One of  the most notorious showman in TV in Spain, going by the nickname, “El Gran Wyoming”, member of the TV channel, La Sexta, has proved to be an expert in spreading shocking-but-false information to increase the audience.  This week, the “El Gran Wyoming” has been in the eye of the hurricane after a video of him bullying a journalist trainee hit Youtube and stirred a huge controversy among his detractors.

Interestingly enough, a rival digital TV channel, renowned right wing biased broadcaster Intereconomia, featured that video live in one of the TV shows most critical with the cited comedian . Intereconomia presenter was ferocious in his criticism against the showman, accusing of being a bully and “lefty fascist”. Inevitably, many suspected that the video was a ploy but the gullible Intereconomia took the bait without verifying the facts. As expected, on Monday, in effect, “El Gran Wyoming” TV show “El Intermedio” confirmed that everything was a trap to mock and condemn the lack of journalistic ethics of his media rival.

The strategy certainly worked and “El Intermedio” got its best TV audience of the year with 1,549,000 viewers, a 7.9% ‘share’.  The program scored its best ratings, thanks to the false video, which  has sparked a debate about whether anything goes on television without getting the facts right. Additionally, the journalistic community has discussed if  certain ‘journalistic practices’ are just a way to settle personal grievances or to gain audiences.

Either way, the truth is that Viral video is one of the most effective practises in order to do what is being called “Guerrilla Marketing”. A very little investment can reap huge benefits and big media corporations like main TV channels are not alien to make use of this word of mouth tools in order to get great results.

If you have any question contact me on twitter on http://twitter.com/oscarcarreras

One of the most important things about last November International Search Summit , was to be able to learn about the special idiosyncrasy of different cultures when it comes down to surfing the Internet. The success on obtaining European rankings might depend on understanding culturally related differences of the country/market targeted.

This proves to be essential when we are planning to enter the Russian market.

Eugene Lomize from Yandex talked on ISS about the Russian Internet audience and its special characteristics:

• Don’t speak, don’t read English
• They don’t trust online communication, prefer direct communication (phone, etc)

He discussed some data about the Russian Internet audience using as source Gallop media:

• Russian Penetration rate. Close to the 45%
• Broadband penetration is improving steadily
• Russian Internet Demographics.  75% of Internet audience is Russia lives in Moscow.

As you should know already, Google is far from being the main search agent in Russia, with Yandex enjoing a comfortable lead. Leading Russian Search engines in 2008 are:

• Yandex. Share has decreased slightly. Audience growing exponentially
• Google.ru
• Mail.ru(using yandex search technology). Steady share. Mail hosting is their main service.
• Rambler. Decreasing as a result of their deal with Google

Russian search advertising market. The Russian Internet advertising market has increased exponentially since 2001when contextual and display advertising started at a similar point but both have evolved very differently:

• Russian Contextual advertising much higher in terms of spend than display ads
• The current economic crisis will see contextual advertising to  increase slowly and display to decrease

Russian Paid search platforms:

• Yandex 60%
• Google 32%
• Begun 9%

There are specific peculiarities with Yandex paid platform. Let´s name some:

• Yandex uses a bid system based in units (unit=30 rub)
• Begun bid system is also based in rubles
• Minimum order yandex 300 rub. Above 21000 rub you get a personal manager(also English speaker) that will help you with keywords, bidding, etc, but not landing pages. Begun Minimum order is 140 rub
• Editorial moderation. (alcohol, tobacco, medicine). Yandex is very strict in its policy about this kind of products; Begun however is much more tolerant.

To sum up, Yandex seems to have been able to lure both Russian marketers and Internet users. My explanation would be their ability to understand Russian language much better than Google, or have shaped their algorithm around the nuances of the slavic languages. Although Google keeps growing in Russia, if any company wants to do online business in Russia, or simply raise brand awareness among the countries or Russian confederation, Yandex Direct, Yandex paid service is the tool to use first in order to maximise reach.

If you have any question contact me on twitter on http://twitter.com/oscarcarreras

In this blog we always welcome any data that could shed light about the current status of European SEO and PPC and the International Search Summit gave us very interesting insight about the European Search landscape.

Alex Burmaster from Nielsen online was talking on topline trends, organic paid an secure, and other interesting statistics.

Search Growth:

• Farly good growth in Spain and UK bigger in Italy, 0% in Switzerland
• Time searching : 26% in Uk around 10% in Italy and Spain but still a small amount of time

Organic vs Paid

• CTRs: Bigger in volume in UK and France. 13% paid CTRs(click through rates) in UK, 9 and 7 for Germany and France respectively
• Sectors: Travel, ecommerce, home & fashion in that order for UK and Germany. Main sectors in France is special occasions, travel and automotive
• Outperforming sectors with CTRs for paid search: Insurance, Gifts, Education Careers, Loans, freebies, credit cards. Insurance has more paid clicks than organic

Ctrs

• Sectors: classified goes to 13% CTRs, credit cards only 0.4

Next he procedes to go through European Search Landscape, studying the most popular engines across the main countries.

• Google, Google Image, MSN, Ask, Yahoo
• Ask and Voila decreased the average user time and Voila decresed visitors too although Ask and Trovit grew hugely in unique audience

Mobile Search:

• Biggest increse Spain but less volume, biggest volume IT, UK, FR, DE
• Male dominated more equal in UK
• Age demographics: 35 to 49 main sector in ll the countries. More equal in UK

It was surprising to see that the Italian Market is slightly more developed than UK for Mobile Search. Andy-Atkins Krueger suggested that since Iphone is unlocked in Italian that might have caused a bigger smartphones handset penetration in Italy in comparison with the other top European Markets.

If you have any question contact me on twitter on http://twitter.com/oscarcarreras