Make It Rain

Google is breaking up!

George Forbes — Fri, 17 May 2013 11:36:34 +0000

Well strictly speaking they are not actually breaking up so this may be a slightly misleading title, but as we all love any news involving Google, it’s no bad thing!

So where has all the traffic gone? Buzz Feed reports a 20% drop across search engine traffic over the past 6 months, including a 30% drop in organic traffic to sites from Google. This sample was taken from sites in a publishing network, over a 6-month period between October 2012 and March 2013, which have an audience of over 300-million people. Granted, publishing does not represent every sector but if they are the bearers of news then perhaps we should all listen to their listeners.

I don’t mean to alarm you but times are changing and at quite a rate! The way people search and the way people administrate search channels are changing for good. I would go as far as to say that the way people are actually communicating is changing for good!

Traditionally, Google has stood proud, in a helpful and sympathetic position to SEOs and businesses, but it strategy has evolved somewhat aggressively. The gatekeeper has now very much set up shop with the integration of many aggregators across various sectors: retail, finance and travel to name just a few. Also, its increasingly granular approach to paid search is prevailing, inadvertently creating a bottle neck for organic listings

It seems that Google no longer wants you to travel to your destination but in fact shop and relinquish your content needs at the very surface. We continue to see additional function as well as Google scrapers providing information for the user directly on the SERPs. Creating this culture among web users will ensure business for Google for a long long time. Also, with the advancement of micro-formatting and APIs, the semantic web is becoming easier for Google to digest.

As is common in business innovation, there has been an explosive catalyst in Google’s evolution. The boom of social media has pulled more and more users towards these communal networks and away from search engines. Adopting a social strategy – and fast – has never been a better idea. With social sites becoming a so-called ‘destination’ themselves, where one can not only converse with friends and colleagues but also perform extensive searches internally, users are finding the need to crawl through organic listings less of a necessity. Social and Mobile apps are syphoning search engine traffic, and I don’t blame people! It’s a world of rich and popular content now and there is no better place to indulge.

So what sort of impact is all this having on us? Well we know that reporting has to be as modular as search is now. Knowing the impact these breaking up channels are having is the first step to optimizing for them. We also know that if you can’t beat Google, embrace their granular modules; get in them and compete in them. Also, we do not need to be pushed into social content, we are already there. Using real content that provokes emotion is the only way you will get heard now.

Google Enhanced Campaigns

Mike Fantis — Wed, 08 May 2013 12:01:32 +0000

First, let’s kick off the blog post with the most obvious question you’ll ask yourself once you find out about the changes that are happening to your AdWords Campaigns. Why on Earth did Google come up with the ‘’Enhanced Revolutions’’?

The main reason is quite simple. Google AdWords has always been a constantly evolving product and interface, reflecting the dynamic nature of Online Advertising itself. AdWords Campaigns has to keep up with the behaviour of people all over the world, and the constant changing of online behaviours. Enhanced Campaigns will provide you with the tools to enter the online multiscreen and multi-device world, improving your client’s performance and saving time to manage multiple campaigns.

Fortunately for Google, these changes also represent a likely increase in mobile spend. Enough of the cynicism.

Through Google Enhanced Campaigns you’ll now be able to target your potential customers not only according to what they are looking for, but also considering when and where they are searching for it.

From Semantic Searches to Geo-targeted Searches

Before the Enhanced Campaigns Revolution, Google was showing results according to the search query the user was entering; that is, through a semantic search. Today, with Enhanced Campaigns, Google will show the most accurate results according to the time and place the user is searching in. Hence, Google will show us more relevant results according to our behaviour, our need in that specific moment and location of the day.

Searching with Google is evolving from a semantic quest to a localized one, enabling you to target your customers at the right time and place.

Device Targeting

So, what happened to your device settings when upgrading to Enhanced Campaigns?

With Enhanced Campaigns, you won’t have to set different campaigns for different devices anymore, but you will be managing the device targeting at an adgroup level. You will not be able to opt out of desktop or laptop. Google states that the two devices are becoming more similar, laptops are becoming touch screen, and tablets now have detachable keyboards. In addition to this, Google tells us that over 70% of tablet usage is in the home and the tablet sales will surpass desktop/laptop sales by the end of 2014. When “we” say mobile we mean smartphones. At a recent Google event they stated that 64% of the UK population have a smartphone, forecast to rise to 75% by the close of the year.

So, how do you manage mobile activity? Simply by managing the mobile bid adjustment. You can still decide not to show your ads on mobile devices, by adjusting bids to -100%.

Originally, the mobile bid adjustment was only available at campaign level, giving advertisers an “all or nothing” scenario. Google has since allowed setting a mobile bid adjustment at the adgroup level.

This provides more control and precision over bids and would be useful if you’ve been operating large-scale campaigns and found that your optimal bids for some keywords would require significantly different mobile bid adjustments within an enhanced campaign.

