Google’s previous efforts, such as Google Buzz, have largely failed. But Google+ is different, in that many people are taking it seriously and suggesting that Google may actually have a new, easy to use tool that could rival existing social networks.

At present, Google+ has a few different aspects to it. When you first sign up, it collects everything you’ve done on previous Google services together at once. For heavy Google users, this makes things a bit easier to start, although slightly creepy, as the system pulls every person you’ve ever emailed for years and presents them to you in a list. You can then categorise these people into your ‘circles’.

Circles

By nature, Google declares that you share things with different people and group them together in your mind. So you can create different “circles” for different sharing levels. You might find something cool that you want to share with your work colleagues, while your personal information can go only to your closest friends. At first glance, this seems like a good way to organise things; like many people, I know I personally have those groups of people from different times in my life, and I’m sure you do too; different jobs, different schools, different levels of friendship.

Photos

Google uses its purchased Picasa technology to store your photos. If you’re already using Picasa, you’ll find all of your photos right there, though you’ll still need to choose who you reveal them to. Future photos can be uploaded both in Google+ and through Facebook apps for mobiles. Called ‘Instant Upload’, Google+ will send your photos online as soon as you take them, but won’t share them until you’ve set your privacy settings.

Hangouts

This functionality is basically Skype built in to Google. You can start a ‘Huddle’ conversation, adjust your webcam and microphone, and invite friends to chat with you. Up to 10 people can enter a ‘Hangout’. This is actually a good idea, integrating a different service into Google so users don’t have to rely on apps installed on their computer, but we’ll have to see about adoption when the site launches more widely. It wants to be a replacement for the unplanned meetup in person, like happens for many of us at uni, but in the real world. It could also be a great feature for families if migration does occur from Facebook to Google+.

Huddle

This works like a chat room, turning your text messages into a single conversation with one of your ‘circles’. So if you’re all trying to go to a movie, you can coordinate in a single conversation instead of trying to get multiple people together.

Sparks

This, another very clever idea, leverages Google technology to bring you stories that you might be interested in. If you’ve listed one of your interests as ‘books’, Google will present you with all the recent stories about books and invite you to share them with your friends.

I quite like this one, as it could help me do a quick round-up of recent news in favourite sectors. I would still want to use Google for actual, impartial search, though those are apparently few and far between these days.

Privacy

This also seems a good move towards more privacy. You don’t have to share your personal news with your boss if you don’t want to, and you can screen out those people you’ve added just to stay in touch with but aren’t particularly close to. You can share whatever you like with whoever you like. Those people can also +1 your news or leave a comment, just like on Facebook.

Google, however, are open with the fact that they’re using the underlying happenings of Google+ in search results. So, if something gets shared on Google+, it’s highly likely that it will go on to influence search results. Of course, we know that some things we share will probably influence search results anyway, like on Facebook and Twitter, so in that sense this isn’t really new. It just means that Google+ isn’t breaking any boundaries on the privacy front, even if it does look easier to use.

Stay tuned for more information as we get it, including a hands on experience!

Google+: First Impressions is a post from WMpS, your one stop digital agency.

The document revealed that ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers had announced a decision to explode its restrictions on generic top level domain (gTLDs) registrations; meaning that from January 12 2012 any word in any language or in fact script can be registered as a domain suffix.

22 recognised domain extensions are currently in use, from .com and .co.uk to .biz and .info but the announcement by ICANN yesterday will undoubtedly lead to a great increase. From countries and cities to institutions, hotels and brands; in what has been labelled the ‘right of the dot’ movement organisations, CEOs and representatives will have the opportunity to buy into completely new domains that will professedly increase brand awareness and identity.

According to the article Australian domain registration firm Melbourne IT whose clients include Volvo, LEGO and GlaxoSmithKline have already experienced a surge of interest from brands looking to apply for their own unique extensions, chief executive Theo Hnarakis stating that, “It will allow corporations to better take control of their brands…For example, .apple or .ipad would take customers right to those products.”

