It appears that the new feature is only live in the US as we cannot, despite trying a wide range of searches, see the new results formats but the fundamental change is that more results are going to be show for the same domain for some searches.

The example that is used on the webmaster central blog illustrates how it will work and is worth looking at to understand the principle.

The reason that we are not convinced by the change is simple, you can already quickly see more results from any specific domain by using the ’show more results from’ feature as highlighted below: 

By having seven or more natural listings from the same domain on the first page of Google’s SERPs, we believe that it is likely to cause user frustration and it does not really help in any way that we can see.

It is also likely to cause some real pain for sites that are currently ranking in the top five natural listings who may suddenly vanish off the first page entirely.

Of course, there will be winners as well as loosers and the impetus will be to ensure that yours is the site that is chosen to dominate the natural listings but we just don’t believe that it is good for one site to dominate in such a manner.

It is not clear whether this is a permanent feature or whether it will migrate across the pond to our shores, but we would be very happy to see it moved into the ‘nice try but ultimately a fail’ box.

If you have proven expertise in SEO, we would love to hear from you and hope that the new post for the SEO manager role will be of interest? If you have a couple of years SEO experience, this could be a great role at an exciting time for the agency.

We are also looking for a seasoned wordpress guru to help us redevelop our website and would like to hear from anyone with a decent level of wordpress experience who lives within striking distance of our Braxted Park office (see office locations).

Thanks for reading and we hope to hear from interested candidates soon!

Why such an obsession for what can be a fairly tedious process?

The process can be tedious, but what the data shows / tells you is far from tedious and it is an absolutely vital foundation for any future search engine marketing work. Most searches start with words, so the words that people use to look for things are incredibly important and you would be foolish not to invest time in building up an accurate understanding of how your target audience is looking for your products or services.

Keyword research is a market research tool that has no equal - it is not a small scale focus group but an opportunity to ‘ask’ the internet population at large how they use search key words.

With an accurate understanding of the language used by your (potential) customers, you can be confident that you will optimise your website for the most appropriate language. Not only will this help secure those elusive rankings, but it will mean that your site uses the same language as your audience, which will help your users engage with your site and hopefully increase conversion rates.

We are therefore pleased to see that the beta trials of Google’s new keyword tool are officially coming to an end and it will be rolled out over the coming weeks.

Google’s keyword tool has become our weapon of choice for most projects as it makes it easy to explore individual territories and has the obvious advantage of being based on the world’s biggest search engine. It isn’t perfect, as all data sources are typically ‘poluted’ by automated tools such as bid management / rank checking software and a lot of the figures you see are wildly inflated, but it is now our ‘go to’ tool and we welcome enhancements with open arms.

Quite a few of the changes are primarily cosmetic, but there are some noticeable improvements that are worth looking at. For the PPC marketers amongst us, the ability to easily add negatives based on keyword research is an interesting one:

screenshot courtesy of Google

Very slick and it should help encourage more people to actually use negatives to full effect.

Google promises that the work has not stopped and we can look forward to more enhancements in the future, but good to see that they are directing energy and resource at such a vital aspect of search engine marketing.

We should point out that the title of this post does not refer in any way to a nasty posterior protruding from the big G, but a reference to the queen’s legendary speech of 1992 where she commented on how things hadn’t really gone well thanks to two royal marriage break ups, one divorce and the Windsor Castle fire.

Why this post now?

It is actually a response to the announcement  that development is not going to continue on Google Wave, a real-time collaboration tool that combined email, instant messaging, social networking and wikis.

In many ways, we are not that surprised to see its early death as it is arguably way ahead of its time, or (more likely) it was a solution for a problem that just doesn’t really exist. Despite some initial fanfare, it just wasn’t welcomed with open arms and it was quite a confusing product to use and as Senior VP of Operations Urs Hölzle stated, "Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked".

Another not inconsiderable failure has to be Google’s launch of the Nexus One phone. We have had a couple of the phones here in the office and they are great (unlike the actual buying process), so it isn’t a hardware issue and the Android platform is growing very well, but the fact that Google has given up on it so quickly (they are still selling the phone but only to developers) after such anticipation and talk of a game changing approach to mobile telephony just shows that Google is not always blessed with the success that it has enjoyed with its search engine.

We wouldn’t want Google to stop developing new applications or looking at new ventures as there are some superb things coming out of the Googleplex but is it possible that this is the year when some cracks are finally beginning to show?