For example, a nationwide retail chain currently uses mobile-only campaigns to optimize bids for several hundred-thousand keywords. They’ve found that 95% of their keywords in mobile-only campaigns have bids that are 10% lower than in the equivalent desktop campaigns.

The remaining 5% of their keywords have very different bid ratios (ranging from 40% lower to 100% higher) based on differences in performance and competition on mobile and desktop. By using the new ad group bid adjustments for mobile, the retailer can better maintain their desired bids and ROI on different devices as they upgrade to enhanced campaigns.

Google Call extensions

Enhanced Campaigns will help you reach potential customers on the go, even though your website may not be optimized for mobile. Through Google Call Extensions it is now possible because, by setting call extensions, now you’ll be able to track mobile calls and it’s now free to use the Google redirect numbers.

In the past you could use these call extensions but only knew how many clicks were made. For legacy campaigns (campaigns not migrated to Enhanced Campaigns) the cost to use the Google forwarding numbers is $1.00, £1.00, €1.00 per call.

We can now set rules before reporting: e.g. only count calls that lasted longer than x minutes. Some of our clients don’t have mobile-optimised sites. This option allows us to test mobile and to give the user the information they want prior to click.

Enhanced Campaigns Pit Falls

The danger of Enhanced Campaigns is the mobile spend. We know that mobile traffic doesn’t behave or convert the same way as desktop/laptop. When moving to Enhanced Campaigns it will be easy for advertisers to allow the campaigns to target mobile users and in turn see a drop in performance.

Analytics will become even more important as you’ll need to monitor the volume of mobile traffic and the performance. While Google is making strides to tie up the cross-device attribution, it is far from perfect.

Examples: Enhanced Campaigns Success Stories

Since the soft launch a couple of months ago, we’ve been reading some great stories about ways that advertisers have improved their performance and saved time with enhanced campaigns. Here are a few examples reported from companies of different industries that highlight actual strategies and results achieved so far with enhanced campaigns:

Online Travel Industry

E-Travel has improved CTR and conversion rate with context-optimized ads, mobile app downloads, and upgraded sitelinks.

E-Travel is one of the leading online travel agents in Greece, Cyprus and Russia, and has presence in other markets in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. After upgrading to enhanced campaigns, Managing Director Nikos Goulis reported,:

“We can now show our ads according to people’s context, like location or time of day [... and] count app downloads as conversions in AdWords reports, which is very important for us because so many of our new customer leads come from our mobile app. These features along with the upgraded sitelinks helped us boost click-through-rate by 43% and conversion rate by 88%.”

Fashion Industry

American Apparel has doubled its volume of phone leads with enhanced campaigns, improving return on ad spend.

American Apparel, a multi-channel fashion retailer, upgraded all its campaigns to take advantage of new features like upgraded call extensions and sitelinks. By extending call extensions across all device types, and counting calls over 10 seconds in duration as a conversion, American Apparel has seen their conversion volume from phone calls double. Return on spend has improved significantly.

Travel Industry

Hotwire’s SEM analysts are saving 5-10 hours per week with more efficient campaign management.

Hotwire.com, a leading discount travel website upgraded all of their paid search accounts to Enhanced Campaigns, both domestic and international, within the first month. Clay Schulenburg, Director of Search Engine Marketing at Hotwire shared that upgrading to Enhanced Campaigns really helped his team manage AdWords more efficiently because all the key adjustments for location, time of day and device are now managed in a single campaign:

“Time saved per SEM analyst is somewhere in the range of 5 – 10 hours per work week that can now be reallocated to either new strategic SEM initiatives or more granular account/campaign optimizations.”

Bottom line: the sooner we upgrade your AdWords Campaigns, the better you’ll be enhancing your Advertising investment. That’s what we are here for!

Written by Alice Massironi, MAKE IT RAIN

On a Budget? SuperScrimper Infographics

Jennie Excell — Fri, 03 May 2013 11:31:53 +0000

The web is a very visual space. Pinterest. Instagram. Vine. Hey, even Facebook. Perusers of the World Wide Web do not want to tire themselves by reading reams of prose, we just want the pretty pictures.

This is why, despite some recent opinion, I believe that infographics remain great. I don’t mean infographics shoddily hashed out in some attempt to game Google’s algorithm, I mean clear, well researched graphics that easily communicate useful information to your readers. Like the graphics that you find in newspapers for example. Punctuating your content with these kinds of graphics adds value for your visitors.

Now, we’d all love to have the budget to get each graphic that we place on our websites expertly crafted by a professional, but I know that this is often not possible. For this reason i’ve listed below some of my favourite free graphic creation sites.

Check out this graphic on world ecommerce markets that we created using Easel.ly:

Here’s my Favourite Three:

Easel.ly allows you to create your own infographics using 16 customisable infographic templates. It is very easy to use and offers a range of symbols and colour options.
Piktochart has a free option that gives you access to 6 basic themes, though includes Piktochart’s watermark.
Visual.ly offers various options for feeding in Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google Analytics data to create visuals.

