KAI CARPS ON TWITTER

He’s not even a week old but such is the instant fame of Kai Wayne Rooney that there is even a Twitter page (@KaiWayne) dedicated to his every move.

It’s pretty clear, with only the briefest glance at his profile photo – a tiny Shrek figure in a nappy – that this isn’t a Rooney-sanctioned Twitter page but, so engaging and downright hilarious are the tweets, it already (after just two days) has 160 followers.

For sport pundits and aficionados of comedy it is a must read. At this stage there is no clue who the real author may be – that’s a whole other Twitter debate yet to be acted out – but, whoever the pen-meister behind the page, he’s a comic genius.

Try this on for size……..

“Blimey! Just reading mummy’s copy of ‘Hello’ and learn that Fergie used to be married to Prince Andrew. Like Elton and David I suppose.”

or….

“Really pleased my surname is Rooney and not Ropractor.”

If that doesn’t hit the spot what about……

“Nev’s telling me about the Pally & Bruce era of 94. Funny, I saw Mr Bruce on the telly earlier. I wonder why he ate Mr Pallister.”

or……

“I wonder if David Ngog’s middle name is Wash?”

It’s like a written version of Spitting Image and uses all the old comedy tricks to vividly paint a picture of what life should be like in the Rooney household right now, with added comedy bells.

Now, while there are lots of ‘fake’ celebrity pages currently residing on Twitter, I’m hazarding a guess that this is one which won’t be reported as spam by anyone.

If only, when Kai does eventually get his own social media page, it could be as entertaining as this.

The tabloids need to do a bit of digging and get hold of whoever is behind the page and give them their own column. If the Queen’s reading this – give the man a knighthood. It’s the best thing online by a country mile right now.

I’ll leave you with the Kai tweet that had me rolling this morning.

“Dad, why is mum called Colin? Are you like, one of those new couples?”

Class.

Adam Moss
Brazen News Editor

Ok so to get started you will need to login to analytics and click on the visitors option in the menu and select hostnames. This will display a list of all the urls including non WWW ones and how many visits have been made to each one. Hopefully the non www one won’t be to high.

Now er need to go a little deeper to find the links themselves. You will need to click on the non www version link and then once the new page has loaded click on the referral option in the advanced segment drop down. Finally you will need to select source in the dimension drop down. All the urls will then be displayed.

As you can see they are pretty quick and easy to find and can be a really useful tool in your seo campaign.

For a long time searches for music and bands has bought up fan sites which give little information for people searching directly for songs or albums. For example many people will be looking for a new album by a band they like but not necessarily know the name of that album. Trying to find that new album would be difficult with the current set-up as users would have to click through several pages on a site. This is not ideal as users want information quickly and easily.

The new service will display a thumbnail, background info, review links and most importantly a preview button. This will allow people to listen to short extracts of music and then have the option to purchase that music. Of what i have read users should be able to buy from other services including ITunes. This will be an important inclusion as Google won’t want to be seen as being unfair. Also Itunes has a huge user base.

Of course we will be able to see just how the service will work on wednesday and it should hopefully transform the way we find out about music on Google.

Just leave a comment below (with your correct Gmail address and also your Twitter name) to enter. We will announce the winner at 3pm (UK Time) today.

Get two entries if you retweet my message on Twitter

Competition now closed – Winner was Dan Alderson

The problems presented by Adwords are set to be removed by Google’s new Local Listing Ads. The name pretty much implies what it is. Essentially they are geographically targeted lisings which show above map listings which show above map listings in search. These ads are unlike Adwords in the fact that they just display the business name, url and contact details. The screenshot below gives you an idea of how they look.

Local listing ads will be charged at a flat rate starting at £20 a month. Businesses who want to use the new system must be in Google Local Business listings and the trial is currently only available in San Francisco and San Diego. The service also offers full tracking and if your business has a unique online number it can track that to.

