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.

This animation is courtesy of theoatmeal.com

What is SOPA/ PIPA?

• SOPA stands for Stop Online Piracy Act and is currently going through the U.S. Hosue of Representatives.
• PIPA stands for Protect Intellectual Property Act and is currently going through the U.S. Senate

The acts are similar in their aims and are backed by some of the largest copyright holders in the U.S. including MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) and RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) who claim that internet piracy is a direct threat to businesses and artists. The acts are also backed by trademark-depending companies including Nike. All of these companies back SOPA and PIPA under the banner of fighting piracy but opposition parties (including Wikipedia, Reddit, Flickr and more) claim that there are serious flaws within the bills that could severely damage the internet as we know it.

The main problem for opponents of SOPA and PIPA is that every time they protest, the corporations and legislators in favour claim that they are backing piracy – a great way to argue even though it confuses opposing one thing with agreeing with another. Many of the websites who are protesting today are actually firm believers in copyright and actively fight against piracy on their websites. They just also welcome the distribution of free information. That is why Flickr users get to choose how their photos are licensed!

So what is included in SOPA and PIPA that is getting the internet so angry?

These bills are aimed to allow the U.S. Attorney General’s office to take actions against foreign websites. Something they have actually already done recently by ordering the extradition of British student Richard O’Dwyer who they want to convict for running a website that links to links that provide pirated content. This is not a crime in the UK but the goodwill deal between the two countries means that O’Dwyer is likely to face charges in the U.S. These bills will only increase acts like this and will go a step further as the Attorney General’s office will be able to take the following action:

If the site is U.S. directed:

• Prosecute the owner of the site of criminal violations
• Seize the site in question

If the site is foreign:

• U.S. sites and search engines are required to remove all links to the site
• U.S. advertising services are required to drop all advertising to the site
• U.S. payment networks are required to cease any transactions between the site and U.S. customers
• U.S. service providers are required to block access to the site through DNS blacklisting

Here is a video from musician and geek Dan Bull on why he thinks we should fight SOPA:

Duty to Monitor

There is a paragraph under SOPA that states that ad networks and payment networds do not have a duty to monitor the placement of links. However, search engines are not included so it may be assumed that they are expected and required to constantly monitor for new links. This is stop the links just appearing again after they’ve been removed.

Domestic or Foreign

One of the many areas that is controversial due to confusion is that sites are deemed ‘domestic’ or ‘foreign’ based entirely on domain name. Supported of the bills claim that the new legislations are aimed at foreign sites (US sites are already regulated to an extent) but under the muddled definition of a ‘foreign’ site, a domestic site with a .co.uk or .jp domain could easily be classified as foreign.

What Offences are Covered?

Another incredibly open area of the bill, violations are described as the ‘facilitation’ of illegal activity. This could be anything as broad as telling somebody how to rip a CD or download a file, without even providing any links to copyrighted material or explaining how these practices could be used to break the law. As shown by the upcoming extradition of Richard O’Dwyer, the U.S. already prosecutes people who link to links that provide pirated content so the meaning of ‘facilitation’ is wide open.

Will This Stop Online Piracy?

Opponents of the acts think this is highly unlikely. They claim it will put far too much power into the hands of copyright owners to restrict the internet. Currently they have to file reports that prove ownership and ask for specific links and content to be removed. Now they can require whole domains are removed, this could seriously hamper sites such as Flickr, Reddit and Wikipedia which support the internet as a free and open space.

Are Corporations Being Given Too Much Power?

The final question is whether U.S. corporations should be able to wield this much power in court to the point of helping to draft and push through legislation. It is easy to look back at almost every new technology and see a way that copyright owners have tried to ban them to increase profits. Cassette tapes, VHS, CDs, DVDs and MP3s have all started out as the enemy of media corporations but after protesting they have realised that they could actually make a lot of money from them. Perhaps these companies should stop trying to fight a losing battle. A statistic shows that the weighted average of software download illegally compared to legally is 59.9%. The U.S. is actually one of the lowest countries with only 20% of software downloaded illegally – this shows why they are now trying to battle against users in other countries. Perhaps it would be better to try and come up with a new way of making money that embraces the internet instead of trying to censor it?