It is thought that around 500 to 1000 new domains will be registered which ICANN hope will also alleviate the rather congested .com market with many companies and groups falling over themselves to find relevant domain names producing inevitable overlaps. To lay claim to a particular domain though, a prospective applicant must demonstrate a viable authority and relevance toward that extension; if two or more parties contend over the same name it is thought ICANN will auction the license off to the highest bidder. One of the first firms to back the change has been Canon, the Japanese imaging company, who have openly expressed their intention to purchase .canon.

Budgetary clout will no doubt play a large role in this new system with an application fee set at £114,000 and a further substantial yearly subscription charge this is undoubtedly a privilege reserved for the most successful or well funded enterprises and out of the reach of most SMEs. ICANN have however stated that around $2million has been set aside to aid applicants from developing countries where the, “evaluation fee or access to technical expertise might be somewhat of a bar”, according to senior vice president Kurt Pritz.

So what do reckon to all this domain denomination? Well there have certainly been mixed reviews in the office; a lot of people are somewhat skeptical about this innovation suggesting that it will just cause confusion for internet users trying to find their desired domain when the suffix could now be almost anything. The overall implementation of this process will no doubt take several months not to mention time for the domains themselves to start competing against existing TLDs and for users to grasp the concept. How this will affect the strength of .com and other extensions in terms of SEO domain url strength only time will truly tell. In the meantime though, I wonder if we are gifting even more influence to search engines that we may soon not only rely upon to uncover content but to actually find the domains themselves; www.wmps.digitalagency hmmm.

ICANN open floodgate to domain extensions is a post from WMpS, your one stop digital agency.

The problem: Duplicate content is a massive problem. If your site’s content is also elsewhere, Google may consider you the copy and downgrade you in favour of another site.

The solution: While you may wish to include manufacturer’s copy in something like a product description, you should always have some content entirely your own on every page. A large ecommerce retailer might opt for customer-generated reviews in this scenario; writing a description for each and every product is time consuming and with reviews, your customers will not only do the work for you but will help encourage others to buy if your products are well received and generate good reviews. Sites with fewer pages should invest enough time to have some unique copy on each page.

The problem: Thin content is short with nothing to add to the end user. It may be spun or exist solely for SEO purposes, so it may exist in a slightly modified form somewhere else.

The solution: Thicken up that content with extra copy and adhere to stricter guidelines. While a search engine probably can’t tell that your content has become massively more persuasive, a variety of external factors such as click-through rate, bounce rate, and time on page may be considered either now or in the future.

If you can’t add much copy onto a transactional site, consider introducing a blog to help out with more in depth and long tail content to get your rankings up across the site. It’s also easier to encourage authority links to a blog page, which will help increase the overall authority of your site.

The problem: Too many ads. Even though Google makes money from AdWords and AdSense, a high proportion of ads above the fold on your site often indicates a spammy site, leading to lower rankings for legitimate sites as well as low quality ones.

The solution: Remove some of your ads at the top. In many cases, they won’t all be making money for you anyway. Find out which ads are more successful – banner ads or text ads, for example – and keep those while getting rid of others. Look for other ways to monetise your site, such as ebook publication or affiliate partnerships, that don’t require spammy-looking ads at the top of every site.

While rankings are generally slow to recover on sites that suffer from the Panda update, these best practices will help you set a good standard for the future.

Correcting Thin Content on Your Site is a post from WMpS, your one stop digital agency.

In the early hours of May 2^nd a team of US Navy special forces raided a mansion in the small Pakistani city of Abbottabad, located in the north east of the country around 100km from the Afghan border. During a fire fight with insurgent forces it is reported that Osama Bin Laden was shot and killed and after recovering his body the corpse was buried at sea by US naval officials from the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson.

Although controversy and conspiracy continue to cloud the exact details of the operation, code named ‘Neptune Spear’, one of the most intriguing insights to arise from the event was however not the incident itself, but the medium through which the news was broken to an unsuspecting world.

Hours before President Barak Obama’s now famous address, the raid on Bin Laden’s $250,000 mansion had been unwittingly ‘liveblogged’ by an Abbottabad resident. Sohaib Athar (Twitter username @ReallyVirtual) roused by the unusual noise of a helicopter flying over head at 1am Pakistani Standard Time originally issued one seemingly commonplace tweet, observing that, ‘Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event).’

