A recent study written up in the Globe and Mail supports what we probably knew intuitively all along: happiness is contagious.

“… they found that when an individual becomes happy, a friend who lives nearby experiences a 25-per-cent increased chance of becoming happy. And the more centrally located you are in your social cluster of happy people, the more likely you are to become happy.”  Further, researchers found that “happiness is a collective phenomenon that spreads like a virus through social networks – affecting even strangers three times removed from each other.”

Fortunately, misery does not, contrary to popular belief, love company. Negative emotions do not seem to spread as intensely as giddiness.

The research, published last week in the British Medical Journal, relied on pretty solid methodology – tracking data among 4,739 individuals over time since 1948, accounting for 50,000 social and family ties.

A couple of questions arise from this:

1. Could it be that social networks supported by social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and flickr, can support the spread of happiness? Aren’t we drawn to wall postings that are light-hearted, fun, and positive? Personally, when I read Negative Nelly postings, I quickly empathize and then move right along, eyes peeled for lighter, happier fare. Boing Boing seems to be aware of this too – when they have a post that is disturbing or disgusting, they offer up a Unicorn Moment, a link to pictures and poems of “unicorns, rainbows, happy flowers forever.” Sort of an antidote to whatever grossness that they had just foisted on their readers.
2. How can brands participate, if at all, in this propagation of happiness? When I first saw the Free Hugs campaign, I thought wouldn’t it have been so awesome if a brand had thought of this. (Or maybe not – that might be another post/conversation altogether). Suffice to say, it was a movement which started small, turned global, got on Oprah (now name me a brand that DOESN’T want to be on Oprah), incited controversy, but generally, did well by others. In the same vein, I wish more brands thought about sparking movements. I wish more brands obsessed about their world view, rather than their shelf space. I wish more brands thought about connecting with folks, rather than interrogating respondents behind a one-way glass.

Insight: Like a virus, happiness can spread. Like a virus, it can be created, propagated, supported, facilitated. The tools are there. On the fringes, proponents act. There exists this wide gaping void for brands to play in. Now more than ever, brands can step up and kickstart a much-needed joy-fest.

The Wave 3 document comes out in favour of widgets and their potential importance to brands. 

It’s early days for widgets, but widgets are only going to get more important, particularly as platforms become more important. There’s been a big growth in people using personalized home pages and aggregators to handle information on the internet, and widgets are a way into this. And desktops increasingly have widgets on them. So it’s clear that the distribution channels are all there. 

Developing a widget can be quite cheap to do. The actual building of it. Getting new ideas and then saving it and distributing the widget is more difficult. But there are some good examples of brands doing it very well. We’ve worked with UPS to distribute their widget, and why it works is it’s a genuinely useful product for people who are already using UPS. What’s interesting is that they’ve used it as the sort of centerpiece of their advertising. So their TV ads, their outdoor ads, their web advertising have all talked about the widget. It’s a nice piece of content to put in your advertising, it’s a nice story.

There’s an interesting curve in Russia in terms of percentage of people downloading podcasts. They’re just in the teens in Wave 1 and 2 and then suddenly jump up to close to 60% in Wave 3. 

Yeah, I know. It’s substantial. We’d be interested to see when we move to Wave 4, whether that was a real trend or blip. In the last year or so there’s been a lot more localization in terms of sites. Sites have grown up that are much more locally oriented in content. Also broadband is much more prolific than it was.

In the U.K. we see higher than average podcast usage because the mass, the TV channels, the radio stations have all got behind it and repackaged their content in podcasts. And that’s also been the case in Russia where mainstream media has started to dabble in social media with blogs and podcasts. The access to technology has improved and it’s easier to find podcasts than it was before.

Do you think podcasting is leaching off radio audiences, or is it creating its own space?

Because of the restrictions in licencing, podcasts don’t tend to cover music, particularly in Europe and the US. So podcasts really are, in the true spirit of social media, very much around very niche topics – stuff that you might not see fulfilled in major media. It’s bringing in a new audience, it’s promoting new types of presenters, new kind of formats. I wouldn’t say it’s big enough yet to be declining radio listening because radio and specifically music radio has a different purpose. But who knows? Over time if podcasts get more established and we get used to the idea of listening on demand, and we can get real music in podcasts, then it might start to impact.