We don’t really believe that the Bing / Yahoo! marriage is going to have much effect and that Google is safe when it comes to search but they should be careful not to tarnish their overall brand reputation by dabbling, and failing, at highly publicised ventures.

Probably not an annus horriblis but we suspect that some Google employees may have taken a bit of a butt kicking over the failures?

It seems that, as the SEO discipline matures, more people are recognising and commenting on the parallels between ‘old school’ PR and ‘new media’ SEO.

Head over to the Econsultancy blog for a recent example and a good read (as always).

SEO is a strange discipline and demands (if you want to be any good at it) an odd blend of technical knowledge (to look under the bonnet and really get to the bottom of on-site optimisation) and marketing fluff (to work on appreciation of your audience, messaging, campaign themes, etc).

Most marketers have no desire to get involved with the nitty gritty of html code and most techies are really only interested in techno-geek and are not good at thinking about the bigger picture, so it is a fairly rare to find people that are really good at both (a bit like a really good developer who can also speak in plain English and describe the technology in layman terms - worth their weight in gold!).

When considering link building, which is an absolutely vital skill for any SEO professional, you really don’t need too much technical knowledge but do need the ability to adopt a PR mentality and identify what a client site has to offer any site that you are approaching for a link.

Just as a good press release will attract the attention of a large number of journalists through concise / clear messaging and a genuinely interesting ‘hook’, link building is at its best when you have something worth shouting about.

It can, however, take a PR brain to identify what you should be shouting about. Some of the work that we are most proud of has involved taking what appears to be fairly dull / uninspiring and creating an interesting angle that becomes interesting (e.g. slicing and dicing data to create a controversial statement that acts as very effective link bait).

The mechanics of doing the shouting is reasonably process driven, but success is driven primarily by the quality of the idea (washed down with a dash of luck!). It is therefore surprising to see so many PR agencies struggling with SEO and Kelvin is right (over on the Econsultancy blog) that SEO agencies have managed to ‘land grab’ work that you would have expected to go to ad / media agencies and PR agencies through an audacious ability to blend both aspects of the skill required.

We have maintained for some time that PR agencies are going to have to change their ways to survive - it would be arrogant to assume that their techniques / channels do not need to change with the times - but we still haven’t seen much evidence of this actually happening. It isn’t too late, but time is running out…

The study, commissioned by Thomson Local, was carried out by Analytics SEO and looked at 1,001 SME websites to review them against a range of SEO criteria.

In many ways, we are not surprised by the general findings but there are some interesting specific points:

• A correlation between organisation size and level of search engine optimisation (notably, 70% of companies with less than 50 employees having minimal or no evidence of search optimisation) : perhaps unsurprising, but we have seen a growing amount of small / new businesses that do totally ‘get’ online and know how important search can be. Equally, there are still many old-school businesses (thinking specifically about legal firms) who continue to amaze us for their reticence to embrace digital, so it is likely that the size factor may be less important over the coming years in our humble opinion.
• 12% of business websites are not indexed at all : this is obviously crippling to the value of having a website at all - if a search engine doesn’t know your site is there, it will never send any traffic to it.
• 82% of SME websites do not have an html sitemap and 75% do not have an XML sitemap : Both these figures are alarmingly high, as it is very easy to create a sitemap, but it is surprising to see that there are more sites with XML sitemaps than html sitemaps.

It is an interesting study and one that would be good to see each year, to see how SMEs use of the online channel evolves.

To those involved at the coalface of online marketing, it seems incredible to think that many businesses are still not taking online very seriously, but it is easy to forget that setting up a business is demanding and business owners are pulled in a lot of different directions.

Whilst battling with the innevitable business issues / hurdles that are thrown at you, it can be easy to put the website on a low priority list and any thoughts of SEO will probably be put on the ‘only do if the world has stopped spinning’ list, so it is not really very surprising to see the results of the study.

We should also remember that search marketing is still a relatively new phenomenon and businesses have survived and prospered without it before. It would be foolish to suggest that you should ignore it, but it would be equally foolish to write off a business simply because it doesn’t have an html sitemap.

We work with companies both large and small and always enjoy the challenge of SEO for SMEs, so please feel free to contact us today if you feel that you belong to the 47% of SMEs that are currently not engaging with SEO.

Most users will be unaware of where the data is actually coming from as the page layout is not changing but it will be interesting to see if the quality of result is improved - remember that bing is a ‘decision engine’ rather than a search engine. 

