As you might know I have a column in the Dutch radio program “Echte Jannen”. With the start of a new year, I had to do some trend-watching of course, especially after covering the topics of last week in the New Year special (Dutch) the previous day. So here are a couple of things that I think will be important for the coming year, in the Dutch speaking part of the internet and beyond.

1 More apps, less browser

Of course a development like this is relative to other things, we won’t see less browser based content in absolute figures, but the relative number of apps and their influence will grow. Due to the rise of mobile the rise of apps will go on in the next year, not even counting games and the quite recent growth of the number of newspaper applications. Apps are an ideal way to be able to charge for content as well as to avoid browser compatibility issues.

2 Professionalization of advertising

Especially Android users will be familiar with advertisements for mobile, but developments will go further than that. Due to professionalization social media will become a normal part of the marketing mix, you can expect a big rise in new marketeers, who we will suddenly call ‘online marketeers’ as well. That’s not a bad thing per se, as long as you keep risks like too narrow a focus on specific online knowledge in mind.

Besides this, the professionalization will have an impact in the opposite direction for bigger companies. These will put even more budget aside for more daring online marketing actions. Guerilla or viral is not dead for online niches, but it’s the big multinationals that will fuel a continued growth here. This means there are chances for larger new media advertisement companies if you aim at small and medium businesses or, if you want to aim at the multinationals, for niche, daring, advertisement agencies.

3 Twittercode

Your complaints may not be any different from those you express at the water-cooler, we will see more Twittercodes at companies. A Twittercode in this sense is a social media code of conduct for employees, to restrict them in what they can say about, for example, their employer online. In the US we can see that restrictive codes are put to the test, and we might see companies abandoning (some) for common sense. In the Netherlands though, or Europe as a whole, we will see the first examples of Twittercodes for employees soon enough.

4 Data visualization

The data that is available online continues to grow, that’s no secret. Data will be more complex as well, especially if the linking of data becomes the semantic web. this could mean a golden age for journalists, visual artists or any other job position you can come up with in this area: if you know how it ‘works’ online, there are huge opportunities. We need people that can process the huge complex amount of data for us. Newspapers are struggling to keep their subscriptions up, but they might be fighting the wrong game if what they want to do is interpret information.

5 Social Games

There will be real social mobile gaming, think World of Warcraft meets Farmville, on your mobile. The only remaining challenge is making this in usable concept, and we will soon see solutions that try to solve this question.

6 Prosecution of a blogger

See also ‘Twittercode’ above. This might not be a real trend, but we will see the prosecution of yet another blogger, commenter or tweep due to something he or she has said online.

If you wondered about promoted tweets and how well they fare: they’re super effective. Or so says online brokerage firm Zecco. In comparison with tweets posted on their normal account they’re seeing an increase in engagement of 50%. some specific tweets even saw a much larger increase in engagement, up to 300% more.

Obviously this raises the question what the original level of engagement was, and what level of engagement can be expected of tweets ‘just’ posted on a normal twitter account of a firm. On the other hand, it’s a good sign for ‘promoted tweets’ as a services that Zecco views it as an important increase, so Twitter is on to an important new asset here, despite critiques on the new promotional scheme.

Coming back to the specific services Zecco offers, it says it plans to use the Promoted Tweets platform (more) to share investment-focused resources. They also want to send out alerts such as ‘most traded’  to provide real-time intelligence from the Zecco community. More about the success of promoted tweets on Techcrunch here.

And if you want to read more on the what, how and why of promoted tweets you can read the guest article by Silvia Todorova on my own blog. You can find her article ‘Does advertising on social networks have to be at the cost of user experience?’ here.

On 12^th April 2010 Twitter announced its new business strategy to include promoted tweets [1] in its organic search results. This new direction in collecting revenue from advertisers raised many questions among the online marketing community and avid Twitterers. Is Twitter not going to affect the user experience in the network by “polluting” the content with promotional tweets? At the same time, marketers have been eagerly anticipating Twitter’s rollout of a strategy for monetizing its value.  The new initiative by the company to mix user generated content with advertisements was therefore hailed by them as the most logical step by a company that wants to maintain sustainable profits in the volatile online technology market.

