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8 September 2010

Social Media ROI Coming Under the Spotlight

After the depressingly predictable social media goldrush seen this year, it appears that questions are starting to be asked of social media and its actual commercial impact.

It's probably about time that some of the heat was taken out of the social media sector. For example just take a look at the starting salaries for social media jobs, the number of self titled social media consultants cropping up around the place, and training courses available. An offshore SEO company contacted me the other day about their services, including what they now call SMO (social media optimisation).

However I recently learnt of a social media debate at Marketing Week, in which Mark Ritson challenges whether Twitter is really a relevant online space for commercial brands to occupy, or instead the preserve of celebrity driven personality culture. As Ritson puts it, social media is a "new and relatively insignificant communications tool that has limited potential for a very small proportion of brands". Ouch.

Then this morning I just read a very good post by Joe Hughes about social media ROI, which illustrates the different ways in which the value to be gained from Social Media could and should be measured. However, Hughes does conclude that Social Media can be very valuable as a brand reputation management tool.

Personally, I can see some value in social media, and feel it is worth participating in. But I am yet to find a good example of a website which has been able to transform social media activity into a core promotional tool that generates value. Twitter followers don't always mean revenue!

8 July 2010

Useful Sites For Finding People To Follow On Twitter

Here is a really useful list of sites to help find people to follow on Twitter. In addition to this list I would add the Twellow directory.

Of course the idea of following people, it to get followers back, and so you want an auto follow thank you message in place which mentions your site and message. You can set this up automatically for multiple Twitter accounts at Social Oomph.

1 July 2010

Google Caffeine and it's Impact on SEO

Google fully rolled our their new web indexing system, Caffeine, on June 8th this year. But what are the implications for SEO and link building?

17 June 2010

Distribute Tweets on Twitter in Advance

Just been setting up a new Twitter account for a client, Sygma Solutions, and came across a feature of Social Oomph (formally known as Tweetlater) that allows you to schedule the advance distribution of Twitter tweets.

I've already used Social Oomph extensively as a third party tool for manually scheduling tweets for a range of client twitter accounts, but I hadn't come across the 'Distribute Scheduled Updates' function before.

It appears to allow you to schedule a batch of tweets to be broadcast regularly at intervals of days, hours or minutes (if you have a lot to say!). You can also schedule your tweets to appear within set times and on specific days of the week.

2 June 2010

Where did Twitterfeed go?

Twitterfeed, the online service which lets you send RSS feeds to your Twitter account, seems to be having some problems.

Their site appears to have been replaced with a spammy domain holding page. Maybe the owners have pulled the site down, or someone else has managed to renew it? Also, the feeds I had set up don't seem to be publishing.

Whatever the reasons this is a real shame - I've been using Twitterfeed for months now to send third party feeds to client twitter accounts, to help increase their tweet volume.

I've been looking for replacements, and am trialling http://rss2twitter.com. It doesn't seem to have all the same functionality as Twitterfeed, like scheduling of updates of the RSS feed, but we'll see how it works - at the moment its set up to send 3 rss feeds to http://twitter.com/dressingupideas.

Free Directory Submission Software Reviews

I've been test driving a couple of free directory submission software programs. Now normally I tend to take the 'quality over quantity' approach to directory submissions and do a small number manually.

However I have so much link building work on the go at the moment, including some sites with pretty much 0 backlinks, that I thought I'd try out a few programs, ideally free. I also thought about using a directory submission service in India, but don't quite have the time to wait (or the budget) for some of these projects.

The first one I tried was http://www.fastdirectorysubmitter.com/ which offers a free download for a trial. Fast Directory Submitter includes 2000+ free web directories. In the free mode the program allows you submit the site to 150 directories only.

The download was smooth enough and then the interface seemed fairly simple to use, to set up a campaign first although there was quite a lack of explanation. However as soon as I set her rolling, the whole program crashed - not very encouraging.

Then I tried a free download of http://www.sliqsubmitter.com, which again offers a free version that submits to just 100 directories, but you can upgrade to a monthly program to get the full list.

