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2011 in Online Marketing

Friday, December 9th, 2011

Hear that mournful whistle? That’s the winds of change, my friend. 2011 is almost at an end, and it’s been an enormously exciting and dynamic year for online marketing. Here is our round-up of the most important online developments and changes we’ve seen in the last twelve months.

Google Panda Update

In February Google initiated its so-called Panda Update, tweaking the algorhithm the search engine uses to determine rankings in search results. The goal was seemingly to ensure the primacy of original content by demoting ‘content farms’ and other sites which use copied or recycled content. This had a noticeable effect on the article marketing we do, which involves essentially farming out content to other sites in return for links pointing back to our client’s website. It still works, and forms a part of most of the SEO campaigns we run for clients, but it is now no longer the quick win it once was!

Emergence of Mobile Browsing

It’s been on the up for a while now, and 2011 saw the continued rise in popularity of people using smartphones to access their emails and other online content. As of October, it was estimated that just under half of the UK population owned a smartphone, and we can safely assume that proportion is likely to go up a bit further on Christmas morning this year!

This key development is something every business with an online presence needs to be aware of, and in the next year or two we are sure to see a trend towards websites being optimised for mobile browsing. This means taking into account some of the important differences and limitations of mobile, so while an slick all-singing, all-dancing Flash based website might seem like a good idea, when you consider that the most popular smartphone, the iPhone, is unable to render it, it may make more sense for going for something plainer and more universal to avoid losing out on mobile traffic.

Google+

After a few problems getting off the ground in the summer, Google + is motoring on fairly well now, up to 40 million followers worldwide (for comparison, Twitter has 200 million, and Facebook has over half a billion). Time will tell if it can pick up enough momentum to challenge the big two of social media, but since Google + has now introduced brand pages, we think it certainly wouldn’t hurt any businesses setting up their own page and starting to build up their own mini network. Here’s what I wrote about potential SEO and customer engagement benefits of Google+ businesses may see in future.

Changes to Facebook

I wrote a piece on the Facebook changes back in October, and it’s interesting to see how some of the changes have since become an integral part of the Facebook experience, and others have been almost ignored entirely (Facebook video chat, anyone?)

The biggest thing that changed from a marketing perspective was the shift from a purely chronological wall feed to one in which posts are given prominence according to how important to you Facebook deems each one to be. This means that businesses on facebook can no longer just rely on getting as many likes as possible - if an individual ‘likes’ a business but does not ever engage with them, then Facebook will consider posts from that business to be of low relevance, and will bump them right to the bottom of the user’s feed, where they are unlikely to be seen.

Twitter

2011 was above all else surely the year of Twitter. Its role in the revolutions that swept the Arab world showed the incredible power and potential of social media as a tool for uniting people in creative and unprecedented ways. Take the example of the protesters in Egypt, who used the hashtag #cairo to tweet updates on their activities, meaning that even those in the city who didn’t personally know any protesters could easily find out where and when they were gathering, and join the demonstrations themselves.

As well as helping to topple governments in North Africa, Twitter users also caused a major headache for the UK legal system by flouting the super injunction imposed on Ryan Giggs’ off-field antics. A great leveller, Twitter was able to subvert the long-standing monopoly over news and information held by traditional media in this country, probably for good.

So in such a tumultuous twelve months, what was the biggest trending topic of all – the Arab Spring? the death of Steve Jobs? The London riots? The Japanese tsunami? No, in fact more widely talked about on Twitter than all these things was floppy haired teenage singer boy Justin Bieber (click here to see the full list of top Twitter trends in 2011).

As a barometer of stuff people on Twitter care about, the top trends list makes pretty desperate reading, but don’t give up on Twitter just yet. It may have its inane and trivial side, but this year also we’ve seen what a tremendously useful marketing and customer service tool Twitter can be, especially for those businesses who are willing to put the time in and use it the right way.

