IAB's new research initiative misses the point
The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) has launched its latest initiative to understand more about the online behaviour, in a bid to provide advertisers with “a holistic understanding of what, where and how people are accessing the internet”.
The Holy Grail for the IAB is to provide “a single online planning currency” for marketers, to help them “plan their online brand campaigns against traditional media”.
The IAB has teamed up with National Readership Surveys (NRS), which will add an online element to the 3,000 face-to-face interviews it does each month with random consumers: “Areas covered in the study will include; demographic information, frequency of internet usage, where people are going online and how they are accessing the internet - for example by PC or through mobile devices.”
The trouble is, I don’t think this is what online media planners need...
Web 2.0 is changing the content battlefield
It used to be that there was this top down content pyramid in operation (operated by traditional media and the big online players), where the quantity and quality of news / content was controlled by relatively fewer organisations.
This is changing rapidly, becoming flatter and more diverse (we’re not really interested in the why’s right now), which can either be seen as an opportunity or a threat. Organisations that embrace this change are going to benefit (think Murdoch buying MySpace), so the question then becomes how one capitalises on the opportunity...
Let's look at some of the key strategic issues to consider.
Using Digg for web PR is dangerous
There's an interesting piece of advice from Steve Rubel on using sites like Digg for PR . In short, don't!Google launches Cost-Per-Action adverts
In an interesting move, Google has started offering cost-per-action advertising to selected website owners on the Adsense programme. In short it’s aimed at getting around the click fraud that is becoming increasingly worrying for Google – where advertisers only derive an income when the website visitor completes an action.
RSS strategy - full-text vs partial-text, round 2
In an article about RSS earlier this week I explained that there is no single rule of thumb when it comes to your RSS strategy.
A number of experts have suggested that the only sensible way to embrace RSS as an organisation is to launch full-text feeds, allowing RSS subscribers to read the whole story (or other message) within their RSS feed reader.
Yes, full-text is the first rule of RSS. But rules are there to be broken. Full-text simply doesn’t work for everybody, for a number of reasons.
Starting out with an RSS strategy
RSS is an alien concept to many marketers, so RSS strategy is pretty much off the radar for the vast majority. The trouble is, there are mixed messages being sent out by the experts, so it is hard to know where to start.
It is just like usability. Jakob Nielsen believes in a rules-based approach. Jared Spool does not. So who do you trust?
Social media: the best and worst of 2009
Email marketing: six steps to improving customer engagement in 2010
Web 2.0
Graham Charlton
Strategy & Planning
