Richard Hartigan

Online analytics tools are often used retrospectively to report on marketing campaigns and standard online KPI's such as visitors and bounce rate. But the power of todays available tools extends beyond historical analysis.

The ability to plug into trends in consumer demand is an amazing resource for an organisation to have at their disposal but one that is rarely used. In a previous job, we examined trends in destination searches to predict future holiday hotspots. For example, if there was a lot of interest in Cape Verde, it would be examined as a potential holiday destination.

It is important though not to confuse online interest with affection. Just because people are searching for a particular subject does not mean that they necessarily feel positively towards it. Nothing demonstrates this power better than the online buzz that surrounds TV talent shows.

Looking at the X-Factor finalists in 2009, Olly Murs was consistently the most searched for contestant throughout the series. Looking at the search volumes in November, it would be easy to predict him as the eventual winner. This trend only seemed to change in the final weeks of the competition, perhaps after Joe McEldery wowed the judges with his rendition of Elton John's "Sorry Seems to be the Hardest Word".

According to the data, it would not have been wise to have placed any money on Dagenham based Stacey Solomon as she never received as many searches as her rivals. She did however overtake Shaun Ryder to become the most searched for contestant and the eventual winner of this years I'm a Celebrity Get Me out of Here.


Looking at the same analysis for 2010, controversial teenage rapper Cher Lloyd went into the competition as  the most searched for contestant. A string of news stories surrounded the precocious talent since her impressive first audition.

Eventual winner Matt Cardle had a surge in search traffic after his performance of Roberta Flack's classic "First Time I ever Saw your Face" but has remained in third position with the searchers despite his popularity with the bookmakers.  

Liverpudlian Rebecca Ferguson received praise from the judges since the competition started but failed to gain much interest from the online public, receiving consistently fewer searches than any of the four finalists. Given this evidence, it was perhaps surprising to see Rebecca in the final two.

Boy band "One Direction" appeared to be the dark horses of the competition to date. There was not much hope for the newly formed band at the beginning of the competition as they suffered from comparatively  poor vocals and a lack of cohesiveness compared to the more established bands. Since that point, the band benefited tremendously from the power of the Simon Cowell PR machine and the popularity of group member Harry Styles and this is demonstrated by their growth in online searches.














So, like Robin Goad at Hitwise, the free online tools incorrectly pointed to One Direction becoming the first group to win the X-Factor. The fact that the two finalists received the lowest search volumes throughout the course of the competition, shows that it is dangerous for brands to become over-reliant on search volume as a measure of product sentiment.

Increasingly brands should endeavour to understand the context of the interest and tailor marketing strategies appropriately. For example, is the context surrounding the product searches positive or negative. If there is a negative context surrounding an existing product then vendors should use this information as important market research. For positive context marketers can identify key themes to utilise in marketing. For example, Cape Verde visitors may be complementing the value of the destination or the weather.

Search queries represent a free and vital source of product feedback with a sample size larger and more economical than any alternative. In the past five years, the importance of online sentiment has had an increasing affect on customer purchase decisions. Customers rely on reviews and feedback from within social circles to fuel purchase decisions.  In 2011 sentiment will play an increasing part in ranking algorithms as well.    

Google recently introduced Demoslam, a rather brilliant way to demonstrate Google products and services to mainstream audiences. Users upload their innovative demos to YouTube before submitting them to the Demoslam site. There is a real emphasis on creativity and fun when demonstrating the benefits of each product. This is a great example of how technology should be demonstrated.

My current favourite is Instant Elements, by Tom Lehrer. At first look, his catchy song demonstrates the power of the recently released Google Instant search. Look a bit closer however and I think there are some real insights into the power of viral marketing to accentuate natural search positions as well as the importance of optimising for universal results.



In my opinion, introducing products to mainstream audiences in a way that encourages adoption is one of the greatest challenges technology companies face. In the majority of cases, the speed of innovation is far greater than the speed of adoption. 

