Since World Cup fever took hold of the Glide office last week (dream teams have been chosen, sweepstake bets have been placed and the plasma screen has been wheeled into reception) we’ve been wondering how the work forces of the UK will be taking in the games being played during the 9-5.  So, we decided to use our market research tool, GlideInsight to tap into the psyche of the football loving 9-5’ers in the UK, Germany and France to find out who’d be playing by the rules and who would be bending them slightly.  We received over 3000 responses within 24 hours, find out the results below.

The majority of UK respondents (23.55%)* said that their place of work would be “showing the games in the office”.  For those not so fortunate, the old “working from home” line was being wheeled out by 19.20% of you with the other popular options included “on the radio at work” (18.11%) and “online at work” (14.49%) so look out for your office internet slowing down a certain points throughout the day.

The most popular disingenuous option for the UK was to “take a sick day”.  However, only 5.43% of our respondents opted for this.  It would seem that the companies who will allow their workers to watch the games during working hours will benefit most.

We asked our panels in France & Germany the same questions.  In France, watching “online at work” was the number one response at 28.44% “showing the games in the office” coming in at number four with 11.93% a lot of faith in Domenech’s troops it would seem).  In Germany, listening to games “on the radio at work” is the favoured option at 26.58% with “showing the games in the office” coming in at number 3 with 15.82%.

The answers from each region are ranked below.

France

1.    online at work
2.    on the radio at work
3.    working from home
4.    work are showing them
5.    holiday time
6.    meetings
7.    parental leave
8.    sick time

Germany

1.    on the radio at work
2.    online at work
3.    work are showing them
4.    working from home
5.    holiday time
6.    parental leave
7.    meetings
8.    sick time

UK

1.    work are showing them
2.    working from home
3.    on the radio at work
4.    online at work
5.    holiday time
6.    sick time
7.    meetings
8.    parental leave

*We surveyed 3020 people for this research; 1009 from the UK, 1005 from Germany and 1006 from France.  The results have been extrapolated from the 1727 respondents who liked football.  All results were returned within 24 hours.

The first battle of the technologies I remember was Betamax ‘v’ VHS (only just I might add, actually, it was more the old top loader I remember) and having witnessed Blu-Ray win the battle over HD DVD format, are we about to witness another head to head with HTML 5 and Flash.

This time, in the HTML5 corner we have technology behemoths Apple and Microsoft and in the Flash corner, we have software provider and owner of Flash technology, Adobe.

Now, those of you who own an iPhone, iTouch or iPad (jealous) will know that Flash is not supported by any Apple device.  To add to Adobe’s woes, Microsoft’s latest edition of Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) has been built to support HTML5 video playback in H.264 (or MEG-4), rather than flash.  Take a look at this to see IE9 HTML5 video playback in action – jump to around the 26 minute mark.

In a letter addressing the Flash issue, Apple’s Steve Jobs discusses the history between the two companies and the main reasons why Apple has chosen the HTML5 route as opposed to Flash.

Firstly, he takes a pop at the “openness”, reliability, security and performance of Flash, stating that it’s the number one reason Mac’s crash (ouch).  He also mentions the fact that Flash has not performed well on “any” mobile devices and that they’ve been waiting on Adobe to deliver a Smartphone ready version since the beginning of 2009 (double ouch).

So that’s Apple’s stance.  What about the rest of the web?

Now, as with all new standards, questions arise around adoption.  Jobs touches on this too, taking a pop at Adobe’s claim that 75% of video on the web is in Flash.  Jobs’ retort? Almost all of that 75% is available in another format (H.264) which is also HD ready.

So if so much Flash content is available in another format, how much of that 75% Jobs mentioned has adopted the new format?  According to encoding.com, a massive 66%.  Based on that stat, I think Adobe might be fighting a loosing battle as it would seem the choice has already been taken out of their hands.

That stat coupled with the fact that Microsoft’s IE9 will only support H.264 video surely has to be the final nail in the coffin of a format which was produced for yesteryear and continually fails to impress on the Smartphone’s of the future.

Jobs makes an interesting concluding point – “Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice… But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.”

Emma

Taking a break from our regular thoughts and musings on the goings on in the digital world, I’m delighted to announce that the Glide family has grown this week.  Shona, Tom and Alistair all welcomed new additions to their families this week – a first for Shona and Tom and a second for Alistair.

