If this doesn’t justify a blog post then nothing does!

I’ve been working on a whole load of new content for the site, will get that live then be back to the blogosphere but for today I felt the urge, no I felt it was my human right to spread the word of the cataclysmic balls up that is VodafoneUK’s latest Twitter disaster.

Some of you may remember late in 2009 when Vodafone decided to fire a member of their marketing team for writing a Tweet aimed at a dig a T-Mobile – if not here is a reminder. I’m with T-mobile and to be honest a dig at their incompetence isn’t without merit but that’s a story for another day. Today’s story is a lot more serious, so serious that if the T-mobile incident got someone fired then I see this one as resulting in a possible hanging. For those of you that don’t know what I am talking about take a look at the image below:

I don’t think I need to say much more. Vodafone has apologised several times about this and confirmed that the account wasn’t hacked meaning someone at Vodafone did it. It could be some (soon to be ex) employee that was pissed off in his job or it could have been someone that has their own Twitter account and was making a joke on that but forgot to switch accounts from the corporate account to their personal one – either way it shows the harm a social media screw up can have on a company’s brand.

Let’s just hope Vodafone finds the beaver they are looking!

Google is all about speed at the moment. They recently announce load time as one of their ranking factors for next year, their own DNS for improved speed and now they have announced real time search results.

Google have agreed a deal with Facebook to pull in their status updates and all public information from MySpace, as well as news and blog updates. This will be displayed in a scrolling real time feed on the search results page.

I’m not sure how quick ‘real time’ is yet but I would think Twitter and Facebook would be pretty much instant feeds but will be interesting to see how quickly News and Blogs rank, not to mention the sources for this tremendous trust Google is offering these sites.

The factors that allow you to rank will be an interesting test when real time search is more widely available. Until then, here is a Google video to show how it will work.

I’ve just been reading a press release by ComScore and GroupM on the importance of Social Media, PPC and SEO integration and the benefits this has on results.

The most important parts are:

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The study showed searchers who engage with social media, especially those exposed to a brand’s influenced social media, are far more likely to search for lower-funnel terms compared to consumers who do not engage with social media. Further, consumers exposed to a brand’s influenced social media and paid search programs are 2.8x more likely to search for that brand’s products compared to users who only saw paid search

Samson and Delilah film This shows the Return on Investment benefits of an integrated Search and Social campaign. SEO regularly shows benefits to lower-funnel search terms, with less competition and higher conversion rates being the most notible benefits. Through Social Media the traffic to such terms can be increased, resulting in an overall increase in traffic for such terms which directly results in additional conversions.

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The study also showed a 50 percent CTR increase in paid search when consumers were exposed to influenced social media and paid search. This revealed consumers exposed to social media are more likely to click on a brand’s paid search ad compared to those exposed to the brand’s paid search alone. Among searchers using a brand’s product name in the query, the CTR increased from 4.5 percent to 11.8 percent when users were exposed to both influenced social media and paid search around a brand.

In organic search, consumers searching on brand product terms who have been exposed to a brand’s social marketing campaign are 2.4x more likely to click on organic links leading to the advertiser’s site than the average user seeing a brand’s paid search ad alone.

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Social Media has similar attributes to Public Relations and the increase in brand awareness is a commonly known benefit of PR. The increase Click Through Rate for Paid search and organic search for brand terms shows that Social Media is offering similar results. Again, the integration between Social Media, SEO and PPC offers benefitial results across all mediums.

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This shows that it is important to integrate these mediums and companies should make sure their agency is fully integrated when it comes to ‘Digital Discovery’ Marketing and doesn’t operate all departments as separate entities as this will dilute the benefits of the integration.

Contact No Pork Pies

for more information on how we can offer you a truly integrated offering.

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Really off topic to my normal blog posts but its one of those things that has had a really impact on my life so thought i’d make an exception.

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Michael Jackson was an amazing musician and performer (i know a lot of people are discussing the other things but that is not what i will remember). To get the post on topic to the site I’m going to try to use his music videos as an example of how people should understand social media. MJ made the most amazing music videos i’ve ever seen and i can think of anyone else that has done anything like it. Like social media the videos don’t need to be so epic or long, most music videos show a song and end, his last 10 mins and had more special effects than most action films.

Why is this relevant to social media? – Well you could be basic and simple and get your point across but will that make people want to share it? It maybe difficult to justify the costs but i’m certainly going to watch Michael Jackson music videos for years to come and he hasn’t made one for a decade! Don’t know any other musician i can say that about! Think of that in social media terms and you get the idea of the impact!

Anyway back to my MJ tribute – I’ve made my own Spotify playlist -
http://open.spotify.com/user/alee171181/playlist/23w6jLhukS5QOka9Lnq3GF

and here are a few of my favourite videos – Ghost has to be my favourite – even if it is a bit of a Thriller ripe off. I remember watching it when it first came out and being blown away! Enjoy

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RIP Michael Jackson

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This is my third social media post in a row which is very unusual for me, but it show how popular social media is becoming and how little certain people know about it.

