marketing your business online: The Wall > SXSW - Brands need to avoid the digital temptation: don't try to do too much

Friday 15 March 2013

The Wall > SXSW - Brands need to avoid the digital temptation: don't try to do too much

SXSW - Brands need to avoid the digital temptation: don't try to do too much

15 March 2013, 1:00PM

Sunday at South By South West (SXSW) left me with one overriding thought more than any other; the next five years will require brands to fight temptation.

Chris Risdon of Adaptive Path set the scene with some great examples of the burgeoning range of products sold not as tools for you but as a means to change your life. From Nike Fuel to connected toothbrushes and in checkout charity donations, the power and potential of ‘persuasive technology’ was clear.

The future of International SEO

15 March 2013, 12:00PM

The World Wide Web is now allowing special characters in URLs which means crawlers now have a stronger signal to localize queries right down to regional dialects.

It is a sizable change to the WWW language landscape given that historically coding has been based on English Latin characters.

Ready your brand for the next industrial revolution: 4 things to consider when it comes to 3D printing

15 March 2013, 11:45AM

Something weird has happened to the agency folk at SXSW. No one seems to notice the deep irony that we are all here to discuss interactivity and all things digital yet all we seem to be talking about is making stuff in the real world. Out of atoms not bits. From bar to bar, coffee house to coffee house, the words on everyone's lips are 3D printing, maker culture and hardware as the new software.

Facebook working on bringing in hashtags to graph search

15 March 2013, 9:47AM

facebook drives more shopping traffic than Twitter

The hashtag is one of the most identifiable features of Twitter, organically produced by users to bring together information on the same topics.

It has now become a key part of the service, with news stories, advertising campaigns and live tweeting all being based around it, and it looks like Facebook wants a piece of the action.

The future of real time bidding lies with improving the advertising experience

15 March 2013, 9:30AM

Since its emergence in 2010, Real Time Bidding (RTB) has been one of the most over-hyped technologies in advertising.

I wrote an article last year where I talked about RTB actually being a huge disappointment and this struck a chord with a number of advertisers that we've spoken with who can't see what all the fuss is about. These advertisers are generally seeing RTB as just another line on their usual media plan, shuffling money from one supplier to another with very little benefit to them.

No picture better captures the technological change of the last few years than these two contrasting images

15 March 2013, 9:27AM

As thousands gathered in St Peter’s Square on Wednesday evening as we all heard the news of Pope Francis one thing was remarked upon by many.

It was the silver flashes of camera phone cameras and tablet computers being held aloft as digital imagery captured the moment and flashed it on social networks around the world. I posted this picture of people waving their iPads in the air as they used them as cameras.

Facebook still dominant as half of British adults use social networks

15 March 2013, 9:00AM

Ipsos Mori has released its quarterly ‘tech tracker’ report for the first quarter of 2013, and found that now 50% of British adults access social networks, with nearly half of all adults using Facebook in the last 3 months.

SXSW: Good vs evil

15 March 2013, 8:27AM

You can't help but come away from SXSW without a feeling of positivity, of excitement about the future and where technology is going to lead us.

As I've mentioned before, just being there gives you an idea of what the future is going to be like – checking into Foursquare becomes useful again, people pay at tills with the Level Up device 3D-printed by the Makerbot, while treats can be downloaded from Samsung just by tapping your NFC-enabled phone.

Tablets outsprint e-Reader ownership

14 March 2013, 1:06PM

Since the Ipsos MediaCT Technology Tracker started tracking the race between tablets and e-Readers in April 2011, it has been a neck and neck contest, with no clear winner in terms of levels of adoption. However, all that changed this Christmas, with one device now clearly dominating in terms of household ownership.

Google Reader drives far more traffic than Google+

14 March 2013, 11:21AM

UPDATE – Just a small update on the Google Reader story from yesterday after Buzzfeed published this very telling graph below. It appears to show that Google Reader drives far more traffic than Google’s social platform Google+.