Full Service Online PR, Public Relations & Digital Marketing Agency | Dead Dinosaur

Google has just launched a huge improvement to its blog search section. Previously if you ran a search for a topic it would bring back posts back with your search term in the title. This was useful but it was almost frustrating that you couldn’t search for blogs on a certain topic. However, now the new service which appears on the left after you have run a search sorts by topic and it seems to be really useful.

I did a quick search for blogs that were about Twitter tools and my Twitter application’s blog came up (www.tweasier.com) as I thought it might as that is the topic of the blog. This shows Google appears to have made this pretty accurate. I would be really interested to know how it ranks the results in order but I fear that will be kept secret as Google has patented an element of this new search technology.

My question is this, does this spell the end of many paid for blog search services and the blog search engine Tecnorati? Sure, it has been around a long time and it has it’s widely respected authority rating but now that you can find blogs, by topic easier, I think this could be the beginning of the end.

The original article from Readwriteweb is here

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As I sure many of you know I am the social media coordinator for the CIPR in the Yorkshire and Lincolnshire region. As a regional committee we get involved in organising lots of corporate events and training but on the whole we don’t organise many fun networking events.

I felt we needed to hold a regional event that brought together the local Yorkshire based PR companies and the media.

I also wanted to do something for a for a brilliant journalist, and friend of mine, who sadly died at the age of 47 during the Christmas period last year. His name was Nigel Scott he was the Business Editor of the Yorkshire Evening Post. I knew Nigel for more than 8 years, he was a great guy but sadly he was struck with cancer. Towards the end of last year he showed his continued support to two great charities which were the Prince of Wales Hospice, Pontefract and Macmillan Cancer Support.

So to help raise funds for Nigel’s chosen charities we have decided to organise a special PR Vs the Media quiz night. We have a professional quiz company holding the event with lots of fun media-related questions, it should give us all a great time and good chance to meet up.

The event is being held at the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Leeds on Wednesday 27th October and will be great fun and good chance for PR people to meet each other. Tickets only cost £20 per person and include food, but please be warned these are very limited, as I wanted to start relatively small but we are hoping we can organise this event every year in Nigel’s name.

If you fancy coming along get your ticket now by booking here.

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The Everton Footballer Mikel Arteta (of Spanish nationality) is now eligible for a British passport (and so he can commit to any British team of his choosing) because he has been a resident in the UK for five-and-a-half years. He was signed by Everton from Real Sociedad in 2005 and completed a permanent move for just £2 million which was a snip.

He was asked at the weekend if he would consider playing for England instead of Spain and he said he would “have to seriously consider it”. There has been a lot of online conversation about this on several forums.

The campaign seems to be gathering pace and this Facebook group already has 1,400 members and there is a growing feeling that Mikel Arteta should be the first non-English person to play for the England national team. There is no doubt that he is a cracking player and to be honest, I can see him pushing Gareth Barry straight out of the team as his passing range is vast.

Would it be terrible to include a foreign person in our national side? Lots of other countries have used foreign players, when they have become available such as France, Spain, Germany but we have never used one but we have had a couple of foreign managers. England captain Stephen Gerrard spoke to Talksport yesterday and commented:

“I’d certainly love nothing better than to see Mikel Arteta available for England,” “You want to play with the best players, and if it makes the England squad better, of course I’d like to see it.

“I think it happens to most national teams [that they pick non-nationals], but it’s up to him if he wants to make himself available. Fabio Capello is the man to answer the question because he’s the manager, but for me he’s an excellent player.”

Is the England team or any other British football team sacred? Or after a terrible showing in the world cup should the English FA now use this as an opportunity to put together the best team it can? I would be interested to hear your views!

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Facebook has announced today that due to popular demand it is adding a new button/feature to Facebook pages. Traditionally, users were asked to become fans of a page but that was changed a few months back. Facebook users are now asked to like a particular product or service and when they do this like is then added to their personal profile. This is also what Facebook uses to select which advertisements to display in a user’s account.

When a user has liked a product or service they then receive all of the updates from that page within their newsfeed. This is brilliant if you really love that particular brand and want to stay on top of what a brand is doing minute by minute. However, what happens if you are interested in what a brand does but you don’t particularly like that brand? How could you get its updates? The answer is nothing.

Facebook hasn’t really launched this feature but it would nice if they did. This isn’t one of mine as I got this idea from FiR the brilliant podcast by Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz. I an an avid listener and thought the idea of a ‘just interested button’ would be brilliant. I mean how many people are out there now that have liked something but they don’t really like it at all? This means they are receiving irrelevant advertisements and they are making a company look good (in terms of like numbers) when they don’t even like it.