What do you think? Fighting piracy or censoring free speech? Let us know in the comments below!

Don’t be a victim of dodgy link building by only using ethical SEO training. Our methods are a best practice approach and work in the long term without getting you kicked off Google! Social Media training is also important to understand how best to social networks to promote your business. InDesign courses, Photoshop training and accredited Prince2 training courses also available.

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Behavioural Targeting: Useful Marketing Tool?

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.

While international unanimity is still lacking, the Digital Advertising Alliance (DDA) is doing its best to regulate behavioural targeting in the US. According to broadcastingcable.com, the DAA has implemented a “newly codified set of online data collection principles” that will help online advertisers and media planners understand what is and is not acceptable when it comes to harvesting and using internet users’ behaviour.

The DAA is confident that the new regulations will protect sensitive user information, particularly data relating to health and financial status, and prevent those who collect user information from using it for anything other than advertising purposes.

Not everyone thinks that the new code will be effective, however. The Centre for Digital Democracy maintains that consumers’ sensitive information is still not protected; that data collectors can still use it for marketing purposes. The Centre intends approaching the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to reject the new code on the grounds that consumer information is still at risk.

In the meantime, the DAA plans to rollout the new regulations sometime next year, although no specific date has been set.

What are your views on behavioural targeting? Do you think it’s a force for good or evil, or something in between?

Sandy writes for a number of blogs on a variety of topics, including media planning, technology, travel and climate change.

Internet Marketing isn’t just about SEO and Social Media. Our Internet Marketing Training Courses include Email Marketing Training and Online Reputation Management Training. Make sure you are thinking about all aspects of your digital marketing campaigns!

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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:

Andy managed to get the Facebook Timeline by using this guide on how to install the Facebook Timeline early.

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.

There are definitely set backs to having everything on Facebook as highlighted by Mashable in their article ‘3 Fights to Expect When You Get the New Timeline‘. While the article is tongue in cheek it does bring up the fact that social media has always been a current media with the focus on what is happening NOW. Facebook have just gone and dragged the past into it.

Most people join Facebook in their teenage years and aren’t careful with what they post as they’re only sharing with friends. It doesn’t matter if there are photos from a drunken night, complaints about your parents and rants about your boss at your part time job because they won’t see it. However, once you reach your adult years and you start to add family and work colleagues on Facebook you don’t worry about them seeing what you were like a few years ago because it’s gone, right? Wrong. If the Facebook timeline goes ahead suddenly everything you shared that once lived at the depths of your profile are now revealed with a few clicks. Not only that but past posts won’t be covered by your current privacy settings but by the settings assigned to posts when they were created.

You can change past post visibility by two ways – go back and change every post individually (or delete it) or you can impose a blanket privacy setting for past posts that can be found in Privacy Settings:

This will set the privacy of all past posts to ‘friends’ but they will still be visible to those tagged in photos, updates etc. and their friends depending on their privacy settings.

Controversially, the Timeline feature will for the first time show users ‘de-friending’ each other. Anonymity really is coming to an end on Facebook as all your activity becomes public.

Facebook timeline is likely to split users into two camps – those who use it less because they’re concerned about who can see what (many of whom will delete their profiles entirely) or those who follow Facebook’s ethos and start sharing more – with friends, with relatives and with businesses. Along with the timeline feature Facebook has implemented an ‘auto-share’ feature for apps which for some will mean opening up a torrent of shared content. More about that later.

These changes will force people to consider carefully what they are putting on Facebook and what they have posted in the past and perhaps shift users out of complacency to really think about their online presence.

News Feed Ticker

Facebook timeline isn’t the only new aspect of Facebook throwing up privacy issues – they’ve also already launched the News Feed Ticker, a constantly updating feed on the right hand side of your home page.

