Search Engine Marketing Blog | Tug » Creative Search

Series of Fun Facts: Part lll

rainelda — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 12:12:34 +0000

It was snowing this morning! Did you see that? Outside everything is dedicated to Christmas – the lights, the shops, the markets and now even a little bit of snow. So I decided not to do anything related to Christmas, but pull together fun stuff that is going on in the World Wide Web.

This time I wanted to look at the things that are really popular at the moment in the Twitter environment, when people are trying to have fun:

9GAG is a comedy website set in Hong Kong and hosted in the United Stated. It launched in 2008 and currently is very popular amongst people. A lot of people are sharing the images they find in 9GAG via Twitter. The site is best known for recurring use of internet memes. It is among the 500 most visited websites ranking 468 place globally. According to alexa.com the sites users tend to be under the age of 35 and they tend to be childless. Visitors to this site spend approximately 64 seconds on each pageview and a total of 13 minutes on the site during each visit. I must admit it is pretty addictive sometimes.
What internet memes do you pass over? I personally use hashtags at the moment, although I’m keeping my options open. So internet memes are basically a concept that spreads via the internet. While doing this research, I found out that the earliest usage of meme in general is in the book created by Richard Dawkins called “The Selfish Gene” – it was published in 1976. Internet meme is an idea that is propagated and spreads through the internet. A meme can be a hyperlink, video, picture, website, hashtag or just a word or phrase. One of the most popular internet memes are misspellings, such as the word “more” as “moar” or “the” as “teh” simply because misspelling is very common. Internet memes spread from person to person through various places like blogs, news sources and social networks, so no wonder Twitter is full with them. Academically, researchers model how the memes evolve and predict which memes will survive and spread throughout the Web, while commercially they are used in viral marketing where they are an inexpensive form of mass advertising.
Rage comic is an extremely popular internet meme at the moment. It is a comic made from a stock set characters, commonly known as rage faces and centre on the rage guy. It started on 4chan in 2008 and in 2009 the meme experienced an upsurge in popularity. In 2010 shirts with the rage face started to appear and were sold by Hot Topic. The comic usually focus on small moments in daily life from the perspective of a protagonist the reader can identify with. The face seems a bit creepy to me, though.

And a little discovery for the ending. The most popular Twitter hashtags in 2011 were:

#egypt
#tigerblood
#threewordstoliveby
#idontunderstandwhy
#japan
#improudtosay
#superbowl

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Series of Fun Facts: Part ll

rainelda — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 15:42:47 +0000

I don’t know about you, but this was a crazy week for all people here at Tug. However, we managed it, as well as we won GOLD at the DMA Awards 2011 for Best Use of Search. Overall an exciting week.

But it is Friday – the best day to learn something new and fun. When you see a little, green robot, what is the first thing that comes up your mind? Personally my brain generates two words and connects them together – Android and Google. Once again I did a little research and here are my personal discoveries about this operating system:

Originally Android wasn’t Google’s product. Android Inc. was founded in October 2003 (Palo Alto, California) by four men – Andy Rubin, Rich Miner, Nick Sears and Chris White.
Andy Rubin was the co-founder of Danger (a company specializing in platforms, software, design and services for mobile computing devices), Rich Miner was the co-founder of Wildfire Communications, Nick Sears once was the VP at T-Mobile and Chris White was head of design and interface development at WebTV. So all four lads had a background on software engineering. At the beginning Android Inc. was operated secretly, revealing only that it was working on software for mobile phones.
In August 2005 Google acquired Android Inc. making it a wholly owned subsidiary of Google. Not much was known about Android at the time of the acquisition, but many assumed that Google was planning to enter the mobile market with it.
A lot of you definitely noticed that all Android versions are named after desserts and go in an alphabetical order – Cupcake, Donut, Eclair, Froyo, Gingerbread, Honeycomb and Ice Cream Sandwich. I strongly believe that I’m not the only one asking the eternal question “Why?” After browsing around and searching, I came up to this CNN article, where the same question was asked. It appears that Google doesn’t want to explain the reason for these names. A spokesman from Google said to CNN that it is an internal thing and that Google prefer’s to be a little bit inscrutable in the matter. So here we are with The Mystery of Android version names.

But wait, there’s more. I made a little survey online and spammed a lot of people to fill it in. Here are the questions and results of the survey:

Question: Which of these (Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, WordPress, Blogspot, Gmail) you use on a daily basis? (multiple answers were available) – No surprise that most of the respondents use Facebook (75%) and in second place it’s Gmail (45%) followed by Twitter (37%). WordPress and Flickr received 2% each – Yes, I use them both, but I didn’t complete the survey. Honest.
Question: Do you retweet offers of brands that you follow on Twitter? – 54% said that they do not retweet offers, while 16% said that sometimes they do. Only 2% said that they retweet offers of brands.
Question: Do you share offers, stories, music etc. on Facebook? – Now this question’s results surprised me a bit. Only 40% of the respondents said that they share things on Facebook and a whopping 32% said that they don’t share anything on Facebook. Why did this surprise me? To be honest, I was expecting that about 80% to 90% would say “Yes”, as every time I log into Facebook, it’s never empty and a new post comes up every 2 minutes (majority being video, news article, blog post etc. sharing).
Question: Which mobile OS you find visually attractive, convenient and quickly manageable? – People were offered 3 options: iOS, Windows Phone 7 and Android. 67% voted for Android, 19% voted for iOS and 5% voted for WP7.

