SiteVisibility » Social Media

Is Google + just ‘Facebook for Grown-ups’?

Sarah — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 15:59:55 +0000

When Facebook was launched I decided not to join up. It just seemed like another website to waste my time entering data into, uploading pictures and then never use. But suddenly I found that I was missing out on events, news and parties because everything was happening through Facebook and I wasn’t part of it. So I joined up, got sucked in for a while, checked it 20 times a day, changed my status, uploaded pictures etc. After a while the novelty wore off a little and now I just dip in from time to time, but it’s still a great way to stay in touch and connect with people without actually having to ‘get in touch’ with them.

Then there was Google Buzz and just as I decided to start using it, it seemed to vanish. People found Google Buzz difficult to get into because you couldn’t categorise the people you were following. It also had a big security flaw when it was launched that opened up Google Profiles to outside people so that they could look at who your contacts were and who you were chatting with most, so many people were sceptical about getting involved and it got off to a slow start. Also, with most people already using Facebook and Twitter, a lot of people thought ‘what’s the point?’ Google Buzz was around for a little over a year before Google announced that they were going to shut it down. I’m glad I didn’t waste my time.

And now there is Google+ and I wonder again whether there is any point in spending time setting up circles, uploading photos, making comments etc if it’s just going to be another flop. Especially as I’ve been using Facebook for over 4 years and already connect with so many people. And it looks more ‘techy’ than Facebook and less user-friendly. And I wonder if I’m grownup enough for it.

But this time apparently it is different. Google have introduced Google + slowly this time, concentrating on privacy and control as a fundamental part of the project and it’s looking like this project is here to stay.

Google+’s homepage has all the similar features to Facebook; posts, images, photos, links etc. The main difference is that Google allows you to categorise your friends, so that you can choose who you share information with. When you create a post in Facebook, everyone you are friends with sees it (hence the stories of people getting fired after their boss sees their comment about how boring their job is). Another strongpoint is that uploading your photos is much easier and quicker, and this is something that lots of Facebook users often complain about. Again, you can share your photos with just your family or friends and make sure that your work colleagues don’t see those embarrassing night out pictures, or your friends aren’t bored by photos from a work event.

A few more features that they have been slowly introducing are ‘Huddle’ where you can chat with lots of people in one window and ‘Spark’ where you tell Google your likes and dislikes and Google sends you information on these chosen subjects.

Google +1 is similar to a Facebook ‘Like’ in that when you ‘+1’ a website you are sharing with your circles that you like a website or story. If someone that you know recommends something then you are more likely to visit the site and Google knows this only too well. The real difference in this feature is that Google will be using this data for very different reasons to Facebook, because they can then use this information to give Google+ users the search results that they ‘think’ are most appropriate for them. Of course it is very early days, but it could definitely prove a bit of a headache for us SEOs, seeing as we have no control over who is ‘+1ing’ what. What this does mean for us and our clients though, is that the sooner they have a +1 button on their site, and the more people they get to +1 them, then when Google does start seriously using this data for search, they will definitely be ahead of the game.

And it seems that Google have already started using +1 in their algorithm. In an experiment by Rand Fishkin it seemed that simply by clicking the +1 button for a page, it’s rankings were altered and it went from half way down page 2, to number 6 on page 1.

So I have I answered my question? Is Google+ ‘Facebook for grown-ups? Ana Hoffman (Self-made Internet Marketing, blogging and SEO Specialist) says:

“I would love to see Facebook remain a “family” social network, and Google+ gear more towards business professionals, sort of like LinkedIn, just with more dialogue. From SEO perspective, Google+ is priceless and we can’t afford to ignore that. All the initial signals indicate that G+ actions, like shares, +1, etc. might become an active ranking factor in the near future”

So I think that yes, at the moment that is what Google+ is. I don’t think it will take over Facebook, but it will become more important, especially to professionals and businesses. Especially seeing as Google have announced that they are to release their business pages earlier than originally planned. So I will get into Google+, but at the moment, possibly more with my ‘SEO’ hat on rather than on a personal level. And then we’ll just wait and see.

Sarah has blogged about social media before, here and here.

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Is Google + just ‘Facebook for Grown-ups’?

Top Free Twitter Tools for 2011

Simon — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 09:35:12 +0000

I’ve been getting more and more involved with social media lately, especially with Twitter, which in turn has led me to conduct a lot of research into free tools to help with my work. After some lengthy sessions of going through blog posts about Twitter tools lists and then using them, I initially realised that there are so many out there. However, despite the fact that there are many tools and blog posts about them, there are very few people who have looked into making a definitive list of completely useful tools (I stress the importance of useful). Therefore, for your reading and Twitter pleasure I have whittled them all down to my top 5 list of free Twitter tools for 2011.

Ok, here we go! First up is:
1) http://twoolr.com
This tool is the only tool out there which can give you detailed free stats on your Twitter account. There are several other tools such as ‘twitterstats’ and ‘archivist’ which look pretty but don’t offer any concrete data. Twoolr gives you a nice dashboard of stats to look through. You can view the times of the day you tweet, where you use Twitter, how often you post, account growth as well as giving you the possibility to view who has followed and un-followed you by date. Finally, you can also find information on your re-tweets and the times of when you are re-tweeted the most. In short, this is the only free tool which will give you those all-important Twitter stats.

2) http://twiangulate.com
I personally have found this tool the most useful of all. I have often sat on Ttwitter thinking, ‘how can I find more relevant followers and quickly?’ Well, this little tool will help you find accurately and quickly lots more Twitter followers. Not only that, the tool is able to compare on one page your competitors followers, which you can quickly add them yourself. A much needed time saving tool indeed! Thank you twiangulate!

3) http://twileshare.com/app/share
Twileshare is a great way to help you create more engaging posts, offering you the power to upload documents straight to Twitter. Pictures, PDFs, word documents and eBooks can all be uploaded which can further engage your readers.

4) http://twtpoll.com/
This brilliant site offers a different way to get customer feedback. Here, you can create and share polls with Twitter followers and Facebook friends. This provides you with useful information and research which means that you can later post this onto your blog to help gain further followers and fans.

5) Twitter directories
http://www.wefollow.com
http://www.twellow.com
http://justtweetit.com/

Ok, as you can see this last entry is in fact a bunch of tools, but more precisely a form of twitter directories. Here you can find relevant followers all split up into different interests/sectors. More importantly, if you sign up and register your own Twitter account you will further improve your Twitter visibility and awareness.

In summary, these tools will improve your Twitter experience as well as save you time. There are some great tools in this list which will heighten your twitter visibility, getting more people viewing your profile, and potentially gaining much more followers.

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Top Free Twitter Tools for 2011

Measuring Social Media with Google Analytics

Graeme — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 13:19:48 +0000

Measuring social media with Google Analytics

Originally produced and presented by Graeme Benstead-Hume and SiteVisibility for the Brighton Digital Marketing Festival event September 2011. Measuring social media with Google Analytics covers a number of ways to segment your Google Analytics data to better measure the success of your social media campaigns.

Handouts for this presentation are available below or as a download here: Measuring Social Media with Google Analytics Handout.

Creating Campaign Tracking Code

Visit http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55578 or alternatively search for ‘URL builder’ in Google.

Website URL – Enter the URL you will be linking to from your social media activity.

Campaign Source – Enter the name of the social channel / site you are linking from, e.g. twitter.com

Campaign Medium – Will group your campaign sources together in your reports so enter Social or Social Media.

Campaign Name – Choose a more specific identifier for your campaign, e.g. twitter outreach.

Click on Generate URL and copy and paste the resulting text instead of your usual URL.

You can find your campaign report in Google Analytics under ‘Traffic Sources’ and ‘Campaigns’

This even works when the URL with tracking code is minified.

