Category: Social Media

Coca-cola should be more sociable

by Joel Turner on / 3 responses

Coca-cola has said this week that it intends to pursue a much more aggressive digital marketing presence.

While that choice of words is probably best consigned to an industry magazine,  the soft drinks giant is clearly reaping the benefits of brand engagement – claiming to have a mailing list of 13 million customers in the US thanks to its My Coke Rewards site and similar success with its UK counterpart, Coke Zone.

Coke Zone Read more →

The UK Social Media Landscape

by Patrick Altoft on / 6 responses

Running a social media campaign is a great way to get lots of visitors to a website but its very hard to target the campaign to a particular country. If your goal is to generate links, buzz or blog subscribers then worldwide traffic is fine but what happens if you are primarily interested in local visitors?

In the past most people have used Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon as the main networks to seed a viral article or blog post and this week I loaded up Google Trends to see which of these was biggest in the UK. As you can see below the daily traffic figures are nothing to get excited about and traffic to all of them seems to have dropped a lot in the UK during 2009.

Social media sites Read more →

The new complaining and your brand’s reputation

by Joel Turner on / 5 responses

You may well have noticed this story over the past couple of weeks. It is about one web developer’s battle with Thomson Holidays for compensation following a disastrous holiday in Tunisia with the tour operator.

Thomson eventually capitulated after his blog gained higher search rankings for the keyword ‘Thomson Tunisia’ than their own site. This type of online consumer activism was recently mirrored in the US by Dave Carroll, who had his prized guitar damaged by United Airlines. The Canadian musician decided to post a series of YouTube protest songs until the airline properly compensated. They did, but not before his high profile stunt caused the airline’s value to plummet by ten per cent.

These two high profile episodes bring about an important question – how can brands protect themselves from the growing trend of online foot stamping? Read more →

Digg just totally killed linkbait

by Patrick Altoft on / 44 responses

Digg has released a toolbar called the Diggbar and in the process has pretty much killed any reason for website owners to try and promote their sites on Digg.

The toolbar works by capturing the target page in an iframe and shortening the URL, you can see it in action here.

TechCrunch

The Diggbar is going to be fantastic for Digg but no so much for content producers. Basically Digg has turned into a Tweetmeme style service with millions of users already.

The main issue with the new Diggbar is that Digg no longer links directly to stories – they are linking to the shortened Diggbar URL instead. This means that not only do you lose any links from digg.com but you also lose the links you get from lazy bloggers who will just link to the shortened Diggbar URL.

To add insult to injury the Diggbar source code has lots of extra content such as comments and related stories as well as an SEO friendly title so will outrank the original post in a lot of cases.

Finally you will notice that the Diggbar links both to the Digg story page and the page on the source website. Guess which one gets the optimised anchor text?

We stopped using Digg for linkbait 9 months ago, I suggest you do the same.

Twitter vs Digg for links and attention

by Patrick Altoft on / 11 responses

Many people are saying that Twitter is corrosive to online marketing and that the sudden upsurge in Twitter use is reducing the number of links being given to quality content.

Certainly Twitter has been game changing but is it really having an effect on link building?

There are two goals that bloggers or website owners have when they carry out social media marketing:

  1. Build a larger readership
  2. Get more links in order to rank higher on Google

What most bloggers forget is that these two goals require totally different strategies to achieve them.

If I wanted to build the RSS readership on Blogstorm then getting on the front page of Digg or releasing a viral widget isn’t going to help me very much. These strategies are likely to give me a lot of links though.

Likewise if I wanted to release some linkbait which people would read, enjoy and hopefully link to from their blogs then the last thing I should do is promote it via Twitter. Anything decent you send via Twitter is just going to be re-tweeted which is fine if you want traffic but useless if you want links.

Twitter is great for slowly but surely building relationships and growing your readership one by one. Just don’t fall into the trap of thinking it’s a link-building tool.

If you want to get a link from a blogger just send them an email. Because they receive the email outside of Twitter they are more likely to blog about it and less likely to post it on Twitter.

UK Sites Dominate Digg

by Patrick Altoft on / 7 responses

Data has emerged from Hitwise showing the sites that receive the most traffic from Digg.

Despite Digg users being mainly US based, UK websites take up 3 of the top 5 places.

The Telegraph is in second place with a 1.39% share, way ahead of the Daily Mail in 3rd. Hitwise argue that the reason for the Telegraphs rise is a Digg widget but to me the answer is simple.

The top sites are catering for Digg users, publishing the news earlier and doing everything better than the rest.

Digg traffic