Research from the European Interactive Advertising Association suggest that the power of the web to lure consumers into trying new brands is greater even than we thought. 49% of UK consumers admitted to switching brands after online research. 76% were driven by search, 72% by personal recommendation.

According to their blog, Google News are trialling a service which will highlight reader comments alongside the stories. The socialisation of the web continues …

Matt Cutts - a key Google blogger - is a great critic of companies who try to spam the search engine index by buying links. This practice of buying text links is “illegal” according to Cutts, and Google penalises it when they can find it. Why do people do it? Simple: it works. Contextual links have the power to drive a company to the top of a search engine like nothing else. If I link to you I am endorsing you. It may be bad ethics for me to sell endorsements, but as long as I understand how to maintain my own authority (perhaps by arranging for my own links) I can pass on some benefits. Link farms for this kind are very common in the areas of travel, of comparison shopping, or online loans, or gambling. But they can work anywhere. (Links are much more important for a business than traffic, a fact seldom noticed by web teams when they set up affiliate schemes.)

There was some consternation last week when it emerged that a senior Google employee Tim Armstrong ran a company Associated Content whose business, apparently, had been doing exactly what Cutts proscribed - selling links. Cutts has since gone silent on the topic, citing an upcoming vacation.

According to a screen-shot on Philipp Lenssen’s outer-court.com blog Google have been considering delivering search returns broken down into functional categories, like “Review” and “Reference” and “Stores”. It brings the prospect of functional search that much closer.

I am addressing a CBI conference this week in Birmingham, UK, where the agenda is to discuss Crisis Management and digital media.

When we established Market Sentinel two years ago we thought that online monitoring and response would be a leading part of crisis management. As time has gone on and we have learnt more about crisis response, we now have a much clearer idea of what works and what does not. Onlinetools have a part to play, but they are more effective in crisis prevention and in dealing with the aftermath of a crisis than they are in managing the crisis itself.

The nature of a crisis

A crisis rarely comes out of the blue. Normally it is something which was previously an “issue” - poor earnings, a problem with a product, a safety worry - which suddenly flares up. In principle the web is a great medium for addressing such issues before they get to the crisis stage, but in practice this rarely happens (more on that below).

When such crises arise the management of a company has an imperative first to act and only then to speak. When they speak they do well to speak to the nearest mass media, radio, TV and print - ideally simultaneously. Such statements should of course be carried on the website or blogsite, but that is not the first outlet for them. Most media outlets will put the full text on their news websites in any case.

When a crisis happens the senior management of a company would naturally be well advised to monitor the response to their words. PR company Weber Shandwick recently reported that a large majority (61%) of business executives were sceptical about responding to bloggers, even if they had their facts wrong. They instead highlighted fixing the underlying problem. The communications professionals should perhaps be exercised by the response to the message, but in practice - again - their time is better spent talking personally to key stakeholders, answering questions and getting the message out.

There is, however, a huge opportunity for using the web to speak directly and in detail to smaller stakeholders where call centres can simply not cope. For example - is your laptop battery one of those which is likely to explode? Here is a link to the webpage.

The nature of the web

The web is an accretive, not a narrative medium. It helps to think of the web as a palimpsest of information, where new information does not quite efface old information, but gradually becomes more prominent, thanks to the impact of new links, new ways of looking at the old information.

Search engines react to changes in corporate reputation only slowly, as the consensus around a topic changes over time. Google indexes only part of the web, and indexes disproportionately the pages that change frequently. Often the key pages in corporate reputation management belong to influential but staid bodies like institutes of safety, or regulators, or tax authorities.

This means that it is only when the immediate firefighting of the crisis is out of the way that the web comes into its own. Perhaps the brand has sustained some damage. How much damage and from whom? Who needs persuading of the error of their information?

This is the time when the tools that could usefully have been deployed earlier, in the pre-crisis, issue management phase of the problem can be deployed. Here it is useful to benchmark corporate reputation in relation to an issue, to identify key stakeholders who need to be communicated with, on or offline, to monitor those stakeholders, to analyse their own networks of influence and to work at understanding how knowledge flows through the group.

So, I am in the lucky position of not having a crisis on my hands, what should I do? First: write down the issues that might become crises; second; note what I am doing to keep an eye on them from a communications perspective; third: ensure that I know who the key authorities are in relation to these issues. Understand them, listen to them, monitor them. When they start talking about these issues, you know that the issue has moved one step closer to becoming a crisis, but you also know where to address news of your response.

Microsoft’s Live Search team have come up with a really cool piece of code (a search macro, in their terminology) which allows you to search a sub-group of sites all of whom are linked from a particular site. (A similar piece of code already allows you to track sites that link to a particular site) This is a very useful tool for a director of marketing or communications who wants to track the progress of an idea. O’Reilly’s Brady Forrest writes it up. Really useful stuff. Kudos to Microsoft.  As Joseph Hunkins pointed out, this is out-Googling Google.

