Flickr is just one of many websites protesting against SOPA and PIPA today by giving Flickr users the option to blackout their images for 24 hours. If you log in and view your Flickr images today (Wednesday 18th January 2012) you will see this box appear below your photo:
Unlike Wikipedia and a number of other websites, Flickr is not forcing its users to join the protest and is not preventing them from showing their content. This is because you own the rights to your images and so it should be your option. Respecting content ownership, nice one Flickr! If you choose to ‘darken this photo’ in protest of SOPA and PIPA here is how your photos will appear:
Don’t worry, you can change your photos back at any time and the darken effect should disappear after 24 hours!
Create images you are proud to show off and use to make a point by coming on a Photoshop Training course in Brighton.
At this point you may be wondering (if you’ve avoided newspapers and messageboards for the past week) what on earth SOPA and PIPA are, and why you should bother covering up your lovely photos for a day in protest against them. Read the rest of "Flickr Protests Against SOPA/ PIPA"
Behavioural targeting is a contentious issue. Online advertisers think that it’s a great way to collect consumer data that can be leveraged to determine which ads should be displayed to which users.
The information collected for behavioural targeting purposes comes from user cookies, so it includes their browsing history (which pages they visit, especially frequently visited pages that demonstrate a specific field of interest) and click history (which ads the user has clicked before, what type, what products, and where were they displayed).
One justification for behavioural targeting is that it is designed to enhance internet users’ experience. Users aren’t plagued by boring ads that are of no relevance to them; instead they see ads that are highly relevant to their interests, careers and hobbies (in theory).
The practice is contentious because many people consider it an invasion of privacy. People aren’t keen for marketers to “stalk” them as they trip across the net. There are concerns as to exactly what data is captured (how personal and sensitive) and how it is used (is it sold to other marketers, is it generalised to offline campaigns?).
Facebook have come under fire recently as it has been found out their cookies track users even when logged out, they use behavioural targeting to justify this, claiming that it is the best way to ensure the right adverts appear for Facebook users. While people don’t seem to mind Google storing data about to provide custom search results, Facebook have caused an uproar. Read more about Facebook tracking cookies.
Behavioural Targeting Regulations
Up to now, behavioural targeting hasn’t really been regulated. There have been some half-hearted attempts to try and impose industry guidelines, but nothing has been properly formalised, especially on an international level. Read the rest of "Behavioural Targeting: A Force for Good or Evil?"
Update: Now that Facebook Timeline has gone live we have written a more up to date post on everything you need to know about Facebook Timeline. The post covers images, privacy, new features and even deleting your profile completely!
Google+ went live to the world this summer as part of Google’s massive expansion (read our Google+ tips) In response Facebook have continuously implemented and announced many major changes to the Facebook layout and the way users share content. To date they have changed the News Feed, revealed a new profile Timeline (resulting in a court case) and started to change the way users share information with auto-share. It has also come to light that Facebook have been tracking users even after they have logged out (also resulting in a court case). Every bit of news concerning Facebook in the past week has involved privacy issues and has led to many claiming they’ve finally had enough with Facebook. There are always complaints when Facebook changes anything but after a while you forget what was changed. Are these latest changes big enough to finally turn people away from Facebook and into the arms of Google+?
If you need to understand how using Social Media for you business can be enormously beneficail to web traffic, ranking, brand awareness etc. take a look through our Social Media Training courses, Google Analytics Training, and SEO courses.
Facebook Timeline
On September 22nd Mark Zuckerberg announced major changes to Facebook profiles at F8. When (or perhaps if – read on) the new profiles are rolled out they will look like this:
As you can see Facebook will arrange all your information into a timeline dating back to when you were born (with a big gap between birth and joining Facebook). This new profile allows for greater customisation as you will be able to add a cover image at the top and choose what appears on your timeline by ‘featuring’ posts (as the photo comp post is) or hiding them.
At first this new design seems impressive but once bloggers put their thinking caps on and had a closer look some issues began to arise.
Firstly it brings into consideration – how much information do you want to share? For the first time your whole Facebook experience is laid out in total for everybody to see. In the past you could be forgiven the occasional privacy slip or rant about your boss as it would slip into obscurity after a few days. Now however, any of your friends can delve through your Facebook history by year and month. Read the rest of "Facebook Changes – Everything you need to know"
The four morning keynotes at BDMF were crammed in to a 2 hour session with no breaks – so it was an intensive morning with some numb-bums by the end, but covered a wide range of digital marketing disciplines well, including social, mobile, and eMail marketing.
