The Topman trouser shoot did not go to plan.

We’ve been working with Topman on their social media and developed their profiles from a standing start to thriving communities providing rich consumer insight and sales. One of our recent projects for London Fashion Week was identified by Yahoo! as the most viewed and searched show during the period. This is a great example of how involving the community demonstrates real value, providing more impact and exposure than competitors. Independent pat on the backs from brands like Yahoo! are always welcome but we also have our own way of tracking results – just ask about our social rating tool.

The press release is below but we think it is a powerful testament to our social work when our male only campaign trumped unisex campaigns by other brands.

***TOPMAN REIGNS SUPREME ON LONDON FASHION WEEK’S CATWALK***
Men’s Growing Passion for Fashion Revealed By Yahoo! Search

Friday 26th February 2010.  As the curtain falls on London Fashion Week, Yahoo! Search has been looking at who reigned fashion supreme as King or Queen of this season’s catwalk.

The Yahoo! Search data over the last week revealed the Topman Design collection made the greatest impact and buzz.  Proving that consumers still have a passion for high street fashion the show generated the highest search reaction and greatest keyword spike of the entire London Fashion Week.

Usually incorporated into the successful MAN event, this year’s AW2010 showcase is the first time Topman Design stepped out on its own.

Following on the smartly polished heels of Topman’s premium collection, the ever popular Vivienne Westwood and Burberry collections ranked in runner-up positions.

Top 5 London Fashion Week Collections by Popularity

1 Topman Design
2 Vivienne Westwood
3 Burberry
4 Jaeger
5 Jasper Conran

IAB Engage 2008

This year’s IAB Engage Conference was yet again packed with impressive speakers. Digital Marketing professionals and advertisers came together on Wednesday to discuss issues from piracy to measuring engagement, from integration of TV and online advertising to the extreme possibilities of the future – we’ll be sending our robots to shop for us within ten year apparently, and our dreams will soon be infiltrated by product placement via our personal contact lens screens!!

The Keynote speakers, Yahoo! founder Jerry Yang and Rt. Hon Andy Burnham MP, were less controversial and engaging than some of the others guests but their presence was a testament to the high profile of the event. A real highlight was a presentation by Orange brand director Justin Billingsley who certainly made the case for making digital the starting point for any marketing effort.

As impressive as Orange’s campaigns are, it is clear that their creative ideas only work because they are based on a simple principle. Namely that digital marketing should aim to entertain, answer, or add utility before it aims to advertise. This is a great way to make sure brands are working with consumers and not at them and it’s exactly how Neoco approaches its work.

The theme of the conference was “who’s in control” which framed the discussions perfectly. More than one speaker argued that marketeers have the power to make the difference – good news for us! Recent Neoco campaigns, however, are a testament to the success of putting consumers in control. For my part, I can’t help thinking control is the subject of so much debate because it’s basically a redundant concept but perhaps that for another blog piece…

Let’s take a look at two recent examples where large brands have left themselves exposed.

facebook error

On Saturday, a good friend of mine super-poked me on Facebook – he virtually drank shots with me. The application automatically generated a call to action in an attempt to prompt a response. The issue here is the developers did not apply a rule relating to actions vs sexual preference. Whilst Tom is a good mate, there is no way I would ever choose to snog, spank, suck or caress him. Part of me is quite shocked that this application would recommend any of those actions to me. The end result is that (as a user) I now feel very uncertain about the application and will not be using it again for the foreseeable future. Shame that such a basic error may lead to many users leaving the service.

yahoo! error

Yahoo! recently posted a news article celebrating the run-up to the Olympic games. The photographs were upbeat and full of tourists, performers and even Olympic mascots celebrating and dancing in the heart of the capital. Unfortunately, the headline above a picture gallery of musicians, acrobats and other entertainers, read: “Tiananmen Square Massacre Remembered.”

Yahoo! said that their news slideshows were automatically generated and added news images to topical albums according to keywords in the photo titles and captions – leading to this bizarre juxtaposition on the news site.