What do you think Facebook should add to Facebook pages?

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Unless you have been hidden under a rock for the last twelve months you must have heard about Foursquare which has been the latest geo-location craze to hit social media in 2010. Basically the premise is you have to travel around checking in to locations near you securing points for travelling around. If you “check-in” to one location more than someone else you become the Mayor of that location and that generally means very little. In the US, and a small splattering of companies in the UK, this can entitle you to a few treats such as a coffee or pizza in your local Starbucks or Pizza Hut respectively. However, many of the big hitters in the world of social media are still remain unconvinced by the network’s usefulness and find it a tad tiresome.

In fact, recently I heard someone say they found the location check-ins, which now feature on Twitter and Facebook, so tiring that they were unfollowing people who did it all the time.

I have been playing with it a while now and can see the marketing potential but, although it is the most popular location based game, it’s still some way off reaching the tipping point as its mostly used by early adopters and the geeks (sorry guys). At the last count it had half a million users compared with Facebook’s 300 million – see what I mean. So we do need to be realistic as to how many people are actually using it. A friend of mine recently attended the Glastonbury festival and checked his Foursquare and found that he was the only person from the whole of his network in attendance.

However, that said as it has a fun new API which quite a few developers have been having a play around creating little applications to make Foursquare more useful. One example is Fourwhere which is a fun little app that mashes up checkins and local comments from Foursquare, Yelp and Gowalla.

It makes it easier to visualize comments/tips left by users. So if you were looking for a place to meet with a  client or go out for a bite to eat, you can use it to find local cafes and restaurants nearby and use the reviews to make an informed decision.

One of the most interesting new apps that have been created is Future Checkin which has just been created by some clever people. It works alongside Foursquare and allows you to choose your favourite venues. The clever bit is you can then set it to automatically check-in when you arrive at one of those selected venues. I have to admit I find this a bit too much and am slightly concerned about privacy issues, it takes me back to the amusing site (Pleaserobme) as it completely removes the human touch but it does make the checking in process easier. Here is a video to explain how the app works.

So location based social media games are useful because you can get local tips and reviews direct to your mobile and the more people that use them the more relevant and insightful the tips are likely to be. Marketers will no doubt soon be able to run ‘promoted tips’ in a similar vein to the promoted tweets option in Twitter. Personally I am not sure if this automatic checking in just turns the whole thing into a bit of a numbers game with the net result being people not playing anymore and moving onto the next latest craze.

Do you think automatically checking in is a good thing or is it the same as auto following on Twitter?

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In December 2009 Facebook made a few adjustments to its formal policy on competitions and promotions which you no doubt will have heard about.

The net result was that promotions on Facebook can’t hold:

• Photo contests which require profile photo manipulation
• Status updates which require posting updates for entry 
• Only contest entries once a user has become a fan of your page

A couple of my clients have been liaising directly with Facebook over this and we have found out that you can actually hold a competition on your page if you support it will £5,000 worth of Facebook advertising.

Now I have been involved in quite a few campaigns that have used Facebook advertising as a small element and if you are working for a global brand £5K is not that much. However, if you are a small business looking to run a promotion on your Facebook page you are going to have to be very careful because as Facebook states:

You may not administer any promotion through Facebook, except that you may administer a promotion through the Facebook Platform with our prior written approval. Such written approval may be obtained only through an account representative at Facebook. If you are already working with an account representative, please contact that representative to begin the approval process. If you do not work with an account representative, you can use this contact form to inquire about working with an account representative.

Recently, Facebook has really stepped up its policing of its pages by closing down competitions and promotions that breach its guidelines. So if you are running a competition for your business or your clients, please do be careful and try to be open and transparent with them.

My question is this – does this £5,000 investment in Facebook advertising hurt small businesses that use this network as a channel of communication or is it fair enough that it charges for this?

Competitions and promotions are one of the reasons Facebook grew so quickly because it encouraged fun and engagement and for me this doesn’t quite sit right. Surely as a business Facebook makes enough money from its advertising platform and it is likely to make even more following the launch of its most recent service, Search which it launched today.

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For the last nine months I have been working on creating a Twitter management application that added value to the Twitter experience. The application, called Tweasier, is currently in beta testing and has several hundred people using it on a daily basis – I have found their feedback absolutely invaluable and I now recognise the importance of having a beta period. During these nine months I have seen a variety of Twitter applications have their services or features throttled by Twitter and I have been asking myself why?

