Indulgence Cupcake Company

Indulgence Cupcake Company is one of Brighton’s best online only cupcake bakery and delivery service. They came to us to help them get their business online having no online presence. Find out how we helped them rake in the orders!

Just Perfect Wedding Cars

Just Perfect Wedding Cars is West Sussex’s premier wedding car hire company. This was the first venue into online for the company. Their brief was to build a stylist and simple website that would showcase their wedding cars. Once the site was up and running we implemented a paid search campaign to start driving high quality, targeted traffic to the site to start generating bookings.

Further to this Revolution reported on the study, raising questions over the ability to use smart phone apps for brand building.

In our opinion, it only goes to confirm the fundamental rule when create any content for online. Make it relevant and useful to the user.

If you have ventured onto the iTunes App Store you will see that it is awash with low quality, “spammy” apps which are either being given away for a short period or for a low price (59p).

The viral effect of big brand apps such as the Carling iPint works wonders, but you don’t see Apple promoting it on the iPhone TV Ads!

“Want to look like your are drinking a simulated pint, instead of actually drinking a pint? There’s a app for that” No!

Why? Because it provides no added value to the iPhone other than a bit of a giggle.

To ensure that the your app is going to do your brand justice you need to plan your app with the following in mind:

• Long last engagement
• Short term, viral effect

Long term engagement

These are the apps that are going to last longer than 90 days.  Specific to a users needs, some brands are going to have to be very inventive to ensure people keep these on their phone for longer.

Examples of this might be, a major high street bank creates a money management app to help keep their finances in check.  Ora cinema might create an app to keep movie lovers up to today with the latest releases, showing times and offers.

Smart phones are the sexy, quicky cousin of the humble PC. They don’t want lots of little apps cluttering up their screens. Chances are they won’t last that long.

Short term, viral effect

If you are going after this market then expect these to be the apps that this research is talking about.  These kinds of apps with have a short shelf life as users become bored of the same functionality which provides little or no value.  Once you’ve bored yourself and all your friends with it, chances are you’ll be deleting it!

A possible way to increase the retention is to update the app with different versions to improve the appeal.  Pocket God on the iPhone is a good example of this, like a cyber pet you keep alive, each update has new features and quirky updates to keep people interested and engaged.

Reality is that much like a viral campaign via email, you will need to create a lot of smaller, regular apps and updates to keep it alive.

Own an iPhone? Please take this 3 question survey based on this research.

Microsoft give their reasons for doing so, but it seems as a low swipe at the EU. You can read the full story here.

Personally, I am a Windows user, this is another thing that has made me seriously consider purchasing a mac.

And our recommendation, if you are reading this on Internet Explorer, is to download a proper Internet browser.

It’s a great example of how not to do things using Twitter. That should be self-evident. Habitat have said that the use of these hashtags was not authorised, but did not say who had used them (Source: BBC News). They have since apologised for the mess up, but it seems the damage has already been done.

But it looks like people are jumping on the bandwagon and following suit.

Habitat Fail, others follow suit

See this very recent example of promoting products and services by using the conversations around the release of the Transformers 2 movie. There are many more like these on Twitter right now.

As with everything online, people will find a way to abuse the system for their own gain. Facebook went through the same, when they started letting third parties develop applications. People’s profiles were awash with invitations to “bite people as vampires”. Not today thanks, I’ve just had lunch!

So, we face a barrage of spam on Twitter against popular subjects. This erodes the credibility of Twitter and the people that tweet genuinely.

Let’s hope that Twitter do something to stop this, ASAP.

For those who don’t know, “facesquatting” is term recently given to one person holding a Facebook vanity URL, that another deems does not belong to them.

I’m being facetious, but it brings up an interesting subject around personal brands online.

I own the URL www.jeremyjacobs.co.uk; I don’t own www.jeremyjacobs.com. I was doing a little SEOing on my own website when I came across an article from the people at Morgan PR. Someone has posted a comment mentioning my URL. For an instant I thought, is someone accusing me of cybersquatting on a URL of my own name? It got me thinking about cybersquatting on personal names.

Now, if a person buys a domain with the knowledge that a brand will want to purchase it in the future, I believe this is wrong. There has to be some governance. It makes the web easier to navigate and use. If I type in www.itunes.com, I want to go to iTunes, not a website knocked together by a 12 year old filled with Adsense ads.

