow is the page rank value of the page/number of outgoing links. At basic face value it then seems to increase page rank flow to another page of “your choosing”; you limit the amount of outbound links from that page to boost the flow of page rank to the desired page. This does not always fit with user experiences so people have created nofollow links that allow a user to navigate, but not the Google spiders.
Matt has now revealed in his blog that this changed (or evolved) some time ago to recognise nofollow links and still counts them in the above equation.
He poses and answers the following question: Does this mean “PageRank sculpting” (trying to change how PageRank flows within your site using e.g. nofollow) is a bad idea?
A: I wouldn’t recommend it, because it isn’t the most effective way to utilize your PageRank. In general, I would let PageRank flow freely within your site. The notion of “PageRank sculpting” has always been a second- or third-order recommendation for us. I would recommend the first-order things to pay attention to are 1) making great content that will attract links in the first place, and 2) choosing a site architecture that makes your site usable/crawlable for humans and search engines alike.
Now in biology, evolution is blind. If a predator could predict the evolution of its prey and change to take advantage of it then it would be a very happy predator (for a few generations, but that’s another rant). But here in this online co-evolutionary arms race, the prey i.e. Google is actually telling the agencies how to get their traffic - with content.
So why aren’t the agencies jumping all over this?
Ever since learning about search engines, SEO agencies and how they work, I am constantly reminded about my undergrad developmental biology course. The course was based around the constant battle between predator (or parasite) and prey and how it drives the evolution of both species (through selection pressures to eat and not be eaten). For example, amphibians were the first land-inhabiting creatures who evolved from sea creatures and flourished because they could escape the predators of the sea. This process is called a co-evolutionary arms race, with each species evolving to better catch prey and in turn the prey evolving to evade the predator.
Effectively it has always seemed that Google wants to direct users to relevant information available on the web. Google’s mission is “to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible” (whilst picking up some advertising cash along the way). Information is expensive as it is difficult to find and report and more costly to create (especially legally if you get it wrong). This means many organisations who want to rank highly try to fiddle Google. Google then works out how this is happening and changes its algorithm to pick up on these cheats. Can you now start to see the basis for a co-evolutionary arms race?
Following a recent appearance at SMX advance in the US, Matt Cutts (Google associate in Search Quality) brought up this issue of nofollow links and how they affect page ranks. http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ and the title of the post is PageRank sculpting.
Over the years SEO agencies have been trying to sculpt page rank through their site. The basic premise behind this stems from the idea that the page rank “carried over” in the page rank flow is the page rank value of the page/number of outgoing links. At basic face value it then seems to increase page rank flow to another page of “your choosing”; you limit the amount of outbound links from that page to boost the flow of page rank to the desired page. This does not always fit with user experiences so people have created nofollow links that allow a user to navigate, but not the Google spiders.
Matt has now revealed in his blog that this changed (or evolved) some time ago to recognise nofollow links and still counts them in the above equation.
He poses and answers the following question: Does this mean “PageRank sculpting” (trying to change how PageRank flows within your site using e.g. nofollow) is a bad idea?
A: I wouldn’t recommend it, because it isn’t the most effective way to utilize your PageRank. In general, I would let PageRank flow freely within your site. The notion of “PageRank sculpting” has always been a second- or third-order recommendation for us. I would recommend the first-order things to pay attention to are 1) making great content that will attract links in the first place, and 2) choosing a site architecture that makes your site usable/crawlable for humans and search engines alike.
Now in biology, evolution is blind. If a predator could predict the evolution of its prey and change to take advantage of it then it would be a very happy predator (for a few generations, but that’s another rant). But here in this online co-evolutionary arms race, the prey i.e. Google is actually telling the agencies how to get their traffic - with content.
So why aren’t the agencies jumping all over this?
Friday, 5 June 2009
Adfero: Does the UK have the best news?
Well yes. I have often thought this for many reasons (working for Adfero obviously) but now apparently those clever guys down at comScore have proved it.
ComScore describe themselves as "a global leader in measuring the digital world and the preferred source of digital marketing intelligence". They recently added the following press release
http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2009/5/U.K._Newspaper_Sites_Aattract_Visitors_from_Around_the_World
As the title suggests, this PR piece shows stats about where online newspaper readers are based. Unexpectedly, the newspaper with the highest percentage of non-UK readers is the Mail Online with 73% of users/readers being based outside Britain.
The piece is excellent and well worth a read. I was trying hard to think of why this would be so high? Does anybody know?
I had a few ideas but nothing conclusive.
Language – obviously English has a wider audience than most other languages.
How people find the pages – Does the Mail have more Google News visitors? If so this will display UK articles to US audiences.
What was happening in the UK – the stats are for March. Was there something very big of international interest happening in March?
ComScore describe themselves as "a global leader in measuring the digital world and the preferred source of digital marketing intelligence". They recently added the following press release
http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2009/5/U.K._Newspaper_Sites_Aattract_Visitors_from_Around_the_World
As the title suggests, this PR piece shows stats about where online newspaper readers are based. Unexpectedly, the newspaper with the highest percentage of non-UK readers is the Mail Online with 73% of users/readers being based outside Britain.
The piece is excellent and well worth a read. I was trying hard to think of why this would be so high? Does anybody know?
I had a few ideas but nothing conclusive.
Language – obviously English has a wider audience than most other languages.
How people find the pages – Does the Mail have more Google News visitors? If so this will display UK articles to US audiences.
What was happening in the UK – the stats are for March. Was there something very big of international interest happening in March?
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