Recently, one social media campaign has found it hard to stay out of the news for all the wrong reasons. What started off as an attempt to raise awareness of worrying problems Africa soon spiralled into something very different. A lot has been written about what went wrong on the Kony 2012 campaign. However, there is a more light hearted story of social media success at the moment involving a pub in Southampton called The Hobbit.
We can learn two things from this story. Firstly that the internet makes it easier for rights holders to find copy right infringement, and secondly that social media can be a powerful weapon if wielded properly.
If you are looking to increase your presence on the web then we recommend our Social Media training and Content Marketing training courses. As well as teaching you how to use the tools at your disposal, the courses are also designed to help you create and manage a successful marketing strategy.
The Hobbit Pub, Southampton
Nestled in the shire of Bevois Valley, Southampton is The Hobbit pub, popular with students. It is a place I visited regularly as a University of Southampton student and is well known for its ‘Fellowship’ cocktails named after Lord of the Rings characters.
The pub has traded under the name The Hobbit for over 20 years and as well as the cocktails features Tolkein-inspired wall murals in the beer garden and a characters from the films on its signs and loyalty cards.
In the words of Tolkein it’s “Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it is a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.”
Saul Zaentz Company Sue The Hobbit
In early 2012, the pub received a letter from the Saul Zaentz Company (SZC) which owns the rights to several J.R.R. Tolkein associated brands. SZC asked The Hobbit to remove all reference to the characters in The Hobbit and Lord of The Rings.
At the time, landlady Stella Mary Roberts claimed:
“We were absolutely stunned. It was completely unexpected, we never intended to infringe anyone’s copyright. Are we doing any harm? I don’t think so. We’re bringing people to the books and the stories who haven’t heard of JRR Tolkien.”
“We don’t have the financial resources to fight it – I can’t fight Hollywood.”
Things seemed doomed for The Hobbit, but not for long. In stepped University of Southampton student Heather Cartwright and the power of social media.
Last week, at an SXSW panel called ‘Dear Google & Bing: Help Me Rank Better’, Matt Cutts of Google and Duane Forrester of Bing answered a question about what search engines do to help ’Mom and Pop’ sites compete against companies that spends thousands on SEO agencies. You can hear the full audio from the panel below, thanks Barry Schwartz at SE Round Table for posting it. Danny Sullivan was also fielding questions and is the third voice in the audio. Skip to around a third of the way in to hear Matt Cutts talking about the update.
The main questions on the ‘Mom and Pop’ topic were:
How does a small site with limited resources compete against a large company?
How does a White Hat SEO compete against a Black Hat SEO?
What are search engines doing about market saturation thanks to SEO?
As a result of these questions we gained a great insight into what Google and Bing plan to do this year with their algorithms regarding SEO, Social Media, and Content Marketing.
Don’t forget that BrightonSEO will soon be upon us! We hope to get a great insight into SEO in 2012 from the many speakers on the day. We are proud to be sponsoring the event this year so come to our stand to say hello if you have tickets. If you missed out (tickets sold out in 13 minutes!) then read our blog post on how to get the last few BrightonSEO tickets.
Google Search in 2012 – Over Optimisation Penalties
In an unprecedented move by Google, Matt Cutts announced a future algorithm change. This never happens, we normally receive an official update long after people have noticed the changes.
Asked what Google are doing to combat over optimisation, Cutts said:
Normally we don’t pre-announce changes but there is something we’ve been working on and in the next couple of months or so we hope to release it. The idea is to level the playing field for all those people who have been doing, for lack of a better word, over optimisation or overly doing their SEO compared to the people who are just making great content and trying to make a fantastic site. We try to make the GoogleBot smarter, we try to make our relevance more adaptive and we also start to look at the people who sort of abuse it, who throw too many keywords on the page or exchange way too many links or whatever they’re doing to go beyond what a normal person would expect. It is an active area where we have several engineers working on that right now.
Coming after recent changes which have seen personal and local search results become default on Google, this announcement is unlikely to go down well with a large portion of the SEO community – notably those who like it easy.
This guest post is from fellow Brighton business FDM. Digital marketing analyst Jonathan Verrall writes about his Top 5 Tools for SEO. Jonathan’s opening sentence also works in reverse: You may have the best SEO tools on the planet, but unless you know what you’re doing or why you are using them they will be useless. Combine the tools with strong SEO knowledge gained on our SEO Training course for search success and then attend our Social Media Workshop for a powerful skill set for internet marketing.
I believe a good search engine marketer is only as good as his tool-kit. My conclusion is based on one factor, admission to data! You may be the best SEO on the planet, but unless you’re able to access data about a given market, competitor or website you are currently optimising for, you may as well be taking a stab in the dark.
Each search engine marketer uses a different array of tools depending on what they originally learnt to use or what they feel are the most appropriate for the job.
Unfortunately, SEO tools don’t come cheap – this makes search engine optimisation rather difficult for freelance SEOs who don’t have a huge budget to spend on research purposes.
Fear not! There is an arsenal of FREE tools out there to help search engine marketer’s drive their online marketing campaigns forward without having to part with a single penny! Read the rest of "Top 5 Free SEO Tools"
This is a guest post by Shannen Doherty. Shannen is a technical content writer associated with many technology and design communities including Broadband Expert as a freelance writer and adviser. In this post she looks the use of social media in the workplace both for personal and business use. When managing a business it is important to set clear rules for your employees to follow. Understanding management skills is also important. Our Management Skills for New Managers course will teach you how to communicate effectively, manage your time, delegate tasks and identify and solve conflicts such as those created through social media. Make sure you read today’s other post on business smartphone policy.
