SEO News

Twitter

Interesting stat: There are 10m Twitter users in the UK and 80% access the site on their mobiles.

Bruce Daisley, Twitter, gave a massively entertaining talk about brands capturing the moment on Twitter. You can read Twitter’s whitepaper on the subject.

Interestingly, searching the conference hashtag, #FODM13, I was mysteriously and powerfully served a Twitter sponsored ad for said whitepaper.

It’s almost like this stuff is planned.

Creating moments

Judd Marcello of ExactTarget, talked about creating moments. Whether social, mobile, responsive, local.

He gave this great example of a moment, from Meat Pack, delivering discounts to mall shoppers based on their proximity to a store. The discount counts down one percent every second and the shopper has to rush to the store to save as much as possible.

HTML5 

James Carson discussed where we are with content marketing.

There were two exciting bits, for me. Firstly, HTML5 – James cited NY Times’ ‘Avalanche at Snow Creek’ and GrantLands’ ‘Out in The Great Alone’ as showcases for how engaging simple text and pictures can be made with this technology. 

James himself has turned a whitepaper on social sharing into a more engaging experience, using the same technique.

Secondly, I was interested in James’ assertion that we are moving back from native apps towards the connected experience of beautifully designed web apps and websites. Vogue is a great example of this. So pwetty.

Future of search 

Will Critchlow, Distilled, delivered this brilliant talk on the future of search. The inspiring bits were looking at how far Google has come in taking search queries and matching them to entities.

My own favourite example (there were similar ones in Will’s talk) is below.

Google has advanced in knowing more about searchers (history, location, time etc) meaning that people are searching differently.

Will termed all the info that Google has outside of the phrase you type as the ‘implicit query’, and users are now smart enough to know that Google has this implicit data.

Will gave the example of simply searching for ‘breakfast’ when he was away in Boston, and getting served results for cafes that were open at that time in the city and aligned with some of his previous preferences.

Although some speakers believed that Google Now will start to preclude searching altogether, Will believes that conversational search is the next big thing, and we’ll start to see a lot more people talking into their phones, which on reflection isn’t an absurd thought (disclosure – Will’s gag).

Mobile and print

FT.com and its web app see 25% of pageviews via mobile and 15% of new digital consumer subscriptions via mobile, too. It was the first newspaper whose digital subscribers overtook those reading in print.

Video for brands

Sarah Wood of Unruly, told us that this year’s brand videos have been all about meme-jacking and the ‘trend to offend’.

An interesting point was the increase on 2011’s average brand video length of 2:04 to 2012’s 3:09. Sarah said ‘length of video does not affect shareability but it’s interesting that brands are tending to produce more longer-form content and clearly feel more comfortable going beyond the traditional 30 seconds of a traditional ad spot’.

‘Exhilaration will be the theme of 2014’. Brazil will be very important – the greatest video sharers in the world, and home of the 2014 World Cup. Currently interaction and shares around ‘Brazil’ are two and four times the global average.

Vine is becoming very popular for agile marketers. Bruce Daisley from Twitter mentioned FCUK as advanced Vine creators –

Big data and small tech 

Oh, and lots of mentions of BIG data and wearable technology. The consensus is that iWatch and Google Glass represent the beginnings of a new movement that Toby Barnes, AKQA, cheekily termed ‘Haute Techcouture’.

Toby urged the fashion industry to get involved so we can make some stuff worth wearing.

The real world

In one of the coolest talks about joining real world and the cloud, Kate Stone, Novalia, used Bluetooth and magnetic inks to make paper drum kits and record decks. Newspapers and gig posters (….and anything) can have content added to them that plays from your phone.

The coolest example by far was the ‘energy pet‘. Posters placed in a building can be connected with the building’s energy monitoring.

When a school, for example, saves energy by turning lights off, taking the stairs, etc, the poster of a tree comes into fruit and looks good. If you don’t save energy, it goes wilty.

THE FUTURE!