Welcome
Hi there, my name is Karim, I’m a London-based online marketing specialist. I help companies improve their online marketing to boost business. Find out more about my experience and how I can help you.
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Wednesday, 24 March 2010
UK Budget 2010: How to Use Social Media & Search To Promote Your Brand
Today is the day of the UK budget announcement for 2010. Understandably searches on Google for ‘UK Budget’ are spiking. This isn’t surprising, but what might not be quite as obvious is that this provides a golden opportunity for financial services brands to leverage social media and search to generate FREE exposure.
By properly using social media sites such as Twitter and YouTube, it’s possible for a brand to quickly and effectively reach users searching for information on the UK Budget. Let’s look at some specific techniques that could be used to achieve this.
Search for ‘UK Budget’
To start off, let’s do a quick search on Google for the phrase ‘UK Budget’. Because of Google’s drive to incorporate social media into its search results, we can use social media as a super-charged short cut to the first page of Google results. The two key areas that allow us to achieve this are:
1) The ‘Latest Results’ Section
This is a live update of key news articles and Twitter messages (tweets) concerning the UK Budget announcement. To take advantage of this, ensure that relevant messages you post in Twitter contain the phrase ‘UK Budget’. See the image below (click to expand) to see how this appears on our Google search for ‘UK Budget’.
2) In Search YouTube Results
Most people don’t think of YouTube as a ‘social media’ website, but it’s actually one of the most powerful social media websites out there. It’s also provides a great short-cut to get your brand and an example of your industry knowledge on the first page of Google. See the image below (click to expand) to see an example of YouTube videos in our Google search for ‘UK Budget’.
Basically, Google includes relevant videos for many many searches, the UK budget is no exception. Many financial service companies have pundits and analysts explaining the budget on national news channels. If these companies have a YouTube presence then they’ll upload a copy of these interviews here too, unfortunately, they tend not to properly optimise these videos for search. To increase the chances of your video appearing, make sure that you again include the phrase ‘UK Budget’ in the title of the video your web team upload to YouTube.
These are two relatively simple, but concrete and powerful examples of using social media to generate brand awareness (100% Free!). Of course, the UK Budget announcement isn’t the only chance to use these techniques. If you’re responsible for the marketing of a financial services brand, there are constant opportunities to leverage social media to reach more prospects in this way. So the question is, what’s stopping you?
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Wednesday, 10 March 2010
Social Media For Skeptics
As a marketing consultant in the financial services space, an industry that has historically lagged behind others in adopting newer approaches to marketing, I encounter some skepticism about the viability of social media as a marketing/engagement strategy. I find a lot of this is due to the media hype around social media. If the media frenzy around social media is to be believed, social media is something that was invented in 2006 by the introduction of Twitter. The reality of course is that social media has always existed online. From the very early days of Usenet groups, geocities, and discussion forums, social media has been there. Certainly the user-interfaces are better, the technology is better, and the speed of interaction has increased (especially with sites like twitter) but fundamentally we’re looking at the same type of interactions that have existed for years.
I know that in my industry at least, no company would dismiss the importance and value of discussion forums. The same is increasingly true for blogs. If these once-perceived ‘faddish’ technologies are now accepted as legitimate, why not Twitter and Facebook? If companies are buying ad space on industry forums and blogs, why not allocate funds to develop a social media presence?
Also, if Twitter etc do end up fading away to be replaced by something bigger and better, so what? They are popular now, they are being leveraged now, customers are looking to interact with the brands they deal with there now. That’s what matters.
On the flip side, there’s a lot of opportunity for up and coming companies to gain a significant edge over some more established players by adopting social media tools. Seeing these less risk-averse start-ups snatching market-share might be the most convincing argument for the importance of social media.
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Monday, 1 February 2010
How Will You Take Advantage of the Apple iPad?
The latest Apple product (AAPL), the iPad will be released towards the end of March. This gives marketers and business owners a small window of time to consider how they can leverage this tool to market their business.
Although companies that already have iPhone applications will have a significant advantage when it comes down to developing apps for the iPad, the increased power and screen size of Apple’s newest gadget opens some great possibilities for delivering content and education. Here are a few specific tactics companies could use to take advantage of the iPad:
1. Develop an interactive brochure – A well developed iPad version of your corporate brochure could be very impressive. Including rich graphics and text, incorporating videos and links to website application forms and shopping carts. Add to this the touch interface of the iPad and you have a cross between a traditional brochure and PDF that’s could be much more than the sum of its parts.
2. Deliver a regular newsletter – As with brochures, taking advantage of the iPad’s touch interface means that you can polished, professional and interactive regular newsletters to prospects and clients alike. If you already have one of these, the main challenge will be developing an app that will allow people to easily subscribe to your newsletter and incorporating the added features that are enabled by the iPad.