Facebook have already altered the News Feed by dividing content into three categories – Top stories since your last visit, Recent Stories and a Ticker. The first two act much like the old Facebook layout – the ‘top stories’ list just features the information Facebook thinks you want to know that appeared since you last visited your home feed while recent stories is the same as the old news feed. The Ticker has caused the most uproar – it earns its name by constantly ticking along with real time updates from your Facebook connections.

At first you wonder why there are so many updates compared to the old News Feed – are people posting more or did Facebook previously hide content? Neither – the ticker shows you all of your friends’ activity even with people who aren’t your friends. Now if you post on somebody’s wall or they post on yours, all of your friends and all of their friends can see your post and subsequent comments. Here’s a humorous example of how that could get you in trouble.

Frictionless Sharing

The first example of Facebook’s frictionless sharing has come about with their deal with Spotify in which new Spotify users must connect with Facebook and in return every song you listen to is posted on your Facebook -

As the Timeline is introduced this feature will begin to appear through other apps and websites until Facebook users are sharing their complete web experience from listening tastes to the articles they read and games they play. Spotify has responded to negativity towards the auto-share feature by temporarily including a ‘private listen’ feature to allow users to listen to their guilty pleasures without sharing with the world. It is yet to see how this will fit with their deal with Facebook.

Unlike Spotify other companies may be reluctant to build in a ‘private’ function as they will want full exposure. Auto-share is touted by Facebook as a way for users to share their lives, tastes and experiences but in reality it is a powerful marketing tool.

Take a news site as an example. Previously if somebody wanted to share an article they had read they would click the ‘like’ button and it would appear on their profile – free advertising for that website to all of the users friends. Now, with auto-share, every article that user reads will appear on their profile – even the ones they don’t want to, always increasing exposure for the website.

This change means everybody browsing the web needs to be aware of what is being shared – accidentally admitting you listened to the Spice Girls is one thing but looking at the whole picture is worse. Facebook connections can build up an idea of someone based on their listening, viewing and reading preferences like they never could before and make assumptions.

Law Suits

Facebook have certainly seen a few days in court – there’s even a film about the first case – but the current one could prevent the release of the Timeline feature. Facebook have been sued by Chicago based company Timelines Inc. (spot the similarity?) Timelines.com is a website for creating timelines for businesses, sports teams, historical events etc. They claim that if Facebook launch their Timeline it will eliminate them from business. Considering Facebook started directing traffic from Timeline’s page to an introduction to Facebook Timeline, they have a point. Facebook have since changed this back.

Surprising considering the usual backlash towards Facebook changes and support for ‘the little guy’ the Timeline FB page has come under a torrent of anger from Facebook fans who are upset at the delay to the timeline and claim Timelines are only suing Facebook for exposure.

A federal judge refused to grant a temporary restraining order on Friday night which would have prevented Facebook from launching the timeline feature and forced them to stop allowing developers to sign up for it. However Facebook have agreed to postpone the full launch until the case is resolved. In the mean time any Facebook users can get the timeline early through a developer profile. The court case revealed that on Friday there were already over 1 million Facebook users who had switched to the timeline and the number was rising by 100,000- 200,000 a day.

It seems unlikely that Timelines.com will win their case but if it does it will have huge implications for Facebook.

Facebook’s second law suit is as a result of the news last week that Facebook have been using cookies to track users even after they have logged out of Facebook! This was originally noticed by Dave Winer but was fully laid open by Nik Cubrilovic. Everything that you did after logging out of Facebook was still tracked by Facebook – even worse one of the cooking ‘a_user’ contained user ID opening up a lot of privacy issues.

Facebook have since fixed the problem by removing the a_user cookie on logout but have left a number of other cookies in place. They claim these are are to help identify suspicious login activity and keep users safe.

A New Social Experience

Facebook’s latest changes really make the experience a social one in which a user’s profile is a snapshot of their entire life – not just the past couple of days. While Twitter and Facebook’s News Feed have encouraged people to interact with social media in a rapid way – always updating to keep pace with everybody else without any end goal or worry about what you’ve said in the past – Facebook has completely switch social media on its head by turning your entire experience into a social scrap book. In much the same way people used to on the old Myspace, Facebook users are forced to think about everything they write and share (and their past) as it forms their Facebook identity. You can even go back and add in your past -

Monty Munford believes this will lead to a ‘social CV’ in his article for the Telegraph. A lot of people probably will go back and delete any incriminating posts from their timelines but I would not put this down to ego. They will remove things for the same reason you don’t go around shouting your mistakes – to keep them quiet.