Our round up of these sessions is below, and we’ll be writing up some of them in more detail soon with some video too…
Mark Kelleher from BBC Technology at BDMF
Keynote – Mark Kelleher, BBC Technology Social CRM Approaches, Risks and Futures
In his very energetic and highly entertaining keynote, Mark Kelleher shared some of his experiences of Social CRM (SCRM) at the BBC, and gave us some advice on the challenges of implementing a social CRM strategy, along with some thoughts on its future.
How is Social CRM different from ‘standard’ CRM’?
Mark started by summarising what sets SCRM apart from the ‘database-of-customers-to-market-to’ approach of traditional CRM. They key difference he highlighted was that with SCRM you are no longer the sole voice of your brand.
He used Dr Who as en example – in the 11 years between the ‘old’ series and the series with Christopher Ecclestone, hundreds of videos had been posted on YouTube and fans had taken ownership of the Dr Wh0 brand. This generated a huge buzz around the launch of the new series which worked in the BBC’s favour.
We’ll publish video with a full write up of Mark’s session later – but the key takeaway points were:
Create a buzz and let go – people will find their own value in your messages and content – you can’t tell them what you want them to think any more – “customers don’t know how they are going to behave”
Accept that it won’t always work – SCRM is much harder to predict, so its very hard to forecast ROI effectively – you have to stick stuff out there and see how it develops – some things will flop!
You can’t be everywhere any more – Because a lot of the channels you use in SCRM are ‘free’ its tempting to want to be on all of them – but there are so many now that this simply isn’t possible. Explore your brand and your consumers’ target channels and prioritise your investment
Mark also provided some good advice on managing the risks of SCRM:
Try to make sure that your customers want you to have an SCRM presence before you invest heavily in it – this can be hard to ascertain but make sure that what you are doing adds value.
Prepare to be flexible – Don’t invest all of your time and effort in to one channel or network – be prepared to shift focus as new things emerge
Don’t wait too long – your brand will be seen as old fashioned if your customers are waiting for you to arrive and you don’t – they’ll take their business to the companies that are there
Your brand doesn’t have to answer all of the questions people have about you. People like to find things out for themselves (and that’s cheaper for you!) and there are other customers out there who will answer questions for you in the social sphere.
We have now launched our first mobile app development course! iPhone App Development Training teaches you how to create iOS 5 apps from scratch, allowing you to style popular apps for iPhone and iPad and have mobile users download your content directly to their phones and tablets.
A recent Ofcom report has shown that one third of adults in the UK use a smart phone.
mobile development training
In 2009 half a billion people accessed the web via their mobile worldwide, and that is expected to have doubled by 2014 as the mobile web overtakes the desktop PC as the most popular way to browse.
Smart businesses are grasping the opportunities that the latest mobile applications make possible. If your website does not render properly on a mobile device, you’ll be missing out on a vast amount of traffic and exposure.
And that’s just mobile web browsers – an increasing number of users are now using native web apps on their phones for their favourite sites. The Financial Times iOS app launched in June 2011, and already has 350,000 users.
Silicon Beach Training is in the process of developing mobile application training courses to meet the industry demand.
If you think you have what it takes to join our team as an associate Mobile Web or Applications Development Trainer, we would like to hear from you.
At Silicon Beach Training we have high standards, and know that simply being a great programmer or developer does not make you a great trainer, so look at the following trainer recommendations when considering your application:
Good trainers need to be great communicators
Great technical training courses teach by showing delegates why they are doing something, showing them how to do it then letting them do it – people learn by doing – it’s important to have well researched and tested exercises and case studies prepared.
You need to start with a well researched course schedule that is realistic within the time frame
It’s important to stick to a schedule and not get sidetracked
It’s important to be able to juggle different abilities - to have things prepared for the high flyer’s so they don’t get bored, and be able to assist the slower delegates to bring them up to speed without holding back the class.
It’s about teaching not lecturing – don’t make the introduction too long, delegates want to start doing practical work before first break
Take delegate feedback and be open to it – we always read every word of feedback and use this to constantly improve our courses.
Courses in development are:
Mobile Apps Strategy Training
This is a course about how businesses can use mobile apps as part of their marketing or communications strategy. Not only will this course cover what you will need to know to use your marketing budget effectively to outsource the development of smart phone apps, but also how to use you can use the iPhone, Android devices, BlackBerrys and Windows Phone 7 effectively for marketing. The course will help you to understand processes for commissioning, developing and evaluating apps.