I’m a big proponent of RSS and I’m always surprised that the adoption rates are so low. In Canada, your figures put it at about 18%. Do you expect to see a spike in that sometime in the future or is it a little too technical for mainstream?

[RSS adoption in] Canada is surprisingly low in our research. It has started to take off, but it’s very slow. I think the problem is that it’s really not very consumer-friendly yet. You know, it’s getting better. But it’s still quite complicated, a complex thing that people don’t really understand. But I think as RSS gets a bit simpler, gets used on mainstream media and they start to explain what it does, and RSS readers start to appear in more places – you can now put an RSS into Outlook, for example.  Things like that will help.

If you’re into social media and you read a lot of blogs, it makes sense to you. And I think as people consume more social media and they get used to not just visiting their favourite news sites and reading sections of that, they’re actually consuming from a large number of sites, they’ll find more of a need for it.

What about on the advertising side – how do you create order out of that chaos and how do you actually create a benefit?  Or can you?

Anything that helps aggregate and prioritize what’s interesting I think will do very well because people are just overwhelmed with the volume of content that’s out there – and you find that when you get on the Internet there’s so much content out there, you don’t really know where to go and what to look at. Anything that can help aggregate and sort this information will be very popular and these are the platforms advertisers should work with. I’ve seen pages where advertisers have sponsored aggregators or readers and things like that, and they’ve done well. Social news sites are a good example. Digg is a nice idea.

How do you keep track of trends? How do you know what questions to ask in the next survey, and how do you advise clients on how to spot the next trend?

I spend a lot of time online.  I read a huge number of blogs. A lot of blogs out there are people who are talking about the future of the web, talking about developments in the web, and these sites are creating invaluable information. And we look at the trend spotting sites – trendwatching.com is a great one. And we read the trade press, to see how it’s percolating to mainstream media. It’s just about consuming a huge amount of content and media, and not everyone’s going to have the time for this. One of the aspects of my role is to distribute information internally. The digital teams will all sift through a lot of stuff and they all spend a lot of time reading things as well. There is so much content out there and not all of it’s pertinent and relevant. But it’s a case of sifting it and making sense of it. And yeah, it’s just a lot of reading time really.

Can you tell us what to expect in Wave 4 in terms of numbers and when the document is going to be available?

We’re putting it together at the moment. We’ve got over 50 markets we want to be involved. So it’s getting bigger and bigger. We’re going to add the Middle East, South Africa, more markets in Latin America, some more markets in Europe. We’re covering a massive portion of the web. 

There are two aspects of research. We do the tracking, which is the Power to the People Social Media Tracker, and we’ll deliver a fourth wave of that to now look at blogging, social networking, RSS, podcasting, and see how that’s grown over time. And we’re also going to run an in-depth report that looks at the motivations and the “why” behind why people create content, why they join community and why they share content – trying to put some more explanation behind the trends basically. The social media tracking should be delivered in January and the in-depth report should be delivered in March – fingers crossed.

Given all of what we’re just talked about, how does an agency need to change to be able to better integrate campaigns across social media and traditional media?

That’s a big question. It invariably will impact the agency structure. Certainly as we see more and more content move onto the web, if we look forward 10, 15 years, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that the internet might be the primary delivery channel for most of your content, particularly television at home, newspapers, press, through readers and so forth.

It really elevates the need for a holistic view of communications. PR has got to be an integrated part of your thinking with what you do on the web. And it  depends on the client, but you’d really want an agency with one point of contact that can think across all of these disciplines, and think how your advertising really impacts on you reputation in social media, and think how your PR strategy will integrate with advertising.

Tom Smith’s role at Universal McCann is leading understanding into the changing nature of consumer behaviour, attitudes, consumption and opinions. His particular focus is the impact of the web, digital media and new technology. He runs a global digital research program called Wave, producing trend pieces, writing articles and providing analysis and insight for clients and agencies within the McCann network.