Facebook’s changes have opened up social media privacy debates for the first time in a while. One of the problems with Facebook, perhaps influenced by Twitter, is we are used to writing something and having it disappear quickly amongst other information. Now that it stays there for all to see it changes the way we use social media website. The Timeline, Ticker and frictionless-share features all open up Facebook to increased sharing and less privacy than before. Some say this is worrying as we’re not in control of what we’re sharing.

In fact you still are in control of what you share and always have been. My main advice is think. When interacting with the new Facebook:

• Only share what you’re happy with others seeing. It is called ‘social’ media for a reason. If you want to keep something private use a private form of communication.
• Don’t sign up to a service that is linked with Facebook unless you are happy for it to share your habits. Always be aware of what you’re clicking on so that you don’t embarrass yourself.

Really, these are good working rules for all social media and you should have been adhering to them long ago. As I’ve said there is a reason it is called social media – Facebook are just expanding on that. Their aim is to get you sharing everything from the films you watch to the articles you read. If you can’t handle sharing that much information there really is only one option – get off Facebook.

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Brighton Digital Marketing Festival (BDMF)

Another day, another conference – the Brighton Digital Festival rolls on, and on Thursday 8^th September we attended the Brighton Digital Marketing Festival (or #BDMF / @BDMFest) at the Pavilion theatre – organised by Pure360.

You can read our write up of the Update 2011 Mobile development conference on Monday 6th September here, we are  also attending BrightonSEO on Friday 9th – see #BrightonSEO 2011 – Attracting Quality Links.

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.

And some tips for the future of SCRM:

• Invest in content for mobile and tablets < this can’t be stressed enough!!
• Allow your brand to be talked about and criticised and be open in your responses – people expect this now
• Provide value for your customers – if you make an app – make sure it delivers what your customers want
• Keep reviewing – things are changing every week

And the ovveriding point to take away was:

• Don’t just make great stuff and sell it to people – interact with people effectively so that they can find the value in it for themselves.

We really enjoyed Mark’s presentation and some of the advice he gave echoed Cennyd Bowles’ thoughts at Update 2011 on Monday. It was a shame he had to rush though some of the later content because of time restrictions – but there was a lot of useful tips to take away nonetheless.

Christopher Dadd of Zenith Mist at BDMF

Christopher Dadd – Zenith Mist
Engaging Mobile Conversations Convert Clicks to Consumers

Chris has a lot of experience in digital innovation and runs his own agency – ZenithMist – and was here to give us some advice on implementing successful mobile solutions for customers – with an emphasis on retail and finance clients.

Unless you’ve been living in a hole for the last few years, you can’t have helped but notice the explosion in mobile and smartphone use for web browsing and shopping and Chris kicked off with some stats to back that up:

• Mobile searches are up 216% year on year as at Q2 2011
• Mobile sales have doubled over 3 years
• 91% of UK customers have used their phone for shopping
• 18% of UK mobile phones are smartphones - By 2010 it’ll be 50%
• Smartphone users are 63% more likely to engage with mobile
• 40% of UK shops will have a mobile shop in the next year
• 90% of people with phones send a text each month and are becoming happier to receive text ads, which are usually read within 5 minutes of being sent

Chris talked us through some of the work he has done with his clients, and some of the successes and failures he has had over the years.

The key take-away from this was six useful tips for innovating on mobile:

Christopher’s presentation went on to provide some useful tips on the issues and opportunities for mobile in  retail, finance and enterprise – which we’ll cover in a more detailed write up later.

Lewis Lenssen of DC Storm talks Attribution at BDMF

Lewis Lenssen – DC Storm
To Attribution and Beyond

Next up – Lewis Lenssen from digital marketing agency DC Storm gave a very useful overview of Attribution, and how to choose an appropriate attribution model.

