Blogging workshop template
Having created and delivered a blogging workshop to a client today I thought it a good idea to share with you the template of the slide deck.
It’s based heavily on 2 sources: the Pro Blogger How to Blog post and Antony Mayfield’s Blogging for Business ebook.
One of the key things to consider if you are a business starting blogging is that collaborative writing tools are a worthwhile investment. However it may be a good idea to start off by using draft post titles to collate ideas.
Digital Strategy 2011
This is a guest post by Tim Aldiss from his blog: aldissandmore.com
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The start of a new year heralds a series of articles about predictions for digital trends 1, 2, 3 for the year ahead, but instead I thought I would summarise where I believe we are after the year gone by.
It’s all too easy to start by thinking by platform. For example the last 5 years at least has always been heralded as the year of mobile, and it certainly looks like this year will be the year of the tablet, but it is of course important to think platform-agnostically! It’s also easy to start by thinking about channel. Has online stolen more budget from offline, has paid media spend been nibbled away by social media investment, etc, but again here it is important to think across channels, on & offline and ‘through the line’.
I believe that the most obvious trend for 2010 has been the shift towards thinking about the end results – the outcome & the user experience – and how greater understanding of this can help not only all of your marketing activity but also your business as a whole.
Every business gets to a stage where it realises how important expenditure on research is. That level of awareness is added to by a mix of worry that the research may in some way not be accurate or relevant depending on the methods used. Well it is now more possible than ever to research end users, and in almost real time, to get low cost information that is ready to use. Take a look at the success metrics around Direct Line Insurance’s ‘ideas lab‘ as an example .
For me this shift to the focus on the user experience is a revelation as it also reflects my decision to move out of a direct role in marketing and back into web development where, working with Cubeworks, I now have a great opportunity to align my 10 years experience in SEO with Cubeworks core strength in User Experience Design.
For years Search Engine Optimisation has been the mother of channel-based strategies. It’s always been proven as the most cost effective path to new and returning customers. To an extent it still is, but the problem with search is that it is still dominated by Google, and by an algorithm that has for a long time been showing it’s flaws. A recent post on Stack Exchange sums up Google’s problems currently.
Google are diversifying their offering to benefit their revenue to the extent where people are seeing different results sitting in the same room as eachother. They aren’t trying to fix the problem with their algorithm the way they used to which means that it’s more and more open to abuse. However search won’t be going away any time soon as more people use online more and more regularly, but other avenues of reference are being used more in the decision making process than search alone.
Enter Social Media and all it’s goodness. Sceptics of it’s viability as a business function were finally laid to rest by the news late in 2010 that Google’s algorithm now uses Social Media metrics to influence it’s rankings. Brands can now no longer avoid using Social Media to compete in search. Social Media is now an activity that all aspects of business are involved in.
I believe that the best lessons of 2010 will continue to be the winning investments of 2010. Creating and then correctly leveraging all of your assets, where people are and in a way that they like and find genuinely pleasurable and meaningful to use is the top line of any digital strategy today.
Here’s a fantastic infographic that sums up what’s needed. Reassuringly it’s only 5 years old!
Search vs Social Media
It is a momentous day in digital marketing.
As tracked by Experian Hitwise traffic to UK websites from their Social Media category is higher than traffic from the Search Engines category.
However what Hitwise don’t explain in the blog post is that they measure traffic in a very different way from what you might expect from an analytics package.
Modern day browsing behaviour means that we very often have more than one tab open in our preferred browser (if not more than one browser open as I do as I type). UK Internet users very often check their Facebook feeds during the work day (some more than others) and when you refresh that page to update your feed this counts as a user action to Hitwise – something which inevitably inflates this figure.
This isn’t a bad thing – it’s merely Hitwise’ way of measuring human behaviour rather than just clicks so it represents an interesting measure.
For ThinkSearch this underlines the shift in emphasis for brands from traditional SEO marketing through to doing business in the social web and merely serves to underline the importance of ensuring your best practice SEO also embraces the benefits of the distribution and advocacy channel of Social Media which also often has direct benefits in the form of links to your website.