Creating an advanced segment for social media traffic

Find and click on the Advanced Segments drop-down button at the top right hand side of the report.

Choose the ‘Create a new advanced segment’ option in the drop-down menu

Advanced segments in Google Analytics are constructed from blocks which allow or disallow certain segments of traffic; in this case we need just one block.

Open the traffic sources drop-down categorised beneath the dimensions filters. Find the Source box and drag it up in to the empty dimension or metric box.

Change the condition to read matches regular expression

Under value input the following regular expression:

This should cover most of the social sites you might receive referring traffic from. If you promote yourself on any other social sites you can add them on to the end of the list using the pipe character | to separate each entry.

Finally give the segment a nice name and create the segment. You can check that the segment works properly by visiting your traffic sources report with the segment enabled.

Filtering Social Media Traffic

Navigate to the Analytics Settings screen where you should see your existing profiles.

Create a new profile with the Add new profile button.

Warning – if you do not create a new profile you may irretrievably lose data.

Add a profile for an existing domain and choose the domain you want to filter in the select domain dropdown. Give the new profile a nice name such as Social Media Filter and click finish.

Once you have created the new profile return to the Analytics Settings screen and find the edit button by the new profile:

Scroll down to the filters box and click the add new filter link.

Referring Traffic Filter

First set up a filter which only tracks referring traffic (We don’t want to miss any potential new social referrers!)

On the filter setup screen:

Select Add new Filter for Profile

Filter Name – Referrer Traffic Only

Filter Type – Choose Custom Filter – Exclude

Filter field – Choose Campaign Medium

Filter Pattern – Enter organic|(none)|direct|cpc|image

Case Sensitive – Select No

Social Media Medium Filter

Next we will group all of our known social media channels into a new medium named Social Media.

Click the add new filter link again and on the filter setup screen enter the following details:

Filter Name – Referrer Traffic Only

Filter Type – Choose Custom Filter – Advanced

Field A -> Extract A – choose Campaign Source and add our social networks regular expression as the value:

Field B -> Extract B – leave these blank

Output To -> Constructor – Choose Campaign Medium and name it Social Media

Field A Required – Yes

Field B Required – No

Override Output Field – Yes

Case Sensitive – No

Please note that our regular expression above has been truncated as we are allowed at most 255 characters in our field extract value.

Full Referral Path Filter

Finally we create a filter which will provide the full path of our referrers so that we can identify traffic from various campaigns even if they from the same social channel. This data is crucial if you are trying to compare the traffic arriving from two distinct profiles on Twitter.

This filter provides this data in the user defined report under visitors.

Filter Name – Full Referral Path

Filter Type – custom filter – advanced

Field A -> Extract A – choose referral and enter the value (.*)

Field B -> Extract B – none

Output To -> Constructor – choose user defined and enter the value $A1

Field A Required – yes

Field B Required – no

Override Output Field – yes

Case Sensitive – no

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Measuring Social Media with Google Analytics

Is There a Correlation Between RT’s, Facebook Likes and the Other Social Signals?

Kelvin — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 08:40:49 +0000

Yesterday I published a well received article on econsultancy on why Google can be fairly confident that Google+ could already give them good social signals for rankings, even though they don’t have as many users as the other social media sharing sites.

I won’t rehash that article, but my gut feeling was, G could be fairly confident if something was popular Google+, it would likely to be popular on other social sites. But gut-feeling is rarely enough. So I carried out tiny scale correlation study looking at one site and whether there was any mathematical relationship between the number of shares on Google+ and the other social sites.

Initially I took 15 recent articles from SearchEngineLand and benchmarked the number of Tweets, Google+1, Linkedin Shares and Facebook Likes. The results were startling.

I explored whether there was a linear correlation between the number of Google+1 votes and the other social votes. There was a correlation a really, really strong one. There were dozens of flaws in this sample, it was just one site, just fifteen articles and the audience of SearchEngineLand far more likely to use Google+ than any ‘normal’ web users but there was no argument the correlation was there.

Between G+ and FB 0.97

Between G+ and Tweets 0.94

Between G+ and LinkedIn Shares 0.95

1.0 is a perfect correlation, and this kind of correlation is pretty much amazing, so much so initially I had to check my sums several times. At this point I’d made my point for the initial blog post but so amazed by the results I had to explore further.

While something being a great piece of content should increase the likelihood of being shared, i.e. all good stuff gets shared but surely different pieces of content would appeal more or less to certain social media users.

So I expanded the test to include a couple of other sites. Surely that’d be enough to break the correlation.

This time I added a further two popular blogs, this time Mashable and & Engadget still fifteen articles. (They didn’t include LinkedIn stats so I dropped studying them) and the correlation was still really strong.

Correlation between Tweets & FB 0.66

Correlation between Tweets & G+ 0.81

Correlation between FB & G+ 0.69

So not quite as strong as the initial sample but still pretty strong, I considering expanding the study to more sites and more articles but I’m growing in confidence there is a huge correlation between the two.

Would you find the research useful?

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Is There a Correlation Between RT’s, Facebook Likes and the Other Social Signals?

What We Think of Google+

Mila — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 14:48:43 +0000

As you’ve very likely heard, Google introduced Google+ last week, which many say is a response to Facebook. We’ve been using it here in the Think Tank to figure it out and get to know it a bit better. It’s still early days for this new tool, but here are some initial thoughts from a few members of the team. Feel free to share your views on Google+ in the comments.

Truus Heremans, Trainee Digital Marketing Consultant:

Initially I had my doubts about Google+, being such a closed social networking tool not worth using when already on Facebook, Twitter or MySpace. However, once invited and logged onto the service I started discovering its interesting tools. As Google released more and more invites I started connecting to others. Your contacts can be assigned to “Circles”, by dragging them from the top of the screen to blue Circles, and you can name them basically anything you wish (and they can’t see which Circles they’re in, so there is much liberty there). Using the Circles model the user gains a greater amount of control over what is published, since you can select which Circles you would like to share your information/posts with. Google+ seems to be aimed at people who are interested in sharing things with people or groups with similar interests rather than trying to reach the highest number of virtual “friends” (as seems to be more the case on Facebook).

When uploading a video, I received an alert asking my visibility preferences. Again, Google+ is truly focused on “privacy” and “control”. You can choose whether or not you would like your friends to comment on your photos, video’s etc. Moreover, when connecting to others, there is no consent required of both sides. You can follow anyone, similar to how you follow on Twitter.

For the individual consumer, Google+ has built a platform where the right content can reach the right people. However, for now, Google+ is really “only” aimed at consumers. If you’ve created a Google+ account for your business you might need to wait a little longer until the right features are released.

Alan Cairns, Digital Marketing Manager:

So Google have unveiled their latest attempt to topple Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook. Since the far-from-impressive take-up of Google Buzz and Wave, I approached Google+ with scepticism. Buzz annoyed me – the way it stole my tweets and Facebook updates without my permission.

It seems to me that many users will have invested so much time, effort and bandwidth into Facebook – creating profiles, uploading content and building contacts that they might see switching to Google+ as going back to square one. It remains to be seen whether people will be willing to spend time establishing a Google+ presence, but Facebook have already blocked one application which can help users to export their contacts to the new G+ network, so it’s likely that migration of other content like photos and videos will be resisted by Facebook.

One of the biggest differences between Google+ and Facebook or Twitter, is that company accounts are not allowed on the new Google network yet. While this might mean less spam and advertising messages, it will also keep some users off the network. Particularly on Twitter, some of the most interesting accounts are actually operated anonymously or by companies or organisations. I look forward to seeing how this issue will be tackled.

