By Jackie Yeadon
Paid search advertising managers will be taking note: the silver pound is strong; meaning businesses who want to expose their products to older generations should be looking to use channels currently considered to be solely for the younger generations.
According to figures published by MyVoucherCodes.co.uk, around a fifth of grandparents over 60 have an active social networking account.
Read More
By Jackie Yeadon
Twitter launched its own Follow button this week, which it claims will make it easier for people to, well, follow more people they like.
These little coding gadgets that are stacking up, colourful and eye-catching, across websites everywhere, are about enhancing the user experience.
Read More
By Jackie Yeadon
Around a quarter of British and US consumers have revealed that they consider social networking sites to be all about fun.
The 2011 Edelman Value, Engagement and Trust in the Era of Social Entertainment Survey said 31% of respondents in the UK thought social sites – such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and YouTube – provided “very good” or “excellent” value. This number rose slightly in the US to 37%.
These figures provide insight into the uses of social networking sites: for a business viewing these figures, obviously it’s pertinent to point out that the survey seemed to be angled very much towards an entertainment focus rather than a purely commercial one: but don’t abandon your business tweeting just yet!
Read More
This week the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) has published positive figures showing that 25% -which has a worth of just over £4bn – of British advertising budgets are spent online.
According to the IAB’s most recent adspend report, this is growth of 12.8%: not bad for a country in recession!
There’s an awful lot of bad business news presently but what the IAB’s report highlights is how commerce is utilising all the skills at its disposal, not only to survive, but to thrive. The IAB notes, using Nielsen’s figures, the top 100 companies in the UK are spending more on marketing.
Smaller British companies sit up and pay attention: if the big 100 are doing this, what is stopping you?
Regular readers of the Adrac blog will know that one of the golden rules is never to shrink your adverting/marketing budget in a recession.
Two common opinions
“Yes but you’re an internet marketing agency, you’re bound to say that!”
“Yes but I’m an SME!”
Read More
Many newspapers today have exploited the irony of the link between Hillary Clinton’s praise social networks’ support of freedom, on a day when civil rights lawyers are trying to retain the privacy of Twitter accounts operated by WikiLeaks associates from the justice department.
Clinton, the US secretary of state, gave her thoughtful speech at the Newseum, Washington DC, and among the delegates was Charles Overby, the CEO of Freedom Forum.
Here are some soundbites, which have been selected with an attempt at balance.
1. The spread of information networks is forming a new nervous system for our planet.
2. Now, in many respects, information has never been so free.
3. On their own, new technologies do not take sides in the struggle for freedom and progress, but the United States does.
4. As I speak to you today, government censors somewhere are working furiously to erase my words from the records of history.
5. There are, of course, hundreds of millions of people living without the benefits of these technologies.
6. We have taken steps as a government, and as a department, to find diplomatic solutions to strengthen global cyber security.
7. By relying on mobile phones, mapping applications, and other new tools, we can empower citizens and leverage our traditional diplomacy.
8. And let us go forward together to champion these freedoms for our time, for our young people who deserve every opportunity we can give them.
Item 7 seems to echo Eric Schmidt (in this link, Adrac particularly liked the term ‘Google ecosystem’), and indeed Clinton went on to refer to it later on. A cynic might begin to refer to the people’s choice of search engine as the people’s search engine: Search for People – map view, satellite view, close up.
But Adrac are not cynics, we’re playing Devil’s Advocate here.
What is important about the collision of these two events – the WikiLeaks Twitter and Clinton’s address – is that social media privacy may indeed mean something entirely different in six months, a year, 10 years.
The usual warning about tweeting an ambiguous sentence, a joke, when you’ve had a drink, when you’re tired and grumpy … these all apply: always be aware of the information you make public. And if it’s not public now, it might be one day.
Perhaps the new nervous system for the planet should make more than just governments a little anxious right now.
This blog post is written in response to a Tweep who insisted that nobody reads past the first couple of paragraphs of any blog post.
It is a serious claim: is the entire blogosphere supported on the failure of unread blogs? Judging by my own personal blog perusing habits, I think not: there are some fabulous blogs that I consume greedily and want seconds; others that I might get half way down and skip to the end; sometimes I do click the back button after the first sentence.
The fact is that blogs do get read, at least in part. If they did not, then the blogosphere would not exist.
However, possible reasons why some blogs fail include:
- you have not spent time building a following;
- the blog posts ramble, do not deliver what the headline promises;
- poor spelling and grammar, limited vocabulary;
- boring introduction;
- obvious lack of authority on the subject, poor research;
- offering unoriginal, outdated advice;
- uninspiring design and presentation;
- because a well constructed news story will tell you at least twice, if not three times, what the post is about; no need to read it all unless it has excellent entertainment value.
Below is a list of insider tips from a qualified and experienced journalist, SEO copywriter and blogger. Some may sound simplistic and directed at new bloggers, but all are definitely aimed at raising the benchmark and enriching the blog experience.
- Plan: A rough list of points to cover is enough, but it keeps you on focus and cuts down the time you spend playing FarmVille while you meditate on your next paragraph. Social media is the Bermuda Triangle of your Working Day if you don’t discipline yourself. Your plan will include an intro, middle and conclusion.
