Uba Kontrovasie

Digital Freegans

Not too long ago I was watching a TV program about Freeganism and Freegans, it was a Cutting Edge style show, not quite sure what channel it was on. It got me thinking…

The web is turning people into Digital Freegans, people who use the webs’ free resources as alternatives to traditional paid for sources of information, entertainment and applications.
 
People often ask me about the longevity of social media. With so many brands jumping on the bandwagon, will social media end up on the pile of communication methods that people become dismissive of?
 
Brian Solis tweeted one of his findings recently: “Only 16% of consumers trust corporate blogs”, stats like these possibly support the sceptical question raised above. There are many brands embracing blogging, social media etc. The problem is they’re probably not “doing it right”, and they’re probably not working to deliver any value to the audiences or communities they wish to interact with.
 
I believe we’re heading towards to the second evolution in social media/marketing, the most helpful brands are the ones that will carry on growing. Everyone in the social media business, at some same stage probably talks to their clients about delivering value exchanges and listening to audiences. I think there’s another magic ingredient that should be added to the mix, it’s called innovation!
 
Not only should brands be working hard to deliver value to the public, they should also be working to deliver value in the most innovative way possible. In time this will mean going beyond blogging and actually delivering personal B2C responses via mediums such as video, and this is where platforms like Seesmic deliver real beneficial functionality.
 
With so much useful content available on the web, the successful brands appear to be the ones that have taken an extra step forward and delivered value in innovative ways.
 
Take for example Gary Vaynerchucks’ Wine library TV, it was one of the first blogs of its kind and even now with so many wine review websites, forms, blogs and TV shows it is still as popular as ever.
 
His success can be accredited to his full length, online TV shows, which are all free to watch (true freegan feast) and secondly his content delivery is innovative in comparison to other wine review shows.
 
He makes wine accessible and easy to understand through his style of presenting. Let’s face it we’re all normally use to out of touch, snoty characters who keep droning on about the South of France, Gary changes all this with informal style of presenting and humour.  

So…whilst it is important to build relationships with key influencers and interest led communities, it is also important to provide something for the growing number “Digital Freegans” who occasionally may require something that a brand could deliver, thus making that initial connection.

The Audio Freegans

  
The music industry and its artists claim that they have been the victims of music piracy and attribute this to declines in financial growth.
 
What they call piracy should be seen as digital freeganism, which empowers the consumer. P2P exchanges and bitorrent websites have given people limitless access to music they have never had.
 
This movement has turned people into more informed music critics, that are more likely to invest further into quality artists. We’re heading towards an era where an artist can no-longer release an album with two good songs and fill the rest of the album up with crap! Sorry to be blunt it’s just the way it is. With so much good music freely accessible, nobody in their right mind will continue to pay for mediocre material.
 
If people are downloading music for free, the next most profitable revenue stream for the music industry resides with live performances, merchandise, special edition TV appearances and guest journalism. In order for these opportunities to arise artists need to turn themselves into brands.
 
This movement will require some give and take, artists and labels and will need to become more lenient towards downloading and see it as a brand building activity, which allows people to become more familiar with them. By feeding the freeganism, or at least not trying to stamp it out, artists can aid efforts of gradually turning themselves into brands with multiple revenue streams.

Tags: content, Digital Music, free content, freeganism, social media

Act like you deserve your top spot in Google!

Modern approaches to NSO (post meta keyword stuffing) encompass many overlapping disciplines such as PR, User Experience (UE) and good design.

So many people in the SEO field (client side web-masters especially) fail to take note of the UE side of well…UE!

Accessibility always seems to get taken into account as this is something which can be partly remedied by good use of semantic HTML, CSS and things such as skip links, access keys and legends around forms.

Website IA (information architecture) from an NSO perspective is also another factor which gets ticked in the NSO check list. The one trick that many web-masters miss (intentionally most of the time) is thinking about what content users want to see.

If you’re not providing your users with good content then you are essentially delivering a bad  user experience.

I was recently carrying out some searches in Google for a clients research document and I queried “used car kent”. You only have to click on the top three search results in order to see that the quality of information being delivered is quite poor.

Try the search yourself (Google UK).

The top three results contained pages full of links and search forms with accompanying content that was keyword rich and not very informative.

Serving your users with weak content is not innovative use of a good rankings and I guess if we had access to their analytics packages we would see high bounce rates from Google traffic.

So who is doing a good job? Off the top of my head I would say Amazon, I did a search for “brand planning book” and they came up in position one with a landing page which, had the exact item I was looking for and alternative books with user reviews.

All in all a positive UE for Amazon users. Amazon may slip up on other aspects of UE as I am no UE expert, however I believe the basics are in place as the content they serve website visitors is essentially useful! Surprise, Surprise!

The natural search landscape is becoming more competitive YOY as YOY CPC inflation on paid search hits clients harder. Websites who have dominated natural search results for years should now invest in innovative content strategies in order to keep their rankings and better convert/retain the traffic they receive.

Tags: Amazon, car kent, client side web-masters, content, Google, Google UK, HTML, natural search landscape, Natural Search Optimisation (NSO), natural search results, paid search, search forms, search results, UE, web-masters

Google first click free

Recently people began to question Googles views on cloaking despite their clear guidelines as the New York Times had content ranking on Google news, which when users clicked through required a subscription. This is essentially cloaking via IP delivery and serving search engine bots a different version of content from what the public sees.

NYT was essentially a “walled garden”, however it appeared to be open in the eyes of the search engines, many people suspected unofficial agreements being made between Google and the NYT.

This may have been true at the time but since then Google launched first click free a service which allows providers of premium news content to have their content indexed and ranked within Google News whilst only providing excerpts of the full articles to surfers, requesting for a subscription fee to continue reading.

This is great news for publishers who rely on advertising/subscription driven business models as having “first click free” traffic will ensure consistent revenue is generated from new content and strategic placement of calls to sale at the end of article excerpts will help to drive paid subscriptions.

Another reason why this is a win for publishers is that publishers have been known to use paid search advertising to drive traffic and increase page impressions and ad impressions through targeting the search “long tail” and buying as much inventory on low CPC’s as possible. As Google tighten their paid search guidelines through the quality score system it will become harder for affiliates and publishers to make revenues via arbitraging traffic.

“First click free” will hopefully counteract the growing stringencies of paid search advertising for publishers at least.

Tags: advertising/subscription, content, Google, Natural Search Optimisation (NSO), paid search advertising, paid search guidelines, search engine, search engine bots, search engines, the New York Times, traffic driving