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I was wrapped up in the whole skittles.com, (i refuse to link to it, don’t want to give them the link benefit!) debate today on twitter and within about 2 mins i worked out a massive floor in the approach to the new skittles website.

For those of you who don’t know, (and can’t be arsed to look) what they have done is create a ‘new’ website (although this is a copy of Modernista) that pulls all it’s content in from Twitter whenever someone mentions ’skittles’. I wouldn’t consider myself a genius but i spotted a similar thing to what i’m sure many of you have already thought about. Within in 2 mins of looking at the site i posted on Twitter something about the very simple possibility to spam the site and slate Skittles who had not built any control into their plan.

What was the objectives of this project? This was something i mentioned within twitter, it could be a brand exercise and the brand got a huge amount of mentions, spidered out across the net at a tremendous rate and more than likely generating a generous amount of links to the site. However with no content on the site it is unlikely to rank in the search engines for anything outside the brand terms.
It will more than likely be mentioned in a large percentage of the newspapers tomorrow resulting in free publicity for Skittles, but probably more so for Twitter which will benefit with a number of new users to ‘have some fun at Skittles expense’.

Will it sell more Skittles? Well the chances are people will remember the brand and when in the local news agent may just turn towards Skittles over M & M’s because they remember the press around this campaign. However they may also remember comments like:

‘You wouldn’t believe it, but skittles are remarkably healthy, if your goal is to get diabetes & possibly aids… #skittles

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This isn’t actually social media participation because Skittles aren’t actually interacting with the users on ‘their’ site. Skittles have no history of being a site that has participated in social media so this step is just a way to use social media to get people talking about them with absolutely no control over it or moderation. I would say the major target market of Skittles is the young children to early teen age group (correct me if i’m wrong) and they now have on their site things like ‘Skittles CUNT’ which i think is a very wrong thing to be showing a kid. I appreciate you have to put your age in when the site loads but any muppet can make up an age and i just went on it at 8.30 GMT and it didn’t ask me for my age so they’ve either turned that off or they are using specific hours to have it on. Which I’m sure could be an issues with website watchdogs.

This is another example of someone trying to get on the buzz of social media and failing. Yes it has received a lot of ‘buzz’ but it demeans the Skittles brand and will ultimately give them a bad reputation in future, especially with parents who don’t want their children to go onto a site plastered with spam and swearing.

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What would i do if i were Skittles – I would change the site to an official Skittles site by the morning with content and sales messages on it. Possibly games and activities that meet their target market’s needs and then all the traffic they are currently benefiting from, and all the press they will get tomorrow will come to the ‘new’ site see how ‘cool’ and useful it is and continue to use it. Maybe this is the strategy, we’ll have to wait and see but if it isn’t then if I were Skittles i would be looking for a new agency preferably someone who knows what they are doing – No Pork Pies are a good agency

For those of you that haven’t seen it Ryanair showed a textbook example of how not to response to blog posts on Jason Roe’s blog

A employee or a few employees responded to Jason’s post on an error in a very negative and aggressive manor. Ryanair statement says they don’t engage in blog commenting and i can see why now!!

The best bit is Ryanair’s response:

Bride Wars psp Ryanair can confirm that a Ryanair staff member did engage in a blog discussion. It is Ryanair policy not to waste time and energy in corresponding with idiot bloggers and Ryanair can confirm that it won’t be happening again.

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Lunatic bloggers can have the blog sphere all to themselves as our people are far too busy driving down the cost of air travel.

So Ryanair have dealt with this by calling all bloggers idiots and lunatic, well done that’s going to solve the issue.

Conclusion, if you don’t know how to deal with social media avoid it cause this is going to hurt!!

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I don’t write much on social media marketing even though i do a lot of it. I find social media marketing strategies vary heavily dependent on your objects so one channel can be hugely successful for one product and have no effect for another but i’ve really started to get into Twitter lately and have seen a huge benefit out of using it. Not only does it have a very large SEO community to bounce ideas between but it is also a great way to mass target specific articles or content i have written.

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I wrote a story on Facebook SEO links quite a while back now and knew it would be a useful post to the SEO community so i have pushed it through blog comments and social bookmark sites and generated a decent amount of traffic out of it. However it is nothing compared to what i got out of it when it got picked up on Twitter. Someone on Twitter posted a link to the story and it then got retweeted by a couple of other people, resulting in the following traffic to the site:

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That is an amazing peak in traffic! By writing useful content and posting a link to it on Twitter, as well as referencing the relevant group can result in more traffic than from the major search engines. So for the people that are still wondering why there is a lot of discussion around why Twitter could be the next Google there is your answer!

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