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If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my Yesterday was possibly the darkest hour for Digital in Britain. The government pulled out a regressive report that, if implemented, will stop Britain from ever becoming a leading Digital nation and prevent us all from taking advantage of the opportunities for disruptive creativity, social advance and jobs-and-wealth generating entrepreneurship that Digital technologies present to us all. Incumbent dinosaurs and monopolists can sleep soundly, sure that no risk menaces their dated business models. Everyone else will miss out, and have to pay yet one more stealth tax for the privilege.
A 50p levy on each fixed line will go towards rural broadband infrastructure. This will be used to encourage telcos to enter into a business they’ve already rejected as not profitable. Digital technology, meanwhile, keeps developing i.e. new wireless technologies that negate the need for the infrastructure in no time. This infra will be built where there’s no demand for it –if there was demand, prospects would have been willing to pay the right price for and would not need us to pay for it. It will require lifelong subsidies until it’s quietly switched off or nationalised. Apparently the tax only covers fixed lines – I’m hopeful for a good unlimited deal on wireless broadband in the coming months!
Innovation will not do for social sharing and cooperation. It doesn’t matter that rights owners, content licensees and ISPs are already cooperating on new subscription models that for the first time seem to address the public’s needs and be commercially viable. New business models, thriving innovation, opportunities for new and existing players? We can’t have that! Instead, we will send a letter to anyone who dares dissent with what we say is best, and if they don’t comply we’ll censor their Internet use.
Practical issues abound about the proposed measures: if a site is illegal it should be shut down, if it isn’t it can’t be censored; ports and protocols are content-agnostic so port and protocol blocking won’t do either (I can hear no talk of HTTP being blocked, being as it is used routinely for the transmission of illegal and indecent material…)
Yesterday was a day of mourning for Digital Britain. The minister presenting the report is on his way out and the government he still serves will follow him pretty soon. But we shouldn’t just be complacent and hope for a new administration to change tack. This is too important. Too much freedom, many opportunities and livelihoods depend on it. I say no to Digital Britain, and so should you.

Posted on June 17th, 2009 by Roberto Hortal
Filed under: Commentary, eBusiness | 2 Comments »

Social media is the darling of our customers. People spend countless hours with one eye on Twitter, upload their lives to Facebook in real time and fiercely compete to expand their LinkedIn networks. eBusinesses know this, fighting for attention as consumers spend their time socialising online. Yet for all the attention and all the investment, most of us can’t really account for the benefit that active participation on social media is bringing to our bottom line.
We know it works, but we can’t see it working. However, there is an opportunity to make at least some business sense from our investment on social media: affiliate marketing.
Like any other form of conversation, social media is peppered with references to commercial entities. Products, services and brands are routinely mentioned in a social context. Indeed it is those mentions that we as eMarketers crave. So, is it so bad to turn those mentions into a measurable revenue stream by offering cash to the people building those links?
I guess it depends who you ask, how you do it and what you call social media. Flogging your wares out of context is a big no. Faking independence is also out of the question. But being upfront and transparent about commercial relationships has been tried successfully by heavily-trafficked, highly popular sites. After all, if you genuinely think a product is good enough to write about, what’s wrong with being rewarded for the trouble? People have been doing this with amazon books for years with no apparent backlash. Why should the mainstream adoption of this model be any different?
I’ve been around long enough to remember the first online ads. A similar rebellious undercurrent could be felt at the time: fear the commercialisation of the net and the end of free online will!
In the end, and not without mistakes and the odd horror story -some of them still being perpetrated today- the introduction of advertising online have given us countless high-quality free services that we enjoy today without question.
The Internet would be a much less useful resource should doomsayers had triumphed. Likewise, social spaces will flourish only if they pay for themselves. Social media and affiliate marketing. A match made in heaven.

Posted on May 22nd, 2009 by Roberto Hortal
Filed under: eBusiness | 2 Comments »

Central and Eastern Europe. Countries like Poland and the Czech Republic are just a couple of hours away by plane. Their press carry adverts for iPhone, there are URLs on every billboard. Large, thriving urban populations are hooked on broadband. Yet, under the skin, the Online Business landscape couldn’t be more different to that of the UK.
eMarketing models are unsophisticated and inefficient. Display CPM banners rule: their ills (in short: they don’t work!) smearing the whole industry with a reputation of mediocre results and hindering much-needed development.
Performance-based eMarketing models are in their infancy – a big opportunity for seasoned Affiliate marketers willing. No matter how hard you look for affiliate-style business (aggregators like Confused, social hubs like MoneySavingExpert, not to mention purpose-built affiliate propositions like MyDeco) there just aren’t any.
These are markets dominated by small local brands running basic services underpinned by basic business models. They have what we used to get years ago, before the Net became a serious business environment and really talented people, backed by a little investment from a few visionaries gave us the great online businesses we all know and love today. I’m not talking about the revenue-challenged darlings of Web 2.0 (Tweeter, Spotify, even Skype) – I’m talking about eBusinesses that generate millions of pounds a year by adding real value to consumers and the business environment alike.
The CEE region has got the hallmarks of the next online battleground. People are online, hungry for products and services. Online banking adoption is large, and raising steadily – an indication of willingness to adopt, and a key payments enabler for internet commerce. What is missing is the eBusiness ecosystem, from great Market and Industry information (cue eConsultancy, eBenchmarkers, HitWise) to eMarketing training (eConsultancy again) planning and execution (results-oriented agencies like iCrossing, affiliate networks like CJ, ad network like DoubleClick) and measurement (DoubleClick once more, Atlas).
Creating this ecosystem, and the businesses that feed off it -from straight offline business models deployed online (Autotrader, Rightmove) to online-only, pure-revenue machines (Lastminute.com)- shouldn’t take long at all. Ideas abound, technology is readily available for next to nothing and this is the Net – distances are not going to be a problem.
This is a market prime for what we do best, barriers to entry are very low and the competition is weak or none at all. Online entrepreneurs of the world: go for it!

