Facebook launched its awards system yesterday which they are calling “Facebook Deals”. Whilst it is explained as revolutionary to most the users it is actually nothing really that Foursquare do not already do. The main difference is that with the backing of Facebook’s large user base the idea could now take off, much like many other ventures started by other companies that Facebook has left in its wake.

For those unfamiliar with how Foursquare did it, here is a quick summary of the Facebook Deals system:

• Using your smart phone handset you open your Facebook application and you need to click on the places button.
• You then need to check in to a one of the nearby registered locations that pops up. Depending on the size of the area you are in this list could either be very long (London) or very small (Beverley!)
• Places with deals are highlighted with a yellow flag and you can then see the deal by clicking on the destination and seeing the deal before then deciding to check in or not.
• Finally you check in at that location in order to claim the deal which you then present to the member of staff within the business.

A lot of the hype around the concept is justified as it has the potential to be huge and not just seen as an update to the Facebook system but rather a change to the way people shop. With Facebook now having more than 26 million users in the UK the potential for shops and services to target these people whilst they are out and about is huge.

The service is expected to take off with advertisers because redeeming an offer will show up in customers’ Facebook news feeds, essentially advertising the products to their friends and peer group. The potential for offers and promotions to go viral amongst friends is then really exciting for companies and a big incentive for them to sign up to the programme. Emily White of Facebook UK noted at the launch that “The wisdom of friends has taken over from the wisdom of crowds.”

The main concern will be of revealing your location and checking in at places meaning you are giving away even more details online than before which will cause concern among parents mainly. This does seem to be the way social networking is going though and is going to happen, for some it’s even an appeal or a status to be associated with certain shops, businesses or restaurants for example (who wouldn’t want to tell everyone they were checking in at the fat duck).

Facebook Deals: The End Of Foursquare Is Looming is a post from WMpS, your one stop digital agency.

First just to clarify what I mean by a Q&A website or network. This is a place where you can go to ask questions and then allow the network’s community to answer them. You are likely to receive a number of answers to your question and you can then vote on which one was the most helpful at the end. There are obvious rules of etiquette and conduct and you have to categorise your question to help people find it but essentially that’s the basics.

Yahoo Answers

I like Yahoo answers the most for numerous reasons but mainly because it has a large user base and questions are quickly contributed to. It also contains a reward based incentive to use the network, which is that as you answer more questions and vote on answers you get points and with more points you raise your authority level which gives you more privileges.

Whilst this may seem trivial, for an individual not going on to promote their business or to network to develop their career you could ask why even use the network. Whilst it is nice to help people, to just go on and churn out answers for a few hours to people who could quite easily find out the answers themselves seems a waste of time without making into a sort of game which Yahoo does with the level points builder system.

The new network – Quora

Why am I talking about this now? Well there is a new contender into the Q&A website marketplace and it is doing a lot of things right over the previous efforts from others that have led to them not being that popular. The new Q&A network is called Quora. It’s quite a drastic improvement because rather than signing up to a new network, they have made the very sensible choice of integrating with both Facebook and Twiter from the outset. From the moment you create your account you instantly follow all your friends on both networks and you don’t need to set up new profiles as its pulled in from your FB or Twitter accounts.

It offers much more than this though. It offers a simple way to select topics to follow (the UI could be improved a bit to make it more obvious to how you add new topics) and once you have a couple chosen you are directed to your homepage where you are then fed in questions on any of your selected topics. Here you can then choose to ask questions or help start to answer them. When you answer a question you can then opt to have it posted on your FB or twitter accounts to both promote your knowledge and the use of Quora in general.

It contains many other features that are useful but I will let you see these for yourself by signing up as it will ultimately change dramatically over the coming months anyway as the large influx of new users (myself included) start to find problems and suggest improvements which is typical with any social based network.

Who should be on Quora

Like with any of the mainstream social networks Quora is likely to have a very large following and considering it has only been live to the public since June 2010 it is growing really fast. This is in part due to the ease of signup thanks to the social network integration.

