Power to the privacy advocates - or is it?

Jonathan Bowers, July 24th 2007, 4:52PM

We should all be pleased that the five big search engines have now shown a commitment to reducing the length of time that they retain potentially sensitive data about their users. Microsoft and Yahoo! announced their intentions this week, which means that Microsoft and Google have publicly agreed to keep user data for no longer than 18 months, Yahoo! and AOL for 13 months and Ask.com is unveiling a new tool that allows users to block the retention of specific search terms and their computer's IP address.

Does this suggest that for the serious privacy advocate there's really only one search engine of choice? After all, ask.com appears to be going way beyond the other four and has prompted Microsoft to pledge similar functionality in its search engine by the end of the year. However, if you're a privacy advocate who is also serious about search results then will it be enough to make you, as a Google user, switch engine?

For many, this is a great step forward but I am not sure that it is enough to encourage a sizeable volume of searchers away from Google (with its 75%+ share of the UK search market) and prompt the search leader to take similar steps.

Tags: privacy, search
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Real people - real recommendations

Jonathan Bowers, July 11th 2007, 3:24PM

It is amazing what the internet has done for customer recommendation. With a record number of people saying that they search online for reviews of a product before purchasing, we're now finding that the general public are becoming very savvy about what is and what is not genuine independent praise.

The idea that we can trust real people to give good honest opinions is stronger than ever. So much so that it reflects very badly indeed when this trust is betrayed by a product or service. Earlier this week, the Manchester Evening News revealed that the GMPTA's (local transport organisation) new publicity drive promoting a congestion charge across the city is in fact falsely portraying members of the public as pro charging.

The people who appear on the site and in direct marketing campaigns are actually models and the images were bought from an American photostock supplier. The case studies that they accompany are fictional and no interviews with the public were done during the production of the promotional literature.

If you read the many comments on the MEN website, it's obvious that by misleading the public, the GMPTA has alienated a lot of people they were originally trying to impress their views upon. It was also crisis management at its worst when both the PR company involved and the GMPTA denied fabricating any element of the information when they were first challenged.

Trust is the most important element involved in customer relations and the Internet is instilling this ever more deeply. Manchester's congestion charge has now set itself an even harder task.

Tags: consumer_confidence, trust, word_of_mouth
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Monitoring brand popularity online

Jonathan Bowers, July 4th 2007, 5:09PM

Some results from a survey by PR agency immediate future have been published this week and they look at the Internet's most talked about brands. The study takes the Interbrand Top 100 Companies and looks at how they rank when considered in terms of the volume of mentions they receive online.

On the whole the information is very useful and while the results do not surprise greatly, some links can be drawn between overall brand success and the online contribution of consumers.

However, a failing in the study brings up a very interesting question. How do you monitor the brand popularity of a company with a generic name? The best example is clothing company Gap, which appears at 52 in the Interbrand 100. It jumps to 17th in immediate future's social media chart and almost half of the mentions are attributed to Flickr the photo sharing website. When you search for 'Gap' using 'most relevant' as the search instruction you have to scroll through 8 pages of images of the London Underground before you actually reach an image of the US retailer.

Gap as a term has over 95,000 results on Flickr but it would take too many man hours to work out how many of those actually refer to the right Gap. Compare this to Honda with 100,000 mentions on the site. It is unlikely that any of these do not relate directly to the brand and therefore a quick search gives an accurate analysis of the company's presence and reach.

So does Gap deserve its place in the study?

Tags: brand, social media
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