I personally think the idea will be very attractive to small businesses as it requires no maintenance. It can also be setup very easily and show provide better coverage than sites such as Yell. I also think it will be interesting to see how well it works in the UK (if rolled out here). At PushON we tried a similar system offered by Yahoo and found the results fairly disappointing.

As always Google have put together a nice little video about the service which you can see below.

Of courses we are talking about the latest and LAST episode of The Factory which we helped launch today. In this last episode David returns to the K3 offices to find much has changed during his six month tour. The locks have changed and his much loved company car has been replaced with a bicycle. So what does the future hold for David?

Find out by watching the latest teaser for episode 7 below:

http://www.k3scs.com/the-factory/episode-seven/7/

For PushON the Factory campaign has been an unusual one and has allowed us to test many forms of social media and various different video sites. The findings in essence haven’t been suprising as many of the things we expected to work have and it’s been a thoroughly enjoyable process.

The campaign was of course given a commendation at this years Big Chip Awards and the video’s have been posted on some great sites such as that of Mel Carson. This was our personal favourite in terms of placements but the results for the campaign were also pleasing. The first video for example gained just under nine thousand views and the number of signup’s for the full episodes was high.

To watch the full episode just head on over to the mini site. We hope you guys have enjoyed the series and look forward to working on projects like this in the future.

Google is launching Google Wave soon.  This is a new model for communication and collaboration on the web using HTML 5.  They are encouraging developers to get involved before the official launch so they have further examples of applications ready for the roll out.

But will it solve the ongoing debate about whether you follow an email tread with your reply at the top like Outlook, or at the bottom like in forums… or will it just add a third option to confuse us all and start the next argument?

Yes, there’s a certain arrogance to them (one character in Mad Men observes that Sterling Cooper, the agency at the centre of the series, “has more failed artists and intellectuals than the Third Reich”). There’s a lack of respect for their audience – and very often their clients as well. But there’s also a lie.

As everyone now knows, traditional advertising is broken. The recession has only accelerated the recognition of digital marketing as more controllable, more measurable and simply more effective. Hands up the guy who’s still searching for “advertising agency”.

Companies have begun shifting their marketing spend to digital. But what many brands are really shifting online are traditional content and old-school attitudes. Going digital is about more than PDFing your catalogue, popping a TV ad on your site or buying a banner on Wired. It’s about fundamentally changing the way you interact with your customers.

Because what is really obsolete is the concept of a polished message and a passive audience. Digital is not about telling people how great your brand is; it’s about them telling you how great your brand is. Or how terrible. It’s not about a single, perfect vision of your brand; it’s about thousands of ill-considered, un-grammatical, pointless, mad, passionate, but above all authentic tweets, e-mails, comments, blog posts and reviews.

As a brand, you can’t control this conversation. You may not like what they’re saying, but you can’t stop them saying it. You can choose only to ignore it or to join in.

As a digital agency, our first job is not to produce perfect copy or pretty websites (though we have built some doozies). We’re about creating opportunities for people to engage with your brand online and for you to engage back. And we’ve just inherited the Earth.

built by Media Spin

The immediate answer would be right now but if you have an old site and are thinking of upgrading it then this might be the time to launch an SEO campaign. Companies such as the Venture Hotels Group have recently invested in a new site and decided on running an SEO / online marketing campaign. They had a clear understanding of the need to develop new guest opportunities and improving the online presence of the site. The group had seven hotels and decided to bring it into one simple and easy to use website. Launching a campaign at this time can be extremely effective as you can alter the design, feel, navigation and usability of a site to fall inline with your SEO campaign. So for example you can look at keyword theming and site navigation.

You may be wondering why SEO is so important however these stats might give you a small insight:

The top result on a search page gets 42% of the clicks
The top 3 results get 79% of the clicks
The top 5 get 88% of clicks

Put simply if your not on the first page then the likelihood of your hotel being found is greatly reduced. Although hotels are found in many ways this is a huge opportunity and can be an effective place for hotels to spend their marketing budgets.

So to the good stuff…..

