There were some great speakers, some even flying in from Europe, and the key note speaker was Bruce Daisley, from You Tube. Considering the video streaming company is only five years old, they have grown in size and influence beyond belief.

He said video is now one third of all traffic, but by 2013 it’s predicted to be 90%. In terms of marketing, video is already massive and is only going to get stronger. However, with more and more content being added, it’s going to be crucial to have quality and be able to stand out from the crowd.

Interestingly, Bruce also said that people are sharing video clips to convey emotion. They might send a friend a funny clip to cheer them up or to say Happy Birthday. I think this was a great insight in terms of PR and marketing.

There was a really useful session on using social media in the corporate world. Some of the more important things to come out of the discussion were:

- Make sure it’s relevant, don’t have a Facebook page for the sake of it.

- Make sure it’s written into the overall marketing strategy to ensure consistency in messages and branding.

- Top manager should understand the social media tools and why they’re being used.

- Look at economies for future. For example, one tweet could make one happy customer but is this economic?

- Some of the panel said they could envisage call centre style ‘Twitter centres’.

You can find full reports on the blog posts I wrote for the SAScon blog here.

Essentially Google Reader is an RSS aggregator; it allows you to manage RSS feeds generated from sites. You then access these from an online dashboard (work, home, mobile), thus ensuring you keep up to date with your favourite sites. This removes the need for you to visit the site to check for updates, new content comes to you.

The one requirement for a site is to produce a RSS feed of new content, if you don’t produce a feed then readers are unable to subscribe and receive the updates to your site. Blogs, the BBC, Google News and some UK newspapers generate RSS feeds, but sites that rely on page impressions for advertising have been reluctant to create feeds (some produce partial feeds, title and first 250 characters of the body).

Google now have updated their Google Reader product to simulate an RSS from sites lacking a feed. A quick test of the new feature on an official football site (majority of the 92 football league sites don’t have RSS) didn’t generate great results, picking up the change in the “next fixture” but not the new news items on the page.

From a technical perspective it looks like Google are using the cached page from the search bot, comparing it to the pervious cache to detect the differences. This could mean that pages that have the date and time displayed would be detected as ‘updated’ even if no new content is added to the page.

To keep the likes of Rupert Murdoch happy Google have allowed an opt-out option with the use of the no archive googlebot tag.

From an SEO perspective if the new feature works well it could provide data to detect the frequency of page changes (added new content is a must for natural rankings) on competitors.

The volume of online sales on Christmas Day 2009 increased by 29% to £132m compared with last year according to a recent article from the Retail Bulletin, with Boxing Day drawing the highest sales volumes at £281m.

It seems as though many stores, both online and offline, started their promotions earlier in December, therefore you could still pick up a bargain before Christmas. This was particularly seen on Christmas Eve, which is traditionally a quieter day for online sales, but in 2009 sales rose by approx 68% to £181m compared with 2008.

David Smith, Director of Operations at IMRG (Interactive Media in Retail Group) said: “It appears that this Christmas we saw internet activity becoming part of most people’s routine, whether e-mailing friends, catching up on social network sites or surfing for bargains. Online retailers were able to benefit from this changing consumer behaviour by achieving record sales volumes with many sales and offers starting on Christmas Eve”.
It could be argued that the weather had an impact on internet activity, with many people preferring to shop online at home rather than venture out in the snow, or not have much choice if they were snowed in!

An online research specialist, eDigitalResearch, supported the findings and commented “Our research shows that 62 per cent of respondents were online on Christmas and Boxing Day searching for bargains. What’s really encouraging is the fact that Christmas 2010 looks like it will be even more prosperous for the online retailer.”

Therefore it seems as though online activity around Christmas is changing, and it will be interesting to see how 2010 performs in comparison.

The imminent release of Google’s Caffeine update (so named because it is intended to sharpen up the relevance and speed of the returned results) is widely expected to take the context and sentiment of conversations about your brand into account when determining your organic rank.