Subject to a successful trial period, Yahoo! believes that U.S. and Canadian organic and paid search will be fully powered by Microsoft’s platform by  August / September, which is not very far away at all. 

What does this mean for search marketers?

In many ways, not very much as bing’s own guidelines for search engine optimisation echo the advice offered by Google. The days of optimising for specific search engines are long, long gone and good, honest / ethical SEO should deliver results across all the major search platforms. 

That said, results do vary (see comparison of search results for ‘uk seo agency’ query - similar, but not identical results) and we may need to take more notice of how sites are ranking in bing as its market share grows.

In reality, however, even the combined forces of Yahoo! and bing fall staggeringly short of the market dominance enjoyed by Google and, whilst we welcome the potential of a rival for Google, we are not holding our breath…

As a general rule, we stay clear of broad match in our PPC campaigns, but it would appear that the new option is proving to be a success and ‘one major UK retailer’ is reporting it to be a big hit.

Anyone who has any experience of managing adwords accounts will be familiar with the different matching options (broad, phrase and exact) and be aware of the various strengths and weaknesses of each strategy - the broad match modifier does address the issue of broad often being far too broad, but it is still unlikely to be as successful as carefully managed phrase / exact match keywords with a healthy splattering of negative keywords.

Where we do believe that this will help is to overcome the dreaded ’search volume too low’ issue (an old soap box moment of ours…). Where Google believes that there are very low search volumes, it can often be next to impossible to actually target specific keywords with phrase or exact match options and you are forced into using broad match.

We always welcome new innovation from Google and it is good to see that this one has been embraced, although we do not believe it is ground breaking.

This message is echoed in a recent video by Matt Cutts (should need no introduction - follow him @mattcutts) where he answers a question that will ring bells with many business owners:

How can a website compete for high rankings using only white hat techniques in industries that are dominated by spammers if Google takes months to react to spam reports and by that time new black hat sites are ranking?

This is indeed a very good question and one that we find ourselves facing on a very regular basis. SEO is very competitive, but ridiculously competitive in particular industries (think finance, travel, gambling, etc.) and websites will do anything to grab those valuable top slots in Google’s SERPs (search engine results pages).

We have always (and will always) maintained an ethical approach to search engine marketing and believe strongly in the long term objectives of establishing visibility across the major search engines but it can be very  frustrating to see spammy sites outranking our client sites when it is clear that black hat techniques are contributing to the ranking success.

We were therefore interested to see what the official party line is from Google, as per Matt’s video:

No real surprises to be honest and no real answers to headaches that you can feel in the SEO game but anyone who has real experience of SEO knows that there are no magic formulas / secrets that will propel you to the top of Google.

The biggest challenge is knowing what to do when almost all the top ranking sites are engaging in ‘illegal’ activity (primarily buying links) as it can appear to be impossible to muscle in on those elusive top slots without playing on a level playing field.

Whilst filing spam reports may help, there can be no guarantee that Google will do much about it (Matt encourages you to contact him via twitter - we can only imagine how many of those he must get…) nor is there any guarantee about how long it may take - this can hurt when time not ranking is most definitely money lost.

What is clear to us, however, is that the long term winners of the SEO competition will be the sites that can build authority - expect this to be the buzz word for the forseeable future in the world of SEO.

How do you build authority? Create an industry leading site and engage with contextually relevant sites. Back to the old addage of ‘content is king’…

Matt encourages webmasters to do exactly this and asks us to have faith in Google’s ability to improve spam filters over time. A big ask, but one that we have to accept. In the short term, you have to look at your site and ask yourself if you are confident that it (in Matt’s words) ‘stands the test of time‘.

If you have managed PPC campaigns on Google’s adwords platform before, you should be familiar with the concept of exact, phrase and broad match.

As a general priniciple, we tend to avoid using broad match as it can lead to some VERY broad ‘matches’ and you can find your click through rate (CTR) plummeting or a lot of highly untargeted traffic coming through (at a cost) to your site.

There are times, however, when very low search volumes introduce particular problems and you are forced into using broad match when you wouldn’t normally want to.

On the surface of things, the ‘broad match modifier’ appears to be good news and it is introduced to the UK and Canada today.

We will need more time to fully assess whether it is really good news, but the modifier should allow more reach / visibility than a phrase match but avoid going too broad as it will include close variants in the searches for which your ads will show.

A ‘close variant’ includes misspellings, singular / plural forms, abbreviations, acronyms and stemmings but does not include synonyms or related searches.

