Pod1 Blog

Thanks to everyone who has confirmed their attendance at our Social Media Seminar on Tuesday 23rd March.

Some information about the day:
Pod1’s Mark Blenkinsop will begin with an introduction about the many different definitions of social media. Anthony Lukom and Hakan Thyr will follow this up by addressing the question of its relevance, particularly in E-commerce.

Fergal O’Mullane and Emma Griffin’s talks will focus on the nuts and bolts of the issue: the use of tools to deliver content and monitor social media strategies. We’ll round this off with a question and answer session via Twitter (#Pod1SocialSeminar) with all our speakers.

A little about our speakers:

Mark Blenkinsop, Senior Search Marketing Manager, Pod1

As the job titles suggests Mark is responsible for all things relating to Search Marketing within the agency with a particular focus on SEO and Social Media. He joined Pod1 in April 2006 with a view to integrating SEO into the agency’s’ offering and the result nearly 4 years later is a healthy client list and an expanding department. An avid interest in digital marketing with a decidedly ecommerce bias has definitely been a plus.

Anthony Lukom, Director, 33 Seconds

Anthony is currently heading 33 Seconds, a media consultancy business which specialises in Social Media. Clients include ATC Management (who work with artists such as Radiohead, Kate Nash) and BD, a creative agency, where they act as Social Media Strategists (clients include Mars, Coke, Nintendo and Cineworld).

Previously he was MD for MySpace UK for two and half years as well as European Head of Business Development. Before that he was at AOL Europe for over 7 years as Head of European Business Development, Head of Search and ran a company wide product innovation project based on Kim and Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean Strategy.

Hakan Thyr, International Partnerships Director, Bazaarvoice

Håkan has 13 years international business development experience from the IT industry with companies ranging from high-growth start-ups to established industry leaders. He has a special passion for companies that succeed by rewriting the rules of the industry. Håkan holds an MSc in Civil Engineering from Chalmers University of Technology.

Fergal O’Mullane, Director and Co-founder, 10CMS

Fergal is a director and co-founder of 10CMS and is primarily responsible for strategic business development. Fergal has worked in the digital media space since 1999 with a particular focus on retail and consumer brands and he helped form 10CMS in 2006.

10CMS is a leading provider of rich interactive merchandising for retailers in the UK and US, client experience includes LK Bennett, Anthropologie, Heal’s, Jimmy Choo and Clothing at Tesco among others.

Emma Griffin, Meltwater

Emma was part of the initial set-up of Meltwater’s Social Media monitoring arm, MBuzz early 2009. In less than a year, MBuzz has now grown to consist of 13 offices spread from California to Hong Kong with over 50 employees and from start-up to one of the most recognised Social Media monitoring providers globally.

Starting as a Sales Consultant in Meltwater News’ Dublin office in March 2007, within a year Emma moved to South Africa to help grow the operations in Cape Town. Within two years of being with the company, Emma led the set-up of our Meltwater News operations in Accra, Ghana.

Emma carries her competitive nature through to her pastimes and has competed for her country in Football, Basketball, Swimming and Lifesaving surfing! She also enjoys Yoga and is an eager cook! Emma holds a 1st Class Master Degree in International Business.

See you on the 23rd!

We are holding a seminar on social media strategies for our clients and potential clients:

If you are interested in attending please contact:  flora.malein@pod1.com

As part of Google’s ongoing effort to improve their Webmaster Tools, they’ve launched 2 new features which I think will make life easier for many webmasters.

The first one is called Fetch As Googlebot Mobile and it’s an addition to the recently presented Fetch As Googlebot feature in Webmaster Tools. The tool shows, in real time, what Googlebot and Mobile Googlebot sees when it accesses the page.

To access the tool:

• Login to Webmaster Tools
• Select your site
• Go to Labs > Fetch as Googlebot

The second addition in Webmaster Tools is the possibility of adding extra users to particular account, just like you would do in Google Analytics. This means that both you, the client, and in fact, anyone can access the same account. The down-side is the fact that the list of verified users has to be maintained and updated if needed.