Just here in Dorchester, we’ve seen local traders take to Twitter with enthusiasm and energy in recent months, creating a vibrant little Twitter community based around the town’s shops, arts organisations and interest groups.

Conclusions

So what lessons have we learnt from the year? Despite changes to the Google algorhithm, content is still king – well-written, relevant content on your website, blog and social media platforms is still the core of any online marketing campaign. Huge new opportunities are opening up in social and mobile web, so it’s vital to stay on top of those and not be left behind. These points are well worth mulling over when you are considering your marketing priorties for 2012, and remember if there’s anything you’d like to discuss with us, you can give us a call Monday to Friday on 01305 755609.

Chris Redhead

Tags: facebook, google, Google Panda update, mobile browsing, twitter
Posted in General, Online Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation, Social Media | No Comments »

Changes to Facebook - How to Keep Your Brand Page Engaged and Relevant

Thursday, November 3rd, 2011

The times they are a’changing in the world of social media. We’ve already had the launch of Google Plus this year, and a couple of weeks back at the F8 conference in San Francisco, Facebook announced some big changes to their site, signalling a major shift in the way they want content to be viewed and shared by individuals and businesses using the platform. The reaction from users has so far been a little mixed, to say the least.

This week’s blog post looks at what has changed, and whether these changes will benefit or hinder brands on Facebook. Is it still business as usual, or is a new approach required in order for brands to get the very most out of their Facebook pages?

What’s New on Facebook?

The change which has had the most influence on ordinary users is the new-look timeline. Instead of a purely chronological stream with most recent posts appearing on top of the older ones, you now see ‘top posts’ at the head of your stream. These are the posts that Facebook perceives you will find most interesting and relevant, based on your previous behaviour and interactions on the site. So the idea is that friends who you communicate with regularly on Facebook will be given more prominence for their posts, while contacts who you rarely engage with will be relegated to lower down the feed, and may not get seen at all.

The top news feature may not be a welcome addition for brands on Facebook. Fans of a brand are often willing to ‘like’ a page, but may not subsequently want to engage with the brand regularly. This could mean that Facebook identifies the brand page as one of the user’s less important contacts, and therefore gives its updates diminished prominence, meaning that updates from the brand page may not be seen by the user.

For a long time, the emphasis for brands on facebook has been to go out of their way to get as many likes as possible. Expedia achieving a million likes has been used often as a case study of a massively successful social media campaign. Now, it seems that the number of fans is not important unless those fans are actively engaged with the business. A strategy of chasing thousands of likes will not bear fruit if your legion of new fans never see anything you post.

As a further signpost of Facebook’s new engagement-focused direction, there are now a few little additions to the layout of brand pages. You may have noticed that under the number of likes on a brand page there is now another number for ‘talking about this’. This, we are told, is a cumulative score worked out by Facebook to reflect how many people are liking, commenting and posting on the brand page. Many brands are likely to be in for a shock when they see how low their score is, which emphasises once again the point that just having lots of likes isn’t enough in the eyes of Facebook – they want to see your brand page become a hub of activity and a community that fans keep coming back to.

With this in mind, it is perhaps a little bizarre that Facebook have also decided to remove the discussion boards on brand pages, since this was a great place for people with an interest in a brand to communicate with other fans. We’d heard businesses tell us how useful they found these discussions for getting specific portions of their fans talking about certain aspects of the business, and now that chatter will be restricted to the main wall, meaning it will be much harder to segment your Facebook fanbase.

So what changes do you need to make to your social media strategy to deal with these alterations in the Facebook ’s makeup? The priority now more than ever is to make sure people are engaging with your brand, so you might want to consider holding competitions, asking questions and posting photos which people can comment on. If your business is location-based (i.e. a holiday park or hotel) then make sure you have enabled a Facebook check-in, which allows people to notify their friends when they have arrived on your premises.

