http://spiwebanalytics.com/component/option,com_jb2/view,rss/ description http://spiwebanalytics.com/component/option,com_jb2/PostID,55/view,post/ I read an interesting article in NMA last week whereby Microsoft have decided to move with the times and start to support multiple media platforms on their flagship gaming console, the XBOX 360.It is yet again a sign of how the times are changing; who would have thought a year or two back that you would be able to have Facebook, Twitter, BBC iPlayer, Sky Anytime, Zune (streaming HD movies online) and Last.fm on a gaming console?Has the world gone mad or has the world started waking up to the phenomenon of Social Media and the power it can bring to big and small brands. Personally, I think Microsoft have been listening to what people want and watching what the market does with existing technology. It doesn't take much effort to find people with iPhones who ALL have ready access to Facebook and Twitter and in a small survey we conducted, we found that 69% used social media platforms much more than they used to and spent in excess of 1hour a day checking what their friends were up to or twittering about what they were doing. When you combine that with the PC/MAC being used to access BBC content (via their iPlayer - not only via their application), it just made sense for collaboration to start to filter across the many platforms that exist today. After all, wouldn't you rather be watching your favourite episode of 24, Spooks, Eastenders or Flashforward in the comfort of your living room on the 50" Plasma/LCD with Dolby Surround Sound instead of your study with a 19" LCD screen and tiny speakers? We thought so! So, social media collaboration is not only in the world of Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Bebo (to name a few) but also collaboration of digital technology; who needs or wants multiple ways to listen or watch something? Perhaps the recent adaptation of digital/social media collaboration will give Microsoft the edge over the PS3 this Christmas? The Wii recently got the iPlayer too, however with it's lack of HD support as a gaming console, I don't think it has been as popular as it could have been (or Nintendo wanted it to be). With the XBOX 360 still being cheapest amongst the Wii and PS3, and Microsoft reducing their XBOX Live membership to a snip over £30 for 12months, the Number 1 Christmas selling console battle of 2009 will be an interesting one to watch! http://spiwebanalytics.com/component/option,com_jb2/PostID,54/view,post/ EDITORIAL: A law that demands consent to internet cookies has been approved and will be in force across the EU within 18 months. It is so breathtakingly stupid that the normally law-abiding business may be tempted to bend the rules to breaking point. The fate of Europe's cookie law became improbably entwined with a debate over file-sharing. To cut a long story short, it broke free. On 26th October, it was voted through by the Council of the EU. It cannot be stopped and awaits only the rubber-stamp formalities of signature and publication. The vote's result was announced by way of a whisper. It featured at the tail end of an 18-page Council press release (PDF) that first had to address fishing quotas, train driving licences and a maritime treaty with China. I'm afraid we missed it. There was no attempt to bury this news – but the hushed tones of its reporting were consistent with the media attention it has received to date. There has been almost no fuss about this little law, despite the harm it could do to advertising, the lifeblood of online publishing. It also threatens to irritate all web users by appearing at every new destination like an over-zealous security guard. Here's what's coming. The now-finalised text says that a cookie can be stored on a user's computer, or accessed from that computer, only if the user "has given his or her consent, having been provided with clear and comprehensive information". An exception exists where the cookie is "strictly necessary" for the provision of a service "explicitly requested" by the user – so cookies can take a user from a product page to a checkout without the need for consent. Other cookies will require prior consent, though. So almost every site that carries advertising should be seeking its visitors' consent to the serving of cookies. It also catches sites that count visitors – so if your site uses Google Analytics or WebTrends, you’re caught. You could seek consent with pop-ups, if you’re happy to ignore accessibility guidelines that discourage pop-ups – though users' browsers may block pop-ups by default, which risks confusion. Or you could do it with a landing page that contains a load of information and some choices. The choices for users could be: Give me a load of cookies, now and in future visits, and let me get where I wanted to go in the first place – and please don't interrupt me like this again.Cookies sound evil. I'm going to use American sites instead, because they don’t scare me with this cookie nonsense.I don't want cookies from your advertising partners, but I'll gladly pay for an ad-free version of your site. What's that you say? I need cookies for that too? OK, but just a few please. You need to ask each new visitor just once, of course – until the visitor deletes his 'consent' cookie. Like a blow to the head, that action will cause your site to forget that you've actually met before and you'll welcome the visitor like a stranger. Between now and 26th April 2011, the date this law must come into force across the EU's 27 member states, two things will happen. The Directive will be transposed into national laws; and we'll get guidance from regulatory bodies. Each of these steps is an opportunity to mitigate the impact of this misguided law. Our Government