Have great weekend all!

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Series of Fun Facts: Part I

rainelda — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 12:14:41 +0000

It’s Friday, so lets tap ourselves on the shoulders for work well done this week (as I truly believe that no matter what, this week was good for everyone is one way or the other).

Do you like to find out different, interesting information? I know I do. Especially those little fun facts, that won’t crucially change your rhythm, but gives you that “Hmm, I didn’t know that – it’s interesting” feeling.

Fun Fact Nr. 1: We all know that YouTube is a video-sharing website. I personally found interesting that it was created by 3 former PayPal employees (Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim) in February 2005, so in 2012 little YouTube is going to be 7 years old. YouTube is based in San Bruno, California, but it’s early headquarters were situated above a pizzeria and Japanese restaurant in San Mateo, California. According to a story that has often been repeated in the media, Hurley and Chen developed the idea for YouTube after they had experienced difficulty sharing videos that had been shot at a dinner party at Chen’s apartment. Karim didn’t attend the party and denied that it actually occurred, while Hurley commented that the idea of YouTube being found after a dinner party was probably a marketing idea to create a true and digestible story. The very first YouTube video was entitled “Me at the zoo” and shows founder Jawed Karim at the San Diego Zoo. The video is still available: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw It is 18 seconds long, was shot at 8:27PM on the 23rd April 2005 and posted live that same day.

Fun Fact Nr. 2: Did you know that you are able to express yourself in 140 characters and allow other people read it a.k.a. tweet nearly 6 years now? Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched in July 2006. Twitter gained worldwide popularity with over 300 MILLION users and generating over 300 MILLION tweets per day. Twitter’s origins lie in a brainstorming session held by board members of the podcasting company Odeo. Dorsey introduced the idea of an individual using an SMS service to communicate with a small group. The original project code name for the service was twttr. Work on the project started on March 21, 2006, when Dorsey published the first Twitter message at 9:50PM “just setting up my twttr”. The first Twitter prototype was used as an internal service for Odeo employees and the full version was introduced publicly on July 15, 2006. Twitter spun off into its own company in April 2007.

Fun Fact Nr. 3: As a blogger I can say that personally after trying Google’s blogspot.com and wordpress. com the second option is more closer to my convenience. WordPress first appeared in 2003 as a joint effort between Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little. The name WordPress itself was suggested by a friend of Mullenweg Christine Selleck. WordPress won several awards – in 2007 it won a Packt Open Source CMS Award, then in 2009 won the Packt best Open Source CMS Award. In 2010 WordPress won the Hall of Fame CMS catefory in the 2010 Open Source Awards and in 2011 won the Open Source Web App of the Year Award at the Critters. WordPress is used by over 14.7% of Alexa Internet‘s top 1 million websites and as of August 2011 powers 22% of all new websites. Currently it is the most popular CMS in use on the Internet. As of February this year, the version 3.0 was downloaded 32.5 MILLION TIMES.

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Google +1 button on your Display ads

rainelda — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 14:25:45 +0000

Are you running display ads on the Google Display Network? Do you want people to recommend your ads’ landing pages to other potential customers? Then you are in for a treat.

On Monday 10th October Google AdWords announced that the +1 button and personal annotations will start to appear with your Display ads. So if you are seeing the button, don’t be surprised, however it is possible that some advertisers do not see this option as of yet, but Google says that they are working hard to roll out the +1 button to everyone who are using AdWords display ads as soon as they can.

The reason to create this feature was because Google believes that incorporating user personal recommendations into display ads has the potential to change the way people view advertising. Google says that a display ad will become much more powerful when users can see which of their friends and contacts have chosen to endorse it. The +1 button on display ads will work together with +1 buttons on search results, search ads and websites. A single +1 applies to the same content across the web, no matter where it appears. It will be able to include the button to image, animated GIF, Flash, Display Ad Builder ads and also on Double Click Rich Media ads.

Google is looking forward to add the +1 button and personal annotations to all eligible inventory over the next couple weeks, as they are confident from their experience with the button on search, that it will be a great addition to advertisers’ Google Display Network campaigns.

Since the introduction to the +1 button on search results and search ads, it has been installed over a million websites across the web with over 4 billion impressions daily, so no wonder Google decided to add it to the display ads as well.

