Be social!

As online marketing is my game in life, I must say that I am a little bit infographic'ed out with staggering digital and social media usage facts. Every day of my life I am bombarded with stats that are supposed to send my jaw southward - it can be tedious.

After a long week of research in latest trends in digital marketing I asked myself this: "How do we prevent social media corroding away at the time that we have on planet Earth?" This for me is a much more important question than "Will Facebook suffer the same fate as Myspace?" Now that I've organised my social media usage in terms of when I use it and what I want out of it I am much happier that it isn't sappping my life!

A recent webminar from Comscore stated that in April 2011, the internet population spent 1.8 trillion minutes online with one in six visiting a social networking website. From a consumer point of view, how much of this activity is actually 'social'? Many people use the big social sites for work tools just as much if not more than for actual socialising. For example, a great deal of Twitter usage is voyeuristic information seeking - social search.

So how else will consumers socialise online in the future? Blurring online and offline is the key. I find Foursquare check in events really impressive as a simple, fun way of introducing a game playing element to an event already in the calendar. This new level of interaction can be done in a really warm, personal way and is big in professional Basketball and Grid iron. Then flip it on its head - online social clubs at a local level (Hooleytime in London is a great example) can market their social events membership and then tie in Twitter/Foursquare activity whilst on a holiday break. When members really become integrated into that community, Facebook groups can depict this new social relationship and there is no brand admin posting everyday waiting to see if they can create social media engagement with their consumers.

In summary, don't get sucked in to living your days on social media sites. Enjoy these powerful superb new services for what they are but define set amount of time away from smartphone apps and social websites. And be social!

How to search on Twitter

How to search on Twitter

In the UK we have seen a direct correlation between smartphone sales and Twitter accounts. Hitwise provide a great source of free data showing the top social networking websites - the top three has been quite static...Facebook, Youtube and then Twitter. What is interesting is that these 3 sites have taken market share from the less popular social networks as UK users become more picky and selective with their mobile and desktop social media usage.

Whether you are on old hand at Twitter or just getting to grips with it, do not subscribe to the view that finding stuff on Twitter is difficult. Take into account that this micro-blogging phenomenon has to take a huge strain on its servers with spikes of trending and increasing international usage. If you have a new account for example, there can be a little lag before you can find yourself on Twitter.com.

Twitter provide a great list of search query methods making it easier for you to find people and keywords. There is much more power to the search functionality than you'd realise from Twitter.com so don't dismiss the Twitter client for all of your usage. Here is the list from the Twitter.com search operator list - really handy stuff: http://search.twitter.com/operators

Digital News 24th June

This week in the search space Google put their Panda 2.2 update live which targets low quality sites looking to 'farm' in traffic. This is designed to refine the sigifnicant movement that has occured particularly in ecommerce websites as many tense webmasters across the world endeavour to get their traffic back. It also will delve further into the issue of content scraping, as the Google search quality and anti-spam teams look to build on the Panda algorithm. Last small bit of Google things to note - the Google +1 button endorsements sporadically (e.g. 10,000 people have +1'ed this site) show against users search results for logged out users. This will have an impact on clickthrough rate, not as much as the logged in version but this is all relevant for both for natural and paid search.

Facebook temporarily deleted content written by Roger Ebert about the late Ryan Dunn's death. There was a placeholder disclaimer saying that Facebook.com 'doesn’t allow pages with hateful, threatening or obscene content.'

Twitter.com have been in testing for 9 months with a new Hootsuite sponsored tweets product but the rumour mentioned on Tech Crunch is that a new in-timeline Promoted Tweets product will be on the way.

J K Rowling opened Pottermore.com with a hidden link to youtube.com which counted down to the final trailer which for many Harry Potter fans would have been a dissapointment as it confirmed that there will be no more Potter books. This digital activity created a huge surge of Youtube, Twitter, email and website activity.

A new free application called JS-Kit created some noise this week which allows comment creation for any site, page or object. A nice, simple line of code that powerfully transforms your site for real time UGC.

Digital News 17th June 2011

Facebook.com hit the news this week for declining traffic in the UK and Canada. Rises in Twitter activity, talk of an IPO in early 2012, and negative PR surrounding data protection have Statistically Facebook have more 'traffic' (social media usage is so different to traditional websites and search engines) than Google in the US and are gradually heading toward 700 million users. However if you take a look at Hitwise UK stats Google has about 2% more market share than Facebook in total traffic terms. Starbucks reported increasing levels of traffic to its Facebook, which now dwarfs its brand website internet usage.

Joey Barton hit the Twitter with a great tweet about his sadness in ex-teammate Kevin Nolan moving on from Newcastle United to West Ham United. iOS 5 has been previewed which has a bias towards Twitter usage. It is listed on apple's site as an official feature of the exciting new update. 'Tweet this photo' joins 'email' assumes a nice position within your camera roll and has app integration on Youtube and Safari.

