Dinner report: SEM to Social Sharing
- Added:
- Mar 27, 2008
How can search marketing adapt to the increasing popularity of social media? This month’s directors dinner looked at the growth of ‘social sharing’, co-hosted by Weboptimiser and Grouptivity. Davina Lines, MD at Netimperative, reports.
Sponsored by search marketing agency
The Wednesday March 19th Directors Dinner was hosted by Netimperative managing director Davina Lines and our two guest speakers, David White, Managing Director of search marketing agency Weboptimiser and Ankesh Kumar, CEO of social content provider Grouptivity.
David White kicked off and is a self-professed 'geek', who moved from being a photocopy salesman for Xerox into database technology, which then led onto opt-in permission-based marketing. Weboptimiser, a search marketing agency, was the fruit of his labour and has been established for 12 years now.
Search has fundamentally changed our lives and now consumers are sold to less and choose more which as David stated is much more pleasurable. Sue Terpilowski of Image Line asked at this point whether Google's monopoly is a problem for the sector and David’s thoughts were yes to a point as their services are so numerous a user could get lost amongst them. He also felt that there should be more video tied in with search results as the web is such a visual medium why not maximise its potential, but perhaps this is to come.
Omaid Hiwazi another dinner guest then asked whether opt-in is just the opposite of opt-out and David replied that opt-in is far more interesting than just data protection. Apparently there is some new EU legislation to come which will shorten the life of a cookie by 50% and there is a self-policing website backed by the IAB called www.allaboutcookies.org
Gigi Dryer commented that mobile search works well, but that the universe of users is just too small at present. However, once a user is engaged with a brand on their mobile, customer acquisition can last a lifetime, she added.
Ankesh of Grouptivity then took over the reins, and told us how he went to the US in 1994 from his UK home to run an IT staffing company which got sold to Monster. During his leisure time off, he came up with the idea for Grouptivity which is an email to a friend service with some social sharing technology alongside it.
He believes TIVO (Sky Plus for us) saved his marriage and is a good example of the immediacy of content and now users expect to get the content they require when and how they want it.
His view is that although there are huge amounts of content available nowadays people just ignore that that they don’t want and therefore content recommended by a friend or network is preferable.
Email to a friend should have a page ranking associated with it and content should be bitesized and where they want it – rank it, rate it, tag it and deliver it. There is an explosion of content distribution and sites such as Facebook so Grouptivity replaces the standard email to friend with a networking account where you can have threaded discussions and ask questions. This differs from bookmarking sites such as Digg and del.icio.us and they don’t allow you to save a copy of the article as frozen in time at that point.
Carla Cotterell, Key Accounts Director, EMEA, asked how they make revenue and apparently it’s based on page views and the ads sold against them is where Grouptivity take their slice of the action.
Graham Jarvis asked if LinkedIn might steal a march on them, but Ankesh didn’t see them as directly competitive so they would both survive in different spaces.
Owen Valentine Pringle of Amnesty asked about privacy and Ankesh remarked that it wasn’t an issue as the publisher owned the content and that the users were communicating which each other on a one-to-one basis.
The guests attending this dinner were:
Davina Lines, Netimperative
Charlie Lines, Netimperative
David White,Weboptimiser
Conrad Swailes, Weboptimiser
John Guria, Weboptimiser
Ankesh Kumar, Grouptivity
Sue Terpilowski, Image line
Owen Valentine Pringle, Amnesty International
Brian Fitzpatrick, Glubble
Graham Jarvis, Media-Insert Communications
Justin Cooke, Fortune Cookie
Carla Cotterell, Advertising.com
Craig Hill, Digital Outlook
Gigi Dryer, Consultant
Thank you to our sponsor Weboptimiser and if you would like to attend future directors dinner please email events@netimperative asking to be added to the invitation list.