A good example of this was Twitter Karma which allowed the average Twitter user to sort their friends by people who were following them back. It was a useful tool which meant, that if you so wished, you could cleanse your account from time to time and keep the numbers down to a reasonable and manageable level. Sometimes people you follow, just stop using Twitter altogether and leave their account static, so a spring clean can often be effective.

As Twitter has grown, so has the online noise in an average users Twitter account. The early adopters of Twitter used to see pretty much everybody’s tweets but now, as there are so many interesting and insightful people out there to follow, you can occasionally miss an important tweet or two. For a news junkie like myself I hate to think that but that’s the way it is on Twitter these days and we have all come to accept it.

Too Many Fail Whales

Twitter has had a bit of a bad run recently launching a few new features which have stumbled and cause the network to break down on regular occasions. Sometimes I actually feel I might as well start having a relationship with the FAIL WHALE as I see him more often that my own account. However, this has prompted Twitter to reduce the limit of requests third-party-applications like Tweasier, Tweetdeck and Hootsuite can make it to its API (down to 175).

By doing this applications have become much less stable and I personally think this may well start affecting the user’s relationship and love for the network. I have seen several tweets today highlighting that Tweetdeck has broken again and I would hedge my bets that it is just this strangulation of the API.

My Advice to Twitter

So my first bit of advice to Twitter is to sort the stability of the network out and return the trust to the users and the developers which have helped make Twitter as popular as it is today.

My second piece of advice is to re-examine bringing back bulk unfollowing. Now don’t get me wrong I am not a spammer and I don’t believe in spamming but surely there is a better way to stop Twitter spammers than removing the usefulness of bulk unfollowing from all third-party applications.

Twitter actually changed its rules in January and now only allows single line unfollowing. In other words you can no longer use an application to select all etc. In my opinion this is wrong, so please bring back features like bulk unfollowing, so the regular users can trim their accounts when they need trimming otherwise it makes it a far harder process to spring clean an account and this means lots of people will be following dead accounts which is surely a bad thing for Twitter anyway as it is clogging up the network for no reason.

My answer to stopping the spammers is simple, when a users syncs their account with a third party application their details are kept in the user’s profile. Why then can’t Twitter just have some kind of notification that flags up when an account is growing and reducing at an alarming rate using one of these applications? It could then ban these guys whose accounts fluctuate and keep the normal users happy by giving us back a host of useful features.

I would love to offer Tweasier’s users the capacity to select all but the way the rules stand at the moment that won’t be the case for some time.

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I have written various posts on here before about identifying influential sites but I thought it was worth posting today because I have found a tool to use to make this process a whole load quicker.

The Google Chrome SEO plug-in takes all of two minutes to install and is in my opinion brilliant. It provides easy access to Search Engine Optimisation Tools that can help with analysis, keyword research, backlink Checks, PageRank Checks and other SEO tasks.

Although I have only just started to use this it seems I am late to the party as more than 150,000+ people are involved in the beta programme and I can see why.

Here is a list of the current features:

• A Keyword Research Tool
• Highlight NoFollow links
• The number of Pages Indexed
• The number of Backlinks
• Current Traffic and Rankings
• Social Bookmark counts
• Cached Versions of the page
• Domain Details like DNS, IP, Whois, Server Location
• Detects Robots.txt and Sitemap.xml

Future Features

• On page keyword analysis
• Integration with Google SERPs. Similar to SeoQuake or the SEOBook Firefox extension.
• The ability to compare site ranking stats, side by side.
• Keyword Ranking Checker to check search rankings.
• Integrate the Keyword Tool with the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to make keyword research faster.
• PPC Integration (Adwords, Adsense, Microsoft Adcenter, Yahoo Search Marketing)
  Support for Wolfram | Alpha
• Better descriptions so any Web Designer / Developer can work with the tool.
• Google Analytics Integration
• Google Chrome SEO Toolbar
• Allow Google Chrome SEO Add Ons sodevelopers can contribute plugins.

The sources it uses include: Archive.org, Alexa Rank, Compete Rank, CoralCDN, Ask, Baidu, Bing, Delicious, Digg, Dmoz, Google PageRank, MajesticSEO, Open Site Explorer, Quantcast, SEMRush, SEOmoz, Linkscape, StumbleUpon, Technorati, WebCite, Yandex Quotation Index, Yahoo.

What I like about this tool is how easy it is to use. You just land on the site you want to check click the button and all of the information is provided to you immediately.

