Brilliant Thinking

A couple of weeks ago there were two significant events in social media marketing. The first was the “quiet” launch of some new Apple products, and the second was the change to the Skittles corporate site. Both used social media in very different ways.

The result of both campaigns was massive brand exposure for both companies. So, mission accomplished?

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I have been a member of Ecademy since 2003. Over the years I have made some good contacts and enaged in some excellent conversations in the various online clubs that I joined. I have also met some good contacts through the occasional offline events I have been to.

However, the value of the system has declined in the past couple of years to the point that I have decided to leave.

There are two reasons for this: continue reading »

Search engine marketing, or SEM, is a form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs). According to the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization, SEM methods include

• Search engine optimization (or SEO),
• Paid placement,
• Contextual advertising, and
• Paid inclusion.

In this article we will look at link building and how it fits within the overall marketing strategy for your site. 

In the above methodologies, link building sits mainly as contextual advertising but can also fit into paid placement and paid inclusion (if you have to pay for the link, obviously).

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Image via CrunchBase

Twitter, part of the modern evolution of the web, provides a platform for micro-blogging. For the uninitiated, a micro-blog is effectively SMS for the web - it allows you to publish up to 140 character text messages about anything, from what you are eating for lunch through to useful references or work-related information.

But it’s more than just a push platform - it’s a collaboration and community tool. People can respond to your posts (called “Tweets”) directly - it’s what makes it different and more than just an RSS feed. You can also read and/or post from both mobile phones, the web and popular IM clients such as Windows Live Messenger and Digsby. There are also a host of other applications that allow interaction with Twitter.

So, where does Twitter sit in your communication strategy?

Blogs are quite easy to place - a business blog contains business-related information, such as this one. Articles are usually longer and more informative and range from technical to strategic. The blog helps visitors understand you/your company better taken as a whole (they can see the focus from the types of posts).

Websites are easy too - they are about your company. They tell people who you are, what you do and why they should buy from you. They also sell things like electronics, books, toys, furniture, jewellery and all manner of things.

Email marketing is also clear - it’s about promotion, the latest news, the newest offer, or a press release. There are other uses, but it’s usually a one-to-many output which can either inform, build the brand, or call the reader to action.

So what is Twitter?

It’s similar to your subconscious - a list of things you might like to blog, but are either too short or not quite on-brand (for business blogs), or conversely too business-like (e.g. blatant self-promotion) for personal blogs. Twitter sits between these worlds and is an acceptable platform to post personal as well as business Tweets. As a marketing tool, you need to determine what is an acceptable work/life balance to create, but the idea about Twitter is to create a constant stream of consciousness - it’s “all about you, baby”. And it’s not conversation either - keep that for IM clients or phone calls.

One important thing to remember is that people reading your Tweets want to know you, so too much self-promotion will have them switching off and not following you. Remember too that you need to occasionally respond to Tweets from people you are following - it’s a community thing too - you need to be involved with your network of followers and the people you are following. It’s the virtual equivalent of referrals. Remember too that it’s a fluid environment, so followers will come and go so don’t panic about losing people along the way. You will evolve your strategy over time and settle on a format that works for you - there’s no magic bullet.

It’s also a great tool to ask people who are following you for input - for example “anybody going to event x?”, “does anybody know about AdWords?”, “can anybody recommend an electrician?”, “what’s a good Lebanese restaurant in London?” These types of posts encourage community and communication, as well as providing insights about you/your brand which would not be obvious from your website, blog or email campaigns - or even be appropriate for them. In this sense, it is a perfect online mirror for offline business networks and allows you the ability to instantly connect to your network without the need for bespoke online tools or logging in to a website before you can check your updates. With Twitter it’s always on, and integrations through your IM client (e.g. Windows Live, Digsby, etc) provide you immediate feedback as it happens.

In essence - to answer the question “what is Twitter” - it is an online, interactive networking tool that allows you to collaborate with co-workers, friends (and complete strangers) through which you can enhance your personal identity/brand.

One guide I use is “don’t witter on Twitter or you’ll end up being a twit.”

Read more:
Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang
Using Twitter Properly (Part 3)
Twitter gets some notice in the enterprise

You can follow me on Twitter here.

Image by LollyKnit via Flickr

Towards the end of May, the AVG Security Suite started spewing fake hits to websites across the web which appear as web stats in your web analytics reports. Given there are approximately 20 million users of the new AVG suite, this amounts to a very large amount of fake traffic.

In February, AVG acquired Exploit Prevention Labs and its LinkScanner tool, then bundled the tool in the latest AVG release. What the LinkScanner does - in an effort to protect the user from being hacked, spammed or spoofed - is to pretend that it is a human and “clicks” on every link found in search engine results. So when you visit Google and search for something, every single result found is visited by LinkScanner to determine if the website linked is legitimate or a link to malware. The end result is what appears to be real traffic on the website.

For small sites, this is not going to make much difference, although it may appear you have more visitors than usual. For larger sites with high traffic volumes, this will mean a large spike in traffic. But, it will also potentially mean larger bills because website owners have to pay for bandwidth (small sites are below the minimum threshold so this doesn’t become an issue).

Adam Beale, who runs a UK-based internet consultancy, says that across his small stable of clients, traffic has spiked as much as 80 per cent on some sites. And this is more than just an inconvenience. After all, sites live and die by their traffic numbers. And net resources aren’t free.

“Although [the AVG LinkScanner] might be good for the security of users, it’s a real pain for website owners and webmasters. It’s causing people to think their traffic is increasing, costing those who pay for bandwidth, and wasting disk space with large amounts of unnecessary lines in log files.”

One of his clients, Beale says, normally pulls in 140GB of bandwidth a month, and for June, he predicts a 5 per cent jump.

At the moment, there is a way of filtering AVG traffic from log files. But it’s unclear whether this method would filter out legitimate traffic as well. After all, the traffic appears to come from numerous legitimate IP addresses of general web users. And AVG suggests that - in the name of high security - they may make changes that prevent such filtering. After all, if you can filter it, so can the malware producers they are trying to block.

“A situation like this generates false traffic, bogus data, and this leads to wrong budget decisions and marketing activities,” says Barry Parshall, director of product management at WebTrends, a popular web analytics firm. “I completely get the value proposition [of LinkScanner], but it would be responsible of them to identify themselves, with agent code or whatever it might be, so legitimate businesses can serve their customers properly.”

AVG have promised a fix to alleviate this condition, but until then pay close attention to the number of very short duration visits you receive on your website (assuming you have good analytics software that shows you this kind of statistic). If you are using basic log file analysis software that does not show the duration of visits or allow you to drill down into the details, it may be time to upgrade or consider more thorough tools such as Google Analytics, Yahoo!, comScore, or Nielsen NetRatings.

UPDATE: 31st July - AVG has now been updated to prevent the spurious web stats issues from the LinkScanner tool. More here.