Figure 1: How a promoted tweet looks like

Connoisseurs following closely how Twitter’s marketing strategy is developing, may be likely to conclude that promoted tweets is not such a breakthrough given the similarity of the strategy with Google Adwords. The only difference with Twitter is that its search engine is (still) not as accurate as the one of Google, with the main issue that Twitter Search displays search results in chronological order, which makes organic search results in Twitter (as they were before the promoted tweet) quite irrelevant at times. Thank God the live Twitter feed is included in the Google search results since last year! However, the promoted tweets will now appear on top of the Twitter search list no matter what time they are posted, which could render keyword searches on Twitter more targeted and relevant to the user.

This seems like a win-win-win situation for Twitter, the user and advertisers. Twitter will substantially improve the quality of its search engine, the user will find more relevant content easier (the Advanced Twitter search is good, but is still not as half as elaborated as Google’s algorithms), and advertisers get the opportunity to engage in valuable conversations with their target audiences, so called “Permission marketing”. (Seth Godin has been promoting this since the beginning of this decade!!). Twitter will protect its users from spamming and will compel advertisers to engage in real value creation by letting users decide which promoted tweets get to remain in the timeline. When a promoted tweet is published, Twitter will look at the amount of “retweets” and “favorites”, which will raise the popularity of a Tweet or doom it to oblivion. Tweets that fail to become popular will be simply removed from the timeline.

While this seems like a great strategy to retain the unique value of Twitter as a social network for content sharing and brand-to-consumer two-way conversations, it is still no guarantee how promoted tweets in the timeline of users will increase their experience in Twitter. To draw a comparison, let’s look at the Farmville Facebook addicts and the displayed Farmville updates in the News feed. Many people simply unfriended other people just not to be spammed with Farmville updates, simply because they didn’t know how to change their settings on the Facebook news feed. Surely, these settings were only enabled by Facebook a few months ago and since then you can adjust the Facebook timeline to your taste, skipping irrelevant status updates from Farmville aficionados (among others).

The question that Twitter has to answer now is: What will happen when promoted tweets are included in the timelines of users that don’t follow the company which sends these tweets? Wouldn’t that wind up the avid Twitter user? And does Twitter offer the option for one to customize the timeline so that promoted tweets are only displayed when the user is interested in them? An example: in Google, promoted search results are mixed with organic search results, which doesn’t directly enhance the user experience, but motivates companies to compete for relevance and improve their website content, which ultimately improves user experience online. As Twitter now offers a similar service to advertisers at the danger of deteriorating user experience, it needs to make sure that:

a) Either the users have the option to customize their timelines (exclude promoted tweets altogether, or allow only promoted tweets from companies they follow)

b) Or companies that are tweeting regularly but not buying keywords for promoted tweets can compete on an equal level playing field with big advertisers (just like in Google, where bigger brands “own” the most expensive and sought keywords and smaller advertisers can only slowly rise to the top of the search page by optimizing their website content for crawlers)

If Twitter is to follow the threaded path of Google’s success, it needs to make sure it has the right equipment for climbing the top. What seems like a shortcut to becoming profitable may turn into a slippery slope towards a collapse. Only time will show how Twitter’s management will tackle this new challenge…

Update: A brief video showing how the tweets are sent by the company and what the user in Twitter actually sees:

(This is a guest article, by Silvia Todorova)

Maybe you are familiar with the fact that a webserver can see which browser version you’re using and for example also how big the window is you’re using to view that website. In itself that is interesting enough for some statistics on the visitors of your website.

But there is more, way more and that is where thoughts of privacy, but also of marketing and research potential come in to play. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has made a website to show a bit of what is possible. (Go support them here, by the way.)

Panopticlick is of course a very clever name in itself, but what does it do? It tests your browser to see how unique it is based on the information it will share with sites it visits. as it turns out, that is often very unique! So someone with access to multiple, if not a lot, websites could, at the cost of quite some server load, potentially track you on your merry way across the internet. This might be heaven for marketeers in some way, but even in this industry tracking to this extend seems to be frowned upon. Cross site tracking cookies have been the topic of much debate, even amongst not so ‘privacy focused’ people, although their existence might prove there is still quite some demand.

Installing a lot of fonts of my system might not have helped for me; when testing it turned out I am very unique. (That is bad if you dislike being traced or tracked, good if you like targeted ads.)

Your browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the 222,512 tested so far.

Currently, we estimate that your browser has a fingerprint that conveys at least 17.76 bits of identifying information.