As an example, I regard Gmail as one of the best products available. At the Beta launch in 2004, it transformed the landscape for email providers by providing a far simpler user experience and increasing the inbox capacity to over 100 times the size of some of it's rivals. In 2010 however, it still has only one third of the amount of subscribers of rivals Yahoo! and Hotmail. For a new online startup, acquiring this market share in six years is incredible growth but for Google, is this really success? It will be interesting to see Facebook market their email product as they look to diversify their technology offering.

I believe that we shall see an increasing amount of technology companies advertising in the mainstream media. Google have already advertised Chrome on billboards and on TV. Microsoft have advertised BING on TV and it is only a matter of time before we see more of Facebook and Twitter in the mainstream media. 

I may challenge my team to record a slam. Looking at the competition however, I think it would take quite a lot of training to gain a title shot.We don't want to put in an Audley Harrison performance.

It's always a strange experience having a birthday at work. The requirement to bring in cakes and treats to celebrate and the card that does the rounds in the office are just some of the traditions that need to be observed for an office birthday.

This year was my best ever work birthday. My colleagues really pushed the boat out with a custom made card, gifts, balloons, hats and a lunch time meal out at Tummies, the only good restaurant on the Slough trading estate.

All this effort more than made up for last year, my worst ever birthday at work, when being asked to sign a card for my colleagues birthday was the highlight of my day. I may have referred to this event over the past year!

During the lunch we held a competition to design a new tank top for me. The winning entry is a mathematical effort designed by Nisha Shah in Online Marketing. Congratulations Nisha, your free sims are in the post!!

Thanks to everyone for a great day!

Courtesy of the rather brilliant Flowing Data blog. I'm currently 10 and 0.

Great beginners guide on 3rd party cookies and behavioural targeting, courtesy of the Wall Street Journal (no less).

Even as an Apple fan and iPhone 4 owner, I was able to smile at this clever ad from Samsung.

I recently had a very interesting debate with an SEO consultant on the subject of redirects that really challenged my thinking on the use and application of server side redirects.

If you raise the subject of redirects to anyone with basic SEO knowledge, they will inform you that you should always do a 301 server side redirect over a 302 redirect. Others may even tell you that a 301 redirect is permanent and a 302 is temporary.

Understanding SEO best practice is one thing, but understanding the nuances of the algorithm and how the intricate application of server side scripting affects ranking and appearance within the SERP's is what distinguishes the real experts.

Best practice dictates that 302 redirects should never be used. We should always use server side 301 redirects to tell the search engines that a web page has changed address. In Layman's, we are advising the web crawler that the webpage that was once hosted on URL (A) has now moved permanently to URL (B).

However, through the management of the SEO function for an number of complex and inflexible web platforms, I have found a practical SEO use for a 302 redirect. This is best demonstrated using a simple example.

Example.com/productA serves a 302 redirect to a product page with a longer URL, example.com/abc/xyz/cba/zyx. The web crawler will understand that the page content has moved over to the longer URL but the shorter URL will be displayed in the SERP's.

The shorter URL is easily identifiable within the SERP's. It is cleaner and resonates with the user. Any marketing supporting the sale of product A will advertise using the shorter URL, so recall from the SERP's is far more likely.

The disadvantage of using a 302 redirect is that link equity is not transferred between the URL's. Therefore, in the above example, the equity of the first URL and the second URL will remain separate.

If a 301 redirect was used, the longer URL would be displayed in the SERPS. This will help the site reach a higher ranking as all link equity will be passed across. However there is an argument that the less friendly URL may not attract as many clicks, even in a higher ranking position.

Whilst this application of a 302 redirect may be seldom used, I have witnessed occasions where brands have benefited from displaying the friendly URL over a complex dynamic URL.

Best practice of course would be to build the page on the shorter URL but SEO's that have worked on sizable and complex websites would understand that this is not always practical.

Recent evidence has identified that there may be an expiry date ability of a 301 redirect to pass equity. For example, after one year equity will stop being passed through example.com/productA to example.com/abc/xyz/cba/zyx. As a result of this changes, webmasters and developers should aim more than ever to build content on SEO friendly web pages, surrounded by a logical customer facing architecture.

SEO's should understand existing redirects and develop a migration plan for all links coming into the redirected URL.

