Awesome, lovely superb…. just finding which social media sites exist today is hard but having to chase round and research available ‘names’ on each one for a new client – time consuming.
Thank heavens for the wonderful people at NameChk.com
They do the grunt for you.
Now all I need is to go register the name…. there’s a handy text download file option that gives you the URL you could get for each one.
Just don’t expect me to know what they all do!
NameCheck social media name availability
We have some clients who desperately need professional advice on website security, hosting and management. They have sites written in Joomla, WordPress, Zencart and “Big Medium” CMS.
Please recommend anyone you have worked with and can give a personal reference.
Note: we only want personal recommendations not pitches.
Site backups and continuity;
Purpose : To ensure that a complete backup of the site, configuration and data is completed daily and the a clear report is delivered detailing what has been backed up and what processe is required for recovery of the site
Email Mitigation
Purpose: To move Email delivery and collection away from the current hosting provider to a thirdparty; thereby reducing the risk of single points of failure for both hosting and email.
Management and Monitoring
Purpose: To monitor utlilisation and to forewarn for potential issues in site maintenance and administration.
Planning for Growth
Purpose : To define the current infrastructure and to agree the stages of utlisation (be that bandwidth, users or revenue) at which the site will move in Hosting agreements and hosting providers.
]]>We did a seminar today at Otago Southland Employers Association about How to migrate your marketing online.
The Resources and additional material which add to the slides are:
- Blog post about website keywords and how to test for their use
- Reverse IP Mapping Explained – and download the free e-book
- Leads Explorer and DomoDomain are examples of companies offering IP lookup services
- How to do B2B leads research guide slide deck
- The Word of Mouth marketing website - this is the Otago/Dunedin page, there are many others
How to use these resources:
Check out the original slide deck; then review the Reverse IP Mapping document – it includes a case study done on our own website about visitors, lastly review the slide deck B2B leads research because this shows how to use the reverse IP mapping in your business development methodology.
]]>We know as well as the next guy that to say there is a lot on the web on maximizing keywords within web pages is an understatement. We do a lot of reading and a lot of testing and have sorted the rubbish from the useful tips for our own resources. And we’re going to share the secrets with you. Here is our keywords list that we use for our own company, along with free tools, so you can check and perfect your work.
How to use Keywords in text
Follow this list but don’t overdo it! The sophistication in google’s crawlers mark a fine line between good content and spam. Overusing keywords will put you into the latter category.
- Primary keywords should be in text 3-6 times (depending on page length)
- Keywords should be in bold or italics where possible – (be sensitive to this one)
- Keywords should be reiterated in SEO tags
- Keywords should be used in the headline (find a balance between a snappy journalistic headline and something utterly searchable)
- Keywords should be used in page title
- Keywords should be used as sub headings in H2 format where possible
The key is in readability, you need to make sure that your page reads as a printed page would, meaning don’t get too carried away with any of the above steps when it comes to page content. There needs to be an effortless flow between page content and keywords, and using bold/italics/H2 should be thought of as journalistic punctuation for key points over keyword highlighting.
Tools
SEO book has fantastic free tools for checking and perfecting your keyword work. Visit the site and download the SEO toolbar. They walk you through how to use it with a short video tutorial. We’ve found the X-ray function to be exceptionally useful- you can visit any web page and get a list of keywords that google is picking up. From there you can alter your page text or SEO tags to pick up the correct keywords. Just change the keywords in your page and keep clicking the X-ray feature until you find the correct combination. Simple as that.
]]>
Nick Burcher is a super star… but I didn’t know that when I first met him. We had coffee together and he gave me very early advice on setting up this blog and since then I’ve followed his work.
Nick’s latest views are about the integration of advertising, marketing and social media in the context of the internet being the central plank of a brand’s marketing, recommendations and opinion-formation with audiences.
This is a really important part of comprehending how the “Old” marketing techniques are migrating to the “New”. For example, do you know how to change your communication methods so that your “old” customers are not alienated by the “New” tools and so that the “New” tools can sit comfortably alongside “Old” styles?
Nick Burcher's Paid:Owned:Earned
Take a look at the image here. This is Nick’s thesis.
There are websites whose purpose is based on payment (brands pay to advertise on them); there are others where brands own the information up there (mainly content-led) and lastly there are others where brands have earned the right to be listed.
Note that some sites (Facebook, Twitter) are listed in all three categories…. this is a really important part of the paradigm.
Your Brand needs to have communication strategies that work in all three contexts, and uses the feedback arrows at the top and bottom as well as in the ones middle of the diagram.
Here is the strategy we use for a client, Rowperfect. They sell rowing sports equipment.
Paid: Google adwords and other sports sites who carry banner adverts.
