It's DigitalMarketing

Now is the time to innovate, not stick your head in the sand and wait for the storm to pass by. That is the theme of my article on social media innovation in this quarter’s edition of Figaro Digital Magazine. The takeaway thought from the article was that whilst budgets are being cut left, right [...]

Today, I bought Chris Brogan’s book, Trust Agents from Amazon. I’ve heard a lot about it over the past few weeks, mainly from the people I follow on Twitter. So, I went to Amazon.com, read the reviews and then placed my order.

And on the way I encountered at least 15 examples of Social Proof.

You may not be familiar with the term, Social Proof, but you’ll be aware of the concept. It’s the wisdom of crowds.

You probably didn’t notice the subtle change that occured on the Google homepage yesterday. I’m guessing that at a glance you still wouldn’t know if I held up before and after shots of the page. As reported by Mashable, Google have said they have increased the size of their search box to remind us that [...]

Would you pay a guy $1 (or £0.60p at today’s exchange rate) to wear your branded t-shirt for a day? Seems an odd question, but hundred’s of companies are apparently doing it. Jason Sadler of iwearyourshirt.com has made $70,000 this year by selling ad space on the tshirts he wears, according to Mashable. Prices start [...]

Updated 12:52 pm 23/07/09: Apparently the mysterious link is a ‘Adwords Local PlusBox‘. Yeah, I’d never heard to them either. Well apparently they were launched in December 2007, but as none of the search team had seen them before, I’m guess they’re a little under utilised. Reading the blurb on them, they only appear for [...]

Has Twitter killed long form blog writing? Is ‘traditional’ blogging already redundant in this micro-blog world? Is it convenience that makes us tweet rather than blog or is it lack of something to say? Has today’s bite sized dumbed down media reduced our attention span to the point we can’t focus beyond 140 characters anymore? [...]

On Monday 15th June 2009, Jobsite launched it’s Jobs by Twitter service – a simple but innovative service to help jobseekers find a new job by providing personalised job tweets via Twitter.

The key component of that sentence is the word personalised. The fact that you can specify the jobs you receive makes it different to the majority of the Twitter based job services available today.

Jobs by Twitter has been a bit of a pet project for me over the last couple of months. This is how it came about…

Robin Goad, Research Director of Hitwise UK revealed some interesting statistics regarding the growth of Twitter today.

Writing on his Hitwise blog, Goad reported UK traffic to the micro-blogging site has increased 22-fold in the last 12 months. That growth has meant that Twitter.com has leapt from the 969th most visited site (May ’08) in the UK to 38th (May ’09). The most impressive aspect of that growth is the fact that 93% of it has come in the first five months of 2009 alone.

As Goad rightly pointed out, that number in all likelihood should be even higher if you factor in the vast number of third party applications such as Seesmic, Tweetdeck and Twitterific that people use to access Twitter remotely.

Today I noticed the new Google Profiles section inserted into the UK search results. When the new plans for Google Profiles were announced last month, it was mentioned that they would insert up to four matching results in a Profiles section at the foot of the first page of the SERPs (for a search on a name). The roll out was due to start in the U.S., but with no announced timetable for the rest of the world. Well, it seems the UK is ready.

According to figures released by Nielsen Online this week, the 10 most heavily used brands accounted for 45% of total UK Internet time in April.  The top two brands – Facebook and MSN / Windows Live (Hotmail) – accounted for 11 billion of the 48 billion minutes that us Britons spent online. The Top 10 [...]