If you’d like to know more about using Facebook effectively for your business, why not give us a call today on 01305 755609

Chris Redhead

Tags: facebook, facebook brand pages, google plus, Social Media
Posted in General, Social Media | No Comments »

Analysing the Riots with Social Media Monitoring

Friday, August 19th, 2011

The 2002 Stephen Spielberg film Minority Report is set in a sci-fi world which police have the technology to see into the future to predict when a person intends to commit a crime, and are able to arrest and imprison the would-be offender before any crime actually takes place. If the recent UK riots are anything to go by, that technology may already be in police hands, thanks to the emergence of new and powerful social media monitoring tools.

This blog post looks at what impact social media monitoring could have on crime-fighting, particularly in the wake of the riots in London and other parts of the country last week.

The Twitter Riots

On Monday 8th August the Sun newspaper led with the headline ‘The Twitter Riots’, claiming that social networking was responsible for the widespread looting in London and calling for police to be given powers to shut down these networks during periods of civil unrest. As ever, the knee-jerk tabloid press demonization of technology was way off the mark.

In truth, shutting them down was the last thing the police would have wanted to do, and in all likelihood champagne corks would’ve been popping at Scotland Yard the moment they realised that this is how the rioters were communicating. While social media may give users the ability to interact and share information quickly and simply on laptops and smartphones, it also makes them incredibly easy to monitor and track down.

Social Media Monitoring is one of the most exciting growth areas in technology at the moment. It has sprung up in the last couple of years to meet the desire of businesses to see what is being said about them online, but the potential of this technology is much more vast and far reaching than that.

Today’s police have an opportunity to latch on to it as a way to keep track of what people are saying in social media, and recent evidence suggests this is what they have now started to do. Already several youths have been charged with trying to incite riots online, including one who set up a Facebook page calling for rioters to gather in Northwich town centre, only to get there and find the police waiting to arrest him. They had found his page by monitoring the social sphere and were able to stop the wannabe rioter in his tracks, before he’d so much as looked covetously at a TV in shop window. It was Spielberg’s vision come true.

Analysing the Social Sphere

As well as locating individual troublemakers and rabble-rousers online, social media monitoring can also be used for identifying overall trends and patterns in online behaviour. Using a couple of the social monitoring tools we’re currently working with at Key Multimedia HQ, I was able to chart exactly how the social networks responded to the London riots between the outbreak of disturbances on 6th August and the end of the riots on 11th August. I used the search string “London AND riots”, meaning that I could pull in all posts made in that time period that contained both of those words.

We can see from the daily mentions graph just how quickly the mentions rose after the 7th August, reaching a peak on 9th, when the riots in London were at their height. By the night of the 8th, the police had flooded the streets and London had started to calm down, while the riots spread to other cities in the UK. This is reflected in the timeline, which shows a significant drop-off in the volume of chatter discussing the London riots at this point in time.

As for the share of mentions, the data shows that the majority of people discussing the riots were doing so on Twitter. The instant nature of this platform makes it ideal for fast-moving events such as the riots, as worried London residents desperate for information would have found much more up to the minute (though not always reliable) news on Twitter than they could expect to get from even the 24 hour TV news channels.

A smaller number of people were discussing the riots on Facebook, and within days of rioting breaking out there were thousands of videos being uploaded on Youtube recording the carnage in London, many of them recorded and uploaded instantly via smartphones.

The ‘buzz graph’ is a useful tool for displaying which other words are being most commonly mentioned alongside my chosen search terms. So we can see in the centre the word ‘Tottenham’, which was the subject of a lot of mentions because it was borough where the unrest first kicked off. This is strongly linked on the graph with terms like ‘violence’, ‘injured’, and ‘loot’ – words which reflect the escalation of disorder in the days after the first incident in Tottenham.

Also linked are words like ‘Duggan’, the surname of the man whose shooting by police sparked the violence, and other terms like ‘protest’, ‘criminality’, and ‘race’ reflecting other dimensions to the discussion as people began to talk about the possible root causes for the riots.