That just leaves Terri….come on baby Watts!

Emma

The decision by the Italian courts to convict Google employees (both past and present) of privacy violation is truly baffling and somewhat concerning.

The case in question concerns a video made by a group of Italian students, which shows them being physically and verbally abusive to a fellow classmate who suffers from Downs’ Syndrome.

In the eyes of the Italian courts “Google broke Italian privacy law by not seeking the consent of all the parties involved before allowing it to go online.”

By pressing ahead with this conviction, is the Italian justice system suggesting that each piece of video content published to the internet, by both individuals and service providers, be pre-screened before publication?  This is surely an impossible task which would seriously alter the web as we know it.

What’s more, to suggest that the publisher, rather than the producers (the true criminals) can hardly be viewed as justice.  The old adage “don’t shoot the messenger” springs to mind.

Lest we not forget that the actual perpetrators of the crime were suspended from their school and sentenced to community service based on the information Google was able to supply the Italian authorities.

Richard Thomas, the UK’s former information commissioner hit it on the head when he said “It is like prosecuting the post office for hate mail that is sent in the post.”

The concerning issue is the wider ramifications which this ruling brings.  The suggestion being made by the Italian authorities is that service providers (such as us) can be held accountable for content published by their users.

So, are the Italian authorities (not renowned for their own credibility some might say) trying to send a message out to the online world?  Should Google have reacted more quickly (it was apparently the most watch clip at one point and resided on the site for two months). What will be the wider ramifications for video/content sharing on the World Wide Web.  Answers to this post below please*.

Emma

*by submitting a comment to this blog, you hereby absolve us of any legal responsibly for your content!

2009 was, as they say, the year in which Twitter exploded.  Celebrities such as Stephen Fry and Ashton Kutcher became fervent Twitter users –  the former of which was accused of having a twitter wobble when he threatened to quit the micro-blogging site after some declared his tweets ‘boring’.

Searches for the site peaked in December 09 after “The Iranian Cyber Army” hacked the site, briefly taking control and redirecting users to their site.

My Twitter revolution began on 11th February 2009.  I had absolutely no idea what it was or why I needed to use it (and to some extent I still don’t). So why did I join? Because if you want to be an early adopter, you’ve got to keep with the times (even if you don’t quite know what the times are).

For the first few months I barely visited the site, with my early ‘tweets’ consisting of updates from my mapmyrun.com feed. Then July rolled around, I graduated and reality dawned “how am I going to find a job?”

What if I made use of all those targeting skills I learned at University and used Twitter to help me find a job? Although that didn’t actually lead me here to Glide, it did give me a valuable insight into how to ‘tweet’ effectively.

What tweet category are you?

A US based marketing research firm called Pear Analytics analysed 2,000 tweets and identified six categories:

1.    News
2.    Spam
3.    Self-Promotion
4.    Pointless babble
5.    Conversational
6.    Pass-along value

The study found that pointless babble (or social grooming as social networking researcher Danah Boyd referred to it) was by far the most popular type of tweet accounting for 40% of all tweets.  But as the category name suggests, it’s not ideal if you’re trying to engage with your audience.

What should you tweet about then?

People like sites like Twitter for real-time news updates.  Take the story of six year old Falcon Heene (the boy from the US who was alleged to have floated away in a homemade weather balloon) who was dubbed ‘balloon boy’ by the social media world.

They also like to promote issues they believe in and protest against those they don’t. For example, every Saturday night for the duration of the X Factor live shows the contestants and the show title were trending topics on Twitter as was the successful Rage Against the Machine campaign for Christmas number one.

People also love the spontaneity of Twitter – think impromptu gatherings like moon walking at Liverpool St station after MJ’s death.

People also like tweets that include interesting content such as music, websites, pictures and videos.

Engage with your audience in the right way and Twitter can be a great promotional tool.  Do it wrong and you risk being classed as a ‘spammer’.

So how can you use Twitter for PR (if you’re not already)?

Think carefully about your strategy.  Take time to understand what (if anything) is being said about you.  Listen to conversations and decide on the best strategy for engagement.