Read the full blog post from Hitwise here: http://weblogs.hitwise.com/robin-goad/2010/06/social_networks_overtake_search_engines.html
Reclaim your Facebook content
I’ve worked on several Social Media campaigns that have naturally gravitated towards Facebook as a popular social platform that affords familiar sharing functionality and presents the lowest barrier to entry i.e. everyones already on it.
There are a lot of annoying things about Facebook, but the thing that’s been getting to me most (yes more than the privacy issue) is that whatever anyone contributes to Facebook remains ‘in the cloud‘.
It’s probably my SEO background getting the better of me, but I want to own that information, that content. I want it to benefit me in the traditional sense of content i.e. one that generates links, citations and attention to my websites.
Keeping an eye on the SERPs as we do at ThinkSearch we are now starting to see Facebook pages creeping into the Google results for more competitive search terms. If the balance keeps on as it does it will be Facebook that outranks you, me and our competitors. Obviously the supports the end goal of Facebook’s advertising revenue based business model so they are laughing all the way to the bank.
But what about that content. Well it occurred to me that there is plenty of talk about the new open protocol that Facebook supports - FBML (Facebook Markup Language) – but what everyone is scrabbling to do is support Facebook’s head long plummet to domination by integrating their content the wrong bloody way!
Why put widgets all over your Facebook page that plant your blog content into Facebook? Why integrate widegts into your blog that allow users to jump straight of back into Facebook leaving your site? Surely this must happen the other way. What about all that lovely user generated content? What about all those lovely references to your site and connections to others? Where is the benefit to all the effort that you have put in over the last 20 years of the web gone?
For the time being it seems like the FBML support is basic and developers struggle to implement the code in any other way than within the Facebook canvas i.e. inserting the content using an iframe as opposed to being written into your page, so the benefits are yet to be tested, but to me this is a treasure trove to open.
Tesco to offer API to developers
Amazing news – Tesco have decided to offer it’s online shopping API to developers to develop what they will with their database and their product inventory.
In a very forward thinking, future-gazing move the supermarket giant are embracing Web 2.0 and opening up it’s doors to allow it’s data to be used elsewhere around the web as third parties see fit.
Interestingly a few months ago now The Guardian also unveiled an API which they called Open Platform. Back then there was equal bemusement as to the use that such an API could be put, and the same can be said of today’s announcement. There will also inevitably be a lot of small print to read!
Of course the whole notion of the API sits firmly within the Open Source movement, and came into the spotlight when Twitter launched, as a minute offering, with an API to allow developers to do anything they wanted to with the data. Indeed this is how Twitter rose to stardom – it’s not the geeky nature of being able to share every engrossing detail of your day, but the ability to chop up and present that data in as many ways as anyone might like to.
So for Tesco – well I guess a whole load widgets might come out of this. They do sell more than just groceries these days… can anyone else come up with anything off the cuff? What is the most useful thing you could do with Tesco’s database? There’s a bunch of bananas in it for the best idea!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/jul/14/tesco-api-programming-shopping
Google Ad Planner and stories from numbers
Avinash Kaushik, Google’s Analytics Evangelist, always says your homepage is not a golden door through which all your visitors will pass. And he’s right. Search engines have flipped the funnel. Every page that drives traffic is a landing page. But just because Google ignores your homepage doesn’t mean you can’t optimize the performance of your lower level pages.
In his latest post Avinash talks about media planning and display marketing from a stories and numbers point of view.
In “Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian & Telling Stories With Data” Avinash demonstrates how the free tools that are available today, such as Google Insights for Search, and Adplanner, provide a great (free) way to help much more accurately target your media, and in turn save you a lot of money. This is particularly so when compared to offline or traditional media.
Avinash also gives some interesting insights into how and where Google gets it’s data:
Ad Planner [does not use] Google Analytics data globally. It has an option where you can opt in your GA data if you want (but you have to go through a minorly painful process to do it – and only you as a site owner can do that).
I am going to go out on a limb and say that 99.9999% of the sites in the Ad Planner don’t have GA implemented on their sites.
It is not hard for you to check.
Search for cnn.com in the Ad Planner or hp.com or your mom’s / friend’s site. You’ll see data. But if you use WASP or do a quick View Source you’ll see none of them actually use GA.
