Jul
22

Google+ close to 20million users…

by Strive Media

Statistics released yesterday by Paul Allen, founder of Ancestry.com, suggest Google’s new social networking site, Google+, looks set to top 20 million users in the next 48 hours, less than a month after its launch.

“Last week, we saw two days where more than two million signed up in a single day,” Allen posted on his Google+ page. “If that rate had continued, Google+ would have reached 20 million users by last Sunday night.

“But the last four days have averaged only 948,000 new users and yesterday the site added only 763,000. Yesterday’s growth of 4.47 per cent was the slowest viral growth since Google opened up invites back on July 6th.”

Addressing the slowing in growth – the figures still make Mountain View’s rival to Facebook and Twitter the fastest growing social network in history – Allen makes the valid point that Google+ hasn’t been marketed by any of the Google channels yet and that the social network is still invite-only.

So, “why hasn’t Google turned on the marketing machine yet?” Allen asked.

Quite simply, it could be all about the sheer size of the project and the number of potential users wanting to join Google+ once it’s been opened up to all, Google CEO Larry Page suggested in an earnings call. In the meantime, the search giant wants to get as much of its latest social experience right first time as possible.

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Jul
07

SEO & Social Media project for larger companies

by Strive Media

It’s reported that nearly half of consumers online, admit that both search and social media influence their purchases. Social Media and SEO are hot topics for most online marketing agencies, today with more and more people and agencies jumping on the bandwagon, claiming the status of “guru”. However this can be absolutely devastating for larger organisations who put their trust and reputation in the hands of these individuals.

One of the most common issues that we have come across, is that, social media efforts themselves are often uncoordinated activities, usually run and managed by individuals with very little experience, let alone working in sync with search engine optimisation (SEO). Many online marketing consultants are accustomed to social media or SEO projects for small and medium sized businesses, which is a very different ballgame, to working with a large or complex organisation. Being able to coordinate social media and SEO processes requires a unique combination of organisational adaptability and subject matter expertise.

Larger companies know they should be utilising and engaging with customers through these channels, but it is a matter of how and by whom. These sizeable marketing initiatives typically involve multiple stakeholders, layers of approval and messaging policies that can stifle ambitious social content optimisation and promotion activity.

It is possible to make significant progress within a reasonable timeframe with the right mix of planning, communication and expertise. Once business units or teams have an understanding of goals and objectives, allocating resources, adjusting processes, training, and reporting outcomes can open up a wide range of opportunities. The key is to get right under the skin of the business and understand how a well coordinated social media and SEO effort can help the company solve problems and achieve goals.

Our top tips for ensuring the above is achievable are:

1. Provide Education

We cannot stress enough, the importance of delivering a well thought out proposal AND educating the key stakeholders within the company right at the start and throughout the project. Yes, you will find that perhaps they may have their own opinions, and may even try and bring in their own contacts and agencies. BUT providing an education session to key stakeholders and key team members, can give you buy in from the off. Hopefully, this will also provide you with social media and SEO champions within the teams you may have to liaise with on a regular basis, making it much easier to request data, content or even updates on key activity within the company.

2. Create Advocates

Touched on slightly in point 1, gaining support from individuals within various teams that have demonstrated a personal and/or professional interest in social media / SEO will help “sell” the benefits throughout the organisation. As champions for website optimisation and social media engagement, client side team members can use various tools to spread the “Social SEO” message, whether it’s via internal newsletters, internal update meetings or 1-2-1 / team training sessions.

3. Share Results

Showing results at multiple stages in the project with attention to those areas of focus for key decision makers can help motivate support for the project and make room for resources you may need to put behind it. Success inspires more success (and maybe support for extra resource or even budget…..).

4. Availability

The Online Marketing team behind the project within your agency or setup needs to be available to client contacts in various mediums for example via Skype, SMS or instant messaging. Training or support via conference call are helpful in providing timely information for internal meetings and the decision making process.

5. Content Creation / Content Curation

Whether its web pages, blog posts or tweets, ensure you are prepared to create content specifically for social media and optimisation initiatives. From experience, we have often found goldmines of content or resource that are able to create superb content within organisations that are simply pigeon holed by managers. By utilising the education sessions and creating advocates within the organisation upfront, you can identify resource that you maybe able to tap into at your advantage. The need for the creation of content in such a scenario can include: presentations, newsletters, images and even training sessions.