Lucidity: The internet has always been a social medium. Was there a single watershed moment that you think marketers began to take notice of the potential of social media and necessitated this kind of study?

Tom Smith: I don’t really think of it as a watershed. The reason we started the study in the first place was that a couple of years ago, everyone was talking about Web 2.0.  It was all over the trade press, and everyone was talking about it, but there was very little true understanding about it.

So it was more of a gradual evolution, but a number of big moments probably tipped it over the edge: things like YouTube getting bought by Google, MySpace getting bought by News International, and more recently the massive growth of Facebook. All of these elements have helped blow it up into the mainstream.  When traditional media gets in and makes these acquisitions and buys these companies we know we’re onto something that’s a big deal.

You’re kind of down on the “Web 2.0” term.  It’s not really very descriptive, is it?

The first time we published this research, it was actually published as Web 2.0: The Global Impact.  But Web 2.0 always had that kind of faddy, short-term thing about it.  And the idea that we switched from a Web that was 1.0 to 2.0  was always kind of simplistic. But the term social media is something that really encapsulates what the movement’s all about and what these sites represent.

Do you feel you’re getting a sense for predicting trends, or is each study still full of surprises for you?

Actually one of the surprises for me was how consistent the growth’s been. In every wave you see lifts upwards, you see movements, more people becoming concept creators and less people being just passive observers. It’s always a worry when you conduct tracking research that you won’t actually see any good trends, but the trends in social media are really consistent.

The striking differences that caught our attention are between the areas where things stay constant and the areas where there are huge jumps.  Like people commenting on news sites – it seems that globally the percentage of internet users who were doing that remained pretty consistent over the past couple of years.

Pretty static, yeah.  I think what you see is that things that have been around and established for a while –  you’ve been able to comment on news pages forever on the internet – these things have already attracted the people who want to do it and want to get active in it. But the things that have had the most impact in the last two years are things that need broadband, video, and the stuff that has been made incredibly easy to use and do by mass market social media applications.  Social networking is now incredibly easy. When we started this research, YouTube was a tiny site and we’ve seen that grow and become a global phenomenon.

As of Wave 3, 36% of respondents think more positively about companies that have blogs. You make a few very strong recommendations in the document, and one of them is that essentially every corporation, every brand should have a blog.

Absolutely.  I stand by that.  Every brand, every corporation should have some voice in the social media world.  And if you don’t talk about your brand, consumers will.  If you go online, you can search for any obscure brand and you will find an immense of content already out there. If you search Flickr, if you search blogs, people are already talking about brands. It’s the responsibility of companies now to be active, to have a voice, to speak from the inside of the company and to be transparent. And that’s what blogs can do.

I know it’s a tough sell for many corporations.  But I think there are many big companies out there who have employed blogging as a strategy and it’s reflected well on them.  They’ve become more open.  They’ve softened their image.  It’s given them some sort of humanity, a bit of personality.

Do you see regional variations in that practice?

It’s more bisected by sector, I would say. Finance companies are obviously  more reticent to get involved.  But I’ve seen examples from all over the world. I’ve seen examples of Turkish airlines having blogs. A lot of US companies have been very good at embracing this and getting involved. Some obvious examples are Microsoft and Sun Microsystems, who have really employed blogs to give themselves a more personal, human aspect.

It depends on the corporate structure of the company, the management and the sector they’re in.  Something I’ve observed speaking to clients is that sometimes there’s confusion about whose responsibility this is.  Does this fall under PR?  Is it part of marketing communications?  No one’s quite sure with social media yet. 

And what’s your view on that?

It has to be part of a holistic approach to communications, but I can understand why it would fall under the PR point of view because if your staff is blogging outwards or your CEO is blogging outwards, then that’s a PR activity.  And if you’re going to distribute that content and engage it in the wider social media space, then you need to engage not just PR, but also marketing and communications, and/or their agencies.

For corporations or brands that are planning on getting into the social media space in a big way, there are a lot of person hours that have to go into things like forum moderation or content generation for a blog.  Do you think there’s an ideal model for that?

