I’ve been working with the fine folk over at Tequila/ and TBWA to support the development and launch of a new Facebook application for National Express coaches.

The idea is simple: targeting students mainly (although essentially this promotion is open to anyone and everyone in the UK), National Express is offering 40,000 £1.00 coach seats (plus 50p booking fee, ahem) available for travel in the UK during October and November 2008.

The Facebook application (pictured) is being used to promote the idea of ‘you should have been there’ to encourage members of Facebook to add our app to their profile.  By doing so, they can share their crazy pictures of fun they’ve had, vote for other people’s crazy pictures, book tickets for travel and win festival tickets, free travel for a year and lots of goodies from Apple.

Their is above-the-line support, a micro-site and activity taking place in Student Union bars all over the country.  From a marketing perspective (as that’s what this blog focusses on), its a nice example of integrated activity, combining broadcast with a micro-site, whilst blending in targeted online display ads and social media (blogs, Facebook groups etc.).

Give me a week and I’ll post the results, but the campaign officially launches on Monday.  Keep your eyes out for the TV ads and the display ads online.

It’s refreshing when a new UK internet start-up comes on to the market.  All I ever seem to hear about is US-based VC-backed digital tech firms that are defining the next big thing in digital.  So, I was really pleased when a mate and colleague of mine just (today) told me about a new venture he is helping launch, fund and run called Favy.com.

Their proposition seems simple enough - take on the likes of del.icio.us and Stumbleupon at their own game.  Social bookmarking is growing, so I’m pleased to see a fresh UK-based approach to this.  For anyone in digital marketing, social bookmarking is an increasingly important part of the mix.  If you’ve seen or heard me speak at courses or conferences, you’ll hear me bang on about distribution strategy as much as destination marketing.  Social bookmarking forms part of distribution - it’s about getting your content out there and increasingly relevancy, as well as pagerank.

I’m excited for Glen & his team at Favy, as I see this part of the mix as really important.  So, sign-up (it’s in Beta, so invitation only, but you can register your interest) and see how Favy.com evolves.

So, last week Google launched its new web-browser Chrome (I would have written about it before, but was nowhere near my blog for most of the week - sorry!).  I’ve downloaded it and played with a bit and it’s…err….OK.  I think, given the hype in the media and the blogs of the past week that it might have been more special than it is.  It’s fast, I’ll give you that.  But, I dont think Firefox need worry!

Right now, the browser market splits pretty much in three: Microsoft’s Internet Explorer which has 75% of the market (largely due to the fact that it comes pre-installed on any PC running Windows); Mozilla Firefox (God’s own broswer) has around 20% of the market and the other 5% is made up of the lesser known browsers like Opera, Maxthon, Safari (Macs) etc.

The install was quite easy and it pulled in all my bookmarks, passwords and search history easily from Firefox.  The tabs are simple and clean and there’s the obvious integration with Google search.  But, in terms of add-ons, Google are gonna have to play catch-up fast.  There are so many things in Firefox that I have come to rely on that it’s going to take more than a brand like Google to pull me away from.

Here’s what it looks like.  Like Google Search, it’s clean, simple and well executed.  One standard feature I quite like is the ‘Most Visited’ panels when you open a new tab.  It’s a bit like Firefox’s ‘Fast Dial’ add-on but not as good…

So, what can I say?  It’s OK, but I’m a digital marketing consultant not a techie.  For me, as long as it does what it should in handling properly the myriad of web technologies that sites out there are built in, then I guess it will do OK with Google’s backing.  If it doesn’t, then Google will either need to fix it or forget it.

You can download Google Chrome here: http://www.google.com/chrome

For those of you wish a passion for all things digital culture, why not give Loop a visit this weekend in Brighton?  Find out more at Loop 2008.

My students (I teach the IDM’s Certificate in Digital Marketing qualification) often ask me where they can find a useful list of facts and figures on digital. So, below is my attempt at bringing together such a list. It’s not exhaustive, but more a start. I will add to it periodically and keep it growing.

It’s organized by subject matter to make it easy to find information on the things you’re most interested in.

Also, you might like to try e-Consultancy.com’s ‘Compendium of Internet Statistics’ which is available via their website.

Enjoy!

