Are you making the most of Social Spoof?

It’s no joke. Is there an easier or cheaper way to get over 1.7 million people to watch your videos online? Persuade 30,000 Twitter users to follow your every move? or even generate support from tens of thousands of Facebook users for marketing plans you are thinking of putting into full scale production?

But where to start? It is hard to be funny and topical, and even harder to turn your ideas into a viral online campaign which captures the imagination of internet audiences. But don’t be scared. You won’t know if you can unless you try, and the result could be a fun project which generates huge interest and fantastic results.

To ease you in here’s our guide for getting you thinking on the right lines;

Audience: Always follow crowds online. If there is plenty of buzz around a news story or celebrity you’re probably onto something topical and widely shared on social networking sites already. This saves you the time of generating the initial awareness on the topic so you can get on with being creative.

Critically make sure that the audiences you are finding are similar to or the same as your business’ target market.

The next key consideration with your audience is judging where you can take the conversation forward to retain or build on the buzz already created.

Anecdote: Think of how you can make your point by creating something radically different but also recognisable to an audience. How? Try flipping the situation on it’s head. The recent news story of Mary Bale (the woman who put the cat in the bin) has been excellently parodied by video pranksters who have depicted the Lola the cat exacting revenge in a like-for-like attack on her assailant.

Not hugely imaginative but over 200,000 hits generated.

You could also play on a personal trait which is understated but obvious. This has been done on the fake Twitter accounts of countless celebrities, perhaps most notably with Cheryl Kerl; the Geordie alter ego of Xfactor judge Cheryl Cole.

Adapt : Once you have found the story or idea which generates interest you will have to bring it back to your business area. What’s the method? The obvious solution is to link back to your site but this may look like an obvious plug. Try publicising the spoof on your own website to increase traffic, repeat visits and rapport building with your customers.

You may also consider using your spoof profile to pull large numbers of your target market to one place on additional social media platforms. Once your audience  is captivated you can support conversations with online advertising and links to your other official pages on these sites which generate sales and enquiries.

Activation: What are your options for starting up? A fully integrated agency can help you set up any number of options from a bespoke Twitter account to a viral Facebook group or video. You may even decide to go a step further and develop a microsite like the clever people at ‘CompareTheMeercat.com’.

Whatever your preferred option Quba has the experts and know how to make a spoof deliver more than laughs.

So, do you have a spoof campaign you want to run? Then give us a call on 0114 279 7779. Simples!

Conventional marketing demands that you know what your customer would want from your product (or service). A marketer must be able to answer these questions:
• What need would the product satisfy?
• What features would it have?
• How your product would be different from your competitors’?
Conversations in Social search can lead to ideas on developing innovations and new products. Social search can also help ‘expose’ a new brand in the search stratosphere. A new product can be virally marketed. Users’ conversation on social media and social search platforms can help marketers’ distil their products’ benefits to customers.

Place:
Kotler’s second P focuses on the marketer’s knowledge of the place to market their product.
• Where would the buyers look for the product?
• Would they want to buy it online, in-store, or through a catalogue?
• What distribution channels would the marketer need to consider?

How can social search help you here? You could start off by asking a quick question on your product (say you are in the leisure sector) followed by the name of a location.
From the answers that you receive, you could gather information on how people identify with your product in your intended locations. Moreover, you would be able to gather users’ affinity for using the product/service in the locations thus giving you an idea of the demand for a new product in that location. 

Price:
Marketers very often go wrong on this aspect of the marketing. Questions that need to be answered are:
• How would the product  be valued by the buyer?
• How are similar products priced?
• What discounts could be offered to segments in the market?

Social search can get your target audience talking on what they might be paying already for a similar product/service or what they would be happily willing to pay. You could obtain information on what their expectations are for a price that they pay. You could even find out if your target audience is price- sensitive. The knowledge might enable you to expand on to a high-end version of the product from a budget version that you might have planned earlier.

Promotion:
Finally, the fourth P is where marketers can get really creative. Promoting the product would mean knowing:
• Where the marketing messages are to be sent out to the target audience?
• Would it be advertising in mainstream media or other channels?
• When would be the best time to promote and how are competitor products being promoted?

Social search would work very well for promoting your product. The social media is a fantastic place where campaigns can go viral, with businesses reaping heavy benefits. Competitions, discounts and give-aways work exceedingly well on the web and are bound to get noticed and talked about in questions posed by eager deal hunters on social search platforms.
Want to know more about social search? Why not give us a call on 0114 279 7779.

