Top marketing opportunity… SEO??
November 30, 2007
A report has been released by Anderson Analytics as the results of a survey of the Marketing Executives Networking Group (a 1,700 strong network of marketers at VP level or higher). The survey asked what marketing concepts these executives thought were going to be the top trends and concepts in 2008.
Worryingly, when asked which marketing concepts they felt were going to be most important the second highest answer turned out to be SEO!
Now, I don’t know whether marketers are unsure what search engine optimisation is or perhaps this was a particularly ‘offline’ group of marketers, but SEO is already hugely important and in my eyes if you haven’t grasped that yet then it’s a bit late. Saying that it will be the second most important concept next year is amazing to me. It’s been part of my life for 12 years and is really just part of the routine I go through for any digital project.
Here’s the rest of the list:
If you had to ask me what some of the concepts I thought were important for next year were (in digital), I’d say:
- Offline/online translation (getting your offline campaigns translated in a seamless manner onto digital media, something that really isn’t being done very well at the moment)
- Viral (campaigns should always be thought of as viral if they touch the web)
- Widgets (cross pollination of marketing campaigns online using widgets)
- Social media (yes, it’s huge this year, but next year should see it mature and the launch of OpenSocial will make it more important than ever)
- Banners (controversial one this but we are now at a stage where banners should become more like widgets and really start to become properly engaging, whether this will happen I’m not sure as most agencies who design banners aren’t particularly forward thinking)
Underpinning all of those, and every other online marketing concept, should be SEO.
What do you think the key concepts of 2008 will be?
Social networking; a global phenomenon
October 29, 2007
Many people assume that social networking is a strictly western past time, with the vast majority of users coming from the U.S. and western Europe.
Not true at all! The latest figures from comScore show that it’s a truely international phenomenon and is actually being lead by the Asia Pacific region at the moment.
This leads me to deduce that it’s not all about Facebook and MySpace. Neither have the presence in these other areas of the world. Orkut, Google’s social network offering, is massive in Latin America and making waves in Asia, but something else must be contributing to these Asia Pacific totals.
Engagement wise, it’s Latin America leading the way. The average social network user in Latin America spends much more time engaged in social networks than users in North America or Europe. Could it be that Orkut is more engaging than Facebook?
The figures above would seem to suggest that although Asia Pacific are heavy users of social networks they are not as engaged and are using them for different purposes to the Americas (perhaps).
Lastly comScore have a breakdown of the regions with what social networks they prefer.
This is where it suddenly jumps out that Friendster is doing really well in Asia, and that a network called CyWorld accounts for a lot of the numbers in that area but doesn’t figure at all in EU or U.S. Also obvious from these figures is that Facebook just doesn’t feature in Asia or Latin America, they have a massive opportunity to break into these regions and gain a lot more eyeballs!
