Archive for the ‘Social Media & Online PR’ Category
There’s been no avoiding the hype about Google’s latest foray into Social Media – Google+. Some questions we’ve been receiving from a few of our clients are what should I do about it? Should we be setting up a profile? Etc.
I won’t speculate about the long-term prospects of their service, that’s a topic that’s already been covered by hundreds, but what I can talk about it is it something you should be doing right now.
Google have made it clear at moment that they don’t want business’s setting up personal profiles for businesses. They’ve even gone as far as deleting some profiles set up in this way. This will be a deterrent for many businesses. You don’t want to go to all the effort of setting up an account and building a network only to have your account nuked. If you’re already short of time and resources for your campaign, then your time might be better spent on something with longer term value.
Read on
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.
Read on
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.
Read on
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. Read on
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. Read on
What are QR Codes?
They are basically a funny looking 2 dimensional code that can be scanned by any modern smart phone in order to display a number of things relating to a company a URL, phone number, video or just a message. They can be read both vertically and horizontally and can be encoded in a much smaller space, which allows for more data than a normal barcode which can only identify a product, the ability to embed more information on a QR code allows the ability to display much more information.
Read on
Personalised search is a topic we’ve been touching on quite a lot recently because it’s having a significant impact on how most people see search results. If a search marketing agency’s role is to deliver targeted traffic and business through the search channel, we need to completely understand the potential implications this has.
image credit
What follows below, I hope, is a good overall introduction to what personalised search is, what it means and what you can do about it.
Read on
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
Read on
Marketers absolutely luuuuuuuurrrrrrrve Twitter, but whats the real reasons why they are so infatuated with the service…
With the rise of mobile internet and social networking over the last couple of years, social media has been increasingly populated with corporate voices, and Vodafone are one of the brave companies which have taken a chance on Twitter. Unfortunately, today saw a mysterious tweet from the Vodafone twitter account, announcing Vodafone “is fed up of dirty homo’s and is going after beaver”.
The tweet was deleted almost immediately but was not missed by Twitter’s dedicated tweeters, who reposted and retweeted the message, and demanded an explanation from Vodafone. Read on