> Blog

Sinead gives her take on the Women in Media conference and asks some pertinent questions about the role of women in the digital industry.

The Old Market in Hove saw the 2nd annual conference for Women in Media. It was definitely a day for the “red heads” to celebrate and share their exciting experiences in the wonderful world of the web, TV, gaming and music.

Linde Wolters, the Editor of thenextwomen.com urged women to have a more ‘can-do’ attitude, and to be more confident. She promotes this when she writes about female internet heroes.

She mentioned that women need to be more entrepreneurial. Her goal for the online community is to make women “more notable and quotable” but feels that it is difficult with the lack of female role models to inspire others. She talked about the digital industry which is perceived to be “geeky” and predominantly male, but Linde believes that geeks are cool. She says that women are being targeted very closely by marketers online as they believe women to be serious shoppers. More women than men are blogging and getting involved in social networking.

Sophie Major, the Head of Yahoo’s International department informed us that there is greater equality on the web than in other industries. In her experience, gender has not been an issue. She believes that being a woman has helped her stand out in her industry and be noticed.

Rosie Freshwater set up her company Leapfrogg whilst being three months pregnant, at the same time as being made redundant. She now employs 20 people and is such an inspiration to others. She said that being a woman in the digital industry is “great” and she has suffered no prejudice. She admitted that “it’s brill to be a geek”

Some interesting statistics emerged: 33% women work in TV & film, 31% on the web, with lower figures of 13% in the music Industry and 12% in the gaming industry.

This leads to an interesting question for further discussion and blogging:

Are women treated differently than men in the world of the web, TV, gaming and music?

Are women suffering prejudice in these industries?

Grant shares his thoughts on being a new father in the midst of the collapsing economy, and how the credit crunch and babyhood are actually related.

Being a new parent and the current financial situation seem to share many similarities.

The sleepless nights and all the worry about the economy (wow- these babies are expensive) all strike a certain resonance.

However soon enough, normality (and hopefully more sleep) will return to the world and those companies who have planned for the future will thrive. As was seen in the Tech boom/bust often those companies who continue investing in marketing through the leaner times will come through stronger and more profitable out at the other end.

In a slowing economy there is inevitably increased pressure to get more ‘bang for your buck’ and in this regard online search marketing delivers excellent ROI. With online adverting set to become even more prominent over the next year, businesses can’t afford not to invest because if your business is not being found in the search engines then unfortunately it’s very likely that your competitors are.

Now I just have to work out how to pay for the school/university/wedding etc etc etc.

Cheers! Grant

Your blog editor, Kaila, has been back in her native country of Canada and shares her perspective on both the Canadian media and the state of Canadian online retail…

Your favourite Canuck (yes, that’s what we call ourselves) is back in Canada for a few weeks. Whilst here, it’s been interesting flipping through our business magazines and (in addition to seeing sentences written with my native grammatical structures – very exciting) seeing how Canadians are interpreting the credit crisis.

It would seem that we were a bit cocky at first. Journalists were musing that the credit crunch may just avoid Canada (though ignore may have been a more apt verb). But alas, our loonie (that’s our dollar) has fallen to the lowest levels it’s been in five years, which incidentally means the value of my student loan has gone down… But probably not so great news for the rest of Canada.

In addition, Time magazine (you may have heard of it) had an article this week on what’s called ‘globality’. The term was first coined by Daniel Yergin in 1998 (wikipedia it). It represents the end state of globalisation, where everyone is competing everywhere for everything.

Though the Time article did not go into much discussion of the implications of this ‘globality’ for the world wide web, I think that it’s pretty obvious that much of this staggering influx of competition would be taking place online. Thus, SEO (and especially, you guess it, multilingual SEO) will play a big role in this new world of anybody’s-game competition.

Now, obviously Time magazine articles are focused on the US, but since most people don’t seem to notice much of a difference between Canada and the US, I feel that I can draw certain conclusions from this article that are quite applicable to my big country.

I’ve only been back for about a week and a half, but from browsing through Canadian e-commerce websites, it would appear Canada lags behind the online times. Not only are our sites not optimised in other languages, they’re often not even optimised in English. (note: if you Google Roots Canada, one of our top Canadian clothing retailers, the US-tagged site comes up first…)

Canada, being a very multicultural country, has massive expat communities from all over the world. Since people prefer to search in their native language, as we at Oban have been saying all along, then actually even those Canadian websites that are only targeting Canadians would do well to have languages like Tamil, Japanese, Punjabi, etc.

All the Canadian newspapers are talking about how retail shopping is down in Canada, and ‘whoa is me, what are we to do’. The trick in the new year will be for Canadian e-tailers to get some serious optimization done on their websites not only in English (and of course our other national language, Québecois French), but also in the various languages of the rising international giants including China, India and Brazil.

Cheers! Kaila

Our SEO news expert Mohammad Heidari Far shares some of the most important recent news in the SEO world.

Google allowing gambling ads in UK

Google announced on October 18th that it is going to allow gambling ads in its paid search service. Yahoo and MSN have recently started allowing gambling ads, and Google surely did not want to miss out on this opportunity.

Google, like Yahoo, requires a copy of gambling license to be submitted when setting up the campaign; MSN at this point does not require the licensing. There is a good amount of interest in this sector and Oban is currently doing some initial market research for a client to tap into this area.

Google webmaster tools alerts site owners about possible hacks

Google announced on the 16th that its webmaster tools will alert site owners of possible hack of their CMS. The post has triggered different reactions from users. The initial step would start with five to six thousand webmasters that run their sites on WordPress version (2.1.1), since this version is known to be vulnerable to exploits.