Here are some tips to get you started:

• Post interesting stories with “retweet value” to spread the word and get you noticed
• Tweet snippets of your releases that contain a link to the full release
• Interact with your customers and clients on a more personal level, listen to what they say and engage in a      meaningful way
• Target journalists, experts in your field and even consumers using the @username function
• Use the search and follow tools to monitor how consumers feel about your brand, your area and your competitors
• Use this great application by Edelman to measure how “important” you are on Twitter

Kate

So,   the ‘to index or not to index’ battle has made its way to the desk of Lord Lucas.  Rupert Murdoch’s portrayal of search engines as dark horses of the apocalypse may have been dealt a blow when the Tory peer tabled an amendment to the Digital Economy Bill outlining “Protection of search engines from liability for copyright infringement(292)”.

In layman terms; the amendment gives search engines immunity from copyright infringement to index and copy some of the content of publicly available websites, as long as the copy is used to link back to said website and only if the website carries no form of explicit request not to be indexed i.e. a robots.txt file.

Should the bill be passed next Tuesday, it might just settle once and for all Murdoch’s grumble with the search engines, in his case with Google in particular.

With around 90% of people beginning their online journey via a search engine (and around 80% of the UK choosing Google), you have to wonder how people would find content on news sites in the first place.

In my opinion, using a robots.txt file and banning Google from indexing content is not the way forward for Murdoch.  He has to realise that Google has the search market cornered and that there are better, more viable options for guarding your content whist maintaining FREE traffic to your site.

Option 1
Create an iPhone app, the Guardian did and it’s making them money already.  Sky News has one but it’s free (miss a trick there Rupert?)

Option 2
Only make the first part of your article publicly available – that way, you can still optimise a large part of your content, build links etc to gain listing in the search engines but have the full article behind a private, subcription log-in.  This option would also allow you to sell highly targeted premium ad space.

I could think of a few more but I think you get the point.  What irks me about Rupert Murdoch’s argument is that he seems so ill prepared on the subject.  Maybe if he took some advice or listened to a digital specialist he never would have started the whole debate in the first place.

All eyes on next Tuesday.

Emma

Er, not so sure at this rate.  In my north London bubble, I’m wondering what all the fuss is about.  Sure it’s cold but there’s not a lick of snow on the ground.  A quick peak at the news tells a different story.

The infrastructure of Europe has ground to a halt (temperatures of -33C have been recorded in some parts of Germany) and the US has had one of the worst storms in decades (1ft of snow in New York and 2ft in Washington).  With more snow for the UK forecast,  I’m wondering what my chances are of making it across the border for Christmas.

Emma

Having just read the draw for the next round of the UEFA Champions league, I can’t help but come over a little cynical about the result.

I mean come on, Chelsea get Inter, sure to be billed as ‘The Return of The Chosen One’ and Manchester United get AC Milan, sure to be billed as ‘The Return of the Prodigal Son’.  Can it really just be coincidence or are there more sinister forces at work.  From all the possible permutations, these two combinations are surely the most marketable and definitely the one’s to watch.

Emma

Go to Google and enter ‘ba strike’ and you’ll see how brands have leveraged this potential PR disaster for BA to push their own products and services.

One ad of particular note and first to the table is the ad from Ann Summers – “The planes may be grounded, but you can still take off with our toys!” Genius.

It will be interesting to see how BA handles this situation from a PR perspective.  How will they gauge pubic sentiment to their threat of legal action?  Will the public get behind the stricken carrier or will they stand firm behind the employees?

To find out, we’re going to ask the audience through our online research panel tool GlideInsight.  Check back tomorrow for the results.

Emma

What will become of my Saturday nights? Sunday’s too won’t be the same.  They were beginning to feel like Saturday’s; home cooked dinner, nice bottle of red, Xfactor.

With Geordie crooner Joe crowned Xfactor king (despite my multiple votes for the shoe shuffler from Essex), what to plan my weekend around now?

Let’s see….mad, patience testing, spending vast amounts of cash on others, Christmas shopping round Oxford Street?  Great.  Extra sessions down the gym followed by some more recall training for Cooper (well, he does need it).  Gym, at the weekend?  Are you mad? (don’t answer).

Oh well, it would seem there’s nothing for it.  It’s back to getting out of the house of a Saturday evening and socialising I suppose.  Lovely, and just in time for the ‘cold spell’.

Emma