Monitoring the social sphere in this way could potentially offer valuable insights to the authorities, and could help shape the way they react and respond to unexpected events. This goes not just for the police, but also the fire service, hospitals and other organisations, who could use insights from social media to improve the services they provide for the public.

Taking Advantage of Social Media

As well as monitoring conversations and analysing data patterns, there is also an opportunity for the police to take advantage of social media as a way to engage with and reassure the community in times of civil disorder. This was something several of the more forward-thinking forces were able to do during the riots, by using their official Twitter feeds to assuage public fears and dismiss hoaxes in parts of the country where rumour-mongers erroneously claimed riots were taking place.

This is also a way to bring a more human side to the police force, opening up a new channel to make them more answerable and open to the public. Just as everyone likes to see a friendly local police officer on the beat in their neighbourhood, having a prominent and approachable local police presence on Twitter is a great way for them to listen, learn and engage with the community.

Lessons from the Riots

The response to the riots suggests the police are now perhaps beginning to wake up to the extraordinary power of social media as a tool for communication and sharing information. The kids who took part in the rioting, despite their heads being emptier than a looted Dixons outlet, are already fully aware of these tools and how to use them, and it seems as though the police are now finally starting to catch up, and are now for the first time fully recognising the importance of these new technologies.

I talked in depth about the uses of social media monitoring for marketing on a previous blog post. If you have any questions about monitoring or would like to discuss how it could help your business, why not give us a call on 01305 755609.

Tags: facebook, monitoring tools, police, riots, social media monitoring, twitter, youtube
Posted in General, Social Media | No Comments »

Social Buzz Monitoring

Friday, May 20th, 2011

Whether you like it or not, your industry, your products and most likely your business itself is being talked about online. Today’s consumers constantly share opinions, reviews, questions and ideas about what they spend their money on, and its up to you whether to see that as an opportunity or a threat.

This online chatter around a topic or a brand is called the social buzz.

What is Social Buzz Monitoring?

Put simply, Social buzz monitoring is the process of identifying where your brand is being discussed online, and by whom.

Like focus groups and surveys, social buzz monitoring allows you to canvas opinions and collect data from consumers and influencers that may be useful to your business. The trends and conversations that buzz monitoring uncovers may have an influence on your approach and the way you plan your strategy for the future.

Some experts will tell you that social buzz monitoring is far superior to traditional survey exercises, as people will usually tend to be more candid when sharing thoughts online with their friends and peers (although not always!).

As well as being great for listening, buzz monitoring also offers opportunities to reach out and engage with consumers, meaning you can respond with help and advice, and hopefully drive sales.

Monitoring Tools

Many of you will be familiar with Google Alerts. This is an example of a free monitoring tool, and though useful for beginners, it is a very basic option compared to some of the other more sophisticated tools out there.

If you want to take a step up from what Google Alerts can offer you, there are paid monitoring tools which are offered by companies like Brandwatch, Attentio and Radian6, who will normally charge you a large monthly fee for use of their monitoring dashboard.

Our own service lies somewhere in between these two options - we are capable of far more sophisticated monitoring than you can get from a free service such as Google Alerts, but without the premium price charged by the paid monitoring dashboards.

So how do monitoring tools work? Basically, monitoring tools allow you to monitor select keywords such as the name of your business, meaning that whenever your brand is mentioned in blogs, news, discussion forums, social networks etc you will get a notification.

You can also take it a step further, and look at other key words and phrases that are related to your business or your industry.

Most newcomers to buzz monitoring will find the data they are given overwhelming and often largely irrelevant, like a fisherman who casts his net and keeps pulling out old boots and bits of junk instead of tasty fish.

The key to successful buzz monitoring is being able to hone your results so your net is not cast too wide, and you are only pulling in the stuff that is of genuine use to you. It is also all about being current and being able to spot buzz as it happens, so you can react and respond instantly.