These three sites have really impressed me for completely different reasons and all stand a great chance of coming out of the recession in fine shape. So I thought I’d give you my analysis of why I think these websites stand out in a tricky marketplace.

Navigation

http://www.alibaba.com/

This international business to business listings service acts as a fantastic portal for buyers and sellers from in the West right through to emerging markets in the Far East such as Vietnam. Planners at Alibaba have been busy revamping their homepage to include a social search facility and have also been devising innovative offline branding initiatives such as TV ads to promote the site. This form of integrated strategy is brilliant for generating high volumes of traffic.

The use of customer testimonials and commodity pricing feeds on the homepage have also added to establishing brand credibility. In a market dominated by Ebay this was essential. The use of both a search form and expandable left hand navigation caters for the different kinds of users which the site is looking to attract and the overall usability is excellent. Advanced product filters help users find information quickly and if they have queries they can even contact suppliers using live chat to discuss product specifications.  Online payment is also reassuringly simple.

Design

http://mclaren.com/

Stunning images, quality graphics and innovatively blended e-commerce and social media. This is a site which you simply can’t leave. The strongest point of this site is the way that all the silky features here have been used to showcase the abilities of McLaren, not the people who built their site.

Social media links and interactive downloads on this site are really hard to refuse and work brilliantly as calls to action. Text and video are also used collaboratively to push the brand home and entice users to sign up and come back again and again; I don’t really like motorsport, I can’t drive and I still signed up to their newsletter.

Lesson Learned: Creating a great looking well branded site with interesting content will always prompt interaction.

Social Media

http://www.breakingtweets.com/

“Twitter is great but so much of it is random personal opinions and I get frustrated”

If you’re like me and wish that Twitter was more organised and relevant this is the site for you. It is no frills, up to date, useful information which you can use to see what is trending on Twitter at any given moment. The site is controlled by Twitter editors who surf through millions of Tweets to find posts which are relevant to specific interest areas. As more and more online news sources go to a subscription model these sites will get more and more popular.

Lesson Learned: Well organised user generated content can be really interesting and useful.

If you like our thinking and have a site which you are looking to revamp why not give us a call on 0114 279 7779 and let us help you boom out of the recession.

You may remember the late 90’s when Ask Jeeves was the top dog search engine (at least in this country…for me). It encouraged you to ask a question to a butler called Jeeves (he’s recently come back from holiday too) in order to deliver your answers.

Well, from personal experience at least, this search query type hasn’t gone away. And it can be a huge source of targeted traffic.

According to Hitwise, search engine queries are getting longer. I believe that this should in part be attributed to the rise of sites such as Yahoo Answers and the Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) sections of websites. Personally, I constantly search for question-related queries in order to find an instance where someone has asked the same question and received an answer.

So how do you optimise for question-related queries – and how do you find the right ones to focus on?

How to optimise for questions

Optimising for question-related queries is easy. As mentioned, you may have a FAQ section on your website, so you can put them in there. Or you could put the question as a title of a blog post and answer it.

A better method (to potentially increase conversion rate) is to include questions in the formatting of your product pages i.e. use questions as headings.

The more specific the questions you answer, the more likely you are to answer the final question of a user that is ready to buy. And if the product is right in front of them then they are more likely to do so from your site.

For example, say you sell…memory cards. You could structure your memory card product page copy with the following headings – using general questions first and working down to more specific ones:

What is a memory card?

How do memory cards work?

How much can you store on a memory card?

…and so on.

Finding which questions to focus on

Finding the right questions to focus on is harder. Google Keyword Tool won’t really help you out. However, if you’re willing to spend a little bit of money, then Wordtracker is a brilliant source of question queries. Simply think of some question words (who, where, what, how etc.), combine them with your product/service (memory cards) and search to see what comes up.

For more information give us a call on 0114 279 7779.

Founded in 1984, Park House Healthcare manufactures care equipment, used in hospitals and care homes around the world. Their beds, mattresses and accessories provide comfort for those who suffer from immobility making movement more comfortable.

The new site, www.parkhouse-hc.com, features an interactive regional map and vastly improved navigation to help users find services and products they need quickly. This is the latest in a line of medical website builds from Quba who have also completed builds for Medilink and the Healthcare Finance Management Association since 2008.

Park House sales and marketing director Peter Carroll said: “We were really impressed with Quba’s knowledge of online priorities in our sector so working with them was reassuring.

“Our site was in need of a revamp so to finally have something in place which serves our customers better is excellent. We’re looking forward to seeing how the site interacts with our users and excited by the prospect of using our new Content Management System to enhance our online presence.”

