Round up of April Fools jokes 2012
Yep it’s that time of year again, where the internet goes crazy with the weird and wonderful April fools jokes. The only problem with this is most people who work in digital are on red alert to any stories coming out either day before or on the 1st April.
So without further ado and in no particular order, I present a round up of my favourite April Fools attempts this year!
No1 – Assassin’s Creed for Kinect
No2 – 8 Bit Google Maps
Where would be without Google throwing their hat into the ring. This years attempts include Really Advanced Search and Chrome Multitask. But the stand out has to be Google Maps in 8 bit for the NES. (Video below)
No3 – IKEA allen key
and finally this little gem from Reddit, the Reddit time line. A quote from the blog post states “reddit, inc. is proud to introduce a groundbreaking new development in social news. Using never-seen before time travel technology, in addition to news, we are now able to offer olds, soon-to-bes, and everything in-between. We’ve taken the most interesting eras of the past and future and condensed them into new areas called “timereddits”"
Don’t forget, if you are going to do an April Fools joke make sure when you tie it back to your website or brand that you remember to use the right link and anchor text!
Read MoreDMCM1112 – Digital Marketing Communications Management
First off I want to say I think what David and Brendan have set out as a module is excellent and involving the Manchester digital community to come in and pass on their knowledge. It not only raises the speakers profile but it also means that when the students graduate they have a base level of understanding of the digital marketing world.
A few weeks ago I was asked by Brendan Keegan (@bkeeganMMU if you want to follow him on Twitter) to do a Google analytics presentation for the 3rd year students. Who as part of their final year project was to build a website and rank for the main term DMCM1112 and the secondary term DSMMCM12. If you have been paying attention or following Brendan or David (aka @groovegenerator) on Twitter you may have noticed the hastags #dmcm1112 and #dsmmcm12 from either those two as well as those from the students being banded about.
As part of the project they have to track where their visitors come from and set-up any goals (if needed). My part was to provide a walk through on how to set-up and install the tracking on the site. The majority of the student where using wordpress blog hosted on wordpress.com or their own domain.
One issue we ran into straight away was that the presentation I had compiled had been for hosted domains, though some of the students had wordpress.com domains. Never the less we proceeded to set-up the accounts for those on hosted domains. Where the talk turned interesting was when they students began to ask questions about SEO and how to rank higher for the given terms. So naturally I gave them some pointers about utilising social media for their brands, I must at this point explain that each of the groups had come up with their own company branding as part of the exercise.
This led to slew of social media accounts being set-up for the two terms (screenshot below).
That said credit has to be given for creativity for the different avenues of approach. From just the first page rankings alone there are two Twitter results, a Facebook page some paid search activity, blogger profile and a few exact match domains.
What is the point of this post? It’s ultimately to show that there are some talented graduates coming through from university and I want to encourage anyone who has some free time to get in contact with Brendan or David over at MMU and volunteer to part some knowledge of to these students.
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Display and Search – Why the two should go hand in hand
You do Display advertising? Better make sure you’re ranking!
Making the move to freelance has given me the opportunity to do a bit more reading and not just the usual SEO posts but also what is happening in other marketing channels such as paid, display as well as offline.
I feel as our job as marketers you should have grasp of what’s going on in other industries/channels, but that is rant for another day!
Anyways, I was looking at research study by Neilson/Netratings, commissioned by Harvest Digital which asked consumers the question
“If you see an online ad for flights or holidays which of the following actions do you usually take?”
Seems simple enough, now remember this question is relating to display activity, what percentage do you think clicked on the ad? 60% 50%, not even close. 26% of the people asked to participate clicked directly on the ad (direct response).
It then went on to give further findings:
- 29% went directly to the advertisers site (attributable if the prospect/user uses the specific URL used in the ad)
- 8% went to a travel agent or another route
- And huge 57% used a search engine i.e. Google it
That’s right the majority of the test subjects used search as the major way to interact with the brand even though they were presented with the offer then and there. I believe from reading into this that SEO should not be some by the by bolt on of a multi-channel marketing campaign.
This study alone goes to show that proper investment natural search attribution is critical because if you don’t appear for a term relating to your display campaign (i.e. this is a huge assumption that the user will search for the offer shown to them along with possible brand term) you stand loose around half your targeted audience.
N.B. There are some Google stats to back this, but in my haste to get this post out I have been unable to find them. Once I do I will edit it with some nice graphs and pictures.
Read MoreGoogle Panda Update Comes to the UK
Google have announced that the Panda update which was designed to provide higher quality sites in the search results that hit the USA a few months ago has now been rolled out globally to all English language based users.
As part of this stage of the roll out Google have now introduced user feedback signals to help people find better search results. With regards to the new user feedback signals I can only assume at this point that factors such as landing page bounce rates, time on page *could be* looked at as well as several other factors.
Google go on to state that;
In addition, this change also goes deeper into the “long tail” of low-quality websites to return higher-quality results where the algorithm might not have been able to make an assessment before. The impact of these new signals is smaller in scope than the original change: about 2% of U.S. queries are affected by a reasonable amount, compared with almost 12% of U.S. queries for the original change.
This morning I have spent some time looking at previous clients sites as well as existing ones and have noticed no significant change in their listings. That said I have seen an increase in competitor sites for some high volume generic terms.
I think once the hype has settled and we have a week or maybe more of data we will be able to see the impact this will of had on the sites we look after.
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Big Thanks and Hello!
Welcome welcome one and all, I have finally succumbed to the pressure and after nearly 6 years have now got a blog! This will now be the stopping point of various musings and discoveries while working with the online marketing arena (plus anything else I find interesting I might want to share with you all).
I suppose one of the big things that has struck me is the overwhelming support I have had from everyone, when I announced on my last day at I Spy Marketing that I was a) leaving and b) going freelance you have all been kind with your words. So let me again say a big thank you to all near and far. I would list you all but you know who you are!
Very special shout to the guys from Zen Web Solutions for sending me these!
Would also like to take this opportunity to say thanks to I Spy for last year of employment it has been challenging but also enjoyable and I predict great things for some of the tools these guys will be bringing out in the future. I believe (if any of you are interested) there is an upgrade for their Iphone analytics app.
Last but not least a huge thanks to Simon Misra (very talented designer and screen printer) for spending the time coming up with the logo!
Take care all and hopefully catch up with all the Manchester SEO lot at the next #mancseo night failing that SAScon
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