The following image does a good job of showing how this should work in practice:

(picture courtesy of Google - full size available here)

The proof is always in the pudding and it will be interesting to see if this can help overcome some specific issues that we experience with adwords (e.g. our ongoing battle with low search volume phrases) but it looks promising and it is a welcome piece of news.

We would expect to see the Canada / UK beta phase roll out across the globe in due course.

2010 has been very busy and we are now looking for more members of our growing team.

We believe that we are small but perfectly formed - this is your chance to join a growing business and work on a wide variey of projects - full details can be found at http://www.browsermedia.co.uk/jobs/pr-seo-executive/.

This is a great opportunity for a new graduate or someone with basic internet marketing experience to work for a growing online marketing agency with good promotional prospects for the right individuals.

We have immediate vacancies but would also like to speak to anyone who is graduating this summer and would like to secure a graduate seo job for later on this year.

Please note that all roles will be based permanently at our offices at Braxted Park.

In our humble opinion, it has been slightly over stated and we would suggest that the TV debates (’old school media’) were far more influential overall, although the surprising failure of the Liberal Democrat party does call this into question.

There were some interesting attempts to use the online channel to help the campaigns, such as the Conservative domination of Youtube yesterday, but it doesn’t feel as though it has had the effect that was seen in the US in Barrack Obama’s ascendancy.

We tweeted a couple of times during the electoral campaign about how using Google’s insights for search suggested some interesting possible outcomes, but the top entry in our ‘Top 10 contributions Google made to the UK election’ list was the logo used throughout the day yesterday:

We always like watching what Google is doing with the logo but this is a good one (albeit not new - it has been seen before), so thank you very much Google!

Unlike the incredible majority that Google enjoys, it looks as though the UK has no clear leader and only time will tell what sort of government we will end up with…

Whilst we still believe that this is often the case, it is Friday and we are going to eat a massive slice of humble pie and launch our very own test on Twitter to see if it can help us to spread the word about our search engine marketing survey.

We are proud of the survey and genuinely believe that it will provide some interesting insight into how organisations are engaging with search (both paid and organic) but we need a decent number of responses to make it a valuable exercise.

In our perpetual effort to be honest and transparent in everything that we do, we admit that we are struggling to attract the level of interest in the survey that we were hoping to achieve.

We have some great responses from known brands such as Xerox, Visa, Lands End and Thorntons as well as many less known (but equally valued) brands but would like to attract more responses.

Can Twitter come to the rescue and demonstrate how effective it can be for ‘Davids’ as well as ‘Goliaths’ (we know we are not in Stephen Fry’s league)?

To test the theory and to help promote the survey, we are therefore launching a Twitter based competition.

The prize is £250 (or equivalent in the currency required) in Amazon vouchers. Whilst there is no cash equivalent, you can spend the vouchers on whatever you like.

All you need to do to enter the competition is:

• follow us at browser_media 
• retweet our ‘SOS - Twitter, please help us!’ tweet

It really is that easy. It could mean £250 for a few seconds of effort to help promote our survey.

The competition will run throughout May 2010 and the winner will be chosen at random on Friday 28th May. You must have retweeted our tweet and still be following us.

We will contact the winner via twitter but can send the vouchers to any email address that you choose.

This competition is running in addition to the survey prize itself, which is two Celebration Package Balloon Flights with Virgin Balloon Flights (worth £598) - a fantastic prize and a great incentive to help us paint a picture of search engine marketing in 2010 and beyond.

Please remember that the ultimate objective is to encourage more users to complete our search marketing survey - please feel free to shout as loud as you can about it.

We really do appreciate your help!

We are not letting the cat out of the bag on this as it has been covered elsewhere (e.g. the excellent Econsultancy blog), but we received an email from the Express Group yesterday alerting us to the opportunity to buy links at £1,000 a pop by providing advertorials in which you can embed links.

Anyone with a working knowledge of SEO will know that link buying is a controversial topic and one about which Google makes its view fairly clear:

"However, some SEOs and webmasters engage in the practice of buying and selling links that pass PageRank, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results."

We were therefore fairly surprised to see such a blatant approach (a bit of investigation suggests that the email was actually from the Express Group’s ad agency sales team - time to get your coat?) and it isn’t a great shock that they have been outed in the public domain.

What is more of a surprise to us is just how many organisations are already doing this. A particular search on Google will show you the extent to which this has been happening, although a lot of the articles have now been taken down (use Google’s cached version if you want to see it….). As you can see, there are some big brands in there including the likes of John Lewis** and Sainsburys.

