After flicking through the online gallery, I decided to share the site via a tweet. As is it turns out the Iraqi Government also wants you to see the full picture—from every outlet possible.

There have been several recent write-ups about social media monitoring tools. The majority of the reviews surround flaws and functionality.

I share some of the opinions, yes we do need clearer geographically defined data and the ability to extract more granular information.

My concerns, however, reside with the completeness of data and information. Note I say data and information, information is created from data when knowledge and context is applied to it.

Opinion, feedback and dialogue features are now plumbed into many websites and web services. UGC is everywhere and it exists in many forms:

Lifestreaming services: Friendfeed and Posterous
Social Networks: Facebook
Blogs
Microblogs
Bespoke online communities: Ning
Dedicated review sites
Review panels on websites
Forums
Comments on mixed media
Comments in online national press
Content voting
Product feedback on retail websites (Amazon et al)

The list above could get much longer, but it demonstrates that if people want to “talk” they have the option to do so — in a variety of different ways.

I am yet to find a piece of software or social media monitoring tool that can accurately collate data and produce entirely complete information and analysis. Even the market leaders (who I will leave nameless) seem to generate data which doesn’t provide a truly complete picture.

The reality is that the majority of these tools use old practices such as screen scrapping or the skinning of data from existing API’s.

We need data that can be segmented in more granular ways, and information that aids strategy development to cater for each type of persona on the Social Technographs Ladder.

I mention the Social Technographs Ladder because I think the way people create and use their own media, social media, will evolve. Proactively catering for each type of persona on the Social Technographs Ladder will become increasingly important for any brand that is truly working to “earn media”.

What I personally want to see in social media monitoring tools is specific insight into the activities of each persona in relation to specific topics, themes and brands.

Samepoint, the free social media monitoring tool, does a good job of collecting data from various social platforms that each persona may use. It would be good to see one of the larger players in the market build on this work, create visualisations around the data and provide deeper analysis.

Apparently he’s done this quite a few times, the clips are below:

Of course this wasn’t intentional and I’m sure that Apple didn’t sit in their Bose-speaker-decked offices fabricating all of this (one hopes not). It does however illustrate what happens when you make lots cool stuff accessible to er…cool kids.

With so many crap viral videos floating about on Youtube, these clips are quite refreshing to see.

Apple invest heavily in their corporate identity, branding and retail experiences. It all seems to have done the trick because their stores have now turned into cool and quick internet stops.

The Kool camp do not just hang out on Youtube. Try doing a Twitter search every now and then:

Marketing Managers if you want your brands to be talked about: be cool, create environments that resonate well with your prospects and let people have fun with your toys!

BMW I’m waiting ;p

At the bottom of their full page ad, I spotted a URL to their youtube channel called armchair sessions.

Whilst there are quite a few brands investing in branded content at the moment, I think armchair sessions is genuinely quite refreshing. The interviews cover a wide range of sports personalities, celebrities and x-gamers.

It’s good to see a brand make a commitment to their content by using offline media to advertise it. I think we’ll see more of this happening, media driving people to interactive brand experiences instead of brochure websites.

Rad.

Most people that know me well know that I have a growing obsession with Japanese stuff. Tumblr have recently re-jigged their search functionality and now you get this lovely digital—and rather square—collage for each and every search result.

We like!

One of my sweet finds are below, it’s a diagram detailing how the smooth criminal shoes were made.

Courtesy of Gizmodo JP

I’ve written about Social Search on a number of occasions, but Steve’s post got me thinking…

So far Twitter Search ranks information purely on temporal factors; in comparison Google ranks information according to a number of factors, including temporal inbound link information and domain authority.

Whilst it is great to see Twitter usage increasing rapidly, I still question the overall relevancy of search results delivered by Twitter – the most recent information is not always the most accurate.

B1 has been using a Greasemonkey script for Firefox, which has been allowing her to see Twitter search results embedded above Google search results. I quite like the dynamics of the information you receive; you can see news pulled in from Google/Google News and reactions/tweets from Twitter Search at the same time:

I can see this complimentary use of Twitter search gain more popularity overtime as it provides a simultaneous overview of authoritative news, and real-time Twitter reactions via keyword search.

I’m not sure if Twitter Search will become a serious rival for Google; however, I do think it will become a staple complimentary search tool for news, making it a fairer rival to Google News.

So…I’m a bit late to air my thoughts about this debate, however, I felt I needed to understand the debate before I made any comments.

Traditional PR agencies vs. Digital Shops, SEO houses and Social Media Agencies—who’s better equipped at utilising new methods of Online PR and leading clients into digital?

A rather tough question to answer and I don’t think there’s a right or wrong answer to be honest (I’m from the school of digital/search). It’s fair to say that there are valid reasons for selecting both types of agency, but I believe the best option is tactical integration between the two.