This is one of those things that you know about, somewhere in the back of your mind, but may have never really considered as an option. You know about browsers being able to detect if you have a certain font on your computer etc. but how could that all fit together with other statistics? That is one of those things you might not always think about.

Thus the topic might well be; are people aware of the (theoretical) possibilities and are they going to be used? Of course the question still remains; how effective can this type of tracking be? This is exactly one of the reasons for starting this project. The EFF wants to try to get your information and add it to their database. That sounds evil enough, though fortunately we might want to believe the EFF about that “anonymous” thing and them not tracking us, of course. Hopefully, this will help evaluate the capabilities of Internet tracking and advertising companies, a goal which in the end can be beneficial regardless of which side you’re on.

Well, of course the end of Search Engine Optimization is not near in a broad sense, but we could be well up for some “SEO, but not as we know it”, quite soon. Despite it being fairly successful, especially in recent times, I’ve always been skeptical about “pure SEO”. That is, SEO for just the purpose of doing SEO, optimizing your website just to look good in search engines. I’m not denying the value of good SEO, after all you want your nice articles and information to be found, but that is the point; nice information! All too often optimization tactics are used as a way of promoting content that is of little value as much as possible. In general I would say this applies to advertisements and advertorials, the value of this could be disputed, but way too often I’ve seen excellent SEO trying to drag me to a site with content that was just promotional and of no (other) value to me.

What is up with these people that create special landingpages aimed at subjects that their website is not about, or that have dynamically generated pages aiming at often used keywords, just to drag you in? Keywords and descriptions that don’t suit the article can be really annoying, although I can even understand the need to place keywords that border the actual subject. Disappointment as a conscious (or worse, unconscious) part of your SEO strategy is never a good one, that is a thing I’ve always believed in. Sure, it does or did work, but only at the high risks of making a bad name for yourself in the long run.

Thus I’ve always been saying that “I don’t believe in SEO”, a bold statement of course, especially for someone who does know the value of keywords and description in a metatag. But as it turns out it does suit my purpose; have people think about what they’re actually doing. Should you be focusing on good content or on good SEO? It’s about the message in the end, not about what you try to make it look like. Of course one could say both but I think good content management encompasses the latter; decent and solid SEO. I write a title because it sounds good and appealing, not because it looks good on google. (Though one could argue that for promoting on different platforms a different phrasing could be helpful due to the audience.) Good content may not promote itself, it’s a hard time promoting bad content, most organizations would benefit more from good content management than from the SEO they say they want or need to deploy.

Search Engines will go for the Content

Fortunately search engines have come to my rescue and they are valuing content more and more by just that; the actual content. It’s nice marketing talk to speak about providing a service to consumers just waiting to find your product, but maybe it’s just not such a good product if you have to SEO the electricity out of your website to get decent promotion. Please, please just give us nice and good content or in the end google will get back at you and turn your SEO tricks against you. I’ve said it may times and even included it in my Social Network model; original content is and will be king!

This approach is not only been appreciated by companies like Google, and mind you I’m not trying to imply they heard me talk, they’re just on the same track here, but it’s also gaining attention in the SEO business itself. Naturally, one could say, as SEO experts are the first to suffer if SEO is less valuable, right?

Being an “SEO expert” has always been a strange thing, such a narrow idea of a job description; I can understand content management, editing and even promoting, but why limiting yourself to specific search engine tactics? Indeed this is the same thing Robert Scoble mentions in his article about SEO in 2010 when he mentions move to naming oneself an “online marketing company” would be wise. So yes, like Scoble says; search engines will start to value your content more and more on the basis of the content itself. The only thing you have to ask yourself: is the content I’m offering really worth to be found? But then again, you should’ve always been doing that already.

Een kort bericht om duidelijk te maken dat ik eindelijk weer eens op een ander weblog schrijf. Natuurlijk ik schreef al weleens op “retecool goldmember”, maar dit is toch net weer even anders. Sjef Kerkhofs heeft me enige tijd geleden gevraagd of ik wilde schrijven voor zijn nieuwe initiatief “Bijgespijkerd” en ik heb die kans aangegrepen om een bijdrage te gaan leveren. Ik kom zelf nog wat moeizaam op gang qua aantal bijdragen. Mijn eerste bijdrage, over “play” op het werk  en wat dat kan betekenen voor online ontwikelingen, is ondertussen al een tijdje hier te vinden.