So, whilst scripted applications can make our lives much easier they are still dependent on the human-created rules that we program in to them. Failure to clearly define the application behaviour can result in lost traffic and users or worse – a political crisis.

The Yahoo! and Microsoft acquisition talks have finally come to an end  – and Google seem to have come out of it as the clear winner.

After a long-running discussion, Yahoo! have decided to partner with Google, building on their recent ad partnership. Yahoo! will now display Google ads next to its search results in the US and Canada from September. Google and Yahoo! also plan to make their instant messaging tools compatible. In total, Yahoo! are expected to gain $800m in additional annual revenues from the deal.

As Microsoft and Yahoo! look to merge, this is turning in to a real soap opera…

Microsoft & Google actually fancy each other; Microsoft loves Googles youthful energy and dynamic rise to wealth and Google loves the established, ‘old school’ power of Microsoft… but it’s a forbidden love. They can never be together, which drives them crazy and makes them want to constantly hurt and out do each other.

In the latest ’series’ of their forbidden love, they pull Yahoo! in to their destructive love-hate relationship…

Microsoft has a one night stand with Yahoo! and then proposes, though not because Microsoft actually fancies Yahoo! – it’s more to get Google’s attention! Something about hurting the ones you love.

Ironically, Yahoo! doesn’t want to marry Microsoft either, but she realises that she’s at a stage in her life where her looks have long faded and her living expenses are a bit higher than her income. Whilst popular, she may not get the chance to bag another rich suitor like Microsoft… but she could hold out to find someone who loves her for who she is. Dilemma.

Yahoo! is unsure about Microsoft’s proposal and decides to think about it, but Microsoft is used to getting any girl he wants and this ‘playing hard to get act’ is something he’s seen many times before. Normally Microsoft would just flash some more bling and the girl would get in the car, but this time, Microsoft feels he’s already flashed enough to Yahoo! so he just goes for the affirmative act of ordering Yahoo! to get in the car. Yahoo! runs crying in to the night…

Confused and upset, Yahoo! seeks solace in the arms of other men. The first to hear about her vulnerability is MySpace who decides to take the opportunity to have a quickie with her (because he’s that kind of guy), but in the morning Yahoo! is back out in the cold. Now she’s feeling really dirty, who should come along but Google. Google knows the situation and wants to get back at Microsoft for hurting him with the initial Yahoo! proposal. Google tells Yahoo! what she wants to hear. Google will love her for who she is and promises to share everything with her – unlike Microsoft. But Google wants to take things slowly, one step at a time. This way Google can really get back at Microsoft without never really needing to commit to Yahoo! (as soon as Microsoft has had enough and the proposal is withdrawn, Google will drop Yahoo! like a sack of potatoes).

Poor Yahoo!. She may be desperate but she’s not stupid. She knows she can’t marry Microsoft or Google as her parents would never approve. So Yahoo! agrees to Google’s ’slowly, slowly’ relationship as rumours surface of stolen kisses with other lovers, notably AOL…

Will Yahoo! actually marry anyone?
Will Yahoo! come home from work early to find Microsoft and Google in bed together?
Does anyone still care who AOL sleeps with?
Will MySpace ever clean up it’s act?

Tune in next week (at this rate) for the next thrilling installment of the MicroHoo! soap opera.

I think it’s safe to say that it is now officially Facebook vs. everyone else when it comes to OpenSocial!

Yahoo has just announced it’s support for Google’s OpenSocial initiative, and it has now joined forces with MySpace and Google to form the non-profit OpenSocial Foundation. The idea behind the foundation is to “ensure the neutrality and longevity of OpenSocial as an open, community-governed specification for building social applications across the web.”

Others who are also in on the foundation include: Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING. So, basically, out of all the social networks and web giants on the web, Facebook is the only one that’s out of the loop – for now.

