With more consumers now online is social media crucial to your business, should you have it, manage it yourself or pay an agency?

Facebook Social Media

Millions of us use Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest and many more social media platforms every day. You can deliver direct to your customers a message, offer, competition or launch a new product line. The possibilities and opportunities for using social media are almost endless if done well.

As a business, creating a Facebook page or Twitter account is common practice. From small general builders to huge retailers almost every business now understands the importance of using social media to get your brand online.

The question is do you manage your company social media yourself or pay an agency to carry out this work for you?

Posting on social media and answering customer questions, queries and complaints is really something your own staff aregoing to be better at. An agency may have looked over your website and got a ‘feel’ for your business. Do they have the understanding of your business goals and ethics, customers and products your own staff have?

I think in most cases the answer would be no. If you are a SMB you also likely don’t have the resources to afford to bring in an external agency. To get the level of understanding of your business, your customers and your products and services an agency is likely to charge a considerable amount before they even start the campaign!

So, how do you manage your social media?

Firstly you need to decide which of the Social Media platforms you are going to use. Some research is needed to find out which social media platforms your customers spend their time on. Managing your social platforms internally or using an agency, if you are targeting a social media platform your customers don’t use you are wasting your time, money and efforts.

OK, we’ll assume that you have looked over the last few months of the Google Analytics data for your website, trawled through the responses to your email marketing campaign and looked at your customers and their purchases in some detail.

The results of your data mining may have identified that Facebook and Google+ are the main platforms your customers use. So, how do you get started?

Following the social platform setup instructions on getting your online presence created should be relatively straightforward for someone with some online savvy. If you have no one with the knowledge within your business it may be worthwhile calling upon an agency to help you through the initial setup.

With your social media account setup, a suitable profile picture and  background image created you are ready to go. A tip for you background image design. Try to include your website, phone number and any other relevant contact details you can in the image.

So, who is going to manage the day to day contact? If you have a sales department and customer services department you will likely need someone from each team to help manage the queries. If you do your marketing in-house you will want someone from the marketing team on board as well.

The aim of your social media efforts should be the same as they are over the phone, through your website or via your brochure. Competitions and marketing posted by your marketing representative. Product questions answered by the sales staff and complaints and customer inquiries answered by the customer services team.

Get the right people on the job and your social media will be a success. Get the wrong people and you could do your company more harm than good.

Things to avoid

• Giving wrong information
• Being rude in your reply
• Spelling mistakes
• Deleting customer complaints

Things to do

• When replying end with your first name, it’s more personal. “Many thanks, Irene – YourCompany Customer Services”.
• With complaints always be sympathetic and start with “I’m sorry to hear that”
• Always try to put a positive spin on negative posts on your page

Interacting with your customers, being friendly and helpful through Social Media can have a huge positive impact on your business. Well thought out competitions and quizzes to get your customers interacting with you can increase your customer base, reinforce your brand visibility and all importantly INCREASE SALES!

There is however a big problem with Social Media, if it is done well then you can sit back and reap the rewards, if it’s done badly then things can go real bad, real fast!

Debenhams

A recent tragedy at the Debenhams flagship store in London shows the huge power of Social Media. Estimates are that this social media mishap could cost them over £1 million.

Debenhams are a multinational company operating since the eighteenth century. Debenhams have 172 locations throughout the UK and operate in Ireland and Denmark.

An earlier incident at their Oxford Street store resulted in a customer falling to his death from a third floor escalator. Witnessed by shoppers and children in the store at the time it was a tragic and terrible accident.

The agency responsible for their Facebook page clearly weren’t aware of the tragedy when posting.

Debenhams Facebook

Unbelievably the agency posted that shoppers should visit their Oxford Street store. No mention of the tragedy or any offer of sympathy or condolences. The reaction to the Facebook post was less than favorable.

The frenzied reaction is now spilling onto other social platforms. Customers are now posting their outrage at the inappropriate sales message at a time when a tragedy has occurred. Should a sales message be more important than the loss of a life?