It resonates with a lot of the interesting work we have been doing here at Market Sentinel. One of our observations is that a series of contextual links create what is, in effect, a focus group on a specific issue. Not a normal focus group, but an opted-in focus group, a focus group of experts.

The effects of this are very intriguing. For example we did some work recently looking at developments in social search. We found that we could look at the sites that were being disproportionately linked by the stakeholders in this topic - and realised that they were consistently identifying cutting edge technology developments ahead of the mainstream media. If I was working for a VC, or a technology company on the hunt for acquisitions, this would be information that would be of great interest to me. via John Battelle

By buying YouTube Google have created the groundwork for a content economy in video. They have an integrated micro-payments system, developed for adwords, which is perfectly adapted to incentivizing content providers large and small in posting their material on the website.

Content owners have had three concerns about the web:

a) how do I preserve my brand experience?

b) how do I stop piracy?

c) how do I get paid?

The brand experience question is still an open question in the era of social media. Shrewd brands realise that the pass has been sold on “controlling the brand experience”. In the age of search, the brand experience will be mediated, like it or not. Brands have to amplify and express their brand via their stakeholder groups (consumers and channel partners).

But b) and c) have been, or will be answered by the Google/YouTube alliance. The streaming format precludes piracy and the payments back-end offers a business model for nervous rights owners.

Google launched a code search engine so that developers can find public code more easily. Now you can find out if anyone before you has ever solved that problem you are working on.

Every time we meet up with colleagues in the business we have a conversation which touches on the following topic: can you do everything you do automatically? This is a way of asking: is your technology doing cool stuff that I don’t understand?

Our technology does do cool stuff, but I can explain it in words of few syllables. And we check the results before we share it with clients. To identify high-value influencers requires a combination of technology and human cross-checking. Measuring sentiment automatically is an ambition, but our current methodology involves human eyes, ears and brains, aided by number-crunching computers. To rely on technology to make these judgements would be foolhardy. Vast sums are at stake.

Because of this, I was relieved to see John Battlelle’s interview with Google’s Matt Cutts where Cutts confirms what we have long suspected, that even the mightly Google supplements its automated efforts with the intelligence of human beings. As Matt points out: “algorithms aren’t magic; they don’t leap fully-formed from computers like Athena bursting from the head of Zeus. Algorithms are written by people. People have to decide the starting points and inputs to algorithms. And quite often, those inputs are based on human contributions in some way.”

It is worth remembering this, because to be acted upon data needs to be processed by something that can understand, draw conclusions and take actions - a human being. Algorithms can save a human being some time, but they can tell him or her what to do to solve a problem.

Next week, Market Sentinel is taking on a work experience student (summer intern). He is Amnon Ferber from University College School in North London. We do this as often as we can. We find school leavers are best, because they haven’t learnt bad habits! We give them reading lists, encourage them to get involved in open source programming, teach them how software development works and how to marshall their thoughts. One of our work experience guys from a previous incarnation, Adam Langley, has ended up working for Google. We tend to end up employing our work experience students irregularly during their college years, giving them interesting problems to solve, pieces of programming, systems administration conundrums to solve. Our ambition is to give them work indefinitely.

I took my approach to talent spotting from working at Amazon. At Amazon I was staggered by the amount of time devoted to head-hunting the most talented programmers. Frequently very senior executives would spend 50% of their working day locating and interviewing talented people. It is an approach that pays dividends. Wealth creation in high technology business is all about finding brilliant people and persuading them to come work with you.

Given what I know about the prospects for this company and those like it I am frequently surprised by how few students are interested in programming. This is a finding confirmed by a UK report, which announces: “a 50% drop in applications for computer-related degrees, a 60% drop in software engineering students and a 47% drop in systems engineering students”.

Market Sentinel already uses a variety of software designers in Ukraine, New Zealand, the Philippines and Sri Lanka for our work. The lack of a UK skills base in programming will result in more and more of this kind of work going overseas, but much more seriously it will mean that there is less likelihood of the Market Sentinels of the future being developed here. This is a bad thing for the UK economy.

Robert Scoble is suggesting that obscure bloggers might consider linking to the word “brrreeeport”.

The idea is that enough people link they they will build their authority courtesy of Scoble. Of course this only really works if someone else manages to interpose their take on the “brrreeeport” phenomenon and gain relevant authority. (And that’s real authority, not the Technorati sort) And that authority is only valuable in the context of someone searching on the word “brrreeeport”. My interest in this is that it is a text book demonstration, using humans, of what black hat influence brokers are constantly doing with spam blogs/splogs.