It seems like today’s corporate culture has changed beyond recognition where apart from the usual few who always rock the boat, employees seem generally quieter.
It is very likely that the office staff might be interacting with not just each other but their friends, families and perhaps people all over the world. Social media and networking have transformed the way we communicate. Tools like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn gives people enormous liberties in images and file sharing, text messaging and multiplayer gaming.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. Web 2.0 comprises of applications like Wikipedia articles, blogs, Google docs, YouTube and Skype, which can potentially keep an employee occupied all day without work. Thus in these recessionary times when companies are looking to cut down cost and improve productivity it is no surprise that employers find these social network potentially destructive.
But do you know that social networks and high speed internet providers aren’t necessarily an evil force bent on ruining employee productivity? On the contrary, it can actually be beneficial if utilised effectively. Think about the times when internet browsing and emailing was restricted in the work place and now, almost no business can function properly without some form of internet access.
As of March 30th, all Facebook business pages will switch to a new Timeline layout to personal profiles. This has been expected since Facebook first unveiled Timeline back in 2011 but nobody thought it would come so soon after the personal Timeline rolled out.
Although the changes will be mandatory from March 30th, businesses can preview and publish their Timeline right now!
Use this guide to ease yourself in to the new page layout and update your page accordingly. For a more comprehensive guide to social media marketing, come down to Brighton for Social Media Training. Book with SEO Training, Google Analytics Training and Content Marketing Training for a full week of internet marketing training and save money in the process.
For a more comprehensive look at the latest Facebook features and a free cover photo template use our Complete Facebook Timeline Guide.
Step by step guide to setting up Timeline for Facebook Businesses
From today, page owners will be greeted with this message when they log in to Facebook:
You have three options here:
Preview how your page will look (gives you a chance to get it looking right)
Publish the Timeline straight away (you can edit it afterwards)
Ignore it and hope it goes away (not a great idea for marketers!)
The first thing we noticed is a new admin area:
This is the new hub for business page owners for monitoring page performance and check recent activity. There are three tabs to get you started with improving your page before it goes live:
We recommend you spend a bit of time using the manage tab before the build audience tab so that you are inviting people to view a finished page. ‘Help’ is useful for learning about all the new features and how best to use them. The ‘Pages Product Guide’ is an 8 page guide written by Facebook and is well worth a read. Then you can begin editing how your page looks.
Our favourite SEO conference – BrightonSEO – is back! Bigger and stronger than ever before, BrightonSEO (April 13th 2012) sold out in under 13 minutes this year. But don’t fret! You can still get tickets by attending a BrightonSEO Workshop. Book now before all the places run out.
We always enjoy attending, participating in, and writing about BrightonSEO. This year we have decided to go a step further and sponsor the event!
As well as attending, we will be manning a stall at BrightonSEO so please come find us for a chat about search or to enquire about our training! We run many courses that would be advantageous to your marketing efforts, including our iPhone App Training and Android App Training courses. Mobile marketing is something that every digital marketer should get involved with, but few have the right skills.
BrightonSEO 2012
This year BrightonSEO is bigger and better than ever before – Kelvin has outdone himself. The event has moved to the Brighton Dome, upping the capacity to 1000 eager search marketers looking to learn from the search experts.
As well as the 16 talks there are also 5 workshops before the conference and a trip to the pub after.
Facebook Timeline has arrived. First announced in October 2011, Facebook Timeline’s official release has been put back, and back, and back again. You’ve always been able to install it using a Developer preview but at the end of January Timeline went live to the world. Now, it is about to become mandatory.
Click to download the Facebook Timeline Photoshop Template
We have been busy compiling everything new about Facebook Timeline and have produced a Complete Facbeook Timeline Guide to help ease you in to using your new profile.
However, the first thing you will want to do is to customise your Facebook Timeline cover photo! Something you’ve never been able to do before!
It is a given that by the end of the year, business pages will also have Timelines. This will be a fantastic tool for marketers to make their Facebook page stand out from the rest so use our guide so that you already know what to do when business Timeline is released! For a full course on social media marketing you should come on Social Media Training. We offer some fantastic deals when booked with SEO Training and Content Marketing Training!
In this guest post, James Christie of Social Media agency No Pork Pies looks at how Twitter has become so influential in today’s society, even having a say into the planning of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee.
The Royal Yacht Britannia: now permanently moored in Edinburgh. Picture by Ian Mackay
In April 2009, it was announced that the British public would now be allowed to follow the Royal Family on Twitter at @BritishMonarchy (it now has 280,790 followers).
Commenting on the development, a Buckingham Palace spokesman said: “The Queen has been advised that it’s up and running but there won’t be any members of the Royal Family tweeting.”
A year later, the Queen ‘joined’ Facebook. “The Queen has approved the decision – she knows all about Facebook,” an aide assured us.
With this supposed knowledge of social media and micro-blogging sites, our sovereign is sure to be aware of how social network communities have reacted to the idea that a new royal yacht should be built to mark the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee.
The idea was first floated by the Daily Mail; the newspaper launched a campaign to build a luxurious new yacht in October 2011. The Mail backed the campaign with several lengthy articles and an impressive artist’s impression of what the yacht might look like (complete with a theatre and a deep sea submersible). However, the campaign sank without trace until 16th January 2012 when The Guardian published a leaked letter from Education Secretary from Michael Gove. Read the rest of "Will Twitter finally sink the idea of a new luxury ship fit for a Queen?"
In an unprecedented move by Google, Matt Cutts announced a future algorithm change. This never happens, we normally receive an official update long after people have noticed the changes.
We always enjoy attending, participating in, and writing about 