Really in my opinion any business should be on this at some level just like with Twitter, FB and Youtube etc. It gives opportunity for businesses to get their teams on there and impart their knowledge onto would be customers and partners. As an individual you also have the incentive of impressing your friends with your knowledge and future potential employers with your ideas.

These are currently the only incentives for going on and I believe my argument still holds weight in what will motivate the larger population to really participate in answering questions. There are obviously niche groups who have a vested interest in that topic and want to be seen to know the answers, but there are still going to be lots of questions people post to simply save themselves time looking up the answer. Without some kind of incentive to help people answer these it could put people off.

I will follow this up in the coming months once the network has had more time to develop but in the meantime I would advise that you check it out.

Question and Answer Networks is a post from WMpS, your one stop digital agency.

Basically you sign up to the programme and register the city where you live, or the closest if you live outside. You are then given a deal each day that may or may not be of much interest to you and if it is and you sign up, you are then encouraged to promote the deal to your friends and peers. The reason you are given to promote to other users is that if enough people do not sign up, no one gets the deal and it is cancelled, so they put the power back in your hands as such.

Does it work?

Sounds great! Well there are some minor drawbacks, mainly that Livingsocial currently only supports the larger cities in the UK (my home city of York is sadly missing from the list). The main problem however is the websites show you offers that 9 times out of 10 are not even remotely relevant to you personally. Whilst this might be expected due to lack of segmentation data when you sign up, it is baffling why this is not requested. For example in the recently I have seen offers for liposuction, tony and guy hair dressing, reduced dresses and spa days none of which interest me in the slightest.

What is clearly missing from the offerings then is some targeted offers to both where you live and your interests.

The online marketing strategy has been given some serious backing though it has to be said. We have noticed within a number of clients advertising space that groupon have started to invade the paid search landscape and often sitting in top positions. Given the fact that the website signup page will return a very low quality score and therefore expensive cost per click on each visitor, the budget is not small.

The social media programme has also been given some good support and the incentive system to recommend the deal to a friend when it is something you really want is a powerful message. I know how I often rally round my mates when I see a good deal and that is without any rewards put in front of me. The only marketing that even comes close to this that is going on currently is the delightful graze snack box company who tempt you in with free boxes of treats then offer you future discounts for each promotion code you hand over to a mate, meaning within a matter of days you have set up your own offline affiliate network in an effort to feed your friends and make yourself a saving in the process.

The drawback of the Groupon marketing is the email campaigns which is echoed by the limited product offering. Not only is it depressing when you go on the site to see the limited range of irrelevant deals on offer, but when this is then communicated to you on daily basis by email you soon get fed up. What should concern Groupon is that losing people at this stage means they are unlikely to be still hanging around in the future when the segmentation issue is resolved.

More Group Schemes!

More recently I have seen something that has not only restored my faith in the group buying process but also has been a source of inspiration for some future social media work for some of our clients. The offer is something that was put in front of me on Xbox live on one of my favourite games, Battlefield Bad Company 2.

Without boring everyone to death with the details of the game, I can summarise that unlike many of the rival first person army based shooting games out there, the game system rewards teamwork and this is the basis for the campaign.

Xbox Live has been growing its online content and is set to be a major future advertising space with the potential to have highly targeted in game ads and up-sells whilst playing almost any game. The avatar system in particular has taken up many brands and now features clothing and accessories for your personalised avatar to wear. The in game promotions are also convincing and are often sold to you at the right times. This is the really great thing about the campaign; it basically rewards people talking about, playing and interacting with each other on the game by issuing a free map to the community once they complete 69 million in game team assists.

It is made clear that the map will not be made available if this does not happen, and without people even realising it, they have been shamelessly promoting the game, other paid accessories and maps in order to achieve this end goal of a free map. What this clever campaign is really doing is allowing social media and interactive channels to promote the game and get people excited about it. I am not almost expecting a follow up campaign that says you will receive an in game item free when you are your friends all buy a map or the latest game, but only if you convince all your friends they must also buy the game. It is no longer enough to want you to buy the game; they want you to become a salesman on their behalf as well.

