I was talking to colleagues during the week and thought it would be timely answer the question, what does Google moving search click-throughs on to HTTPS mean for PR people?
We have less data to use as part of a scientific approach to developing messaging as HTTPS moves inbound search words private. For non-mainland Chinese audiences we are reliant on Google advertising keyword data rather than what has been working driving traffic to their site. For instance, when we think about how we use websites, what might work in a sales situation, may not work when we are looking for information or customer support
When creating content for websites, there needs to be a greater focus around the quality of the content rather than the classic focus on keyword density, since there are less clues on organic searches with HTTPS. This is a key advantage for PR people over ‘content marketers’ who have focused on creating content that is just good enough. We can still see which posts are the most popular for traffic coming from Google and then look to infer what works by looking at commonalities across the pages: content themes, likely audience intent etc.
HTTPS reduces intelligence. Inability to draw conclusions whether our content has an effect on consumer behavior, which keywords were used to reach the intended website, and the penetration of our messaging in the public lexicon when they search and arrive at the specific site. For example, a campaign to promote the ‘Bold washing powder’ causes a rise in searches for “Bold washing powder” to arrive at the P&G UK website, now we no longer able to draw this conclusion. In essence, it is much harder to prove online behavioural change from offline PR activity
A move towards increased link building for client’s websites; blogger relations and responding to posts becomes more important, since there is less of a focus on keywords
Client spend on search advertising is likely to increase as it becomes harder to prove the ROI on tactics used to bolster organic search traffic
More to think about HTTPS here. More on Google here.
This is the first in a number of posts that are designed to expand upon a post I published in May about eight trends for the future. They appear in the order in which I bite them off, chew them around and verbally masticate as posts on the blog. For this post I am looking at digital interruption.
The U.S. civil rights movement
I started thinking about the civil rights movement in the U.S.
By the late 1950s the US civil rights movement found that discourse and letters hadn’t moved the needle meaningfully and it took events like Rosa Parkes sit-down protest and the Stonewall riots to move the process forwards towards a more equal rights for all.
If one looks at the process in terms of mechanism, rather than the politics behind it; the Greenham Common Women, the tunnels dug by road protesters like Daniel Hooper (aka Swampy); they are an extension of the tactics used by civil rights movements decades before.
The first digital protest
The first digital-powered civil rights protest was the burning of draft cards by young American men from May 1964 onwards. The cards were printed with a font that could be read by an optical card reader connected to a mainframe computer, allowing the processing of draftees more efficient. 46 Americans were subsequently prosecuted for destroying their draft cards.
Digital interruption: learning from the Max Headroom takeover
Analogue interruption of media as a form of protest hasn’t worked that well in general. Whilst pirate radio stations routinely disrupted analogue broadcast transmissions, there weren’t a form of protest media, but generally a form of expression.
Probably the most famous hack was the Max Headroom broadcast interruption in Chicago.
The takeover likely to have been done by transmitting a more powerful microwave signal at the transmitter on the Sears Tower used by local broadcast TV stations. The people behind the Max Headroom takeover have never been caught, though there seems to be a number of people on Reddit who have a good idea who they are based don the some of the discussions you can Google. There were two things with analogue interruption:
You had to have a good deal of specialist knowledge to do it
It was quite hard to not get caught, similar media interruptions that occurred earlier by the likes of Captain Midnight (aka John MacDougall) who was busted the previous year whilst protesting at HBO’s unfair charges to satellite dish owners
The roots of computer hacking come from a wide range of sources from the political movement of the Yippies providing guides to phone phreaking (getting the phone network to do things the telephone companies wouldn’t like – giving you free calls etc.) to researchers finding flaws in early mainframe programs in the mid 1960s.
By the 1980s, bulletin board services had started to become popular; mainly because local calls were bundled with the line rental of a phone and so were effectively free in the U.S; allowing a pre-internet digital culture to build up. Bulletin boards also existed in other countries but the relatively high costs in regulated telecoms markets across Europe was a major barrier to take-up.
Computer viruses that were propagated disk-to-disk could extend their reach; particularly as magazine cover disks were often compiled with shareware and freeware originally downloaded from a bulletin board as a service to their readers. Magazines were also paid to distribute trial versions of commercial software and dialers for the likes of CompuServe.