This material was a little drier that what had gone before – but was thought provoking and provided some very useful tips nonetheless.

There’s not room to cover Lewis’ detailed summary in full here, and we may give this one a full write up later too – but as many of you reading this are likely not to know much about attribution – the key points covered were:

What is attribution?

If you use Google Analytics or something similar – you’ll be used to tracking where users come from when they buy from your site. Most commonly (and according to Lewis – 90% of businesses do this) the ‘last click wins’ – so the value of the sale (or goal) is attributed to the last place the user came from – whether that be a Google search for a specific term, an affiliate site or whatever.

In reality – the journey a user takes before they buy something online is much longer – and depending on your sales cycle can be hours, weeks or months of organic searches, PPC hits, EMail campaign hits, visits to affiliate sites and so on… There can be lots of contact points, and users refine their search terms throughout the journey.

Attribution models use advanced analytics techniques to divide the value of the sale as fairly as possible between all of the channels that contribute.

How do you divide the value of the sale fairly between channels?

This is the million dollar question in attribution – and why you need an effective attribution model that is understood and agreed by your business and any affiliates you work with.

Just dividing the value of the sale equally between all contact points isn’t necessarily the fairest way to do it. For example brand searches that occur late in the cycle (like “Canon EOS 550D Digital SLR” as opposed to “Digital SLR Camera”) are often downweighted as they are very specific and informed by earlier searches or marketing activity. You also need to carefully select the length of time that you are analysing – as contact points that occur very early in the sales cycle can be missed.

As I’ve mentioned – there was too much in this presentation to do justice to here – but one of the main take-always was that any Attribution Model must be carefully planned and agreed by all parties – and Lewis provided some useful tips for making sure that happens:

• Run a workshop - Map the sales journey out on paper and ask all concerned parties to give their opinion on the weighting of each channel / visit – present them back and reach a consensus
• Build the model from the workshop using real data and present it back to the group. Refine this until you have consensus. If everyone feels that they have contributed to the attribution model that are more likely to see it as being fair.

Pure360's Marc Muriner presenting at BDMF

Marc Munier – Pure 360
Putting Advanced Email Marketing Techniques in to Practice

The final presentation of the morning was from Pure 360‘s commercial director Marc Munier – who provided some useful EMail Marketing tips, and useful insights on how to combine EMail marketing with Social Media - coining the term “Somail” in the process – we’ll see if that catches on!

Like Christopher, Marc kicked off with some stats about the huge increase in mobile use including:

• Smartphone use is up 63% in the last year
• There has been a 41% increase in people checking email on their phones in the last year
• By 2014 there will be more mobile web users than desktop web users

The key statistic here for those running EMail Marketing campaigns is the second one – a huge increase in people reading mail on their phones.

There are lots of people who don’t think to test their EMail marketing campaigns on mobiles before they send them – and Marc had some embarrasing examples from some big organisations who you would think had the resources to make sure that happened.

Marc provided a lot of really useful tips for EMail design – and our favourites are summarised below:

Basic EMail Design Tips

• Test before you send! Use inbox simulation tools
• Make all buttons big enough – fingers are fatter than cursors!
• Don’t include too many calls to actions – send targeted actions with a clear objective – people are less likely to click if there are many diluted calls to action
• Image size – compromise on quality to increase speed
• Set pixel width and line wrapping with mobile in mind

You can find a really comprehensive guide to EMail design for mobile from Smashing Magazine here

More Advanced Tips

Marc went on to provide some other great tips on SMS marketing and using EMail Marketing with Social – which we’ll cover in a fuller write up soon.

That’s it.

All in all a great morning of presentations. Heather and Nathan are attending Workshops as part of BDMF – and we’ll have more from these soon too.

Many thanks to Pure360 for organising a great event – and for a very generous goodie bag for attendees, which included badges, artwork, water, chocolate (already eaten), chewy bar (already eaten), stick of rock, a TruThoughts CD and free Olympics tickets for one very lucky winner. Oh and a pen – but who uses them at a digital festival (powers down laptop)!