Orders Without Borders: The Why, Where and How of International Ecommerce

Jennie Excell — Fri, 03 May 2013 11:31:18 +0000

The UK is one of the most internet-based economies in the world. 67% of adults purchased goods or services over the Internet in 2012, with the figure increasing to 87% for those aged 25-34.

With the market for ecommerce businesses selling in the UK maturing, more and more decision makers are targeting export opportunities.

Over the next few minutes I will summarise:

1. Why international eccommerce is worth your attention

2. Where (in which countries) you should be focusing you efforts

3. How you go about beginning the process of setting up international versions of your site

Why?

Global Internet usage continues to grow, and the Internet provides low cost access to global markets. Additionally, Global ecommerce has grown 13% annually over the past 5 years.

This is impacting the decisions that business owners are making in terms of their marketing strategy, with many testing new markets online via international ecommerce websites.

Where?

According to a study carried out by IMRG, growth in the mature markets (UK, USA and Japan) is slowing.

The report reveals that the fastest growing markets will be France, Italy, Spain, Russia, Turkey and Poland in Europe, and worldwide will be Latin America, led by Brazil and Mexico and the Middle East, led by Israel and UAE.

Other sources, such as consultants A.T. Kearney, site China as the one to watch, with its online retail market growing 78% annually since 2006.

However different markets will prove to be of differing value dependent on the products being sold. Google’s Market Finder is a good starting point for finding new customers overseas.

Created using free infographic site Easil.ly

How?

How are businesses successfully selling to international markets online? Econsultancy have created a hefty guide to international ecommerce, which I won’t aim reproduce here.

As a starting point: key elements of success are:

Make sure you have all the legalities covered, including looking into tax and VAT implications.
Translate the design of your website, not just the language. Different cultures expect a different look and feel.
Ensure that you cover the preferred payment methods of the territory that you are selling in.
Aim to keep delivery costs low – this will more often than not require local distribution centres.
Invest in multi-lingual search and social media campaigns to ensure that your website is found by the target audience. The right strategy here will also ensure that you avoid the pitfalls of improperly executed international SEO campaigns

The Secret of Successful International SEO Campaigns

Jennie Excell — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 12:10:57 +0000

The correct implementation of multi-site international SEO can be a minefield, particularly when pages targeted to different countries are in the same language (as this can cause duplicate content issues).

Stay with me for the next 5 minutes and i’ll let you into a little secret; the secret of successful international SEO set up

Image source: http://myscarlettheartt.com/

Domain Strategy

Use folders on a strong .com TLD. For example:

www.example.com/us rather than www.example.us

This is because:

Recent changes to the way that Google deals with geo targeting means that country specific domains no longer provide the strong benefits they once did. Our experience working with brands targeting multiple territories is that a subfolder on your hero domain provides more clout. This is due to inherited domain authority: so by putting the US site in a subfolder on the .com, the US version “inherits” the authority of the .com, meaning that we aren’t starting from ground zero with the US version.

Edit: Through my experience working with UK brands with medium sized budgets that are looking to test new markets over seas, this strategy has worked the best for them in terms of delivering both traffic and sales. Global brands with larger budgets may well benefit from country level TLDs (as in some territories this may increase CTR) as they will have the resource available to them to undertake the extra work, in addition to the strength of online branding, that it will take to establish a reasonable position in the SERPs. (Thanks for pointing out this omission Paul)

Geo Targeting in Webmaster Tools

A very simple step; ensure that you create profiles in Webmaster Tools for each of your international versions, and set the geo-targeting in that profile to be the country that you are targeting.

Create an XML sitemap for each international version, and submit this to Webmaster Tools.

Hosting

We do still recommend hosting the site in the countries being targeted.

This is both for SEO (as the location of the servers is taken into account by Google’s algorithm when deciding on to which countries your site is relevant), and also for usability, as the site will load much slower for US visitors if it is only hosted in the UK (plus, site speed is another factor taken into account by Google).

Avoiding Duplicate Content Issue

If you do go down the route of having a separate version of the site for US and UK visitors, and the content is exactly the same on both, then there is a risk of duplicate content issues.

This can be avoided by:

Using the rel=”alternate” hreflang=”x” tags in the XML site maps of both versions. These annotations help Google serve the correct language or regional URL to searchers. An example of how this would be set up can be found here.
On pages where content is exactly the same on the US version as on the UK, you would then also want to point the canonical tag of the US version to the equivalent UK page (due to the above tag, Google will still show the US version to those searching in the US).

Content and Outreach

Finally, once the technical set up of the site is in place, it’s time to create a content and outreach strategy for each language and territory in order to start attracting backlinks from sites in your target countries.

Is Responsive Design Really Good For SEO?

Lauren Jones — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 14:35:39 +0000

I’ve recently been looking at Mobile SEO for a client and I presented 3 design options.

Responsive Design
Dynamic URL serving
Separate Mobile Domain

Google tells webmasters that its preferred method is responsive design. But I got to thinking, is it really the best option for a site in general and in particular, where SEO is concerned?

