Author Archive for iClick Solutions

Watch out Google – Here come’s Facebook Search

Published on June 25, 2010 by iClick Solutions. View Comments

Facebook GoogleYesterday we were searching on Facebook for the phrase “phoenix restaurant” to see what Facebook pages would show up for that phrase.  We noticed a new search result showing up in Facebook search (as shown below) that could spell trouble (or at least create a new headache) for Google.

Few would argue how powerful Google.com search is so the concept of Facebook search killing Google is a stretch. But instead start learning how this Facebook search change can be leveraged by your business as an additional opportunity for increasing awareness.

When Facebook launched the OpenGraph API at the annual f8 conference about 2 months ago, Facebook created a platform that allows sites and apps to share information about users in order to tailor offers, features and services to each one’s interests and tastes — even if that individual has never visited the site before.

Facebook Search ResultWhen you’re signed on to Facebook, participating websites like CNN.com will display information, goods and services tailored specifically to your interests — without requiring you to sign in at that website or provide it with any information.

For websites to leverage the new Facebook OpenGraph API it requires just a few lines of code added to your website.  When we 1st heard about this we immediately thought this could create new opportunities for search engine optimization.

By placing the OpenGraph code on your site, Facebook can crawl for specific information and our prediction (which is now proved to be true) off Facebook results would start to show on Facebook search.  There is a cool feature on Facebook called URl Linter and based on the example above with Yellow Pages you can see what Facebook is crawling.

This is all very exciting; however, Facebook will need to quickly improve the relevancy of results if they want people to start using Facebook search instead of Google.com. With the Yellow Pages example above if you clicked on the link it would send you to the Canada Yellow Pages showing a Phoenix Restaurant.

Facebook know’s my information (clearly from Phoenix, Arizona) so the results should only show sources that will send me to a website talking about restaurants in Phoenix Arizona.  Facebook has not officially announced this change so it is quite possible we stumbled across Facebook testing so let’s not start bashing this.

We encourage you to watch this closely to see what Facebook has in store with web search.  In addition, take the time to learn about Facebook’s OpenGraph API and how you should consider adding the Facebook meta code to your website so when (not IF) Facebook fully launches web search features your site will start showing up.  What are your thoughts around this?  Are you seeing results showing up in Facebook for non on Facebook.com results?

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How Is Social Media Working Out For You?

Published on June 11, 2010 by iClick Solutions. View Comments

Measure Social MediaSo how do you determine if the energy you and or your team members are putting into social media are proving to be beneficial to your business bottom line?  Speaking with clients many (all should) want to measure ROI of their social media campaigns but just don’t know where to start.

Businesses need to be able to determine whether or not their focus on social media is generating results and making an impact to business income.  However, when looking at “results” it is critical that the stakeholders in the organization all agree on your social media objectives.

With some businesses the objective might be increasing traffic to the website, where another business it might be to connect with customers to garner feedback about a new product or service.  Understanding the social media goal you are trying to accomplish is critical so you know if what you are measuring social media against is actually meeting or hopefully exceeding company objectives.

Before we get into what to analyze, it is also very important to understand that social media comes in a variety of flavors, each with a very different end result.  As mentioned in one of our favorite posts last year “What Results Can I Expect From My Social Media Campaign?” by Greg Finn, social media campaigns occur on social sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn where users or companies interact with others in the community.  Social media news campaigns push content out onto larger social news networking sites like Digg and Reddit.  While both of these are types of social media marketing, the results are anything but similar.

Keep in mind that if you are not measuring social media today you are not alone.  According to a 2009 study performed by Mzinga and Babson Executive Education, 84% of professionals representing a variety of industries reported that they do not measure ROI so don’t be disappointed if you currently fall into that bucket.

Measure Social Media ROI Stats

When analyzing return on investment with social media here are 3 main focus areas around social media metrics to monitor:

  1. Establish Baseline – For each of your social media profiles start out by making note of current statistics such as number of Twitter followers, how many people like your brand on Facebook, referral traffic from social media sites in Google Analytics, what is currently the most popular content on your website and or blog, monitor number of people currently subscribing to your blog, how many views you have had on your YouTube Channel, number of bookmarks on Del.icio.us, etc.
  2. Record Timelines – Keep detailed notes of important dates so when you are analyzing results you can understand why spikes happened.  With Google Analytics you can leverage the annotations feature by clicking on any specific date and noting an activity.
  3. Monitor Sales Revenue – On a month over month basis look at sales performance before you started focusing on social media and ongoing measure sales to determine ROI.  When analyzing sales drill down into individual sales details as well.  If you find that a certain product or certain geographic location is showing improvement after you dedicate more time and resources to social media analyze why so you can further improve upon results.