There is Strength in Numbers! is a post from WMpS, your one stop digital agency.

Something in the news recently has highlighted another form of SEO that doesn’t strictly fall into any of the bad SEO categories but arguably shouldn’t be rewarded all the same, is what is being dubbed as “negative SEO”. This is a bit confusing as there is already an SEO activity well documented with this name which is also referred to as Google bowling. This is where the focus of an SEO campaign is put on the competitors rather than the promoted website and work carried out to move them down the serps, leaving it more open for your own website. Negative SEO in the case of this article though is something quite different as I will explain.

The company that has openly highlighted this negative SEO as their SEO strategy of choice is called DecorMyEyes and I will not do them the service of creating a link here, further fuelling their campaign.

DecorMyEyes and the negative SEO campaign

Essentially the company did not plan to carry out the strategy they are now on course with. It happened out of chance from operating a genuinely unscrupulous business model. Basically what the site has done is gain large amounts of links from lots and lots of negative complaints on a range of customer feedback / review websites that contain large levels of domain authority. What is really strange though is the company has not only used this to their advantage in the serps, but also seem to have further developed their business model in order to maximise its potential. This has been done essentially by becoming extremely dishonest and in cases probably illegal when carrying out day to day business dealings.

The owner of DecorMyEyes, Mr  Vitaly Borker actually went as far as to going on some of the customer review websites and incited the customers even more by telling them all their negative feedback was only helping his business even more. Whilst it is extremely frustrating for the customers to here, he sadly is quite right.

The New York times report this story in detail and really is quite an interesting read which I encourage you to take in. What I really wanted to discuss here was how and why this has even worked as an SEO strategy.

Why does negative SEO get you good rankings?

Essentially what Mr Borker was taking advantage of  is phrased perfectly in the NY times piece:

“Google is unable to distinguish between adulatory buzz and scathing critiques when it scours the digital universe and ranks the best and the brightest.”

This is stating in short that to Google, a link is a link and when adding up the amount of links from good quality websites to your own, it doesn’t see whether it is to warn people away or to sing the praises of the site. This is something Google often claim they do carry out in their site ranking algorithm and they refer to it as “sentiment analysis”.

Whether it really is part of their algorithm or not is beside the point as if the algorithm does contain this information, it’s not working and this is shown by the fact searching for many top designer glasses terms brings back decormyeyes on page 1. In many cases the website outranks even the official designer’s website. Whilst this is quite a common feature and something that surprises lots of people, if the official website does not focus its own SEO efforts and have good authority and popularity, why should it rank highly for a competitive term?

What is happening is decormyeyes is optimising its website for designer glasses, it has done some of the normal SEO work legitimately and now it is being supported by a mass negative link baiting campaign which, providing the complaints keep coming in on the negative review sites, will continue to push his rankings up in the future.

But is this right? Why should Google promote a website that is making its money by ripping people off? Well the answer in my opinion is that it’s because people link to it and it’s popular, meaning it is an important website for the chosen search term. When you google a term like “designer glasses” you are not telling Google you want to see companies that are reputable, honest and sell designer glasses for a good price. You are simply saying you want to see the most talked about, popular websites related to that search term which it does.

There are times when this should be changed and that illegal content should be handled properly but this is essentially censorship and should only be carried out when absolutely essential. Instead the answer is that people either learn to refine their search queries to represent what they want to see from a search, in this case “online designer glasses for sale from reputable company” or Google needs to have some filter options to allow you to select from highly rated sites, much like with the business listings / places format.

Does negative SEO work as business strategy?