Here’s the thing: responsive design minimises issues such as duplicate content (which is a high risk if using the separate mobile domain method), tracking errors, redirections and other issues. The thing you have to ask yourself is: “Am I happy to serve my desktop content to my mobile users”?

There are many reasons to differentiate content: firstly, mobile users digest information quicker than desktop users, so presenting a page with a lot of content may not be the best option. You’d have to restructure all the content on your site to make it more user friendly for all devices (a tall order!). Imagine if you’re a b2b site that relies heavily on content and has a large volume of content pages…

Doing mobile specific campaigns may be tricky as you might need mobile-specific landing pages, which you can’t really have with responsive.

Then there are the mobile optimisation elements that you may not be able to transfer to responsive, such as a mobile xml site map, geo targeting, quicker checkout options (1-click checkout), easy click-to-call options etc.

However, there is also a strong case for responsive, such as link-building advantages (no need to do separate link building), cloaking can be completely avoided (which can be a high risk with the dynamic url serving option above).

The main takeaway is that you really have to assess your site/business structure to determine which solution is right for you and your users. Always ask: “Would mobile-specific content be better for my users?” If the answer is yes, then responsive design may not be the best option for you…

7 e-Commerce Lessons from Amazon

luke — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 10:24:05 +0000

There are probably a thousand marketing and e-commerce techniques you would love to test or try.

What if somebody could just give you a large chunk of that insight right now? For free. With almost zero resource commitment…

One of the (many) beauties of digital marketing is having high visibility and insight into the innovation of other businesses.

Amazon, a relentless innovator, iterate and evolve endlessly to squeeze every last percentile of conversion from their websites, all while delivering the best user experience in their marketplace.

Here are 7 lessons you can learn from them and apply to your site today!

Remember: they have an unimaginably large data-set for their test & learn program. We can all piggy-back on that.

1. Have a permanent basket

Once something is in there it is in there until manually deleted. It doesn’t time-out and at any point can, with a single click, become a purchase. If you get buyer’s remorse you can even save that item for later. The customer is in control but Amazon keeps the fire burning so the initial desire is not lost. They don’t need to rekindle or remind later.

2. Implement cross-device, friction-free purchasing

People don’t usually enjoy entering credit card details on a smartphone.

Simple solution: allow purchases via a single password, and a CSC code. Alternatively, allow customers to add to their basket or wishlist so that they can complete the purchase later/once they have access to a larger device.

On top of this, keep them logged in so that you can track behaviour across devices.

3. Acknowledge that there’s a ‘dreaming phase’ in the purchase funnel

Amazon’s Wishlist is a triumph of functionality and utility. Just because you desire an item or read a recommendation doesn’t mean you are ready to part with your hard-earned cash there and then. You may want to wait until payday or get a friend or relative to buy it for you later. Amazon isn’t scared of this, they know they’ll get you eventually and don’t try to hard sell.

The hard sell initiates the rational mind and propels our defences into action.

Embrace the limbic portion of the brain! Keep their dreams and desires alive while making sure you…

4. Sub-consciously assure the rational brain with the power of reviews and star-ratings.

Goes without saying.

**5. Become THE shopping destination**

Amazon cannot possibly stock and sell everything you might need. But their partner network pretty much can!

Amazon realised that strategically, mind-share and dwell-time were more important than this quarter’s margin per transaction so they began working with partners, who often sold the same product for cheaper. Amazon listed that option on the product page, and took a cut if the customer chose that route.

It seems crazy on the surface to cede such control but look how well it played out!

The graveyard is full of myopic businesses that died a slow, painful death.

6. Harness herd mentality

Amazon has a clever feature on their product pages – ‘after viewing or purchasing this item, other people viewed/purchased X‘.

While we all, on the surface, like to think of ourselves as distinct, most of us also long to fit in, to be fashionable. Features like this enable and encourage that thought process. There is comfort in numbers. It makes the majority of us feel secure to know that lots of others have bought this same product.

7. Fix the little things

If you’re based in the UK, those little Royal Mail cards are, while clearly a first-world problem, pretty annoying!

Amazon acknowledged this and implemented Amazon lockers, making their customers’ lives easier by allowing delivery to code-activated lockers in and around the city.

Just pop over on your way home, pick up your parcel and stay well away from Royal Mail collection centres (no way to spend a Saturday morning).

None of the above seems like rocket-science but rest-assured that if it’s on Amazon’s website, it’s very probably been tested.

And, what a sample-size!

Disclaimer: we do not work for Amazon, despite the love-in.

The Rise of Twitter: Its Success and Impact

Simon Green — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 12:01:22 +0000

A few weeks ago, on 21 March, Twitter celebrated its 7th birthday, marking seven successful years since its inception. Its meteoric rise to prominence has been impressive and exciting. It is now the Social Media Platform of choice for celebrities and has, as Rupert Murdoch put it: ‘helped change the news biz and the world.’