3. Viral games – This isn’t a new idea by any means, but again the increased size and processing power of the iPad means a whole new world of gaming possibilities. If the iPhone was too restrictive for the types of viral games you might have envisaged, the iPad could be perfect.
4. Hotel/Property 3D Tours – This one seems glaringly obvious, the iPads touch interface and plush screen make it an ideal tool for 3D tours of hotels, rental properties, historic sites, holiday resorts etc. If this could be relevant to your business, you need to start thinking about this ASAP.
5. Banking/Financial Applications – Sounding like a broken record now, but again, the bigger screensize means that financial and banking applications can be even more powerful and pleasurable to use on the iPad. Stock trading applications can take advantage of the additional screenspace to display more information, and banking applications can be clearer with a ‘bigger text size’ option for mature users (the silver surfers could be a huge target market for the iPad).
There are obviously tons of other potential uses for the iPad, the point is to get the ball rolling. We’ve all seen that the iPhone and the app store have been huge, and there’s no reason to doubt the iPad won’t be huge too. Better to get on board now than miss the boat!
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Monday, 25 January 2010
Facebook & Twitter See Massive Growth in 2009
According to research conducted by the Nielsen group (see chart below) time spent on social media sites has skyrocketed 82% between 2008 and 2009, with Facebook and Twitter leading the pack.
While there can be no argument about the seemingly unstoppable growth of facebook, There has been some debate about the longevity of Twitter sparked by an apparent plateauing of its traffic as illustrated in the chart below from compete.com.
Even if traffic, in terms of number of unique visitors, to sites like Twitter is dropping, we have to take Nielsen’s increased engagement stats very seriously. Perhaps more people aren’t visiting Twitter but those that are most certainly are spending an increasing amount of time there.
So what does this mean for marketers today? Well it only confirms what many social media enthusiasts have been saying for a long time, social media is an important place to reach prospects and clients. Some predict that 2010 could be the year that social media overtakes email as the average internet user’s main activity. Best to start investing in a social media strategy now then!
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Tuesday, 12 January 2010
Easyjet Leverages Twitter To Deal With Winter Flight Disruptions
As many holiday makers, travellers and commuters experienced, transport has been one of the biggest casualties of the severe weather conditions over Xmas and New Years. Flights in particular have been disrupted by the snow and cold. The low cost airline Easyjet was one of the hardest hit carriers, cancelling over 250 flights. Despite the inevitable chaos and customer complaints, Easyjet was able to leverage their social media presence to help deal with the crisis.
By directing disgruntled and concerned travellers to their twitter profile Easyjet opened a quick and easily accessible information channel. The Easyjet Twitter account was used to flag fight cancellations, respond to customer questions and generally keep a line of communcation open between the company and its clients.
The fact that Twitter followers more than doubled from the start of December 2009 to Jan 2010 (see chart below) indicates that this channel is providing value for followers.
Of course it’ll be interesting to see how many of these followers Easyjet will retain as the bad weather subsides, but if Easyjet continues to provide value, perhaps by creating exclusive Twitter offers or promotions, it will have created a valuable and profitable marketing asset out of a bad situation.
The Moral of the Story
Every company experiences its share of customer service crises. In this case, Easyjet has demonstrated that it is possible to leverage social media services such as Twitter to help manage these crises and potentially come out in a stronger position at the end of the ordeal.
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Wednesday, 9 December 2009
Social Media Gets Serious for Search
A lot of skeptics still think of social media as a ‘touchy feely’ waste of time. However, Google’s recent announcement that it will be piping in real-time results from twitter and other social media platforms into its search results is very serious. Check the video below to see how this will work.
Of course, we’ll have to see exactly how this feature fucntions in ‘the wild’. There will have to be measures taken against people spamming social networks with streams of keywords to make sure it’s useful. But the fact that Google is willing to place this feature on centre-stage means it’s taking it very seriously.
This means that we have to take it seriously too. If there are any doubts in your mind or the minds of key stakeholders in your company about the value of social media, the impact on search needs to be considered immediately.
With this new feature, Google is offering prime search real-estate for your competitors to transmit messages in real time. This could trump your SEO & PPC activity and require a wholesale re-think of your search strategy.
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Friday, 6 November 2009
Bringing Social Media Into Your Marketing
This is a great presentation that demonstrates some very interesting tactics for integrating social media with your existing marketing.
Key Takeaways
1. Social media works best when used in conjunction with other marketing approaches.
2. Social Media + Search: Consumers exposed to brand in social media 2.8 times more likely to search for that brands products
3. Fishing for traffic with social media appropriate content. Brands with blogs experienced over 50% increase in traffic to main website.
4. Social Media + Email: Enable social media sharing in email.
5. Social Media + Market Research: Ask your fans/followers/Blog readers for feedback
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