This is a matter of opinion really as the argument decormyeyes owner Mr Borker uses is that there are plenty of new customers out there and he doesn’t need to focus on the repeat ones. As a large percentage of customers coming in to your website on non brand specific terms are likely to be new anyway, his argument does gain some ground. The main point against this is the cost of a return visitor is much lower and should always be at the core of an online marketing plan. His counter argument is that as his new customers cost him nothing though due to his free negative SEO campaign generated by the people who most want to see him fail, this is not a concern for him.

In the long run, he will come into problems though as the company name is being dragged through the mud which people will start to see and limit any future growth. The potential market open to him also will reduce and reduce until he goes out of business (in theory).

One of the main concerns is that this could take a while to happen, or he could just start the process again under a new company name. Rankings would take a while to establish but it could work. Thankfully shoppers are becoming much more savy and before completing a purchase people will visit review websites or even Google the company name to get some background before handing over their hard earned cash. This is where the negative SEO work seriously falls down here though and due to the authority of some of sites showing these comments, they rank highly for a search on the company name, giving customers easy and quick information that can prevent the purchase being made by doing a quick google search for the company name.

So what is to be learned from this? While in the short term a negative SEO campaign will quite possibly get you rankings for some hard to get terms, it is not a sustainable business model so for any genuine company wanting to be operating in the coming years. Instead we should be looking at the source of the good SEO work (the customer review sites) and focus effort instead on building a large amount of links from happy customers who will pass on their good experiences and deal with the bad customers in a much more effective way.

The strange workings of the search engines! is a post from WMpS, your one stop digital agency.

More recently though Facebook is starting to put pressure on some larger companies with its service expansions. The Facebook places software is encroaching on the presence of Foursquare and other location based social networks which we have previously discussed. But now Facebook have taken their battles one step further, and is challenging the biggest internet player of all; Google.

How has it started?

Google has traditionally operated its Gmail contacts API quite freely so if you plug into it you can allow a user to add their friends also on Gmail quite easily. So when you login to Facebook with a Gmail account you could import any of your contact lists in, meaning you can quickly add your existing friends to Facebook.

Well that was great and worked like it did with other email clients such as hotmail, yahoo etc but now Google have updated the terms of service to say if you use this feature from the contacts API, you must also allow the data flow to go the other way back to Google. Personally this seems reasonable enough but Facebook were not of the same opinion and did not allow this to happen, which subsequently led to Google blocking Facebook from using the API. Facebook then went further and put in place a workaround for users to simply export their Google contacts and upload them into Facebook.

The latest problem

As pointed out by Ben Parr on Mashable, the reason this battle is taking place is that no one wants to make a losing move in what is ultimately the battle for who controls social media on the web. But the battle is slowly turning into a war with the latest announcements from Facebook.

They have just announced a new messaging / email service dubbed project Titan which has been referred to as a “Gmail killer”. It is essentially a combined messaging service that you can use to communicate with friends over a number of different methods such as SMS, Email, Instant messaging etc.  Whether this is viewed as a replacement to Gmail is yet to be seen, but it shows Facebooks strategy to move into a more all encompassing service.

Other Areas of Competition

Both sides are ramping up their offerings and Google has recently announced a change to its business listings review area which has now been called hotpot. This is more along the lines of something like Trip Advisor where you are using a location based search to determine which business / restaurant / bar to visit based on other peoples recommendations (again something Foursquare was trying to do). Whilst this is not yet directly competing with Facebook, it is starting to encroach on Facebook pages (where you list your business) and will undoubtedly be competing more heavily in the future.

Facebook as well has been making other inroads into Google based products, with ventures such as doc.com which is a direct rival on Google docs which is all based on sharing documents with friends or work colleagues.

It will be interesting to see who throws down the next challenge and which area this will be in, so keep checking back to our blog for more updates in the coming weeks.

The Google vs. Facebook War is a post from WMpS, your one stop digital agency.

This will be completed worldwide by 2012 and the integration will move over all of Yahoo’s back office systems into Microsoft. This even includes their “build your own search engine” system which is no longer going to be available to developers for free. They will also stop the search monkey toolset which is currently available and also put an end to the APIs for Yahoo Site Explorer which is currently a measure used by quite a few search engine toolbars.