In this post I’m going to look back at its creation and development before moving on to explore some of the reasons why it has become so phenomenally successful as well as the impact it has had upon the wider world.

In The Beginning

Jack Dorsey, the man behind Twitter, first touched upon the idea while attending the University of Science and Technology in Missouri, the state where he grew up. He had for years been deeply interested in the coordination of city taxis and emergency services (in St. Louis) and how they so neatly synchronized and traversed the ornate city grid.

He dabbled in the industry during adolescence and some of the open-source software he created is still used by some US taxi firms. He claims that it was the succinct communication system of city transport that inspired the concept of Twitter.

In 2006, Jack found himself working at Odeo, a company specializing in podcasting and audio files. He has recently said of this period: ‘I was not that interested in podcasting, but I was very interested in the team… very interested in working with Biz Stone, Noah Glass and lots of the engineers.‘

A couple of months after he began there, Apple completed and launched the component of Itunes dealing in podcasts and audio files. Their complete domination of the trade forced Odeo to begin backing out of what was sure to become a dead-end industry. If the company was to survive, it needed a new direction.

Around this time, SMS, the instant messaging service, was highly popular. The short style of messaging made Jack think back to his dealings with city transportation services and he approached the board members of Odeo with an idea. In its simplest form, this was to enable a two-sentence message to be sent from a cell phone’s keypad or computer to anyone who wanted to receive it.

The idea was to link the residents of a city similarly to the way the transport services in Missouri had been linked. Unusually, the idea was immediately applauded and embraced by co-founder Evan Williams and so Jack was provided with the resources he needed to create a basic prototype. In March 2006, the Twitter platform was completed and Dorsey published the first tweet ever:

After its release to the public on July 15, response and participation were initially slow. In an interview with Business Insider, Dorsey described the average man’s thought about Twitter in the early years to be ‘Why do I want to know if my brother’s eating oatmeal?’

Five or perhaps six years ago, I can remember this phase of indifference. I certainly wasn’t a fan of Twitter. The general sentiment of my friends and me was: ‘why would you join Twitter when you can do the same and more on Facebook?’ To us, a tweet was simply a limited Facebook status; however, as it turned out, it was this restriction that would become Twitter’s strength and propel the tweeting community into the hundreds of millions.

Twitter’s Success and Impact

The Spread of Information

Dorsey attributes the beginning of Twitter’s ascent to its use by businesses. He has mentioned specifically a network of internet-savvy doctors in San Francisco who would use it to spread news about meetings, conferences and even social events. It was usage like this (by professionals and communities) that really kick-started the platform’s rise to prominence.

As well as being highly useful for organisation and logistics, its utility as a medium to spread breaking news and gossip also became quickly apparent. In the past few years, murmurs of Twitter (as well as other Social Networking sites) forcing traditional media into obsolescence have increased in volume, and have been corroborated by many real-life instances.

The death of Whitney Houston, detailed on Twitter 42 minutes before an official news outlet, or the clueless IT consultant who tweeted unknowingly about the Osama Ben Laden raid are just two of the many examples of huge and wide-reaching news stories that were broken on the social network first.

It has even, for a while now, been considered normal for more localized announcements, such as road accidents, house fires or bomb scares, to be announced on Twitter first. People started getting used to this idea back in 2008. The news coverage of an emergency plane landing in New York early the following year demonstrated this with the headline, ‘New York plane crash: Twitter breaks news, again.’

A Tool of Logistics

Its unmatched capacity to spread information instantaneously far and wide can be seen in its usage in the 2011 Egyptian Protests and its resultant forced shutdown by the nation’s government. Twitter was also a major tool of logistics and organisation during the 2010-2011 Tunisian Protests and the Iranian Election Protests a year earlier, among many others.

The tool has also, however, often been taken up by governments and other official bodies for more ‘constructive’ purposes.

For many, Twitter replaced all other information outlets during Hurricane Sandy in the US last year. Useful and important information could be relayed instantly to the people, informing them about things like rising water levels, damaged buildings, problems with infrastructure and power. Never before was such a huge amount of specific, localised and important information so easy for so many to access. Who knows how many further casualties Twitter prevented in this instance?

Twitter’s Political Role

The social network has also taken an increasingly prominent role in the political world in recent years too. The culmination of this trend was probably reached during the 2012 American presidential election, proving the prediction of Dick Costolo, the current CEO, to be bang on the money!

According to Twitter Inc. the presidential debate on October 4 2012 generated more than 10-million tweets, more than any other event in US political history. This systematic mass of opinions and comments gave journalists, strategists, political junkies and commentators more insight into the event than had ever been possible before. It helped a lot of voters to put the issues under discussion into context and better understand the process as a whole.

Undecided voters could often be swayed by the tweets and online voice of political candidates and their supporters. Obama used this to his advantage like no one before. He has been more digitally active than any other political figure and his presence on Twitter has been one of the most compelling and important pillars of his political career.