To bring it to life a bit I have shown an example of it in action using Neville Hobson’s blog. As you can see it clearly shows all of the information you need nice and simply. I also like the statistics section which you can click on and it then takes you through to a more in-depth analysis. In my opinion this is a great tool and it’s free you can’t say fairer than that.

To download the plug-in click here.

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I have been really busy recently, with this launch and that, but in my spare time I have been reading quite a lot on the ROI of social media and scratching my head. As more and more of these amazing buzz monitoring tools spring up out of the woodwork providing us with this set of data and that, it seems the big question is still what is the return on investment from social media?

Sure data is all good and well but unless you have someone with half a brain who can process that data and tell you why this spike in conversation took place it’s pretty much useless – as useless as giving a caveman a microwave.

I am sure there are loads of brands out there monitoring social channels but not doing anything with the data they get and that’s the most important bit. If you are listening that’s great – now use that information to improve your product or service.

I was running a social media workshop with the marketing team of a well-known global brand the other day and they were saying that the most senior person in their business was regularly asking: “That’s great but where is the money?” Now for a start I do think that is a bit callous. However, let’s be honest here that’s what every business really wants – sales. Social media can be fun, help with traffic and it’s a great form of direct communication with your customers but at the end of the day the client wants to see an impact on their sales.

I have been working for another client for several months now writing and engaging on various social networks and they have regularly asked me about direct sales from social media and often I had to show them the data from the latest campaign but I did struggle to show direct sales from social media. To be honest I helped the client begin from a standing start and although they regularly acknowledged that their website’s traffic had increased by more than 300% and the most popular section of their website was their blog – the client still wanted to know the direct sales impact from running a social media campaign.

Personally, I think this is an education process for us all working in this industry. Social media is about helping the sales process but it’s far, far more than that. It has many more benefits than most other forms of marketing – don’t get me wrong I am not saying it’s not the holy grail to business success but if its executed beautifully and integrated properly with a media relations, advertising and direct mail campaign it can be hugely effective. Thankfully the client I am referring to got a £10,000 sales enquiry last week off the back of a blog post, and the client told me personally, which was nice to hear. I suppose I am saying it can take time to educate but we should all try to do our best.

So for one last time, social media isn’t about direct sales, it’s about building relationships. However, if you build strong relationships the money will eventually follow because people buy from people they like.

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As many of you know for the last six months or so I have been really busy working in online public relations both freelancing for my own clients and working as a digital consultant for the lovely people at Lucre Communications in Leeds. To be honest that’s not all I have been doing, I have also been working late at night, burning the old midnight oil to produce Tweasier which is my Twitter management application.

Why have I done this? Well over the last three years or so I have used almost every twitter tool available, apart from some of the more spammy nasty ones that we all try to avoid. There are some truly great tools out there but I felt there was a real gap in the market for a tool that would help people get more from Twitter.

It all came from an idea after I started blogging specifically just about useful Twitter tools. The Tweasier blog started to grow in stature and popularity and I started to think that maybe a tool should be developed which has some really great features.

The application is packed with helpful services, allowing Twitter users to do any of the following:

• Run, save and clone Twitter searches based on location, keywords and personal biographies so conversations can be monitored.
• Receive personalised email notifications informing the user about their activity within the Twittersphere
• Visit Tweasier’s fully equipped analytics suite – providing more than 30 different up-to-date statistics on any Twitter account. Some of the graphs and data can also be exported for use in future presentations or reports.
• Sort an account’s friends or followers by more than 20 different criteria such as: people that haven’t tweeted in the last 30 days, people that didn’t follow the user back and also prune your friends to clear an account up if necessary.
• Users can take a quick peek at Twitter conversations between two people to get both sides of the story.
• Users can read messages, tweet, direct message and even shorten long URLs using Tweasier’s dedicated Twitter client.
• Scheduled tweeting – users can write and save several tweets until later in the day
• Users can use Tweasier’s own in-house ranking system which easily shows whether a user is worth following or not

Now if you read my blog regularly you will know I have been involved in various internet projects, some of which I have shared on the blog before. However, this was much more of a substantial undertaking but thankfully we have finally managed to get it ready for beta testing. I have messaged my online buddies asking them for their feedback as I am genuinely looking to create something which helps people out. So rather than writing a post that goes on for ever, I thought I would share Tweasier’s walkthrough video with you here.

The product is only in beta testing (so please be gentle) but we are hoping its users will help us find the bugs so we can eradicate as many as possible.

For those of you more social, you can like Tweasier on Facebook, follow us on Twitter or simply subscribe to the blog.

I hope you like Tweasier but if you have any questions or you fancy an invite, feel free to drop me a line.

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