Watch Bebo watch Bebo

Heather Hopkins alerts us to Bebo which is catching up to eBay as the most searched for brand in the UK.

Since May, the term "bebo" has ranked #2 in the share of UK internet searches after "ebay", and Bebo's rapid rise is narrowing the gap. The market share of UK internet searches for "bebo" has increased more than three fold in the past six months and 17.6% in the past three months.


So everyone must head over there to see why this is such an interesting communication channel and Social Network.

An interview in the Sunday Times last Sunday said that Bebo head Michael Birch seemed prepared to wait before earning much money from the service:

Birch, 36, is almost dismissive of the need for Bebo to generate revenues at this stage. For the next two or three years, his priority is to establish the firm as one of the global leaders in social networking. The big challenge is in America, where Bebo is currently a distant third behind MySpace and Facebook, a college-based site.

“At the moment there’s a race for traffic,” says Birch. “Implementing a successful business model does not necessarily help in that goal. There are so many avenues that social networking can go down.”

So Friday’s revelation that Bebo is planning a mobile service isn’t about revenue? Pete Cashmore notes:

…it seems that Bebo Mobile is a step closer - mobile phone group O2 is in talks with the company, although discussions are still at the early stages. There were rumors earlier this week that Bebo plans to extend the site via SMS, rather than the WAP-based services that other social networks are pursuing.

The Ad industry and ethics

Julie Rusciolelli is opening up a debate that offers a problem for 'Marketing PR'. Essentially, she is asking, to what extent can Public Relations endorse, nay even support, advertising when advertising stretches the truth.

'Creative' may mean unethical.

Lets mashup the social space

MySpace is booming in popularity; Facebook is gracing the headlines again; Bebo is growing incredibly; Tribe relaunched; Cyworld, Hive7 and SecondLife are nothing short of a phenomenon; LinkedIn is becoming 'People Search'; ITToolbox relaunched with a host of social networking features; Friendster is now refueling itself to enter the market again.

This is a snippet from a post on Read/Write Web is a very comprehensive run down of waht is available for Social Interactions at present.

The call for a Social Space mashup is a cool idea too.

City AM offers mobile news

Free financial newspaper City AM is today launching an evening news update service for mobile phones.

Called City M, the service will send breaking news updates to mobiles each day at 6pm. It will also contain banner and pop-up adverts personalised for the user.

So:

1.... when pitching a story to City AM will it be available mobile and

2.... are you monitoring what is available on mobiles about your organisations

This New Media stuff is such fun....

Hezza -un reformed

The Tory party may like to think it is going to use social media to engage the British electorate.

I suggest they avoid ex-Tory minister, and leader hopeful Michael Heseltine's publishing houseHaymarket. Not only does it try to run Social Media conferences that pretend some speaker is going to show how a PR person will 'control' the bloggers, it can't even get a blog to work on its site.

The whole Hezza empire is surrounded with subscriptions, passwords and restrictions that, even if I get a copy of PRWeek because of my membership of the CIPR, there is no way I can use it here except in passing.

Fake metrics in evaluation by fakers in PR

I note from the Institute for Public Relations site that they have bitten the bullet on multipliers.

There are some limited and highly specialist areas of our work where long experience shows there is a statistical correlation between and out-take and outcome. It is rare. I have no evidence to support this but have friends who say they have.

This week's Conversations column introduces a new paper (free on the Institute website) by Mark Weiner, president of Delahaye, and Don Bartholomew, senior vice president of MWW Group. In "Dispelling the Myth of PR Multipliers and Other Inflationary Audience Measures," the authors describe the ways in which multipliers are used by public relations professionals to report total impressions and value.

Multipliers are fake figures. Having evaluated millions of press clips - yes MILLIONS, I have no evidence to show there is a consistent multiplier.

The agencies who apply fiddle factor are conning their clients....

yahoo paid for search on mobiles

Yahoo! has started a beta trial of paid-for search results on its mobile internet service in the UK and US.

The launch, starting with a group of just under 100 advertisers, forms part of the portal’s plan to extend pay per click services to mobiles.

Both it and Google, which has not yet provided advertising on its mobile search service, are in a race to attract mobile users through partnerships with operators.

There is a load of confusion out there

Nielsen//NetRatings has released a survey that shows the latest internet trends and technologies are still a mystery to many UK consumers. Another gem from e-consultancy.

The report shows 52% of British web users believe online and digital technologies make their life easier, but a similar percentage say they find them difficult to follow.

The least-heard-of terms include VOD (75%), Wikis (70%), and IPTV and Really Simple Syndication (both 69%), while 67% aren’t aware of Web 2.0. One in seven also know of the iPod but don’t know what one is.

Financial PR has to solve this problem

For financial PR there is a real problem with material information notes Andy Lark.