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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.

Have you got what it takes? If so please send your CV to alistair@siliconbeachtraining.co.uk

Related posts:

1. NEW iOS App Training: App Development for iPad and iPhone
2. Demand for Android training soars as Google pip Apple
3. New Mobile Web Design Course Using Dreamweaver & jQuery
4. How to Make Mobile Apps for Non-Developers
5. Customising E-Commerce Sites For All Mobile Devices

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.

New – Check out our guide on how to Customise your Google+ Profile and our post that will take you beyond the Google+ Basics

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.

UPDATE – If you know your way around but want some more advanced Google+ tips click here or check out our guide to the Google+ iPhone web app!

Why Google+ is different?

Google+ Circles

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.

This goes for following too you can see all the messages from your sets or circles separately. Circles in Google+ offer a unique a way of sharing content with an exact group of people.

For many who are frustrated with Facebook this is a chance to start anew as Facebook friend lists can be unmanageable. The word “friend” in existing social networks has really lost it’s meaning, now according to Google+ “Your real friends, the ones you feel comfortable sharing private details with.”

Your profile is public unless to edit your settings

Social networks can be private and/or public, defined by the default privacy setting. Facebook is meant to connect you with actual friends; they have to accept your invitation for you to see most parts of their personal profile.

With Twitter anyone can follow and see anyone else (if they haven’t blocked you).  With Google+ you can follow anyone, including Matt Cutts! You can see his stream, “like” his pictures, and comment on his posts. Beware though, it does attract a lot of comments and once you comment on a post expect an update a millisecond! Brilliant Google have a solution to this problem, another gem, you can mute a post to stop receiving comment updates – PHEW!

So far the only way to keep your profile private is to go to the privacy settings of your profile and un-check the button, I think they are all public by default.

Hangouts

Hangouts allow ten simultaneous users to connect with each other for video messaging. This is an original feature and Facebook has nothing in comparison. The closest comparison is Skype.

Instant Upload

A great time saving feature. Any photos or videos taken on a smart phone connected to your Google+ account can be instantly uploaded the moment they are taken and put into a private folder where they wait to be published. This is an improvement over Facebook’s very slow Photo Uploader which requires you to load the photos manually. We’ve written a guide to the Google+ iphone app

Sparks

Sparks allow users to type in what they are interested in and provides news and website suggestions. This is a unique part of Google+ that no other social networking site currently provides. It will be interesting to see how it decides what to recommend, and whether its suggestions are actually relevant to a user with less mainstream interests.

Huddle

Huddle allows a grouping of messages into one conversation. For example, if you were arranging to meet up with six friends for dinner, rather than having to juggle each friend individually you can group all the messages into one place so everyone can become a part of the organising of the event. This is being marketed more for the Google+ smart phone app. It is certainly a useful feature but not entirely original. It is very similar to the idea of Facebook  Event Pages.

You Can Get Your Data Back

With Facebook you are forced to make certain parts of your personal data “public”, and It is very hard to permanently delete your Facebook profile. Google, has made  it possible for you to pick up all the data you’ve ever banked with Google!. This is done through a Google+ tool called “Data Liberation.” You can download data from your Picasa Web Albums, Google profile, Google+ stream, Buzz and contacts, save it all and delete your account.

You can edit your messages

Hooray. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve cursed because Facebook doesn’t have that option.

Developer access is coming soon

Developer access is coming soon for Google+ users. Read this on Rafe Needlemans blog this morning:

“It’s simply a matter of time. As Vic Gundotra, senior vice president of social for Google, told me at a Web 2.0 Summit cocktail party tonight, “I’m a developer guy at the core. It is inconceivable I would build something without a platform.””

Sounds like Google are already celebrating their resounding success!

Google is collecting names from developers who want to know when the company launches developer tools. There’s an e-mail and Google Group sign-up online now.

