The Adfero Blog

Adfero: Does anyone know how much bird feed costs these days?

2009-10-01T11:20:00.001+01:00

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.

Well done to the Adfero Editorial teams.

2009-09-18T12:14:00.001+01:00

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”.

Adfero Autumn

2009-09-17T15:08:00.002+01:00

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!

Nofollow links, Matt Cutts, Google, content, evolution, Adfero and a long rant by me.

2009-06-17T17:07:00.004+01:00

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?

Adfero: Google Wonder Wheel and keywords

2009-05-28T18:41:00.014+01:00

Back to business, no more celebs. I have been playing around with some of Google’s new options when searching. In the blue bar just below the search box there is an option for “show options” -see below.

Clicking on this brings up a whole host of different search options that allow you to restrict your search and make it more relevant. I won’t go over what all of these do - Google will happily tell you - but I was particularly interested in the second from the bottom - Wonder Wheel.

When I searched for “renewable energy” it brought up a whole host of related topics, as the example below demonstrates.

When I clicked on one of the related topics - “types of renewable energy” it brought up the associated Wonder Wheel and the search results on the right changed to reflect the refined search topic – see below.

That is a simple explanation of how it works from a user's point of view. But how does Google select related topics? I can't find out. I must have read every blog and Google file available on the Wonder Wheel and no one wants to tell me!

I assume that if the wheel is automated by Google then the related content must be related to what people have previously searched for in the same Google session but I could be completely wrong.

If this is the case then surely this has a huge commercial benefit to people trying to launch new products, sites or even benchmark competition. Can it be used to generate related keywords to focus optimisation on?

Do you know? Can anybody tell me?

Adfero’s Dress Down Friday – pullovers for politics?

2009-07-15T17:55:00.001+01:00

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.

Habithash...tag

2009-06-26T16:58:00.005+01:00

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??

Adfero: Does the UK have the best news?

2009-06-05T12:18:00.002+01:00

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?

Online video rocks – I’m going video

2009-05-29T17:47:00.001+01:00

Ok, well maybe not me but hopefully someone without a face for radio will be going video for me.
It's late on Friday so I'm going to keep this quick.

In the online media world there's a buzz around this data from the US Global Web Index which has been compiled into a market research report by Lightspeed Reaserch for Trendstream.

It all sounds very dull when I phrase it like that but preliminary statics of the US show that online video is more popular than blogging and social networking. In fact it shows that online video rivals traditional broadcasting and is the fastest growing media platform in history!

At Adfero we "predicted" this and earlier this year we launched our video news product where companies can get the latest bespoke news uniquely written and read out for them in a branded news room and published on to their website. But sticking to the original purpose of this blog, I will not be turning this into a sales forum so won't wax lyrical about Adfero Video News here (if you want to look at sales material see http://www.adfero.co.uk/products/news-videos/) .

Im also not going to go in to all the years of research we did about how and when Google will start to cache video and how to make it SEO effective.

I will however mention that we will be creating video blog pieces to support the Adfero blog!

Watch out for the announcement and link to YouTube coming soon and enjoy the weekend.

Genuine question, no advice given: Can Jordan be an asset to your business?

2009-05-27T16:01:00.002+01:00

Apologies if the Adfero blog looks like it’s turning in to a celebrity blog given the last post involving Ricky Gervais; I can assure you it is not. That said, I found myself glued to the TV over the Bank Holiday watching an advert for the latest Katie and Peter reality show on ITV2. Having only seen the advert (honestly) I noticed it was sponsored/in association with http://www.kiddicare.com/ which caught my interest.

Kiddicare subscribe to our DirectNews product which was why it caught my attention. Adfero have worked with Kiddicare for many years and one of our early success case studies demonstrated that one article we wrote for them about Jordan directly resulted in a significant increase in traffic and product sales on their website. The team at Kiddicare are excellent and I am in no way suggesting that this played any part in their decision to sponsor this show BUT it merely started my cogs turning – well, once I had figured out that Katie Price is in fact Jordan!

The thoughts going through my mind were not whether Katie/Jordan or Peter are good role models for parents with young children (I will leave that to Kilroy and Trisha) but how did Kiddicare come to their decision to sponsor this particular show?

I understand the principles or PR, branding, advertising etc but is it risky to associate your brand with an individual – particularly one as controversial as Jordan? How does this work online? Typically this level of above-the-line advertising and brand association is for individual products as a source of endorsement, but you never see Gary Lineker having an argument with his family in a Walkers advert - he just eats crisps.

