by David on June 28, 2009
Of all the forms of public transport, the bus is probably the hardest sell. They’re invariably uncomfortable, dirty, over-expensive and difficult to walk in without ploughing hip bone into steel rail. For all the stick they get, the train is a vastly superior alternative.
Of course, the above view was largely formed about 15 years ago, since when I’ve taken approximately two bus journeys. Both were undeniably miserable, but are they really all like that?
Perhaps what the bus really needs is decent bit of online marketing. AC Transit runs the bus transport in the San Francisco Bay area, handling more than 65million passengers each year. I don’t know whether they all have a more positive idea of bus travel, but even if a small proportion do, ACT Travel deserve some credit.
They’ve created an excellent microsite called ACT for me, which presents a welter of useful content that succeeds in presenting bus travel as a far more friendly and worthwhile means of getting about.
Take the webisode contest, which asked travellers to submit a short video highlighting the role their bus plays in their community. An overly ambitious project, you may think, but the results are impressive – and the winners and finalists are all now enjoying cash prizes and free bus rides.
Aside from that, there’s a hugely useful savings calculator, which calculates how much money and carbon you could save by taking the bus instead of your car.
Then there’s lots of information about community and environmental benefits, as well as the future of ACT Transit (”essentially light rail without the tracks”). Testimonial quotes and images, news and a link to journey details complete an impressive example of how to use content marketing online.
Of all the forms of public transport, the bus is probably the hardest sell. They’re invariably uncomfortable, dirty, over-expensive and difficult to walk in without ploughing a hip bone into steel rail. For all the stick they get, the train is a vastly superior alternative.
Of course, the above view was largely formed about 15 years ago, since when I’ve taken approximately two bus journeys. Both were undeniably miserable, but are they really all like that?
Perhaps what the bus really needs is decent bit of online content marketing. AC Transit runs the bus transport in the San Francisco Bay area, handling more than 65million passengers each year. I don’t know whether they all have a more positive idea of bus travel, but even if a small proportion do, ACT Travel deserve some credit.
They’ve created an excellent microsite called ACT for me, which presents a welter of useful content that succeeds in presenting bus travel as a far more friendly and worthwhile means of getting about.
Take the webisode contest, which asked travellers to submit a short video highlighting the role their bus plays in their community. An overly ambitious project, you may think, but the results are impressive – and the winners and finalists are all now enjoying cash prizes and free bus rides.
Aside from that, there’s a hugely useful savings calculator, which calculates how much money and carbon you could save by taking the bus instead of your car.
Then there’s lots of information about community and environmental benefits, as well as the future of AC Transit (”essentially light rail without the tracks”). Testimonial quotes and images, news and a link to journey details complete an impressive example of how to use content marketing online.
by David on June 19, 2009
So this is how The Telegraph should have done it. Instead of drip-dripping the MP expenses’ information in the way they have done – all generated while holed up in some all-hands-on-deck war room – they could have got everyone involved like The Guardian has done.
They’d never have done it, of course, as it would have meant selling considerably fewer papers over the last six weeks.
But what the Guardian is doing is demonstrating just how powerful the crowd can be – as a data-gatherer, news-maker, journalistic tool, or whatever. In just over 24 hours so far, over 92,000 pages of expense documents have been reviewed (with plenty still to do).
And they’re not just hunting for stories – reviewers are sorting the vast amount of data by date, amount, type of expense and type of document. By the end of the process, the Guardian will have a searchable database that will prove far more useful and permanent than the Telegraph’s sensationalist headlines.
If they’re one thing, online PR and link-building are certainly hard work. But if first appearances do not deceive, Buzzstream represents something of a blessed relief for SEO, PR and social media types.
A quick view of both pleasingly to-the-point videos (it’s just been released in beta, and unfortunately a gremlin prevented me from signing up on the occasion I tried) provides evidence of an extremely handy tool for managing blogger relationships, link-building opportunities and inbound marketing activities generally.
Here at Social Magnet we’re committed fans of the inbound marketing approach, so we’ll definitely be giving Buzzstream a good go in the not too distant future.
Owing to a spate of new Wordpress jobs, we’re on the lookout for a freelance Wordpress developer to get stuck in on some great new projects with immediate effect.
You’ll need two things:
- Demonstrable talent and experience of working in Wordpress;
- Ability to work from our office in Manchester for some or all of two or three days a week (initially), with a view to more projects later on.
Pay will be up to £200 a day dependent on experience. Email me (david@socialmagnet.co.uk) for more details.
Optimising your LinkedIn profile is incredibly easy – just follow these two quick steps.
Firstly, make sure you edit your public profile name to include your real name, like I’ve done here. (I really need to start connecting with more people, by the way!) Apart from looking cleaner and more professional, it is also much more likely to rank high in the search engines when people input your name. Those with less common names are at a distinct advantage here, of course.
Secondly, unlike say Twitter, LinkedIn allow SEO juice to flow through their links. So whereas clicking on your Twitter account link does not pass on any search engine benefit owing to the presence of a no follow attribute in the code, you are allowed three no-follow-free links on your LinkedIn profile. To fully capitalise on this opportunity, it makes sense to customise the anchor text on the link as search engines do read it to understand more about the pages they’re linking to.
These two things – which should take no more than a couple of minutes – will ensure your LinkedIn profile is optimised.
Social media isn’t just about big business. It’s not just for the likes of Dell, Starbucks and Ford.