Debenhams Social Flop

Early predictions from industry analysts estimate that the badly timed and less than sympathetic social media mistake could cost Debenhams over £1 million in lost revenue.

A very expensive lesson for Debenhams in the etiquette of dealing with your online presence on social media platforms.

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Essex Police

It is not often that I have needed to call upon my local police force, Essex Police.

I called 999 at around 19:00 on 10th June to report that a large group of over 20 youths aged 15 to 18 were at my front door making threats.

I explained that my son had already been assaulted and that I had prevented a further attack, and that now a large group were making threats at our home.

The Essex Police operator said that this was a priority incident and that I should stay on the phone with her as officers were being sent immediately.

My daughter managed to lock the front door whilst I was on the phone to Essex Police. The operator then said that so long as we were safe she would go?

I explained that the group were still outside shouting and making threats. My children were still very worried, fearing that one or all of us were going to be attacked or worse!

After 45 minutes I called Essex Police again on 101 to find out why they had not arrived? It was after all a “priority incident”!

The Essex Police operator told me that my 999 call was a priority and they would be there within an hour (with only 15 minutes left?).

I asked to make a complaint as I felt that my family were still in danger. I also believe that if Essex Police had responded sooner that they would have caught some or all of the offenders. The operator said that she would ask one of the sergeants to call me about my complaint shortly. Surprise, that call, like Essex Police never came!

I am writing this blog, very angry at Essex Police. Nearly 5 hours after my initial 999 call and not even a phone call from them!

Essex Police High Priority Vehicle?

I can only assume that budget and/or staff cuts have reduced them to using their latest crime fighting vehicle to attend “priority incidents” (left).

This however is not a joke! I genuinely felt that my home was about to be overrun and that my children were in serious danger.

I did finally receive a phone call from Essex Police (not a visit) at 23:41. I explained to the officer that him contacting me almost 5 hours after my “emergency” 999 call was pointless. After this long anything could have happened.

I called Essex Police thinking that due to the serious nature of my call that they would arrive quickly to deal with the incident. I was wrong!

In our wonderful new city of Chelmsford, with all the additional revenue from; an increase in council tax, street lights off at midnight and the council car parks making millions of pounds we can’t get Essex Police to respond to a “priority incident” in less that 5 hours!

When I spoke with the officer at nearly midnight I told him that I didn’t want them to visit and I didn’t want to make a statement. I have no confidence in Essex police to be of any use in this or any other matter now or in the future. If they cannot attend within 5 hours then what hope do they have catching the offenders?

Forget 999, forget 101, you’re better off calling 118 118 and asking for the Ghost Busters. They will probably turn up faster and be of more use than Essex Police!

So, why did Essex Police not attend my home after me calling them some 5 hours previously?

Will this count as a closed incident?

If so perhaps this is how they hope to lower the crime figures?

Possible solution?

Should we have the right to bear arms as the US does?

The second amendment was influenced by the English Bill of Rights 1689 and also dealt with personal defense of English subjects.

My point being, if you cannot rely on the police to attend a “serious incident” then should we have the legal right to defend our family and home? I am not advocating the use of firearms, however non-lethal firearms like tasers and pepper spray could be a realistic possibility in the UK if you cannot rely on your local police force.

With more cuts in the UK police force, the likelihood of other similar incidents happening is very high in my opinion.

If you have had similar poor, bad or downright disgraceful treatment by Essex Police, please use the link on the Essex Police website to raise your concern. http://www.essex.police.uk/contact_us/compliments__complaints/make_a_complaint.aspx

I would like to thank the gentleman on the red bike who stopped to try to stop the 1st assault on my son.

I would thank the 2 different Ka drivers who stopped, but they only stopped to watch the assault not stop it.

As a parent I can only hope your son or daughter doesn’t get assaulted and passers by stop to watch.

The post Essex Police making Chelmsford City a safer place? No! appeared first on Fish 4 Sales.