The tweets which continued on for several hours catalogued a series of explosions and supposition that a helicopter had been shot down. After reporting that apparently one person had been killed in a helicopter crash Mr Athar who studied for an MBA at the University of Central Lancashire further in a tweet that, ‘I think the helicopter crash in Abbottabad, Pakistan and the President Obama breaking news address are connected.’

By now of course this was only one of a fury of microblogs being sent all across the globe in what was later revealed to be the highest sustained rate of tweeting in the service’s history which over a three and a half hour period preceding and following President Obama’s address averaged at over 3,000 tweets per second. The news itself was actually revealed by former chief of staff to Donald Rumsfeld, Keith Urbahn who a further hour before the President’s official statement tweeted that, ‘So I’m told by a reputable person they have killed Osama Bin Laden. Hot damn.’

Although many questions still remain over the validity of Twitter as a journalistic or even commercial resource the power of live-feed news it seems is undeniable and the impact of having access to an exclusive insight can be tremendous, just ask Sohaib Athar whose Twitter followers jumped from a respectable 751 on April 30^th to 101,526 two days later! Although this was of course a unique scenario it does demonstrate the growing influence of live-feed news and in an age where presidential candidates are announced over Facebook and Royal engagements revealed in a Tweet the growing impact of social media even, or perhaps especially, upon the most official and governmentally sensitive aspects of our culture is undeniable.

Social media and the fall of Osama Bin Laden is a post from WMpS, your one stop digital agency.

Herein is one of the problems with relying on so many other people for our data and actual methods of working. Already, our websites are hosted in places we can’t control, our marketing activities take place on Facebook, Twitter, Quora, and Foursquare, and work simply cannot happen without access to the internet. How many of our readers out there would struggle to get any work done without email? Even jobs that have nothing to do with the internet are often reliant on it for basic communication – you can just pick up the phone, of course, but it’s simply not as easy. It’s the same in your house, though, if you think about it; we’re all crippled if the power goes out or if the water stops running. We don’t generate these things ourselves, we pay others to ensure that we receive them.

The cloud is simply not any different from the services we rely on. As the saying goes, you should never put all of your eggs in one basket, and neither should you rely on any one service for your online marketing. I would never advocate that you abandon your website for a Facebook page, for example, no matter who says the trend is going in that direction. Have multiple methods of marketing and try new things; that way, if one ever does fail, you’ll have plenty in other areas to keep you busy while it gets back up and running.

For the general cloud industry, however, Amazon’s downtime is very worrying. If it can happen to them, it can happen to anyone, and in an industry that asks small to medium size businesses to rely on them for everything, Amazon’s failure is a catastrophe. This failure has certainly damaged their credibility in the cloud field and undoubtedly caused doubt in the minds of many who had previously relied on the cloud with no worries. Amazon, however, have their eggs in many different baskets, and can afford to take the hit. If all of your systems go down, can you?

What Do Cloud Failures Mean for Your Online Marketing? is a post from WMpS, your one stop digital agency.

Kate Garraway came up with the idea and name Goodypass.com after she set out to find ways of developing a long term business that offered something real and of value to her fans.  Her idea was that celebrities get freebies so why shouldn’t the general public and these values also suit the sites aims to push products in a socially authentic way. Kate has also signed up twelve other celebrities to help her promote deals on the site and each will have their own portal which will include videos, photos and a blog, from where they can recommend deals. These celebrities include Alison Hammond, Lynda Bellingham, Aldo Zilli, Lisa Faukner and Laura Hamilton to name just a few. The site also intends to donate 5% of all profits to the Make-A-Wish Foundation for kids.  

Goodypass joins a growing number of social commerce sites best illustrated by LivingSocial and Groupon which has been a massive success in America and has recently been valued at over $1 billion. It could perhaps be questioned that the online voucher market is becoming a crowded market place but having celebrities making recommendations does tend to give the site an exciting edge.

How does Goodypass work and what is on offer?