I really liked the interface on this, really simple with lots of rollover help comments and suggestions making it a good proposition for use by temps and freelancers who might do work for me. The submission seemed to go well, although you do have to remain involved to handle the category selection and recaptcha completions for submissions, and it is quite slow. You feel a bit like you are watching a machine in a factory after a while!

I also checked out http://directorysubmitter.imwishlist.com/ but I'm afraid the US style never ending sales landing page kind of put me off, and I don't think it is genuinely free to try (just a free download of the software).

1 June 2010

Trying out PeerPower B2B Social Networking

I've been invited by an old contact, Julie Anderson at http://www.rapinteriors.com to try out what looks to be a new b2b social networking site, http://www.peerpower.com. So far it has quite nice functionality but most members seem to be based in India. I will wait to see if the weblink on my profile page gets detected by Google Webmaster.

18 May 2010

New Features for Google Webmaster

Google have at long last released some useful new features for the Google Webmaster Central control panel.

One of the most handy additions is the new way of granting access to individual sites to other Google Accounts - gone are the days of having to create a separate Google Webmaster account to share with a client, because you don't want to grant access to all your client sites.

There's also a new way of verifying your site ownership using a DNS record.

Finally, there is a lot more detail on impressions and clicks from natural search terms, but I've been reading a fair amount of criticism over the accuracy of the data when you compare it to stats from Google Analytics for example.Far too many long tail search terms are just categorised as getting <10 clicks, which could mean 0 or 10 - there's quite a difference!

14 May 2010

How Twitter Followings Illustrate Link Popularity on Google

I've been setting up some new Twitter accounts for clients like Premium Sofas and Zen Cart Web Design, and working to get them more followers. In the process it occurred to me that the relative value of different Twitter accounts based on the Followers/Following quite resembles the theory of link popularity which Google uses to assess popularity of a website.

For example on Twitter, a lot of Followers make a user look good, just like a lot of backlinks to a site look good. But look deeper and if you have more Followers than people you follow, you look even better. More sites linking to your website than you link to, also looks good (which is one of the reasons I don't tend to focus huge amounts of effort on self cancelling reciprocal links).

But then I thought about how your new Twitter account can gain kudos just by having a very popular Twitter user follow you. I mean, imagine the impact of say Stephen Fry following you, based just on the number of people who follow him (nearly 1.5 million followers at time of writing). This immediate surge in publicity is kind of like the extra brownie points Google gives your site when you get a link from a really credible and authorative website, that in turn has a lot of links which point to it.

This is why whenever clients send me a cold link request they've received and ask what I think, I always check the Page Rank of the site offering to trade links first. If it's not popular, there's little point.

In the future I wouldn't be surprised if Twitter replicates some kind of version of Page Rank (if they don't already) based on the difference between your Followers/Following, and the number of Followers your Followers have got.

12 May 2010

Great use of mobile marketing

The Museum of London has launched a free iPhone app called StreetMuseum, which guides users to more than 200 historic sites in the capital, where, if they hold up their iPhones, they can see a photo of the past emerge as an overlay across the present scene.

What a fantastic use of smart phone functionality - its truly mobile, feeds geo-specific content to users, and promote the Museum at the same time. Next time I'm in London I'll give it a try.

7 May 2010

Quote of the Week: New BMI Social Media Strategy

"We have designed our social media strategy to offer an exponential increase in added value for our customers who choose to engage online, whilst ensuring the sustainability of interaction through a newly re-structured digital team," said Callum Adamson, head of search and social media at bmi.

Now what on earth does that mean? Answers on a postcard, sorry - I mean on an online engagement.....

29 April 2010

Where are your website hotspots?

Two recent reports released by web usability guru Jakob Neilsen have shed new light on just whereabouts on a website visitors look the most.

In one report Neilsen revealed that "Web users spend 80% of their time looking at information above the page fold. Although users do scroll, they allocate only 20% of their attention below the fold." The fold he refers to is the traditional direct marketing term for information above or below the fold in a letter or mailer. In web terms, he means information below the bottom of edge of your browser window.

In his other report, Neilsen confirms that: "Web users spend 69% of their time viewing the left half of the page and 30% viewing the right half. A conventional layout is thus more likely to make sites profitable."