You already see a lot of corporations that have started employing social media people or social media evangelists, and I don’t see why it can’t be someone in-house who is there to manage that interaction with the consumer. If that’s about removing posts and moderating posts that should fall on someone internally, I think. And I think this role will become more important as companies become more open, more accessible through social media.  There’ll be a need to have someone internally who really understands the company, who is there for long term, not just involved on a campaign basis.  Social media isn’t a campaign, it’s a permanent process.

It seems like there’s a relatively low number of active internet  users in Canada reading and writing blogs compared to South Korea, the Philippines, China, Mexico, Brazil.  Are there cultural differences driving blog usage or is it more a result of technology and accessibility?

Technology is crucial, access to broadband is crucial.  But I definitely think cultural traits play out. The users in China are relatively young, they’re relatively affluent. They’re educated.  And  the web becomes their main point of information, main source of content, main way to socialize with friends.  And there’s less competition from traditional media in a lot of these markets as it is not as strong as it would be in the US or Canada or Europe. And there’s less in-home technology as well.  You don’t have games consoles, you don’t have satellite TV.  And the web is really a very low cost window on the world.

There are also interesting geographical and lifestyle regions.  In China people tend to live in very small apartment blocks with not that much to do, whereas in the US and Canada, people live in larger houses, they have more life out of home, there are more activities out of home. All of this impacts the way that people use the web. A lot of it’s about entertainment.  I mean, in China there are a few state-run channels but there isn’t the massive choice of entertainment – I have 400 channels at home on my satellite. I bet there’s a lot more in my house for me to do. The web really opens things up in markets where there hasn’t been this kind of opportunity before.

Does geography determine what people read?  Do Canadians read Canadian content and British people read British content, predominantly?

It really depends on language. In Europe, there’s a very, very strong blogosphere, but it’s very local because obviously Italian content isn’t produced anywhere else.  In the U.K., the blogosphere isn’t as active, but people are reading English language content, a lot of which is American or possibly Canadian or Australian, or from anywhere in the world. So we really see it moving along language lines rather than national borders. It’s interesting in Canada, because obviously you have two languages, and this came out in the research. There’s a much higher level of readership on the English side than the French side. And I’d put this down to the availability of content through the US and Europe.

Can you pinpoint a number one emerging trend in blogging in terms of content or behaviour?

Blogs are much more sophisticated than they used to be.  People are incorporating a lot more rich content and videos, and a lot of this is done with widgets and video sites providing content for bloggers to use.

In the West a lot of blogs are essentially becoming like professional media and carry advertising. In Asia, blogging is much more of a community thing, people use it as a way of staying in touch peer to peer. And I think that trend’s increasing there.  There’s also an emergence of micro-blogging, which has been a big deal recently and that’s just spread from tech people into the mainstream.

And by micro-blogging you mean Twitter and Facebook status and… are there any other big names in micro-blogging?

Twitter is the big one.  There’s a few others.  There’s one called Jaiku. Twitter is the one that’s caught people’s imagination – it’s also become a generic name for it.  People say “I’ve Twittered it,” or “I’ll Twit it”. People would never have predicted that writing things in short bursts could really take off, but it really has. I’m not convinced it’ll move into the mainstream, but it’s proved to be a very valuable service and it’s built a real community.

It seems to have a foot in both worlds.  It’s both blogging and social networking, and you can actually have an ongoing, almost real-time conversation.

And I think a lot of people use Twitter as a self-promotional tool. They’re using it for building contacts, building networks.  It does bleed the line between blogging and social networking.

Do you think the relative positions of MySpace and Facebook and Orkut have stabilized, or is it still anyone’s game?

It’s very much anyone’s game. I think MySpace is on a continual decline, but it’s still massive. MySpace has managed to maintain its position by kind of moving away from being a social network to being a home for music, video, message boards, TV. But predominantly for music.  It’s still the number one place to find bands, to find new songs, to stream new music.  And that’s really how it’s managed to maintain its position, whereas Facebook is really just oriented around socializing and peer to peer contact.

Tom Smith’s role at Universal McCann is leading understanding into the changing nature of consumer behaviour, attitudes, consumption and opinions. His particular focus is the impact of the web, digital media and new technology. He runs a global digital research program called Wave, producing trend pieces, writing articles and providing analysis and insight for clients and agencies within the McCann network.