Kelvin Newman, Creative Director:

I was initially very sceptical of Google Plus; it seemed far more “me too” than it should be, but having said that I’m slowly starting to change my opinion on it. Most of that change was motivated by reading this piece in Wired, it’s a long article but it really illustrates quite how strategically important Google Plus is to the organisation as a whole and quite how seriously they are taking it. That focus is reassuring as most of their previous social efforts have felt like the product of Google’s famed 20% of time spent on projects not directly related to their day job.

As a marketer, though, is it worth the effort? Well, it’s going to take some time for Google to make it clear how a business should have a profile on the network. For most people once that’s decided that will be the point at which they should consider getting involved. I imagine there will be some kind of spin-off of Google Places or Merchant Centre that it’s based on. However in the meantime there is a small window of opportunity for businesses to “try things out” on Plus. They may not work as the audience is as varied and deep as the other social networks but there will be PR value in trying these early campaigns. You only need to look at Ford’s coverage to see how that could work.

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What We Think of Google+

Staying on the Right Side of the ASA

jo — Fri, 13 May 2011 10:19:03 +0000

As many of you will know, from March 1st 2011, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) have extended their digital remit to include all marketing messages and communications online. This covers their own websites and includes social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) are the UK’s independent watchdog committed to maintaining high standards in advertising. They are self regulated and funded by the advertising industry who are required to contribute 0.1% of their media spend to regulating the advertising industry. The ASA’s authority is recognised by the Government, the courts, other regulators such as the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) and Office of Communications (Ofcom) as the established means of consumer protection from misleading advertising.

The Committee of Advertising Practice (CAP) are the body responsible for writing the CAP Code which is governed by the ASA. Their purpose is to ensure the industry remained honest, truthful and within legal guidelines. Basically, to ensure that what you see is what you get.

Unbelievably, until March the 1st the digital remit only covered paid for advertising such as E-mail marketing , banner and pop-up advertisements, PPC, commercial classified advertisements and paid-for listings on price comparison sites so out side of these paid for adverts online marketing was entirely unregulated and advertisers could get away with saying what they liked. The new rules will effect all businesses no matter what the size or nature.

What are the benefits?

Firstly, the new rules should go at least someway to ensuring what we see online is truthful and reducing the amount of outright dishonesty in marketing messages. It will also be effective in making online marketing a more equal playing field as currently ethical marketers could be losing out to competitors who sound amazing and lure in unsuspecting clients with far cheaper prices which are not anywhere near the truth! The good that about the guidelines is that if you are aware of a competitor doing this you can report them and they will have to be open and truthful about their prices and services.

Why has this only just come in to place?

The extended CAP code has come into play this year for a number of reasons. Firstly and probably most significantly as 2010 was the 1st time online advertising spending in the UK exceeded TV yet this was largely untracked. Unsurprisingly, the Internet is now the second most complained about medium after TV. In the last 2 years, Over 3500 complaints regarding websites that fell outside of remit. For these reasons, even the Conservative Party pledged to ‘Tackle currently unregulated marketing on corporate websites targeted at children’ and ‘to shut this regulatory loophole and clamp down on irresponsible online marketing targeted at children’.

The ASA gave advertisiers a 6month grace period from September to get to grips with what the new rules mean to them and have been offering online site audits to marketers who are unsure.

To fund the new remit, the industry has agreed to apply the standard 0.1% levy on paid-for advertisements appearing on internet search engines through media and search agencies. This has been spent on an advertising campaign including TV ads and posters around stations and on billboards.

The Official line from CAP….

“Advertisements and other marketing communications by or from companies, organisations or sole traders on their own websites, or in other non-paid-for space online under their control, that are directly connected with the supply or transfer of goods, services, opportunities and gifts, or which consist of direct solicitations of donations as part of their own fund-raising activities.”

So what does all this actually mean and how will it affect me?

There are now a number of things that you will need to be careful of when considering your marketing activity:

1. Watch out for claims you can’t back up

In theory everyone should have been doing this anyway! But you must now substantiate not just everything you say or write on your site, social media platform or blog, but also everything everyone else does too.

3.18 … Quoted prices must include non-optional taxes, duties, etc.

3.7 … must hold evidence for any claims that consumers are likely to believe are objective

3.17 … price statements must not mislead by omission and relate to product listed

3.9 … not stating significant limitations or qualifications

2. Social media and User generate content

For the first time, Social media platforms fall under the remit as “ Non Paid for Space under Advertisers control” something that will undoubtedly effect they way we think about our social media strategies.The biggest challenges for marketers regarding social is with regards to User generated content (UGC) and distance marketing rules.

The first big consideration is using content from your Facebook page, Twitter account , blog or forum for your marketing materials. Previously, you could quite rightfully take positive comments or Tweets and use them for self promotion. This, along with using photos that have been posted by users on Facebook, even if you are tagged in them is no longer allowed.

Another major factor is ensuring everything you Tweet or post can be substantiated at the time you post it. This includes ReTweeting or even liking something a fan has written about you that at the time you engage with that comment is no longer true.

Top Shop for example recently go into trouble for ReTweeting a comment someone made about how great they were and how they had just bought a skirt in the sale. By the time Top Shop ReTweeted the skirt was no longer in the sale so the comment was unsubstantiated.

The CAP code refers to this as, “Inaccurate or misleading copy that contains a claim written by the advertiser themselves or by the customer and then reused by the advertiser” .

3. Distance Selling Marketing

The inclusion of Distance selling marketing communications in the online remit essentially means all promotions, Tweets and comments about a product must include:

9.2.1 the main characteristics of the product

9.2.2 the price, including any VAT or other taxes payable (see “Prices” in Section 3: Misleading Advertising, and payment arrangements

9.2.3 the amount of any delivery charge

9.2.4 the estimated delivery or performance time (see rule 4.9.3) and arrangements

9.2.5 a statement that, unless inapplicable (see rule 9.6), consumers have the right to cancel orders for products. Marketers of services must explain how the right to cancel may be affected if the consumer agrees to services beginning less than 7 working days after the contract was concluded.

This is virtually impossible to do in 140 characters and so could essentially change the way we use Twitter and Facebook for promotions. However it is still very unclear how strictly this will be enforced.

4. Forums and reviews

Moderating out negative comments and only showing positive ones was one of the specific examples given by the ASA of situations to which the code applies. Leaving aside all the usual reasons why this is a damaging practice, doing so now guarantees that your review system will be eligible for scrutiny from the ASA.

Fake Reviews where marketers actively plant comments acting as ‘consumers’ is another widely used tactic that is now be a banned by both the ASA code and under European Law.

5. Blogging and commenting

If you are undertaking blogger outreach as part of a campaign, then you should ensure that any commercial benefit received by the blogger is clearly out in the open. This should be the case anyway, and brands that have not historically followed this common sense approach have seen it backfire on them. Another example of this would be if a blogger, with the approval of your company is fundraising on their blog and you have editorial control over the content – particularly, if the blogger has been paid (monetarily or another benefit such as tickets to an event, link exchange, etc).

It would be advisable to ensure everything has an audit trail is out in the open so blog readers are informed upfront.

The same thing goes for using a pen name…. although this is not entirely made clear by the ASA, if you are using a pen name to write content for a client or to comment then that would potentially be regarded as failing to disclose information or falsely impersonating someone.

So What you CAN still do within the CAP code?

-press releases and other public relations material

-editorial content

-corporate reports

-investor relations material

Natural listings on a search engine or price comparison site, will not be included

“heritage” advertising (e.g. old Guinness advert videos) as long as they’re placed within appropriate context.

Poppin’ a cap in your ASA : Are the new codes enforceable?

This is the big questions and the answer is currently very unclear and like every set of new regulations, advertisers and agencies will have to wait for the first companies to be rapped on the knuckles. Underpinning the ability of CAP to maintain and improve high standards in marketing communications is an effective range of sanctions. If a marketing communication is in breach of the Advertising Codes, the marketer responsible is told by the ASA (or the CAP Compliance team) to amend or withdraw it. The vast majority of marketers willingly undertake to do so. If they do not, sanctions are applied, although the possibility of imposing sanctions is often sufficient to secure compliance with the CAP Code.