So in summary if you want to push one thing on your web page - a newsletter sign up, top products, enquiry form etc. - then you should put it on the top left hand section of your web page.

There's also a possible argument for creating short pages that within most browser windows without the need for scrolling, although I have also read a lot of material which says that sales oriented conversion or landing pages should be as long as possible - go figure!

Search Latest Twitter Chatter Using Google

Now here's a nifty trick - you can search Twitter traffic in real time or past discussions, using Google.

Simply search for a search term on Google like normal,  then click on “Show options” on the search results page, then select “Updates.” You'll see a graph showing the frequency of mentions of your search term on Twitter, which you can extend to a longer period of time. Here's an example on the search term 'volcanic ash'.

An amusing distraction, or evidence of the growing importance of Twitter activity?

28 April 2010

Creating yet another mixed Twitter account

This is getting to be something of a habit - I've just been working on creating another new Twitter account for a client, in this case www.zencartwebdesign.co.uk who sell Zen Cart e-commerce add ons, hosting, installs etc.

I firstly created their new Twitter account at http://twitter.com/zencartwebsites then I found some third party RSS feeds from Zen Cart forums and sites. I plugged these into my account at http://twitterfeed.com which aggregates them and pushes the feeds to the Twitter account.

Then I went through the client's website and pulled out 30 odd products and articles, and wrote a tweet about each one, with a link of course. Then it was off to my account at https://www.socialoomph.com where I pasted each tweet in, pre sent to publish one a day for the next month (I noticed that if you pay to upgrade to the Pro, you can create a reservoir of tweets and have it publish one a day randomly).

So now we have a nice new Twitter account publishing numerous tweets daily all on its own, with each tweet  packed full of keywords so they'll appear in searches on twitter!

Now I just need to submit to some twitter directories and start following some e-commerce twitterers to get the ball rolling.

Playing with Plugged.it

I've been playing around with a new social networking site called www.plugged.it (you can see my profile at www.plugged.it/joshwhiten).

I quite like the premise, in that its for all of us people looking to plug things online - products, businesses, websites etc. I'm still trying to get to grips with the best ways of doing this though. I've added a link to my own site in my profile, but I really need to find how to get client sites mentioned. I've started by doing a blog post on a new client, www.zencartwebdesigns.co.uk.

Will wait to see if the links appear on Google's radar, by using the Google Webmaster links report.

26 April 2010

There ARE real people at DMOZ!

I just received an email from an editor at DMOZ, the open source directory project. A listing on DMOZ is widely accepted as helping improve your rankings in Google natural search results. The email says;

"Thanks for suggesting that we list http://www.youressex.net within our directory. Sadly, it's not possible for us to evaluate the site without a logon and so it's been declined. If you suggest it again, please include logon details in the description like this [User, PW] They won't be published."


This must be the first time I've ever had any human contact with DMOZ let alone such a prompt review - I submitted the site on24/03/10 so that' approximately 1 month. The last site I got accepted took over 6 months! Plus of course some useful feedback about actually letting them got into the site, which is a little odd as they have accepted sister sites without asking for this. Must just be the views of different human editors.

23 April 2010

Kent 2020 Exhibition: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Isn't it strange how people behave at exhibitions? I had an interesting and somewhat varied afternoon at the Kent 2020 business exhibition yesterday.

22 March 2010

Listen the Latest Episode of The Bottom Line with Evan Davis

I can really recommend listening to the latest episode of the BBC radio business programme, The Bottom Line.

The episode broadcast 18th March has an excellent discussion between the bosses of a drinks firm, a housebuilder and an online gambling website, in which they look at issues such as competition, market trends in the recession, benchmarking and regulation.

The talk also touches on the topic of market disruption and disruptive technology on the internet, particularly from the view of the online gambling site, which is a general topic I hope to return to soon.

18 March 2010

Check out Tweetfeed for Building Quick Twitter Accounts

I'm currently a big fan of Tweetfeed, a free online tool for aggregating RSS feeds from different sources and then pushing them out to different Twitter accounts you manage.