Redirects and server side scripting is often regarded as the complex side of SEO but the principles are simple to administer, even if the application is not.

... and it well and truly is for England now. However any World Cup cannot pass without remembering this classic Partridge sketch from The Day Today.

I received the below email from Flybe before embarking upon a recent trip. The email kindly wishes me a good trip, reminds me of my booking details and invites me to check in for my flight online.

The intention is great, despite the fact that it invites everyone to check in online, so securing the best seat becomes a scramble for who can open their email fastest.

However they have made a huge mistake within the design of the email. The large red arrow that contains the call to action to check in online is not hyperlinked.


One of the greatest strengths of online marketing is the ability to deeplink customers into further within a site. This could be to a stage within a purchase or registration process or to a page that contains the relevant content. In this instance any deeplink should land me at a minimum on a page that allows me to log in to the early check-in process.

Unfortunately, it looks as if Flybe have missed an element of the design that is essential to delivering the great customer experience they are intending.

Last week I was fortunate enough to attend the Mobile Industry Awards at the Brewery in London. 

Amongst the key prizes that were handed out was the prestigious "Hottest New Phone of 2010" award. There have been some amazing developments in mobile technology over the past three years so there was always going to bound to a number of strong contenders.

This years award was given to the HTC Desire, an Android based phone that demonstrates the continued progression of HTC in the SmartPhone market.
 

I read with interest reports from NMA of Google moving into the price comparison space for financial products with Google Comparison Ads. This product has been floating around for a while in the US under the guise of Google Merchant Search but the site of comparison functionality under a search for "secured loans" represents the first sighting in the UK.

The threat of Google increasingly moving into this space must be the cause of many sleepless nights for online comparison websites such as Shopzilla, Kelkoo and Shopping.com. These organisations have built their businesses around a consumer desire for simple online product comparison. The majority of their revenue comes from turning cheap clicks acquired from search engines, into more expensive clicks and sales for advertisers paid on a CPC/CPA rate.

Google have continually denied any desire to move into the price comparison space. A number of years ago, I challenged them on the rumours of a travel price comparison site named Troogle, a new rival to TravelSupermarket and Cheapflights. Although this was categorically denied by Google, the main reason the rumours continue to circulate is that there remains a gap in the market for an all powerful meta comparison engine. I also know some Google staff have made it their life's goal to ensure that purchasing travel online is made so much easier.

In my opinion, one of the main reasons that Google is so reluctant to state any explicit intent to expand into the price comparison space, is the conflict between their desire to innovate and the effect this may have on their cash cow.

Despite continual diversification into new and innovative products and the majority of Google's revenue is still obtained from their original Adwords product. Price comparison sites are traditionally significant spenders in PPC. In the UK, MoneySupermarket is renowned as Google's largest single account. It is also the largest price comparison site.

MoneySupermarket will typically feature and compare the products of many leading brands that also pay to advertise within the Google sponsored listings. Without doubt the competition between direct and indirect advertisers is a major contributor the Google revenue figure (and also one of my personal frustrations).

Whilst Google may see it as desirable for the user experience to combat the additional layer that is the price comparison site and give more value to direct advertisers, there is clearly a risk from the reduced number of advertisers bidding for the top positions.

By creating price comparison functionality within the search engine results pages, Google threatens to bite the very hand that feeds them. They will earn some incremental revenue from the increased clicks from the direct brands that advertise with them directly but I question whether this will compensate for the investment that will lose by marginalising the comparison engines.

I can't help but wonder how this will develop. Comparison Ads infiltrating the UK SERPS, Google Shopping maturing and growing and an increases desire from Google to ensure that they are the first port of call for any activity that takes place online.

Courtesy of XKCD

I wanted to put this blog together to retell my experience of using Rapid Data Recovery and hopefully warn others as to the dangers of using a cowboy operation to restore faulty hard drives.

In the digital age, data is so precious. Photos, videos, memories and media are all stored on hard drives rather than portable media such as DVD's. Therefore, when your hard drive goes wrong there is not a lot that you won't do to get it repaired.

Rapid Data recovery and their parent organisation Fields Data capitalise on the emotional attachment that users have with their data to get them to invest large sums of money in data recovery services.