What about personal brands?

So you have two people with the same name. Who gets the online brand?

Personal brands are not as widely trademarked as business brands, but is there going to be a shift? Personally, I was tempted to fight Paris Hilton over the “That’s Hot” trademark, but soon gave up…

Reviewing many legal cases, people who have tried to trademark and protect their name have found it difficult to do so. Unless you have a rare name, that is strongly associated with a product or service, then it is unlikely to sit well in court. With more people trying to sell themselves online, this could become a contentious issue with more legal battles over the ownership of a personal name. So how can you prevent this?

How to manage multiple personalities on search engines

If you notice that there are other people coming up in search results against your name, you will want to manage this relationship. It may be that this person is totally unaware and if you are happy to leave things be, then do. If not:

Get in contact – introduce yourself and explain what is occurring. If they are optimised for their own name, then chances are they will be aware of how they got themselves there, making the conversation easier. Reference this article in your email. Above all be friendly.

Remember - search engines are online reputation management systems. If they deem that your website is relative to your name, then there is no point trying to knock the other person off the listings. This is egotistical.

Page titles – ensure your pages have a succinct description of your name and what you do. Mine would be “Jeremy Jacobs – Online marketing expert and amateur photographer”. Then people can see easily from the listings who is who, making it easy for them to navigate around.

Write a good description – ensure the meta descriptions on your pages clearly explain who you are and what you do. These will be used in the search results as the text below the blue title. This will reduce any confusion.

Relax - unless the other person does exactly the same profession as you, then there is little to worry about. People searching for that person may have a look around, but they’ll know what they are looking for.

More often than not, there is little reason to rock the boat. If you are having problems, then try the friendly approach to try and resolve any issues amicably.

FYI, I have been in contact with the owner of www.jeremyjacobs.com and we’ve agree that we operate in separate fields, so we’ll continue on as is.

Dell’s example sets a good benchmark on how a company integrates social media tools into their business. Their next challenge is to help “revolutionise” their business.

Marketing people don’t work in customer services and customer service people don’t work in marketing; there may be good reason for that. But there will always be an argument for integrating marketing and customer service departments, or at the very least having them sat next to one another. This has never been so important as social media spreads.

How can social media help companies with bad customer service?

If you have had a bad customer service experience with a company, then you probably have felt:

• They don’t listen to your complaints
• They don’t care what you have to say
• They are only interested in themselves

These all go against the qualities needed to succeed in social media. You have to listen, engage and respond to your customers. If they are actively participating in conversations around your brand, then they have a desire to interact with your brand. Even if they are complaining, people generally complain because they want something resolved. If your product or service is that good, then chances are they want you to make it all better, so they can forgive you and start buying from you again!

Help, what do I do now?

Integrate - you might be scratching your head thinking, who is going to run our social media? Marketing or customer service? Answer: Both. At the very least, get weekly meetings between the people running your social media campaigns and your customer service department. Ideally the people running your social media campaign would straddle the two.

Monitor – use online tools or a social media agency to monitor online conversations around your brand. People online will not be coming to you to complain. Social media gives the common consumer a voice. It enables them to find other people with the same interests and concerns and discuss these. That might be positive or negative.

Listen – to what you customers are saying. Share the feedback from your social media campaigns with the customer service department. They will be able to advise on how to respond. Share feedback from the customer service department on complaints coming in from email and telephone. Pre-empt your online audience by identifying a problem and providing a solution. You’ll get points for that.

Respond - it’s no good listening and not responding. It’s a bit like talking to a brick wall; the speaker will walk away quickly. Even if you can’t provide a good response there and then, buy yourself some time. There is nothing wrong with saying you’ll get back to someone. As long as you do. Remember to respond to positive comments; these people will become greater brand advocates.

Listen again – ensure that the conversations online continue on a positive route. With social media you are opening up issues to a wider audience. You might find that someone else will jump on the band wagon if they are not happy with your response. Even though they did not start the conversation, you have to start a conversation with them.

Be careful – a brand entering a private conversation between consumers has to be careful. If the company goes about it in the wrong way, then this can do more harm than good. You need to be gentle in your approach and show the consumer that you are only interested in helping them. This is not a place for brand promotion. Leave that out!

Luckily for our clients, our business is built on a team with backgrounds in customer service and marketing, so we are experts at improving customer service through social media.

