mikejeffs

Black Friday – who, where, why & what? [Infographic]

Ok, this may be turnng into an Infographic blog but in my defence Black Friday is a trending topic at the moment. So, exactly who’s buying what and for who? This visual from Mashwork gives you the lowdown for the US.

Related articles

• Who’s Tweeting About Black Friday? [INFOGRAPHIC] (bjconquest.com)
• Infographic: Black Friday As Seen Through Foursquare Check-Ins (searchengineland.com)

Top 3 Premium Music WordPress Themes

There are some really eye catching wordpress themes out there for pretty much any genre or niche. Here’s a little top 3  for band or music themes.

Faded Theme
The faded theme by Mint Themes looks great for rock bands and indie bands alike. The theme includes most things that a band would need with a cool rotating banner. $79 for this one.

Soundcheck Theme
Created  by Press 75 this theme is probably my favourite, the design is slick and has an almost social media feel to it, with tiles and widget boxes which reminds me a little of the Tumblr dashboard. Yours for $75.

Dark ‘n’ Gritty
You’ll gather I’m a fan of dark websites and so its no surprise that this one has made my top 3. This has a grungier feel to it and offer pretty much everything a musician or band could need from a site. This theme costs around $70 from Foxhound.

For more cool Wordpress music themes check out this selection from Premiumwp.com.

Tumblr Numbrs: The Rapid Rise of Social Blogging [infographic]

Here we have a fairly funky infographic based on the massive growth of social media blog platform Tumblr. I’m a fan of both Tumblr and WordPress for social blogging, both sites for me offer something slightly different:

Tumblr
I find Tumblr to be very creative and extremely popular with photographers and designers. Although I’ve not really used it for articles yet I do follow some blogs who publish articles regularly. I guess it depends what theme you use and your search and share style. You’ll notice my tumblr is a little random and includes lots of images without any real structure.

WordPress
WordPress for me is much more tailored to a journalistic magazine style approach. I find the platform easy for article based posts, although the CMS is perhaps not as user friendly as Tumblr. Again this depends on your theme and various add-ons and widgets.

The problem I have with Tumblr is that a lot of content is copied or reblogged. This may be the sites that I follow, but with WordPress sites I feel I gain a little more insight into topics but perhaps without the creative cool factor.

Anyway, here’s the infographic:

3 Cool Everyday Packaging Designs

Spending copious amounts of time of the internet, you come across some cool things and some awful things. I’m a huge fan of creative designs (as you’re probably aware from all the infographics I publish) – even if they’re not relevant to me. Here are a few awesome packaging designs I’ve found:

Twinfish display this one proudly on their site, a really unique take on the age old salt and pepper pots.

A really colourful collection of fire extinguishers here from Looks Like Good Design – not sure how practical they’d be. ~Damn cool though!

The King of Pop tribute can, a strange choice you may think but the sheer idea by the Dieline is brilliant here. Perhaps a bit risky for Pepsi to use?

How to use Linkedin [infographic]

I couldn’t agree more with Business Insider, Linkedin is certainly the ‘darkhorse’ of all the social media sites that I use. I tend to use Linkedin but without really ever engagaing in it. From the looks of this infographic from expert Lewis Howes I’ve a little way to go yet before I’ve completed ‘boot camp’.

Minimalist Music Posters

Love this collection of minimalist music genre posters I found on Jlaven.com. My favourite has to be FOLK.

*It looks like Jlaven.com has been taken down but check ot the posters at Visualnews.com.

Movember – ‘Tis the Season to Mo! [Infographic]

There is a cool/ strange trend for November this month, loads of males (and perhaps some females) have been attempting to groom the most epic of epic moustaches. Affectionately known as Movember, the Mo’s aim is to raise awareness of men’s health in particular prostate cancer. Donations can be made at www.movember.com and there are a number of companies blogging about their progress (or as the case may be lack of).

Anyway, ’tis the season to Mo so here’s a nifty infographic that I saw on Sortable.com.

SEO is Marketing isn’t it?

The search engine optimisation (SEO) industry has been growing for some time now. I myself have been an avid marketer for around 6 years and have been involved in SEO for the last 12 months. A constantly recurring theme throughout the last year has been that SEO is an industry all of its own.

Last week saw Search Engine Land announce that they would be launching a sister site Marketing Land, suggesting that in fact the two are a separate entity.

This is something that I find hard to agree with, as marketing in its truest form is about understanding consumer behaviour, predicting it and then meeting the consumers needs. With this in mind surely online marketing is therefore these three steps but translated for the internet.

SEO can be defined as a the practice of increasing the traffic that a site receives via a search engine. The process itself has developed from the understanding that consumers behaviour when using a search engine means that the higher the rank of the site the more users will visit that site.

As more and more marketers become aware of the Google Panda update, what does appear open to debate is how important SEO is to your marketing strategy and equally how long using SEO in your marketing strategy will last. There is no greater lesson to be learned than those sites which have all their eggs in one basket and have been punished by the Panda update.

It is this unpredictability on search engine updates that provides the sole reason why it isn’t recommended to build a business based upon search traffic, and illustrates why SEO should be carried out as part of an overall marketing strategy.

Beware of Google Image Search for Competitions

For those of you using search engines on a daily basis you will be familiar with Google Image Search. Paste in your image URL or upload a picture and Google find visually similar images for you. A great tool particularly if you’re looking to measure coverage or ‘take up’ on any campaigns your brand may have run such as an infographic.

Whilst this tool is undoubtedly useful for marketers, it may also poke a serious hole in some online marketing campaigns.

Take Vouchercloud for example, who are currently running their Christmas comp (we all LOVE a Xmas viral) where you have to “spot the snowball” from a picture which has been airbrushed – to remove the snowball.

Unfortunately for them, using the google image search tool, you can are able to find the original picture – COMPLETE with snowballs, on Shutterstock.

So the real question here is, intentional move by the marketing department to embrace the image search functionality or not? We’ve all seen the TV competition questions which are so easy, it guarantees entrants. Is this the case? As a marketer I’d like to think so, but then again……

…..Hope I win!

Update: Apparently the original picture is not what counts here – according to Voucher Cloud, the winner will be the one closest to where the judges think the snowball(s) is(are). Sounds a little strange to me, but check out item 15 on the terms and see what you think!

Brought to you by the epic combination of Matthew Jackson and Liam Stilgoe.

Stop Motion Video

As quite rightly pointed out by Brandflakes for Breakfast this video is stop motion awesomeness! It must have taken ages!

Hudson – Against The Grain from Dropbear on Vimeo.