Goodypass.com works with a wide range of national and local businesses to source deals which offer members access to discounts on various goods and services including beauty treatments and designer clothing and accessories.  To buy a goodypass deal all you have to do is click, buy now, register, pay and you are sent an email with a link so that you can print your voucher. Your voucher will then detail exactly what you need to do to redeem it.  Once you’ve tried it out you might want to tell your friends all about the company and Goodypass are offering £5 credit to members who refer a new member providing your friend buys a deal within 72 hours of receiving your invitation.

So how does Goodpass.com make a profit? As well as negotiating discounts which are passed direct to consumers, commission is also negotiated for the company. This percentage helps to cover the cost of running the businesses and it is hoped this will eventually allow the business to make a profit. Until then celebrities involved will laso take a share of the commission in return for their involvement.

Potential influence of Celebrities on Social Commerce

Using celebrities to promote offers to a mainstream audience does seem like a smart move.  What makes Goodypass different is that it allows consumers to communicate directly with showbiz personalities. Most offer sites are set up with no pre existing brand or audience, however Goodypass is already an official discount partner of Ok magazine and Kate is very active on Twitter and blogs every week.  Kate only joined Twitter last year and already has over 38,000 twitter followers and Angela Griffin has 43,422 so Goodypass has an opportune audience base.  

The offers aren’t available for every city yet, but the company is growing very quickly. The website states that if you can help get any Goodypass.com deals in your city to get in touch.  The sector of celebrity and social commerce definitely seems like one to watch.  It is currently free to sign up to Goodypass.com so I’m definately tempted to give it a go!

Goodypass.com: A group buying site offering members a slice of a Celebrity Lifestyle Online is a post from WMpS, your one stop digital agency.

This update’s main focus appears to be on low quality content. Google is punishing sites that don’t provide real value to the people who visit them. These are sites such as article directories, how-to sites, and scraper sites that are piggybacking off others’ content. There is no word yet on whether the impacted sites’ links actually pass less ‘link juice’ than they did previously. Regardless, if you’re solely relying on low quality content farms for your SEO strategy, you’re going to need to come up with a new solution; they may not have implemented this yet but we can almost guarantee they will in the future.

What should you be doing to ensure the impact to your site is minimal?

1.      Write your own content, and write it well. This is something we have always recommended and will continue to do so. Even if you are selling products that are sold on many other websites and in offline catalogues, it is essential to keep the content on your site fresh, interesting, and unique. Not only will this help you rank better, effectively written selling copy will push more products and entice more users to click through and purchase.

2.      Monitor your backlinks. You should be conscious of any links coming from sites impacted by Panda and thus aware of the possible devaluation of those links. If you’re heavily affected by newly classified spam sites, you may wish to consider asking for the removal of those links and focus more time on high quality, genuine, natural links – even if the spammy links were natural. As we all know, not all links are created equal. This is especially important given Google’s recent crackdown on paid links and public exposure of sites known to be breaking the rules.

3.      Focus more of your energy on social media. While not every site is naturally aligned with social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook, there are a variety of niche sites and opportunities; this can make a difference not only to your rankings but to your image. If your company isn’t suited to social media, ask yourself whether any aspects of it can be incorporated and focus a campaign on those. For example, a company that makes engines isn’t going to be an instant win on Facebook, but can appeal to the average customer by creating a page on choosing an eco-friendly engine or even educating the general public about how an engine works. These signals are now officially used in rankings; while you’re waiting for the Panda / Farmer update to get sorted out, consider an increased investment in social.

Preparing for the Google Panda Update UK is a post from WMpS, your one stop digital agency.

Key Findings from the Study: Gender differences uncovered

The study indicated that 38% of men own a Smartphone compared to 29% of Women and 60% of Women use Facebook, compared to 52% of men.  Time was also identified as a potential factor with women being more likely to engage in the social elements of a retailer’s Facebook page, whereas men might look to speed up the purchasing process via a mobile. Mobile Commerce does seem to have made more of a connection with men, as 14% of men surveyed revealed that they use phone apps which support shopping, compared with just 8% of Women.  In contrast consumers have yet to become engaged with brands and retailers through their Social Networking medium, as just 9% of all consumers indicated they follow brands on Social Media and just 6% make a purchase.  