To access the tool:

• Login to Webmaster Tools
• Click on Verify next to your site
• Click Add a user

Go to Webmaster Tools to check out new tools and visit our Search Engine Otimisation page to see how Pod1 Ecommerce can help you improve your website’s rankings

Google claim this will be the worlds most widely distributed sporting event, I’d like to see the same with the World Cup.

Find out more how Pod1 can help you with Search Engine Optimisation

There was no need to watch the Oscars live this week you could have used Google instead, the search engine has released some lovely graphs to show how search traffic trended through out the night as different categories and winners were announced. I suppose this is one way to miss all those ‘gushy’ acceptance speeches. Anyway here is Google’s take on their lovely graphs, enjoy;-)

Winners
Throughout the night Oscar®-related searches rose and fell as nominations were introduced and winners announced. Avatar had the most searches before the ceremony, but as The Hurt Locker received more awards, searches for that film exceeded all others and peaked when it won Best Picture. Precious also had a good run throughout the night. Its peak matched that of “Avatar” during the ceremony:

Click on the image above for the full article

Have you ever felt like painting your car with nail varnish? Well… you’re neither insane nor alone.

Brilliant video promoting new Fiat 500 Pink Limited Edition and http://www.pinkmyride.tv/

More about social media marketing

1. Homepage takeover of VIMEO that is pretty outstanding. Great execution. It goes from this:

To this:

(originally found here: http://www.andykinsella.com/2010/03/02/tostitos-salsa-nice-takeover-example-on-vimeo/)

2. Skinput: using the skin on your arm instead of a joystick/keyboard – see for yourself:

We’ve implemented Wordpress for many of our clients, and the social side of blogging is one of the main reasons to do that. The options for doing social networking around a blog have just got broader, as an enhanced version of the Buddypress extension to Wordpress has just been launched.

Buddypress offers bloggers the following:

• Enhanced membership and profiles for registered members (who might be anyone)
• Groups so those members can organise around shared interests
• Ability to have lists of friends among other members of the blog’s community
• Activity streams, showing what members have been up to
• Messaging and discussion tools that extend Wordpress into a true social application

Buddypress has matured and become very reliable, and the latest version addresses 2 important limitations of its predecessors:

• You don’t have to install Wordpress-MU any more, which made set-up and administration more complex. You can still use Buddypress with Wordpress-MU if you want to.
• You don’t have to create Buddypress specific Wordpress themes, as they’ve developed tools that make existing Wordpress themes work with Buddypress.

I’ve installed Buddypress on my personal blog so that people can see it in action if they’re interested. It doesn’t have much of a community at present (just me!) but you can see all the features in operation.

1. Users can restrict their searches for content in 35 non-English languages, including Klingon.
2. Google’s search technology PageRank has nothing to do with webpage ranking. It’s actually named after Google co-founder Larry Page.
3. Google’s Home Page Has 42 Validation Errors.
4. The ‘I’m feeling lucky’ button is almost never used. Google has kept it as some user experience trials have shown that for some people it is a comfort button. The button actually costs Google around $110 million a year.
5. Google’s revenue from advertising amounts to 97% of the total revenue. In 2009 advertising earned Google $22,888,804,000.

   

6. Google’s name is a play on the word googol, which refers to the number 1 followed by one hundred zeroes.
7. Google’s domain name was registered on 15^th August1997 and the beta version of the site looked like that: Google in 1998
8. In 1997, Larry Page and Sergey Brin needed large amount of disk space to test their PageRank algorithm, but the largest hard disks available at the time were only 4 GB. They stacked up 10 of these together and solved the issue… not for long though.
9. Googleville data center is calculated to require about 103 megawatts of electricity – enough to power 82,000 homes. Google calculated that it uses as little as 1 kJ (0.0003 kWh) of energy to answer the average search query.
10. Google has 20k employees. They can spend 20% of their time working on ideas and projects that interest them. 50% of Google products originated from this 20%.