Facebook is the most popular social media site on the web. Ten years ago, we asked people we met for their phone numbers or email addresses, now we ask people if they’re on Facebook. It’s become more than a web sensation; it’s become an unhealthy addiction. It’s the little black book of the 21st century, a place to arrange dates and yes, even end marriages. It’s become everybody’s social calendar and source of social information. Yet there is a method, and a young CEO, behind the madness.

Mark Zuckerberg is a 25 year-old billionaire and the creator of Facebook. He started programming before he was in high school and set up the social media site from his college room in Harvard with the help of another student, Eduardo Saverin. Columbia Pictures have the movie rights for Aaron Sorkin’s (the creator of West Wing) bestselling book called “The Accidental Billionaires” which tells the story of how Zuckerberg started Facebook.

No Comments »

So, the year is half way through which is as good a time as any to review the predictions that were made at the beginning of the year. There were predictions that SEO, email marketing and social media were going to be the most popular forms of Internet marketing for 2009, and they were predicted to show the most growth.

So what has transpired through the 09?

Ad agencies and clients alike are suffering through the recession. A recent survey conducted by Reardon Smith Whittaker (RSW) entitled “Client-Agency Economic Outlook Survey” reveals that the economy has had a negative effect on 87% of ad agencies and 91% of their clients. The survey also revealed that during the first half of the year, 55% of clients decreased their spending by 6% or more. In addition, 35% of clients said that they expect to slash budgets by a further 6% during the second half of the year.

No Comments »

When approaching search engine reputation management, it’s vital to remember that you are not the omnipresent ruler. The internet is the all mighty ruler of cyberspace and you are a little blimp. As soon as you try to control the internet, you will encounter problems.

Li Evans from Search Marketing Gurus says that you can’t manage your reputation, you can only manage relationships. So, what you have to focus on is building relationships. What relationships with reputable bloggers and consumers will give you in a time of crisis are support and positive reviews if you’re ever in the situation where your reputation is headed for a black hole of bad press.

No Comments »

Microsoft’s Bing is actually doing really well at the moment, despite predictions of a fate similar to that of Microsoft Live. The search engine is being described as a decision engine. Statistics from Hitwise in the UK, as well as the USA/Canada region, have indicated that Bing is making waves. It is catching up to Yahoo! and reactions from techies and average users alike are mostly positive.

Having said that, will Bing be a passing fad or will it actually make inroads in Microsoft’s titanic battle with Google, and what, if anything, will this mean for SEO or DEO - “Decision Engine Optimisation” for Bing?
All of Bing’s features are only available in the US at the moment, which is a pity for the rest of us who will have to wait a bit longer to see what all the fuss is about.

What are some of the positives?

No Comments »

The point of social media is to get noticed by large audiences, but making a name for yourself can sometimes be very hard. Then, on top of making a name for yourself you need to make sure that your name is a good one because, obviously, nobody wants to be extremely popular for something bad.

I read a post about the sins of social media by Jennifer Horowitz. It made some excellent points on how not to come across to your audience and I just want to cover a few of the main ones.

The first thing they talked about was vanity. In all honesty I would be the first person to shower myself with praise once I have achieved something good but sometimes arrogance takes over from your confidence and you become disliked by many. You should know when to draw the line. If you know you’re good at something the best thing to do is teach others how to do it, instead of bragging about how good you are. The feeling in the end will be a much better one and comments about you will be good ones instead of negative ones.

No Comments »

With so many anything-online-gurus and online-social-psychoanalysts cluttering virtual space, you would think that someone would have been able to pinpoint the exact value of Twitter and determine the core reason for its mass popularity – in other words, why people love Twitter? But so far no one has. There are a lot of theories going around – quick and easy communication, business networking, social needs, etc. These reasons are all plausible, they’re all probable but I think that they invest too much depth into something that is really quite simple.

It’s not that we get to communicate with celebrities; it’s that we get to be celebrities. Twitter appeals to our ego, or at least it does to mine.

No Comments »

I always thought that an aspiring movie maker with a badly-paid day job could only dream. I mean, with £50 you couldn’t even produce an episode of Little Britain, let alone a full-length horror movie. When we think of how a movie can make it into the public eye, we think of Hollywood fat cats throwing millions at it and using all the special effects known to man. Yet, Marc Price, a Brit taxi dispatcher, has achieved just this at a measly £45.
How did he do it? He simply gathered a group of actors, make-up artists and extras through the medium of facebook and other social media sites. The largest expenditure on the zombie movie called “Colin” was on a crowbar and some tea and coffee (the cheap stuff from Tesco). In fact, the film was so inexpensive to make that it has been called a no-budget movie.

No Comments »

The wait is finally over: Microsoft’s long anticipated new search engine is to be unveiled this week by Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer. Bing is the renamed and revamped search engine to replace Microsoft’s current search engine -Live.

The project, previously named Kumo, has seen Microsoft pour a lot of its resources into it. According to advertising trade magazine, Advertising Age, Microsoft is set to spend up to $100 million to promote the site. And for a deep global economic recession or any period for that matter, that is one heck of an investment. It is an especially large figure when you look at it against the industry leader Google, which only spent around $25 million last year on advertising.

No Comments »

If you find you have a high bounce rate or people are trawling your site but buying none of your products, you’ll have to face the fact that your website is simply not ‘doing it’ for them. You have all the SEO strategies in place to drive people to your site but what they find when they get there is confusing, long winded or plain boring and bland. It’s like inviting people to a party at your house and giving perfect directions, but when they get there they find the house unlit, the gate locked and a snarling Rottweiler glaring at them.

Jennifer Laycock from Search Engine Marketing has given an inspired suggestion on how to find out why your high traffic is not delivering the desired conversions with her blog, Showing all the right people all the wrong things. It’s as simple as, ‘ask Mom’. The point of this exercise is that the mom in question knows as little as possible about SEO and is approaching the website entirely from a usability point of view. You’ll realise what needs to be changed by taking note of when she starts getting frustrated or lost on the site.

2 Comments »

The Internet is now where most people choose to spend their time, especially on social media sites. Inevitably, that means that companies have had to adapt their customer acquisition and relationship marketing strategies. Consumers’ preferences have evolved over the last few years, so who has taken it upon themselves to try and make social media work to their advantage.

A great example of a company that has embraced the change in consumer preferences is Zappos from the USA. The company, which employs around 1500 employees, currently has 434 employees on Twitter with more joining everyday. This is great exposure for the company, and is a good way to reach each customer in a more personal way.

Robert Scoble visited Zappos headquarters, and made some pretty fascinating discoveries including the firm’s use of social media. These days, new recruits at Zappos are expected to create a Twitter account and post a few times during for the duration of the training period, after which they can choose to stop.

No Comments »