But there is an upside. Say if you are a marketer, with a message that you are blogging about. You encourage bloggers to use your message in a link using a particular keyword, and you reward the most imaginative of them with a frontpage link. We were talking to a publisher this morning and this would be super-relevant to them. Each time an author’s name or book title was mentioned in an amusing way the publisher could highlight the link, and share some of the brand’s authority with that blogger. A cool viral campaign.

[Incidentally - I came across this post as a result of a mail from my old friend from Amazon - Dave Mutton - who has launched a cool site called Blogcode . The idea of it is to find blogs similar to mine - kind of opt-in collaborative searching for blogs. Neat idea.]

Search engine optimisers BigMouth Media are back in the Google organic index. I mailed Steve Leach to find out what went wrong, but can’t find a public statement online. The threads here are the only clues and are full of (for me, baffling) speculation about redirects and scrolling text in divs.

To Paris yesterday to hear the great David Weinberger, by the special invitation of Guillaume du Gardier, now with Edelman.

David Weinberger was one of the editors of the Cluetrain Manifesto and thus has a legitimate claim to be at the heart of the philosophical shift that underlies the rise of consumer-generated media, and the transition of public relations into “public relationships”.

Weinberger is now at Harvard Law School’s Berkman centre for the Internet and society. As he spoke I made some notes on my PDA. This isn’t everything he said - it is everything that he said that I thought was interesting. So not an impartial account at all - and please mail with corrections!

Weinberger:

“If you want to understand at how the internet has impacted information look at Wikipedia. It has 994,000 articles in English alone. I mean, Encyclopedia Britannica has 32 volumes and contains 65,000 articles. That’s not just because the editors decided there are only 65,000 things in the world that are interesting enough to write articles about. It is because of the sheer costs of paper and printing, and shipping books about the place.

“And the Wikipedia is not edited at all, in the conventional sense. No single person decides what’s in or out. Famously, there are articles about the use of the umlaut in heavy metal - something that would never find its way into a conventional encyclopedia. The Wikipedia approach to knowledge management is that the originators don’t manage it at all. They allow people, members of the public to decide what’s relevant, and what’s not.

“What the Wikipedia is to knowledge management, the blog is to personal expression. Everything is allowed. Tonight, though I would like to talk about what a blog is not. A blog is not about advertising …”

Weinberger used the Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit blog. He pointed out that this was not a blog in any meaningful sense of the word. It was not a true expression of someone’s experience. It seemed to revolve around two people arguing which of them liked Juicy Fruit more.

“I mean - even the guy from the advertising agency doesn’t like Juicy Fruit that much … Anyone from Juicy Fruit, here? No. Good. I mean, come on.

“A blog is not about cats. I hear that a lot from people in marketing. People blog about their cats, right? In fact one of my neighbours in Boston really answered that the other day. If I want to blog about my cat, who are you to say that I can’t do that. I should be able to blog about anything that interests me. And in fact, there are many blogs about cats. But that is not the point. A blog is about whatever I want it to be about. It is my agenda, and not yours.

“A blog is not about journalism … although some journalists blog and some bloggers are increasingly being hired as stringers by the news media. The worlds of blogging and journalism overlap, but they are distinct. Bloggers distrust journalists because they suspect them of being corporate whores serving some kind of hidden agenda from the news organisation’s proprietor. Journalists distrust bloggers because they suspect bloggers don’t check their facts (right! and newspapers do, I suppose?) and that they are single issue merchants and cranks.

“Blogging is not about 1 to 1 marketing. 1 to 1 marketing in blogs often doesn’t work, because one of the 1’s isn’t really a 1. It is a big corporation. How can I have a conversation with Wrigley’s, or with Ford? The fact is that blogging is about a conversation. Blogging is a new social space. My weblog is me. It is my body in the new public space.

“One of the key things about blogging which distinguishes it from the stuff that’s gone before - the marketing messages on the one hand, and the conventional journalism on the other - is the freedom to write badly, the freedom to make mistakes. Making mistakes is a sign of authenticity. It is a sign of being human. Of course we are all going to make mistakes. It establishes intimacy. And on the internet pretty good may be good enough. “

Weinberger went on to talk about links:

“Links are little acts of generosity. They are saying: don’t stay on this site, visit this other site. The web is based on links. The web is links. But look at the home page of the New York Times (registration required). It only links to itself - oh, and to advertisers. Journalists talk about bloggers being narcissistic. That’s narcissism. The New York Times home page.

“In the old model, businesses thought of themselves like a fort. They controlled their brand, they released only the information they wanted. But now the fort has holes in the walls. People are having conversations about those companies that the companies can’t control. The fortress business model has been overtaken. Now our customers know more about our business than we do. And the customers trust other customers to tell them about our business more than they do the marketers. You cannot control your customers by the selective release of information. Customers are not there to be managed. We trust Google, craigslist, Robert Scoble and Jonathan Schwarz because they are there for us. They are for us.”

