Love-struck Facebook users can now mathematically calculate how likely their partners are to accept a marriage proposal this Valentine’s Day with the Branded3-designed Interflora ‘Love Machine’ Facebook app.
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.
This week Google has announced a major change to their search results called “Search plus Your World” which isn’t a particularly catchy title.
There is an excellent summary of this feature here and examples of how Google favours Google+ here – this post is mainly my thoughts on the service.
When I first tried the system yesterday afternoon I searched for “golf” and Google came up with pictures of myself and some friends on a golf holiday in 2005. For an average searcher they probably wouldn’t think this was amazing but I think it’s pretty mind blowing. To have Google searching the web and images stored in my Picasa albums is just amazing to see working.
I think the way Google has launched this is really clever. In the past both Twitter & Facebook have tried to stop Google indexing all their content and wouldn’t give them full access to crawl sites. Twitter used to give Google a feed of all tweets but turned that feature off and killed the real time search that Google used to show for breaking news events. Now that Google has launched with a massive favouritism for Google+ data we here Twitter making statements saying that this isn’t fair.
For years, people have relied on Google to deliver the most relevant results anytime they wanted to find something on the Internet.
Often, they want to know more about world events and breaking news. Twitter has emerged as a vital source of this real-time information, with more than 100 million users sending 250 million Tweets every day on virtually every topic. As we’ve seen time and time again, news breaks first on Twitter; as a result, Twitter accounts and Tweets are often the most relevant results.
We’re concerned that as a result of Google’s changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone. We think that’s bad for people, publishers, news organizations and Twitter users.
So Twitter stopped the agreement to give Google a feed of tweets and is now saying that this new system isn’t fair and wants to be included. All Google has to do is agree to include Twitter and ask for full access to data and Twitter will probably agree.
At the moment unless you use Picasa and Google+ or have friends that do then the new system isn’t a major change to the organic results. But once Google gets Facebook and Twitter on board as well as perhaps LinkedIn then this will be amazing.
SEO at present is about getting people to link to sites and the search results are based on a voting system that takes into account how trusted each linking site is. This has no relation to whether the person linking for the site is actually trusted by the searcher or not. I can see in a few years that Google will be focussing more on surfacing sites and search results that a users friends like as well as relying on links from sites that the searcher might have never heard of.
The new changes have a major impact on PPC. A search for “cars” brings up the Google+ results shown below for Ferrari & BMW above the PPC ads on the right hand side of the page. For BMW & Ferrari where PPC is mainly a brand play I’m sure they would much prefer to have their logo and a long snippet of text rather than a PPC ad, especially when it’s totally free.
Getting users to share your content on Google+, Twitter & Facebook has to be a part of your SEO strategy for 2012. Certainly brands need to be working on building up followings on these social networks every single month.
For those people who think this is the end of SEO I can assure you it isn’t. As long as people still search for things then there will still be sites needing to use SEO to get to the top of the list of search results. Whether SEO is about on-site optimisation, links or encouraging sharing via social media sites or some other method is irrelevant.
Most of the UK has been doing very little for the last couple of weeks thanks to 4 bank holidays but there is still a load of interesting SEO news to wade through.
Firstly Google Analytics now has a page speed report which is very good for finding the slowest pages on your site.
Next up is Village Voice who were caughtspamming reddit and then said they were very sorry, blamed an agency and said they knew nothing about it. Turns out they were caught spamming Digg years ago. Plenty of people spam social media sites but you need to have the guts to stand up and admit it if you get caught. Read more →
This week I’ve been at TFM&A talking about link-building strategies and also at the Some Comms conference in Manchester talking about our Twitition.com site and how we get 1.2m visitors per month to it.
Presentations are below via Slideshare, any questions drop me a note in the comments.
Buried in the middle of an otherwise fairly uninteresting New York Times article about Digg is the following piece of information, emphasis added by me:
According to Quantcast, an online audience measurement firm, Digg’s domestic traffic has dropped sharply in recent months, from 27.1 million unique users in April to 13.7 million in July. By contrast, Facebook had 145.2 million domestic users in June, according to comScore. While not giving specifics, Mr. Desai of Digg attributes the decline in domestic traffic to changes in Google’s search function that resulted in fewer Digg stories showing up in Google searches.
Yet a more pivotal reason that Digg is falling behind, analysts say, is that users are simply spending more time on Facebook and Twitter than they are on Digg. Instead of Digging, many social media users know that they can post a story they like on Twitter or Facebook.
When was the last time you saw a story page from Digg ranking? Now I think about it I’ve not seen one for months. In 2008 Digg used to outrank the original piece of content on quite a number of occasions even though the page added no value aside from a few dozen inane comments.