Personally I cannot work out this move at all and neither can a number of other people, some who have written articles on the matter and others who have just left comments on blogs. The batch of comments on the official Yahoo post discussing the matter highlight my exact problem,  why would people now choose to use Yahoo at all, at least as an “alternative” to Bing considering it’s exactly the same? This is the same story all across the internet with some people now focusing on the fact that with Bing and Yahoo combining efforts, it may actually put a dent in Google, but most on the point that with Yahoo using Bing, it will only last a short time before people just go direct to Bing and Yahoo will eventually die out.

What is really strange is that Yahoo now claim their focus is going to focusing on “technology innovation in the search experience to bring more value to users and advertisers alike” but quite how this is going to happen when its all coming from Bing is not clear. They even discuss the issue of now charging for services that were previously free in a positive light like there is some benefit to this, despite not even mentioning that the cost may be justified by some new functionality on these services.

What will this mean for users and advertisers?

Well not that much for users I don’t think, as all the traffic from Yahoo will eventually move to Bing or more likely to Google. With Yahoo UK getting the update to their search soon, users will have no benefit of using Yahoo at all once this is live and the other services have shut down or started charging. So people will then be left with a choice of Bing and Google, and unless something major is announced on the Bing engine that can out do Google, it is unlikely to make the dent in Google that some people predict.

For advertisers it does mean one less channel to operate on if the decline does indeed occur. As this will lead to higher traffic on the other engines, this will mean a likely rise in costs for advertisers although ones doing a good job will see benefits from the increased traffic. The one main problem will be the loss of the niche markets that are sometimes available on Yahoo. These are keyword areas and interests that are represented by the Yahoo demographic and can often be small but cheap sales. For some companies, finding these customers again at the same acquisition rates may not be an easy task.

I will keep you all updated as and when there is more concrete news on a UK deadline for the switch.

Yahoo! no more! is a post from WMpS, your one stop digital agency.

This to me seems nothing short of crazy. The network is on the way to finding a good funding source for its future without resorting to charging users for the privilege of using the service, which no one wants. But quite what they expect will happen when people find they can no longer track their spend properly through the channel and justify its cost is beyond me. From the point of view of our company, unless a reliable alternative tracking solution can be found we will be struggling to justify its use in the future.

The most annoying aspect is the channel works and we have seen some good success stories using all elements of Facebook for our clients, but particularly from paid advertisements. They offer a level of targeting and huge audience that can be matched by few other places. If your target customer demographic happens to fall into the main user base of Facebook as well, then you really are in luck. Up til now we have been happily running the campaigns, providing Facebook with much needed revenue as I’m sure a lot of other people are doing. But as a company that focuses its marketing on ROI, this is going to be problematic in the future with only a clicks measure to go on.

The problem is compounded as well by the fact that an alternative solution is going to be difficult to use as Facebook do not allow the use of third party ad servers which is summarised on DDDM in a post end of last week. Without this data, they support my conclusion that Facebook are going to take a hit on their revenue due to the change.

So the important question is why they are making the change. Let’s give the team the benefit of the doubt and assume that have not lost their minds, which means that either a) they are removing it because on the whole the channel was not proving successful and they don’t want to highlight this to people, b) they are planning something much bigger to replace it or c) something else I have not yet considered (please leave any comments on insights for this). Based on the results we have seen for our clients I really doubt that a) is the problem as the network ad programme does currently allow a good level of customisation and targeting to a wide audience and providing you do a good ad and get it in front of the right people, you are in with a good chance. Then factor in the cost of the ads are pretty low considering, it’s hard to believe people can be messing it up that badly on the whole. So that leaves me to believe they will be replacing it with something bigger and better.

The change is due to come in around November time which still gives a month to make a further announcement of what improvements could be put in alongside the change to remove the sour taste left in advertisers’ mouths. If they don’t, there are obviously a plethora of alternative advertising sources that people can shift their Facebook budget to, most of which do allow the most primitive basics of tracking the success of advertising with them.