Weinberger talked about Howard Dean’s election campaign, which he was involved with as an election strategist.

“The thing that characterised the Dean campaign was its openness, the sense of involvement that it generated. And typical of that was the way that they got this 31 year old kid Matthew Gross blogging. Traditionally the campaign messages are tightly controlled by the candidate and by the press officer. This time Matthew Gross just blogged the whole campaign, talked about it the way he saw it. It caused a sensation, got huge buzz.”

Weinberger on branding:

“Branding - as a metaphor - is drawn from what you do to a cow with a red hot iron. And that is still - mostly - the way it is done. Branding is done by someone to your customers, the way you might brand a cow.

“And yet business is evolving. You start with brand and you move towards the idea of reputation and then the idea of relationship. That means that every business is going to be involved in blogging one way or another.”

Weinberger on trust:

“Blogging is best - or at least very good - if taken internally. The blogosphere operates as a vast, amorphous focus group - a defocus group. It creates a sense of trust. I feel that this is my company. That is like the relationship I have with Google. I feel that Google is my company, although I don’t own stock. “

What should companies do?

“Public relations needs to turn into ‘public relationships’. Companies need to listen, to audit, to engage, to give up control to their employees. Companies need to develop a blogging policy - not rocket science, just saying that blogging employees need to observe the same standards as anyone else - keep corporate secrets, don’t run down the corporation. Fundamentally companies must try to sound like a human being, to be like a human being. Engage, don’t defend, be transparent, and link, link, link, link, link. “

What mistakes do companies make?

“You don’t know more than your customers. Your customers know more than you. Don’t be boring. Take risks. Blogging is about opportunity, about connectedness, about breaking down the walls.”

Weinberger then fielded a few questions. What would he say to corporations who worried about loss of control:

“You would better ask: do you want people to talk about you? That is the question. If you do, you should blog.

“Thinking we were in control was magical thinking, it was delusional. People have always talked about us, we were just deaf.”

The phenomenon of consumer blogs having such a disproportionate influence on major brands, which we highlighted in our “Search is Brand” study, derives in part from the failure of brands to create functional, easily indexed sites for themselves, and to produce lively, relevant and topical content.

But some companies get over this by cheating. They do deals with unethical agencies who use spam and dummy websites to create phoney relevance and push a brand up to the top of a search term willy-nilly. We have been anxious for a while about this, as large brands have been using this technique not realising the risks (pace the BMW ban) or suffering from the fact that their competitors are doing so.

Ashley Friedlein, writing on e-Consultancy’s forums, points out that some black hat tactics appear to be working for some SEO-related consultancies. A company called Oyster-web seems to have got itself up to number 2 in the “Search engine optimisation” search, but its business seems to be selling leads to SEO companies.

At the same time Google appears to have woken up to this to the extent of going after first BMW and now some SEO companies to punish. It’s very surprising that they have picked a highly reputable agency like Scotland’s Bigmouthmedia to zero-rank. Bigmouth have some very respectable clients and it would be surprising if they have knowingly done anything unethical, but it is a chilling development.

BMW are back. German web search guru Alan Webb writes about it on Public Relations Online. Apparently the speed of their reinclusion in the Google index has caused some raised eyebrows. Scandic Hotels are still in the outer darkness of zero page rank many months after being booted by Google for similar offences.

Google’s BMW blacklisting is an affair with many ramifications.

We have noticed a huge increase in “black hat” SEO by a number of companies, although few as high profile as BMW. This gives us issues because it has a big effect on blog spam. Suddenly a humble keyword search on a customer’s brand is flooded with a blizzard of bogus sites. The sites look like this:

http://www.mownhose.com/

They have no archive, the content is nonsense and the sole function of the site is to spam a keyword.

I got this one by using the search term

“aluminium”

What is intriguing about this is that the link is misformatted.

It looks like this

http://www.mownhose.com/7//

and gives a 404 error.

I don’t entirely understand why this is so …

These companies are using techniques which are designed to give them authority in particular search strings. They are then selling this authority to … well, who knows, but probably someone in the Aluminium business.

The fact that companies as big as BMW, as Ricoh have been doing this shows that spammers have evolved from working for the gambling and porn industry into having a roster of “legit” customers. Work done by our company recently identified a highly respectable company as the beneficiary of a web of complicated links from affiliate schemes via invisible sites. Google say that they have a fix for the problem, but my guess is that they wouldn’t have chosen as big a beast as BMW to blacklist unless they wanted to fire a loud shot across the “black hat” SEOs’ bows.

Update:

Even weirder: here is someone trying to spam the name “Alan”

http://alanblog.morsalan.com/