Google Panda 4.0

The Google Panda 4.0 update is all about unique, high quality content and back links. In order to best tackle the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) ranking of your website you need to formulate a content marketing plan. Some questions we need to ask ourselves.

• Why are we creating content?
• Who are we trying to reach?
• What benefit does our target audience receive?
• What benefit do we get from the content?

After reviewing our SERP rankings before and after Panda 4.0 we now need to look at how Panda will affect us in the future.

You need to ensure that your website contains a good mix of unique, helpful and authentic content. Product descriptions can no longer be simply copied and pasted from the manufacturer’s site or brochure. You need to re-write product descriptions and make them unique from other retailers above all they must contain relevant and helpful information.

Adding a variety of good quality images, text, video and animations on the site will improve your visitors experience and SEO ranking. Google is looking for valuable online resources which provide unique, informative and helpful information.

Using a wide variety of media content we can provide better quality pages. Animations and video clips from YouTube will engage visitors for longer . We can use this content to also keep visitors on the website longer. We need to ensure that the content we create is unique, helpful and engaging. The ‘stickier’ the web pages the longer visitors will stay and explore the website.

What is Google Panda?

Google Panda is a filter that prevents low quality sites and/or pages from ranking well in the search engine results page. The filter’s threshold is influence by Google Quality Raters. Quality Raters answer questions such as “would I trust this site with my credit card?” so that Google can distinguish the difference between high and low quality sites.

The Google Panda patent (patent 8,682,892), filed on September 28, 2012 and was granted on March 25, 2014. The patent states that Google Panda creates a ratio with a site’s inbound links and reference queries, search queries for the site’s brand. That ratio is then used to create a site-wide modification factor. The site-wide modification factor is then used to create a modification factor for a page based upon a search query. If the page fails to meet a certain threshold, the modification factor is applied and, therefore, the page would rank lower in the search engine results page.

Google Panda affects the ranking of an entire site or a specific section rather than just the individual pages on a site.

In March 2012, Google updated Panda and stated that they are deploying an “over-optimization penalty,” in order to level the playing field.

Google says it only takes a few pages of poor quality or duplicated content to hold down traffic on an otherwise solid site, and recommends such pages be removed, blocked from being indexed by the search engine, or rewritten. However, Matt Cutts, head of webspam at Google, warns that rewriting duplicate content so that it is original may not be enough to recover from Panda—the rewrites must be of sufficiently high quality, as such content brings “additional value” to the web. Content that is general, non-specific, and not substantially different from what is already out there should not be expected to rank well: “Those other sites are not bringing additional value. While they’re not duplicates they bring nothing new to the table.”.

What did the Panda 4.0 update do?

Initially it appears that press release websites seem to have been worst affected by the new Panda 4 update. Other prominent TLD websites have also seen a huge drop in SERP ranking. EBay has suffered badly from the Panda 4 update losing its ranking as one of the top 10 websites online.

Panda 4.0 losers

An SEO search on the main TLD sites has found a variety of high ranking sites affected by the update. EBay has seen ⅓ of its pages dropped from search engine results. The Yellow Advertiser website has also seen 20% of its pages dropped from search results. The table below gives an insight into the top list of losers from the Panda 4 update. It has been reported by eBay that they lost their ranking due to manual changes to their site which happened at the same time Panda 4 was released?

The Panda 4 winners

Although we have seen giants topple from their top SEO positions we have also seen others benefit.

What do you need to do?

The following points are an indication of what to do to appease the great Google Panda 4.0. The list is compiled from the Google Webmaster blog which lists a large number of things they look at when assessing quality.

• Are the articles on your site full of good detailed information, or very shallow?
• Do you have duplicate content? This could mean that content is duplicated on multiple pages or that you have content that is duplicated on other sites across the web.
• Do you have spelling errors?
• Do your articles provide original content that can’t be found elsewhere on the web?
• Would people want to bookmark and share your content?
• Are there a distracting number of ads on your pages?