Facebook Killing Their Own Advertising Programme? is a post from WMpS, your one stop digital agency.

Develop Your Subject Lines

Your subject line is often the one chance you will get someone to open your email. Having a good subject line is often not enough, you have to instil a sense of urgency in the consumer’s mind and give a reason to really make them want to click on your email. You also need to sum up the best or most topical / relevant piece of content in your email in the subject line. People will get many promotional emails every day and it’s becoming a real challenge to get your email opened.

The best way to find the best subject line is not simply though brainstorming and running with the best idea, you should be actively testing multiple subject lines with each send. You may have had multiple subject lines that have worked well in the past and in some rare cases, sticking to these with only small modification will work. For the rest of us it is more difficult than this and you need to use around 3 unique lines per send.  You can then send out a small proportion of your email list to a good sample of your email list and from there determine which has the best open rate. Then you can use this data to choose the email subject line for the rest of the send, ensuring you have gone with the best performing line for the bulk of your campaign.

This may sound tricky to do, but actually most good email providers will do this automatically on each send with the only work involving setting up the different subject line variants.

Segment Your Data

The ideal aim for any email marketer is to have a list segmented out to each relevant area of your business and emails to these people will then always be highly targeted and therefore well received. This can be problematic though and if the lists are not large enough to allow specific sends for only certain interests then you may have to settle for less targeted sends to the whole list.

If you do have the option to target emails then you should be doing this. This should be based on previous buying history, interests registered when signing up, areas of the website viewed previously and data collected from previous emails sent out. You will receive much better rates of open, click through and conversion if you can target people in this way, and also reduce the risk of these people unsubscribing from the list.

Once you have got your data into segments, you should store it in this way in your email system by either sub categorising your main list or using separate lists for each segment. Then when you create your next campaign, only send to the segments that will really be interested in this promotion. This also means you can create more campaigns over the month but individuals will not be bombarded with that many emails in too short a time period, which brings me on to my next tip.

Manage email send frequency

Striking the balance between keeping regular contact with the user and bombarding them with too many is a tricky task, but in general I would advise sending certainly no more than one email per week. For some industries this may even be too much and a fortnightly send is the right amount. A lot of companies try more than this, and even brands that should be able to get away with it by having rapidly changing stock and regular offers send too many emails in my opinion. Amazon is a real offender in my book and I only keep subscribed with them to monitor this situation, I long gave up clicking or buying on the email I receive every other day.

There is a debated technique that is built into a lot of email providers and that the is the “second chance send”. Essentially when an email is sent out to your list and x amount of people receive but do not open your email, you are given an option to second send your email with a some of the key features of the email changed to try and encourage them to open this time round.

This in my experience can be a really powerful tool and can boost enquiries / sales without the need for much extra work in terms of setting up a new campaign. It can however annoy people on your list and lead to much higher than usual unsubscribe rates. It is something to consider and use from time to time, but be careful about which emails you do it from, and which segments you send it to.

Summary

There is obviously more that can be done and I will pick some of these up in my next post. There is another big change happening in the world of email marketing and that’s Google’s priority inbox. Assessing what affect this is having on emails is key at the moment and is something we will be documenting soon. In the meantime check out Matt’s post on the key features of the system by clicking here.

Some New Email Marketing Tips! is a post from WMpS, your one stop digital agency.

Just to be clear this means that if you search for a certain term and Google can recognise that the user is likely looking for something on specific website, it will dominate the search results with results from that website either entirely or mostly. So for example we have noticed this on client called Turquoise Holidays which their website is on www.turquoiseholidays.co.uk.

If you make a search for the brand name “Turquoise Holidays” then the first 7 results are all from the turquoiseholidays.co.uk website. Only a few weeks ago the results were completely different and would show only 2 listings at most and the second result was an indented version of the main site, most likely the honeymoons section as it appeared Google was assessing which part of the site was the most dominate area. This is the same as doing a search now for “wmps” where you see our main site first then the blog home page as the indented second listing.