37% of the survey’s respondents said that they didn’t see the point of brands using Social Media and 18% said the same of retailers. The research does clearly confirm that younger consumers in the 16 – 24 age range are far more likely to engage in Social Media activity whereas none of the 55 plus age group indicated they followed any brands or retailers. From the consumers who indicated that they do engage in Social Media activity, 32% revealed that the main reason which resulted in their decision to follow a brand or retailer on Social Media channels was to feel part of a group. 29% of consumers follow them to share their thoughts and be part of forum.  A further 10% sign up to benefit from discounts, vouchers and promotions and 6% of consumers joined just to make a complaint.

What can Retailers take from this research?

The overall message amongst the findings is that there are some clear opportunities for retailers and brands through Social Media and Mobile commerce, but getting this offering right is more difficult than it seems. The figures in the study do suggest that the gender and age divides revealed in terms of Social Media shopping platforms and Mobile Commerce could be put to good use by retailers to better target and engage their customers. Social Media has previously been used in more of a supportive role, bringing traffic to retail websites which provide the actual online shopping experience. However the encouraging response to innovate offerings such as Facebook Deals and Facebook Places does tend to confirm that Social Media is now fast becoming a more viable channel for online shopping.

There also seems to be a barrier in shopper’s minds as to why should they communicate directly with a brand and why brands would want to communicate with them. Brands must therefore work harder to connect with shoppers and then maintain their attention. They need to create a social network space, which not only generates brand interest but also provides visitors with a reason to return.

We would love to hear your thoughts on the findings of this study!

Gender Divide in Online Shopping Revealed? is a post from WMpS, your one stop digital agency.

Reading the post myself, perhaps the most salient and memorable insight that was raised concerned the relationship between video content and SERPs and explicitly that videos are more than fifty times more likely to feature in Google’s universal results than a respective text document. Taking this on board perhaps it is time we took a closer look at video search engine optimisation or vseo for short (it’s initialism gone mad!).

Video content, as we have learned from Meghan’s post, can prove incredibly valuable to rankings particularly if your video file and your target page are linked; as far back as 2008 for example more search queries in the US were entered into YouTube than Yahoo which goes to show that people are certainly accustomed to pursuing search terms with the goal of finding specific multimedia content. Significantly, in universal search results, a combination of Google’s vertical search properties which includes images, maps and videos etc., it is in fact videos that visually dominate the SERP interface. However, with millions of clips out there floating around in cyberspace the next challenge comes with the task of having your video promoted prominently and accurately in Google’s results. This as you might expect is achieved by getting your content crawled and indexed by Google, in this case Google Video, the database used by the search engine to collect all of the information about the multimedia that it discovers on the web. Ensuring that your clip is indexed by Google Video is a key strategy towards having it appear in the universal results because the video content Google actually displays there is taken directly from Google Video.

The most fundamental step towards getting your desired multimedia content indexed by Google is creating a video sitemap. A video sitemap, just like a normal sitemap that contains all of the information that indicates the architecture of website, contains information integral to the content of the video for example the URL for your landing pages, where the video can be found, thumbnails and the titles of the videos themselves. Information that particularly in the case of multimedia might otherwise not become available via the usual crawling mechanisms.

An alternative to using a video sitemap is an MRSS or media RSS, an extension of the traditional RSS that is used for syndicating multimedia files. Generally speaking though, sitemaps are preferred as they provide publishers with more control over the content that they are trying to get indexed.

Sitemaps can be submitted via Google Webmaster tools, after which the Googlebots will crawl the specified page and verify that the video it is proposed exists on that URL is actually there. When submitting a sitemap there are several elements that Google will pay particular attention to meaning that the proper and appropriate tags should be provided if you intend for you video to be successfully indexed. The elements that are focused upon when Google is trying to determine your video can be broken down into five main features: Title, Description, Play page, Thumbnail and Player or Content location. It is especially useful to address the last of these requirements and although only either the player or content location is mandatory, including both is highly recommended. Each tag actually contributes significantly to the processing of a video; the player location corresponds to the arguments responsible for playing the video, usually a SWF file, which basically shows Google that the video you have directed it to actually exists on the page, whereas the content is actually the raw bites that make up the video and is used for generating meta data. The type of thumbnail that you choose to represent your content is also an important consideration, for B2B traders for example, publishers may want to be selective in how they promote their company.

