Marketing

WordPress Wishlist Survey 2011 [infographic]

via

Related articles

• What the WordPress community wants for 2012 (thenextweb.com)
• WordPress 2.0 for Android Gets Redesigned, New Action Bar Available (news.softpedia.com)
• Woo Themes Offers 3 Months Free Subscription on Standard or Developer Plans (theapptimes.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.

Online Tools – Making Banners, Flash Ad’s & Buttons

A great online tool for producing pretty much any type of online ad banner possible would definitely be worth a look for businesses with smaller budgets, who perhaps can only stretch to media spend and not creative.

Fear not such a tool does exist in the form of Banner Snack. Simply sign up, or if you’d prefer connect via Twitter, Google ID, Flickr etc and then you’re all set.

The functionality is very straightforward to anyone who’s ever resized a photo, written a blog post, uploaded an image et cetera et cetera..here’s what i came up with:

Using Negative Space for a Logo

Bison Logo via Vector Tuts+

Recently I’ve been working on some logo’s for a consultancy firm who are re branding. Although not a designer myself, the concept and ultimately the creation of a logo for a brand is something that really interests me.

Traditionally a brand or branding involved ‘labelling’ your cattle with a stamp, and the term branding has evolved over the years from this to now standing for the identity of something. As written by brandingstrategyinsider.com a brand isn’t simply a logo, it encompasses a number of things: name, sign, symbol, colour, belief, even a slogan. Essentially the brand is the personality of the company, and forms the point at which a consumer can identify the product/ service or company.

How a company chooses it’s logo is key to how that company will be able to use the logo, and I think this is where a lot of SME’s fall down. The significance of the use of a logo when establishing a brand can often be overlooked by people wanting the prettiest or most contemporary design. Not taking into account the effect that a complex image has when reduced in size (as brands often are), it is at this stage when companies should be creating brand guidelines – not once they’ve got the logo/symbol etc but before they brief the graphic designer.

As shown on the Graphic Design Blog it is then the designers job to design something that stands out whilst ticking all the boxes of what the company stands for, something clean, simple and most importantly – memorable. One of the interesting points outlined in the GDB blog post is the running theme of using negative space in a logo to help represent what the brand stands for.

Bacardi Confusion

Without doubt quite a few of you will have seen the latest campaign from Bacardi. The ad encourages consumers to make a status update in person.

Photo from Marketingmasterinsights.com

The version of the ad can also be seen at the cinema, and focuses on consumers avoiding LOL and OMG, by going back to our Homo Sapien behaviour. The interesting thing about the ad is that it suggests avoiding social media – perhaps Bacardi don’t want to join the social media bandwagon? However the call to action at the end of the film is for consumers to visit facebook.com/bacardi. This seems strange as this is exactly what consumers are told to avoid. Confused? Me too….

Watch the Ad at DCM.co.uk

Google Vs Bing – the infographic

This is a great infographic that I found on infogen. I found it relatively impartial….

Reporting Tools – Word Clouds

I’m sure you like I are looking for good ways or tools to liven up client reports and other work related documents. Having been a fairly avid user of wordle.net, I had a little look around for other tools that may be available.

Tagxedo.com is a great tool, almost a step up from wordle and has a few more options. For instance, you can enter a URL and the tool creates a word cloud based on the content of the site. Below is an image based upon mikejeffs.co.uk.

Word Cloud from Tagxedo.com

As well as being able to choose from a number of colour schemes, you can use a variety of different shapes.

mikejeffs.co.uk word shape from Tagxedo.com

There are a couple of other sites out there, but for me they’re nowhere near the mark: http://www.tocloud.com/, and http://tagcrowd.com/.

Tagxedo has also had good reviews from TechCrunch and donwasteyourtime.co.uk, let me know if you use it, or if you find any other useful online tools.

Trusting Social Media

Image by Intersection Consulting

The Social Media Bandwagon

Image via Flickr Creative Commons - juaniraola

The world of social media has transformed the way marketers interact with their consumers, moving away from previous tools such as email marketing. The idea of sharing something isn’t new these are the the equivalents to ‘word of mouth’ and latterly the ‘send to a friend’ function.

Whilst checking my Twitter feed this morning I was drawn (and subsequently re-tweeted) an interesting article by Econsultancy: “Why your best social media strategy might be not having one.”

The article details the risks involved with adopting a social media presence for a brand. However, it wasn’t long ago that these types of articles were being written about email marketing and online marketing generally. Indeed whilst at a previous job, I experienced the difficulties associated with consumers trust towards email marketing, when personalisation and segmentation of email marketing were at its peak. In fact it would be fair to say that trust was issue with online marketing from the outset. It is only now that we are more familiar with the process that we have begun to trust and in some cases rely on the web.

There is undoubtedly a difficulty in obtaining ROI figures for social media, and as mentioned in the Econsultancy article companies are effectively giving away their personal relationships with consumers, whilst the Social networks develop based on the data gathered. Can this behaviour be attributed to social media as a tool (and perhaps even a weapon) being an unknown entity.

Further from this are we creeping from personalised marketing, where marketers could suggest, to consumer controlled marketing where the brand has little impact on persuasion. It’s easy to see why brand’s are adopting social campaigns, equally it is obvious that brands are adopting them without having any kind of strategy. It may well be a case of jumping on the bandwagon, and the consumers are driving it.

One Device World

Image provided by Expansys

It’s has been announced today that Nokia, the Finnish mobile phone manufacturer is to cut around 7,000 jobs.

The cuts include removing 4,000 positions held at Nokia whilst moving another 3,000 employees to Accenture to work on developing the Nokia and Windows OS. According to Marketingmagazine.co.uk Nokia employs around 2,400 staff in the UK, and they will be getting rid of around a third of these (700). The reductions in total sum approximately 12% of staff worldwide with the UK being heavily affected together with Denmark and Finland.

Once a giant of the mobile phone industry, the development of smartphones and the release of the iPhone and Google’s Android OS has seen Nokia spiral in the wrong direction over the last few years. Despite still maintaining a significant presence in the lower end mobile market, their recent releases: Nokia N8 and Nokia E7 have failed to make smartphone consumers switch from exisitng devices made by Apple, HTC or Samsung.

The interesting point here is a growing trend within the phone sector of brand collaboration. As with laptops and computers a decade ago, manufacturers are becoming wise to consumer use and ultimately having to use better equipped brands to cope. In the same way that netbooks made by Samsung or Toshiba use Windows 7, are we seeing the start of mobile phones becoming a force in the gadget world.

You can already log into Xbox Live via Windows 7, watch TV on the internet, you can use the internet on your smartphone. So surely this is the start of a long term demise for laptops and games consoles? And indeed a new fight between arguably the ‘big 3′ of the technology world – Microsoft, Apple and Google. For once it appears as though it is the software calling the shots, and how accessible that software is. As we know from PC’s, Microsoft are pretty adept when making their software cross compatible.

Surely then it is the beginning of the end for all other media devices – the DVD player, Sky Box, Mp3 Dock Station.