Please do add any comment. Do you sponsor a celebrity?

Adfero thanks Ricky Gervais and apologies to Karl Plinkington

2009-05-21T18:20:00.002+01:00

Following on from my rather extended and in-depth blog on Google News and the news agencies, I am happy to bring you a lighter, shorter and hopefully more entertaining piece today.

Thanks to Ricky Gervais who put a link to Adfero’s very own http://www.inthenews.co.uk/ website from his blog today. I’m sure we will return the favour Ricky. Cheers.

Apparently one of our Adfero reporters was the first person to ask Ricky a question following the movie at last night's premier of Night in the Museum Two.

When we asked if his XFM producer Karl Plinkington would be confused by the prospect of a museum coming alive, Gervais replied: "He'd just say: 'Bit weird, innit?’”

Ricky then wrote on his blog: “Karl is quite a phenomenon now and this could actually turn him into bald Manc world icon. The first question at the press conference for Night At The Museum 2 in Washington was about him. Unbelievable.”

Sorry Karl if we in anyway contributed to you being called bald.

For anyone who wants to read Ricky’s blog here’s the link: http://www.rickygervais.com/thissideofthetruth.php

Adfero: Pride or publicity (well, traffic)?

2009-05-20T13:17:00.003+01:00

Traditionally most news agencies, including Adfero, take pride in the speed at which they can break an article. The goal of improving speed and accuracy has caused many Adfero journalists sleepless nights, long hours and missed lunches. The sandwich-boarded youth of Victorian Britain shouting “read all about it” and the foundations of modern journalism are all based around the principle that the first to publish gets the readers.

So what has happened online? Has publishing news online using aggregator services such as Google and Yahoo allowed news agencies to publish faster? Well the obvious answer is yes, but will this continue or will the news agencies reach a Google News “stand off” and delay publishing their articles online?

Perhaps I should explain a little more. Over the past few years we have been tracking/working with and utilising Google News for a whole host of Adfero products. I recently attended a conference and got together with some other news agencies to specifically talk about Google News and how it affects the flow of traffic to news websites. Whilst everyone loved the fact that you could get upwards of 60,000 unique visits from one story, the issue comes when trying to predict the type of story and most importantly when to publish an article to ensure maximum Google News traffic from that article.

At a basic level Google News works like Google but for individual articles, not entire websites. The news sites accepted by Google are trawled much more frequently and by submitting dynamic site maps to Google News, this can allow Google News to monitor when an article is updated on a site. The position an article appears in the news ranking is based on relevancy (of course) but also publication time with the most recently published articles being top. This means that the first company to publish an article about a breaking topic will soon be pushed off the top spot by other agencies writing similar articles on the same issue more recently published. Generally it will take a few hours for the public to hear about the issue and start searching for it on the news section. This means some “traffic hungry” editors “sit on” breaking articles, watching Google Trends and Microsoft Xrank to find the exact time when the public is searching for the topic, while other agencies have already posted articles, so that their article will be at the top of Google News for the longest period when most people are searching for it.

Are these “traffic hungry” agencies swallowing their pride in place of money? Or simply providing the best results for their advertisers? What would happen if all agencies started doing this? Would we reach a Google News stand off with everyone being afraid to be the first to publish online and therefore slowing news delivery?

At Adfero we are still striving for speed and accuracy. As proven yesterday when I spoke to a very stressed Matt West (Adfero consumer news editor) who was desperately trying to hold of one of our political correspondents in Westminster to leave the G8 select committee and get over to the Michael Martin resignation to make sure we had all the information first and were among the first to publish the article.

Comments please

Introduction to the Adfero Blog

2009-05-20T10:21:00.002+01:00

Welcome to the Adfero blog.

The purpose of this blog is to inform Adfero clients, employees and other interested parties of what we’re currently up to and hopefully offer some interesting information about the developments in the news and online arena.

Unlike other blogs, this is not a shameless opportunity for us to plug the Adfero products. However, if you do want to get a better understanding of these then please visit http://www.adfero.co.uk/.

Worth a disclaimer here: despite the fact that we employ a whole host of very talented and clever journalists, I am not one of them – as you can probably tell already from the first few lines of this blog. We are sticking to the original blog philosophy: creating an open forum where even semi-illiterate people such as myself should not feel intimidated to give there two penneth worth. If you would like to see well-written, informative news then please see the Adfero consumer news websites at the bottom or http://www.inthenews.co.uk/ .

If you would like to contribute to this or any other future posting then please feel free to add comment.