Mobile
6bn - the number of texts we send every month in the UK
120% - the mobile penetration rate in the UK (that is, the number of handsets in active operation)
25% - the number of people with a mobile phone in the UK that access the Internet
58m - the number of users that sent picture & video messages from their mobile

Internet Audience
Worldwide Internet users - 824,435 million (total unique)
Europe - 232,866 million
North America - 183,823 million
Asia Pacific - 308,817 million
MENA - 39,904 million
UK - 34.2 million

The average age of the UK Internet user is 38.

Share of 55+ year-olds has increased from 16% to 19% in just over a year, hence the arrival of sagazone.

MiniClip has the youngest UK online audience average age (28.1).

Marks & Spencer has the oldest online average age (46.5).

Online advertising
£3.4bn - the UK market size forecast for 2008, according to the IAB.

By 2010, 80%of Microsoft’s $1 billion advertising budget will be spent online.

Search Marketing

According to the Internet Archive, there are over 85 billion web pages on the Internet.

There are 23 million web searches in the UK every day!  That’s 1 million searches an hour, or, 264 queries a second..

730 million - That’s the number of searches carried out in June 2008, with over half a billion click throughs.

£406m - Google’s UK ad revenue for Q1 2008
£1.7bn - Google’s forecast ad revenue for 2008

€8.1 billion - Forrester predicts that European Search investment will reach by 2012

72% of search users click on Natural Search Results in Google
61% of search users click on Natural Search Results in Yahoo!
71% of users in MSN click on Paid ads, whilst only 29% click on Natural search
AOL users click equally (50/50) on Paid ads and Natural search results

99% of Click-thrus come from Pages 1 & 2

16.6% - the average amount of Click-fraud now reported by search engines on paid ad campaigns

BBC iPlayer
1.5 billion - the number of programmes expected to be viewed in 2008 on iPlayer
2.8 billion - the number of programmes watched on iPlayer by 2012

Social media & Social networking

Social networks have grown by over 87% in the last year.

By 2010, they will account for £2.2 billion in advertising revenues worldwide.

Facebook - 14.35m unique users in April 2008

Bebo: 12.03m unique users in April 2008
MySpace UK: 8.5m unique users in April 2008

YouTube: 100million video views daily & 65,000 new videos uploaded daily
Technorati: Tracking 65m+ blogs

In light of declining ad revenues from its print directory & use of online services, Yell.com, the online service from Yellow Pages, has launched a new Facebook application called ‘Yell Socialiser’. It was developed by digital advertising agency AKQA and hopes to inspire Facebook users to find new activities to do and places to go.

The Yell Socialiser, currently in beta mode, is an application which allows Facebook members to pick from a range of activity types including “arty stuff”, “pampering”, “eating” or “night clubs”, then select up to five different venues in their chosen area.

These venues are marked on a Multimap map and personalised invites with themed images can then be sent to the user’s Facebook friends. Users can edit and adapt the plan once it is created.

The new Facebook application is Yell’s first move into social networking as part of its strategy to connect with new communities outside of its declining platforms. By combining the core business-finding strength of Yell.com with the additional social functionality of Facebook, Yell hopes to approach a wider audience and interact with it in a different, more social environment.

See www.facebook.com

Us digital marketing consulting folk have been touting for some time the message to clients that developing fake blogs (known fondly as ‘flogging’) is bad practice. Well, now new official Government legislation makes it illegal!

Brands that have fallen foul of this practice historically include Sony with their ‘alliwantforchristmasisapsp.com campaign & Walmart with their fake ‘Across America’ blog. Both were caught out by their online audience and simply faced ridicule. But, since 26^th May 2008, under the new EU Directive on Unfair Business-to-Consumer Commercial Practices, any UK company doing this faces prosecution, fines or even jail terms for staff.

The kind of activities the legislation seeks to address includes:

• ‘Astro-turfing’ - where employees pose as ordinary members of the public to post favourable reviews about their company

• Posting entries under different aliases to make something look more popular than it is

• ‘Sock-puppeting’ - where marketers poses a question online, then logs in as different people, all posting favourable responses

So, not only is it bad PR now to get caught-out engaging in this kind of thing, but the message is quite clear. Don’t fake it – if you do, you could go to jail!