Now that you know what key metrics to monitor with your social media campaigns sit down with your team to agree on social media objectives and start tracking results today.  We recommend on a monthly basis update each of the key social media metrics and meet with your team to discuss results.

If you are measuring social media ROI today what kind of results are you seeing?  Are their tools you are leveraging you recommend others look into?

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Future of Retail

Published on June 5, 2010 by iClick Solutions. View Comments

Future of RetailIn just over 80 pages, PSFK Consulting provide an analysis of the Future of Retail. The report explores a future from the perspective of brands, shoppers, retailers, and communities, highlighting how technology and our senses play a role in the retail experience both in and out of the store.

It features interviews with senior executives from Ace Hotel, Polyvore, Starbucks and Target. The trends identified within this document and the examples used to bring them to life are inspired by innovation from around the globe.  Check it out below:

PSFK presents Future of Retail report

Let us know your thoughts below.

WordPress SEO Made Easy With 5 Awesome WordPress SEO Plugins

Published on June 2, 2010 by iClick Solutions. View Comments

Wordpress SEOBesides creating an opportunity to help show your personality and connect with customers, a blog on your website is a proven online marketing tactic to help generate serious traffic from search engines.  What is not well known though is that there are over 22 million WordPress publishers as of February 2010 with 10.6 million blogs hosted on WordPress.com plus 11.4 million active installations of the WordPress.org software (per WordPress Stats).

What is even more amazing is that over 350,000 blog posts (see below chart) are published every day.  So with more and more blog posts being published every day, how can you increase your chances of having your blog appear at the top of search engine results like Google.com? The answer is simple – optimize your website for search engines.  Wow, we are genius right?  Obviously how that gets done is where the challenge is and we want to help you and hope you find this blog post on WordPress SEO made easy beneficial.

Wordpress SEO Made Easy With 5 Awesome Wordpress SEO Plugins wordpress seo statsThis WordPress SEO blog idea can be credited to a few clients who do have a good blogging strategy in place; however, they are not seeing traffic coming from the search engines to their blogs and requested our advice on what tools we have in place for WordPress SEO.

At the end of the day, without optimizing each and every blog post you won’t get much traffic, and your blog will slide into SEO black hole.  We know it is hard enough to create unique and consistent content for your blog so optimizing your blog post for search engines is one more step that can be easily solved leveraging existing WordPress SEO plugins.

Here are 5 WordPress SEO plugins that we have found that will help make your blog more search engine friendly and will help achieve your WordPress SEO objectives (oh and of course with our search engine marketing services too):