Firstly and most significantly, the ASA will not be actively policing the remit. To get in trouble, someone will have to report you and the ASA will then have to investigate.

The enforcement process is fairly simple;

- Informal warning at first asked to withdraw Ad.

- If you fail to remove it, the ASA will report you to the office of fair trade.

However, if you still refuse to comply the penalties are tough;

-They have a black list page on the site where any non comlying companies will be featured. This is an enhanced name and shame policy – providing details of an advertiser and the non-compliant marketing communication on a special part of the ASA website.

- Removal of paid-for search advertising – ads that link to the page hosting the non-compliant marketing communication may be removed with the agreement of the search engines.

-You may get to feature in ASA paid-for search advertisements – the ASA could place advertisements online highlighting an advertiser’s continued non-compliance which will clearly have a knock on effect for an advertisers reputation.

As a result of such strict and potentially damaging consequences the ASA have seen 97% compliance rate in previous offline broadcasting and would expect to see something similar online.

How can I be sure I am staying with the remit?

CAP Services will be providing training and advice to help website owners and agencies get to grips with the new rules. However this costs a hefty 8k so it would definitely be worth getting to grips with the rules yourself.

I would recommend signing up for CAP newsletters or watching the online webcasts which will keep advertisers up to date with the progression of the remit and give them a better idea of how the rules will be enforced.

-Understand what is and isn’t acceptable to the ASA

-Keep up-to-date with the latest developments and guidance in ad regulation

- Help avoid reputation and commercial damage that can come with an upheld ASA adjudication.

See below for Jo and Graeme’s full presentation on the new ASA regulations from Brighton SEO. Our Creative Director Kelvin Newman is delivering a presentation at SMX Advanced in London next week about ASA regulations and their impact on digital marketing.

Staying on the Right Side of the ASA – Graeme Benstead & Jo Morley – #BrightonSEO

View more presentations from brightonseo

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Staying on the Right Side of the ASA

Brighton SEO – Everything is a Social Network – Paul Chaloner ( @PaulChaloner ) #brightonseo

Lyndsey — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 15:15:50 +0000

Session 3 Brighton SEO

With so many differing opinions about whether we have always ‘socially networked’ or whether or not the end of SEO is rapidly approaching, Paul Chaloner, Social Media Specialist at FreshEgg examines our treatment of social media compared to other aspects of digital marketing.

Paul takes us through why SEO and Social Media have to work together as part of a combined strategy and not fight it out against each other. He begins with SEO is dead, social media is here to stay!

Fresh egg ran 2 tests to examine the affects that twitter has on influencing rankings:

The first test was a blog post on a well ranked site, the blog fed into Google news, and the number of tweets reached a total number of 53,000 people. The post which was called “There are no social media experts” and shortly after the experiment, the post was ranking on page 1 of Google.

Test 2 was a post on a lower ranked website, it wasn’t fed into Google news and there were no initial tweets about it. However when the tweets began the page then became indexed a few days later.
Concluding thoughts and takeaways from this experiment-TWITTER IS VITAL!

-Tweet with your keyword
-Tweet on an account with 1500+ followers to get maximum reach
-Your blog must be fed into Google news
-Optimise title tags

Fairly short and sweet. So get out there and tweet.

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Brighton SEO – Everything is a Social Network – Paul Chaloner ( @PaulChaloner ) #brightonseo

Do URL Shorteners Break Links?

Alan — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 10:01:49 +0000

Since communicating on social media went 140-character, there has been a proliferation of url shorteners to help squeeze web addresses into tight status updates and tweets. But can shortened urls break the link chain and ruin some hard-earned links?

If the URL shortening service goes bust, and some have, then the link is broken. When their server is down, those links are broken. Look for url shortening services which are reliable. The ideal choice would be Google’s url shortener, but Goo.gl is currently restricted for the use with Google products.

If a short URL is contained in a followed link, it will pass pagerank. But, if the shortening involves a 301 redirect, most search engines will reduce the authority of the link.

So is there any benefit to link building on Twitter when the links are no-followed? Well while you might have to wait days for a static link or a blog post about your content or activity, Twitter links can spring up immediately, and are increasingly visible in Google results pages:

Note that the BBC gain a link to their Twitter page, the individual Tweet and the shortened URL in the real-time search results

Search Engine Land have produced a great graph of URL shorteners and their different properties which can work as a good guide for which one is best for you to use.

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Do URL Shorteners Break Links?

The Real Reasons Marketers Love Twitter

Kelvin — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 13:29:34 +0000

Marketers absolutely luuuuuuuurrrrrrrve Twitter, but whats the real reasons why they are so infatuated with the service…

The Real Reasons Marketers Love Twitter

View more presentations from Kelvin Newman.

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The Real Reasons Marketers Love Twitter

Is Google’s URL shortener a Trojan Horse to Track the Real Time Web

Kelvin — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 09:02:45 +0000

There’s been plenty of talk about how Twitter and how the proliferation of URL shorteners has broken the link graph. Everyday millions of links pass through URL shorteners, and although some do pass link equity, if one goes under (which plenty have), that leaves thousand of broken links. Not good news if you happen to be a search engine that relies on the link graph.

Image Credit

That seemed like the perfect reason for Google to launch their brand new Goo.gl url shortener service but I think there are alterior motives for them to launch the service.

If you’re Google and doing your best job at keeping up with the real time web, you’ve got a couple of options. The easiest is to buy Twitter, but it doesn’t look like that’s happening anytime soon.

So how about another option: get a chunk of the url shortening market, and you suddenly have a huge amount of link data including click throughs and the like. It seems like that would be a great ranking factor.

I know people are reticent to hand over their data to Google, but I know I feel more comfortable placing my short links in Google’s hands rather than one of the other shorteners, especially if they intergrate the reporting into Google Analytics.

And though we’re drowning in Google product launches at the mo, suddenly this one makes a lot more sense.

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Is Google’s URL shortener a Trojan Horse to Track the Real Time Web

Real Time Search Might Not Be Good News For Your Brand But It Is For Twitter

Kelvin — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 09:14:57 +0000

We’ve already talked a little about Twitter tweets appearing prominently in the search engine results pages. It’s open to exploitation that’s for sure…

Image Credit

If you’re a big brand, this is especially worrying, as someone else might be getting the lion’s share of your branded search, but it’s not all bad news. There is one company that’s doing great out of Google rolling out a huge but half-baked change in their search results – Twitter.

You don’t need to be a genius to realise being number one result for thousands if not hundreds of thousands of search results is going to send huge amounts traffic to Twitter, but this nice little graph shows the traffic to Twitter in December.

Not bad aye? Well hopefully Robin Goad, Heather Hopkins or one of the other lovely analysts at Hitwise can share their data on this because I’d love to know how much extra traffic this real time search is sending to Twitter.

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Real Time Search Might Not Be Good News For Your Brand But It Is For Twitter

Why Real Time Search Matters Even If You Don’t Do SEO

Rachel — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 16:09:57 +0000

Google has started rolling out real time search, which has far-reaching implications for brand reputation monitoring and SEO, particularly for those brands that up to now have largely ignored social media. Those brands that dismiss the need to monitor their online presence, or are just not well equipped to do so could quickly start to see unfortunate results – just ask Tiger Woods. With the inclusion of live Twitter streams in the natural SERPs, brand reputation has never been so important.

Folks who are just Googling for a brand are soon going to know all about the current hot issue for that company, good or bad, live from the people who matter – the actual end users, the customers. One entry into the search box will bring up everything you need to know, and you won’t have to search Twitter for more personal opinions and anecdotal evidence before you choose to buy or book.

