Well I wrote about the amazing success of the Old Spice Guy campaign a while ago, and then was alerted to some info on the web which suggested that sales of Old Spice had gone down. Now a new study is heralding Old Spice Guy as the hottest Social Media Campaign in history. I must say I prefer this version (the positive spin) as I think it is pure genius.
Brandweek notes:
There is little doubt about the viral hit’s popularity. Launched in February, the official version has racked up nearly 12.2 million YouTube views.
But sales of the featured product—Red Zone After Hours Body Wash—aren’t necessarily tracking with that consumer appeal: In the 52 weeks ended June 13, sales of the brand have dropped 7 percent according to SymphonyIRI. (That amount excludes those rung up at Walmart.) P&G execs were not available to comment.
Watch this video spelling out The Old Spice Guy’s resounding success, watch it ladies – you know you want to.
Those of you who regularly use Google Blog Search may be interested in a recent change. It makes it easier for you to find a blog on a specific topic , rather than finding individual posts. Google collects information from a blog’s feed and from the blog itself in an attempt to understand what a blog might be about.
It might collect information such as the content of posts, post titles, post authors, blog authors, the blog’s title, profile information about the authors, blog roll information, and possibly other information about the blog.
Rather than focusing upon ranking individual blog posts for a particular query, the search appears to be determining whether the blog itself should be ranked for that query.
If you start a search at Google’s home page for the term “Brighton SEO Training,” and then choose “blogs” in the left sidebar, you will see three blogs listed at the top of the blog search results under a link that says “Related blogs about Brighton SEO Training.”
Google Blog Rank for Brigthon SEO Training
You will see three blogs listed at the top of the results on Brighton SEO Training, and then a line separating those links from results that appear to be a ranking of individual blog posts about Brighton SEO Training.
Silicon Beach Training blogs are number 1 because we write many new and interesting blog posts about SEO Training each week.
One nice thing about this change is that when you click on the “Related Blogs about Brighton SEO Training” link we can now see a much longer list of “home pages” (the front page of a blog dedicated to the subject) on topics that we search for. We get a sense of how relevant a blog might be to our search – those blogs (not articles or pages) that Google deem most relevant for it to show up at the top of the “realated blogs” search results.
Google still delivers results for the most relvant single page or post underneath the “Related Blogs” list. Read what Google have to say about on the Official Google Blog
The New Gmail Priority Inbox is going to make Gmail much more viable for mainstream users. Introduced yesterday in Beta, it enables GMail users to prioritise email based on who you contact. So spammers and email marketers are going to the bottom of the pile.
This priority filter is smart – it looks at a lot of things, such as who you email a lot, who you chat with, and who you actually read email from, among other things. In effect it sifts through your communications for you puts your important people at the top of the pile and delegates what it deems to be insignificant to the bottom.
I think this move is totally in tune with the changes in marketing and personal online activity. People want to choose who they allow to suggest products to them. It may depend on an existing relationship with a current supplier or a recommendation from someone they know and trust. Just as we now fast forward through the adverts making them ineffective most of the time because we just choose not to see them, so applications such as GMail are helping us to do this with our every day communications by making intelligent decisions for us by looking at our online behaviour.
It is being rolled out gradually like Google Buzz and soon every GMail account will have. Once it’s activated on your account, you’ll see a prompt asking if you want to enable Priority Inbox. There are a few options to choose from for example:
you can choose the order of your various in-boxes
you can choose contacts you’d like to always mark ‘Important’
What’s great about it is there aren’t any rules to set up and you don’t need to ‘teach’ Gmail what is important, it just works.
The big brands are now getting more exposure in the Google search results than ever before. Although Google are talking about the importance of brand there seems to be little information about how “brand” is measured, what makes a brand stronger in the eyes of Google would be very useful indeed.
One thing is for certain - the way the big brands are handled by Google is changing, but so far we can only speculate on how Google measures a brands strength. It’s such a fuzzy area and one that is difficult to research so I put brand expert Nichola Stott on the spot at the last Brighton SEO meet and this is what she said:
Google is now allowing the initial pages of some search results to be dominated by a single brand or website, if it has sub-domains and a “strong user interest”. The fact that a user’s query “may be restricted” to a search of the one website/brand most associated with that query is an issue for SEO providers. For an example of this type ‘dell’ into Google and it will return the 5 top results from dell. But this is not universal – type Nike into Google and it’s a different story. This suggests these restricted searches will only effect brands that have been specifically targeted by Google so smaller businesses will not be effected. Your ranking, however will be effected by what Matt Cutts calls ‘trust metrics’.
He even goes on to say that Google doesn’t think about Brand that much! Mmmmm… I’m not so sure about that, but I certainly think that following his suggestions will definitely help your SEO efforts:
Provide great content
Become an authority in your niche
Be the expert that people want to link to (read linkbait)
Be the expert that people want to talk about (ie: references to your company name)
Kevin Rose, Digg’s co-founder previously warned “the new version of Digg, which would go live in the next few months, would represent the biggest change in the site’s history.
“This is just phase one of what will be an on-going, iterative process, involving lots of input from all of you. We’ll be pushing out features on a regular basis and tweaking often.”
“Our goal has always been for Digg to be a place where people can discover and share content and conversations from anywhere on the web. With Digg v4, we are introducing a few things that will make discovering and discussing news a lot better.”
“When you see the new design, you’re going to go, ‘Wow, this is not the same site’.”
What makes Digg different from other social bookmarking sites is it’s strong user community who vote on how interesting stories are by “digging” the articles they like, and “burying” those they don’t. With 35 million unique users per month many bloggers and web developers feature Digg buttons on their site (like us) to allow readers to easily share articles.
Speed is a big factor as the new Digg is faster in every way: submitting articles, loading pages, and Digging content, great news for those using it as part of their social media routine.
Personalisation is even more key, the new design will makes it easier to view content and connect with friends, publishers, and influencers you care about. I think this will be key to Diggs ongoing success, whilst there has been a lot of speculation lately about the future of Digg, this could get them right back on track.
Digg had become a tool for “digg power users” and the company was both unhappy with the way that power users were influencing the natural and organic way in which Digg is supposed to work. Now the new features make the social and community aspects of Digg paramount, it has definitely made digg much more attractive to peopel like me who want to use it for social media. Read the rest of "I’m digging the new Digg?"
Have you ever signed up for something when you really didn’t want to? Good sales people spend months, sometimes years learning to break down your resistance to the NO word. Of course you could always enrol onto our brilliant Assertiveness Training course to make it easier (next one is 14th and 15th Oct 2010), meanwhile…
Learning to recognise some of these familiar sales techniques may save you from signing up to a spectacularly unmissable waste of time and money!! …
People feel obliged to return a favour – right? Sales people exploit this by offering you small favour before getting you to sign you life away! Remember they are not really doing you a favour – REMEMBER IT’S ALL A BIG PLAN TO PART YOU WITH YOUR MONEY.
When you are made to believe something is rare (”a limited time offer!”), you want it for fear that you will loose out. If it’s not still available later/tomorrow next week etc. YOU DON’T WANT IT.
Sales people seek to find things in common with their victims, tell jokes, and pay compliments. Flattery, common interest, interest in your family/work/holiday etc, will get them everywhere. THEY ARE NOT INTERESTED IT IS ALL A PLOY.
Sales People convince their marks that they are experts in order to gain control of you. That’s why they pin pictures of themselves posing with famous people on their walls. REMEMBER YOU KNOW BEST.
People are like sheep. A Salesman will try and convince you, and often show some kind of proof that everyone else has signed up/bought in. It’s called the “social proof” technique. DON’T WORRY YOU ARE NOT THE ONLY ONE WHO HASN’T GOT ONE!
Sales people will set you up by asking you a question to which you will proudly admit yes to. for example “Other people think you are a great photographer right?” oooo I want it already, what is it? REMEMBER THEY SAY THAT TO ALL THE GUYS/GIRLS.
So now you are prepared you should be able to fend them off! Of course if you find it difficult to say no generally you could enrol on our Assertiveness Training course, it’s great for Confidence Building. If you spend all you time on the phone being sold stuff you could come on our Time Management Training courses, and if you want your staff to use all the above to your advantage you could organise a telephone sales training course for them so that they can become annoyingly difficult to say NO to!
Good assertiveness skills help build confidence and self esteem. They help avoid bullying and being bullied or feeling the victim.
We provide a two day Assertiveness training course providing practical guidance for anyone who needs to develop their assertiveness skills and build confidence for a range of situations.
Assertivness encourages mutual respect within relationships. It can save you from being/feeling/acting the martyr. It’s healthy, non aggressive and liberating…..so….
What causes people to avoid being assertive?
Many people are not assertive for fear of displeasing others or not being liked. However, in the long run although you may avoid some immediate unpleasantness by not being assertive, you can also create more tension and resentment in a relationship if you refuse to assert yourself and then feel that you are being taken advantage of over and over again. Remember for someone to have control over you, you have to give control to them. Yes, you are responsible, which is difficult to take on board at times, you do not need blame yourself, but you can take responsibility to make changes to the way that you think, behave and react to other people by learning and practising healthy assertiveness skills.
How Assertive Are You?
Ask yourself the following questions.
Do you find it easy to ask for help if you need it?
Can you express anger and annoyance appropriately?
Do you find it easy to ask questions when you don’t understand something?
Do you offer your opinion when you think or feel differently from someone else?
Are you able to say “no” when you don’t want to do something?
If you answered no to many of the questions above you would benefit from developing stronger assertiveness skills. We have provided a detailed, free assertiveness resource, or you could enroll onto our Assertiveness Training course. th next one is running on 14th and 15th October 2010.
You need to people to see your post especially if your blog is new. Here are some top tips for publicising your Blog. These techniques not only get traffic to your blog but also serve as a very effective way to use social media for link building – which is great for your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) .
How to Increase Traffic to your Blog, Improve Ranking and Link Building using Social Media
Search for other topic related Facebook business pages and find ones that automatically show “others” posts on their wall, you can post your link up here too.
Those of you who regularly use 
The big brands are now getting more exposure in the Google search results than ever before. Although Google are talking about the importance of brand there seems to be little information about how “brand” is measured, what makes a brand stronger in the eyes of Google would be very useful indeed.