It is interesting to note that the online chat function which drove the adoption of services like CompuServe and AOL whilst mirroring much of the bulletin board function; drew their paradigm from CB radio; with CompuServe’s online chat function being originally branded a ‘CB Simulator’.
Other forms of protest such as flame wars and trolling which came out of the bulletin board culture could be seen as incubators for similar behaviour on Internet platforms from Usenet groups to Facebook pages.
Underlying internet technologies have facilitated a step-change in protest; on the one-hand functions like emailing a politician or an online petition have become increasingly ineffective. ‘Peaceful’ consumer protests against the likes of the UK’s Digital Economy Act were ignored by the politicians and petitions supporting Edward Snowden achieved nothing but provide the authorities with a list of trouble-makers.
Brands that have come under attack on their Facebook pages like Nestle have demonstrated a remarkably thick skin, showing the online people power via social media is often a fallacy.
Consumers were taught by the body-politic that vigorous discourse and petitions don’t work compared to the face-to-face interactions with corporate lobbyists from industry bodies like the BPI, the MPAA or the RIAA.
From this lack of effectiveness came the modern digital interruption. Denial of service attacks have been happening for years as a prank or financial shake down but first came into their own as a form of political protest with the use of the low orbital ion cannon (LOIC) program by members of Anonymous to attack sites related to the Church of Scientology and the RIAA. Whilst this form of protest is illegal in many countries, it is seen by those who use it as a form of civil disobedience; similar to overloading a switchboard with protest calls or a picket line.
People involved are jailed and since Anonymous, like democracy is as much an idea as an organisation; the attacks continue.
Website blackouts by authoritative brands themselves have proven to be much more effective. On January 12, 2012, Wikipedia, Reddit, Flickr and a host of other large sites were effective in overturning the RIPA and SOPA pieces of proposed legislation in the US.
On their effectiveness MPAA chief executive Chris Dodd was quoted in the Los Angeles Times:
“It is an irresponsible response and a disservice to people who rely on them for information and who use their services,” Dodd said in a statement. “It is also an abuse of power given the freedoms these companies enjoy in the marketplace today.”
It was a tacit admission that whilst consumers could do without films and music, internet search, email and Wikipedia were now must-haves. The web blackout scared politicians because of the services ubiquity to modern life. They couldn’t be ignored like the petitions or emails and be dismissed as a fringe influence.
The world will break down into two types of organisations:
Social
Anti-social
From a communications point of view anti-social means not engaging for a specific reason, be it regulatory or not wanting to change controversial business practices. Conversely a social organisation not only communicates with it’s audience but also acts on what it hears from co-creation to changing business practices. Reputation management opportunities for agencies will occur when a client organisation tries to fall between the two categories and need to be guided between one or the other. Key skills will include:
Closing down social presence to deny digital interrupters an attack platform
Being conversant with techniques to help harden non-social online presence
Management consultancy to bring about business process change as part of making an organisation a social one
Irish cookery teacher terrified into handing over website name to Lady Gaga | Irish Business | IrishCentral – the smart thing would have come to an agreement with the Irish cookery teacher and agree to licence the name to her for cookery blogging purposes only. Instead they’ve risked a social media shit-storm for a box-ticking exercise. In this day and age, that’s an act of gross negligence and incompetence by whoever signed off on this and I feel for the Irish cooker teacher involved. More Irish related content here.
Quitting Facebook: What’s Behind The New Trend To Leave Social Networks? Eurasia Review – Reasons for quitting Facebook were mainly privacy concerns (48.3 percent), followed by a general dissatisfaction with Facebook (13.5 percent), negative aspects of online friends (12.6 percent), and the feeling of getting addicted to Facebook (6.0 percent; other/unspecific, 19.6 percent).
Hilton Worldwide Files for an IPO – Euromonitor International – interesting analysis of their business. Hilton Worldwide can trace its history back to a Texas hotelier in the early 20th century. It expanded to New York in 1943. Hilton Worldwide was one of the first users of computing with its centralised hotel booking system. It also pioneered the airport hotel with the first Hilton Worldwide airport property at San Francisco airport. Hilton Worldwide is being taken public by private equity company Blackstone.