Now it’s more crucial than ever to have constant monitoring for potentially tricky situations. Brands need to be ready with quick responses, information and, where possible, solutions and apologies to combat a potential wave of negativity that could spring from one tweet or blog post.

The Carphone Warehouse, Europe’s leading independent retailer of mobile phones and services, has already bought into this: It says, “I’m sorry” when necessary on its Twitter page to customers who tweet about poor service or products.

If I post unfavourably about a new restaurant I visited from my iPhone, enraged and disappointed, and my followers and the Brighton feed retweet this, it auto-updates my Facebook status too, and my friends share this info, and then that starts showing at number one on Google, that’s something the restaurant needs to know about and be prepared to respond to, no matter how many ads they have in the local listings mag or how many leaflets they have dropped around town. They would be better off using their marketing budget to employ someone like Pizza Hut’s Twintern or task their SEO/ social media agency to respond to customer feedback, good and bad, online, before it becomes a major, brand destroying issue.

Of course it would be better if they had sorted their lousy service out at the time before I vented my spleen online, so maybe this move by Google could have even more far-reaching effects on the way customers are treated. Prevention is always better than cure.

Further reading and opinion:

http://econsultancy.com/blog/5091-google-real-time-search-the-experts-view

Some of the UK’s search and social media experts have already started to share their opinions on how Google’s real time search will affect brands and SEO including Henry Ellis, Head of Social Media at Tamar, and Dave Wilding, Senior SEO Analyst at Epiphany.

Social Media for Good – Charity Fundraising Social Media Case Study

Rachel — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 09:23:51 +0000

I have spent the past year helping a small group of strangers raise money for the NSPCC. In the wake of the Baby P tragedy, we have collectively walked, ran and bungeed, baked and bellydanced, and many other bonkers activities. OK, nothing unusual about that, except that the main people involved didn’t actually know each other, and still haven’t met in the flesh. We all met via Facebook. I only met my first fundraising friend for real this September, which was a bit like a blind date!

In November 2008 when Baby P first hit the headlines, many people were drawn to the 500+ groups on Facebook to discuss the horrific case. Some were spurred into doing something positive in his name. One such person was Louise Harvey, who founded an official fund via the NSPCC, the Baby Peter Tribute Fund , to raise money for them in Peter’s name. Her original target was £5,000.

Now a year later we are all proud to say we have raised over £26,000 with Louise, with every penny going to the NSPCC, and we still have only met a handful of times- everything has been discussed, organized and achieved through Facebook and more-recently Twitter, follow us here @babypfundnspcc

We set up a Facebook group first, followed by a Page, which allowed us to be more interactive with ‘fans’ by updating their newsfeed. By debating the issues around Peter’s story and that of other high profile cases we raised awareness for the work of the NSPCC & ChildLine. We shared the NSPCC’s own press releases and encouraged people to donate. An amazing amount of people organised their own events from garden parties to Blue Ribbon Days, sponsored silences and so on. Corinne ran the London Marathon, I did the Big Bike Ride, the list is endless. The money kept rolling in.

the world’s leading activist fund raising chimp - Chimp le Singe

We tweeted our latest totals to our growing number of followers on Twitter, and shared news stories and opinion on child protection issues. We shared our success and helped other charities, whilst also learning from some of the big boys online like the NSPCC itself and Barnardos.

The website http://www.thebabyptributefund.co.uk/ received increased traffic, mainly from Facebook links. Without Facebook and Twitter we might have raised the same amount, but I doubt in such a short space of time, and we certainly would not have been able to reach such a huge like-minded group of people, not only in the UK but across the globe; we have had donations from the States and South Africa.

Friends we have made on Facebook started a separate fund for a Memorial Garden in London for all abused children, they have so far raised a further £10,000, and the garden opens soon. Again much of this fundraising was publicised via social media, and news shared on their Facebook page and group.

Facebook has allowed us to spread the word and raise awareness in a way we could never have imagined a few years ago, and best of all; it was free to use and accessible to almost all. Ordinary people were galvanised into action and they helped us to achieve something really positive.

We are now looking at new exciting projects for 2010, to continue our work in Peter’s memory, and to continue to raise funds for the NSPCC. We are now being asked to get involved with other related projects. 1-3 children die as a result of abuse and neglect in the UK every week – that’s a shocking statistic however you look at it. The funds we have raised will go a long way in helping the NSPCC. To put this into perspective, that’s the equivalent of paying for the rigorous training and induction of around 15 volunteer counsellors. Each of these counsellors will answer calls from 200 children in their first year alone. Together, that’s about five medium-sized primary schools’ worth of children receiving essential support, and the counsellors having skills for life to support children through ChildLine.

If you would like to be part of this success please donate to the Baby Peter Tribute Fund – many thanks.

You can read about some of the other charity efforts made by the SiteVisibility team as part of the yearly CSR day here & here.

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Social Media for Good – Charity Fundraising Social Media Case Study

The Real Reason Web Designers Think Widgets are the Future

Kelvin — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 14:39:42 +0000

Though the fuss about widget’s really seems to have quietened down in recent months, there really did seem a strong agenda of pushing them as an elixir of ‘doing social media’, and while I can’t argue with the success stories, it’s not hard to search Facebook and the like and find failed widgets of every shape and size.

And while with every marketing campaign there will be successs and failures, I think there’s definate reasons why some web agencies have been keen to push widgets as the magic wand.

A Product Not A Service

Although a few companies can straddle the divide, online or off, almost every company offers a product or service and it’s a difficult barrier to switch from one to the other. Most web design companies are firmly in the product camp. You pay for a website, you get a website.

There’s thousands of steps inbetween but ultimately there is a start and a finish and a tangable product. It’s not surprising given this sort of DNA that a widget. (Which is more than a little ironic that people refer to factories as makers of widgets)

Short Term Solution to long term problem

Social media is hard to get right, agencies are struggling how to sell it or learn it, clients are struggling to make the changes in structure and process to make it work and management are struggling to find the funds.

Widgets work well as a ‘campaign’ they lend themselves well to social media measurement. This is great but my only worry is that some people use it as a band aid for what is a really serious injury.

- Limited change in skill set – if you can launch a new product or service that doesn’t require much of a change in skillset’s it’s a no brainer. That’s part of the reason SEO agencies fancy themselves as social media experts. ‘We get the web’ they say and it’s true to a certain extent but the cold hard truth is very few people and companies have a proven track record in social. So it makes sense to go with those who have the most experience doing something similar. And because widgets need coding and design they fall under the remit of web design.

- Customers Understand the concept – a lot of what we evangalists call social media is a bit wishy washy. ‘Go Viral’ ‘Engage customers’ & ‘Build Relationships’ all great aims but a lot tougher sell than we’ll build you a bit of code you can show your boss and all the staff can put on their Facebook page then delete six months later never having used it!

I suspose the moral of the story is, when it comes to social doing something is sometime better than doing nothing but if you’re doing it with the wrong intensions the only person you’re kidding is yourself.

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The Real Reason Web Designers Think Widgets are the Future

The Unavoidable Reason Social Search Can’t Work Alone

Kelvin — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 14:36:00 +0000

It’s tempting to think that some kind of social search could topple Google but I don’t think Twitter search or anything similar will ever truely replace traditional search entirely.

I think what will happen is there will be a blurring between what is social and what is search. It’s been around for years already but universal search, I think, was the first big step on what will become an inevitable journey, but I can’t see a purely ‘social’ search engine catching on.

Google was Academic vs Digg is like the charts

I like to think about the way the Google algorhythm works very similarly to the world of academia. If you write a paper with your latest theory you might get some readers but if the big players in your discipline read and promote your work, then your paper could receive even more attention and the more you’ll get credence and respect in the future.
The bigger those names are and the more readers they have, the more trusted you’ll become and the more people will take your findings seriously. It works well as an analogy of search.