It takes considerable resources to execute and manage a successful Social Media / SEO project. Not many consultancies are prepared for the demands in communication, education and patience. It can also be a challenge to manage the billable time for the kind of support recommended here, so setting expectations and parameters up front is essential. BUT from experience, this can create fantastic results and set you off on a very good long term relationship with your client.

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Jun
27

Google Buys PostRank to Boost Social Analytics

by Strive Media

You can see what is coming….sentiment trackers are largely expensive and disappointing in our opinion. They do not pick up every online brand mention and are not great at analysing the complex language issues of saying whether the articles have a positive or negative sentiment. Computers aren’t good at understanding sarcasm and the complexities of language and slang.

But Google has now bought Post Rank. It appears they want the development team rather than the product. This is their 4th such acquisition in recent times. Surely a low cost but effective sentiment tracker will be on its way soon. Here is a great article which outlines more about the Post Rank deal

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Jun
27

Implementing the Google +1 Button

by Strive Media

Recently Google conducted a webinar, showing how to implement the Google +1 button into your own websites, allowing users to +1 your own content, below you can find a link to the Google Webmaster Blog +1 section.

Google +1 Button Implementation

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May
25

Tesco buys social media company Bzzagent

by Strive Media

Yesterday it was announced that Tesco has bought US word-of-mouth social media company BzzAgent for a reported $60 million.

Bzzagent, a Boston based start up, uses volunteers to sample FMCG products and then encourages them to describe these products through Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. The company has 800,000 volunteers, working across brands like Unilever and L’Oreal, who spend their time describing their product experience online.

By purchasing BzzAgent, Tesco clearly want to better connect social media marketing with product marketing. With access to some on the most comprehensive consumer data collected from their loyalty card holders, the extra content and data gathered from Bzzagent can only serve to enrich this further.

Is this a sign of things to come with much larger independent retailers buying up companies such as Bzzagent to influence more and more online behaviour? Also another question that we were pondering over, how is this going to affect the exsiting customer base of Bzzagent ? Is it simply going to be a case of them dropping Bzzagent due to them being biased to a potential retailer ? Only time will tell, and we are very interested in what other companies follow suite.

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May
13

Facebook release new best practice guide for marketing

by Strive Media

This week Facebook released a new guide titled “Best Practice Guide: Marketing on Facebook“. We think it’s really helpful since it has different models to help you think about how to market better with Facebook. But these aren’t details on advertising rather the frameworks help you plan or review your Facebook strategy – the five guiding principles are particularly. For each, they give you give steps of tools you can use to reach and engage your audience.

You can download the PDF here…

We’ve also pulled these slides for Facebook marketing and believe these are very good slides you may want to have a look through.

15 Facebook Learnings from the top 50 brands

View more presentations

40 ideas & tips for facebook product pages

View more presentations
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Apr
15

Linkbuilding strategically after the Farmer/Panda update

by Strive Media

As some of you maybe aware the Google Farmer / Panda update has kicked in over in the states and has just been rolled out across all English language engines. Yes, there are some winners and losers, but all in all the majority of our clients have remained unharmed. BUT….this has led to more questions being fired to the team around, What are the best strategies to continue linkbuilding without having to constantly worry about future updates.

Firstly, you must think strategically about what you’re doing. Focusing all of your energies and time into one linkbuilding tactic, no matter how much value or immediate traffic it will pull into your site is not sensible. Let’s be honest, Google like to keep updates to their algorithm secret until they are ready to be launched. So unless you have John Edwards in your back bedroom, or own something from Hogwarts, theres very little chance of knowing what the next update will target to devalue. In order to cover yourself for future updates it’s critical to ensure your link building activity includes a wide array of different techniques, which should hopefully result in a varied and colourful back link profile.

So what is the point i hear you ask, well if Google’s next update devalues a certain type of link. The likely impact to your ranking is going to be alot less, for example the update may only devalue 15% of your links rather than 70 or 80%.

What we are trying to say is that putting all of your eggs in one basket (or targetting one type of link) is a big no no. If you separate your eggs, or links in this case, into different baskets the impact of damage to one basket will not hurt you as much as it would if all of your eggs (links) were in that damaged (devalued) basket. So take time to plan your activity around a range of linkbuilding methods rather than simply looking for the quickest win. Think…Users first, search engine’s second

Also, if you are currently creating content purely for the purposes of SEO and search engines, stop. Not only are you failing to add value to the experience of your website visitors by providing content that is genuinely useful, you also run the risk of Google placing little or no value on this content. Which in short, makes it a complete waste of time and resource.