Benefits of Social Buzz Monitoring

Used effectively, social buzz monitoring should help you to answer some of the following questions:

Are people talking about your brand?

Buzz monitoring gives you a sense of how much people are talking about your brand. Even if you are a small business and there may not be that much buzz around you, there almost certainly will be chatter about your industry that could be very useful to tap into. What are the needs and problems of customers in your industry? What are they looking for?

Who is talking about you?

Buzz monitoring is a great way to locate your market – for example, are your customers mostly Facebook users, or are they more often to be found on Twitter and LinkedIn? Pinpointing your customers in this way will allow you to target your marketing (both online and offline) more effectively.

You may also be able to identify key influencers in your industry – those bloggers, tweeters and others whose opinions are influential to other people. Identifying and engaging with these influencers could assist you greatly in spreading message about your brand.

What are they saying – is it positive/negative?

Even negative comments about your brand can be useful, as it may allow you to spot problems you might not otherwise have identified or been told about. You can even engage with your unhappy customers who are complaining about a disappointing product or service and offer to put things right, or at least put across your own side of the story.

Are online consumers looking for your products/services?

One of the huge benefits of social buzz monitoring is its ability to generate ‘hot leads’, by notifying you when someone is asking about or looking for a product or service that you can provide. You can then reach out to this individual and offer your advice and assistance, and perhaps generate a sale. Even if you don’t get a sale, you have benefitted your brand image tremendously by listening and offering to help a consumer.

How to Start Monitoring

Used properly, social buzz monitoring can be extremely valuable, whether for gauging consumer opinion, providing customer service or pushing sales.

As a business, you have the option of choosing an online marketing agency to do your social buzz monitoring for you, or you can have a go at doing it yourself by purchasing your own dashboard from the likes of Radian6.

However, as is the case with many things, having the expertise to know what to do is equally important as having the best tools to do it with. Just as a chef can have everything he needs for a delicious roast lamb dinner but can still end up with a soggy undercooked kebab if he doesn’t know what he’s doing, effective social buzz monitoring relies on more than just having the best, most expensive dashboard – it requires the knowledge of how use it and respond to the data it produces.

If you would like to know more about how social buzz monitoring could help your business, why not give us a call on 01305 755609, or drop us an email at info@keymultimedia.co.uk

Chris Redhead

Tags: facebook, google alerts, linkedin, social buzz monitoring, Social Media, twitter
Posted in General, Social Media | 1 Comment »

The Week in Web News

Friday, May 13th, 2011

It’s been a busy week in the online world – there have been good ideas, bad ideas and more jostling for power and backstabbing than an episode of the Apprentice.

The big story this week was the revelation that Facebook secretly hired a PR company to smear Google. They hoped to get stories into newspapers and blogs claiming that Google was breaching privacy laws and gathering excessive amounts of data on its unsuspecting users.

Facebook were hoping to do this all on the sly, but when the PR company, Burston-Marsteller, approached bloggers with the stories they were challenged on the information, and admitted that Facebook had put them up to it.

To some degree Google expects these kind of attacks – you don’t get to be one of the biggest, most profitable businesses in the world without making a few enemies, and it’s safe to assume that for every one of these smear stories where the perpetrator gets uncovered, there are several more that don’t.

However, when companies like Google find themselves being attacked and smeared from all sides, it means they have to spend a lot of their time putting out fires and defending themselves, and less time focusing on the more important task of finding new ventures and evolving their business.

Microsoft Wins Battle for Skype

Some would say that being forced to adopt a defensive posture because of smears and criticisms was the biggest problem which plagued Microsoft throughout the previous decade, and has now caused them to lose their leading position in recent years. Microsoft’s big news this week was their acquisition of Skype, the online video phone service. Several other companies, including Facebook, were said to be interested in the purchase, but Microsoft secured it with a deal thought to be worth around £5 billion.