This post is by Paul Cook, Founder, Positive Feedback

When Google bought DoubleClick and - a year or so later - Microsoft acquired Atlas, there were genuine worries amongst media agencies about the two biggest online media owners having access to such powerful data about their advertisers’ campaigns.

Since then, the worries have abated and both DC and Atlas still control the vast bulk of the market.  Why?  Because there is a no credible alternative to break this dependency and they are already too plugged into agency infrastructure for switching elsewhere to be viable.

But, that doesn’t mean that their access to and control of the majority of UK (and worldwide) online advertising data has disappeared, nor that such power should be given up so easily.  Agencies are aware that their strategic value to clients is being lost as their core service - the group buying of media - is becoming commoditised.  They know their long-term value will come from not only better collation and analysis of advertisers’ campaign data, but more importantly, allowing them to use it to enhance targeting.  So, while, for now, Google and Microsoft’s ownership of the two biggest ad-servers in the Western world is only of minor concern, its repercussions are likely to completely undermine the future value of the media agency.

But there is a way around this and it centres on winning back control of the site-tagging process.  At the moment, DC and Atlas are wrapped up in a battle to control the master tag - the tag to rule them all - the one site tag into which all other site tags can be plugged to make de-duplication of results possible.  The battle is being waged by all-comers - affiliate networks, site-side analytics companies, search agencies and, of course, the ad servers.  All of these companies are giving away free tag management solutions because they know it will lock clients into their technology, their data and their media.

But none of these companies is in the strategic position of being able to take the data that a master tag delivers and feed back to the advertiser in a holistic way - a view that enables them to decide sensibly where and how their online budgets should be spent.  That role - for now - remains with the media agency.  So, it’s time then that the agency made efforts to win back control of tagging by owning the master tag themselves.  There’s no such thing as a ‘free’ tag management solution, in fact, freedom is the last thing you get with a piggy-back solution.

This is why we’ve developed a standalone Tag Management System, TagMan, to put agencies back in control.  It’s a one-tag system that allows the agency and the client to plug in every tag on an advertiser’s web page into one back-end with one interface.  The data this feeds back is gold-dust and the simplicity of adding, editing and removing campaign tags from that point on is worlds ahead of anything currently available.  It can be done, for example, just by visiting the relevant page on the client site.

But, while freeing up all the time and energy that goes into tagging a site properly is vital, it is the strategic win of taking back control of a client’s data that offers the biggest gains.  DoubleClick and Atlas are now aware fully of the value of having campaign data passing through their doors and are keen to do as much with it as it goes by.  If these companies do see shifting media agency revenue as a potential source for future growth then the ammunition in the battle is data.  Knowing this, it seems a strange advantage to hand over before the battle has begun and agencies need to find solutions like TagMan to provide the armoury they need.

I recently attended the 55th Annual Cannes Lion 2008 Advertising festival and saw the presentation from Unicef and their fund-raising partner David Droga of Droga5.  What these guys have achieved is nothing less than…amazing.

You see, what David Droga pitched to Unicef was such a simple, yet powerful idea for raising money and awareness of the plight of people around the world who dont have clean water.  Essentially, it works like this:

Restaurants in New York City (the initial launch city for the campaign) were invited to ask their customers to donate a minimum of $1 or more for the tap water they would normally drink for free with their meal.  For every dollar raised, a child somewhere in the world will have clean drinking water for 40 days.

Now imagine this.  If every restaurant in every major town or city in the world got behind this and did the same, unclean drinking water could become a thing of the past to those where sterlised and sanitised drinking water has been merely a dream.

So, I love this idea for its pure simplicity and scalability - two aspects of marketing and business I believe very strongly in.  I also love this idea because it has united the marketing and advertising communities in ways I’ve never seen before.  Since its launch in March 2008, it has leveraged over $7m of pro-bono creative fees and 1 billion FREE ad impressions online.  Not bad eh?

So, if you’re any agency or work clientside, join the likes of AMEX, Esquire and Turner Broadcasting, amongst others, & get involved.  Take a look at www.tapproject.org then contact Stephen @ Unicef or David Droga @ Droga5.   You’ll be glad you did!