A close eye needs to be kept on the great Google Panda, updates to Panda means new tweaks to our website content to keep ahead. Ecommerce managers and business owners alike need to understand the importance on relevant, fresh and unique content to the Panda!

The post Google Panda 4.0 what’s it all about? appeared first on Fish 4 Sales.

As part of the course we were set the task of creating a PowerPoint slide to depict a day in our Digital Life.

My submission for the Digital Slice is below, enjoy

A Slice of my Digital Life

The post Squared Online – My Digital World appeared first on Fish 4 Sales.

The focus of the lesson tonight was to get everyone thinking about how they interact with social media.

To reflect on social and how we connect or engage with others in the new digital age.

It’s all about the engagement!

What platforms we use and what we use them for.

Some of the questions raised were, what are the brands using the social platforms for? What do they want?

We had TONS of homework!

Many articles, infographics and data to absorb and understand.

I have listed the articles below:

• http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-life/9614419/Bodyforms-response-to-Facebook-rant-a-viral-hit.html
• http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/social-media/9987213/What-type-of-social-media-user-are-you.html
• http://empowered.forrester.com/tool_consumer.html
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0EnhXn5boM
• http://www.viralblog.com/social-media/analyzing-your-social-media-strategy/
• http://www.simplyzesty.com/Blog/Article/March-2013/50-Social-Media-Case-Studies-You-Should-Bookmark
• http://www.techlife.net/lifestyle/news/2013/5/10-online-and-social-media-campaigns-that-changed-the-world/
• http://blogs.worldbank.org/youthink/social-media-and-social-change-how-young-people-are-tapping-technology

There were other PDF files which are part of the course material, unfortunately if you want to read these articles you will need to sign up for the next course!

The post Squared Online – Get Social appeared first on Fish 4 Sales.

The video presentation from Neil Perkins was great!

Neil started with an interactive short history of how long some of the tech we use every day and take for granted. I had pen and pad at the ready on noted some of the historic moments in our tech history.

1. 1971 – 1st email was sent using ARPANET, the predecessor of what we know today as the Internet.
2. 1978 – 1st email spam was sent
3. 1990 – 1st website created
4. 1993 – 1st search engine created – W3C, then Yahoo in 1995
5. 1994 – 1st eCommerce site
6. 1994 – 1st banner ad created
7. 1995 – 1st eBay sale – a broken laser pointer
8. 1998 – Google launched
9. 2002 – 1st social network – Friendster
10. 2006 – Facebook opened to everyone
11. 2010 – Instagram launches in October and now has 100 million users

Just looking at the list as I wrote it down was quite amazing. The advances we have made in such a small amount of time. The hardware technology we now have at our fingertips and the amazing possibilities that can be created.

Neil went on to speak about Moore’s law

GAFA – Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon – The ones to watch for emerging as leaders in shaping the digital tomorrow.

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one person can make a difference and everyone should try

Grand Theft Auto V PC Version

An avid PC gamer since the dawn of the PC gaming I am very disappointed to hear that fellow PC gamers would not be seeing the latest 18 rated title from Rockstar, Grand Theft Auto V.

It never even occurred to me that it wouldn’t be available for PC. My sons had been going on about it on XBox (yuck) the past few weeks, we assumed everyone would be breaking our cellophane seals and enjoying the latest GTA V.

Rockstar. If it were possible for you to see the error of your ways and the HUGE mistake you were making alienating the platform that saw you launch the other versions of Grand Theft Auto.

One person can make a difference, hundreds of thousands all asking Rockstar for GTA V might get their attention and make a BIG difference!

Please join hundreds of thousands of other dedicated PC gamers to make a statement about your unhappiness at our platform missing out on Grand Theft Auto 5

Gamers Unite!

Grand Theft Auto 5 PC – Be a part of the change – Sign the Petition!

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Somewhat relieved that we don’t need our web cam for the Squared Online lessons I waited in anticipation for our 2nd more in-depth lesson.