The Riverdale High gang

While the concept of search (organizing and cataloguing information in a manageable format) is ancient, search, in the context of an online environment, began in the early 1990s. During this time most web sites resided on university servers and were simply directories where files were stored, as most information shared by people was via FTP (File Transfer Protocol) sites. As the amount of information grew and became more complex, so did the need to index these sites, files and folders into manageable formats.

Archie (short for Archives) was the first program developed to assist in the process of finding and retrieving files based on a user’s search criteria. It was developed by Alan Emtage, a student at McGill University. The program helped users find public domain documents, so long as the user knew the name of the file they were looking for.

On Archie’s coat tails came the launch of Gopher, a search and find network protocol. The protocol indexed information based on text and directories located on servers. Gopher, along with Jughead and Veronica (which were renditions of Archie), would search plain text files and indexed servers. Both Jughead and Veronica were search engines for the Gopher protocol.

Spiders, bugs and bots

The development of search engine spiders really kick-started the search revolution. Essentially, spiders (also called “bots” and “crawlers”) are programs that search internet pages and links for relevant content based on a consumer’s search criteria / query.

1993 saw several key firsts for search engines. The first spider (The Wanderer), developed by Mathew Gray, launched in June 1993. Its purpose was to collect the number of active public web servers. By December 1993 three full-fledged search engine spiders came into existence:

1. JumpStation – collected information from the title and header of pages. But as the number of sites continued to grow Jumpstation came to a stop. It couldn’t keep up with the growth of the web as it listed information in a chronological format.
2. World Wide Web Worm – collected titles and URLs, and faced the same demise as JumpStation.
3. Repository-Based Software Engineering (RBSE) spider - collected URLs and text information within a website, while ranking the relevant information.

The launch of Excite (developed by six Stanford University graduates) made a big splash. Excite was based on the notion of using statistical analysis of word relationships to make searching more efficient. Due to its success Excite merged with @Home (a broadband provider), but eventually filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in June, 2001.

Into the new millenium and beyond

1994 witnessed the launch of a slew of search engine programs, including:

• Yahoo!Directory, which was based on David Filo’s and Jerry Yang’s desire to collect all of their favorite websites. Ultimately this collection morphed into a searchable directory due to the growth of the world wide web.
• WebCrawler, which was released by Brian Pinkerton of the University of Washington and was the first crawler that indexed entire pages.
• Lycos, a catalog of documents that allowed users to obtain information based on ranked relevance, as well as prefix matching and word proximity bonuses. Ultimately its size grew exponentially and by 1996, Lycos had indexed over 60 million documents, making it the number 1 search engine.

Throughout the growth of the dot.com bubble many other search engines entered the spot light including Inktomi, Altavista, Ask Jeeves (Ask.com), AllTheWeb, Magellan, and Infoseek. During this time Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin started collaborating at Stanford University. By December 1998 an incorporated Google Inc. tasted the first fruits of its labour by being recognized in PC magazine as one of the Top 100 websites.

Since the turn of the millennium three prominent players have emerged in the North American search engine market:

1. Google
2. Yahoo (utilizing technologies from Inktomi, Altavista, and Overture) 
3. Live.com (aka MSN Search)

In future posts we will focus on the successes and challenges these players have faced in the past four years or so. 

An interesting thing happened to me on the way to some information recently.

I had stumbled across what I thought to be an obscure Yiddish interjection in a book I was reading, and typed it into the search field on my browser to see if it would cough up an instant translation. The first hit was not a translation, however; it was the very chapter of the book I was reading, in HTML.

Because I was reading a book, and in a literary frame of mind, I was ready to ascribe some sort of greater meaning to that event, though in reality it was just an odd coincidence. The phrase that I typed in was actually a proper name, and the chapter of the book in which it was contained had been excerpted for an online review. But even for a digital lifestyle proponent such as me, this kind of collision between analogue and digital, between what I imagine is happening in my head and what I imagine is happening somewhere out there, gives me pause. I know some computer in California wants to read my mind. And a computer in California already has control of my teeth.