Objective C Training
This course is an introduction to coding in Objective-C, its a good primer for those who need to learn the Foundation Framework to develop code for iPhone or iPad apps using iOS
iPhone and iPad app development
This training course is an introduction to iOS development techniques and concepts. Delegates will learn to use the major tools and APIs in the iPhone SDK, and how they fit together.
Android Application Development
This is a hands-on training course taking delegates through how to set up the Android Development Environment to publishing an application on the Android marketplace.
Responsive Web Design
This course covers using the latest Web standards including HTML5, CSS3, jQuery and JavaScript to design dynamic web-pages, using flexible layouts which render perfectly on all mobile devices.
Many Social media junkies from the UK are screaming for an invite to try out Google+ but they may have to wait a little bit longer.
Despite the skeptics who referred to Google Wave and Google Buzz as an indicators that it wouldn’t take off, I believe it’s easily the best social offering from Google to date and has become the hottest invitation you are likely to get for a while.
Google had to stop inviting users to join its new social networking service less than two days after its launch in the US due to “Insane demand”. An early indicator that Google+ is going to be a big contender in the social media arena.
The message many in the US users were getting yesterday was
“We’ve shut down invite mechanism for the night. Insane demand. We need to do this carefully, and in a controlled way. Thank you all for your interest!
For any who wish to leave, please remember you can always exit and take your data with you by using Google Takeout.
It’s your data, your relationships, your identity.”
If you have been lucky enough to get a head start don’t forget to follow us on Google+!
Most of the people who are on Google+ so far in the UK are people with existing strong social networks. Google have admitted they have been accepting people who have strong social graphs.
The brilliant thing about circles that is missing from Facebook is that you can choose to message everyone at the same time or you can send messages to groups (circles) that you have set up to include a special set of people. Read the rest of "Google+ It’s so hot"
Some of you may have seen The Circus of Horrors on Britain’s Got Talent recently. Amanda Holden described them as “gruesomely good” after seeing a woman being swung around by her hair.
I was lucky enough to see them live performing for the Brighton Fringe Festival. I asked permission to take photos as performance photography is a passion of mine, and as usual tagged the images and geolocated them so that they appear in Google Search. Sure enough when you type in “circus of horrors Brighton fringe” I will come up number one.
For marketing my photography this is a great tool. If you take a look at my flickr account, you will notice that I link the rest of my photography sites Brighton Photographer, Heather Buckley Photography (my Facebook page) and my twitter account, in the image description. Its a good example of cross marketing.
To learn more about SEO and Social Media, you could come to Brighton and enrol on one of our Social Media Training. If you would like to learn how to improve your image editing skills for your business blog than you might like to try our Photoshop Training courses or WordPress Training.
In doing this exercise however I noticed that the Circus of Horrors was in the news today, of all the acts on Saturdays show this is the act that the papers are talking about. I got me thinking about how marketeers can learn from Dok Daze and his freak show. Bear with me and enjoy the images and I’ll give you some inspiration for your marketing endeavours.
“Kilt-wearing Captain Dan the Demon Dwarf, for example, uses a delicate part of his anatomy to swing a bowling pin between his legs. Then there’s Hannibal Helmurto, who can pull a four-ton truck with ropes attached to meat hooks in his back”
The editors of Search Engine Land have been busy organising the schedule for the next SMX advanced program in London on May 16th and 17th . Search Marketing Expo has now been going for more than 10 years and has been attended by tens of thousands search marketeers.
The advanced expo in London is designed for professional or knowledgeable SEOer’s – the line up will be discussing cutting edge contemporary theory and tips, no wasting time going over the beginners SEO basics. They promise “Sessions are fast-paced, Q&A-packed, frequently controversial, always informative…”
Attending this conference allows SEO experts to connect with decision makers from the search engines, and other key industry stakeholders. You’ll be encouraged to participate in conversations orchestrated to debate thorny issues and move the industry forward. Some of the most accomplished and influential search marketers in the world will be revealing cutting edge tips for driving traffic, increasing paid search conversions, SEO, social media marketing and search analytics.
At Silicon Beach Training we understand that getting your delegates involved is a powerful learning technique so this approach should get you absorbing all those wonderful secrets and set you off thinking about search marketing in new and innovative ways.
