Google

You probably weren’t using Google in 1999. You might not even have heard of it. But in the past ten years it has won us over in many more aspects of our online lives than just search:

• Google Analytics (2005). Making what were previously enterprise-level website statistics available to all – for free, of course
• Google Maps (2005). Remember how clunky online maps were before?
• Google Docs (2006). Taking the idea of cloud-based applications mainstream (although most people still cling to the security blanket of Microsoft Office.
• YouTube (acquired 2006). The Queen launched the official Royal Channel in 2007.
• Picasa (2006). Not as popular as Flickr, but free-er.
• Gmail (2007 opens for all). Invites were like gold-dust until 2007 and the service only came out of beta in 2008.
• Android (2007). An open source operating system for mobile phones.
• Streetview (US launch 2007; UK 2008). Despite complaints from some about privacy, Google continues to photograph the whole world. They recently added Pompei
• Chrome (2008 for PC, 2009 for Mac). Claims to be the fastest, most stable web browser around. Certainly beats Internet Explorer (but what doesn’t).
• Google Navigation (launched in selected US cities 2009; roll-out 2010). Garmin and TomTom’s share price tumbled when Google announced release of their free turn-by-turn navigation application and they’ve been slashing prices ever since.

They’re doing quite well financially, too. In the last full financial year (to 31 December 2008) they made over $4.2 billion profit. Not bad for a company that hadn’t worked out a monetization model until 2001, when they launched AdWords. Although they didn’t invent the ‘pay-per-click’ platform and they weren’t the first to place adverts on search engine results pages, they were the first to figure out how to really make it pay – for themselves, but also for advertisers and users.

Connecting to the Internet

Almost all of us were still on dial-up connections to the Internet in 1999. Ten years later we’re almost all on broadband. Here’s a rather dull chart from the Office for National Statistics that shows the rate of changeover.

Changing gadgets

In 1999 most of us used:

• film cameras (and photo albums)
• floppy disks
• road atlases
• basic mobile phones
• VCRs
• CDs

Over the decade these have been replaced by:

• digital cameras (and online photo sharing)
• USB memory sticks
• sat nav and online maps
• smartphones (Blackberries, iPhones, etc)
• DVDs and BluRay
• MP3 and downloads

And what will be obsolete or in terminal decline by 2019? How about:

• USB memory sticks (and other storage devices) replaced by online storage (such as DropBox).
• personal sat nav devices replaced by turn-by-turn navigation on mobiles.
• chequebooks (and maybe even cash) replaced by micropayment methods.
• DVD and BluRay replaced by on-demand services. The BBC iPlayer is just two years old and now serves over 80 million programmes a month.
• Software on PCs replaced by software-as-a-service: applications hosted online and accessed via your web browser.

Social media

The second half of the noughties, and the past couple of years in particular, has seen an explosion in the use and participation in social media. Facebook now boasts over 350,000,000 users – half of whom log in to their account at least once a day. Often quoted, but impressive nevertheless, is the statistic that if Facebook were a country it would be third only to China and India in the size of its population.

Hair straighteners

In compiling my content for the radio slot I asked my Twitter followers for their ideas (thanks @jonmoss, @squiggle, @sc_r, @mattseward, @strawbleu, @johnpopham and @azp74).

You can see from my profile pic that I have no use for them, but thanks go to @leedsgrub for tipping me off to the miracle that is GHD hair straighteners. According to Katie

Before ceramic straighteners, you either had to use straighteners that didnt really work or spend ages blow drying. Having GHDS has revolutionised hair fashion, as super straight styles were never achievable before that.

I’ll just have to take her word on that…

What about you?

What technological change in this decade has had the biggest impact of your life and what are you looking forward to in the next decade? Leave your comments below.

Yesterday one of my clients was paying an average of 40¢ per click on a maximum bid of 45¢. After I switched the account to GBP the bid was automatically converted  to 27p (about right at today’s exchange rate). But when I checked the account just now I discovered that impressions and clicks had plumeted to a fraction of their previous level and the recommended bid was now in the range 46p to 56p – that’s a whopping 75¢ to 90¢.

Hopefully this is just a short-term blip and they’re working on the solution. Facebook Ads are great for raising brand awareness amongst a really tightly defined audience but the company is not noted for being very responsive to customer support tickets. I guess I’ll just have to wait and see how this works out.

graze.com operates a similar model to wine clubs – you sign up for a regular delivery (which you can cancel or push back anytime) but instead of receiving a box every few months, Graze boxes arrive on as many days of the week as you like and instead of wine, they supply fresh fruit, dried fruit, nuts and seeds in a beautifully presented, letterbox sized box. The quality of the goods is exceptional and the range of ingredients is really unusual; I’ve never tasted dried blackcurrants or dried morello cherries before. (They are both delicious, by the way.) At £2.99 a box, including delivery, it’s almost hard to see how they’re making any money.

9NTR77N

Their use of social media – Twitter and Facebook in particular – to grow awareness of the brand is brilliant. Most people get their first box free and their second half-price, via a promo code posted online by one of their friends (mine is 9NTR77N if you want to try it out). As soon as you sign-up, you get your own promo code to pass on to your friends, with one-click buttons to post a link to Twitter and Facebook. Every time your code gets used, you get £1 off another box. Like pyramid selling for pineapples. I don’t have all that many followers on Twitter but already four of them have signed up from my code. If each of them get another four people to sign up, and each of them get another four people to sign up – well, you get the idea. A quick search of Twitter reveals how often these codes are being passed on.