Quba project manager Charlie Hill added: “We always enjoy working with organisations like Park House who are trying to make a difference in the quality of people’s lives; so to have completed this project on budget and to a high standard is really rewarding.

“On this project all members of the team were focussed on delivering major usability enhancements. The changes we have made vastly improves the visibility of Park House products on the web, which in turn increases the chances of people who could need Park House equipment finding their services.

This could improve their quality of life and it’s great seeing the human impact that usability changes can make on sites we are involved in like this.”

Apparently most children grow up to become still more inquisitive adults in nature (at least in my case), which must have been in some way been the premise of social search.

So, what is social search?

Social search incorporates the wisdom of real people rather than of the semantic wisdom of search engines for queries that range from “What is the best dog food brand that I could buy?” to “How do I plan a wedding?” In a way social search is more an extension of the social media available online. Though social search sites began cropping up a few years ago, it’s never been as exciting as now for marketers to tap into the potential of what social search sites can offer for promoting brands.

Fluther is one such social search site that creates a ‘trusted community that shares diverse experience and knowledge’. The free question and answer service gets more than 700,000 unique visitors each month where users have until now answered more than a million questions. Fluther founders Ben Finkel and Andrew McClain, see their service as a tool for “knowledge-networking.”

More such Q&A sites that are populating the internet include Quora, Hunch, ChaCha as well as the recently purchased Aardvark. Aardvark was bought for a nice sum of $50 million by Google sparking interest among investors for other social search sites.

What does social search mean for business?

So what would social search mean to an average marketer? Not only would they be able to glean information from social search related queries but they would have an opportunity to participate as well.

When people pose questions, they inevitably reveal a lot of information about themselves.

I investigated a question and answer thread on the best place to eat sushi in Sheffield on a local website.  As well as discovering the popularity of sushi in the city I found revealing information on the demographics, age, gender, and disposable incomes of the people in the conversation. All information like this is hugely valuable for knowing where to market products so that they reach carefully targeted audiences.

You could also use Social Search in specific sectors. Let’s say you own a sushi business in Sheffield. How could social search help you? For starters, social search hubs could offer you all that information on a platter. You could get an idea of what your target market thinks of your competitors or what they would be willing to spend on a decent sushi meal.

After all, if social media has given any indication of what marketers spend online trying to woo people on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, it’s only a matter of time when you get a shampoo brand trying to get your attention on your question on ‘how to take care of your thinning hair’.

Think you could get some marketing mileage for your business out of social search? Why not give Quba a call on 01142797779. We will be glad to help you find cash generating conversations.

It’s really hard working out which is the best league to join with so many options to choose from. Some look great but are unworkable, others are brilliant but you can only afford one decent player and some sites have rules that are so cruel that you don’t dare transfer players who are having a nightmare season.

So where should you manage in 2009-10? There’s so much choice this year so we’ve asked members of the Quba team to review five of this years options to help you decide.

Metro Fantasy Football- Will Barron (Designer)

http://fantasyfootball.metro.co.uk/

Most expensive player: Didier Drogba – £10M

Best value: “I’ll take a guess and say Ben Foster – £4.1m. He might not have done very well at Manchester United, but he could easily follow in Joe Hart’s footsteps & have an excellent season with Birmingham.

Usability: “The Metro’s fantasy football isn’t bad, however it doesn’t live up to my high expectations from being an long-serving user of the Official Premier league fantasy football.

The site has a glossy look & feel, however the interface can be a little fiddly & difficult to follow when it comes to making your initial team selection. ” 6/10

The Mirror You The Manager- Jessica Penny (Senior Symphony Account Executive)

http://youthemanager.mirrorfootball.co.uk

Most expensive player: Frank Lampard £9.5m
Best value: “On a value for letters basis Bilyaletdinov is unbeatable at a mere £4.5m!.”

Usability: “As a fantasy football virgin, I was really going into this blind.

The site looked appealing (even to someone who doesn’t like football) and I could easily and quickly work out what I needed to do as a paragraph of text titled ‘Selecting your team could not be easier!’, was big. Each step of the setup process was also user friendly.

A scroll bar enabled me to easily view players from each of the relevant categories and I could find key information I was looking for. Unfortunately there were no photographs of the players though which was a big disappointment!

Realising that perhaps, choosing players on the basis that they had nice sounding names probably wasn’t going to get me the best results, I also found the ‘reset’ button very handy!