Google Q3 financial report

Despite the worries from analysts about the weakening economy and its impact on Google’s revenue in this quarter, Google reported a Q3 revenue increase of 31% year-over-year, and an increase of three percent over the second quarter of 2008.

This further proves that online advertisement has not suffered enormously due to the credit crunch, since advertising on Google turns out to be much more economical and affordable than traditional marketing methods, such as print and TV.

Yahoo to cut workforce by 10%

Everyone remembers Yahoo turning down Microsoft’s offer a few months ago. Microsoft offered a share price of $33. Yahoo had its quarterly financial report this month and there was no good news. The share prices are at an all time low of approximately $12 and Yahoo announced the plans to cut its workforce by 10%, i.e. 1,500 employees. Mr. Yang has a hard few months ahead of him.

Cheers! Mo

The Oban girls made a trip to the Women in Media Conference which took place in Brighton last Friday. Being women in media themselves, the girls found the day to be jam-packed with relevant info. Here, Sandra Zerr gives her take on the event…

Impressive woman power at the Women in Media Conference 2008. It was a day packed with lots of interesting and also amusing talks by various women from ‘the Web’, the gaming sector, TV and Music.

Main topics were how well women coped within these sectors, how well they were presented and what are good reasons for women to work within these industries. Of course, the important question was addressed of how to combine (and is it possible to combine) all this with children and family life.

While the Web part was obviously closest to our hearts (us=the female Oban delegation) all the other topics were very interesting as well…especially since the main message for women in general was pretty much a red thread going through all presentations: Women, say ‘Yes’ and go for it!

Particularly Rosie Freshwater’s story on how she founded fellow Brighton ‘search-led digital marketing agency’ while being pregnant, was really inspiring.

Didn’t someone just tell me that a large percentage of new businesses are started by ‘new mums’? Apparently, a woman’s brain capacity is at its peak after giving birth, err – but despite being at a low during pregnancy…well that didn’t seem to apply to Rosie!

The colourful Benita Matofska (Electric Sky Productions) illustrated beautifully her key points for success (all run through while reiterating her story of success, including smoking ‘local herbs’ with Algerian immigrants in Malta…haha) – which I’ll try to repeat here:
1. Sense of humour, 2. Sense of humour, 3. ALWAYS have a plan B, 4. Never take ‘No’ as an answer, 5. Stamina & determination…and a few more I probably missed.

Overall it was a highly inspiring event, with loads of interesting women – on-stage & off-stage during the short networking slots between the talks.

I’m definitely looking forward to Women in Media 2009!

Cheers! Sandra

Hi everyone,

Just wanted to let you all know that Oban has been asked to edit the SEO and Paid Search page for the tourism and hospitality management online publication Victoo.

We’ll be keeping it updated regularly with loads of interesting international search marketing news and tips for the travel industry.

We’ve just had a new article published now from our MD Greig who talks about the future of search marketing for tourism and hospitality.

Do let us know if there is any particular topic in this area that you would like to read about.

Cheers!

Kaila

Sinead Comerford gives her take on the Sussex Enterprise Conference, highlighting special Oban mentions during International Trade discussions and the attractiveness of James Caan…

The Sussex Enterprise Conference took place today in the Brighton Centre. Guests listened with great interest to talks delivered on International Trade and got to learn handy tips about forging working relationships with China and Russia. The Principal of Chichester College, Dr Richard Parker spoke of the college’s success in reaching its Chinese audience. Stephen Dalziel, the Executive Director of the Russo-British Chamber of Commerce gave a hugely interesting speech on Russian relations and highlighted the need for planning, patience and persistence when forging a successful working practice with this nation.

The International trade team of the Sussex Enterprise mentioned to my delight, that Oban recently presented at their last meeting on the power of search engine optimisation for the global internet. (more…)

Self-described Sussex dragon Carol Joy discusses the recent Sussex Enterprise Annual Business conference.

Wow – a plethora of dragons….. Chinese dragons; James Caan (speaker) and me (certified Sussex dragon). Brighton has been overwhelmed.

Oban was at the Sussex Enterprise bash today and attended the International Trade sessions – really interesting stuff on China and Russia. Striking how business-like Universities and colleges have become. Chichester College has successfully targeted Chinese, Japanese and Korean students, and is aware of the growing importance of the internet and the word-of-mouth (blogs) sources of student acquisition… Oban Multilingual was mentioned in the International Trade sessions, and we hope that budding exporters were listening to the message that culture-specific marketing is key.

-Carol

Sinead would like to thank her fellow Obanites for their generous support to Cancer Research UK. The 10K race around the beautiful grounds of Blenheim Palace was a challenging one and the weather was most unkind. Sinead battled through the cold and the rain up the torturous hills, spurred on by the generous support of her colleagues kind donations. She reached her target by completing the race in just under the hour (despite twisting an ankle the week before). The next big challenge is the Great Northern Run next year in Newcastle which will be a gruelling 13 miles.

-Sinead

Though it may have taken place a good few weeks ago, faithful Oban blogger Sinead Comerford is still excited about Ad:Tech. Here she talks about just what made it so great.

Ad-Tech was a great success and the footfall was a plenty. Oban met with folk from around the world and the event was truly a global one. Some of our visitors were from the States, Europe and Israel. We met with Presidents, CEO and MDs from UK Flower companies to Dutch Online Gambling companies. (more…)