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.

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 Social Media tracking - it’s a new buzz word.  But what does it mean?

In a nutshell, it means reading and making sense of all the stuff written on the web by people who find the time and energy to do it.  You know, blogs, forums, wikis, twitter and all that.  It’s like a combination of market research and conversational eavesdropping.  More traditional methods of market research use people with clipboards, telephone surveys or more recently, online panels to ask ‘consumers’  questions.  This is both a strength and a weakness.  The strength is that it’s very targeted.  Questions like “What do you think of Gordon Brown?”, “Rate your experience of the customer service call you just made to Vodafone?” will get you answers, but, sometimes it’s the questions that aren’t asked that could deliver the most useful information like “Are you thinking of switching to those evil iphone lovers over at O2?”.  Furthermore, the survey can introduce a bias - who did they ask (it’s always a sample) and did the questions or the questioners influence the response?

Social media monitoring, by contrast, takes the Internet as its data source and tries to make sense of it.  That’s to say, there are no questions, no prompting and a lot less sampling.  So, in theory, it’s a good thing, but it’s a lot harder to do.  For instance, with a simple Q&A, the data is clean and very well structured. Extracting what someone thinks about a product, a politician or a service from a piece they write in a blog, or a post in a forum is a much bigger challenge.  Imagine having a conversation with someone about your mobile phone.  Most likely you would talk about a bunch of different things and not all of them would be about the phone.  Some might be about the network, something you did with it, like drop it or leave it on a train and you are likely to stray off- topic during the chat and mention something else that happened to you recently.  It’s a normal conversation and if I was eavesdropping, I might have to have a bit of a think before telling someone else what you said about your Sony Ericsson.  Social media monitoring faces the same challenge.

So that’s it ? It’s just all a bit hard?  Well no, that was my intro!  But give me minute!

There are some fancy things that modern computers can do, such as getting a feel for ‘sentiment’ by looking at and analysing the words that are used, pulling out common phrases and putting together summaries and graphs that help you see what’s going on.  It’s not as focused as a survey, but, as I say, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.  And this whole area is coming along in leaps and bounds at the moment so be prepared to be amazed at what will be possible over the next couple of years.  For example, imagine being able to use the collective intelligence of the Internet to your advantage.  OK, that’s a bit fluffy and borg-like (sorry non-trekkies), but type your name into pipl.com and you might be surprised at how a reasonably simple system can gather information about you and summarise it in a slightly spooky way.

So what’s worth tracking?

Well, if there is something that gets loads of chat on the web, chances are that your day job will prevent you from reading it all and trying to make some sense of it.  So that’s your starting point.  Do you care what people are saying about the new BlackBerry Bold or are you a marketer that has some responsibility for a well known brand or a client?  If so, and you find that Google Alerts start taking over your inbox within a couple of days, you might want to consider checking out the some of the tools that people have developed to do a better job of it.

How do know what’s worth looking at?

Good question.  Do you care what people are twittering about?  Maybe you do if there’s some tweet firestorm (I now own that phrase!) going on out there.  But, chances are there will be forums that are big news in your sector - like pistonheads for the auto guys or moneysavingsexpert for finance types.  Those you will want to track.  So too will be influential bloggers - although knowing who is influential or not isn’t always a simple task.  Then there are all those comments on the big news sites - a lot of people read and contribute to those and there is some extremely useful insight in amongst the petty private battles that pop up.  I’m sure you know a lot of the influential sites and sources in your sector, but monitoring them often isn’t so easy.

What about social networks?

Ah yes, what about poking or throwing sheep at your friends on Facebook, virtually stalking Mika on myspace, getting serious on LinkedIn, or doing something teenagery on Bebo.  Unfortunately for Social Media Analysis software, a lot of those virtual playgrounds are locked down.  No invite, no dancing.  But even with an invite, you’re not allowed to bring friends so getting some automated system in there to try to read the information and make sense of (the enormous amount) it is, so far, not something that can be done.  But I’m sure that over the next couple of years, there will be a way to anonomyse it, aggregate it and analyse it for the benefit of all (demonic smile!)

So, if I want to track social media conversations about my brand, where do I start?

With the best of course!  Check out my tool at Brandwatch.net!  (Shameless plug).  The end.

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 anyone interested in mobile marketing to youth, have a look at Antti Ohrling, co-founder of Blyk, blog.  He talks about the state of the youth market and how best to reach it.  He was participating in the ‘YPulse Mashup 2008′ in San Francisco, organized by YPulse, a media platform and blog for youth media and marketing professionals.

Some of his key points:

• Young people have become more difficult to reach due to rapidly changing, savvy media habits
• Marketers have a lack of understanding when it comes to young people
• Europe is ahead of the curve in youth related issues and many trends are created overseas

His conclusion: “Relevancy and engagement matter to the youth audience and mobile is the perfect media for relevant and interactive communication”.

You can read the full post here.

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

Digital advertising isn’t just about the digital delivery platform; it’s about the interactivity and data that can be extracted and utilized. Many of the larger industry players, such as Google and Microsoft, fail to see that brand advertising is as much about creativity and interactivity as it is about the numbers. While this model may, on the surface, appear to create more efficient media buys, it actually lessens
opportunities for brand differentiation and ultimately limits potential for the future.

Open and shared access to data between advertisers, agencies and content owners allows for more effective advertising in the long haul, whereas the “black box” model stunts creativity by placing all data and decisions in the hands of the publisher. Over time, this “commoditization” will result in a battle of who is willing to pay more for better results - effectively hobbling overall advertiser media efficiency and limiting a brand’s ability to compete. Media efficiency can’t overtake creative strength. Consumers want and demand uniqueness from a brand. Creativity is the key to that uniqueness.

The impact of this new focus on Interactive Digital Advertising is that the desired brand experience drives the creative input, requiring artistic skill and analytics to work in harmony. The sustainable difference for brands will be the combination of creative and data. Brand managers will be tasked with a more thoughtful and detailed approach to the brand experience because of the new, multifaceted options for interaction. They will think not in terms of 16 ads to make an impression, but rather one or two.

The future will find consumers demanding real-time, highly customized and intimate brand interactions. A boundary-less Internet will allow for digital media to live and breathe across multiple digital platforms, further integrating itself into our everyday lives. It is in this environment that Interactive Digital Advertising will thrive - advancing brands in ways never imagined.

Interactive Digital Advertising is the future. We are standing at the threshold of an entirely new marketing experience where technology becomes the facilitator for unlimited potential rather than the gating factor to creative innovation. Consumers will realize more relevant and enjoyable brand experiences delivered at their discretion and pace. Advertisers and agencies will enjoy a limitless creative palette matched with a “crystal ball-like” sphere of data placing the industry’s elusive Holy Grail - the seamless marriage of creative and data - within their reach.

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!