This is a useful exercise because if you want to use Twitter to attract new followers and website visitors, the best way to think of Twitter is like a mini search engine.

Is the Facebook vs Google PPC Face-Off Coming?

A recent report on Brand Republic announces that "Social network Facebook has overtaken search giant Google to become the most visited website in the US for the week ending 13 March".

Now we usually expect new developments in the US to soon make their way over here (housing market crash, credit crunch, bank failures etc.) so it will be interesting to see how long it will be before Facebook possibly overtakes Google for usage in the UK.

9 March 2010

A Bad Day for Facebook

Facebook has been plastered across the media today because of its use by a sex offender, Peter Chapman, who posed as a teenage boy to meet a young victim on Facebook, Ashleigh Hall, who he subsequently met and tragically murdered.

Its an awful case that has repurcussions for everyone involved - the local police force which lost track of Chapman for 9 months, plus of course the social networking site he used, especially as he has now been dubbed the 'Facebook Killer'.

Whilst Facebook can't be held legally responsible for the actions of it's users, it does just remind us all quite how easy it is to pose as just about anyone online - after all what identity checks does Facebook use when signing up?

It also reminds us all about the importance of reminding young people about the often overlooked dangers of social networking online. When I was running a focus group of 13 year old social networking users for the planning of www.kent.co.uk, we discovered just how little structured education these youngsters felt they received from either their schools, or especially their parents.

It will be interesting to see if/how Facebook and other social sites grasp this important opportunity to help educate web users.

(Then, just as the Facebook team thought things probably couldn't get any worse,  the site has been mentioned in another case of a man who murdered his former girlfriend, prompted it is claimed, by her entries on her Facebook profile.)

New Online Media and Advertising Rules on the Way

How up to speed are you about the forthcoming new rules about how businesses promote themselves online?

Last week the Advertising Association submitted recommendations to the Committee of Advertising Practice to extend the non-broadcast code to company websites and even branded Pages on social networking websites like Facebook.

It's been suggested that a refreshed version of the Code will come out in Autumn and will be enforced by the Advertising Standards Association, who already enforce the Non-broadcast Code (CAP Code) which already covers paid for online advertising.

My guess is that like most of us, this has one has crept up unawares, especially on smaller businesses. So I'll be reviewing both the current code and the new proposals shortly and will report back on the implications for websites, socil networking and online advertising.

ASBO's for Dogs? Now thats what I call tactical.

Just heard a BBC radio news headline about a government proposal for ASBO's for Dogs. Yes really.

Now doesn't that sound just like something from an episode of satirical political comedy The Thick of It? Ollie Reader throws his desperate Minister a quick headline grabbing policy idea to take the heat off - "Quick Ollie, give me something I can go to Cabinet with this week; ASBO's for dogs? That'll do!"

Or maybe it's just coincidence that the proposal comes from the department of Home Secretary Alan Johnson; a former postman.

In either event, it sounds awfully like a short term tactical measure, at a time when surely the attention should be on strategy, and dare I say it the 'bigger issues'.

In other words, sounds like the tail is wagging the dog.

4 March 2010

Are Ebay and Amazon underated as E-commerce sales channels?

I've just been having a catch up with a former client who's coming back for some more work, and our discussion has raised some interesting issues about the use of Ebay and Amazon.

2 March 2010

Useful Free Link Analysis Tools

Here are a few useful free link analysis tools and backlink checkers....

Why Don't all Backlinks show up in a link: Search on Google?

Here's a nagging little issue that's been bugging me for ages, and recently came to a head when a client asked me why they had so few backlinks showing up when they use the link colon command?

10 February 2010

Now is the time to sign up to Google Maps

If you haven't used the Local Business Center to add your company to Google Maps yet, you'd better pull your finger out!

2 February 2010

Hyphens in Domain Names Help SEO?

I've recently been analysing a potential new client, www.red-art.co.uk, to see where they can improve performance in natural search.

13 January 2010

Do .com domains get indexed faster than .co.uk?

I've been continuing my my current trend of creating 'sponsored' microsites for client websites, each targeting a specific search term with a keyword or phrase rich URL.