Searching on twitter is more passive and recreational than using a search engine. People will be interested in conversations rather than actively seeking a piece of information. Thinking carefully about how you write your tweets and using the correct words and tone will help to promote your business.

Optimising your tweets

All the major twitter platforms, including the web interface, have a search facility. This enables users to search for a particular phrase that interests them and see who is tweeting about that topic. They can then follow this person’s tweets.

To start growing your online audience, consider doing the following:

Keyword rich tweets – you have 140 characters, use them wisely. Think about your audience and the keywords they might use to find your product or service. Use your existing research to help you. Search campaigns, other social media, web logs are all good places to start.

Search for your own terms - find out what people using those keywords are saying. Think of it as a little competitor analysis. Do you fit in? If not then try some similar searches.

Make it natural - you should not stuff your tweets full of keywords, it should still read well.

Use hashtags to incorporate keywords – you can use these in your tweets to include keywords which do not fit in naturally. Simple place a # in front of your keyword and remove all the spaces; now you have a hashtag. Your tweet will show up against those searches.

• For example: #seo #search #searchengines
• Be aware that you will need to include plurals and that Twitter cannot differentiate between two words in a hashtag. So #mobilephones will be picked up on searches for “mobilephones” and “mobile” but not “mobile phones”.

Use URL shorteners -  this will free up space and allow for more keywords. If your URLs are already keyword rich, you may want to use the full URL. If not, use a service like bit.yl and then add parameters to the URL rich in keywords. This is a great way to get keywords in without ruining the flow of your tweet.

• For example: http://bit.ly/1a0ULG?topic=seo will work and help increase the keywords. The parameter is the bit from the “?”. Format them “?topic=keyword”

Shorten, shorten, shorten – your text. Strip out unnecessary words, use ampersand (&) instead of “and” etc., use numbers (22) instead of numbers (twenty two). Think like you’re writing a text message.

Find a suitable time - broadcast when your audience is most likely to be search/watching. Try different times and watch the response rate. This might be when people are on their lunch break or on a Friday afternoon. Don’t be tweeting your breaking news story at 2am!

Provide value - as with all marketing, give your audience a reason to follow you. Offer free advice, the latest industry news or your opinion. Do it on a regular basis to gain a following.

Choose a personality – when writing your tweets try to keep your tone consistent. No one wants to follow an irrational tweeter, but do show your personality. This is a great place to show your audience the open, fun side of you. Leave the corporate facelessness for your dull print brochures.

Make a pretty profile - ensure you have completed your profile with a link to your website. Perhaps change the colour scheme from the norm, create an avatar and put up a background. See our twitter page for an example.

Things to be aware of:

We encourage you to take all of this advice when you next tweet, but remember the following:

Don’t over tweet -  unless you have tons of interesting updates that provide value, your followers will become irritated and stop listening. We’d suggest no more than an average of one tweet an hour. Don’t retweet the same stuff!

Don’t be afraid to block - it’s not a race to get as many followers as possible, remember quality, not quantity. You want relevant follows who share an interest. Unfortunately there are spammers who will follow people just to get followed back. Block these people if you feel it is necessary.

Follow them – if someone has followed you and they are relevant to you, follow them. It’s polite and it shows that you are interested in what they have to say, building a better relationship.  It’s not all you, you, you!

The main point to take from this is to be yourself and provide value. Don’t over do it; few people enjoy aggressive marketing, especially in a social space like Twitter.

• Tweet Beep – alerts you via email when your brand or keyword is mentioned with hourly updates.
• Tweet Later – software for automating your tweets
• Tweetmeme - Tweet aggregate service, finds the most popular tweets. Great WordPress plugin as used on this site

Our favourites so far are the WordPress and Font apps!

Let us know what your favourites are!

Blogging has brought about a new era of publishing. Anyone with with a laptop and internet access can get online and publish their thoughts, views and opinions to the world. Some will proudly stamp their name all over; some will hide behind the screen.

A recent court case over the identity of a controversial blogger in the UK has threatened that anonymity and could have implications in the future.

Give a man a pen and he’ll write for a day, give a man a blog and he’ll write for a lifetime.

Masking your identify in writing can be beneficial in writing. It’s rather exciting to know that “ladydeli70″ who works for your local branch of Asda is blogging about the true goings on of your local deli counter! Well, perhaps it is to me. If her identity was known then she wouldn’t be dishing up meaty treats much longer.