These convergences have been stacking up in the back of my mind like cordwood for the past few years. I was once talking to a friend about the somewhat disturbing ritual of cooking and eating an Ortolan (I have done neither). Some time later he expressed amazement that when he went to look the bird up on Wikipedia, he discovered that I had quoted entire passages to him from the online encyclopedia. He seemed somewhat impressed. I was rather alarmed.

I rail against Wikipedia, foolishly, pointlessly, because it has succeeded in being the monolithic oracle of online information that it always wanted to be. I was reviewing the work of a colleague and wanted to substantiate an un-footnoted claim. The claim came from Wikipedia – but even in Wikipedia it wasn’t attributed. So I did a broader search on that phrase, and immediately realized the folly of my attempt. I found dozens of children of that Wikipedia entry before I gave up, many in quotes, and many without. I can only suspect that the progenitor was not among the search results. But even if it had been, how would I know?

The internet is big, my friends, mighty big. But in spite of the incomprehensible vastness of it all, there’s an unsettling sameness to it in a sense. We have, essentially, one encyclopedia. We have one search tool. I just typed some not really random words into Google as they popped into my head: car, computer, bread, file folder. Wikipedia was the first hit for three of them, and the second hit for “car” (first place honours in the car category went to carmagazine.co.uk). I don’t mean to understate the variety of experiences available on the internet, but merely to suggest that the path of least resistance often seems to be looking at it through a straw.

Some of you may have read the Atlantic Monthly article this past summer entitled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” – the author’s premise is that the internet is changing how we read, and conceivably affecting our ability to absorb long complex texts. The online version features links to some interesting information, including an academic study of the online search habits of researchers (and plenty of Wikipedia entries, of course). But as much as I’m interested in how stupid I may be getting, I’m also interested in how smart we are if we all know the same information, in the same words, from the same source. I’m reminded of episode of The Prisoner (and yes, we also have only one movie database) entitled The General, in which the titular character has invented a system called “Speed Learn”. In its ability to instill in the recipient the equivalent result of three years worth of study in a mere three minutes, “Speed Learn” is eerily indistinguishable from a futuristic brainwashing technique.

What does it all have to do with marketing, you may be asking. Our newest research team is tackling the subject of search, and it’s a pretty far-reaching topic. On one side are pure and simple iterative techniques, spreadsheets full of keywords, easily tabulated click-through rates. On the other side are people, though – unpredictable, whimsical, subject in varying degrees to influence not only from the information they absorb, but from the medium itself. As a writer by title and inclination, I am particularly interested in how people read, and how to predict the right answer to the questions they are about to ask. But I also just like good questions, sometimes more than answers. “How do you get to the top of the search result?” is a popular one. Another good question might be “Would anyone search the word ‘car’ for any other reason than to prove a point?” 

The itsy bitsy spider climbed through the world-wide web.

At a basic level, most of us are aware that elusive “spiders” are part of how search engines work. But what are spiders? What do they do? How do search engines find and rank pages – and in particular how can you ensure your page gets ranked above the rest? If these questions are on your mind – have a read below. This is the first in a series of postings in which we will attempt to de-mystify search engines for you, with a simple explanation of what they are and how they work. In future posts we will further explore how you can best optimize your site for search.

What is a Search Engine?

Google, while certainly not the first or only search engine on the web (other important search engines include Microsoft’s Live Search, Yahoo, and Ask.com), may be the one that comes to mind when you think “search.” Its ubiquity has made its name a verb: “to Google” something. But what are Google and other search engines? They are databases containing an index of content from the Internet. And when you enter a search query, they return to you a list of web pages that match the search query you performed on that database.

What are Spiders?

Search engines create their web listings by using automated software programs called spiders. These spiders (also called “crawlers” or “bots”) constantly crawl through the world wide web to check out web pages, index their information, and follow the links listed within them. They return to pages over and over again to catalogue updates. This catalogue of information is the search engine database.

Spiders do not crawl into private networks, password-protected sites, prohibited information repositories, etc. – they only go where they are allowed, and they find new pages through links. Spiders are used to create a copy of all visited pages for the later processing of a search engine that will index the downloaded pages to provide fast search results. Spiders start by visiting the URL, then identifying meta tags and hyperlinks. They then visit those hyperlinks as well.