There are also three highly recommended optional tags that you may consider including in your sitemap; these are duration, which helps users filter by length of video, expiration which is an important feature in maintaining a successful user experience and a clean index and finally the regional restrict tag which states whether or not video publishers have limited access to certain geographical areas, if Google cannot determine where they can play the content they may not index it.

There are several shortcomings that can hinder the indexing of your video by Google. For example every URL for all the content that it takes to render your page should be accessible to Googlebots, so if your video is hosted by a third party or platform such as Brightcove and the player URL links to that platform you need to tell that platform to un-robot them so that they can be indexed. If you are using a content delivery network to serve your videos (as you may well be) then it needs to be stored on the domain name of the site even if your content is not hosted on it. Google also needs access to all the URLs and so they must be completely susceptible to crawling, the system cannot retrieve files from URLs protected by even basic authentication. Every URL that you submit should also be unique, if you have multiple videos on a single page, Google cannot direct users to different videos if they can’t be reached via different URLs. (This is good practice for general site design)

Finally, it is also important to include video transcripts along with the sitemap. Basically these are short text files describing the content of the video, some people do not see the value in video transcripts but not only do they provide additional SEO (especially with the inclusion of keywords), but some visitors perhaps viewing via smart phones may not be able to access the multimedia, may not be able to listen to the audio or simply may not have time to watch the entire clip.

The significance of VSEO is slowly coming to the fore and it is vital for any SEO enthusiast or practitioner to embrace the importance of video content for search results and as a way of occupying valuable SERP real estate in Google’s universal rankings.

An Introduction to Video SEO is a post from WMpS, your one stop digital agency.

One of the most valuable keynotes for me was by Facebook UK’s commercial director, Stephen Haines. He began by breaking the news that Facebook has hit 30 million active users in the UK – a full half of the population – which means that if you haven’t considered your brand strategy on Facebook, you are missing out on a valuable opportunity. Mr Haines mentioned quite a few strategies for marketing on Facebook, especially using Facebook ads. He highlighted a few statistics that underscore the importance of linking ads to friends. If your target sees an ad that has been ‘liked’ by a friend, the ad results in:

-          68% lift in recall

-          4x increase in conversion

He also said that the fastest growing demographic on Facebook is people over 35, so it’s no longer justifiable to remain off Facebook because your target market is a bit older.

Haines also highlighted a few different ways to use Facebook’s ad system to suit your purposes. We do use these ads ourselves, and are familiar with the tool, but it was still very interesting to hear how others are using the same ads. For example, one company has started distributing samples via Facebook ads, while another company used the very narrow targeting allowed to essentially steal away a rival company’s employees with an ad.

Haines proposed that, because Pages have more ‘likes’ than independent sites have visits, sites will eventually disappear and be integrated with Facebook. This is an observation I simply do not agree with, certainly not the way the internet is structured today; ‘likes’ are spread out over a Facebook page’s lifetime. Monthly visits to a site are a different thing and cannot at all be compared – a more likely comparison would be the number of unique visitors over a site’s lifetime, and I suspect that number would dwarf the Facebook page’s ‘likes’. Both are important, and both are necessary.

A few other useful tips I picked up were in regards to Video SEO. There were two different presentations on the subject and it was great to see these different perspectives on the topic and compare them with my own.

Essentially, optimising your videos for SEO is very important. Videos are up to fifty times (yes, fifty) more likely to show up in the SERPs than a regular text page and they carry the added bonus of a thumbnail, which you can choose, and an interactive element which means they attract nice higher CTRs. If you can show your video on the same page as your site, you’ve just captured more real estate in the SERPs, an important goal for any SEO. The consistent appearance of this particular topic across the presentations just really underscored how important video is. If you’re not fitting it into your SEO strategy, it is definitely time to start.

If you’re interested in what Facebook pages, ads, or videos can do for your online marketing, contact us today!

A Few Insights from TFM&A 2011 is a post from WMpS, your one stop digital agency.