Our very own Design, Development and Social Media teams built the Facebook app to coincide with the most romantic day of the year, giving visitors the chance to find out whether 2012 will be the most romantic year of their lives.

As a Facebook user, you need only ‘Like’ the page to get the cogs and springs of the ‘Love Machine’ working.

A series of lifestyle and personality-based questions about your potential husband, wife or civil partner for life will generate a percentage to reveal how likely you are to hear a heart-warming ‘yes’.

The Interflora app is based on data collected from a nationwide survey of more than 3,000 participants. Each person was asked for basic information on their hobbies, lifestyle and living arrangements and, of course, how they think they would respond to a proposal this year.

The Love Machine takes the information that each individual participant enters about their loved one and compares it to the survey data to generate the possibility of receiving their partner’s hand in marriage.

Interflora has been harnessing the power of social media with Branded3 for some time now and has seen a significant boost to its following and overall presence as a result.

Even before development began, the survey itself revealed some interesting stats about the besotted couples of Britain. Women, it seems, are 12% more likely to accept a proposal than men in the first 12 months of a relationship and the chances that they would say yes at any point beyond that stand at 70%. Men, on the other hand, at 63%, are either less enthusiastic about the whole idea of getting married or slightly coyer about admitting that they want to get married.

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Branded3 engineers Interflora ‘Love Machine’

The brainchild of some good friends of mine, Bethemiddleman.com is aimed at the private selling, rental and roomshare market. As far as we know it’s the first portal in the UK to bring all of these areas under one roof, so no matter where you are on the property ladder you’ll be able to use the site.

I was asked to come on board with the project to help with copywriting and SEO, and the last several months have seen a lot of hard work to get the site ready for launch. Luckily for me, the developers and designers are great at their jobs and have put all their skills to good use – we’re really proud of the site and over the moon it’s finally gone live.

Bethemiddleman.com aims to help people sell or let their own property – we believe you don’t really need estate agents and want to make the process as easy and hassle-free as possible. What’s even more important, the site is free to use so you save your estate agent’s fees!

Any feedback on the site is much appreciated – Bethemiddleman.com may have launched but that’s just the beginning. We’ll be adding loads more features over the coming months. If you want to get in touch about the site, just email zoe [at] bethemiddleman.com.

No agents, no fees, no fuss!

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New Property Portal Goes Live

The BBC reports that these new software Ninjas will make it even easier for people to find bargains online. Buyers say how much they want to pay, and sellers say how eager they are to make a sale, and if the price can be lowered when stock reaches a certain level. If the Ninjas find a good match between a buyer and a seller, the seller is prompted make a personal offer and try to close the deal.

What’s even better for buyers is that the Ninjas will be free to use – sellers pay 0.3% of the buyer’s asking price however if they choose to contact the buyer.

The Ninjas will be trialled on Aroxo this autumn, just in time to help credit crunch Christmas shoppers find the best deals.

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Aroxo’s ‘Negotiation Ninjas’ Help You Negotiate Online

Unfortunately I get something that needs to be embedded into a 3rd party site rather than a desktop app and it seems everybody else is just as unhappy. Out of the 14,528 people who have visited that page only 188 have actually installed it!

Here are some of the comments on the download page:

This thing is a desaster. You cannot install it on your computer as a desktop application. You can just integrate it in other kind of nonsense noene uses.

WHY CANT U DOWNLOAD IT, THIS IS RIDICULOUS!!!!!!!!!! I COULD DO A BETTER JOB MYSELF, CALL URSELF PROFESSIONALS, U SHULD BE ASHAMED OF YOURSELF!! LOOL

Agreed, totally useless, the R&A, as the name suggests, are living in the past

In the (famous) words of a great from another sport … “you cannot be serious!!” Being able to download it would be a start. Why not find some nine-year-old at Turnberry – he or she would be a better job than this.

Start programming now and maybe you’ll finish up with something better for St. Andrews in 2010… )

The Twitter feed looks OK (probably because they have sensibly handed it over it to top amateur golfer Gordon Stevenson) and has lots of pictures so probably best to grab that instead.

There is an iPhone app which leaves a LOT to be desired, the news is scraped from the website and not even formatted for the iPhone. Videos don’t play as you would expect and aside from about 5 apparently fake reviews in the App Store (probably from the developers) there are a few people being highly critical.

If you are going to bother doing an iPhone app and releasing a widget then why not take the time to do it properly? The event is on every year so why not just do it right?