How do Search Engines Work?

Every search engine works slightly differently, however, the basic process is this: First, a consumer types a query into the search bar. The search engine software then immediately sorts through its database to find matches to the query, and previews its results to the consumer, ranked in order of relevance. The relevance is based on a constantly changing process designed uniquely (and confidentially) by each search engine. Google, for instance, uses its unique “PageRank™ algorithm” that considers “more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms.” Search engines serve different niches, and build their algorithms in unique ways – which is why different search engines may serve up different sites of relevance for the same query.

Search engines do not search the entire world wide web, but rather their own database of pages. Google, for instance, indexes about 8 billion pages.

Think of a search engine as a really fast librarian. You tell her what you are looking for, and she searches through her database of all the books in the library to find the best ones for your search. She doesn’t search all the books in the world, but she has a big selection to choose from.

How Do You Ensure Your Site is Indexed?

There are two ways your site can be listed on a search engine results page. The first is through organic search – these are the URLs that will naturally appear in the search results to any given query based on the relevance indicated by the algorithm of that particular search engine. These results appear in the centre of the search engine results page. You may have heard the term “search engine optimization” (SEO), which refers to things you can do to ensure spiders crawl your site and that you’re ranked more highly in the list of organic results delivered to the consumer for relevant queries. The second way to ensure your site is listed in the search results to particular queries is through paid search placement. In this scenario, you define the relevant search terms, then pay for your rank within the paid search portion of the search returns. Paid search results typically appear in a top block of search results or in the right-side panel of the first page. All other results listed are organic.

Details of paid and organic search, and some tips for search engine optimization are the topics of the second post in this series. Coming soon will also be a glossary of terms to help you through your understanding of search engine marketing as you explore with us the significance, opportunities, and growth of search – so stay tuned to Lucidity to find out more.

Due to the proliferation of specialty television channels, the widespread use of the Internet and the growth of guerrilla marketing, consumers are now inundated with messaging from all sides. In response to this, new technologies have been created that help consumers avoid much of the advertising that is sent their way. Targeted markets now have the ability to skip television commercials, filter emails and block out advertisements on the Internet. So how do you interact and engage with a consumer who has learned to tune you out?

One solution is Digital Out-of-Home Marketing, a phenomenon spurned on by a 50% year over year increase in the number of digital sign placements around the globe. Expected to reach $2 Billion in revenues by 2009, Digital Out-of-Home is a rich opportunity owing to two key factors: 1) cheaper, more readily available digital screen technology and 2) the ubiquity of the mobile telephone.

Digital signage is one of the fastest growing market opportunities today. Digital signage can be summarized simply as an out of home tactic that involves a digital screen. Screens can be updated dynamically with new or existing content from anywhere in the world. Also, digital screens engage consumers with touch screen technology and direct interaction with mobile phones. It is estimated that there will be over 2.5 million digital out of home sites and over 10 million digital advertising screens by 2012.

An example of a digital out of home campaign is Motorola’s “Say Goodbye” campaign. When the Hong Kong international airport opened up a new wing they wanted to draw attention to it. The idea was to allow users to take a picture of themselves on their mobile phone  and then upload it on the large digital screens that had been installed in the new wing for everyone to see. When the picture was uploaded onto the screen, it appeared in the casing of Motorola’s latest Razr phone. The campaign was a huge success with thousands of people uploading their pictures generating momentum from word of mouth buzz and coverage in the regional press. It had people coming to the airport, just to say goodbye.

Digital signs can be controlled in a totally branded environment, delivering a completely unique brand experience. And from billboards to gas station pumps to in-store programming, digital signs fit just about anywhere. For example, Wal-mart has launched its own in-store television network that alerts customers to sales and other in-store incentives.

Interactive signage solutions in the retail environment such as touch-screen kiosks enable the direct measurement of consumer response. Signage can also provide marketers and venue owners with detailed information on the number of people that view specific content, it can identify who’s been engaged by it, and it can clearly articulate each advertiser’s return on investment.