Like many of the internet companies which are being traded for sky-high prices at the moment, Skype doesn’t actually make itself an awful lot of money (it actually made a loss last year). It is massively popular – it has around 660 million users worldwide, but these users don’t spend very much on it, and the challenge for Microsoft is how monetize this huge customer base.

One option would be to integrate it into other services – Skype used to be owned by eBay, who bought it in 2005 with a plan to integrate it into their online marketplace, hoping this would allow buyers and sellers to talk to each other more efficiently via internet phone. It didn’t catch on with eBay users, but Microsoft could try something similar – for example by finding a way to integrate the technology into MSN Messenger, or even Xbox Live?

Apple is Top Banana

It’s been a relatively quiet week for Apple, but it still managed to make the news this week by topping the list of the world’s most valuable brands in the Brandz annual top 100 global brand power list. This is the first time Apple has topped the list, beating off competition from the likes of McDonalds, Google, Coca Cola and IBM.

So what does this all mean? For me, this week’s news all comes down to the crucial importance of brand image.

You could put so much of Apple’s success down to the way it has built itself a fantastic image, becoming known internationally as a company which consistently makes desirable products people love. Consumers associate the Apple brand with stylish design and superb user experience, and this gives Apple an enormous advantage over some of its less glamorous competitors.

Google has an equally positive brand image – its mantra – ‘don’t be evil ’, reflects its values and reputation for ethical business practices. The Burston-Marsteller smear campaign this week was presumably Facebook trying to bring to the limelight a darker side of Google’s business, and hoping to cast some doubt on their ‘nice guy’ image.

Microsoft, meanwhile, has serious brand trouble. Compared to Apple and Google, Microsoft is in danger of becoming perceived as an uncool brand, associated largely with joyless suits who give dreary powerpoint presentations in offices and go to sleep at night dreaming of spreadsheets.

Microsoft has taken a major punt by paying so much for Skype, but it is part of a new generation of thrusting young internet companies, and Microsoft may be hoping that by bringing Skype into their fold a bit of that cool will rub off on them.

Chris Redhead

Tags: Apple, eBay, facebook, google, Microsoft, Skype, twitter
Posted in General | No Comments »

Google Brings +1 to the Social Media Party

Friday, April 8th, 2011

Well, this is exciting. Google has announced one of its biggest forays yet into the social sphere with its new +1 tool. +1 will take the form of a clickable button which will appear on web pages and will allow users to recommend sites and share their recommendations with friends and contacts.

Watch Google’s explanation of the service here:

If it all sounds familiar, that’s because Facebook has been doing the same thing for a while now with its ‘like’ button, which is becoming an increasingly common sight on third party websites across the net. There’s also the Twitter ‘retweet’ button, which offers an almost identical service for Twitter users.

So it’s a classic me-too product from Google. Is this a sign that the great innovator is now resorting to playing catch-up with its more genuinely edgy, boundary-pushing, and social media-savvy rivals?

Google’s Social Woes

When companies get really big (and Google is certainly that), there is always a tendency for them to take their eye of the ball, and this allows the younger, hungrier rival companies to take advantage.

The social element of the web in particular has been a real Achilles heel for Google in recent years, and its high-profile stumbles have opened the door for other companies to steam ahead and steal a march in the social media arena.

Last year Google launched Buzz, the much-derided social network meant to challenge the hegemony of Twitter and Facebook. The service was a massive flop, seeing a very poor uptake by users and ending up being quietly shelved by Google not long after.

Despite all the many great achievements of Google, there remains a suspicion that Google doesn’t really ‘get’ social media. It could be partly the culture of the corporation, which was founded by engineers who made Google such a success in the field of search through a winning combination of logic, problem-solving and scientific efficiency.

Unfortunately, this no-nonsense approach doesn’t always apply to the social side of the web, which to some degree is all about the nonsense! It’s not just about creating the best algorithms, it’s about interaction between human beings, and therefore requires a humanistic approach which Google has sometimes been lacking.