- Story construction: your intro will hook your audience, with mystery or promise, and tell them what you are going to tell them. Your intro must be interesting, it should never contain hackneyed information they have read elsewhere, or that’s obvious – this will lose their interest pretty quickly. Your middle will expand on your points; your conclusion will remind your reader of your points and wrap them neatly for taking home.
- Learn to edit: ruthlessly, or enlist a co-blogger’s help. The first para of this story was originally the fourth or fifth in its first draft. Blogging lends itself to all kinds of rambling. By the third draft you should have eliminated (pretty much) all self-indulgent purple prose. Less is more.
- Title: optimised, snappy, an accurate reflection of the post itself. Titles are also a whole issue by themselves.
- Writing: spell check; do not include unnecessary adjectives or adverbs; expand your vocabulary but do not overuse your thesaurus; do, however, use a dictionary; use a style guide (try The Guardian); get a blogging friend to check your post through; read your post aloud – this will reveal clumsy sentences; did I mention a spell check?
- The law: you should have an idea of the fair use, far comment and best practice employed by journalists. Check out the editorial policies of your preferred newspapers (try The Guardian again) and also the guidelines of the Press Complaints Commission. At the very least, you should understand what libel and plagiarism are and how to properly cite or protect your sources. You also need to know your own rights regarding the free press and freedom of information.
- Audience: they are who you are writing for; do not forget this.
- Pimp, shamelessly: advertise your blog post via your Facebook Page, your Twitter account, link it to your website if you have one, put it in your signature when you comment on other blogs and forums.
If you got this far you will no doubt have noticed that I have broken or at the very least manhandled a few of these rules. My response? You need to know the rules in order to re-craft them to your bidding. After all, you are still reading.
Here’s to happy – and successful, inventive, quality – blogging!
Social media. Everyone is doing it, aren’t they? But businesses with improperly managed social media accounts, which have no measurable goal or outcome, might struggle to understand what all the fuss is about.
Google is ever expanding into so many different fields, you might be forgiven for forgeting that it is a search engine.
Regular developments to the core Google business never go unnoticed, though. This time, search engine developers unleashed an updated Google Local, which has garnered serious interest from SEO companies.
But what does this mean?
A significant revamp of Google search has been already scheduled in for the end of this year. Before then, we will be able to properly explore the impact of new features like Google Instant and Google Local searches.
Google Instant, is not everyone’s cup of tea; but some users find it very helpful and SEO companies have to take this on board in 2011 and integrate their optimisation to incorporate Instant results.
Google Local is what SEOs at Adrac Ltd are most excited by, because of it actively helps businesses attract web traffic. Integrating Google Maps and YouTube into search engine results pages (Serps) has been around for a long time now and is inspired – yet its value has been underapprieciated.
The rebranding and packaging of this service as “Local” will change this – now we can see that Google integrated YouTube and Maps so it can show users actual locations.
This could herald the direction of Serps and search engine aglorithms in 2011, plus the exploitation of the usefulness of social media integration into search.
The Mashable Social Media winners have been announced, and there are familiar faces on the roll of honour, as well as some surprise guests.
For example, Best Social Media Customer Service (award sponsored by Blackberry) was won by Eurail.com.
It is somewhat of a difficult concept for Brits, that train companies win awards for being good at something; they get a lot of bad press, after all.
However, Eurail.com has apparently used social media to look after customer needs.
The ecommerce site for Eurail train passes regularly updates and replies to customer queries using Twitter account, Facebook and other channels, said Mashable.
Also among the winners was World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) was Most Creative Social Media. Its desire to correct its image and reputation, it launched the Stand Up For WWE campaign and encouraged fans to support it via social media and with videos (presumably on YouTube).
Mashable reported that its also published facts about the WWE that were not particularly well known, and some of its supporters were very high profile.
There are many fascinating ways to utilise social media, but again and again success comes to those who focus the interactions, how they happen, what happens and when, around the needs of their audience – read, customers.
Another tip is to link all your information/customer service channels: Facebook, Twitter, your company blog, your company website. If the information you give out has value, visitors will return.
This past week, Google has predominately been in the clouds with its Chrome Web Store and Chrome OS pilot program.
However, while it was promoting the Chrome brand, it also announced its annual Zeitgeist, an overview of the popular searches of the year.
My first thought was “… really? People searched for that?”
To explain, I assumed the web is so firmly embroiled with the entertainment industry that we would expect celebrities to always be at the top of the tree in searches. WRONG. The quickest rising query of 2010 was Chatroulette with Friv and Myxer also in the top 10?
At least when Twitter will announce its 2010 overall top trending topics, we will see something to showcase our maturity in the top 10. Oh wait, Vuvuzela and Pulpo Paul are there. I have to admit I also tweeted about both these topics when they were trending – oops!
Then there is YouTube, where millions of people spend endless hours watching the most random clips ever created. Did we expect anything else from its top 10 of 2010? Again, I must admit I contributed to their success; I had watched all 10 of the clips before the list was announced, such as the Bed Intruder song, Tik Tok Parody, Greyson Chance.
A year ago Pulpo Paul, Chatroulette and Antoine Dodson were not in the consciousness of the public. This just goes to show the power of the internet; even the most apparently random things in the world, with the right exposure and online presence, can achieve worldwide recognition in one year, or even within an hour.
