I’ve just read an article on Ad Age about new legislation in the UK.
Essentially the new law makes it illegal to:
Not disclose that you are being paid to write a blog post about a product
Pretend to be a consumer
All in the name of consumer protection. I must applaud the law makers over in the UK, we might get a law like this in New Zealand in 2025.
It’s a nice time to be a consumer, where companies are needing to be transparent to be competitive.
In my experience with banks and insurance companies – transparency is not usually a term they know about. The financial services industry has the biggest challenge with ‘new marketing’ in my view. They have made screeds of money over time that they aren’t as likely to get away with now. Somehow they need to be transparent and add more value for consumers – great customer service isn’t going to be enough. Although they’re spending a bunch of money online – they’re not embracing new marketing and instead dishing out a meatball sundae.
NZ Marketing Magazine and DLB (NZ Marketing Association) seem to be constantly regurgitating messages about “embracing new marketing” at the moment, so I apologise for the cliche.
To start with; “Chief Blogger” is a wanky title. Hiring someone to blog is essentially the same as hiring someone to manage PR which defeats the purpose of blogging in the first place.
The best thing I’ve seen in company blogs is the passion that comes out of them. Google has their geeky engineers talking directly to other geeks. We love it. It’s not someone blogging trying to manage the brand; it’s the Google engineers being the brand. Sure the chief blogger could be passionate and be a part of the company, but he/she would still be out of the front-line where sometimes the best insight comes from.
Searchme is a new visual search engine which is currently in a private beta. I’ve just signed up to try and get onto it, so I’ll let you know when I can comment on my experiences with it.
They’ve already got invesment from Sequoia Capital who was an early investor in Google and YouTube.
I have to admit the features and appearance of Searchme do look impressive, and it’s always nice to see innovation in the search arena. It looks like it’s all AJAX based and the beautifully displayed visual search results are returned quickly using the Apple cover flow design used in iTunes.
It also uses category filters, kind of similar to Ask.com. So if you searched something like “nets” Google will traditionally show what it considers the most relevant and a big part of this relevance is importance. New Jersey Nets completely dominate these results, but what if you were actually searching for fishing nets? Searchme would present category options to you, so you could either choose to look at basketball category sites or fishing category sites.
Take a look at their introduction video
Will it catch on? For a new search engine to catch on it has to be necessary and more useful than Google to give people a good reason to change, or at least use in combination. While Searchme looks good, I don’t think it’s necessary. The reason why Google is so popular is because of the quality of it’s search results and the simplicity to get to them. Googles search results are based on the fact that content is King, and trust is it’s Queen. How useful would Google be if it ranked results with a design factor?It’s a common assumption among SEO’s that Google already considers user behaviour after a search. Higher click through rates of your organic listing if you’re in second place, will show people like your listing more than the 1st place which proves it to be more relevant. Also once you click through from a search result, and hit the back button straight away – Google will know that the page you saw didn’t match what you wanted to see. Based on this it’s fair to say Google doesn’t judge these sites ‘by their cover’ which is exactly what Searchme will encourage.The other main feature it has is the category filters. In my example above I talked about fishing nets and the New Jersey Nets. If you were searching for fishing nets and searched for “nets” and got results for the basketball team, wouldn’t you just try again but this time be more specific and search for “fishing nets” instead?
If it does catch on, what effect will it have? Design will be king. If users can see your site before clicking on it – it needs to look good. Not only does it need to look good, but it will also need to appear extremely relevant. You would need to have quite specific pages to match specific search results. You should be doin this already, but it would take it to a new level.I’m not sure how Searchme will rank it’s search reulsts but surely it won’t be as complex behind the scenes as Google, so most likely not as high quality results. It might be a more useful idea if it was actually just a new way to display results, using the backbone of Google technology. Perhaps not a possible business model though.
Overall I think the idea is ‘cool’ and might come in handy for certain searches and industries. But no one will have to take it too seriously, at least not for a while.
AdAge recently reported about chief bloggers being a new trend with corporates. 