The mystery of online Social Media revealed

As more and more business begin to embrace online social media opportunities it is important to make sure that you have a good understanding of exactly what it is all about and exactly the impact that it can have on your business.

One of the biggest issues with using social media as a marketing strategy is when a business or individual chooses to go heading off like a bull in a china shop without fully understanding the implications or processes of what’s involved in participating in a social network.  For anybody who is new to social media I strongly urge you to watch the video below and then follow it up by reading this great article by Jennifer Laycock - How social media (didn’t) change business.

 
Social Media in Plain English from leelefever on Vimeo.

Firefox Download Day - Cool For a Number of Reasons

Some of us nerdy computer type people have a stranger sense of cool than the normal everyday person, but I am going to try and justify that title to you. Yes, you too may find a software update cool if you read this!

Firefox Version 3.0 is due for release in the next few weeks and includes a number of pretty flash updates that will make their web browser better and more appealing to the computer using audience. If you don’t already know what a web browser is, it is the program you use to surf the internet. Most likely if you fit in this category you will be using Microsoft Internet Explorer, as it is the default web browser in Windows, and is still by far the most popular web browser.

Firefox is an open source program, which tries to focus on being quicker, more secure and most importantly - free to use.

Current figures from the W3Schools website show that IE still holds the majority of the market share, but Firefox is making good inroads into Microsoft territory.

So what is Download Day and why is it cool?

The next big software release, Firefox 3, is due for release in the next couple of weeks and the first reason that it’s cool and exciting is that it is a great program. It is faster and more secure, and it does a great job of rendering well coded web pages - which makes our job as web designers much easier. It also has a lot of cool addons and plugins to give you a more customised browser to suit what you want to do.

The second reason is that the release is coming out in rather a cool and exciting way. The Firefox team is asking everyone to sign up and download the new version on the same day, Download Day, to try and set a world record for the most downloads of a software package in 24 hours. I have never been a part of a World Record attempt that I know of, so I want to give this a good go - even if all I am doing is clicking a button.

The third reason is probably the best reason, as it is the main reason this post is in this blog. The Mozilla Foundation, the company behind Firefox, has harnessed the power of web promotion as well as any company on the internet. Their marketing of the Firefox browser has relied on the users to spread the word on the browser, through blog posts, buttons to put on your website, an active loyal community and a far sprinkling of Anti-Microsoft sentiment. With the cool idea of Download Day, you can see that Mozilla already has a million people willing to download the new version of their software.

It goes to show that with a good product and a little bit of creative thinking, you too can compete with some of the players that pour almost infinite amounts of money into their products over many mediums. As the economic climate starts to become a little tighter, web marketing represents the greatest ‘value for money’ promotion that you can find.

So that’s it - cool, huh? Well… maybe it was not that convincing, but go to the Spread Firefox website and check out the Download Day website anyway. At the very least check out what all the fuss is about.

Distribute your online video with TubeMogul

When it comes to online video if you’re not already mixing it into your marketing campaign you really need to consider it. Your Web site visitors are so conditioned to watching television and with increasing uptake of broadband connections the transition to watching video online is growing at an astonishing rate.

Recent YouTube usage statistics tell us that over 10 hours of online video is uploaded every minute and that YouTube has become the 6th most visited destination on the Internet. The fact that Google were willing to invest $1.65 billion to purchase YouTube speaks volumes about what their view is on the future of online video!

When it comes to watching online video there are a number of video sharing sites that any producer (website owner) needs to take into account when developing a distribution strategy. These sites receive massive visitation and with the introduction of universal search the major search engines now display results directly from these video sharing sites in their search results.

With all of these video sharing options it is important for me to introduce to you a fantastic free service called TubeMogul, that allows you to upload a video once and have it automatically syndicate across a range of the more popular online video sites.

Not only does TubeMogul allow you to automatically distribute your project to the video sharing sites it also provides some seriously powerful tools such as the Cross site analytics and social bookmarker. The Cross site analytics alone make signing up worth the effort by providing a reporting dashboard to view, compare and contrast your viewership information.