Google are hoping that is what this new +1 tool will help to provide. It’s a way to personalise searches and ensure your search results are relevant to you and your friends. And despite their patchy track record with social, we think there’s every reason to expect that Google’s +1 will be a success.

Probably the biggest single factor that sunk Buzz was that people didn’t have time to commit to using another social network, with the important part of the market already largely nailed down by Twitter and Facebook. Google +1, on the other hand, requires only one click, so users probably won’t be put off from the service because of time constraints or ‘social networking fatigue’.

From a business perspective, the real impact of the +1 service could be when the +1s start to influence Google’s search rankings. In the near future, we are likely to see that sites with the most social recommendations will begin to be rewarded with more visibility in search results, and of course, given that +1 is Google’s own feature, you can fully expect that +1s will be given more weight in terms of influencing the Google rankings than Facebook ‘likes’ and other rival services.

If you would like to know some more about utilising social tools and boosting your search engine rankings, call us for a chat on 01305 775609

Chris Redhead
SEO Copywriter

Tags: facebook, google, google +1, social tools, twitter
Posted in General, Social Media, Tools | 1 Comment »

The Rise and Rise of Social Media

Wednesday, March 30th, 2011

Another day, another story about the growth of social media. We are constantly being told about the increasing influence of social media in the world – last month there was the story of the Egyptian man who named his child ‘Facebook’ in gratitude to the role that social networking played in his country’s recent democratic revolution - what better example of how ubiquitous these sites are becoming in our lives?

However, amidst all the hype it can be hard to get the facts and work out just how big social media really is. I was therefore interested to see this week Econsultancy.com putting together a set of statistics on user numbers of various social media platforms, and comparing them with the same figures from a year ago. The results are absolutely astonishing.

Social Media Usage Stats

According to their statistics, twelve months ago Twitter had 75m user accounts. It now claims to have 175m users worldwide. The average number of tweets written per day is now 95m, up 250% from the 27m a year ago.

Professional-orientated networking site LinkedIn has also seen its user numbers increase greatly in the last year. It is now up to 100m users, up 100% from the 50m who were using the site a year ago.

Meanwhile, Facebook’s membership has grown from 350m to an unbelievable 640m in the space of just one year. Given that the world’s population is thought to be around 7 billion, that’s not far off 10% of the entire world using Facebook!

When you read these kinds of statistics, it’s incredible to think there are many people out there who still think of sites like Facebook and Twitter as “just another passing fad” that everyone will get fed up with before too long.

It’s clear from the stats that social media is here to stay. When you look at Facebook’s over half a billion strong membership, it seems beyond doubt that it is now far too big to disappear any time soon.

The example always cited by the social media naysayers is Myspace, once the biggest, most active social network on the web, now the online equivalent of a ghost town. However, the important thing to remember with Myspace is that the reason its millions of users (myself included) abandoned the site was not because they had lost interest in social networking, but because there were other sites (namely Facebook and Twitter) ready to migrate to which did the same kind of thing, but better.

So if you accept that social media is with us for the foreseeable future, the question for businesses is how do you take advantage of it?

Putting the ‘Social’ in Social Media

As well as the huge numbers of users, one of the great things about social media from a business perspective is that people who use these sites (particularly Facebook) give away a great deal of insight into their personal behaviours, likes, dislikes etc. This provides businesses with a unique opportunity to target their marketing towards certain types of customers in a much more effective way than is possible with traditional forms of advertising.

However, the caveat here is that social media users don’t always respond well to direct advertising, so if you just blunder in firing off ads in all directions, you are likely to simply be ignored.
Instead, probably the best way to approach marketing on social media sites is to use them as they are intended – by engaging with people, and building relationships and communities around your brand.

It’s not just about selling – social media gives you the opportunity to put a personal face on your company, and show your fun and interesting side. Building a community takes time, but if done properly, it can improve your brand image, increase awareness and hopefully give a boost to your sales.

So if you’re not already making use of social media, there has never been a better time to start. We don’t recommend you name your child after Facebook, but we do encourage you to take full advantage of it as a tool to really reach out to your customers and show them what you’re all about!

If you’re interested in finding out how social media could benefit your business, why not give us a call on 01305 755609

Chris Redhead

Tags: facebook, linkedin, Social Media, twitter
Posted in General, Social Media | No Comments »

Guerrilla e-Marketing seminar in Verwood

Wednesday, January 20th, 2010

The Guerrilla e-Marketing seminar in Verwood is all put to bed. Powerpoint presentation is finished, all that is needed now is an early night and hope that the forecast for snow doesn’t come to fruition and we get a good attendance.

Quite by surprise I have taken quite a few calls this week from people who had attended the last Guerrilla e-Marketing seminar in Dorchester. A couple of people phoned to check a few details on running an ffective email marketing campaign.

After coming along to the Kingston Maurward event, one Poole based company used the bad weather theme and created a specific e-marketing campaign to target those that had damaged their cars during the wintry weather.

Neat little idea that by all accounts worked a treat!

Take a look at the example from Ooops.net

OOOPS Email Marketing

Twitter and Facebook Tip Sheets

Twitter and Facebook also seem to be on a lot of people’s agenda this month - even if it is just finding enough about it to make a decison whether to write them off for now.

If you are thinking of using Twitter or Facebook to promote your business we have put together a couple of tip sheets to get you started. They are easy to follow and in PDF format so no problems printing them out either.

Tags: blogs, facebook, Guerrilla e-Marketing, linkedin, twitter
Posted in E-marketing, General | No Comments »

Guerrilla e-Marketing in Verwood Dorset

Thursday, January 7th, 2010

The first Guerrilla e-Marketing seminar at Kingston Maurward in October went down a storm with nearly 100 people packed in to the seminar room.

Slight panic to begin with as we didn’t have Internet access - so unfortunately, we couldn’t do any live demos. But the sheer number of local businesses present proved that owner managers are waking up to the fact that Social Media networks like Facebook, Linked In and Twitter are tools that need to be understood - and if they are appropriate, embraced within the business.

I am just putting the finishing touches to the second date of the Guerrilla e-Marketing seminars for Business Link that is due to take place in Verwood, near Bournemouth.

Will try and make it slightly different to the material we used at Kingston Maurward so I make it more relevant to the local area and businesses attending.

Guerrilla e-Marketing for 2010

If you missed the introduction to the first seminar - Guerilla emarketing is:-

"An unconventional system of promotions that relies on time, energy and imagination rather than a big marketing budget.
Guerrilla marketing campaigns are unexpected and unconventional; potentially interactive; and consumers are targeted in unexpected places.
The objective of guerrilla marketing is to create a unique, engaging and thought-provoking concept to generate buzz, and consequently turn viral."

The fact that Google and the other search engines have recently integrated real-time search within their search engines - picking up feeds from the likes of Twitter - it makes it even more important for businesses to be aware of the changing search engine landscape if they want to keep ahead of the game when it come to search engine optimisation.

Hopefully, there will be plenty of material for you to start thinking how to start to exploit the likes of Facebook, Linked In and Twitter.

Look forward to seeing you on the 20th January.

If you can’t make it - I will post a copy of the Guerrilla e-Marketing slides after the event, plus some tip sheets for creating Twitter and LinkedIn profiles as well as building a Facebook Business Fan Page.

I know there are still places left on the seminar - so to make a booking follow this link - Guerrilla eMarketing Verwood Booking or contact the Business Link Events team on 0845 0707 747 or via events@businesslinksw.co.uk

Tags: facebook, Guerrilla e-Marketing, linkedin, Social Media, twitter
Posted in E-marketing, General, Online Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation | 1 Comment »