My first conversation was with a gentleman by the name of Daniel Reece, who was polite and informative about the services offered. I explained my problem, a 750GB Maxtor hard drive full of my treasured music, video and pictures that had become corrupt and unreadable. I also explained that I would pay more if the exact folder structure of my original drive

The standard practice for this organisation is to allow them to examine the hard drive before they are quote a price for recovery services. Having only a phone contact for the organisation, I was a little bit nervous about simply sending it by post so I asked if I could drop the hard drive off at their registered offices. Upon visiting their offices, I was denied the possibility of speaking with any of the staff at Rapid Data Recovery and asked to leave my valuable hard disk at reception with a note, something to which I reluctantly agreed.

A number of days later, I received a phone call from Mr Reece stating that a full recovery of my data was possible complete with the full, original folder structure. Needless, to say I was delighted and happy to pay a reasonable fee for such an comprehensive piece of work. The price proffered by Mr Reece was £435, which was substantially more than the initial estimation but something I was delighted to pay nevertheless.

I waited the given five days for my hard drive to be returned to me but received nothing. After contacting Rapid Data Recovery, I was informed that it had been delivered. I later discovered that the drive, holding so much of my personal information, had been delivered to a neighbour. When I contacted UPS on this, they informed me that the organisation sending the package has specified that this is perfectly acceptable. I would ask anyone contemplating using Rapid Data Recovery to ask whether they trust their neighbour with their personal information.

When I eventually managed to recover my hard drive and plug it into my computer, I immediately noticed that the original folder structure I had been promised and paid a premium for, was not evident. Therefore, syncing with my iTunes music library was not possible.

Using iTunes, I was also easily able to cross-reference the number of records recovered, with the number of records in my iTunes library. The recovered data was short by missing approximately 33% of the total records. Worse, when I reluctantly loaded the recovered files into iTunes, none of the files appeared to work.

I immediately tried, calling Rapid Data Recovery and left answer phone messages, which nobody returned. Occasionally, on the rare occasion I managed to speak to someone, they would simply put me on hold for as much as twenty minutes, or until I lost patience and hung up. I emailed both Daniel Reece, his manager William Lewis and the generic quality control email available on the Rapid Data Recovery website.

With no repsonse I then spoke to Fields Data Recovery head office and was forwarded to their customer services team who promised a reply within the day. I later received a response from Abigail Richards at Rapid Data Recovery who drew my attention to the following line from the Rapid Data Recovery terms of service.

6.1. The client accepts that Rapid Data Recovery will not examine the contents of any files contained on the media supplied to them. Rapid Data Recovery further accepts no responsibility whatsoever for the contents,integrity, functionality, corruption or usefulness of any data recovered.

This clause seems to distance Rapid Data Recovery from any blame for delivering services that were unsatisfactory. My issue is not their unsatisfactory work, it is the false promises that were made prior to the work being carried out that I believe to be deceitful and fraudulent.

I therefore replies to Abigails email and have sent three further emails without reply, no matter who I send them to. Unsurprisingly, Rapid Data Recovery is amazingly illusive when you are not trying to spend money with them. What originally I thought of as excellent customer service, actually translated into a desparation to take my money from me.

The result, my data is in exactly the same state, I am missing approx 15,000 iTunes audio and video files which cost me a small fortune to buy over a number of years. The drive is also in such a state that no other organisation can perform any sort of recovery on it.

Now I am pursuing via trading standards and if necessary the small claims court. Whilst this process is in place, I want to advise everyone of my experience and to use the comment section of this blog to share their own experiences of Rapid Data Recovery.

I realise that this is but one opinion, so I would urge any doubters to read this thread or this thread or share your experience on this website.

One of the major threats to e-commerce is the faceless nature that some organisations can adopt in order to conduct unethical and sometimes fraudulent services. Better authorities are required in order to take action against such organisations without the potential cost of a legal pursuit.

We are fortunate that these organisations remain the minority, else the ability to make transactions over the world wide web, that some of us strive for every day, will remain an aspiration.