In San Francisco this week Google, launched Voice search for desktop, instant pages and search by image. Some nice updates, my favourite and in my view the most important is instant pages. This is where Google Chrome speeds up the access to the Google #1 result when you click on it - great demo to show the staggering benefit that this can give the browser.

In the daily offer email world, Google Offers beta has created some noise after launching a fiercely competitive model, undercutting Groupon who resisted the Google acqusition approach. Instead of a 50:50 revenue share, Google give you 80% of the income generated on your daily offer.

Bing launched some updates to Bing Webmaster tools allowing users to increase crawling options, the helpful Index Tracker has been transformed into 'Index Explorer' and adding admins/users to any said account. Whilst 2 of the 3 updates are merely following in the footsteps of the Google Webmasters tech I really like the Index Explorer as many 10 year old plus .coms have all sorts of pages floating about from layered development set ups that digital marketing managers need to know about from a housekeeping point of view.

Twitter apps

Social media clients to check out for Twitter.com

Using Twitter.com for SEO learning and strategic white hat SEO is great and becoming rapidly common.

For those search engine optimisation peops that are a bit anti social media and are reluctantly moving towards Twitter usage I thought a summary of some of the great social media applications for desktops (and smartphones) would be useful.

Initially, you create your Twitter account and you can use their own client for all of your messages. This is particularly appropriate if you have a personal account that you want to use to say 'Hi I'm here' and have an objective of 50% business tweets and 50% personal/leisure tweets. Core functionality of tweeting, retweeting, following/unfollowing, direct messaging, managing lists, hash tagging, people searching profile editing enables you to get to base 1 - absolutely great for feeling your way into Twitter.com. I quite like doing a proportion of my Twitter activity using the Twitter.com app, particularly good on iPhone where you can tweet across multiple accounts in one action and follow pan account with one tap. Of course you will have to login in to Twitter.com to make any edits to your Bio, profile including background and avatar. Note that some 3rd party Twitter apps will supply links to edit profile but these will click out to the relevant areas When you get into a scalable position of wanting to shorten URLs, create multiple search query feeds, schedule activity or share a Twitter account across a team or locations - then you need to look at some of the weird and wonderful world of Twitter clients.

It was announced that on the 25th May 2011 Tweetdeck.com was acquired by Twitter.com which in itself is an advertorial to this superb Twitter client. Tweetdeck makes you feel the pulse of Twitter, bringing home the rapid fire and huge waves of content and sorting it out. Tweetdeck offer a free and low cost multiple user option - the free version is superb. Tweetdeck has led the way with query searching, giving advanced search options with the use of speech marks to allow for exact match style searching. You can snoop, lurk, spy, monitor and identify fellow Tweeters - power at your finger tips. This is how to get to grips with trending. You can see with your own geeky Twitter eyes what trend terms move quickly, slowly and querky (geniune) trends. Where Tweetdeck wins out is the front end UI. It is pretty to the eye, illustrating feed columns beautifully with the ghost prompts providing you with core tweet info as you work. You will increase a deeper understanding of Twitter but beware of the addictivness potential. Voyeuristic Twitter at its best!

Hootsuite.com goes head to head with Tweetdeck in the most popular free applications with a core strength of scheduling. It is worth mentioning that both Hootsuite and Tweetdeck can be used for other social sites such as Facebook and Foursquare but lets stay on Twitter for now. You can schedule tweets specifying date / time, whether you'd like email confirmations and with Twitter (only) you get a column showing what is scheduled named 'pending columns'. Everything else is similar to Tweetdeck - you can shorten URLs, see your mentions/home/DMs and login to multiple Twitter accounts. Hootsuite recently ran some enhancements which means that you can search on keyword terms to compete more with Tweetdeck. Also the stats element (paid version) has improved significantly. As with 'the deck', multiple account users are at an additional low cost.

Cotweet.com has taken things to a new level, offering multiple account access for free. Set up your account, connecting to your Twitter and then you can assin email addresses as new users. The new user receives an email inviting them to configure your new account from there. Once you're in, the standard channel view is like almost like an email inbox where 'home' and inbound tweets from followers are brought together within 'inbox' and then 'outbox' pulls together scheduled and sent. You can set up 'CoTags' which allow you to put short signatures on different users. Big brands are going down this route and then use their background to show the various authors of their Twitter page. Then you can archive Twitter threads, for any mad Tweet days. One last thing I like - when you search for people, it shows their Klout score against their main Twitter stats. Cotweet is powerful.

Then there are sites like Ping.fm and Social oomph with quite similar offerings - great free functionality and then a paid few bucks per month option with similar options. I like the Twitter automation features with Social oomph where you can automate following new followers, vet new followers and send DMs to new followers. All of these features are subjective and in my opinion are worth testing for your product/service/brand.

In the Wordpress.org world, check out tools such as Wordpress tweeter and Socialite to push out any new blog posts - perfect for any bedroom bloggers that are looking to boost social traffic referral with the clear benefit of saving time. This illustrates another point that Twitter can be incredibly time consuming so work out your strategy and set defined time where you WON'T be tweeting.

OK - hope this wasn't too waffley - if it was, here is a concise recommendation: Cotweet!

I would value any comments on these Twitter apps and any that you have come across that kick a$$!

+1 Google API

In May, we heard about the +1 API as the next stage of Google's social search project. Just a really quick that Google have now made this live - you can see it at here.

See you later Google Buzz buttons!

Practical white hat SEO strategies

Follow @Spike_Digital

First there was content farms and white hats. Then there were grey hat farmers - now Google has stamped down on this SEO phenomenon. Wearing a white hat is cool. If you don't really get what this means and don't care - then find yourself a good SEO! White SEO is great for small companies - it can be affordable and can support online brand building. The perception is that creative, white hat SEO is rock hard. Admittedly, if your current SEO service provider thinks that they can just throw some money as poor quality article site links or something equally lazy - then yes, white hat is the more challenging route. I liked Rand's recent blog on SEOMOZ about white hat SEO really working. It is both inspirational and directional long term taking into account the powerful evolution of digital. So Black / grey hatters - don't be scared...hunting for links organically is fun.

One pre-cursor to implementing white hat SEO is that it could take a while to kick in. Tactics like linkbait are absolute winners but with any lasting brand led SEO you aren't going to ping up 20 pages on an exact term in 2-3 weeks...so you and/or your client will need to be patient.

In this post I have broken down the tasks within some of my favourite white hat techniques to make the exercise less daunting. There are many more great white hat techniques but my intention here is to demonstrate how easy great link building can be by putting some basic project management in place. This helps me give a process to my working day - but even better - it enables me to give a better visibility of what work I am doing/have done as an SEO service provider.

1) Connect with bloggers using incentives. This could be either a judge based competition or a simple sweepstake. I favour the sweepstake route at the moment - the blogger enters by posting about a particular element of your business To confirm entry to your comp, the blogger could then contact you direct via email - or you can leverage social media to build some more online awareness. Twitter is great for this - fueling both relevant social media activity and references back to your website in question, which adds SEO benefit. So here is my blogger competition project task breakdown:

- Pick a competition theme and prize

- Set up a competition page for the blogger to link to

- Generate a target list of quality bloggers

- Email details - subject title, sender & main body

- Entry confirmation method - email, twitter, facebook

- Monitor responses, blogs and inbound links to the page

2) a. Targeted pyramid linking. Widely used in SEO, each party gets a one way link - no money involved - everyone's a winner. However, this technique is abused a bit where an SEO offers a link from a website that is irrelevant to yours and then asks for your relevant site to their core website that they are link building to. I would quantify that type of activity as grey hat - depending on the quality of the site that gives you the link. If you do some pyramid offerings like this, then offer something that is relevant to them. It could well be that you/your client runs a blog on a free software provider such as Word Press or Blogger.

2) b. Reciprocal linking. Google's Florida update was as major as the recent Panda update and pulverised many blue chips for building up huge offsite profiles with mass link exchanges. Then began the bizarre SEO economy - the world of paid links was born due to the craving to get one-way links without doing the hard work. The temptation here is to be too critical of this as a strategy, however if your website is something that doesn't naturally generate high volumes of 'votes' (I really like Matt Cutt's recent example of porn), what do you do? Look now at how sites in niches rank. Some sites have virtually no link footprint. That isn't to say that links are unimportant, far from it. However with a handful of well targeted reciprocal links with suppliers, partners or related services and you will get an improvement in search engine rankings. Furthermore, you will get a trickle of high quality traffic - a great bonus of white hat SEO offsite work.

3) Referrer programme. The 'new school' of a 'link to us' page. By having a 'Partnerships' page you can incentivise website users to talk about you on social media or link to you. I like the advanced web ranking program where you can receive their product for free by writing a long blog article with a link back - effectively they are willing to get SEOs to write sponsored posts for them...nicely targeted SEO. Quidco.com also have some nice referrer techniques that are well worth checking out. The key here is to make the act of linking to you interesting, moving away from the 'dump this script in your footer' approach. Widgets, inforgraphics and referral programmes are all great examples but adding some type of incentive will always win in terms of final results.

4) Blog Comments. Blog commenting is a common method of SEO, particularly in black hat circles. However, why shouldn't you comment regularly on blogs that is related to you/your client's website irrespective of the blog rules? Some blogs are dofollow/nofollow, some allow embedding of links - some don't...but the point is that a natural link footprint of an authority site would have a diverse range of links, one example could well be a link on a blog comment with the anchor text 'John Smith'. If there are a fair few 'John Smiths', then this shows an abundant amount of relevant commenting that is giving users exposure to your site/brand - has to be viewed by Google as good. So don't shoehorn in anything spammy and don't worry about whether the link will be nofollow or not...contribute to the page's article and demonstrate authority on the topic in question.

Summary

White hat SEO could be viewed in layman's terms as best practice online marketing. I have purposely referred to well known white hat techniques and explained the steps that I would take to try and contribute to the community that is the web!