Social Networking

A few months back I wrote a blog post on my personal blog, about Social Networks and in it I speculated that it wouldn't be long before somebody came up with some sort of aggregator, (cf Trillian for messenger) which allowed you to combine all your different bits on one site.

I received an email this week and blog comment, about the first site to do this, Spokeo.com, started by a couple of college Grads. I've not had much chance to play with it and my first thought was the interface was a bit confusing, but take a look and let me know what you think - I'll add more of my own comments, errmm, soon.

British and French most susceptible to online marketing

New research shows that British and French internet users are the most susceptible to online advertising and marketing, according to NetObserver Europe.

The findings, from the 13th edition of the report, found that in the last six months 55.6% of French internet users had taken part in an online competition organised by a brand or an e-commerce site, compared with 35.1% of British internet users.

In contrast, Germans were the least likely to respond to advertising campaigns online and less than half of them thought online advertising was creative or innovative.

Universal Music backs ad-funded download service

The online music world has changed again this week with the planned launch of a new music download service called SpiralFrog. This new service will offer totally legal music downloads for free and will monetise the service through advertising. It will be fascinating to watch the reaction of other major labels and services like iTunes. Not forgetting how this will impact in other areas such as movie and game downloads.

UK "Europe's Top Online Shopper"

Having worked for several large US global businesses (Amazon and Yahoo), I have found it fascinating to see how different markets in Europe develop. At both it was always frustrating to the local team in Germany that the UK market, despite having a smaller population, consistently performed stronger.

I am sure the benefit of English language websites has an important part to play, but even now with major internet adoption in both markets, the UK still seems to be ahead in online activity. Mintel has just reported that in 2005, UK online shopping was worth €9.79bn,comparedd to €9.71bn in Germany. You can read more here on the BBC news website

Consumers lie in online surveys

This could be a worrying trend. If users are regularly lying in onlne surveys then this calls into question the reliability of selected Direct marketing databases which rely on this type of data collection. Read more here

Online sales to rise 20 percent in 2006

Latest data suggest that online sales in the US will rise 20% this year, to $211 billion. What is interesting is that the fastest growing sectors are pet supplies and cosmetics! $73 billion of this total is allocated to Travel online. This growth compares with a forecast 4.7% for offline retail in 2006.

Google reinvents TV ads with pay-per-click video

We should have expected it, Google was never going to rely just in text ads if it could come up with a way to use display and rich media adverts. This article describes how Google will soon launch a pay per click video ad service. Google will host the video and the ads will be static until the user choose to lay it (at which point the advertiser presumably incurs the click cost). Google will also track how long a user watches each advert and suggest that it could be used to help test which TV ads should run offline.

Have Blogs reached the Tipping point?

Last week saw the WE Media Global Forum in London Hosted by Reuters and the BBC. The forum put the spotlight on trust in the media and citizen journalism, in an era of 24-hour news. When anyone with a mobile phone can take a photograph that makes it on to our screens and newspapers, the lines between those who report the news and those who read it are becoming blurred.

This report from the BBC website focussed specifically on the rise of citizen journalism and blogging. The internet, enabled by a rapid switch to broadband, has recently reached a tipping point in its evolutionary path. It has moved, relatively quickly, from a predominantly one-way, read-only medium to a more two-way, participatory, collaborative and interconnected medium. Read more...