  1. Google XML Sitemaps – This WordPress SEO plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask to better index your blog. With an XML sitemap, it’s much easier for the search engine crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently. The Google XML Sitemap WordPress plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content. You can see an example of iClick Solutions Google XML Sitemap.
  2. All in one SEO Pack – This WordPress SEO plugin will help you take care of all your meta and title tags. There are a few amazing SEO features included with this plugin such as Canonical URLs which allows for the best URL format, i.e. www.sample.com versus sample.com or sample.com/blogpostname.php, optimizes titles of posts automatically, automatic generation of meta tags based on content which can be overwritten if you wish to change them and allows you to easily customize these important attributes without the need to dig into your html code.  It is important to still understand what keywords to optimize for so if you need assistance with your search engine optimization keywords please let us know.
  3. Redirection -  The Error 404 “Page not found” is the error page displayed whenever someone asks for a page that’s simply not available on your site.  The 404 error page is bad for users but also not loved by search engines.  This WordPress SEO plugin makes it much easier to manage all the pages of your site that have moved. The Redirection WordPress SEO plugin helps manage 301 redirections, keep track of 404 errors, and clean up any loose ends your site may have. This is useful if you are migrating pages from an old blog, or are changing the directory of your WordPress installation. It is well know that if you have too many 404 errors, search engines like Google may remove you from their index and really hurt your chances of achieving top search rankings.  The search engines closely monitor bounce rates and reward those websites with good rankings and traffic if you provide a good user experience so definitely leverage this WordPress SEO plugin to ensure you don’t have any dead page 404 errors.
  4. WP-Super-Cache – One of the newest requirements for increasing your chance of earning top search engine rankings is to ensure your website or blog loads quickly.  You can learn more about this topic on our Google page load time prior blog post.  To help your blog load faster leverage this WordPress SEO plugin that generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier WordPress PHP scripts. The static html files will be served to the vast majority of your users, but because a user’s details are displayed in the comment form after they leave a comment those requests are handled by PHP. With this plugin the search engine crawlers will be able to access your website faster and page load speed is one of the important on-site search engine optimization requirements.
  5. Sexy Bookmarks – Though the name may be a little risky for some (don’t worry clients won’t see the WordPress plugin name), SexyBookmarks has proven to be an extremely useful and successful tool in getting your blog readers to submit your blog post to numerous social bookmarking sites. This WordPress SEO plugin (see below this blog post for example) will automatically insert an attractive navigation bar on top or bottom of each blog post so that your readers can automatically bookmark your website on any of the most popular social bookmarking sites. You can customize which social sites such as Twitter or Facebook.  This WordPress SEO plugin helps the search engines find your content easier, and it can help boost your search ranking if more people discover your site and link to it.

There are many other amazing WordPress plugins available; however, we have found the above 5 WordPress SEO plugins to work the best.  We recommend you install (we can help if you need it) some of the above WordPress SEO plugins and are confident you will see improved search engine traffic within a few weeks.  Share with us below other WordPress plugins you have found to be of benefit and why.  We would love to learn from you as well.

Image Source from PromotePoint.

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Privacy on Facebook Settings Made Easier

Published on May 31, 2010 by iClick Solutions. View Comments

Privacy on Facebook

As you may have heard, today is Quit Facebook Day when a number of users around the globe plan to delete their Facebook profiles in protest over recent privacy on Facebook issues on the world’s largest social network.

At the time of writing this blog post a little more than 27,000 people had committed to delete their accounts, according to the Quit Facebook Day Website. While Quit Facebook Day may be a bit of bad press for Facebook, the reality is those intending to leave Facebook today make up just 0.0054 percent of Facebook’s 500+ million users.

We are huge fans of Facebook and almost always include Facebook in our social media marketing plans.  Yes, these recent Facebook privacy issues have been confusing and we don’t agree with how they were communicated; however, people are getting a little too upset about the privacy on Facebook concerns.  Our recommendation is before you follow the other Quit Facebook Day users, take the time to learn what the issues are and how you can make adjustments to your Facebook privacy settings.

Here are 2 great resources to check out:

Facebook is currently rolling out modifications to its privacy settings in response to the recent influx of user complaints. According to founder Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook needs to continuously update itself in order to accommodate its exponential growth.

Some of the recent changes, especially those dealing with privacy settings, have been met with controversy. The new updates aim to offer more privacy controls and limit 3rd party applications from accessing personal information.Concerns around privacy due to Facebook’s recent OpenGraph changes has been getting major press over the past few weeks.

Below is a Facebook video on how to edit your privacy settings on Facebook:

Here’s a recap of some of the ways Facebook simplified the privacy on Facebook settings:

  • Reduced the number of settings required to make all information private from nearly 50 to less than 15
  • Introduced presets that cover 18 individual settings for sharing with one single control—two clicks to control what had been more than 100 different options.
  • Consolidated 10 settings on three separate pages into seven settings on one page.
  • Reduced the number of separate pages in the privacy settings from 13 to eight.

The new controls are launching gradually, and many of you may not see them on your privacy settings page yet. Based on these updated privacy on Facebook changes everything you post is now in your control. That’s a big improvement and that means you can choose exactly who sees every post you make.

What do you think?  Are you concerned about your privacy due to Facebook recent changes?  Do these recent Facebook changes making it easier to set your privacy controls address your concerns?

Image Source:  sdow.semanticweb.org

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