Digg and social media sites are much more like the pop charts. And like academia is seperate from pop culture, but getting closer, I think we’ll see the same in search/social

Mob Effect

It’s very easy to whip-up a mob mentality in social media. Over 10 thousand people signed a petition via twitter to reduce the cost of the new iPhone for people already on a contract. Most people know this is unlikely, but they signed up anyway. If you sign up for a 18 month contract you’re obligated for 18 months, but in the heat of the moment it’s easy to get caught up in the mob.

1%ers aren’t Representative

A great book I read a year or so ago brought to my attention to the concept of the 1%-ers. These are the people who go out of their way to partcipate in and create content on social sites. And the simple fact is 1% of people don’t represent the whole. They are different so don’t represent everyone. There’s a similar flaw in Google’s algorhythm (not everyone has a website) but I think it is becoming more apparent in social media.

Doesn’t Stop the Popular Becoming More Popular

Some people think it will democratise media. Wrong. It’ll probably just make the popular more popular. It’s common knowledge that more big media gets airtime on sites like digg now than it ever did in the past. They have got their fingers burnt, changed their policy slightly, and are now benefiting from the additional traffic.

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The Unavoidable Reason Social Search Can’t Work Alone

Thinking about advertising on Social Networks?

Jennie — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 13:33:29 +0000

As much of the English speaking world seems to be poking, tagging and micro-blogging on a daily basis, is it time to start advertising on social networks?

Fast growing Demographic

People in the UK spend more time on Facebook than any other social network. Surprised? Probably not. What is interesting for marketers though, is the fastest growing demographic are not the kids… but women over 55. The 35-65 year olds now represent a third of all Facebook users. One explanation for females leading the way is they want to view their families’ photos and Facebook has become the biggest online repository of photos in the world.

Good time for female brands?

As women have traditionally held the purse strings in most households, and 85% of all brand purchases are made by women, does this mean it is a golden time for female brands to start advertising on social networks?

Trust

Whilst it’s probably true that the people you want to connect with and promote your products to are almost certainly using social networks, it’s also true they don’t trust and are often simply not interested in adverts on social networks. Some say the CTR on social networks is as low as 4 in 10,000. At that rate you’ve got to ask yourself; “is the set up and management time worth it?”

Targeting

I personally do not even see the ads on Facebook. Although I have a fairly active profile, I made a special visit for this post just to check out the advert positions and see who’s advertising to me. All were pretty boring and basic to look at offering me things like storage solutions, currency exchange, phones, graduate jobs (local ad) and hair removal! Hair removal was repeated and repeated, are they trying to tell me something?

Joking aside, while I was pleased not to be awash with ads of a sexual nature. I can’t say any of these adverts actually relate to me, knowing that both Facebook and MySpace have the ability to target fairly niche groups by interest type. My ads, as I’d like to call them, were as generic as horoscopes and held no value for me.

We’ve had some successes targeting fan bases with direct promotions i.e. music fans with their favorite bands. Reaching ‘Killers’ fans for example is much harder to get right with traditional banner advertising and much more expensive on search networks i.e. Adwords.

Ads of the future

Not all ads are as poor as those though. The recent online video ad for Unilever’s AXE deodorant aimed at men on social networks had over a million views in April 2009 on Facebook and Myspace. 10,000 people thought it was so good they shared it with friends. I would have included a link to it but I couldn’t find it on You Tube so here’s their most popular instead.

Perhaps this is one answer for brands. Borrow the ‘ratings and review successes’ and apply it to your advertising. Create an ad worthy of sharing and recommending to friends.

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Thinking about advertising on Social Networks?

The Anatomy of the Moonfruit Twitter Success Story

Kelvin — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 10:28:14 +0000

Occasionally a company creates the perfect storm when trying to promote their product or service via a new technique or channel, and inevitably becomes the proto-example used for years to illustrate how to get it right.

The recent success of DIY website provider Moonfruit may very well be the latest of these uber-case-studies. Their recent competition on Twitter increased traffic to their website by over 600% and got their brand over 30k followers on Twitter in a matter of days.

I won’t re-hash the story – several people have already done a great job recounting what happened. What I wanted to explore is specifically why this campaign worked so well and if it can it teach us anything that might be applicable to other campaigns.

Trending Topics

The campaign inadvertently launched at the perfect time, as it was around the time that trending topics were given prime real estate on everyone’s Twitter side bar.

Coupled with the death of the King of Pop (Michael Jackson), this meant that users were paying close attention to trending topics, which means that something which gains enough momentum to become a trending term was more likely to spread virally.

Nostalgia

Although the appeal of Twitter is growing and usage is spreading into all demographics there is still a ‘typical’ Twitter user. Many of this ‘typical’ group will have some nostalgia for Moonfruit’s glory days. I certainly did due to my early websites were hosted by Moonfruit. They were largely focused around me and my mate’s mountain biking stunts and didn’t get much traffic, but my fond memories of Moonfruit certainly encouraged me to spread the meme on the first day. I’m pretty sure this was a motivation for at least some other of the initial seeds.

Apple Effect

This isn’t the first competition to spread virally on Twitter. In my whitepaper on Twitter I mentioned Namecheap who’d had huge success with a Twitter competition, It led to a twenty percent increase in sales. But why did this giveaway reach so many more people? I think the apple effect has a part to play. Giving away a Mac Book Pro is perfectly aligned with the Twitter community.

The most appealing laptop from a company favoured by the users of the site is almost a no-brainer as a prize. The fact that the prize wasn’t a product of the company also must have helped. Many of the competitions that have been successful on Twitter have been companies giving away their own products or services, and though appealing in many cases, it probably isn’t perceived as quite so generous.

Ease of entry

One of the first rules of viral marketing is making your ‘thing’ as easy to share as possible. Just cutting and pasting a hashtag is about as easy as it gets, and Moonfruit didn’t even make you follow their account which would have been a barrier to entry. However lots of people did choose to follow them.

Success breeds success

I’m not sure whether this was a deliberate policy but as soon as the campaign got any traction there was a lot of industry coverage of the success of their promotion. The coverage of how well they were doing won’t have done any harm in spreading the idea further. It’s an illustration of how in some circumstances the coverage you get with the industry press can justify a strategy regardless of whether it is a ‘true’ success with its target audience.

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The Anatomy of the Moonfruit Twitter Success Story

Facebook duplicate url’s and rel=”canonical”

John — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 11:13:35 +0000

Yesterday I received this question about Facebook pages from my girlfriend:

Could you tell me which URL, if any, take you directly to the page (make sure you’re not logged in):

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Adventureland/110824832007?created#/pages/Adventureland/100397302070

http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/pages/Adventureland/100397302070?ref=search

http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/pages/Adventureland/100397302070?ref=mf

Why doesn’t Facebook make things like this easier?

This got me thinking. The short answer was actually none of the above. You can strip all the parameters and # tags out of Facebook urls to give the ‘canonical’ url – http://www.facebook.com/pages/Adventureland/100397302070.

photo credit: noii

So I wondered with all the links going to Facebook pages (and groups, profiles etc) which amount to about 800 million according to Site Explorer how many people are blindly copy pasting urls with tracking variables like the ?ref=mf attached?

About 13 million by all accounts. And thats just Facebook business pages with 1 tracking variable attached to the end of it. I’d suspect if we looked at links to groups and profiles and all the possible url variables which Facebook churns out we’d be looking at hundreds of millions of non-canonical urls being indexed by Google from Facebook.