In a blog entry on Monday, Schwartz ponders why public companies like his must issue paper-based press releases or stage "anachronistic" telephonic conference calls every time they want to reveal information considered material to their financial performance.

There has to be a better way and the XBRL evolution with XPRL has to resolve this issue.

Games - a communications Channel

Sony's PlayStation is to challenge Microsoft's Xbox in its one undisputed area of dominance - the online world.

The PlayStation 3 will be "network ready" out of the box when it launches in November and will offer a range of services similar to Xbox Live.

Darren Waters covers the story for the BBC.

For years I have been telling the tale of how games on-line are a channel for communication and on-line they are really powerful.

IBM - the blog case study

We encouraged employees to externally. They did, and we got tons of press without ever issuing a press release or calling a reporter - IBM

It is one of the great case studies.

UK Online advertsing up 40%

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has predicted that UK online ad spend will overtake national newspaper advertising by the end of 2006, after reporting that the web’s share of the ad market reached double figures in H1.

The study, conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers on behalf of the IAB, showed firms spent £917.2m on online advertising in Britain between January and June, a 40.3% rise over the same period last year.

The IAB said the web continued to be the ad industry’s fastest growing sector during the six months, having increased its market share to 10.5% from 7.3% a year before.

Evaluation problems

Eric T. Peterson is a veteran of web analytics and author of Web Analytics Demystified, Web Site Measurement Hacks and The Big Book of Key Performance Indicators.

He spoke to us about how Web 2.0 features and concepts are shaking up the measurement space, the need for standards and the implications for site owners and advertisers.

In a nutshell, what are the challenges associated with measuring Web 2.0 traffic? asks e-consultancy.

Blogs are being measured with, Visual Sciences , MeasureMap , Blogbeat etc, and RSS with Feedburner . Top-tier vendors like WebSideStory are announcing new measurement options.

On-line shopping keeps growing

Tesco has posted a 28.7% rise in sales at its online division, with revenues coming in at £554m in the first half of this year.

The supermarket giant, which dominates the UK’s online grocery sector, said profit at Tesco.com increased 43.1% to £33.8m, excluding the launch costs of its non-food operation Tesco Direct.

The John Lewis Partnership has launched a direct services company called Greenbee , which will market a range of financial, travel and leisure products online and by phone.

Source e-consultancy

Google plays with images

Google is playing around with a new Ajax interface and novel search ideas at SearchMash. B2Day says: It gives you image results on the right, and you can drag results around if you think, say, the fourth result should be the top result instead. Click on the green URL and it gives you options such as "open in this window," "open in new window," and "more similiar pages." Click on "more web pages" and it scrolls the page down. Pretty nifty.

Putting the media channels together

News Corp has continued its internet shopping spree with the purchase of UK graduate recruitment site Milkround.com.

The deal – reported to be worth around £20m – will see the site being integrated with the media giant's UK business News International. The full report is at e-consultancy.

The group, which saw off competition from Trinity Mirror and DMGT in an auction, hopes to use Milkround to strengthen The Times' employment supplements.

Mashing up print and online goes well beyond news online first. But Milkround is important for PR recruitment so interesting on two fronts.

Gadgets get green

A short-range, wireless technology that is more energy-efficient than Bluetooth has been unveiled by Nokia says the BBC.

Ben Wood at UK-based Collins Consulting told Reuters news agency "Bluetooth is clearly not suited to some of the cooler applications like intelligent jewelry, watches - a less power hungry, smaller, cheaper solution will open some interesting new opportunities."

This thinking opens up ideas for even more platforms for communications channels to work through.

Happily for those of us who try to keep up, its a few years (OK weeks) away.

Making notes fflexibly

Stepan Pachikov has a great one liner:

One person cannot ruin a good company. It takes a strong management team to do that.

He also has cool software and a new startup called EverNote. Like Google Notebook, EverNote offers a software download that lets you highlight and clip information as you surf the Web and stores your clippings for you online. But, says B2Day, EverNote goes much further than Google Notebook because you can also clip text from any Word document, Excel spreadsheet, PowerPoint slide, Outlook e-mail, or digital-ink scrawl. It stores all of these clippings on the Web in an endless, chronological tape that is highly searchable.

Sony sidles up to BT

Sony BMG has struck a deal with BT to offer on-demand access to music videos through the telco’s upcoming IPTV service, BT Vision.

Although it is yet to announce pricing, the move will give BT exclusive early access to newly released videos through the BT Vision Download Store, launched in July.

Its nuts!

This is going to be fringe stuff. It will make some money but will be diddly squat compared to the rest of the online video exchange.

Old thinking.

PRN buys USNewswire

Press release distribution business PR Newswire has bought US Newswire from Medialink Worldwide for £10 million.

The purchase of US Newswire will give PR Newswire, which is owned by United Business Media, a significant foothold on the government and public interest sectors and improve its distribution channels in the US says Journalism.co.uk.