We have always been against buying links (see ethical search marketing guarantee) but there can be no doubt that it does occur and it is understandable why some organisations choose to do it for especially competitive sectors.

What will be interesting to see is how Google responds. There are signs that some of the Express sites may have already been penalised to some extent (e.g. the OK website’s page rank is currently at 2 whereas it was 6 not so long ago…) but what is Google likely to do to those companies that have been paying for the links?

Will we see a ‘negative impact on site rankings’ as Google suggests in their guidelines?

Our guess is probably not, but it will be interesting to see if there is any ripple effect now that it has become so public.

Perhaps more interesting is the fact that the Express Group has gone down this route. Yes, we all know that publishers are feeling the pinch and are desperate to generate revenue wherever possible but the publication of advertorials will surely lower the quality of the content and the long term consequence appears to have been forgotten in favour of short term gain.

No doubt it will all be forgotten in the very near future, but definitely an interesting end to the week and a reminder to one and all that not very much can happen in secrecy in this modern era of the internet….

**We have noted a mini surge in traffic to our John Lewis case study page today (we rank very well for a lot of John Lewis SEO related phrases….) and would like to point out that we worked with the business in 2007 and are NOT behind their apparent purchasing of links.

As a general rule, we congratulate Google on its mission to promote online resources that are genuinely interesting to those searching for them.

Most of the official guidelines encourage best practice when designing and building a site and the speed at which any page downloads does indeed have an impact on the overall user satisfaction.

If you have talked to us about SEO in the past, you will no doubt have heard us discuss the benefits of lean html code - whilst it is only one of a myriad of factors that you should consider, there are definitely advantages to having a site that downloads quickly and it shouldn’t really be that difficult to achieve (simply using CSS and stripping out all unnecessary inline code can make quite a difference to overall page size).

There are concerns amongst the online community that this could cause real problems for sites that are inherently ‘heavy’ such as photographic sites but we would be confident that Google will compare like for like, so this shouldn’t be too big an issue.

There are also question marks around how exactly Google will measure the page size / speed and how often this would be done (e.g. you may be unlucky if a spider encounters one slow download of a page due to network issues), although we would strongly suspect that information collected via the Google toolbar will be instrumental to this as it will ensure that the data is based on actual users rather than isolated pings from Google servers.

One area where we do think it will have an impact is for sites that are heavy on advertising, which can often be slow to load and could have a detrimental effect on search engine rankings over time. Ironically, this is especially true for Google Adsense code and also true for Google Analytics code which can sometimes prove to be fairly slow to load - perhaps Google will shoot themselves in the foot?

As with most announcements like this, we are not expecting to see massive changes in rankings in the short term but it will be interesting to see longer term trends. We do, however, support Google in any attempt that is made to improve overall user satisfaction and welcome the official introduction of page speed analysis.

A new post entitled "Three ways to control your AdWords costs" caught our interest and offers the following video explaining how to ‘control’ your advertising costs:

Whilst all three approaches that are discussed are indeed methods to control your costs, we find it fairly amusing that the first two techniques are actually going to increase costs rather than reduce them - an interesting take on the concept of ‘cost control’. Great for Google, perhaps less so for the advertiser…

Google encourages us to ‘increase daily budget for maximum exposure’ and ‘raise your CPC bids for your best performing keywords’, both sound strategies in many situations, but interesting to be included in a cost control video?

Perhaps more alarming is the reliance that it places on the traffic estimator tool, which the video suggests should be used for both daily budgets and CPC bids.

Anyone who has any experience of the tool will know that it is useful but plagued with the same innacuracy that afflicts all keyword tools. There are a number of factors that can inflate the keyword volumes (notably bid management / rank checking software) and we would never recommend that you place too much faith in the data that it shows.

The best aspect of the video, without doubt, is the last section on the quality score. This is where you can really make a difference when managing AdWords campaigns - the structure of the account and the quality of the ad groups will ultimately make a lot more difference than the amount you bid for any keyword and is the real ’secret’ to managing AdWords campaigns successfully.

You can’t blame Google for producing the video but it is important to consider their motivation (increasing revenue) and the motivation of the advertiser (maximising ROI, which includes minimising spend). Whilst Google will want you to ‘control’ costs upwards, most advertisers will want a more traditional form of cost control.