His followers have had unprecedented access to his private life and the steady stream of charming photos, make him perhaps the most relatable and of-the-people president yet.

Being ‘one of the lads!’

Loved by the People!

And, my personal favourite:

How good is this man’s PR team?

The photo posted after his victory, showing him in an embrace with his wife Michelle, quickly became the most retweeted message ever – trouncing the second (Justin Bieber) by a staggering amount.

Always Positive?

Although Obama has mostly attracted appreciative and positive messages from the online community, this is not always the case. Setting aside the dark world of anonymous trolling, many public figures have been humiliated and abused after joining the platform. George Osborne, for example, received a torrent of abuse after signing up and the Pope was also not safe from a mass of sarcastic quipping and criticism.

Before Twitter, neither of these written onslaughts would have been possible, so can we call it unequivocally ‘good’?

Twitter is a tool that allows people to be heard. Being able to voice concerns and legitimate opinions to community leaders and figureheads is always beneficial to the community as a whole and Twitter allows any subscriber to be heard by almost every ear in existence. It gives individuals a voice like never before and although this can be abused in various ways (as can most forms of technology), it is, unquestionably, a good thing.

Conclusion

Along with its value in the areas of politics, news, organisation and its obvious benefits in marketing (an area too large for me to cover here), it is still used mostly as a tool of entertainment and gossip, perhaps the things Dorsey had most in mind when he pitched the idea back in 2006.

It is nearly always at large entertainment events that the barrage of tweets reaches fever pitch. One of the earlier climaxes was at the World Cup in 2010, which saw a record of 2,940 tweets per second being set after Japan scored against Cameroon on June 14, 2010.

Beyoncé revealing her baby bump at MTV’s 2011 Music Video Award Show saw a flood of tweets culminating at 8,868 per second. This record was trounced, however, in Japan during a television screening of Hayao Miyazaki’s ‘Laputa: Castle in the Sky,’ a highly popular anime film which, unbelievably, reached a new high point of 25,088. This remains the record for tweets per second, but Obama’s re-election saw the highest number of tweets per minute, a newer unit of measurement – a whopping 327,000!

With the notable exceptions of Barack Obama, who appears at number 5 with 28,966,634 followers and the CNN account at 32 with just over 10 million, over 90% of the 100 most-followed Twitter users are pop artists, sportsmen, actors and celebrities. They are overwhelmingly players in entertainment rather than education or information. This gives us a further indication of why Twitter has become so immensely popular. Along with its undeniable value as a news source, a marketing tool, a political device and an educational aid (much research has been done into its educational value, particularly by Dr. Reynol Junco , an American psychologist and social media researcher – and this has been almost wholly positive), it has allowed people to connect to their role-models and childhood heroes in a way impossible up until seven years ago. It’s a way of finding out what your favourite actor did today or the opinions of the front-man of your favorite band, from him, not his PR manager.

It is this connectivity and communicative ease that makes it so valuable. Perhaps it is the ultimate democratizer! It allows its users to really feel part of a community, a network of companions with similar tastes and interests. Jack has achieved his vision: he has connected the people of the world like the city taxis of Missouri.

Congratulations to Jack and the team at Twitter inc. for seven successful years in the business. Here’s to many more…

Facebook Graph Search: An Introduction to Facebook’s Game-Changing New Search Tool

Simon Green — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 12:19:01 +0000

The worldwide total of Facebook users reached 1 billion in September last year. More amazingly still, each day Facebook users spend a combined total of 10.5 billion minutes on the social network – a staggering and counterintuitive 20,000 years!

With an average of 3.2 billion likes and comments posted every day, no other site generates such a vast quantity of content. Wouldn’t it be a good thing if we could mine and use this information succinctly?

The day before yesterday, on Tuesday 15, Mark Zuckerberg announced plans to do just that. Speaking from the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California, the Facebook founder unveiled their new service, dubbed Facebook Graph, that searches the Social Network itself for information that has already been posted. The update would be unrecognisable from the current tool and would take the search process in a different direction to Google.

How is this different from Google?

As was carefully laid out several times by Facebook representatives at the product launch yesterday, they are not providing an alternative or a competitor to Google, they are providing a completely different service. While Google provides a search for webpages, Facebook will provide a search for digital representations of people, places and objects by using the huge amount of user-generated data accumulated over the past decade.

Considering the nature of the social network, it is unsurprising that the Social Graph will be very people and personality orientated. If looking for something to munch for lunch, Google would effortlessly present you with thousands of results for text-heavy blog posts and webpages optimised for the term ‘Best Burger in London.’ Facebook’s effort, however, will allow you to refine your search like never before with parameters such as:

‘Best Burger in London… that my friends like…’

‘that my friends’ friends like…’

‘that people who like McDonalds like. etc…’

Bing’s Involvement

Despite being one of the world’s most popular websites, one of the main issues for the Facebook team is that most of their traffic is lost by users leaving to perform an internet (i.e. Google) search. An agreement with Microsoft provided the first steps towards tackling this problem. The statement by Microsoft’s Bing about its involvement with the Social Graph says: when people want to search beyond Facebook, they see search results from Bing with social context and additional information such as Facebook pages.’