The lesson involved looking at how we used technology in our daily lives. The intention was to get everyone thinking on how we use tech today and how we might use it tomorrow.

The lesson outcome was to get everyone thinking about how consumers use tech in their daily lives, who had access to their social data and how it was used. We were also asked to think about how everyone behaves differently and how this might affect an individuals digital life.

We watched a short video called Class of 2015, intended to depict a day in the digital life for students in 2015. How tech affected a digital day in the life of a student.

For your viewing pleasure below.

We were also introduced to Kiva and Kickstarter, two websites made possible using technology and innovation to help small businesses to start up or expand.

Another quite scary part of the lesson for me were the statistics on how the public perceive the use of their data and how the majority of us don’t care about it?

The Telegraph reported that three-quarters of the UK public do not care about privacy. In my opinion this is very worrying. I would imagine this is either due to lack of the public’s knowledge about the huge amount of data they create and what the web sites they use are allowed to use it for. More public awareness needs to be made about the privacy policies on social sites like Facebook and what they will be using the collected data for.

We were also asked how emerging technology would affect us in the future. Some stats below:

• 47% of people believe that technology will make life better
• 44% say it is too soon to tell
• 10% say it will make life worse

How do you think emerging technology will affect your life in the future?

• Teleporting to work?
• Time machines?
• Trains that arrive on time?

Part of the lesson resources was to look at the conversation prism, pasted below.

Conversation Prism

Homework

As part of our homework we were all set a day in my digital life, we have to create a slide to depict a day in our digital lives. A PowerPoint presentation link was given for students to add their slide and show how tech was used on a daily basis.

And no I haven’t shot my video yet and yes I am still dreading the video part of this course! Hearing my strong Essex accent makes me cringe! I will do it under duress

Here’s my slide

A Slice of my Digital Life

The post Squared Online – My Digital Life appeared first on Fish 4 Sales.

Background

I have worked successfully in the digital marketing industry for a number of years now. All of my knowledge and skills have been self taught with no formal training.

I read blogs, articles and use analytics from various sources to try to understand my clients customers and their behaviors.

Since August this year I thought it was time to gain some qualifications to prove my skills and worth to my current and perspective clients.

I manage many large pay per click campaigns so I started with the Google exams in August and qualifies a week later passing my Google Fundamentals and Advanced search certification.

I want to acquire the full set of Google certifications but with my work commitments gaining the Display and Analytics advanced exams before starting Squared Online proved too much .

1st Lesson!

With some nerves and anticipation I prepared for our 1st lesson of the new Squared Online course. Pen and pad at the ready I suddenly realised I hadn’t setup the web cam that was on the hardware list!

Spending the next 15 minutes trying frantically to unpack and get my web cam working, I realised it wasn’t necessary for the classes (to my relief) until we started the lesson.

As Squares were joining the classroom we were all getting acquainted, discussing interests and chatting in general.

We had a brief introduction to our tutors, the interface and how to use the online campus and the resources that would be used as part of our online study.

Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and WordPress seem to be the main platforms used on the course, thankfully I have accounts with all of these platforms so just a quick template change, update the details and I’m set to go!

A Q&A session finished off our 1st Squared Online class.

Overall a good experience.

Homework already!

We have a video to watch from Neil Perkins on changes in technology and behavior and the impact of change on digital. Looking forward to watching Neil’s video and acquiring a different perspective on our digital world and what influences it.

What I’d like to get from Squared Online.

I have always worked on my own, without a team to support me or bounce ideas off and gain new inspiration. Therefore I am looking forward to collaborating with other Squares from the same marketing industry.

With this in mind I am keen to support my fellow Squares and share tips and tricks with them. I would also like to learn as much as I can from Squares with experience in the digital industries I currently have little or no knowledge of.

Concerns?

A main concern of mine with the Squared Online course is having to publicly display my views on the web, something I am not used to doing on a personal level.

I post blogs, tweet and use the social platforms for clients but always masked by a business profile as opposed to a personal one.

Thanks for reading!

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