We have just published a new post that will take you beyond the Google+ Basics

We are not the only ones who think its great:

You may be interested to know we provide some great SEO and Google Analytics Training Courses, Social Media, Project Management , HTML5, Ajax and JQuery courses.

Related posts:

1. The evolution of Google+
2. Inside the Google+ iPhone Web App
3. How to Pimp Your Google+ Profile Design – Download Template
4. Comparing present Google results with Google Caffeine
5. Google +1 vs Facebook – can it challenge?

circus of horrors

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.

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circus of horrors

In the mirror today

“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”

I only saw Captain Dan the Demon Dwarf stick a henry hoover on his todger! Apparently Captain Dan made headlines in 2007 when he was hospitalised after accidentally gluing his penis to a vacuum cleaner as he prepared for a performance at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

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circus of horrors - Captain Dan The Demon Dwarf

Ex accountant Hannibal Helmurto was hanging stuff from his nose, apparently he was stuck in front of a mirror for five hours once when practicing his new self hypnosis techniques in order to swallow three swords at the same time (I witnessed this one!) His wife had to call his hypnosis instructor because she couldn’t snap him out of his trance.

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circus of horrors - Hannibal Helmurto

The Mirror also published an article on the fact that The Circus of Horrors have already appeared with Ant and Dec (shock horror!)

Loving this one just in from “Metro”

BGT’s Circus of Horrors were banned for lewd penis display and smoking

What can we learn from the Circus of Horrors?

If you want to be noticed do something:

• Extreme
• Extraordinary
• Controversial
• Gruesome
• Shocking
• Different

Now I’m not suggesting that you reveal your privates to get the attention of your customers, but do some thing extraordinary, or shocking and you will capture their attention, get you lots of lovely link juice for Search Engine Optimisation, and get the press interested.

Ideas

Run a freaky or wacky competition

1. This could involve customers to do something extraordinary or different and get them to upload photographs to a Flickr account or get them to video themselves and upload to YouTube.
2. Get them to video their weirdest party tricks, or send in images of their most gruesome Halloween costumes etc etc.
3. Inform the press and don’t forget to tell your customers that their images can be used to publicise the competition in your rules.
4. Plaster it all over Facebook and twitter
5. Write press releases and Blog posts about it
6. Register it with all the competition listings you can find on the Internet.
7. Try and get a Judge who is heavily involved with Social Media
8. Try and get a prize sponsor who is heavily involved with Social Media

Find the Popular and Bizarre on the internet and write about it in relation to your product or service.

Just like I have done here! Other examples of where this technique has worked well for us in terms of generating traffic and links are:

What Marketing Tips can we learn from X Factor Wagner?

What Business Skills can we learn from The Apprentice’s Melissa Cohen?

BrightonSEO Video – Using News Search Tools for SEO (& Karen Gillan’s Underwear) – this is a video about the power of writing about trending topics.

So think about the extreme, the wacky and the different. Maybe you could have an internal competition for the best idea and have a vote on it.

Dare to be different, and vote for the Circus of Horrors on Britain’s got talent so that I can see the Queens face when she sees Gary Stretch.

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circus of horrors - Gary Stretch

Related posts:

1. Why Inspiration Should Never Party With Plagiarism
2. Great SEO and Online Marketing Tips Video
3. Great SEO and Online Marketing Tips Video part 2
4. Brighton Digital Marketing Festival (#BDMF) – Morning Keynotes Review
5. Why you need Social Media Marketing for Business

SMX Search Marketing Expo 2011

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.

Silicon Beach Training provide Social Media Training, Google Ananlytics Training, Advanced Google Ananlytics, jQuery Training and Ajax Training in Brighton Sussex.

Discount Code for Search Marketing Expo London

We can also offer you a 15% discount if you book using this discount code: SILICONBEACH011

when you book. To reserve your ticket go to http://searchmarketingexpo.com/london/register

Related posts:

1. Great SEO and Online Marketing Tips Video
2. Why you need Social Media Marketing for Business
3. Great SEO and Online Marketing Tips Video part 2
4. Win free Email Marketing Course
5. Google Blog Search & Blog Directories: How to Promote a New Blog