Facebook are clearly aware of this issue because they’ve implemented the rel=canonical tag on all of their pages which, in theory, should resolve this duplication. Although that doesn’t seem to be working for them at the moment. For example:

The I ♥ COLLEGE page is indexed with the url:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/I-COLLEGE/80075224204?ref=mf

despite the canonical tag:
<link rel=“canonical” href=“http://www.facebook.com/pages/I-COLLEGE/80075224204″ />

Interestingly there doesn’t actually seem to be a huge amount of duplicate page entries, rather Google is using the non-canonical version instead of the canonical. This isn’t a problem for Facebook really because their url variables are just tracking code but imagine if the ?ref=mf referred to an affiliate tracking id and instead of returning the canonical versions Google was only returning the affiliate links. The affiliate mf would be laughing!

So what can Facebook do if the canonical tag isn’t working?

Making it easier to link to Facebook pages would be a good idea. Google maps provide a ‘link’ button which gives a linkable url for users to share. The same thing could work for Facebook, it might also encourage users to share more links…

Also Facebook are rolling out vanity urls (usernames) which should clean up the longer page names but won’t help the url variable issues.
Moving away from using url variables for tracking internal links would be a better long term solution

Personally we’ve found a few uses for the canonical tag with some mixed results, albeit on a much smaller scale than Facebook’s 550 million indexed pages. I know others are questioning whether its working at the moment. Has anyone got rel=canonical to work properly on big sites yet?

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Facebook duplicate url’s and rel=”canonical”

Social Networking is Hard Work – Sarah’s Social Media Experiment

Sarah — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 07:50:06 +0000

So, my social media experiment was probably the most pathetic experiment ever conducted. (See part one here: http://www.sitevisibility.co.uk/blog/?p=278) My plan was to throw myself into all things social media for the whole of April and then write about it in May. However, as you can see I am only just getting around to writing about it now, not because I’ve been so submerged that I haven’t had time to write, but more because I kept finding something more interesting to do and suddenly over two months had gone by and I hadn’t done a thing.

Anyway, I did try…a little, but mostly found the experiment very frustrating.

photo credit: lennox_mcdough

The first thing that I did was to create a Twitter account. Not as easy as it should have been and I have to confess I did have to ask for help. But I was assured that everyone found Twitter confusing so I felt a little better. Once I had my account setup I wasn’t sure what to do. I tried to find my friend but it seems that if you want to follow someone you have to know their username which I thought was a little annoying.

The next day I went to log into my twitter account and couldn’t get in. Great start. So I clicked ‘forgot my password’ but never received a password. So then I emailed the help email and a few hrs later I got an email saying that my problem had been fixed followed by an email saying that the ticket had been closed. Not hugely helpful. So I emailed again and a few days later finally got a reply saying that my password had been reset. But I still can’t log in and now sent another email but it say that the ticket had been closed and to submit a new one. I give up.

I’ve used Facebook a little bit but found that I’d log on and then didn’t know what to do. How do people spend hours on it? What are they doing? I changed my status to ‘doing a social media experiment – please read my blog post’. I think 2 people read it and neither commented.

One thing I did get a bit excited about was the new ‘Google Location’ app from Google. My husband sent me an email inviting me to join Google Location – I’ve just got a new phone and I can run the app from that. It was really easy to set up and within about ten minutes I could see where he was on a map and it’s actually pretty accurate. If you don’t have a phone then you have to add your postcode and it shows where you are, but if you have a phone and you run it constantly (which would probably cost a fortune) then your friends and family (and anyone you invite) can actually see where you are and where’re going.

“How cool is this?” he said. “Now go for a walk….” So I walked home with the application turned on and my husband watched on his computer at work and could see where I was and when I got home. After the initial excitement wore off I suddenly realised what he’d just done…..he’d tricked me into installing a tracking device on my phone. And conveniently his phone doesn’t support it so he can see my every move but when he calls up and tells me ‘sorry, I have to work late tonight’ and then promptly goes to the pub I’m none the wiser…

So – I think we can consider my experiment a failure, although, let’s be honest, I didn’t really give it my all.

However, I am slowly beginning to realise that my lack of ‘social medianess’ is more due to laziness than lack of interest because I am curious about what is happening and what is going on, I just don’t want to find it out for myself.

I get that there are lots of exciting things happening that are going to revolutionise the way we do many many things, some of which I actually might get involved in in the future. I guess I’m just happy to wait and let everyone else experiment with all these new fads and then I’ll join in later on….

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Social Networking is Hard Work – Sarah’s Social Media Experiment

The Twitter Metrics that will completely change the way you use Twitter

Kelvin — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 11:21:11 +0000

Social media is notoriously difficult to measure, hence the efforts of Will McInnes and his band of merry social media darlings at measurementcamp.

photo credit: CarbonNYC
But for some reason there really seems to have been a perfect storm for Twitter, as already some people have come up with some really valuable metrics to measure how well you are performing on the site.

Clicks per 1000 followers – Say Ashton Kutcher, with his nearly two million followers happens to retweet your post, how many visitors does he send? And how many relative to his overall community? Once you know who is sending you the most traffic you know who is worthy of some good old-fashioned schmoozing.

Follower velocity – Twitterholic and plenty of other tools can help you track accounts popularity over time. Understanding when you get upswings in followers can help you replicate that success in the future.

CTR (clicks vs. followers) – a favourite of mine which I’ll be using to judge the success of our recent Twitter whitepaper. Add up the number of clicks from twitter and divide by the total follower count of everyone who retweeted your content. Seeing the click thru rate will help you understand what topics are popular with visitors, not just the people retweeting!

Retweet Depth – If you release a cd single you can be sure your mum will buy a dozen copies; the people closest to you are always most likely to pay attention to your content. Getting people who aren’t your contacts to retweet your content is much more valuable than six contacts doing the same. And if those people are five steps away from you, it’s even more powerful.

This is part of our #tweetsheetweek series of posts to promote our new white paper on getting the most from twitter.

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The Twitter Metrics that will completely change the way you use Twitter

5 Functions I’d Cut Off My Right Arm For Twitter to Add

Kelvin — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 09:03:26 +0000

If you’ve read our latest whitepaper about Twitter you’ll already know how head of heels we are with the service and know how we think it’s going to work with more general search engine marketing.

photo credit: g-hat

But despite our teenage crush there are a few little niggle we really wish they would solve.

1. Shared Friends – okay I’ll admit Twitter have really improved their ‘You’ve got a friend’ email by including the profile picture and their follower count but I think they could go one step further. It’s stolen straight from Facebook but the ability to see whether you share mutual friends would be a great addition to the email

2. ReTweet buttons on the web interface – all the twitter clients make it easy to reply and retweet with easy buttons, it would be great if the same kind of functionality was available on the standard web interface. Yeah not many people just use the website but when I do use the web interface it’s sorely missed.

3. Re-Tweet Chains that don’t eat the character limit - if something really takes off on twitter it can quickly get three or four people deep retweeting but to stay within the character limit people get dropped off, I have no idea how they could make it work but it would be great if every link in the chain was credited

4. Bit.ly stats built into the interface – bit.ly is a huge step forward in the way twitter deals with url shorteners, but the ability to track how many people have clicked a shortened url has whet my appetite for more info about click thru’s and the like. If you could get the stats direct from twitter and maybe make sure all shortened versions of the url are the same.

5. The User who tweeted the link included in the referral string – I would love to know every time someone lands on my site from twitter which tweet sent them there. Bit.ly and other might be able to provide some information but it would be much easier if Twitter just parsed the details to your favourite analytics package. http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/26/the-awesome-potential-of-retweet/

I suppose it’s only a few niggles but little changes like this would really make my day.

This is part of our #tweetsheetweek series of posts to promote our new white paper on getting the most from twitter.

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5 Functions I’d Cut Off My Right Arm For Twitter to Add

You’ll know twitter jumped the shark when….