Posted on April 24th, 2009 by Roberto Hortal
Filed under: Commentary, eBusiness | 1 Comment »

I’ve been an avid user of Twitter for a few months now, to the detriment of this blog among other things. I’ve already written about the appeal of short text and how Twitter encourages hard thinking so that your message will fit the format.
But that’s just the beginning. As a consumer, Twitter is empowering me to have a reach and a potential influence that I could only dream of before. I follow people and media outlets that I follow and read in real life. But on Twitter, I can talk to them and they talk back to me.
From ABC and El Pais, 2 of Spain’s biggest dailies all the way to Derren Litten, the creator of ITV’s Benidorm and some of the leading UK journalists at The Guardian and the FT have found time to read my messages and reply to me. In a small way, I may have influenced these people in some way. Maybe Derren will add a sketch about the legendary inaccuracy of Spain’s weather forecasters to a future series of Benidorm!
The secret sauce of Twitter is its ability to bring down barriers and allow personal communications, intimate and directed within an open space, to flourish. The open nature of the communication keeps it honest, while the ability to direct messages (using the user-invented @name formula) makes it intimate, akin to looking at someone’s eyes over a crowded table at the pub.
So personal is this space that brands typically encourage people to Twitter under their name, not a blank branded account. Even when using branded channels (Spain’s media are particularly bad at this, never letting on who sits behind the corporate account) the personality of the writer can’t be held back. ABC.es is clearly written by a staffer well below the average age at the paper, one whose Tweets sometimes feel so remote from the ethos of the paper it is hard not to feel sorry for the brand, the writer, or both.
Thinking about all this, it is no wonder so many of the people I follow post about their after-work drinks with the same zeal as they do about their work activity. Twitter is a bit of a large local where everyone’s welcome and the atmosphere never gets too rowdy.

Posted on April 7th, 2009 by Roberto Hortal
Filed under: Commentary, Social Networks | No Comments »

I’ve only recently started using Twitter. I have not been an early adopter of the short-message-to-the-cloud service. I signed up early but didn’t use it. I didn’t understand what was in it for me. Then I spoke at a conference and mentioned my Twitter name. By the time I was off the stage I had about 10 new followers and a few direct messages and replies. This was good!
Microblogging has a certain quality, a way to provide satisfaction to both the originator and the readers. It may be the ability to engage in conversation. It may that you can snoop into other people’s. It may be that it gives the small people the power to interact, maybe influence, brands and figures that seemed so removed before. But for me, the key to Twitter is the self-imposed restriction to 140 characters.
Through history, scarcity -real of self-inflicted- drives human ingenuity. Scarcity is at the core of the market economy. But is also at the core of the creative genius. We are fascinated by the small, the brief, the instant. And we love to play with language, that most human of creations, to make it fit down narrower and narrwoer alleys. How small will it go?
Cast your mind back for a second to a former era. Think of classified ads. Scarcity, generated by the size of the page, the need to fit as many ads as possible and the cost per word model has generated masterpieces of the brief. A recent BBC radio segment provided excellent examples of creative uses of the space -all sadly gone from my memory now. They showed the evolution from dry brevity to inventiveness to innuendo, humour etc. Taking advantage of, rather than fighting against, the brevity of the format.
Fast forward a few decades and SMS takes off as a consumer communication medium. A generation adopted SMS as their preferred conversation carrier. It is instant, it can be broadcast, it is personal. But the key to its success must be its brevity. In an era of unlimited storage and ever larger screens, kids flock to the limited format of SMS because it provides the boundaries against which they can exercise creativity.
I have rambled on long enough. I could go on to talk about Haiku, to conjecture about the important of paper size in the adoption of carrier pigeons. I could go on and on. But I have now discovered Twitter and joined the small is beautiful revolution. So I’ll shut up now. See @you all later on #Twitter!

Posted on March 7th, 2009 by Roberto Hortal
Filed under: Commentary, Social Networks | 3 Comments »

Today I spoke at Revolution’s Innovate Your Paid & Natural Search Campaigns For Maximum ROI.
My presentation centred on Google’s Universal Search, Google’s current way of presenting search results mixing pages, pictures, video and more. I explored how Universal Search introduces a range of opportunities for Online Marketers and how MORE TH>N Business has benefitted from moving early to take full advantage of them.
What do you think are the key opportunities and threats presented by Universal Search? Is it a revolution for SEO and PPC or just not much of a change at all? Let me know in the comments!

Posted on March 4th, 2009 by Roberto Hortal
Filed under: eBusiness | 1 Comment »