Owned: Blog content, You Tube videos, forum discussions, Twitter feed, Facebook page.
Earned: followers on FB, Twitter, YouTube and others linking back to the Owned
I was delighted to watch this video where Nick sets out the lessons behind the simple headline “Paid-Owned-Earned”.
Does this have resonance for your brand strategy? Where do you think there may be issues or conflicts with traditional brand-led marketing?
New Trends in Digital Advertising [exclusive video] from Hayko on Vimeo.
Related articles
- Paid Owned Earned – how it works [image and video] (nickburcher.com)
- Paid Owned Earned: Paid Owned Earned on Star Wars Day – VW The Force and Blackberry (huguesrey.wordpress.com)
- Advertising’s Future Is 3 Simple Words: Paid. Owned. Earned. | Story Worldwide (huguesrey.wordpress.com)
- Separate content from platforms (beingpeterkim.com)
Image via Wikipedia
There was a once a time when global brands selected their marketing and advertising departments on their creative ability and trained them in the philosophy of business. The most successful staff members were the ones with the most unique ideas which would push their brand to success.
This last sentence is still true these days, with one exception, the internet has allowed for the most successful and unique ideas to come from anybody around the world. No longer must you work as a ‘staff member’ for a company or brand to have your creative ideas fulfilled, nowadays it’s as easy as entering an online competition or registering on a website.
Sharing brand ideas
Take video sharing specialist, Tongal, for example. This website gained global attention last year when it entered in a US based initiative programme where “emerging” companies were asked to submit entries detailing their unique tools and services. This programme secured over 400 entries, and one of the winners was Tongal, who are now participating in a project for Brisk Tea.
The irony of this is that Tongal, itself, is a competition based website which allows anyone around the globe to enter their skills in creative thinking, filming, pitching and testing products.
Do brands need creatives?
It would seem that to work in the marketing department for a global brand in this day and age, you don’t need a creative bone in your body; you just need to know how to run a competition and recognise a great idea when you see one.
PepsiCo, the food and beverage giant, recently launched a competition very similar to the one in the US which found Tongal. The project, called PepsiCo10, asks “emerging” companies to submit entries detailing their unique tools and services by mid-July 2011. The primary fields of interest include social networks, mobile marketing, location-based properties, digital video, gaming and “learning” platforms.
“PepsiCo10 will bring value to our business by ensuring that we are at the cutting edge of whatever digital and social media technology is out there,” Peter Charles, a PepsiCo marketing manager, said.
This movement to ‘hunt’ the globe for great creative ideas is gaining more and more popularity, and so it should. Essentially, everyone wins, the brand gets the creative ideas they want for a reasonable price (PepsiCo is offering £10,000 to the winner), the winners or top entries get recognition, make contacts and gain experience in how to pitch winning ideas and the public get to see the most cutting edge, unique and creative advertising and marketing campaigns from sources which otherwise, would probably have never surfaced.
Other brand contest sites
A leading agency in this ‘buy an idea’ movement is idea bounty, a website that that allows clients to ask the world for creative ideas in exchange for a reward, or Bounty. The clients review the submissions and select the best Idea as the Bounty winner. Clients can only use Ideas that they’ve paid a Bounty.
And what about Swagapalooza - turning it round this is new products pitching bloggers with large followings. A product in search of an audience…. creative? Innovative? Worthwhile?
What does the marketer of the future DO?
Are we heading towards a future where a marketing departments primary job will be to select winners of competitions for creative ideas? As bad as that sounds for all you marketers out there, I think the answer is probably even worse. Why even have a marketing department for that task when people can submit their entries online and have the public vote for the creative idea they want to see actioned the most.
Be warned – The End is Nigh!
11 Crowdsourcing websites:
- 99 Designs – graphic design
- IdeaStorm - ideas
- CrowdSpring – Graphic design
- CrowdWorks – more for corporates
- Brandstack – logos
- InnoCentive – problem solving for businesses
- Spudaroo – specialist for copy writing
- AdHack – advertising experts who’ll write your next ad for you
- Brainrack – a brainstorming site
- NamingForce – to name your product
- Clipik – video editing
Related articles
- Is spec work evil? (creativeagencysecrets.com)
- PepsiCo and Highland team up in hunt for ten new social media hits (telegraph.co.uk)
- 10 ways of crowdsourcing your needs or talent (the10most.com)
- Evil Genuis Finds Case Study in her Pepsi (inc.com)
- Mashable Teams With PepsiCo To Find Europe’s Most Promising Startups (mashable.com)
We are members of the Open Rights Group, ORG and their really helpful newsletter gives updates on the lobbying work they do to preserve and promote your rights in the digital age. For a £5 monthly subscription, you can support their excellent work – from which we all benefit.