However, unlike Google and Bing, Yahoo! will not only be incorporating real-time Twitter feeds into its search engine results pages, but also allowing Twitter users to tweet from a number of its platforms, such as Yahoo! Mail, News, Finance and Sports as well as the search engine itself.

The search integration actually went live earlier this week, but it is not currently known how or when the further integration throughout the rest of Yahoo!’s collection of products is likely to occur, although it has been speculated that it won’t be until later this year.

At the end of 2009 Yahoo! also integrated its services with Facebook and has been trying to increase its profile in the social world ever since and are hoping that this latest deal with Twitter will do just that. Bryan Lamkin, senior vice president of the company’s consumer products group said: "We’re turning the key to the online social universe - you will find the most personally relevant experiences through Yahoo!". He went on to say "We’re also simplifying people’s lives by bringing their social worlds - and the world - together for easy access."

Twitter is also said to be very excited and enthusiastic about the collaboration, and rightly so, as it will be the one seeing the greatest advantages, as it will not only be increasing its audience to the millions of Yahoo! users worldwide, but Yahoo! are also paying Twitter for the privilege.

Twitter’s co-founder Biz Stone has said: "The information in one single tweet can travel light-years farther with this Yahoo! integration. Tweets in more places brings relevance where and when you need it most."

So it looks like things are looking up for Yahoo! with the announcement of this partnership and also that the its search deal with Microsoft has also been approved by regulators.

Returning to the spiritual home of St. Anton, we were once again blessed with fantastic weather and great conditions in the majestic beauty of the Austrian mountains. 

See update below for video footage, but here are some photos of the event, mainly courtesy of Julian Sambles of telegraph.co.uk who is a legend on skis but also proves to be a dab hand with the camera :

Our regular readers will have seen previous posts about these trips and trip no.4 has cemented my opinion that online marketing is a very, very good place to be.

It is a real pleasure to spend time with a group of people who are all working at the coal face of digital marketing - the enthusiasm and passion for what we do is a credit to our industry.

Perhaps most significant aspects of the trips, in my humble opinion, is the fact that ‘competitors’ are happy to talk and chat about the greater good. I had an excellent time with Search Laboratory and Epiphany and whilst they are theoretical business enemies (hence no link!), they are great people and the passion for online marketing is a strong bond. 

So, who would want to work in online marketing? Count me in. Who wants to sign up for digital ski 2011? Count me in…

***UPDATE***
It’s here - for your viewing pleasure, here is the latest instalment in our Digital Ski trip videos:

We have migrated from "We need a website" to "We need to get more people to our website" and are now firmly into "crikey - can you help me make sense of all this social media stuff and what should we be doing with twitter as everyone tells us it is important and we just don’t know where to start and how on earth can we possibly keep tabs on what people are saying about us and what should we do about it…".

You probably get the picture and the mild sense of panic may well be familiar to a lot of our readers.

The truth is that there are a number of different approaches for organisations looking at social media as a method to engage with their target audience.

There is no such thing as a ‘one size fits all’ approach to social media and the most appropriate approach will depend on a number of factors, most notably the resource that is available to dedicate to the activity.

There are, however, clear examples of how not to do it and @VodafoneUK must surely scoop the award for the most spectacular twitter howler of recent weeks / months for their infamous post to their 9,000 followers:

It is not clear exactly what happened but it demonstrates how empowering employees can backfire (it doesn’t appear to be any form of hacked account) in spectacular fashion in an alarmingly short period of time.

Credit where it is due - Vodafone responded individually to all those tweeters who reacted with a message of "We’re really sorry. A severe breach of rules by staff in our building, dealing with that internally. Please keep your faith in us."

Perhaps it actually demonstrates a human face to a big corporation, which is no bad thing although this particular incident is likely to be perceived as a bit too human.

It is interesting to watch the evolution of social media and there will undoubtedly be some more own goals in the coming months that will demonstrate that immediate / powerful reach can be very potent, but equally lethal.

This is the first in what we hope will be several market research initiatives over the coming year but we are starting with a bang as we have two champagne balloon flights from Virgin Balloons to offer as a (massive) carrot to encourage users to complete the survey. All completed surveys will be entered into a draw for the prize.

The survey is ultimately aimed at client organisations but agencies are welcome to register an interest and we will be making the findings known in a report once the survey is complete.

Thank you for your interest and please send on to anyone who you believe would be able to contribute to what we hope to be an interesting survey.

>>Search Marketing Engagement Survey