Clients now require online marketing that encompasses a variety of skills, disciplines and practices—not to mention integration with other types of marketing and reporting.

SEO is also an ever-changing field as end-to-end projects require strategy and consultancy, which cover the following areas (in no particular order):

- Copywriting
- Usability
- Information Architecture / Accessibility
- Business and market intelligence
- Keyword research
- Technical consulting
- Applying emerging semantic mark-up
- Utilising web analytics
- Understanding and visualising social networks
- Content planning
- Asset optimisation
- Developing social media strategies for the brand
- Online PR to aid SEO and increase WOM influence between key online communities
- Managing, interpreting and visualising large quantities of data

Now it is clear to see that the list above is rather long and it includes online PR as a function to support other aspects of digital marketing and optimisation.

In most cases the nature of online PR generated by a Digital Shop is grassroots online PR, publicity from bloggers and influential people using a variety of self-publishing tools and social networking platforms on the web.

In comparison, traditional PR agencies have always been more proficient with managing media and investor relations, reputation management, crisis management and establishing mainstream media contacts.

It is therefore evident that both schools of thought provide two very different types of PR, and both have gradually evolved in different ways.

Digital shops have been adept at quickly honing their online PR skills to support integrated online marketing, whilst the traditional PR agencies still seem to be behind with integrating their offerings with digital practices such as SEO.

Do traditional PR agencies need to adapt rapidly?

I’m not so sure; to some extent traditional PR practices do affect the aforementioned digital practices—whilst simultaneously delivering value in their own right. I say this because traditional media (newspapers and print publications) are progressively moving from offline to online; the press coverage generated by a traditional PR agency—in mainstream online media— does affect a brand’s community positioning and share of voice within search engines.

It is therefore important for digital shops—as they manage certain aspects of online PR—to collaboratively work with traditional PR agencies in order to align traditional PR practices with new methods of online PR and marketing.

I believe both types of agency have their strengths, and on a case-by-case basis one outfit may be more suitable for a certain brand than the other—this of course depends on the nature of the PR and marketing required to meet a client’s objectives.

The “Us vs. Them” debates seem rather exhaustive to me and I think both sides of the battlefield need to stop worrying about who’s eating who’s lunch and focus on forming agile, multi-agency, and multi-discipline business webs that provide more effective marketing.

So there we are, that was my two pennies worth. I’m not a PR expert by any means so please forgive me if you’re a PR bod and I’ve made you cringe.

A report by Search Engine Land discusses how Yahoo and Microsoft saw a decrease and stabilisation in search market share last year, however, I do not believe decreases in market share can entirely be attributed to more people using Google.

People are becoming savvy browsers and utilities such as Last.fm, Flickr and LinkedIn are, in many respects, social search platforms that provide more than just search results.

Flickr, Last.Fm and LinkedIn all provide extra associative information in addition to search results and I believe people find this information really useful.

If you do an image search on Google or Yahoo you get delivered standard image search results, however, if you carry out the same searches in Flickr you receive lots of images in various sizes, all with exif data.

I think there is real value in improving specialist search functionality, I would love to see another search engine crack this before Google.

Yahoo wake up and export Flickr technology into your image search results.

I’ve been a crap blogger recently, if you subscribe to my feed you’ll probably notice that I haven’t given you much to read. I haven’t packed in the blog, I’ve just busy been reading, observing, analysing and thinking.

The Ad/Media world has turned into a circus over the last 6 or 7 months. Budget cuts, new agencies and departments popping up everywhere, and of course everyone is now a “social media” or digital expert.

I’ve been reading all the various debates occurring on the blogs of the Ad world celebrities, and there really have been some excellent p**sing matches going on. Also there have been some great examples of people trying to turn themselves into celebrities by adding valueless minutia to some of the debates that I have been reading.

I think it’s great that the Ad/Media world is more connected through things like blog’s, microblog’s and feed’s. Unfortunately I sometimes get the impression that there are some really over confident personalities out there, who appear to be forgetting that people are quietly taking notice of what they’re saying.

Increasing the reach of your voice shouldn’t mean you decrease quality of what comes out of your mouth, or speak negatively about your industry peers or other disciplines in advertising.

Add value, disagree with respectful reasoning or just shut up!

Some of the best blogs I read are written by quiet people who blog infrequently, but when they do blog their posts are always amazing. You can tell they are methodical thinkers who spend time thinking about what they write. They don’t need to build their own brand by trying to make themselves visible everywhere, they just write great content which keeps people coming back naturally.

Anyway rant over.

Aside from all the standing back and watching the recent good weather gave me an opportunity to test out my new macro lens, which I bought aaages ago and the picture above is one of the first few test shots.