A colleague pointed out that it was unusual to not be able to pick subs so perhaps this is an area where this site falls down. Other than that, the site surprised  me in terms of how easy it was to use and I actually had fun using it!” 7.5/10

Skysports Fantasy Football- Matt Solly (Junior Developer)

http://fantasyfootball.skysports.com/

Most expensive player : Didier Drogba £7.9m
Best value: “Looking at the points from last season in relation to this years’ prices I’d say Drogba again. He scored 201 points last season with the next best being Wayne Rooney at who scored 181, and he’s only 0.1m cheaper!

Usability: “I found the onsite Usability to be really good and the layout was also easy to use which made selecting my team easier.
Like most of these games you are only allowed to pick 2 players from each team in the premiership; but it was good that once you had 2 players selected the other players from that team were greyed out so they couldn’t be selected.
The only issue is only being given £55m to start with, which doesn’t seem very realistic in some of the valuations of players in todays market. Rooney is easily worth somewhere between £40m and £50m!” 8/10

Official Premier League-Ben Franklin Developer

http://fantasy.premierleague.com/

Most expensive player : Frank Lampard £13m

Best value: Javier Hernández Balcázar £7.5m (My tip to do big things at Man Utd!)

Usability: “I feel I had an easy review having been given the official Fantasy Premier League. I’ve been entering teams for around 5 years now, and I always find it slick and easy to use. To be fair there are plenty of features I haven’t even touched, such as the Pundit and Fantasy Stats sections, but the ease of creating private leagues and the simple transfer system keep me coming back. It is the choice for Quba, and has been for the past few seasons.

The only negative is last season I picked a team full of ex-Sheffield United players, and they all let me down big time!” 9/10

Telegraph Fanstasy Football-Jon Eaton (New Business Executive)

http://fantasyfootball.telegraph.co.uk/

Most expensive player: Drogba/Lampard £7m
Best value: “Andre Arshavin £4.7m. If Fabregas does go to Barcelona the little Russian maestro will surely be given the more central role he craves.”
Usability: “Overall I left the Telegraph site more confused than amazed. I liked the tactical options and that all players came with a photograph (useful for finding lesser known world cup players) but the additional features were fiddly and unworkable. Some of the links back to the main site failed and the navigation was far from intuitive; what would happen when you need to make changes quickly before a mid-week game? or when someone gets injured? Imagine the stress!”  5/10

If you want our opinions on your site please give us a call on 0114 279 7779

Having lost count of the number of website briefs that I’ve seen over the years, I wanted to share what I think needs to go into a good website briefing document.

The documents have ranged from half-a-side of A4 to a 30 page book full of technical information and specific instructions on replying. To give you the agency point of view on tenders I’ll share three tips that will ensure you get the best value from your agencies.

Step 1: Have clear decision-making criteria

Take time with your project stakeholders to work out what factors are most important to the success of the project. Is it creativity regardless of price or is it cost first. For each project you have three elements working against each other:

1. Price; how much you’re willing to pay
2. Requirements; what you want
3. Timescales; how soon you want it

So for some businesses the overarching requirement is to have a really creative website with high quality photography and attention grabbing copy. Other businesses have budget constraints and will happily accept stock imagery (so long as they’re not too pricey). Controversially timescales are too often cited as being critical, when all too often they’re just an arbitrary date with little significance.

There may be other factors to consider, for instance is being geographically close to the agency important to consider.

Once you’ve selected, defined and agreed on your criteria create a shortlist of agencies based on research, word of mouth recommendations and directory searching (Quba are now on the Recommended Agency Register). Obviously Quba should always appear high on the list!

Depending on your timescales now may be the time to filter down your list of agencies. Review their portfolio and results, contact the sales team and ask for testimonials, day rates and example project costs.

Step 2: Be specific about budget or requirements for the best value

“Do you have a budget in mind?”
“We do. But we wanted to see what you come back with to ensure we’re getting the best value.”

In most cases this view is a fallacy. To get the best value from your web agency you should be specific in either of the following ways:

• A. Create a very detailed brief and response guideline for the agency to quote against
• B. Set a budget range with a loose brief that the agency can interpret

The reason that this works for you as a client is that with option A the agency has very specific criteria against which to quote. Therefore you can quickly compare prices. To be competitive the agency has to offer to meet your criteria at the best possible price. It also allows the agency to demonstrate clearly how they will add value.

Option B is about approaching the project from the other end. The agency will take your loose brief and come up with a solution that matches the budget. Agencies can then be compared on the basis of what they offer rather than what they cost.