Anonymity in blogging is not always a good thing though. We encourage brands to create identities in their business, who blog externally. This creates a close connection with an otherwise “faceless” brand. We also encourage the brand to be open and honest with their customers, especially in light of any breaking news. That leaves less chance of red-faced corporate bosses when the 18 year old sandwich maker starts rubbing snot on your sub! “Yes, we sacked the idiots” is the response we want, and got, from Dominos.

The judge in the “Night Jack” case felt that the identity of the blogger was necessary to help people assess the validity of the story. But in this instance, the blogger would have not been able to continue for fear of being disciplined or fired. Resulting in a very short spell as a blogger providing the exposé on the police force.

With any story you hear, you judge its validity based on the source of the information. If you have a reason to distrust the source, you distrust the story. It’s a blessing and curse that anyone can blog. It gives voice to anyone who wants to let people know their views on something. But at the same time the good content is often drowned out by complete dross. This makes it difficult to find good content for continually having to judge the reliability of everything you read.

The future of anonymous blogging

WARNING, here be sensationalism: So it seems that the courts have decided that our identities are no long sacred in the online world of blogging! If the courts decide that the interest of the public in knowing the identity of the writer outweighs the impact of unmasking them, then you’re no longer safe behind your computer.

Run for the hills, big brother is coming

Perhaps the cynic’s view is that it’s just the establishment using their power to unmask these people. Others might argue that your days as an anonymous artist are numbered. Do we know who Banksy is yet?

Although this is just one case, it raises the issue of protecting your identity online. It’s a wonderful thing that the truth can be exposed, providing it is the truth and not slander. But if is the norm for cases like these, then we may lose one of the biggest advantages of blogging, freedom of speech.

This post was written by Jeremy Jacobs, owner of The Digital Consultant

• Read the full BBC article on the “Night Jack” case

The Digital Britain report was published last Tuesday, a road map set out by the government for the digital future of Britain. We won’t discuss the ins-and-outs of whether digital is a good/bad thing. We sit firmly in the good camp.

The government has promised to give all UK homes a minimum of 2Mbps broadband. The leading digital inclusion charity, Citizens Online, say this is not good enough. We’re inclined to agree! 2Mbps is too slow!

Debate aside, even if the government do achieve their goal, will people use it? Let’s have a look at how these digital “luddites” could be divided:

The uninformed

For those outside of the digital industry a lot of what we, inside, talk about is a whole different language. Make something relevant to them and people will take an interest. People need to have a motivation to do something rather than be told they must do it.

That might be “I need a job and need to know how to email” or “I want an easy way to connect with friends across the global and find out what they are up to”. There are plenty of digital solutions that work great, until people are informed about these then we cannot place an expectation for them to know.

It’s fair to say, digital is all over the press, Facebook and Twitter two of the biggest. So it’s quite difficult not hear mentions of it. But is there a need to know how to use twitter? Perhaps not. But the need of basic computer skills and writing an email, for example, are skills needed in today’s age, ss much as reading and writing.

Solution: Make it accessible, make it friendly, make it easy. There are too many arrogant people in the digital industry that hold the common person over a barrel with their “knowledge”. Luckily there are just as many who want to help.

The fearful

People who fear technology are likely to do so because they don’t understand it and become frustrated when people are telling them that “they have to be on Facebook”. They may not see the benefit or show an unwillingness to understand the benefit stating that their “life has been perfectly fine until now”. Digital technology does not have to take over your whole life, it can be about improving and enriching your experiences.

Solution: Inform, much like you would the uninformed. If people can understand the benefits outside of what the cynical media channels tell them then this is a great step. From then on it’s about showing them how.

The ambivalent

What, there’s a thing called the Internet? There’s probably, hopefully, not a lot of these people around. But it is likely that this group are late adopters of technology. Not a threat to development but probably will be the last to arrive.

Solution: Buy them a laptop for their next birthday

The resistant

This group are going to be the ones who will cause the most trouble. Think the Luddites of the early 19th century! Riots on the streets (OK, perhaps a little dramatic). These people will probably under up living underground “Demolition Man” style.

Solution: Help show the benefits that digital technology can bring to lives and realise it doesn’t have to be all consuming. There is an off switch, well for now there is .

This post was written by Jeremy Jacobs, owner of The Digital Consultant

• The Citizens Online article on the Digital Britain report.