could take a bullet for Digital Britain. It could interpret the Directive creatively or, to be pedantic, wrongly. Doing that allows businesses to comply with UK law while putting the UK Government in breach of European law. The European Commission then makes threatening noises before hauling the UK before the European Court of Justice for a shoeing, a process that generally takes a few years to resolve. (The UK is mired in such a battle right now over the original version of the cookie law – it's just that it's not the cookie provisions in dispute.) I doubt this will happen. The new law amends an existing Directive, passed in 2002. The UK's implementation of that Directive was faithful and, given some MPs are pleading to make all behavioural advertising opt-in, there may be political will for an opt-in approach to all cookies. Perhaps that was the motive in the EU passing this law – I really don’t know. If it was, behavioural advertising could be managed without wielding a sledgehammer that cracks almost all cookies. Lawmakers should identify any harms they see in today’s practices and legislate against the harms. To legislate against the technology is unnecessary, short-sighted and destined to fail. The 2002 Directive is not so different from the new law at first sight: it said that cookies should come with a "right to refuse". The UK implementation reproduced these words precisely. But the Information Commissioner's Office took a pragmatic view, saying that the right to refuse could be given after the delivery of the cookie. Compliance was easy: you just had to put some information in your privacy policy. The new law turns that upside down. So a better prospect than a faulty implementation of the revised law is that our Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) publishes pragmatic guidance again. The ICO might be motivated to do that: the cookie law is likely to be as irritating for consumers as it is for business. This won't be easy, though: the new wording gives limited room for manoeuvre. The wriggle room, such as it is, probably doesn’t lie in saying that advertising or traffic monitoring are ‘strictly necessary’ to provide the free service ‘explicitly requested’. A better prospect is a weird recital to the Directive that suggests "the user's consent to processing may be expressed by using the appropriate settings of a browser". It's not a get-out-of-jail-free card by any means. Remember, it's only a recital, not an article. Recitals are meant to explain the lawmakers' rationale and sometimes they're used to resolve ambiguities. They are not meant to contradict the business end of the Directive – and this recital sounds like a contradiction (which smacks of bad drafting). We've heard a different view of what the recital might mean, but to many it will look like a place of shelter. Subject to whatever our domestic law says, and our ICO’s guidance, some businesses might be tempted to hide in the confused wording of that recital. If I was desperate to avoid landing pages and pop-ups, I would too. The risk you run is a £5,000 fine, unless the penalties are increased (which the new Directive invites member states to do). That's a gamble that many will consider worth taking because the alternative might be to haemorrhage ad revenues.source: out-law.com http://spiwebanalytics.com/component/option,com_jb2/PostID,53/view,post/ An interesting article in NMA last week was that Polydor has launched a cost per engagement model for ad campaigns for artists such as La Roux to generate better value from its marketing.Instead of using the CPA model (where the quantity may not equal the quality), they have now fully moved to a CPE mode, meaning Polydor only pay publishers when a visitor engages in content on the site (such as rolling over and watching an online music video).Perhaps this is the start of a shift in businesses wanting better value for money. Google now allows everyone to compete for everyones brand name. Meaning genuine acqusition of quality visitors could be reduced (not to mention the issue with 'click fraud' - which Google have been trying to resolve for years!).A CPE model is by far fairer and better value for businesses in marketing. Well done Polydor for taking the initiative! http://spiwebanalytics.com/component/option,com_jb2/PostID,51/view,post/ Web analytics will become more important to businesses in the next year, experts have predicted. According to analysts from CMS Watch, the rise of multimedia web content and the growing popularity of the mobile internet will prompt businesses to search for analytics solutions that address either or both of these areas. "The growing number of customers who care about measuring mobile access and multimedia use will likely have to invest in multiple analytics tools," CMS Watch said. Recent research from comScore suggested that one-quarter of all UK residents now surf the web from a mobile device, representing a nine per cent increase compared with last year. Popular online activities for mobile users were found to include search, email and social networking. According to comScore, usage of mobile search has risen by 36 per cent in the last year, with mobile email seeing growth of 20 per cent and mobile social networking experiencing a surge of 179 per cent. http://spiwebanalytics.com/component/option,com_jb2/PostID,52/view,post/ A lack of clear metrics for the online PR sector is presenting challenges for marketers, according to a new report. E-consultancy said that this issue of having no definite way of measuring online PR had led almost 30 per cent of businesses to outsource digital PR to search marketing companies, while 22 per cent sent this work to web development agencies. Michelle Goodall of E-consultancy added that traditional PR agencies - to which 51 per cent of firms outsource their online PR projects - also faced the problem of their client not necessarily being the budget holder for digital PR campaigns. The real budget holder usually has a clear idea of what their online ROI and measurement should be, she remarked. "This is one of the reasons why online PR is being outsourced to search marketing and web development agencies who have developed their own version of online PR metrics," Ms Goodall stated. Citigate Dewe Rogerson recently published research findings suggesting that less than half of businesses spend more than five per cent of their overall PR budgets on digital platforms. http://spiwebanalytics.com/component/option,com_jb2/PostID,50/view,post/ On September 15th 2009, Adobe acquired Omniture for $1.8 Billion! A lot of cash for an Analytics company, but an interesting move nontheless. Interestingly though, this makes Omniture by far the largest vendor in the industry with the ability to reach more customers, get better analytics integrated into flash based web sites/apps but also raises some alarm bells for me. Take for example all of the acquisitons made by Omniture up until now. There are some really happy customers (tend to be more the new customers) and more unhappy customers (existing customers forced to comply with the companies new strategies - aka the extinction of HBX (hitbox) and the upgrade to SC (site catalyst), which irritated some customers enough to switch vendors. You then have the scenario of Omnitures offering with multiple products from companies they acquired. Not all these tools are fully incorporated into the 'Omniture Suite', and this is also causing new and existing customers some problems. There is also speculation among folk that Adobe/Omniture will re-release HBX as an 'Omniture Lite' product offering... How happy will the old HBX customers be (who were forced to upgrade/pay for SC)?! Now cast your mind back to the era of Scene7... Did Adobe do a good job of managing that acquistion? So, the combining of forces between Adobe and Omniture certainly does make very interesting reading (and the opportunity for one vendor to dominate the marketplace will certainly shake things up with their competitors), but don't go thinking it is GAME OVER just yet. http://spiwebanalytics.com/component/option,com_jb2/PostID,49/view,post/ ITV has sold Friends Reunited for £25m, despite having paid £175m for it. The buyer is Brightsolid Limited, which is owned by DC Thomson, Dundee-based publisher of comics such as the Beano. The announcement came with the release of half-year results, which were hit by the worst decline in UK television advertising on record. ITV made a pre-tax loss of £105m in the period. There was no more information given on the recruitment of a new chief executive to replace Michael Grade. Mr Grade is due to stand down by the end of 2009, following a regulatory review. The £105m loss compares with a £1.5bn loss in the same period of 2008, although last year's figure was hit by a £1.6bn charge, reducing the value of investments made in 2000 and 2004. ITV's advertising revenues fell by 15%, which was slightly better than the 17% fall in the overall market. Its chief operating officer, John Cresswell, told the BBC that advertising revenues were improving. "We're down 15% in the first half and in the third quarter the decline is still pretty tough at -12%," he said. "But September for us is at -7% so the direction of travel is good." Mr Cresswell, who is thought to be among those in the running to be the new chief executive, added that "we are taking advertising share from our competitors". The broadcaster's pension fund deficit had ballooned to £538m by 30 June, compared with £178m at the end of 2008. ITV is in the middle of a cost-cutting programme, which aims to deliver savings of £155m this year and £285m a year by 2011. ITV paid an initial £120m for the Friends Reunited website in 2005. It paid an additional £55m earlier this year - a sum which had been dependant on its financial performance. ITV said that the site was profitable. The company buying it, Brightsolid, already owns findmypast.com, which operates the official 1901 and 1911 census websites. Friends Reunited was launched in July 2000 from the spare bedroom of Steve and Julie Pankhurst's home in North London. Its model of helping people to find old friends from their old schools, colleges or clubs attracted millions of users to the site. But more recently, it has been overtaken by social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. source: bbc.co.uk http://spiwebanalytics.com/component/option,com_jb2/PostID,48/view,post/ US computer giant Microsoft has won back its crown as the number one consumer brand in the UK. The 12th annual top 500 Superbrands survey has revealed the winners and losers during this economic downturn. A list of about 1,400 brands was considered by a panel of experts, with more than 2,000 UK consumers taking part in a vote. At number two was Rolex, while Google slipped two places to third. Lego and Coca-Cola were new to the top 10.      The results, as always, return some surprises, with this year's notable high achiever being Encyclopaedia Britannica Stephen Cheliotis, Centre for Brand Analysis Other brands which have kept their top 10 places include the BBC, British Airways and Mercedes-Benz. Last year, Microsoft lost the first place to internet giant Google. This year, Apple has made it into the top 10. "This year's survey reaffirms some of the downturn's winners and losers, with fast-food chains and supermarkets doing particularly well," said Stephen Cheliotis, chief executive of the Centre for Brand Analysis, which carried out the research on behalf of Superbrands UK. The results, as always, return some surprises, with this year's notable high achiever being Encyclopaedia Britannica."      