Kelvin — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 12:15:52 +0000

At the moment, Twitter is right at the very peak of its hype, but surely it can’t be long before it officially jumps the shark….

But as a public service announcement, below are a couple of sure fire signs of an impending twitocaylpse

Jason Calacanis Quits – He quit blogging because he wasn’t enjoying it anymore; if digital’s most divisive figures jumps ship, you know it’s on its way out….

Your Mum Gets An Account – Facebook suggests people who you might know based on mutual friends and pops their mug shot into the sidebar. For the last few months, I’ve had various friends parents staring at me from screen right, which is a little off putting when I’m procrastinating at work.

As soon as your parents are signing up to a social site, it’s time to think about moving on.

Daily Mail Links the site with Paedophilia – as soon as you get some results appearing on this search query, you know a website has really hit the mainstream.

People use the word ‘twategy’ with no sense of irony – it’s only recently I heard Ciaran jokingly use this term, but I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before someone uses it without their tongue firmly in cheek.

People like me write white papers on the subject – that’s the final nail in the coffin when someone like me writes a whitepaper on how to use Twitter effectively with case studies and tips from industry experts!

This is part of our #tweetsheetweek series of posts to promote our new white paper on getting the most from twitter.

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You’ll know twitter jumped the shark when….

Find out who’s getting ROI from twitter with the Tweet Sheet Whitepaper

Kelvin — Wed, 27 May 2009 09:07:33 +0000

It’s here our latest whitepaper, this time on Twitter with some tips aimed specifically at the PR industry, but with plenty of value for everyone, or at least we hope!

It’s split into six sections:

WHAT IS TWITTER AND WHY ALL THE FUSS?
EXAMPLES OF SUCCESSFUL USE OF TWITTER
HOW PRS CAN USE TWITTER
PRACTICAL TIPS ON GETTING MORE FROM TWITTER
WHAT’S IT GOT TO DO WITH SEO?
TIPS FROM INDUSTRY EXPERTS

You can download the white paper here. We’d love to hear your feedback, either here in the comments or on Twitter using the hash tag #tweetsheet.

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Find out who’s getting ROI from twitter with the Tweet Sheet Whitepaper

The SEO Industries 25 Most Popular Twitter Users – A Year On, Where Are They Now?

Zac — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 10:44:43 +0000

On the 8^th of May last year, Kelvin wrote a post on the top 25 Twitterers. Now one year on, we return to see how they’re doing now. Of course none of these numbers are a scratch on Stephen Fry’s 392, 822 followers.

Congratulations are in order for Shoemoney, a.k.a Jeremy Schoemaker, who leads the top of the table with 25, 736 followers; that’s a massive 910% increase on last year. And, FYI at the time of writing (09/04/09) his following has now reached 25, 916. That’s an extra 180 followers gained in one day; keep up the good Tweeting Shoemoney!

A tip of the hat goes to Doshdosh, Danny Sullivan and Lee Odden who take up second, third and fourth place. Although it’s worth mentioning that even Doshdosh, who’s second, still only has approximately half the followers of Shoemoney.

And we’ll stifle a yawn for Bill Slawski who’s been neglecting his Twitter responsibilities and lost nearly half his followers over the past 12 months.

Not that I can talk. This post has been published slightly late, so bear in mind that the numbers will have changed somewhat. But this is unavoidable with the ever changing social media scape and we’ve been so busy in SV Towers, I haven’t had the time to alter the numbers accordingly.

Keep an eye on the blog, as Kelvin’s Twitter white paper is coming soon.

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The SEO Industries 25 Most Popular Twitter Users – A Year On, Where Are They Now?

Integrated Search Marketing – A Quick How to Guide

Helen — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 10:11:17 +0000

If you’re thinking about integrating SEO and PPC, what are the benefits of integration and how exactly do you go about it?

The benefits of integrated search
Reducing Adwords spend is usually the main driving force behind integrating pay per click and natural search engine marketing, but there are a great many other advantages to this particular mix:

•    Attracting quality links to increase natural search engine positioning for your top keywords.
•    Delivering search optimised content assets that promote your brand, either onsite or offsite.
•    Driving higher volumes of relevant traffic from search engines, referrers and social media.
•    Increasing goal conversions including subscriptions, brochure downloads and online sales.

photo credit: John Sexton

In short, integrated search marketing improves the effectiveness of your marketing spend, delivering a greater return on investment and enabling more creative, newsworthy content to be developed. It’s a kind of virtuous circle, the more effective your marketing mix, the more amplified your natural search positions, the better your ROI.

It all starts with a search
Whether your potential customer is at the research phase or ready to buy, they’re looking for a solution to a problem. Therefore understanding your customer and what would be of value to them is the key to embarking on an integrated search campaign.Rather than starting with a marketing message and interrupting as many people as possible with it, integrated search focuses on recognising what your customers will find useful and delivering this to them in the right place at the right time. Usually via a search or recommended by their social network.

Out with the old
Traditional marketing models like the 4Ps (product, place, price, promotion) and 7Ps (the 4Ps plus people, positioning, process) fail to identify one key element… customers! In our 21st century business world where entire businesses exist because of user generated content, it is clear that marketing models that ignore a company’s best asset need to be revised.

In with the new
I’ve always been a fan of a good marketing acronym – AIDA and SOSTAC still serve me well in writing email marketing campaigns and planning marketing strategies. Each letter represents a step to help you remember an otherwise complex checklist of practical stages to deliver repeatable campaign successes. So, in true marketing model style, my advice would be to make sure your integrated search marketing campaigns have a THEME…

Tribes
Identify who your interested parties are, this is a bit like identifying your publics or stakeholders in PR. They might not all be customer groups, some may be media owners like bloggers and magazines or customer influencers like associations and agencies. The main point of this step is to segment your audiences by their behaviour and interests.

Hook
What key benefit can you offer to this specific group that they’re going to be interested in? The purpose of this step is to develop a proposition that can be applied across different online channels including natural SEO and PPC, plus social media, online PR, viral and email marketing initiatives. This may or may not be a sales message, although it’s far more likely to succeed if it’s not selling anything but offering a genuine mutually beneficial and unique opportunity.

Engaging Content
Once you know what kind of offer is going to be of interest to your tribes, the 3rd step is all about creating a great piece of content that encapsulates the idea. The content might be a whitepaper, blog post, podcast, widget, video, special offer, event, e-book, guide, tool or simply a new page on your website. The content should be optimised for your relevant top keywords for natural search purposes and be designed for sharing and bookmarking, with the ultimate goals of generating traffic; back links and goal conversions.

Marketing
This stage is crucial to the success of the campaign, once you’ve developed your content where’s the best place to promote it? You may decide to publish it to your website to attract natural search traffic and support this initially with a PPC campaign to attract a certain volume of traffic to jumpstart the social networking effect. Alternatively the content might be more appropriate to syndicate to PR news wires; approach bloggers with or serialise in snippets via Twitter. Timing is everything and both PPC and email marketing can be used to kick-start seasonal content offerings.

Evaluation
As with any marketing campaign, you’re going to need to find a way of assessing the success of your campaign. Choose a maximum of 1 or 2 key performance indicators (KPIs) for each segment. In total the effects of your integrated campaign should be designed to deliver a mixture of different results including links in; relevant traffic and goal conversions. Together, these different elements support a search amplification effect to ultimately improve search engine positioning for your top keywords; help your website to appear in universal search results and improve your website’s overall reputation, further driving more relevant traffic and goal conversions.

For more updates on integrated search make sure you’re subscribed to the Apple Pie & Custard Blog via RSS, email or follow us at http://www.twitter.com/sitevisibility

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Integrated Search Marketing – A Quick How to Guide

Integrated Search – 3 New Strategies You Can’t Live Without