Tag: research

  • How to Assess the Impact of Stopping Search Advertising: a Google Study

    It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to root out the motivation behind Google’s latest research finding that advertisers who stop buying paid ads on Google’s search engine lose lots of search engine clicks. So, in this post I’ll take a look at the research to help you navigate your way through the data. First up, Google’s…

  • CIM Report Shows Many Marketers are Ill-equipped for the Social Web

    The UK’s Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) recently teamed up with Ipsos ASI and Bloomberg to carry out new research to assess how businesses are adapting to our social media fuelled world. The results appear largely consistent with previous studies, although do provide a valuable benchmark for comparison with other data sources. And while many…

  • The Future of Sharing: Social Media Week Panel Debate

    I joined a panel debate on the topic of “The Future of Sharing” as part of Social Media Week on Thursday. You can see the on-demand video at the SMW Livestream site to find out what my fellow panellists Ash Choudhury of Nokia, Trevor Johnson of Facebook, Mark Jones of Reuters and host Gordon MacMillan…

  • The Future of Customer Service and the Rise of the Social Customer

    First Direct is that rarest of breeds: a well-loved British bank. And their customer service, at least in my experience, is second to none. So it makes perfect sense for them to have co-authored a report, released today in partnership with It’s Open, that discusses how customer service departments need to evolve to keep pace…

  • Why women are easy and size matters for men

    In the categories labelled “Gross Generalisations” and “Blindingly Obvious” I present to you, dear reader, proof of what you may have suspected all along: men and women are very different, and women crack sooner under the advertiser’s spell. A study by comScore of 292 television ad copy tests shows that women are more likely to…

  • “Things we’ve learnt about Communication” NEW Microsoft Research report

    An insight-packed report from the Socio-Digital Systems group of Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK landed on my desk today. In reading it, I rediscovered why communicating means so much more than simply transferring information from one entity to another. I was reminded that sometimes communicating over a distance is preferable to talking face-to-face, and I…

  • Advice for Marketers: How not to be unliked

    Many online marketers spend their days obsessing about attracting new fans and followers, but new research from ExactTarget and CoTweet suggest that they might be wise to spend more time thinking about how to stop people ‘unliking’ their brands. The top reasons people cite for unsubscribing from emails is that they come too frequently, are…

  • Google Instant: How paid search has changed

    The jury’s still out on the long term usefulness and practical implications of Google Instant, the new feature rolled out in early September that shows search results as you type. Many have described the feature as an unwanted distraction, while others have heralded its launch as the death of SEO. New data from Marin Software…

  • State of our Social Media World: superb ‘Wave 5’ study by UM

    I’ve long been a fan of Universal McCann’s ‘Wave’ studies which analyse how we’re using the web in our daily lives. Now in it’s fifth instalment, Wave is the largest and longest-running dedicated social media study in the world, and it’s a goldmine of fascinating facts that helps us understand how our use of social…