Hotel SEO Tactics

We could spend a lot of time going in to the various different tactics but I wanted to discuss some of the key areas in which you should look at optimising your hotel site.

Firstly looking at geographically based search. Many users when looking for hotels will search by location. For example if your looking for a hotel in Chester then you may use the search term Chester Hotels. This is because people are going to get much more relevant search results rather than lets say searches for just hotels. It is important to take advantage of this through the SEO of your site.

Optimising your site for geographical searches is usually fairly straight forward. It’s a case of optimising your content and page titles for these geographical terms. You would for instance want to look at title tags, page headings and of course content. Hotel owners can also take advantage of Google local business listings. This provides a quick and easy win for geographical searches.

The other key area hotels will need to look at is the booking process. The booking process can have a huge impact on your conversions (bookings) and requires careful planning and analysis. If users find it difficult to make a booking then they are likely to go elsewhere. Hotel owners need to optimize the site so that it is easy for users to make bookings. You effectively need to optimize the process.

Tools like Google Analytics can be used to monitor and measure the performance of your booking process. Any site owner should be using tools like Google Analytics to measure the effectiveness of their SEO campaigns.

Beyond SEO

Of course optimising your site is just beginning, as successful hotels will make use of other innovative online marketing techniques to promote their hotels. Social media and review sites provide plenty of opportunities to interact with potential guests. For example many people use Trip Advisor to help make decisions on which hotels to stay at. Hotels can do certain things to improve the feedback left on these sites and identify key issues for visitors.

Content also plays a valuable part in a campaign. People need to know about attractions and facilities in the area of your hotel. You need to give people a reason to stay with you. Providing guides can be invaluable and researching what customers want is key.

The key to any SEO campaign is research, testing, analyzing and developing. You need to set out objectives and find what your customers are looking for. Once you have done this you can implement your plans and begin testing. Once testing is on progress you should analyze your results. Then you must make changes to improve the campaign.

Length of Training: 26 weeks (6 months)
Training Allowance: You will get a training allowance for your attendance on this placement, which will be comparable to an entry level salary in the industry
Location: Manchester
Placement Start Date: September 2009
Placement Finish Date: March 2010

About the Company

PushON are an award winning online marketing agency who diferentiate themselves via their technical expertise and ethical approach to online marketing.

About the Placement

The Trainee Online Marketer will have the opportunity to work with the PushON team in fulfilling client needs across SEO, PPC management, online PR, blogging and copywriting. This is a unique opportunity for an individual who is already turned on to the potential of digital marketing and PR.

Placement End

By the end of this placement the trainee can expect to have worked hands-on on accounts for high profile, demanding clients with one of the region’s leading agencies in this field. Your training and development will be bespoke with the aim of arriving at the point where your business knowledge, creative abilities and technical insight are at the level where you can confidently manage your own client base.

Person Specification for Trainee Placement

You need to be able to demonstrate a strong prior interest in this particular area of the digital industries – a degree in subjects such as e-business or marketing / digital marketing would be useful, but not essential as long as you can demonstrate the right level of understanding in the following:

•    SEO
•    PPC Management
•    Blogging
•    PR
•    Copywriting
•    Basic web development / HTML

This knowledge can have come from studies, work experience or voluntary activities – ideally a mix of all three and hands-on wherever possible.

Eligibility

To be eligible for this opportunity you must:
•    Be over 18
•    Reside in the Northwest of England (Cheshire, Cumbria, Greater Manchester, Lancashire, Merseyside)
•    Have LESS than 12 months’ PAID experience in the industry
•    Demonstrate a commitment to a career in the interactive and digital industries through a combination of education, training and work experience

Northwest Vision and Media are funding the succesful candidatetrainee. So the application process is via them.

Just to really underline the point, the people who we like to employ have got off their backside and already done something demonstrably digital. It may be running a blog. It may be running a small website. There are so many easy things that you can do online to develop skills. You wouldnt believe the amount of CVs we get where the applicant hasn’t done a thing online. I’m thinking this is turning into another blog post about how to get into the industry….