Fresh from her BBC documentary series “The Virtual Revolution” Dr Aleks Krotoski came to Wired Sussex’s “Make it in Media” job fair to talk to the students, graduates, and digital media enthusiasts about her trajectory into technology and journalism.

She started by describing her New Orleans origins and Type A parents, and I did appreciate her Lex Luthor reference as she described her megalomaniac tendencies. Being a workaholic was a recurring theme and seemed integral to her achievements.

Alex attributes much of her success to her unusual multi-faceted accent, an odd mix of American and English that seems to intrigue producers and lends itself well to voice-overs. Her initial foray into broadcasting journalism was securing herself a place on a BBC internship programme. The most useful advice she gave regarding this was telling the crowd if they ever find themselves in a similar position, to type up all notes at the end of the day and leave it on their boss’s desk as a way of showing their dedication and organisation.

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Social media flourished in 2009 and this year it’s going to become an even bigger player in the way we browse, consume and share information online. Below are my predictions for the biggest trends regarding social media’s development in 2010. (more…)

Real time search results. Recently we’ve seen both Google and Bing attempt to include Tweets in their SERPs however it was apparent from the out-set that they weren’t quite ready. From a ranking perspective it simply didn’t seem fair that people could get a number one result just because they were the last person to tweet a certain search term. So this year hopefully Google (and the other search engines) can develop a fair and effective way of integrating real time search.

Conversion rate optimisation. One of the most important reasons for a business to improve its online presence through SEO is because it wants more people to find its website and to make more money. However often the conversion rate isn’t as high as it should be.  We’re now into the realms of conversion rate optimisation and this year I think it’s going to be important for more agencies to introduce CRO as part of their standard SEO process. It’s very measurable, normally with a good ROI when done well and therefore should be an added string to any SEO bow.

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Many SEO’s believe that content is king. Quality content will always do well online, people will link to it, disseminate it for you, often it can take on a binary life of its own and raise your brand’s awareness with little more effort expended by the creator. And we’ll happily produce it for free as long as it garners us some positive link equity and other such digital marketing perks.

However for newspapers the game is a bit different. For years now the major broadsheets and tabloids have been giving away their content for free. Why spend £1.20 on the paper when you can surf the website without having to pay? This is the quandary I find myself in most days. I’ve compromised by reading articles on the website in the week and purchasing the weekend editions Saturday and Sunday, so I don’t feel like a fully fledged, ice cold cheapskate.

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There had been some speculation of Google’s dominating position online, what with Twitter implementing real time search, Microsoft unveiling Bing and buying Yahoo. However, as we should have suspected, Google had an ace up its sleeve.

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Google’s search engine developers have been secretly developing a new project – dubbed “Google Caffeine”. Caffeine apparently has a next generation architecture for Google’s web search which aims to push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. Sounds like a huge step for Google but is it all hype? (more…)

Almost every day I’m getting emails and reading articles on the recession and recession-beating strategies. No question, times are tough and the focus is on return on spend more than ever before. But this got me thinking why we should all be looking at digital media much more closely at the moment. What are the key elements that make it so popular, particularly during tough times?

Here are a few reasons why I believe that businesses need to raise the prominence of digital marketing in their own strategies.

Digital Marketing works; if planned properly and managed well a digital marketing campaign can produce very good results. As budgets are being migrated from traditional to online marketing, companies are seeing good results. According to a recent report by Nielsen (more…)

Microsoft Corp. registered a 0.4% increase in their search market share in June at the slight expense of Yahoo! not Google, said comScore.

The bigger picture of the worldwide search market now looks like this (figures updated on July 9th):

• Google 90.85%
• Yahoo: 4.26%
• Bing: 3.04%

32% of Bing visitors come from the US, taking BING’s search market share in the US to 8.45% (StatCounter, June 2009), an additional 0.4%, whilst Google remains stable at 65%. However in the UK Bing only represents 2.56% of the search market.

What’s in it for users?

Microsoft presented Bing not as a search engine, but as a decision search engine, offering more contextual, relevant results to help decision making. (more…)

Recently we have had Wolfram Alpha offering a comprehensive “computational” knowledge engine and Google Squared promising a simple way of pulling organised data from websites into a spreadsheet style format.

Now last week we have seen Microsoft’s Live Search engine evolve into what they are now calling their decision engine. Originally code-named Kumo and supported by Microsoft’s hefty marketing muscle, Bing has been launched. (more…)

With the arrival of Microsoft’s new search engine now imminent it seems as though it is anyone’s guess what the service will be called.

The latest rumours coming out of Microsoft have the word “Bing” bounding around as the potential new name. This follows on from the other possible contenders that have been thrown about, the much vaunted Kumo, Hook and Sift.   (more…)