More and more people have mobile devices capable of delivering a similar quality of browsing experience as desktop computers. This increase of traffic to websites from mobile handsets requires webmasters to ensure that their websites display correctly on the most popular devices and their supported browsers. Mobile SEO ensures that all important site content can be viewed as intended and navigated to quickly. In most cases a dedicated mobile orientated version of the website is required which is optimised for the search terms used by mobile audiences which are usually more succinct and increasingly feature town, city or place names i.e. “Cinemas in Manchester” and “Indian restaurants in Leeds”.

This year will see the mass-adoption of Microformats such as rich snippets and hcards within HTML code as a means of semantically labelling web content. Content such as product name, description, brand, price and reviews can be included in mark-up for Google to pull into their search results as appropriate. Google’s continuing efforts to deliver the most relevant content to users and the increase in mobile internet usage from GPS enabled handsets will increase competition for local traffic from search engines. Any opportunity for a company to reinforce its regional credentials must be seized if they are to retain high rankings for searches on locally targeted search terms.

Link diversity will become more important than ever with websites needing backlinks and brand citations from a broad range of web properties such as news sites, blogs, micro blogging platforms such as twitter, social networks such as facebook and bebo as well as social bookmarking sites like digg and del.icio.us.

Taking concrete steps to enable you to manage your content has always made sense. And yet it routinely features near the bottom of everyone’s ‘To Do’ list. Until now – and people are waking up to the fact that looking after your content is worth time, effort and money. And they’re recognising that in order to make real use of your content you need a proper, grown-up strategy.

Content strategy is …

As with most “new” things in our industry, someone else has already thought up the best definition. Leading Content Strategy advocate Kristina Halvorson defines content strategy as “the practice of planning for the creation, delivery and governance of useful, usable content”. Which pretty much works. So, why content strategy and why now?

There are two principal reasons why, in my view, content strategy is suddenly in everyone’s mind.

The pips that squeaked

The obvious one is money. In these leaner times, making do with what you have makes sense. Wasteful and disorganised is very last year. Austerity is the new black. The smart money is invested in releasing the latent potential of the content you already own.

• Ensuring your content is fresh, relevant and coherently organised
• Checking – and checking again – that your content contributes to usable experiences
• Focusing content production and management on things that actually add value
• Taking care of the mechanical underbelly – SEO, accessibility, workflow, archiving

There’s the flipside: rather like finally tidying out the garden shed can be a messy, dusty, exhausting business, so turning in earnest to your content for the first time can be a daunting process. Albeit with fewer spiders.

If you don’t, they will

A less well understood reason is social media. Or, to use the older but more relevant tag, user-generated content. Nothing defines the Web 2.0 world more, um, definitely, than the simple fact that content is now firmly in the domain of the user. We have transcended the era of the web in which large brands and organisations were the primary publishers of content. Now, to use one of the typically vibrant memes that have sprung up around content strategy, everyone is a publisher. But we are still in the ageless era of content = experience = value. Upshot? Brands and organisations are no longer the primary source of experientially meaningful online facilities. We can all create and publish things that have a practical value to users all around us – and increasingly, we’re using your content to do it.

A second reason why social media contributes to the awakening of interest in content strategy: most digitally active organisations have done some social media toe-dipping by now. With a wide spectrum of results. Most are now evaluating what went well and what didn’t. And more often than not, one of the main answers they encounter is “content”.

Social media is two things:

• a channel by which we use content to reach out and project – to each other, to brands, to consumers, to organisations and institutions.
• a channel which we use to deliver or to profile content of every shape, form and shoesize.

Meaning? Meaning that in either instance, careful handling of content – both within your own brand space and outside it – is paramount. Meaning that without a strategy for using your own content, how can you hope to influence the way other people do?

There are lots of resources available which outline the basic principles of content strategy. There are lots of blog posts extolling the virtues of content strategy. The difference, here, now, finally, is that it appears to actually be making a difference.

Content is king: suddenly less banal truism, more urgent call-to-action.