She has completed 2 races in Switzerland to date, the first of which was the Stockhorn half marathon. This consisted of over 1700 metres of uphill climb (the highest mountain in GB, Ben Nevis, is only 1344 metres) where she was the first woman home. Below is a picture of the final section of the race which was steep, painful and the rain was pouring down.

The next race was the Thyon Dixence, which Anna finished in 3rd place behind 2 top internationals and with only 1 minute between them. The below picture shows Anna (centre) with the other 2 winners following the race.

Anna then came back to the UK to take part in a race at Snowdon in the trial race for the GB team for the World Mountain Running Championships which will take place in Slovenia in September. She finished a well placed 2nd in a very competitive race.

On the 9^th Anna flew to Colorado with the England team for the World Long Distance Mountain Running Championships (The Pikes Peaks race) and she will have 2 weeks to acclimatise to the altitude before the race on 21st August. Anna ran for England in this race when it was held in Austria last year and came in 9^th place but with all the training she is having she is hoping to improve on that this year. The race finishes at the peak of the mountain which is over 4300 metres!

Anna will be keeping us updated on her future races and I am sure everyone will join all of managed services in cheering her on and wishing her well.

Google has released details of a major change to its trademark policy in UK & Europe, which will come into play from 14th September 2010. Search advertisers in the UK will now be permitted to both bid on trademarked keywords and also use these within their ad text in some cases. The implications on this are most likely going to be felt by the brand owner with increases on brand costs inevitable as they face stiffer competition.

Under the new trademark policy, advertisers will be allowed to include the trademarked term in the following instances.

• Ads which use the term in a descriptive or generic way, and not in reference to the trademark owner or the goods or services corresponding to the trademark term.

• Ads which use the trademark in a nominative manner to refer to the trademark or its owner, specifically:

o Resale of the trademarked goods or services: The advertiser’s site must sell (or clearly facilitate the sale of) the goods or services corresponding to a trademark term. The landing page of the ad must clearly demonstrate that a user is able to purchase the goods or services corresponding to a trademark from the advertiser.

o Sale of components, replacement parts or compatible products corresponding to a trademark: The advertiser’s site must sell (or clearly facilitate the sale of) the components, replacement parts or compatible products relating to the goods or services of the trademark. The advertiser’s landing page must clearly demonstrate that a user is able to purchase the components, parts or compatible products corresponding to the trademark term from the advertiser.

o Informational sites: The primary purpose of the advertiser’s site must be to provide non-competitive and informative details about the goods or services corresponding to the trademark term. Additionally, the advertiser may not sell or facilitate the sale of the goods or services of a competitor of the trademark owner.

Aggregator sites, department stores and affiliate sites are likely to welcome the news, which should allow them greater opportunities to show specific adverts, whereas before they needed to remain generic. In turn, this is also likely to mean better CTR (click through rates), which will improve their quality score and make advertising on key terms a lot more affordable. It obviously has the reverse effect for own brand resellers who will now face competition on the SERPS to legitimate ad copy that could be more compelling than their own if they have not optimised it correctly before this comes into effect.

The results page on a term such as "iPod" is likely to change a great deal with iPod sellers and accessory vendors now being able to advertise more freely having previously been restricted by Apples overbearing restrictions on their trademark.

For own brand advertisers they should take this next month to focus on their creative messaging serving their brand terms. This will ensure that when the clock strikes on the 14th September they will be well set up to ensure that they continue to give their consumers the best brand experience possible. They should also possibly review who their biggest threats to CTR will be when the time comes. Reseller and affiliate relationships will also be important to the strategy of Search marketing more so than before

European Policy Change

For the rest of Europe Advertisers will still be unable to put trademarked terms in the ad copy of their campaigns. However, they will be able to bid on trademark terms from the 14th September. We have many learning’s from the UK as to how this is likely to impact the markets on the continent. The most important one being of course that they are likely to see their brand CPC’s inflate significantly initially and remain higher than they have paid before. They will eventually stabilise out after the initial brand bidding war commences but complacency where your brand messaging is concerned will definitely remain a thing of the past.

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.