Used in conjunction with digital signage, mobile phones can help deliver a personalized message at a meaningful and relevant moment. Mobile technology allows for immediate interaction and personalization of experience and message; it can even help consumers find what they are looking for. And the sheer novelty of many of the applications in use today is often enough to create a memorable brand experience. In one simple example, in Times Square users could dial a number on their mobile phone to hear the audio associated with a particular digital billboard.

One of the earliest and most successful digital outdoor campaigns was created for Nike and ran across Canada in the lead-up to the World Cup. Consumers could choose, via text messaging, their favourite soccer clip and it would be displayed on digital screens in popular malls. Through the interaction consumers were encouraged to visit a dedicated website and opt-in to receive other Nike news via SMS.

Another key way mobile phones can integrate with out of home advertising is quick response (QR) codes. Originally developed as a supply chain management tool, QR codes have given marketers the ability to send consumers from a magazine, an in-store display or an outdoor sign directly to a web address. The process is simple: a user with a camera phone equipped with the correct reader software can scan the image of the QR Code, which automatically directs the phone’s browser to the programmed URL. This act of linking from physical world objects is known as a hard link or physical world hyperlink. The QR code replaces more cumbersome URLs that marketers can only hope consumers will remember.

One of the reasons QR codes should be thought of as an enticing tactic for marketers is how easy they are to acquire. Anyone can generate and print their own by visiting one of several free QR code generating websites. As long as a consumer has QR code software on their phone, they have the ability to read and interact with the code.

When your target audience tunes you out you have to find other ways to grab their attention. Digital out of home signage has proven effective in engaging consumers where they were previously unreachable. Through the burgeoning technology of digital signage and mobile phones you can broaden your marketing reach and strengthen your brand communications. In a time when consumers have stopped listening, you can get in front of them with timely, relevant and engaging digital signage.

If you’ve been relying on anecdotal evidence from polling your friends and colleagues to support your theory that the use of search engines is on the rise, read on. An August 6, 2008 report on search engine use prepared by The Pew Internet & American Life Project substantiates your claims. The survey finds that the percentage of American internet users who use search engines on a typical day has risen to “a new high of just under one-half (49%)” from about one-third of all users in 2002. According to Pew that places search, as an internet activity, very close to the use of email, which the report puts at 60% of internet users on a typical day, and describes as “arguably the internet’s all-time killer app.”

At the same time, a recent report from Ipsos Reid states that “three-quarters of online Canadians indicate they can usually find what they are looking for on the first page of search results.”

So how do you leverage the burgeoning significance of search, and capture the attention of potential consumers who are turning to it in such great numbers? Most importantly, how do you get (or ensure that you stay) on that first page of search results?

Most Canadian companies and organizations with a web presence and products or services to sell have made a foray into the world of search engine marketing (SEM), a seemingly esoteric practice made up of natural or organic search engine optimization (SEO) and paid or pay-per-click (PPC) search. What they, and perhaps you, are wondering is “what are we actually doing, and are we doing it right?”

In the coming weeks, we’ll attempt to demystify search. While we’ll examine aspects of both organic and paid search engine marketing, our focus will be on search from the point view of the consumer. Because that’s how search works. Search is user-driven – it’s about consumers asking questions.

Our approach will be two-pronged. We’ll shed light on SEM basics for those new to the process by defining key terms and practices, and we’ll take a look at analytical tools that can quantify and provide insight into your SEM efforts. At the same time, we’ll engage in more in-depth analyses of various aspects of SEM such as managing your brand footprint through link building, differentiating regional from global content to drive users to your site, the role of keywords in defining brand, and more. And we’ll be asking how we can learn about consumers through their search habits and provide them with the content (answers) they’re looking for.

In addition, we hope to augment our practical research with occasional side trips into more philosophical and personal territory – detours that acknowledge the very human aspect of search and the extraordinary ways that it infiltrates our lives.

We’re looking forward to our explorations and in particular, we’re looking forward to hearing from you.

The search team,

Jinnean Barnard, Patrick Dean, Stephanie Katsuras, Greg Emin, Carolina Gomez de la Torre, Vicki Waschkowski