Since Microsoft has been a long-term investor in Facebook and actually powers the Social platform’s current search tool, the pending partnership is fairly unsurprising. Alongside the inward-looking Facebook search results, Bing would provide a list of suggestions from elsewhere online, meaning the human user doesn’t have to leave the Facebook domain.

Through various efforts and campaigns, Microsoft has been struggling to gain on Google’s lead within the search industry and has made progress in a few countries. An example is the renowned ‘Bing It On Challenge’ (which was available towards the end of last year), an online program in which the results for both search engines were compared to try and prove Bing’s (apparently) superior speed and relevance. It gained almost no traction and the difference it made to market share was negligible.

Google’s constant algorithm updates, revolutionary Google Maps, and even many of its various offline investments, such as the worryingly futuristic Google Glasses, suggest that their relentless and total domination will continue unless Microsoft implements a change in tack. Could this unconventional fusion with Facebook be that change?

Social Graph and Brands

As the public become more digitally aware, they are trusting brands less and less, demonstrated by this survey: consumer trust in online, social and mobile.

The rise in Social Media has had a leading role in causing this shift and now, through likes, shares and links it is the consumers who market and publicise brands online, whether the brands like it or not.

A more accurate and selective method of searching through the bottomless goldmine of Facebook data will make it all the more important for brands to obtain social signals and recommendations. Like Google search, one of most important factors to rank well in the Social Graph is on-going engagement. Having a lot of fans and likes will help, but to really come up trumps in the search results, relevance is key. One of the biggest positives for this change is that it will really give smaller, local businesses with loyal customer-bases a chance to rank alongside the international big dogs.

For now (and the foreseeable future), there is no paid placement, so it’s important to get certain ranking factors right. These are the most important points to keep in mind:

Important points for Brands to Rank well:

- Make sure all the information on your page is up-to-date, relevant and helpful, particularly in terms of location.

- Make sure your page is properly categorized.

-Creating a tight-knit community around your page is more effective than a load of aloof and uncommitted fans. This is because they are more likely to interact with one another, and it will be easier for you to respond.

-Try to create content and posts that will encourage them to comment and engage.

This emphasis on content, interaction and engagement is another step towards the more human and inter-connected network. With everything and everyone more closely entwined, brands will really have to push for attention and recognition – another customer win!

Is this good for Facebook users?

The increased pressure on brands to attract consistent engagement will result in a steady stream of content that has value, whether funny, inspirational, helpful or interesting. It will also dissuade spamming tactics as brands cannot afford to lose fans by clogging up their News Feeds.

Providing an effective alternative to Google and topple their monopoly on web search will initiate a bit of healthy competition and should hopefully go on to improve the quality of both services. Perhaps the approaching shadow of a Facebook-Microsoft alliance will shake Google sufficiently to address some of its more unpopular updates in recent years e.g. by reducing the number of paid ads encroaching on organic listings or perhaps ultimately quash the ever-present controversy of Google favouring its own services…

The Search Graph will undoubtedly be providing a useful service in many ways. Information given to us about services, places, holidays and events will be much more welcome and valuable to us if it comes from actual friends and acquaintances whom we like and trust, rather than a random blog post or faceless review. Searches like ‘photos taken by my friends in New York,’ or ‘nightclubs in Berlin that my German friends like,’ or perhaps, ‘plumbers recommended by my friends in Sheffield,’ are examples of some of the more useful elements that the service could provide.

Although Google is undeniably good at showing you suitable webpages and information, often we still spend time sifting through results to find something we like, want or need. With this new search facility keeping track of your preferences in a more personal and rounded way, it is highly likely that the browsing experience would be far more relevant and personal.

Mark Zuckerberg talked eagerly about expanding relationships and the real-people community feeling from his social network into the web as a whole, an idea that echoes the man who made it all possible, Tim Berners-Lee. Should we not continue the Internet creator’s vision?

Are there any issues for Facebook users?

Most of the criticism and opposition for the Graph Search has largely been moulded around the issue of privacy – a persistent blotch on Zuckerberg’s copybook. Growing concerns over the matter has been the largest reason behind huge numbers of people leaving the Social Network in both the UK and US over the past year, including 406, 360 in the last two weeks in the States alone.

Facebook insisted that it will be including an opt-out tool, shielding your information from crawlers. This, however, brings to light another issue. After a quick (digital) headcount in a Facebook group I set up yesterday, 50% of those taking part said that they would hide their personal information, while a further 30% said they would place limits and make certain portions of info. private.

Although this is obviously a tiny sample size and cannot be taken as a true representation of the online population (43 people), judging by general public concern over the platform’s past privacy issues, I cannot help feeling that the real proportions wouldn’t be too dissimilar. What is the point of a human-based search engine if there are no humans to base the searches on?

Facebook emphatically insisted that nothing would be made available that cannot already be seen. They were, however, unable to deny the fact that forgotten and hidden pieces of your past would be easy to bring to light and even posts and photos in which you have de-tagged yourself would be simple for others to access and share.

Although the personal and human touch is largely positive, it too certainly has its drawbacks. Although (perhaps) highly personal information will not be accessible by ‘unknowns,’ searches such as ‘female friends of friends who are single and live near me,’ ‘single friends of friends who are attending this nightclub on Saturday 11th,’ are examples of some of the other ways in which the tool can be used…

Conclusion

Like most Facebook updates, the Social Graph will be rolled out slowly over the coming months. You can find out more about it and actually sign up to the beta version here. It will be interesting to see how the project unfolds.

The increased importance on location, engagement and interaction will boost the online success of small and local businesses making the online market a fairer place to campaign. Popular little bars and restaurants, previously hidden from the untrained eye will now jump to the top of the human-driven search listings and will remain there if they continue to please the community.

The new service will take Social Media to the next stage, joining friends, family, customers and businesses in a global community like never before. The obstacles of distance, time and sheer volume (of data), will be removed by the Social Graph, meaning that praise and appreciation for hardworking and engaging businesses and brands can be shared and heard immediately and easily.

Although the project is not without its opponents and niggling issues, for the Internet as a whole, moving forward in the two largest online industries (search and social) is hugely important and certainly desirable. The nature of the industry will mean that problems and unpopular elements will be altered and fixed as quickly as possible, as without willing participants who are happy to engage, the Graph Search is useless.

What do you think about Facebook’s Graph Search? Please share your thoughts and/or concerns below in the comments.

Some of the resources I used:

Guardian – Facebook Graph Search to take on Google and help users

Guardian – Zuckerberg hopes Facebook ‘third pillar’ will halt user decline

The Times of India – Facebook Graph Search: 5 Things to Know

ReadwriteSocial – Facebook’s Graph Search = The Ultimate Online Dating Service

Tech Crunch – How Facebook’s Graph Search Just Replaced a Major Chunk of Google

Forbes – Facebook Social Graph: Important But Boring

TechRadar - Facebook Social Graph: Social Lock up Your Data!

Brand Channel - Will Social Graph Bring a Brighter Future

First Post - Facebook’s Challenge to Google: A More Social Graph Search

Mashable – Analysts are unimpressed with Facebook graph Search

The Social Skinny - Facebook stats and figures

Check Facebook – Facebook Stats

SocialBakers – Facebook Stats

Google is Now Indexing Text in Flash Files!

Simon Green — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 12:34:18 +0000

Say it ain’t so! While doing a bit of research, and trying to audit the indexation of Flash files, our head of SEO, @lukeregan, stumbled upon something very interesting… It appears that Google can now index text within a Flash file.

As SEOs, we’ve always advised clients to avoid putting any important text into this format as, in the past, Google and other search engine bots have not been able to read and understand the content within them. It seems that that this is now a thing of the past!

To illustrate this point, we conducted a simple test using Amazon.com. We typed the following in Google:

“site:amazon.com filetype:swf”

These parameters narrow Google’s search to Flash files within the Amazon domain.

This is the result from that search (we’ll be focusing on the first result):

The meta details on that page are non existent, here’s a screenshot using the Mozbar:

As you can see in the results on the search-engine screenshot, Google has grabbed quite a bit of text from the Flash file in question.

Here’s a screenshot of the Flash file with the Google snippet underneath:

It seems that a whole load of previously unavailable information can now be seen…

And just to make sure we’re not imagining things we found out that Google had updated their support pages with the info! We found out by conducting this search. Note the date the page was updated: 3^rd December 2012 (very recent):

A quick look at the Google support pages confirmed our investigation:

What does this mean for search and SEO?

In the past, Google’s help documentation has advised against flash-heavy sites:

In general, search engines are text based. This means that in order to be crawled and indexed, your content needs to be in text format. This doesn’t mean that you can’t include images, Flash files, videos, and other rich media content on your site; it just means that any content you embed in these files should also be available in text format or it won’t be accessible to search engines.

This has been a bit of an issue for users and webmasters alike as it has meant that a whole host of engaging and useful content has gone unrecognised by search engines and has therefore been absent from relevant SERPs.

This new and improved ability to index text in Flash files will further improve Google’s relevance, putting more distance between them and their competitors.

Flash has always been a frustrating issue for us SEOs. Up until now we have argued that text should be in HTML, and only non-textual or unimportant content should be set up in Flash, such as video illustrations.

Like alternative-text optimisation, will Google’s new ability open up another area for on-site SEO? Either way it looks like it will be a lot easier to work with Flash-based sites in future, and will perhaps go some way towards subduing the ever-present, designer-SEO friction concerning design/appearance vs optimisation…

What are your thoughts on this exciting development?