Twitter makes IPO plans official: files confidential S-1, but expected value is about $14B — Tech News and Analysis – that this is a confidential filing means the company’s annual revenue is less than $1 billion. Usually when companies announce plans to go public, they have to file an S-1, the securities filing that companies use to provide details about their planned initial public offerings. Under the JOBS act of 2012, however, companies with less than $1 billion in revenue can file confidentially.
Wintel destined to eventually fail, says Acer founder – many downstream players moving to Google eco-system… For an ecosystem to have a chance of growing and staying strong, it must have leadership adopting strategies that allow all partners to earn profits. – Surprised Stan Shih was that blunt about their relationship with Microsoft
I had a late evening in the office so decided to stay up late and follow the Apple event where they unveiled the Apple iPhone 5c and the iPhone 5s. Here are my thoughts from the launch permeated through a couple of days thoughts.
Evolution rather than revolution
The Apple share price declined 5 per cent by the end of trading after the announcement as Wall Street hadn’t been blown away by the new products. The expectation of continuous revolution is unrealistic, innovation is lumpy. The relative low-key approach should have been a clear sign; Apple held the event on campus rather than the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Secondly if one looks at the launch of the Samsung Galaxy 4 one could see the lull in innovation.
Unfortunately consumers didn’t get the message here is a couple of sentiment curves I took a picture of during the first 24 hours after the launch:
iPhone 5c
iPhone 5s I was shocked to rate in the 10 percent most positive sentiment group.
They may not be buying iPhones, but they are interested them
What Apple doesn’t have in market share it more than makes up for in terms of defining the direction of the smartphone industry.
It’s about experience
The smartphone industry seems to be marketed on speeds and feeds, from Apple going to VLIW (very long instruction word) processor architecture or MediaTek and Samsung going to eight-core processors. It is getting progressively harder to compare devices on paper even with the same operating system.
Where the performance does show out is in the experience. Xiaomi have done a lot of work in terms of not only redesigning their fork of Android but also optimising the code to run faster on the hardware they select. Which is the reason why they can sell a decent handset at a lower price point. This increases the disruptive nature of their direct to consumer model.
Why 64-Bit?
There are a number of aspects to that answer, the big part is that one is not sure which is the the most relevant:
OSX has been 64 bit since 2006, there is the opportunity for more underlying code share. Knowing Apple, I would expect this to result in a leaner OSX rather than a bloated iOS. Expect to see speculation of Apple equivalents of the Microsoft Surface tablets, and then promptly discount them. People like to keep their hands on the keyboards too much.
Reducing processor cycles by taking in more data per cycle and reducing power consumption. This only works if applications are designed to work wtih 64-bit, there is likely to be some work required on applications to make them work.
Addressing a lot of memory is something that made 3D popular in the desktop computing world, allowing for more programmes and information to be held in RAM for quicker access but there is no indication of what this will be used for.
The M7 co-processor
The M7 co-processor has been heralded as a way to do indoor mapping, or a boon for the quantified self. All very fine utopian visions: data is collected, what happens to it after that is both a work of wonder and of the darkest imaginations as the Edward Snowden affair has demonstrated. What I find more interesting is that Apple opted for a discrete component rather than putting this on the die of the A7. It would have probably made more sense, given Apple’s focus on computing power per Watt since Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) in 2005. It’s not like it couldn’t have multi-core sleep mode.
Was it because:
They didn’t have time to architect it into the processor?
They didn’t want to telegraph what they were doing to Samsung? (It’s interesting that Samsung said straight away that they were dong a 64-bit processor next year, especially as they fabricate Apple’s chips)
They want to use the M7 in non-A7-powered products?
The 5c is about the supply chain
Probably the most debated aspect of the phone line-up is the iPhone 5C industrial design, specifically the steel reinforced polycarbonate chassis. Moving the iPhone 5c down the Apple food chain would mean lots more milling machines churning out even cheaper phones and would be likely to act as a bottle-neck for Apple trying to get significant numbers of the iPhone 5s out into the marketplace.
The mistake that pundits made was the association of plastic as a cheap material. If it is done well with the right blend, the right tooling and the right design plastic isn’t a cheap material but a great material. In modern parlance it has been associated with disposable throwaway products, but it’s like thinking of wood as a cheap material because we associated it with tooth-picks.