In the OpenSocial camp there is, of course, a lot of hand shaking, back patting and congratulating. Yahoo says they believe “in supporting community-driven industry specifications and expects that OpenSocial will fuel innovation and make the web more relevant and more enjoyable to millions of users;” MySpace is “setting new industry specifications for social web application development,” while Google is reassuring us that “OpenSocial will be forever free and open..” All three companies will work on OpenSocial, everything will, of course, stay under the Creative Commons copyright license, and they’ve created an open source reference implementation called Shindig, available at incubator.apache.org/shindig/.

The official web site for the Foundation is opensocial.org, while the technical bits are still over at code.google.com/apis/opensocial/.

Microsoft Chief Executive, Eric Schmidt,  has stated that any deal between Microsoft and Yahoo! could be “bad for the Internet”.  Google have already made it clear that they believe that such a deal could have implications for the openness of the Internet, and exert an “inappropriate…influence” over the Internet.

When Microsoft proposed a buyout of Yahoo for $44.6bn last month (which was rejected by Yahoo’s board), experts said that the buyout was an attempt by Microsoft to challenge Google’s dominance. And Eric Schmidt admitted that he would be concerned by any kind of acquisition of Yahoo by Microsoft.

However, earlier this month, Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer has said that they will gain market share against Google in search and advertising, even if led to his “last breath” at the firm.

As we told you last week, Yahoo have put back their decision to at least April, and now Microsoft have threatened to oust Yahoo’s 10 directors if it can’t broker an amicable takeover.

An anonymous source has told CNET that Microsoft and Yahoo! are at least talking about a merger on friendly terms. According to the report:

“Microsoft and Yahoo! are holding informal merger discussions, marking a shift from the “radio silence” that previously existed between the two companies, according to a source familiar with the talks.”

This follows the news last week that Yahoo! would be extending the deadline for nominating new members to its board of directors, which we thought might be a signal that they were at least willing to consider negotiating with Microsoft . Microsoft has made it fairly clear that they will initiate a hostile takeover of Yahoo! if they can’t reach an amicable deal. Yahoo currently sits at more than 10 percent below Microsoft’s initital offer price of $31 per share, first announced back on February 1st.

Does anyone else think that this story is just dragging on like an Eastenders crappy plotline involving a ‘will they? won’t they?’ scenario… just get together already!

Microsoft’s free email service Hotmail is currently suffering from a bug that logs off users and prevents them from logging into the service again. Currently, this behavior is affecting only a fraction of the userbase, but the bug has not been fixed yet.

Microsoft spokeswoman Samantha McManus said the following in a statement: “The issue is purely impacting the login process for customers and largely does not impact customers who were already logged in. We have made significant progress in decreasing the number of customers currently affected since initial reports, but the issue has not yet been completely resolved.”

As a consolation, McManus added that Hotmail should be fully operational “shortly,” whatever that means.

Reminds me of a comment I heard earlier online; someone was discussing problems with their Yahoo! email account to which another user quipped “they must be getting ready for the merge with Hotmail!” lol.

Sorry but some things are just too funny to let them pass without comment…

Google co-founder Sergey Brin commented on the potential Microhoo (Microsoft Yahoo) buyout. Brin said that he found Microsoft’s takeover bid for Yahoo an “unnerving” maneuver that threatens innovation on the Internet, and mentioned that such a merger could “violate antitrust laws and harm Internet users.”

Huh?! This is Sergey Brin of Google, right? Check out any Comscore, Nielsen or Compete data talking about exactly how much marketshare Google has over the competition in terms of eyeballs, advertisers or any other number of metrics – though you are probably well aware that Google is the dominant leader in just about everything they put an effort (or buy) into. For Brin to actually say himself that this creates anti-trust issues (especially in the midst of an anti-trust battle themselves) is a bit hypocritical.

Oh and if you thought Google already have enough money to get to the moon, you might not be shocked to learn that the comments were from their HQ for the Lunar X Prize. Lunar X Prize is a race to land a privately funded robotic spacecraft on the moon. Because apparently there are no better causes on Earth…