A picture speaks a thousand words…
Stop thinking of it as social media and start thinking of it as hundreds of different channels having thousands of conversations…each one becoming the opportunity for a recommendation for your business.
Before Working with GBL the Realnet team had no idea just how many applications there were for plastic…and not just plastic, they also use Acrylic, Polycarbonate, PETG, PVC, High Impact Polystyrene, Polypropylene…to name but a few. Like a number of our industrial clients…the products themselves aren’t exciting, it’s what can be done with them that captures the imagination…with that in mind we moved forward with the design and build.
Red Balloon, a local charity for the recovery of bullied children has gone live with a new design overhaul.With the scheduled opening of several new centres nationally and big plans for the future, Red Balloon needed a ‘go to’ on the web that catered to anyone interested in their work. Realnet first designed and built their site in 2007 so they came to us for the upgrade.
As well as revamping the old site, improving the copy, and adding new features we went one step further and made micro sites for each of the schools with their own information and Ofsted reports.
One of the most important things for Red Balloon was having as much control over the site as possible. Changing copy, images, and whole pages was paramount, but at the same time had to be intuitive. We achieved this in the following ways; (more…)
Twitter is 4 years old!
For something that was sniffed at by many it has turned out to be a web marketing phenomenon. Looking at some of the stats, it seems its a business plan many people wish they had thought of first:
It’s worth $100 billion
It has a Growth Rate of 200% year on year
There are 26 million users
the UK has the 2nd largest Twitter Fan Base after the USA
Most importantly for you is that out of every 350 visits to a website 1 of them will come from twitter, a figure that cannot be matched by any other traffic directing website.
The question many are asking is what next?
Over the years we are writing less but we are writing more often:
1999: A company website was a must have. It meant writing pages of information and thousands of words…but you only wrote it once.
2005: Blogs were all the rage, you wrote a couple of posts/articles a couple of times
2007: Facebook extended beyond the universities and everyone was updating their status writing 100 words a couple of times a week (or more if you are a self confessed addict!)
2008: Twitter took hold and people were telling the world their news in 140 characters a couple of times a day (or if you are Stephen Fry this reached over 100 per day)
2009: Facebook tried to keep up by changing the way it displayed status updates….and it looked suspiciously twittified.
Facebook however manages to hold peoples interest. Its retention rate for registered users is 70% where Twitter is only 40%. of the 300 million or more Facebook users 140 million of them claim to log in daily. Whereas 65.5% of people registered with Twitter claiming to be PR professionals have never posted a Tweet.
One thing that can be concluded is that there is a definite increase in the number of words being said…even if it does mean you say them lots of times. The discerning web user doesn’t have time to trawl through websites and blogs, they want information in as fewer words as possible (something that will please Tony at Realnet – he has been saying this for years). So what’s the next web phenomenon…summing everything up in just one word?
Probably not, but it is still moving towards less is more with videos and photos and a whole range of new media that you need to be thinking about.
But just in case it turns out to be ‘what goes around comes around’ I’m going to call my next post blogging for business!
Sources:
The new Advanced Air website
For more than 35 years Advanced Air has grown by focusing on customer support. They asked Realnet to build a web presence that fully reflected the company ethos.
The new site went live this month and represents a quantum leap in style and usability for them.
The site has been well received by the local team as well as by the parent company, Nailor Industries.
As well as being easier to use, the site better represents the current capability and performance of the UK subsidiary and is expected to make a significant contribution to future growth.
This might be the case, Mr Cameron, when it comes to click happy politicians but when it comes to business it becomes a highly effective marketing tool…and its not just for the big players.
Just because you have a small business with a brand that hasn’t (yet!) become a household name doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be exploiting this opportunity to its limits. If you could generate just a few customers from a couple of tweets then does it really become a waste of time? Or is it time well spent where you may otherwise be driving halfway across the country wasting time and resources for someone who may or may not be interested after an hour of chatting around a table.
There are 400 million active users on Facebook, over 50 million professionals on LinkedIn and around 10,000 people joining Twitter every day. If you can HONESTLY say that you don’t need that exposure or the potential business it could offer you, then by all means leave now.
On the other hand if this looks like the sort of customer base you want to reach then read on…
(more…)
The search-engines crawling the Web are becoming increasingly influential, delivering more than 30 percent of the traffic on some newspaper, magazine or television news Web sites.
But these software bots do not appreciate the subtleties of wit, irony, humour or stylish writing. They are inhumanly fast yet boringly literal-minded. The software is left-brain whilst humans are usually right brain.
The art of journalism has always been to find headlines drawing culture into titles, but that creativity is wasted on the search engines.
The BBC News web site offers two headlines. One headline, usually on the first Web page, is clever and designed to attract human readers. Then, click to a second Web page and a factual headline appears with the article itself, which is search engine friendly.
The Associated Press, which feeds articles to 11,000 newspapers, radio and television stations, limits its online headlines to less than 40 characters as a concession to small screens.
Journalists and copywriters might be wise to do some keyword research to determine the most-searched words that relate to their subject and include them in the first few sentences of the copy.
At Realnet we routinely apply this principal when writing copy for our clients. In an increasingly competitive world on the Internet, gaining visibility amongst a growing number of competitors is a challenge that needs constant attention.
But at the end of the day the copy is there to provide information to the people reading it. And this fact must not be sacrificed to the new god, Google.
There has been a huge strategic failure to incorporate social media into advertising and PR campaigns. While the large multi-nationals are beginning to realise its potential it is still viewed as an ‘added extra’ as opposed to something that should be integrated at the very start of a campaign. Not only that, but the number of small companies utilising this form of advertising is ridiculously low. (more…)