Oh and don’t even get me started on the Rolex popup ads on the tee times page.

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The Open Championship iPhone App & Desktop Widget

Here’s one of my favourites so far:

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Google wants you to search for crazy stuff

Of all the things Google could fix I would have expected this to be the first. What happens is that SEO companies use link spam and networks of sites to get top rankings for keywords that send them customers.

Customers assume the company must be good at SEO and hire them to work on their sites. The SEO company uses spam to promote their clients and links back to their site from all their clients and gets even higher rankings.

If Google was to just start banning dodgy SEO companies then clients wouldn’t find them and the whole industry would clean up in months. Few clients are going to hire an SEO company that’s been banned from Google.

My question is, why don’t Google ban these sites? Of all the search results that should be manually edited I think SEO related ones are top of the list.

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How Google Could Clean Up SEO

I’m not sure what to tell you about myself, so here are some facts in no particular order:

I’m 23. I write a blog called Piggynap which talks about SEO and whatever else is on my mind (normally something weird). You might find it interesting or you might just wonder why I keep posting things about cats. I like Adwords which is great, because that’s one of my new responsibilities at Branded3. I live in Harrogate with my web designer boyfriend (that explains the Twitter background) and like a typical girl I really like shoes…and chocolate.

We’ve been snowed out of work today so I’m writing this from home, but I’m really looking forward to working with Patrick and everyone else

I’ll be attending Think Visibility so if you’re going, see you there!

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Zoe Piper Joins Branded3

• Company Name : Branded3
• Location : Aberford, Leeds
• Salary : £28-£35k per year

Contact Information

• First Name : Vin
• Last Name : Chinnaraja
• Email Address : vin@branded3.com
• Website : http://www.branded3.com
• Phone Number : 0113 2814100
• How to Apply : Email CV

Job Description
Branded3 is an innovative digital agency with offices in Leeds and Malaysia. We have delivered work for a number of leading organisations such as Interflora, Heinz, and Airbus. We are a team of digital enthusiasts with the drive and passion to deliver outstanding work for our clients.

Having a ‘can do’ work ethic, you’ll discover the core culture of our agency:
‘We like to challenge and be challenged.’

We are now in a good stage of our growth and are looking for a dynamic, talented and committed marketer who can help take our agency forward. Working directly with the MD of Branded3 your role as Marketing Manager will be to develop, define and execute marketing strategies and generate new business leads to contribute to our ambitious growth plans over the next few years.

If you like the sound of us, we can offer you a role that will stretch you, challenge you and reward you fairly.

Responsibilities

• Develop cut-through long-term marketing strategies for Branded3
• Generate leads
• Execute all agency marketing campaigns
• Manage agency PR
• Manage creation and updating of agency literature (website, email, credentials)
• Manage pitches and presentations
• Agency brand custodian
• Event management and networking
• Outbound communications (email, DM)
• Contact and prospect database management

Skills
The successful candidate will have significant B2B marketing experience preferably for an agency. You will be comfortable dealing at different levels (from Chief Executive to managers). You are ballsy but grounded, witty but humble, friendly and focussed. We are looking for someone who has a good contacts book and is driven to succeed.
Any experience working for a new media/digital agency would be preferred but is not essential.

Relevant Work Experience
2+ to 5 Years

Salary
28,000.00 – 35,000.00 GBP per year
expenses, car allowance and uncapped commission

For more digital jobs in Leeds or SEO jobs Leeds check our our jobs in Leeds careers page.

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Branded3 is hiring a Business Development Manager

The SEOBook Toolbar seems to work best on FireFox 3 and includes as much data as you could ever need to evaluate a page quickly. Best of all it has an in-built RSS reader with the Blogstorm feed included meaning I get lots more RSS subscribers which is why I decided to help Aaron promote it.

Last year I switched to Google Chrome and don’t use Firefox much at all. Chrome is faster and allows me to get more done in a day. The disadvantage is the lack of toolbars although Dave Naylor has an overlay bookmarklet that does enough for me.

Do you use SEO toolbars? Which is your favourite?

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New SEO Toolbar

The options available seem to be TweetBacks from Joost and TweetSuite from Dan and I’ve tried both of them today finally settling on Dans implementation after struggling to get Joosts working with Thesis.

Check it out below.

Has anybody managed to do a really good implementation of one of these plugins using Thesis and WP 2.7?

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TweetSuite and TweetBacks which is best?