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?"
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.
Forget the viral hype of the facebook dislike button scam, whilst the facebook scam directed you though a survey that made them money before redirecting you to the official FaceMod Dislike Button page, the facemod page is not in any way connected to the scam and the dislike button is real and not scary to download! It won’t eat your computer. It’s real, it’s alive and you can download it now!!! Hooray.
Having said that DO NOT click on the download in facebook itself – go straight to the link below – I promise – it’s safe.
If I had a pound for every time i heard “I wish there was a facebook dislike button” I’d be able to retire. But wait a minute - It exists it really does!! A legitimate Facebook Dislike Button in the form of an add-on for Firefox, and soon an Internet Explorer version will be available as well.
The Official Facebook Dislike Button developed by FaceMod adds a Dislike button option right alongside the Like button in Facebook.
You can use it to show your support when your miserable friends are complaining.
Or you can use it to loose friends by disliking everything they say
Unfortunately only other Dislike Button users will be able to see your “dislikes.” so it should pick up speed when the IE version is available and apparently support for other browsers, like Chrome and Safari, is also coming soon.
“This is very sketchy indeed. Just as bad as the scam survey. Please don’t encourage people to download this.
It stores your personal data on some unknown, unregulated server somewhere with no written privacy policies, no recourse in the case of abuse, and no real proof of what else they might be capturing besides your “dislike” data.”
So although all Facebook applications do this I must admit that I do not know weather or not the application developers have anything else in mind for your data.
Facebook Places use the mobile browser of any cell phone that supports HTML5 and geolocation, If you want to learn HTML you should look at our HTML5 training course – it’s the future! Although ‘Facebook Location’ is currently only available in the U.S. UK users and the rest of the world will be joining in soon – could it be the new foursquare? It is not yet known when the service, which allows users to check-in to restaurants, bars and shops, will launch in the UK. It is currently live via the Facebook iPhone app in the US and on an advanced version of its mobile site.
Facebook has said it is working with Foursquare and Yelp, to develop Places, although there is no information about how this relationship will work and it is apparent that the service could be a threat to these established giants considering it already has has over 500 million members. It is already influencing it’s competitors/collaborators. Yesterday Foursquare introduced new privacy settings, ahead of the Facebook Places launch, which make it easier for its users to hide their email addresses and phone numbers, to opt-out of automatic check-in at certain venues, and to choose which lists they appear on. It allows them to control whether or not they publish their Foursquare activity to Facebook and Twitter, and to decide whether they want businesses to know if they are a regular customer or not.
Here’s how Facebook Places works
Display your Location on Facebook
Now, or at least soon, you can broadcast your current location to your friends on Facebook now Facebook has unveiled it’s new location based service called Facebook Places
If you show your location using Facebook Places it will show you other people who may be near that place around the same time.
Who will see my location on Facebook?
As Always privacy will be a concern but this time (once bitten!) Facebook has added very simple settings allowing you control the visibility of places where you are checking-in.
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.