The truly great thing about social media is that it’s incredibly democratic. The small business around the corner has just as much chance of succeeding as the behemoth with the enormous marketing budget. All they need is a great product that people love and have a kind of innate desire to let others know about too.
So I thought it wouldn’t be a bad idea to flag up a few examples of small companies around the world that prove the aforementioned theory. Here are the first two in what will be a continuing series:
Company: Wiggly Wigglers
Social media activity: A small gardening business in Herefordshire is not, you’d imagine, a natural home for cutting-edge social media activity. But you’d be wrong. Co-founder Heather Gorringe has built a fantastic “Wiggly Community” thanks to her blog, podcasts - “like the Archers, but real!” – videos, Facebook page (with 1,500 followers as of writing) and Twitter account.
Results: Heather is a fantastically enthusiastic and knowledgeable face for her brand and that enthusiasm is infectious. Hers is such a personal and authentic voice, a real lesson for some bigger businesses who simply try and fake it. And according to this analysis, her social media activity has done nothing less than save the business.
Company: Dustin Meyer Photography
Social media activity: Based in Texas, Dustin Meyer provides wedding photography, graduation and family portraiture mainly targeted at high-income couples and families. He started using Facebook to directly target students as he believed they would be the best means of influencing their parents to pay for the high-end service, mainly to display photos and video montages but also as a means of engaging with fans through applications.
Results: In November 2008 Meyer claimed that 75% of his business originated from Facebook, with 100% of his senior portrait business has been from Facebook or referral. “It allows people to instantaneously promote my business to everyone they know with barely any effort,” he said.
Series to be continued.
When executed well, an online PR campaign can be a hugely effective way of communicating your message. Below are eight examples of companies with different objectives who have all achieved outstanding results.
CASE STUDY 1
Creating a new search term out of nothing with Skin MD Natural
The problem: Beverley Hills-based skincare company 21st Century Formulations not only came up with a new skin care lotion (Skin MD Natural), they came up with a new skin care lotion category: “shielding lotion”. All well and good, but consumers had no awareness of this new category, and were therefore unlikely to find the website set up to advertise the product.
The solution: An online category and brand awareness campaign was launched that aimed to reach consumers online through high search rankings on specific keywords and phrases, articles, blogs, newsgroups and forums. The main objectives were to create a new search term – shielding lotion – and gain search engine visibility on the researched keywords and phrases – Shielding Lotion, Dry skin, Dry skin treatment, Dry skin lotion and Eczema treatment. The strategy involved the following tactics:
- Keyword research undertaken and the website’s pages were optimized for the chosen words and phrases;
- A news section of the site with RSS Feeds was created;
- Weekly articles on the subject of dry skin and related skin conditions were written and posted to the site. Every article page was optimized on these keywords;
- All articles were posted to the news page and syndicated in an RSS Feed using the PRESSfeed content syndication system.
Results: The articles were picked up in Google News and other syndication websites, improving the site’s search rankings through regular content updates and increased inbound links. Prior to January 2006, there was no mention of shielding lotions on the internet. Today when you search “shielding lotion” in Google you get over 20,000 mentions. When you search “Skin MD” you get over 40,000 results. The articles were published on many other websites and the leading physician journal for aesthetics and wellness. The news pages also showed up in Google Blog Search, and the feed was picked up on more than 1,500 other websites and blogs.
[click to continue…]
Three thousand six hundred. That’s approximately the number of seconds I’ve stood in a wifi-free Post Office queue this week, unable to do anything except stare blankly at a mute screen as John Henshaw promoted away.
Both times (for it took a mere two visits to clock up such a gargantuan amount of waiting) have seen my mind drifting as to the possibilities for postage in a Web 2.0 world. Surely there’s a better way?
Well, the prospect of Mail 2.0 may just have been glimpsed in the form of Zumbox. Currently only available in the US, it’s essentially a digital mailbox.
Anyone with a street address can simply type in their address, view their mail as envelopes, and then click through to see the contents. Any printable file can be sent or received, and of course web formats such as HTML can also be built into the “mail”.
It looks such a giant leap on from the antiquated system we currently have. I for one will be hoping we see something similar over here very soon.
We’re huge fans of Wordpress here at Social Magnet, which for the uninitiated is an open-source content management system that started off as a platform for blogging but has gradually become more widely used for all kinds of site.
A superb example of this is the website for sailing tour operator Adriatic Holidays. There are a few things I particularly love about it:
- The imagery: A holiday website should look alluring and attractive; this site certainly delivers. The product pages, too, are gorgeous. Shows the aesthetic potential of Wordpress.
- The text: Look at all that juicy text, which Wordpress’s highly user-friendly backend should ensure is regularly maintained and updated.
- The calls to action: Six are visible as soon as you land on the home page, but I particularly like the impatient people panel here.
- The country sub-sections: Click on a country and you get a wealth of specific content. Useful, persuasive and extremely clear.
All in all, a really fine looking site.
Manchester’s Contact Theatre provided the home this week for a fascinating concoction of ideas, philosophies and latest trends in the form of the Social Technologies Summit.
Billed as “the place where the technology and digital sectors connect with the creative vision of the international digital arts community”, it showcased new ideas in everything from mobile technology to the semantic web.
It was certainly an inspirational place to be, brimming with tantalising indications of the way social media technologies are – and in some cases should be – changing the way businesses and individuals operate.
Tom Ilube, the CEO of Garlik and founder of Egg, repeated Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s suggestion that despite the web now containing over a trillion pages, we are only at the tip of the iceberg, and judging by the Social Technologies Summit, it’s impossible to disagree.