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Apr
06

3 Tips for Linkbuilding in 2011

by Strive Media

Link building in 2011

1. Don’t get hung up on the link !!!

It’s all to easy to just go after a link, so much so that you only ever look at how many links you have or how many your competitors website has. Instead focus your time & energy on the reasons people want to link to you. Are you generating blog posts, white papers or amazing infographics ?

ALWAYS – Think about your audience and create content that they too will find amazing. Get this right and people will link to you or feature you on your site. Generating shares and tweet or a blog post will ensure a much more natural way to acquire links into your content / website.

2. Make your content sharable

As mentioned above, successful & natural link building is having “amazing content”. Making that content easy to share and reference is just as important. Give your visitors the option to share the content direct from the page through & think about send to a friend services. Second to this, is making content easy to access through publishing content on external sites. By publishing your content via such platforms, you’ll make your content accessible to people and therefore they are more likely to find / share / link and comment on your content.

3. It’s all about relationships – NOT LINKS !!!

Link building has been about building a list of websites “you think” you need a link from. As Bob Dylan once blurted out ”Times, they are a changing….” Yes, we have moved on guys…..

Start to look into where your audience are online and what websites they are engaging with. Back to point one, do not approach it for the link, look at it from the view point of adding “additional” value to the users in a way that you will create a relationship with both other websites and it’s users. In turn this will help develop awareness of your website / brand name which in-turn will generate traffic to your website, generating more opportunities for your content to be shared.

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Apr
05

Year in review – Looking back, over my shoulder….

by Strive Media

Yes i know this is by no means an earth shattering post, but after reading many blogs, a hell of alot of trial and error, attrending various conferences, these are some small takeaways from the last 12 months or so that we wanted to jot down. Here is what I think we can all learn and take back to projects that we are working on at Strive.

  1. Put Users First - plain and simple, if you keep them at the front of your websites, you won’t go far wrong.
  2. Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff – Small changes in ranking, site speed, or any future algo changes, should not be stressed over tooooo much. Put the first point into action and these changes should have little effect on you and your websites, this does NOT mean to totally ignore the updates that are happening through the industry, it simply means to get the basics right, and champion this through your team. 
  3. Keep Your Finger on the Pulse - Ok, Ok i know there’s alot of people out there who simply say it’s all about learning and doing rather than reading. But after that last note, we do recommend always knowing what is going on in the industry and with your own site/s. We can’t remember the number of times we have been asked a question from a certain client around the latest trend or update, only to find that as soon as you back opinions up with raw hard data, it all seems fine, and they dive back into their blogs/feeds to find the next question to fire at you…
  4. Create great content, and Engage with people - Do it right the first time, don’t cut corners and pay attention to “point 1″. Revisit your whole whole marketing plan, and ensure that SEO is taken into account at all stages. Take this into account and you should get more opportunities to influence your rankings / listings within SERP’s. 
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Mar
31

Google +1 Recommendations Button in Search Results

by Strive Media

Rolling out across English Google over the next few days is a new “+1″ feature that allows you to endorse URLs. If you’re not yet seeing it in your search results enable it in Google experimental. Once enabled you see a little grey +1 next to all search results – including adwords listings….

So what does this mean for the next stages within the master plan of the big “G” ??? From the official page and what has been posted within the Google blog, what’s the impact of this for SEOs?

Well, looking at the opening paragraph from the Google +1 page:

The +1 button is shorthand for “this is pretty cool” or “you should check this out.”

Click +1 to publicly give something your stamp of approval. Your +1′s can help friends, contacts, and others on the web find the best stuff when they search.

Now the thing we have picked up is, Google is emphasising right from the start that this is going to influence search results. Another quote from the official Google Blog :

Say, for example, you’re planning a winter trip to Tahoe, Calif. When you do a search, you may now see a +1 from your slalom-skiing aunt next to the result for a lodge in the area. Or if you’re looking for a new pasta recipe, we’ll show you +1’s from your culinary genius college roommate. And even if none of your friends are baristas or caffeine addicts, we may still show you how many people across the web have +1’d your local coffee shop.

So from the above and reading throuhg some of the post around the subject online, the bottom line is that getting people to +1 your content is going to help you get more organic traffic from Google. Maybe even more/cheaper paid traffic too! Watch this space people, another emergence around the Social SEO machine…

Link to the official page around the +1 button…

http://www.google.com/+1/button/

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