Which Web sites are currently included in the TubeMogul distribution?

When it comes to distributing your video TubeMogul has all of the big guns covered including YouTube, Google Video, Yahoo Video, Blip.TV, AOL Video, MySpace & MetaCafe to name a few (there are plenty more niche options available). You can click here for the full list as well as links to the signup page for each property.

How does TubeMogul work?

Anybody looking to get started using TubeMogul should firstly create themselves an account. It is then a matter of signing on with the various video sharing sites that you would like to distribute your footage to and entering your sign in details for these video sharing sites into your TubeMogul account.

The next step is to prepare your video, upload it to TubeMogul, choose where you would like to distribute it and sit back and watch it all unfold. I think you would agree it is much easier than going to each video sharing site to upload your video individually.

All that you need to do at this stage is implement your plan to promote your online video and monitor the results through the Cross site analytics conveniently provided in your dashboard.

I think that you will agree that this is an extremely useful tool made all the better buy its price — FREE!

To get a real feel for how it all works I suggest that you head over and look at their instructional videos!

Search Engine Spam - What Google Knows!

Google knows plenty about the techniques that spammers use to “trick search engines” into thinking that their site is more relevant than others and Matt Cutts ( a Google engineer) gives a great presentation into some of these basic techniques that are being used.

 

Reap the Benefits of Email Newsletters Done Right.

Communicating with your audience is always a challenge – regardless of whether you are aiming at attracting new customers, or keeping your existing customers informed. Although there are a few obstacles to overcome, one of the most successful ways of communicating with your customers is through an email newsletter.

But how do you go about it? Email has never been easier to send, but at the same time it is becoming increasingly difficult to get the message through. Spam filters will block you at every opportunity, and if you do succeed, the time restraints of the modern day consumer means your carefully crafted newsletter could end up straight into the Recycle Bin.

It may seem that this is all too much, but consider the advantages. An email list is a valuable thing, representing a highly targeted market for your product. People have actively made the choice to receive your email newsletter, so right from the start they are willing to hear what you have to say. Additionally, people don’t have to make the effort to seek out your information online or through other media. With one click, users can open your newsletter and (if done right) can quickly see all that you have available.

Another major benefit of focusing your marketing efforts on the newsletter is the direct feedback you can achieve. As with so much of your online marketing effort, analytics programs can almost instantly tell you whether your are heading in the right direction or whether you need to rethink your marketing plan. Try getting that from television or the newspaper.

In the next few weeks we will publish a few articles that will steer you in the right direction, helping you get your email marketing campaign up and running with as little drama as possible, and show you that email communications done right will help give you a competitive edge in the market place.

Twitter - What Tha?

When it comes to the latest technology or Web services, explaining to those non-technologically minded what it is all about can be a hell of a job.  This is very much the case when it comes to Twitter, a new Web 2.0 phenomenon that has been getting plenty of coverage of late.

So what is Twitter?  Well like a lot of people it’s taken me a while to get my head around it and the video below was one thing that really cemented my thoughts as to what Tweed is all about!

Interesting YouTube Usage Facts

For anybody who still has doubts over the uptake of video online here are some interesting facts about YouTube from the Mercury News.

• YouTube was the number one video site on the Internet as of January - with 67.5 million unique users in the U.S., according to Nielsen NetRatings.
• The site also was the 6th largest Internet destination overall, Nielsen determined.
• People watch hundreds of millions of videos a day on the service.
• Every minute, 10 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube.
• Of the 9.5 billion online videos watched in the U.S. in November last year, 2.9 billion of those were watched on YouTube, according to Comscore.

Landing page load time to impact AdWords quality score.

One of the toughest things for a small-business owner to get their head around when using Google AdWords is making sure that they are taking care of the different elements that can increase and decrease the quality score of each advertising campaign.

Over the coming weeks we will go into more detail as to what elements can make a difference in increasing your quality score (and ultimately the amount you have to pay to keep your ads running), but thought that it would be worthwhile referencing a change that Google has announced will be integrated into their quality scoring system in the near future. Read more