This even goes one step further though and applies this rule to search terms where the entity is included but not just on its own. So for example “amazon books”. Typing in this search query brings back almost all the results as amazon pages. Granted some are for the .co.uk version which appear at the top as I am searching from the UK but also some from the .com and one even from a sub domain of the .co.uk. There is only one other result in there which is from the Nectar website. The SERPs still feature alternative displays where neccessary which is postive such as news posts, images, videos etc.

What does this mean for users and brands?

Well it means quite a lot actually, for one the brands that are benefiting from these searches have just eliminated a mass of affiliate or sneaky competition who were appearing in the natural search listings underneath there site. Obviously this means the days of losing clicks to competitors who have a nicer sounding META description than yours are potentially over, well that is until you consider the paid search ads which will now be increasingly desirable for any competitors.

If you are going to be cynical you could even argue that this seems to have been done at a time when Google has relaxed rules on competitor trademark advertising even more and potentially means a new stream of revenue coming in from competitors who want to appear for a search term of one of their closest competitors as the paid search route is now the only way to cash in on this.

For users it means seeing results more suited to what they likely looking for in the first place in my opinion. A search for Amazon books really doesn’t leave much scope open for what else the user would want to have seen apart from a selection of web pages from Amazon offering books for sale and book reviews. This is taking nothing away from the competition who arguably offer a similar service and sell similar items who will be annoyed that they are no longer appearing for free, but its not what the user wants to see based on their search term.

The immediate effect that brands should see is a rise in overall longer tail traffic to their website that includes the entity or brand term within it. Similarly competitors and affiliates should start to see that traffic tailing off. At this stage the list is not exhaustive for all brands and there are a lot that are still not functioning in this way.

How does it work?

This is something I am currently pondering myself, as what determines whether a brand or entity term is necessarily related to that website is not an exact science. It was about as exact as deciding which website to rank top for the same search result before this update was made but now it’s a lot more important as if Google gets it wrong, you will not only have to scroll down one or two places to find the site you were actually looking for but now even go onto the next page of results.

Even the prospect of how Google identifies whether the search is a brand / entity full stop is interesting enough. This is debated in a recent post on SEO by the sea and is covered in more detail than I can do justice here.

Essentially though Google will work this out on the same way it works out relevant websites for any query. If a website URL, META data, content, inbound links and previous click through rates from that keyword all support the same brand term then that is likely to be a safe enough bet that its the right site. There will undoubtedly be times when this is wrong and you see a page of irrelevant results for the search you made, and this will either mean the way people search will change slightly to accommodate for it, or more likely that Google will refine the algorithm even further to make sure it works more of the time.

Brands In Google Search Results is a post from WMpS, your one stop digital agency.

This is assuming though that more mobile phone manufacturers follow this trend. For example, whilst Apple continue to develop screen size and quality to levels that enhance the browsing experience on their latest iPhone offering, they are still refusing to integrate properly with flash. Currently the iPhone browser does not support Flash in any way and is unlikely to in the near future. Flash is also under attack from supporters of the HTML 5 code standard which has arisen after recent discussion on the BBC website. Essentially people are claiming the BBC is not embracing open development standards because of its reluctance to move its flash functionality into HTML 5, and this sort of news, whilst been played down by the BBC, does not help support Flash in the public domain.

Whether it will continue to enhance the android platform in the next few years remains to be seen, but the main problem is getting hold of a phone at the moment that supports android 2.2 is a challenge on its own. The market leading model, the HTC desire, is currently out of stock on most of the main carriers and with no confirmed date of when it comes in. In the meantime I will have to go back to my non-flash supported G1 and continue to view websites with big gaps in them where the flash animation cannot be displayed, much like the millions of iPhone users who will continue to see this view in the coming years.

Flash on your Mobile Phone is a post from WMpS, your one stop digital agency.