Marcu Taylor's Blog, page 33

Who Still Advertises with News of the World?

Over the past few days there has been a massive uproar on social networks around the #notw phonehacking scandals. A large number of brands including Ford, Mitsibushi, The Co-operative Group, Vauxhall, Lloyds Banking Group and Virgin Holidays have boycotted the News of the World following a Twitter campaign launched by The Z Factor to stop major advertisers funding the newspaper for its illegal phone.

It seems that there is now a relative competition going on between brands that are continuing to advertise vs. those that have pulled out. Many of the brands, especially Mitsubishi have gained some great publicity by donating their News of the World ad spend to charities. Many other brands including Tescos are however getting a lot of negative PR for how they are handling the situation (slowly..)

Anyways, here is a list of the brands who are currently still advertising with News of the World. You can send them a tweet to boycott their advertising spend here.

Butlins

Coca Cola

Comet

Gone Fair Trade

Morrisons

RBS

Renault

Tesco

Carpet Right

First Choice

Ford

T Mobile

Xtravision

Here is also a great list on the Guardian of the top 50 News of the World advertisers along with their official comments: http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/databl...

My thoughts

I am massively supportive of this campaign, and find it fascinating particularly from a social marketing perspective. It clearly shows that a negative PR campaign is a lot easier to send viral than a positive one; which has been demonstrated before with the likes of the Rage Against the X Factor campaign. However, my only concerns are that firstly, will this boycotting last? Even if 20% of The News of the World's advertisers are lost it is only a 10% revenue drop for them. Secondly, is it really right? Ultimately, The News of the World employs a large number of ethical people who had nothing to do with the phone hacking, and by hitting their ad revenue those people's jobs get put at risk.

Update

It appears The News of the World have claimed that this Sunday's issue of The News of the World will be the last one ever due to the boycott and damage caused to the brand.

What an awesome case study for reputation management and the power of social media

Social Media vs. SEO Return on Investment (with Daniel Bianchini & Marcus Taylor)

Today, Daniel Bianchini and I thought we'd create a video blog post discussing the difference between return on investment on social media and search engine optimisation. We hope this will be the first in a long line of video blogs by SEOptimise.

We hope you enjoy it and provide us with your valuable comments below about the video and chosen topic.

How social media impacts on our buying decisions and what it means for businesses

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of doing a really fun guest talk at Oxford Brookes University on how social media has affected the contemporary consumer and where online business is heading with the growth of social media. In this post I want to share a few of the points from that talk on why social media is not just a service full of buzz words that can be strapped on to the end of an SEO campaign, but is in fact an essential element of something much, much bigger to come.

Rewind the clock ten years ago, remember when you would tell friends about products you liked or disliked only if you felt really strongly about them? Chances are only a small number of people would hear about what you thought of the products and services you'd use on a daily basis. Fast forward to today, where the context of your relationships with your 'friends' are based on frequent micro-updates – a whole lot more people know a whole lot more about the little things you like, or dislike, and because everyone's doing that it impacts those product's business.

For example, imagine that you just tried a new a new flavored cola and decided it tastes disgusting – ten years ago you'd probably do very little other than throw it in the bin and swear to never make the purchase again, nowadays that would qualify a tweet or a status update to many people – which if you were the cola manufacturer could do a whole lot of damage to your sales if people are telling thousands of people that it tastes like crap.

Similarly, if you walked into a brick-and-mortar shop, lets say Coffee House XYZ and they have a terrible service, the consequence 10 years ago is that you'd say "I'm never coming here again" and Coffee House XYZ would lose one customer, but nowadays the consequence of that bad service is Coffee House XYZ can potentially lose tens or even hundreds, maybe even thousands of customers if that experience is broadcasted via social networking websites.

In a way this is fantastic news, as the major corporations who have got away with serving sub-standard products and services for years will be the first to become dinosaurs in this social revolution, and the companies who are personable and showing their human side will raise the bar and rise to the top. There is a great interview I recommend that social marketing genius Gary Vaynerchuk recently did on MSNBC's Morning Joe show where he suggested that our great great ancestors are better adapted to how businesses should be ran today than we are – whereby back in the day you would walk into a local convenience store and the store owner would know your name and all about you and your tastes and make recommendations personalised to you. That is exactly what the minority of social-savvy online businesses are doing right now.

Why does this approach work?

People like relationships, and are often prepared to pay a company more money if they like that company more than a competitor. Imagine if you had a few quid to spend on healthy food bars this week and you walked into your local food store to find some own brand bars for 40p each or an alternative bar that was 60p but the brand with the 60p bars had sent you a thank you message on Twitter when you last bought their bars and you knew that you could phone them up to tell them about your day if you needed to. The relationship with the brand is what a lot of people want to buy in to, and if you don't believe that then I recommend taking a look at the success of companies like Nakd Wholefoods, Wine Library TV, and Graze.

Will Google drop the bomb on social search?

Finally, I want to bring to reality why all of this is in fact going to be a big change – the company who I and many other people within the social media industry believe are sitting behind this revolution is Google. Over the past year or two we've seen Google introduce personalised search, prominence of local results increasing, social signals becoming a ranking factor, real-time search, and most importantly the 'shared by' snippets beneath search results, all of which are steps towards what I believe will be the future search – a social search engine whereby Google will be returning results based almost entirely on your personal social graph.

Read more: http://wallblog.co.uk/2011/04/01/how-...

What Happens When You Build 10k Dodgy Links to a New Website in 24 Hours?

You get penalised. You get a heap of traffic, and then get penalised.

While I am certainly no black-hat by any means, and do not advocate the techniques outlined in this post for long-term SEO projects, I love testing the theories and rumours that circulate in the SEO community about what link building works and what doesn’t. Regardless of how dodgy the rumours are,  it helps me build a bigger picture of  how Google treats link building.

 

So during the Christmas period a few months back I decided to set myself a challenge:  to see what would happen if I built a very large quantity of low quality links in a short period of time into a new domain, in order to gauge where Google draws the line with this type of link building and to understand better what pattern this kind of link building penalty might have. Call me crazy, but these things are good to test and they help you to understand what to do and what patterns to look for when something goes wrong unintentionally.

So, I took a new domain that I wasn’t too worried about destroying, picked a reasonably competitive keyword, and built about 10,000 really nasty-looking low quality links in to the home page with a mixture of phrase and exact match anchor text (note: these weren’t ‘paid links’ per se). I assumed that this should easily be enough to obliterate the site from search results.

 

The Result

The site ended up ranking #1 on Google.com for this keyword for about three weeks, which as you can see had a significant impact on increasing the site’s traffic. Just as I was beginning to lack faith in Google’s ability to detect the most unnatural of link patterns, the site suddenly dropped out of search results for everything including brand searches, and what’s more it’s never bounced back.

 

Analysis

The test confirmed what I had assumed might happen (the site would receive a ranking penalty), but I was surprised to see that it took over 3 weeks (and several thousand visits) before Google decided to do anything about it. So how could you utilise this?

I think one of the most practical uses for this tactic is to get a  website ranking for a seasonal or short-term one-off high traffic keyword. For example, it might have worked wonders to get a website ranking competitively for ‘vuvuzela’ for a few weeks around the South Africa World Cup last year, or you could use it to rank for a term such as ‘gym equipment’ for a few weeks after new year when people are keen to get back into shape. However, it’s important to be cautious and aware of your local advertising laws and to know Google’s view on this type of tactic.

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