If you want to learn where the Ad Planner gets its data here is the faq:
http://www.google.com/support/adplanner/bin/topic.py?hl=en&topic=15016
Google Ad Planner is surely a revolutionary free tool, but as Avinash hints, it’s the ay the data is interrogated and used that counts.
Here at ThinkSearch our analytics experts have many years experience seeing ‘The Matrix’ in data strands. Talk to us about how we can help you utilise these free cutting edge tools to your great advantage.
If It Doesn’t Spread It’s Dead
Henry Jenkins, the Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program, has written an eight post serialisation of a white paper which was developed last year for the Convergence Culture Consortium on the topic of Spreadable media.
Luckily for us there’s an hour long video summary of the 8 posts, and it’s well worth a listen as it backs up Antony’s latest Connect post.
http://www.henryjenkins.org/2009/02/if_it_doesnt_spread_its_dead_p.html
SME’s – don’t be fooled by SEO link networks
Over the last couple of weeks, I have noticed that there seems to be a lot of companies offering low budget SEO work that use graphs like this to explain the powerful results of SEO:
What a graph.
Two companies I have looked at recently are Local Web Ring – a ‘local’ link network associated with a small web design company, and Be Found or Die – a more proffessional SEO company bidding on the term ‘search engine optimisation’.
The first, although containing a number of sites that I don’t think are ‘local’, and using very blatantly optimised anchor text, is almost forgiveable because of the fact that the majority of the sites are pretty small businesses, and in the Cheshire area.
The second is more suprising because I would have thought that this would not be effective for any of their clients, and that they might have been penalised for operating like this. They not only have a load of optimised text links to their clients in the footer of their homepage, as well as on links pages on their client’s websites, they also link back to their own site on ‘search engine optimisation uk’ on some of their client’s websites.
Be Found or Die are not ranking in the organic results for ‘search engine optimisation uk’ but their clients seem to rank ok for the niche terms that they are going for – (Nutley Tiles on the first page for ‘marble tiles‘). Am I showing my ignorance for thinking this was an ‘old school’ SEO tactic that shouldn’t work anymore?
I don’t want to – but all I can takeaway from this is: Link Networks Work
*Guest post by Rob Green
Say hello to Google Wave
Google Wave is a new tool for communication and collaboration on the web, coming later this year.
Interesting… I mean the timing is interesting… I’m sure any tool launched by Google in the web 2.0 era will be awesome (with this much fanfare > there are 1990 linked Google news articles to the original Reuters article on Wave in Google news as I write this morning) but it’s the fact that its’ launch is almost exactly timed as a response to Bing.
Now Wave isn’t Bing (and Bing Is Not Google!). Both are useful if not game changing – Microsoft finally appearing to have brought some brains in to create a new spin on search which will almost inevitably bring back market share. But as the social media/knowledge sharing, enterprise geek I am, Wave’s integration of all the typical communicatiosn tools we use into one platform looks really good.
One question: why are all the presenters on the clip Prject Managers?!
PS Wow – just seen the demo of multiple users working on the same doc at the same time, with real time doc updates – awesome!!
GoCompare ranking penalty (again!)
Isn’t it great when the authorities in your field pick up on something that used to be such a hot topic within a much smaller community. I remember the last time round (must have only been a year and a half ago) when GoCompare incurred their last ranking penalty that it was only really picked up by the SEO community. This time round it was Econsultancy that broke the news which inspired Hitwise to release free data (wow) backing the story up!
The great thing about stories like this in the SEO community is that it defines boundaries. We all know how crappy Google has been at imposing it’s own ethical policies and that SEO is all about testing and pushing limits (not on client sites of course!) but it’s always a good thing to see just how far you can go before you get noticed.
What’s so funny about the story this time round is that GoCompare are going to suffer much worse than their 6 month drop first time round. This time their media spend is going to have to be enormous to counter their lack in visibility on brand terms. Hell I might even have a bid myself! Thanks again to Google’s relaxation in trademark bidding policies every man and his dog can bid on GoCompare’s brand terms and get away with it, making competition all the more expensive.
You’ve got to love them – Google and GoCompare too! Here’s a lovely graph for the wall courtesy of Hitwise.
GoCompare loose traffic from Google ban
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