Digital Strategy 2011

This is a guest post by Tim Aldiss from his blog: aldissandmore.com ————————————————————————- The start of a new year heralds a series of articles about predictions for digital trends 1, 2, 3 for the year ahead, but instead I thought I would summarise where I believe we are after the year gone by. It’s all too easy to start by thinking by platform. For example the last 5 years at least has always been heralded as the year of mobile, and it certainly looks like this year will be the year of the tablet, but it is of course important to think platform-agnostically! It’s also easy to start by thinking about channel. Has online stolen more budget from offline, has paid media spend been nibbled away by social media investment, etc, but again here it is important to think across channels, on & offline and ‘through the line’. I believe that the most obvious trend for 2010 has been the shift towards thinking about the end results – the outcome & the user experience – and how greater understanding of this can help not only all of your marketing activity but also your business as a whole. Every business gets to a stage where it realises how important expenditure on research is. That level of awareness is added to by a mix of worry that the research may in some way not be accurate or relevant depending on the methods used. Well it is now more possible than ever to research end users, and in almost real time, to get low cost information that is ready to use. Take a look at the success metrics around Direct Line Insurance’s ‘ideas lab‘ as an example . For me this shift to the focus on the user experience is a revelation as it also reflects my decision to move out of a direct role in marketing and back into web development where, working with Cubeworks, I now have a great opportunity to align my 10 years experience in SEO with Cubeworks core strength in User Experience Design. For years Search Engine Optimisation has been the mother of channel-based strategies. It’s always been proven as the most cost effective path to new and returning customers. To an extent it still is, but the problem with search is that it is still dominated by Google, and by an algorithm that has for a long time been showing...

If It Doesn’t Spread It’s Dead

Henry Jenkins, the Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program, has written an eight post serialisation of a white paper which was developed last year for the Convergence Culture Consortium on the topic of Spreadable media. Luckily for us there’s an hour long video summary of the 8 posts, and it’s well worth a listen as it backs up Antony’s latest Connect post....

Sing-along-Friday: The Day The Media Died

SME’s – don’t be fooled by SEO link networks

Over the last couple of weeks, I have noticed that there seems to be a lot of companies offering low budget SEO work that use graphs like this to explain the powerful results of SEO: What a graph. Two companies I have looked at recently are Local Web Ring – a ‘local’ link network associated with a small web design company, and Be Found or Die – a more proffessional SEO company bidding on the term ‘search engine optimisation’. The first, although containing a number of sites that I don’t think are ‘local’, and using very blatantly optimised anchor text, is almost forgiveable because of the fact that the majority of the sites are pretty small businesses, and in the Cheshire area. The second is more suprising because I would have thought that this would not be effective for any of their clients, and that they might have been penalised for operating like this. They not only have a load of optimised text links to their clients in the footer of their homepage, as well as on links pages on their client’s websites, they also link back to their own site on ‘search engine optimisation uk’ on some of their client’s websites. Be Found or Die are not ranking in the organic results for ‘search engine optimisation uk’ but their clients seem to rank ok for the niche terms that they are going for – (Nutley Tiles on the first page for ‘marble tiles‘). Am I showing my ignorance for thinking this was an ‘old school’ SEO tactic that shouldn’t work anymore? I don’t want to – but all I can takeaway from this is: Link Networks Work *Guest post by Rob...

New kid on the block: Google Squared

Wow Google have some cool tools in dev! As well as the (below) aforementioned Google Wave Google Sqaured looks like a really clever new way of co-ordinating info from search. In fact it sits nicely against Wolfram Alpha‘s mathematical based results format presenting data in a more creative/visual type way. Have a read of what James Turner says over on the O’Reilly Radar blog, and below is a screenshot of a results page for the search term ‘2009 movie gross’. He thinks it’s a game...