Some of the brands which showed the strongest year-on-year improvement in the survey include McDonald's, which rises 227 places, Burger King, up 189 places, KFC rising by 164 and Domino's Pizza, which moves up by 144 places. The highest new entry into this year's list was Krispy Kreme doughnuts, indicating demand for relatively low cost treats in the downturn. "Actually making the top 500 itself is an achievement - the competition amongst brands for consumer attention and share of wallet is intense and growing fiercer." said Stephen Cheliotis.      Recovering from last year's plummet in the survey were the supermarkets, although only Sainsbury's broke into the top 100. Morrisons and the Co-op have both entered the top 500 for the first time. Royal Doulton has lost its top 10 position, but still remains ahead of giants like Vodafone, Audi, Nokia and Cadbury. That, said Stephen Cheliotis, "is incredible". The survey defines a Superbrand as having established "the finest reputation in its field". Such a brand is deemed to offer "significant emotional and/or tangible advantages over other brands, which customers want and recognise". The brands are judged against the following three factors:     * Quality. Does the brand represent quality products and services?     * Reliability. Can the brand be trusted to deliver consistently against its promises and maintain product and service standards at all customer touch points?     * Distinction. Is the brand not only well known in its sector but suitably differentiated from its competitors? Does it have a personality and values that make it unique within its market place? TOP 10 SUPERBRANDS 2008/09 TOP 10 SUPERBRANDS 2009/10 1.Google 2.Microsoft 3.Mercedes-Benz 4.BBC 5.British Airways 6.Royal Doulton 7.BMW 8.Bosch 9.Nike 10.Sony Source:Superbrands UK/The Centre for Brand Analysis   1.Microsoft 2.Rolex 3.Google 4.British Airways 5.BBC 6.Mercedes-Benz 7.Coca-Cola 8.Lego 9.Apple 10.Encyclopaedia Britannica Source:Superbrands UK/The Centre for Brand Analysis source: bbc.co.uk    http://spiwebanalytics.com/component/option,com_jb2/PostID,47/view,post/ A third of young people regularly access Facebook and Twitter via their mobile, a new report has found. The study, published by mobile research firm CCS Insight, found that access to social networking sites was driving the take-up of mobile internet services. Facebook is more popular than Bebo, MySpace and Twitter combined, it found. Its study - into mobile usage among 16 to 35 year olds - also found that the service most youngsters wanted on their phones was the BBC iPlayer. The suggestion that Facebook is more popular than Twitter chimes with a recently published Morgan Stanley report on internet and mobile usage. Compiled by a 15-year-old intern, the report said that teenagers favoured Facebook over Twitter. "Teenagers do not use Twitter. They realise that no-one is viewing their profile, so their tweets are pointless," Matthew Robson wrote in the report. He echoes the words of CCS Insight analyst Paulo Pescatore. "Forget music and video downloads, social networking is where it's at and Facebook is king of the hill," he said. Charging models The 24-36 year-old age group are those most likely to buy content on their mobile phones, the report found. The revelations will be good news to mobile operators, desperate to fill some of their revenue gaps with the money to be made on mobile internet usage. One third of respondents said they would like to see the BBC's iPlayer available on their mobile phones. But people will expect charging models to be fair even when they are using bandwidth-hungry applications such as the iPlayer, said Mr Pescatore. "The challenge operators face is balancing demand for these services with the bandwidth they consume. Networks are going to think carefully about how they charge for mobile internet access," he said. There appears to be a gender divide when it comes to mobile internet usage with twice as many men as women accessing the web via their mobiles. "It's clear that the industry could a better job marketing to women. It needs more than pink paint to succeed," said Mr Pescatore. CCS Insight predicts that by the end of 2009 some 44% of mobile users will access data via their handsets. In separate news, a report from research firm Juniper has revealed that the number of mobile application downloads will approach almost 20 billion per year by 2014.source: bbc.co.uk http://spiwebanalytics.com/component/option,com_jb2/PostID,46/view,post/ Today saw the exciting announcement from Google that they are to release a new and exciting platform, the Google Chrome Operating System!Nearly a year ago, Google released their Chrome web browser. A revolutionary browser that enabled users to have allocated memory for each tab as well as being faster, slicker,and include several development tools right out of the box!Well today, Google continued that theme with their own operating system. Some might recall the Google Phone going on the market a few months back. A completely open sourced platform that enables developers to once again be innovative in building applications for everyone anywhere, except this time on a much wider scale.Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we're already talking to partners about the project, and we'll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve. Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. Google designed the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as they did for the Google Chrome browser, they are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don't have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work Read more about this revolutionary new platform here.