Here’s an extract from their recent email about Privacy.
Ignoring an EU decision, Ed Vaizey has not required that advertising agencies ask customers to opt-in before using tracking cookies to collect their data. Instead, he’s stated that people can ensure they “consent” by changing their browser preferences. How someone can give “consent” without knowing what’s happening, and be expected to withdraw consent when they work out what browser preferences are, is beyond us. …Read more
There are great discussions in the comments thread from Owen Blacker, Gervase Markham and Jim Killock – we recommend you read them.
This has obvious implications for lead generation and reverse IP mapping for business development experts.
An introduction is the very best way of getting a meeting or speaking to a new business prospect company. Thanks to Alex Krupp I checked out a new service called Go Hachi.
It uses your existing connections on social media sites, to suggest the best person to connect you to your target.
Read our slide deck about our trial.
Here’s my connection link you help me get my beta invite by clicking here to make the connection.
See how Go Hachi describes itself
Related articles
- Hachi Shows You How To Meet New People (crenk.com)
- Emerson tests out how to meet Zuck (emerson social media.com)
It is well known now that Google changed its search algorithm significantly last month.
The way Google searches and indexes your website is pretty important as the number one search site – if you’re not ‘found’ on Google your business loses out.
The change mainly affects sites who copy / reproduce content from other sites (commonly called farming) and do not add value to browsing readers.
What can you do?
- Produce unique content. Write or re-write your material. If you resell for others, add depth to descriptions with your own review / opinion to differentiate your site.
- Continue to write good copy in titles, metatags, HTML layout
- Make it easy for human readers rather than trying to second-guess bot readers
- Don’t waste your time working with ‘farmer’ website owners. One of our clients set up relationships with sites who were sending traffic using automated link farming – their importance will probably drop after this roll-out
- Do check your site analytics and see whether you have been affected.
- Review your SEO and steer tactics away from those not favoured by Google.
SEO experts take a look at the SEOMOZ view.
A custom report for Google Analytics from Andy Beard.
If you have e-commerce clients they should read the analysis on Practical ECommerce.
Web masters read the technical issues on SearchEngineLand.
Related articles
- Google’s Farmer Update and Its Effect on Independent Publishers (xfep.com)
- Google Analytics Version 5 (seroundtable.com)
How much do marketers and their agencies need to know about technology. Code is now on a par with content.
- Allison Mooney, head of trends and Insights, Marketing Google
- Ben Malbon, Director of Strategy, Creative Lab Google
- Matt Galligan, SimpleGeo
- Rob Rasmussen, Tribal DDB
- Rick Webb, The Barbarian Group
#agileagency
How much do marketers and their agencies need to know about technology. Code is now on a par with content.
Rasmussen - campaigns aren’t dying but seasonal work continues. Campaigns work on top of the platform of engagement. We try to do it backwards – all the funding is against campaigns especially media buying not spend on platforms.
Webb - Platform = brand; Campaign = products
Malbon - at BBH we tried to dismantle the “masterpiece mentality” of it had to be perfect before we show it to colleagues let alone clients. Tech companies are better at killing stuff that doesn’t work.
Webb - campaigns are humdrum.
Malbon - Tech companies make things that last much longer than a campaign, which lasts 5 minutes
Mooney – creative is being tested on YouTube by BMW.
Rasmassen - it’s almost backwards to create it and later push out to channels… reverse the order the core idea rather than individual executions.
Galligan - FourSquare and Amex combined deals so Amex built a tech platform to enable this it’s more than a campaign because it uses multiple platforms and FourSquare happened to be launch partner – they’ll extend it to others later. It was an experiment the first implementation. Take interesting bits and remove the poorly performing parts and go on. Software companies have one core concept we stick to one thing that we do.
Webb - software companis need marketing and Brands can’t take it back like software can.
Galligan - Marketing is every aspect of what you do as a tech company. E.g. Twitter began as Twittr and was a hideous purple website. Someone turned that brand round. The danger is to think the core product is what matters. We market as a consumer internet comp[any even though we don’t deal with consumers
Malbon - Three things in summary
- Software companies need agencies to capture and distill the culture. Because inside tech the world is your company. Agencies can do this and understand who you’re designing for.
- Importance of having untethered creatives around the place inside tech cos. The best agencies have random crazy people who think Tech has too many people who are samey.
- Agencies push tech companies in directions we could never have thought of. Brining the two worlds together is great. Tech can be used to create magic plus agency crazy thinking person.
Also covered by RachCreative
Related articles
- Do Agencies Need to Think Like Software Companies? (adgeek.us)
- SXSW Day One Delivers…Everything (adrants.com)