Their site is as gorgeous as the product. It’s all very web 2.0, in its design and functionality. Personalisation is a big trend right now – think of Moo cards for the ultimate bespoke business cards – and graze.com’s rating system (bin, try, like or love) keeps you engaged with the brand by allowing you to tailor the product to your tastes.

Reduce, reuse, recycle

The company do use a lot of recycled material in their packaging and encourage consumers to recycle again, but it’s difficult to ignore the environmental impact of this product. Recycling is good but reducing packaging is better. And there’s still the fuel used in transporting the box to your home / office. But I’ve been well and truly seduced and despite the tuts of disapproval from some of my coworkers am going to continue to enjoy my guilty grazing.

What about you? Have you tried graze.com yet? What’s your view on the product and its green credentials?

Tweetdeck’s great strength is its ability to split your tweetstream into manageable chunks so you can keep on top of the people and searches that matter most to you. And they’ve done a great job of constantly developing its features, releasing the latest version just today.

It work on Mac and PC because it runs on the platform-independent Adobe Air. But this is one of it’s downfalls for me. I’m a big Mac fan (that’s a big fan of Apple Mac computers, not nasty burgers) and Adobe Air just doesn’t feel quite like a Mac application. Nambu does, because it is ‘native’ to the Mac.

Nambu has some extra features too, like threaded conversations, so if you reply to a tweet or get a reply to one of your tweets, the conversation is kept together (think of how emails look in gmail, compared to all other email applications).

I’m about to download the version for the iPhone. Surely it can’t displace Tweetie…

I write different content for different media: blog posts are more considered and take much longer to compose; tweets are often  irreverent and fired off as a quick response to something that has caught my eye at that moment. So I’m going to keep the two separate. I’ll have a link to my Twitter account, so that people have a route to connect with me there, but I won’t reproduce my Twitter content here.

What’s your approach?

Log in to Twitter and click on settings:

Click on settings in your Twitter account

Click to the notices tab, where you will find three options in the drop-down menu:

The options for @ replies

You can choose to see:

• all @ replies – this is where you end up seeing one side of conversations
• @ replies to the people I’m following – this means that you will only see @ replies where you are following both parties
• no @ replies – this options means you will never see public replies (unless they are addressed to you)

Experiment with the settings and see which suit you best.

Tweetdeck uses columns to separate out different tweets from the general stream of people that you’re following so that you can see much more easily the tweets that are most important to you. By default the application starts with three columns:

1. All friends. These are all the tweets from all the people you are following.
2. Replies. These are all the public messages that include your username.
3. Direct Messages. These are all the direct (private) messages that you have sent or received.

But you can also add further columns. Two really useful ones are ‘groups’ and ’search’.

Groups

To add a new group, click on the groups button in the top of the Tweetdeck window:

Groups button in Tweetdeck

This adds a new column that will contain tweets from just a selection of the people you are following. You might choose to include just clients, or coworkers, or another group of people whose tweets you are especially interested in. You can set up lots of groups columns.

Search

You can already search Twitter by visiting search.twitter.com but there is no way to save the results of this search within Twitter itself. In Tweetdeck you can save a search query and have it constantly refreshed by adding a new search column. Here’s how. Click on the search button in the top of the Tweetdeck window:

The search button in Tweetdeck

You might use this to monitor mentions of your company name / website, products, competitors. It’s a simple way to monitor your reputation within Twitter and be able to act quickly if there is any discussion about you.

Easy access to features

Tweetdeck makes it easy to access Twitter functions such as reply, direct message and retweet. When you hover over a user’s profile picture, some new buttons appear.

To reply to a tweet, click on the reply button:

Reply using Tweetdeck

To send a direct (private) message to another user, click on the direct message button.

Send direct message using Tweetdeck

And to forward on a message that you have enjoyed or found useful, click on the retweet button. Retweeting is a good way to show that you value another user’s tweet. It flatters the original author, because it makes their message travel further and gives them credit for the original message. It helps your followers, because if you liked the original tweet, the chances are that your followers will too. It helps your followers to find new content and new people to follow.

Retweet button in Tweetdeck

You can follow me on Twitter at twitter.com/jamesward.

comparethemeerkat.com is a playful, witty and clever promotion for comparethemarket.com with TV adverts that feature its ‘founder’ Aleksandr Orlov whose Russian accent explains the mispronunciation.

They have taken the concept right through to creating an entire site where visitors can compare meerkats – oh, and this website just so happens to use the same functionality as the similar site where you can compare car insurance, of course.

Aleksandr’s Facebook Page (35,657 fans) features photos from his family album and notes about his forthcoming rip to see Céline Dion (priceless) and he also maintains a Twitter profile (1,149 followers) where he tweets about eating jellied centipedes.

Why I like this campaign so much:

• It’s hard to not feel warm about the brand just from watching the TV advert, but even harder when you see the depth to which they’ve developed the idea.
• It’s personal. They are taking their marketing right down to individuals. It looks like they do a public reply to every message they receive on Twitter.
• It gets people talking and sharing their enjoyment of the campaign.

Compare this to the clunky efforts of some other companies who think they can just publish their same old marketing schpeal in social media sites and expect it to ‘go viral’…