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London SES – thoughts from Wed 23rd

Nick — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 18:35:30 +0000

I had the opportunityt to speak at SES this year – which was a great honour. Somehow I was asked to discuss Tracking and Attribution alongside the MD from VCCP Search. It’s not my expertise but my intro to the subject was well received (I hope!) – we will load up the presentation on our site next week in our search marketing news section. I had to rush home to collect my daughter but was still able to see 2 other presentations – here are my outtakes from the 3 sessions:

Attribution panel (myself and Paul Mead): before you decide to drop last click wins and start using an attribution model – ask yourself – and analyse the data – how long is your typical clients’ path to converion? if it’susuallty only 1 or 2 clicks – stick with your current tracking model. Don’t overcomplicate just for the sake of it. Eventhough the technology now is truly amazing for analysing paths’ to conversion and setting up attribution models – there will always be leakage within the system and it is still a bit of a fudge… attribution models are much more useful for products that have a long purchase cycle – if you’re selling t-shirts – don’t waste your time and money!

Retargetting panel: That search ignite guy is pretty impressive – as was the speaker from Banner. Top tips I picked up were: 1. use the cookie data you have – if you know they want a flight to spain definitely advertise that not a generic flight ad 2. Test your re-targeting window – one speaker found that the most efficient was to retarget only for 7 days after the first engagement 3. Don’t stalk – actually i knew that from when I was single…. 4. swap remarketiong tags (illegal?) with a partner site that has a complimentary service 5. dont retarget to everyone who came to your site and didn’t convert – make sure they had some engagement such as they got half way through the application form, or they viewed 3 or more pages etc.

Biddable Media: again that search ignite guy is pretty smart – good at taking a concept and drilling down to what’s important – I only saw his speech before I had to go pick up Amelia. He made 2 good points – 1. the cool thing about display auctions is not the fact that they are auction based – search has been like that for a decade. The cool thing is that you are bidding on targetting an individual with all the cookie data recorded on this person – if they are your sweet spot an advertiser might be willing to pay 10 times what someone might pay for just a blind impression. 2. agencies are starting biddable media departments….. food for thought for all Search MDs…

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Social Media Integration with PPC & SEO is Top Priority for the US in 2011

admin — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 11:31:06 +0000

Although these statistics were released before the end of the 2010, I wanted to remind/inform you all, of the ever growing importance of Social Media, and it’s effects on all frontiers.

According to Emarketer, integrating Social Media with PPC & SEO is Top of the to do list for companies in the US (and I’m sure the UK have the same prerogative). Link Building programs and CMS processes round out the top 3 for SEO, while local search advertising and managing the impact of Google instance make the top 3 for PPC.

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Blekko – A New Search Engine

admin — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 12:19:41 +0000

Well, it appears that we have another new search engine joining our ranks. The search engine is called “Blekko” and it claims to be a new wave of search engine that eliminates spam using a feature called “Slashtags”. A Slashtag is a group of websites that are relevant to a particular topic, e.g. Health, Money, Travel, etc.
Slashtags will be added to the search queries you type in on Blekko to limit the search results to only the relevant sets of sites.
For example; If you were to use the search query “Vaccination”, Blekko will show you the highest quality websites in the health category, thanks to the use of Slashtags.

Because Blekko has only just become up and running, they have a limited number of Slashtags (search categories), so if your search query does not match one of the pre defined categories, Blekko will use proprietary ranking algorithms to deliver relevant results from the 3 billion web pages contained in Blekko.
As more and more users start to use Blekko and more search queries are used, Blekko will create as many relevant sub categories as possible to provide the most relevant search results.

“Today is the first step in a process of building a volunteer army at Blekko that will eventually slash spam from search and deliver the most relevant results,” said Rich Skrenta, CEO of Blekko.“As the number of URLs on the web increases from billions to trillions, it will take a layer of human oversight to separate the trusted content from the spam.”

So to sum up, it seems as though this is quite a standard search engine that has been created, but with a few new & interesting features/concepts, but ultimately I think it will come down to the fact of personal preference on how successful this will all be. I think it’s going to take a big effort to replace people’s minds from thinking of Google as their No.1 search engine!

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The Yahoo! Search Open Ecosystem

David — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 11:34:38 +0000

While there has been remarkable progress made toward understanding the semantics of web content, the benefits of a data web have not reached the mainstream consumer. Without a killer semantic web app for consumers, site owners have been reluctant to support standards like RDF, or even microformats. We believe that app can be web search.

By supporting semantic web standards, Yahoo! Search and site owners can bring a far richer and more useful search experience to consumers. For example, by marking up its profile pages with microformats, LinkedIn can allow Yahoo! Search and others to understand the semantic content and the relationships of the many components of its site. With a richer understanding of LinkedIn’s structured data included in our index, we will be able to present users with more compelling and useful search results for their site. The benefit to LinkedIn is, of course, increased traffic quality and quantity from sites like Yahoo! Search that utilize its structured data.

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