Step 3: Consider the marketing of your website

Back in the good old days when I was cutting my teeth as a junior programmer, it was considered good enough if you just rammed a load of keywords in the META Keywords tag. These days digital marketing has multiple channels that need to be considered.

In the brief tell the agency about current traffic figures and website conversions (unless it’s a new website). Explain your goals in the brief and ask the agency for their ideas on how they will achieve this. You should always base this on the number of conversions your want to receive not where you want to rank!

Summary

If you’d like the team at Quba to help you get more from your website get in touch with David Sealey on 0114 279 7779 or via dsealey@quba.co.uk.

A well functioning website should be jigsaw of inter-connecting pages that cater for multiple user groups

Have you ever wondered how much of what you do is unnoticed?

Every day in the UK good work escapes praise. People get ignored and services get forgotten. Answers get lost and questions remain unanswered. It’s life..but it shouldn’t be, especially when it comes to your business’ website.

We’ve had loads of enquiries about getting your site indexed by search engines recently so we thought a blog article could help turn sites from secret gardens into public parks.

We’ve had a whip round our team and come up with the following tips.

…

Improving navigation gets users to visit more pages on websites.

“Sameness is the mother of disgust, variety the cure.” Francesco Petrarca

There should be a logical route to any page on your site from your homepage in three clicks or less.

But what if you have thousands and thousands of pages? How can you get them all in your site within three clicks? You need to be creative, this rule is not for bending.

1. Drop downs – A dropdown menu categorises content quickly which helps a targeted user to find what they want, fast.

2. Tabbing – Tabbed pages are useful for multi-faceted organisations or businesses who have a wide range of services. By skipping to the pages relevant to their area users only find content useful for them.

3. Calls to Action – Getting users to contact you can also be done by offering clicks to themes or subjects rather than business areas. Think outside the box.

4. Landing Pages – Be flexible. Cater for different kinds of users by incorporating search forms or having good quality related links to pages on your site that interest them.

Correctly linking to pages within your website gets them high up the rankings

“All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.” Galileo Galilei

Everyone knows that users need to find your website when using search engines. But finding the right page within your website can be the difference between a bounce and sale.
When a user searches for a phrase related to a service or product you offer, you want that specific page to be at the top rather than the homepage. Why depend on the user to click three times when they can click once?

1. Link structure – Make the link structure of your website as flat as possible ensures that both product and service pages appear in the search engines.

This means linking to as many important pages as possible from each page. A great way to do this is again implementing drop down navigation.

2. Anchor text – Make sure your links have the right ‘anchor text’.  If you want a page to appear in the search engines for a particular key phrase, make sure that the key phrase is used as the text to link to it. This means both links on your website and on others.

3. Use the correct URL – When linking to your website, choose the most relevant page. For example, if you are promoting ‘family law’, then make sure you link to the ‘family law’ page within your website.

Use social media to generate targeted traffic

“When you give yourself, you receive more than you give.” Antoine de Saint-Exupery

In most cases your website should be the hub of your online presence. Your social media profiles act as spokes or outposts around the hub to engage with your audience and drive traffic to your site.

1. Useful information only- Social media is great for sharing content, provided it is useful to your audience. An effective way to drive traffic to your site is to simply ask your fans or followers what they would like to see from you and then create it and promote through your communities. An on site blog, for example is one of the simplest and most beneficial methods for improving your website’s search engine rankings.

2. Find Relevent Conversations- Another way to use social media to drive traffic is to go out looking for conversations that are happening around your industry and services. Become a member of the community, offer expert advice and where appropriate link back to your website. Again you should always ensure you direct people to the most relevant page in your site.

If you would like to have a chat about improving your website’s search rankings and traffic levels, please call Jon Eaton on 0114 279 7779.

Speaking to The Guardian this week Zuckerberg talked about the future of Facebook, “If we succeed [in innovating and remaining relevant] there is a good chance of bringing this to a billion people… it will be interesting to see how it plays out.”

To celebrate this new milestone Facebook are running a sweet campaign called Facebook Stories where half a billion Facebook users across the world can share stories about how they use Facebook and how it has impacted their lives.

The stories range from funny to moving, for example “Holly Rose, a mother in Phoenix, who credits a friend’s Facebook status message telling women to check for breast cancer with her being diagnosed in time to treat the disease. She used Facebook for support during treatment and became a prevention advocate herself.”

This got us thinking, what would happen if Facebook disappeared? Would you care? Would you be able to cope?! To answer these burning questions, Quba Director Darren Bristow and Account Exec Jonathan Eaton took to the streets armed with a video camera and microphone. Here’s what the folks of Sheffield had to say: