Take a search engine challenge

Do you default to Google? Or has my banging on about Bing enticed you to play?

Some research I read recently suggested that there's a huge amount of blind faith in Google to come up with the right results. In fact, in tests, any other search engine results displayed with the Google logo on the top get more votes than if displayed with the accurate search engine logo on top. That's branding for you. Brilliant!

Try a blind search-engine test yourself and see what happens. This site will give you results from Google, Bing and Yahoo and not reveal who the search engine was until after you've voted for which one you liked best.

Entertainingly, preliminary results suggest that the results would be Google: 44%, Bing: 33%, Yahoo: 23%, which is entertaining given the Bing-oo! merge and Google's 70%+ market share domination of the search market.

Creating content doesn't have to cost a fortune: Human dominoes

I must have sat in goodness knows how many meetings with PR agencies over the years where they've wheeled out ye olde,"bugger we've had no time to think about something really relevant or creative to answer your brief, how about we do a World Record attempt for xxxx" approach. Let's face it, it's August, which means silly season for the media so anything goes. At no 18 in the Video Viral chart I get sent once a week, was this world record "attempt" from Benson's Beds (a UK bed and mattress company).



Fair play to them, they've understood that video content doesn't have to cost millions to create, and ideas and creativity rule.

They've grasped that slapping your branding all over something from the outset isn't necessary nor necessarily a positive - people will watch content that's silly, fun or engaging, and if you capture imagination quickly at the beginning there's a reasonable chance they'll watch long enough to get to the "brought to you by" explanation.

It looks this was uploaded on the 26th July and has already had 415k views which isn't too shabby.

Help! Twitter fell over today

Oh no, Twitter was down for a bit a few hours ago. I've seen many tweets / posts / status updates about it, which for me just ratifies the point that Twitter is increasingly becoming an important communications tool that some of us rely on in one way or another.

Here's a few from my contacts:

"arghh Twitter is down? I work on my own, it's my 'watercooler'! Make it work!!"

" twitter is down - hello facebook"

"is everyone surviving with twitter down???"

"#tweetdeck firing on all cylinders again... welcome back fellow tweeters"

A picture tells a thousand words

There's a ton of different free tools available to us to monitor how our brands are being talked about/represented on the web, and figuring out which ones work best against specific tasks requires some trial and effort and often some lateral thinking.

Yesterday I tripped over yet another one, but it has a slightly different, more visual take: It's called Spezify and it gives you a nice very visual / image based overview of how your brand is appearing on the web, drawing from Flickr, Yahoo, MSN, Twitter, Amazon & eBay.

Who needs moodboards anymore when a big screengrab from this site printed out in colour can make the point in a much more dynamic and arresting fashion? It's warm in London today and warm weather and Pimms go together like hand and glove for me, so I decided to use that for my example...

If nothing else hopefully it will re-inforce the point that consumers talk about brands in all manner of every day contexts, and in normal language that isn't about USP's. It might also serve as a reminder that properly tagging image and video content should not be an after-thought if a brand wants to make sure its' official face is properly represented.

Food for thought.

Brilliant mash-up

I just came across this fantastic mash-up via a Tweet from a friend of mine: The London Underground map updated with the designer's favourite pubs on in relation to each station.


Brilliant! Now could someone do a mobile app for that please? The London Underground tube map app is already one of my favourite / most useful apps, but add pub suggestions to it...pure gold!

Social Media: Brands really can't afford to ignore it for much longer

I came across the presentation below on Slideshare (a great resource for the curious, as in the spirit of Generation G (that's genorosity, remember?) there's all sorts of presentations and thought pieces being shared far and wide). If you are a sensitive type, then be warned the F word is used a fair bit, but get over it and watch anyway, this is about the real world, and the way that consumers are embracing social media. It's not going to go away, however far you stick your head in the sand, so smell the coffee and start to work out how your brand could be participating. The rules may not be hard and fast, but if you need help, ask!

Some of the stats are slightly out of date (for example they quote 13 hours of videos uploaded to YouTube a minute, whereas the last stat I saw said 20 hours), but let's face it the accuracy of the numbers is somewhat irrelevant, because the web is changing every second of every day, and all you need to take out is that the number is a LOT.

What the F**K is Social Media: One Year Later

View more documents from Marta Kagan.

Stunning Sydney and Bingles

The Bing summer photo competition winner has been announced and the winner was this stunning photo of the Sydney skyline / Centrepoint Tower lit up during a storm.


9400 photos were submitted which is pretty respectable for a relatively small scale initiative that I only saw publicised within the Facebook environment. And if I was Jeremy Somers (the winner) I'd be pretty chuffed that sometime soon I was going to log in to Bing and see my picture there for a day. I'd also be suspecting that he'll be telling his friends not only of his win but also to keep checking back to Bing to see when his photo is posted.

Involvement and WOM propogation. Nice.

And I'm a bit behind the program but Bing were also involving the video-creating communities via a another competition:

"Since everyone is having fun with the name, we thought it would be interesting to see what you can do with it, put to a little music! Got a fun jingle, or as we like to say in the halls around here “Bingle” you want to share?"

$500 as the prize was hardly going to break the marketing budget, but I reckon the views of the videos submitted where worth far far more than that, not to mention the involvement of those that bothered to take part. Worth a snuffle around YouTube (oh the irony, owned by arch-rival Google!) - there's some super cheesy versions like this one and some which have clearly been thought about quite a lot! This was the winner: