Pinterest, anyone? Cue the sound of site owners everywhere groaning with disbelief as the newest content sharing site becomes the big ‘must do’ online marketing activity of the moment! Launched in March 2010, by December 2011, Pinterest was in the social networks Top 10 with 11 million visits per week, according to internet data analysts, Experian Hitwise.
So will site owners ‘pin it’ to be in it …?
Read more
Ecommerce, Mcommerce, Fcommerce … and introducing the latest letter to be bestowed with online marketing status … Tcommerce! Yep – rumours are circulating that within days Twitter looks likely to be raising the user experience game by introducing ‘enhanced brand pages’, which will enable site owners to build platforms and add interactivity to their Twitter account pages.
Read more
Content to context marketing? Google plans to collect search data on each single user of all its sites, such as Google+, Gmail, YouTube, Google Maps and Android Mobile. The aim is to create one merged user profile, and fine tuning returned search results, which will also drive more individually targeted product or services ads.
Read more
Website page layout is key to customer experience. A new algorithm change has been announced by Google, aimed at penalising eCommerce sites with too many Adsense ads, over three quarters of which are located ‘above the fold’, before scrolling down. While Google actually advises that best results are obtained by a focus on above the fold ad placement, they state ad heavy sites are likely to “not rank as highly”.
Read more
The deadline for eCommerce website owners to fully comply with new EU cookie legislation is 25th May 2012. What the amended ‘cookie law’ means is that from now on, permission must be obtained by a clear and explicit consent to opt-in from all website visitors before installing cookies on their computer.
Read more
So how many small business owners reading this will be stumping up the $185,000 ( £120,360) to purchase a “top-level domain” for their website? The newly launched system, which enables companies to use their own brand name as the suffix rather than just .com or .org, is a significant move with huge implications for positioning brand identity and boosting online marketing opportunity.
Read more
Website owners who fail to keep up and pay attention to the changing web are about to have a rude awakening! From January 2012, Microsoft will update Internet Explorer (IE) browsers to the latest version automatically – without the user’s knowledge! The message is clear – the multichannel and platform search and social age is here now and either eCommerce adapts or dies!
Read more
“Optimise your website for mobile – now!” is the big message constantly aimed at you, the hapless site owner trying to get a handle on what needs to be done to keep your presence ranking on a fast changing web. Dipping your toes into social media, blogging and tweeting was a bit of a leap of faith and now being told you have to lay out more money to enable user access to content via mobile and tablet … calm down dear, it’s only multichannel marketing!
Read more
Latest news that Twitter looks set to launch its promoted tweets and trends service in the UK in October seems to be a further sign of the increasing convergence between social and business on a networking site where marketing has been trying to gain a meaningful foothold. But will the micro blogging site start to look more like a Google SERPS page even as Google+ seeks to take the search engine further into social territory? Is social marketing coming of age?
Or is it the same old, same old? Site owners have been constantly befuddled by social media and the ROI question since networking sites first made their appearance around five years ago. Today, there is still a significant percentage of both eCommerce and service based site owners who are yet to be convinced that ‘social’ currency can sufficiently influence hard cash sales to be worth the effort of devoting increased time and resources to social content provision.
Read more
The great search and social divide! Once again news surfaces highlighting a hardening of attitude adopted by some companies towards their employees using social media. In the aftermath of the recent high profile hacking of major brands and global organisations, security fears have led to a 10 per cent increase in banning staff from accessing social network sites.
Social paranoia appears to have gripped the business world as newly published figures show over two thirds of companies monitor staff activity on the web and more than half are blocked from accessing a number of social media sites. Security concerns are overriding the very real benefits that social media content sharing and networking bring to establishing a holistic perception and trust in a brand identity across today’s multi channel and platform environment.
Read more
Recent observations of Google testing a new design concept for its’ search results page could replace the ‘Google No.1’ mentality, which has constantly obsessed eCommerce site owners, mostly to the exclusion of all else in the last twenty years. In the age of the smartphone and tablet, it’s the scroll and the flick-thru’ rather than the clunky click that gets the speedy search result. Seems Google, mindful of search and social remodelling the landscape around itself, is going scrolling…
In other words … Google is testing the idea of an infinite scroll of web search results. It appears that the top search box, navigation bar and the left-hand side panel will be retained while the user scrolls through results, producing a page sequence matching the current Google experience. While a click is still needed to go to the next page to see more results, the possibility for infinite scrolling in web search results, as deployed in Google Image Search, could be a real boost to future online marketing campaigns and improved traffic performance from selected SEO keywords.
Read more
Twittering on the edge? Or just getting on your tweets? Scrolling through the endless stream of marketing messages can make you fed up to the back tweet when looking for a reply to your query, a solution to your problem. You thought that social sites were like forums, a community where individuals, groups and businesses try to connect and engage by offering help and insight.
Er – no! All you seem to see are businesses just looking for clicks, social point scoring with Google, ramping up their ranking …
Is anyone actually having a conversation? When individuals ask questions directed at Twitter users who have set their feeds for specific topics, is anyone actually answering? While the more savvy of eCommerce ‘get it’ and understand how to use Twitter as an effective customer service channel, it appears that an overwhelming number of users are just going about their daily online marketing business.
Read more