Some background in a 2009 post from Danny about social media sites. Google is quite right to do this but if Digg wants the traffic back they need to start trying to add some value to the pages rather than just keeping doing something that Google clearly sees no value in.
Facebook really is first among equals when it comes to social networks. Worldwide around 500,000 new people sign-up every day and the average UK user spends three solid days a year on the site.
The network is a strange mix of public and private, and besides advertising those with pages for their business or organisation need to think creatively about how to attract fans.
Here are a few ideas you can put into practice very quickly and form a good basis for Facebook marketing campaigns. Read more →
Everyone loves a good viral video and when successfully executed they can deliver a real boost for your brand – spreading a message or just getting you mentioned and noticed. But can you replicate viral success time and again?
The question came to mind when I heard that one of my favourite virals of recent times was getting a sequel.
J’aime la Tour
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Commissioned by visitBlackpool to promote tourism, this clip gives a humorous take on the Lancashire town, comparing it to Paris with a cinematic nod to French cinema thrown in.
This video is undoubtedly very clever, but by viral conventions isn’t particularly humorous, is a little slow paced and doesn’t really wow.
Despite that it still attracted 60,000 viewers on YouTube because what really made it stand out when uploaded earlier this year was its ability to jump vertically between different media channels. It had crossover appeal which was capitalised on by an effective PR campaign.
While people sharing your video on facebook, twitter, or even through good old fashioned emails is great, it is never likely to have real penetration unless it migrates to other channels.
Mainstream media remains the biggest game in town and successful PR increased viewers and the video’s spread. National TV coverage included BBC News and Sky News, with newspaper coverage including the Daily Mail and a host of regional newspapers and websites.
This was in effect a great PR campaign based around a solid, but not spectacular video.
Repeat success?
A lot what we do online is about the ‘new’. People want a succession of exciting, fun and interesting experiences (as trendwatching.com pointed out, describing it as ‘nowism’).
The media is no different and is constantly looking for fresh content and stories – especially in the 24-hour news cycle we now inhabit.
In that environment can we expect virality to strike twice? It does sometimes as Blendtec’s Will it Blend? series and VW’s recent Fun Theory videos have shown - but they are the rare exception.
If you can get one of your viral masterpieces off the ground you should consider it a success – thousands have failed in the same quest, lacking the resources to mount a PR campaign that would help it jump between channels and gain mainstream penetration.
In essence though viral videos are an opportunity to look creatively at your brand or products. While they might not lead to overnight YouTube stardom they can give you a fresh perspective on marketing . People like fun, engaging content –whether it is a video, news story, tweet, picture, or podcast.
So will the second video share the same success at J’aime la tour? I’ll let you be the judge of that…
This new dilemma was highlighted to me yesterday as I tried to update my LinkedIn social profile to include my involvement with MajesticSEO. LinkedIn’s privacy statement is robust and reassuring, but they have a new beta section asking me to add details about my company. The ”number of employees” section was a compulsory field. Now I am not especially precious about this data, but I serve many masters. My legally binding contract with MajesticSEO includes a confidentiality clause, naturally. Even if it didn’t, I think that I should make it just a LITTLE difficult for prying eyes to build up inside knowledge about businesses where I am not the controlling interest. What if you work for TESCO. How many employees even KNOW how many people work there? Read more →
Parting the dark clouds that have surrounded the British banking sector since the beginning of this recession is not an easy thing for those trying to market them.
Cutting through the mistrust that surrounds them requires personal relationships with customers, something that many of the bigger banks had lost interest in.
Not an easy job, but one that UK internet and telephone bank First Direct is trying to tackle head-on. The bank, a subsidiary of HSBC, has no branches yet consistently proves a consumer favourite.
Marketers and PRs have always enjoyed a fairly uneasy co-existence. Often based on mutual misunderstanding that unease has only grown in recent times as both come to terms with the power of online advertising and PR and the growth of  social networking sites.
Traditionally the ones with the bigger budgets, ad agencies have been staking their claim and winning some high profile social media accounts. Invariably when an ad agency muscles in PR execs claim they’ll lack the ‘right tone of voice’ and the ability to ‘position’ brands. They also suggest that the PR skill set is a better fit for social media.
While marketing agencies can comfortably integrate social media into their campaigns (they already often have responsibility for online advertising, email marketing and to a lesser extent SEO) the main criticism levelled by PRs remains their inability to handle the mysterious duo of tone of voice and positioning.
So what the hell do they both mean? And is that the only difference between PRs and marketers when it comes to carving up the social media cake? Read more →
Love-struck Facebook users can now mathematically calculate how likely their partners are to accept a marriage proposal this Valentine’s Day with the Branded3-designed Interflora ‘Love Machine’ Facebook app.