Whilst spending time with family over the festive period I started to miss my media. Music, TV, shows and films that are stored on the hard drive of my home computer that I am constantly accessing. Whilst researching ways to access this, I uncovered a wealth of different software and services available to stream media to various different devices.

Therefore I thought I would take this opportunity to review the various streaming devices I have experienced in order to offer some assistance to users that are potentially experiencing the same problems I had when trying to stream from a singular source.

Windows Media Player
Windows users will be able to take advantage of the default media streaming service via Windows Media Player 11. The service is able to stream media to a number of devices. The method of setting up a shared library is unnecessarily complicated for the user as both library and network options need to be addressed.

In my experience the streaming service offered by WMP11 is tempermental at best, suffering from intermittent crashes and failures over even a wired LAN connection. Currently there is still no support for mobile streaming. This is on the horizon for Windows Mobile operating systems but unlikely for iPhone or Android users at present as Microsoft try to take advantage of their operating system doninance in order to grow their mobile base.

According to recent reviews, Windows 7 which features Windows Media Player 12 offers a far better experience when it comes to sharing media across multiple devices but mobile is a medium that remains unsupported.

However, I am still nervous about updating my operating system for fears that WMP12 is not all it promises to be and I am faced with incompatibility issues with any of my alternative solutions.


Tversity
If you encounter any problems when streaming media from your hard drive to any playback device an online search for the relevant error messages will always result in a strong recommendation to use the media streaming software alternative, Tversity.

The free version allows access to a limited amount of the users media library but $30 allows the user to share their full library across multiple devices. The console is intuitive and illustrates a guide to setting up media streaming for a particular device.

However on the negative side, whilst Tversity does claim to support iPhone playback, in reality this feature materialises in slow, clunky and tempermental performance. It is adept at playing the Quicktime default formats of MP4 and MOV but struggles with MPEG or AVI formats. This is because live conversion is not supported so each file needs to be converted to an appropriate format before it can be played.

Air Video
This solution manifests itself in an application that can be downloaded for Mac or Windows operating system and an application that can be purchased from the iTunes store. Users can purchase the free version which restricts the user to a limited view of their media library but a one time payment of £1.79 removes this restriction.

The application allows Remote Access over WIFI which is very easy to set up on both core and satellite application. It also allows upscaled playback via the component cable output which is incredibly useful when wishing to access movies or TV content from another WIFI destination.

The only downside of the application so far is that depsite claims on the website and within the iTunes store description, it restricts use over a 3G connection. However, restrictions on media streaming are not unexpected as operators rapidly try and upgrade their infrastructure to cope with the exponential increase in demand for bandwidth triggered by mass smartphone adoption.

TVCatchUp
This website has become a cult sensation amongst the SmartPhone community. It allows users to access TV streams from the most popular FreeView channels including BBC, ITV and Channel 4 services. Indeed the number of channels has grown significantly since launch and the service now offers access to 30 free channels over a computer or iPhone.

The application can be accessed via any web browser over WIFI and 3G connections and is free of charge, although further attempts to monetise the product are surely on the horizon in 2010. The user interface is clean and simple and the ability to upscale using a component cable is again supported.


SkyMobile TV
This SKY application allows access to all the main SKY Sports Channels as well as ESPN, At the Races and SKY News services. The user experience throughout the sign up process is made complicated due to the necessity to register for a SKY ID and set up the direct debit for the regular £6 per month payment.

This applications shares the same restrictions on 3G playback as Air Video. However component video playback is not available which dampens enjoyment somewhat. It is understandable that SKY would want to protect the base of users that are persuaded to subscribe to their full channel packages in order to receive Sky Sports but watching live sporting events over the iPhone is simply not practical.


This serves a quick roundup of some of the software and services available for online streaming, I am sure that this number will grow significantly in 2010 and inevitably some of the bigger software providers will increasingly get involved.

In the future however, I envisage that content will be stored in the cloud and users will be required to pay for ownership or access to the content. It is such a waste of resource that users download content to their machines when it can so easily be stored in a central hub. Playback will be available on a multitude of media devices and screens including computers, TV's & mobiles. At the current rate of innovation, this future may become a reality very soon.