As the latest video epidemic hits the web going viral with over 2,271,865 hits in 24 hours of it’s release, what else would I be writing my blog about. I couldn’t help but grin for the 4 minute duration of the new flight safety video from New Zealand Airways. A light hearted spin on the traditional, and lets face it rather boring flight introduction video that celebrates the upcoming The Hobbit cinema release that has followed every trick in the ‘Viral Success Bible’. I found myself laughing and marvelling in the perfect production that was always going to be an online success due to it’s amazing sharable content.
Insights
The Importance of Trends Analysis in Business Planning
One of the biggest problems that a company can face is predicting what will happen in the future in regards to online presence. There are natural peaks and troughs throughout the financial year in any industry as demand for product and services change due to the nature of season i.e Christmas in retail, the first quarter of the year for the property market.
How important is Google to your online presence?
There has been a revolution recently in online marketing and Google has been the driving force, with their numerous algorithm updates: Panda; Penguin and Top Heavy. Ironically, in an attempt to improve the quality of search results, Google have accelerated the importance of building an online brand and somewhat lessened the need to be found for keywords.
SEO is a dying practice and this, in my opinion, is the best thing to ever happen to online marketing. Why?
Industry Patterns
Analysing thousands of websites develops your mind and you start to see campaigns and industries less as numbers (competitiveness, links, keyword reach and social) and more as illustrations. These illustrations have become clearer still since we produce industry reports.
I have developed a few examples of how I see a industry online.
Each circle in these examples shows the respective size of a website influenced by links, keyword reach and social. The center is the epicenter of the industry, being closer to the center shows that you are progressing well and becoming very influential in the industry.
Controlling CSS3 animations using jQuery – Simple Loveliness
The introduction of CSS3 based animations afew years ago really got me excited. No longer did we have to rely on jQuery .animate() to add so visual candy to our websites as we could now do it directly in our stylesheet. When first introduced, CSS3 animations wasn’t widely supported by most browsers but today Chrome, Firefox, Safari and even IE 9 provide fantastic support.
My only real gripe with CSS3 animations was not being able to control the timings / trigger points of animations unless interacting directly with that element.
Partnership working is power
This blog is rather out of the ordinary for me as it isn’t a preaching piece about the magic of marketing, but current events, which has led me to type down my thoughts on partnership working.
Two Heads Are Better Than One!
Teamwork
Working as a team can, most of the time, be a lot better than working on your own. Think about it, if you need advice you have people to turn to, if your workload is too big you can ask for help and if you have a problem to solve, well as they say, two heads are better than one!
What does the new Google Disavow tool mean?
So after months of speculation, Google have finally brought out a Disavow tool!
In the run up to this tool being brought out, we have had a lot of debates in our office on the benefits and possible flaws. For some of our clients who have been affected by the Penguin algorithm, we have been itching for Disavow as we’ve been repeatedly contacting webmasters with no joy! But we also understand that in irresponsible hands, the disavow tool could have become a way of SEO‘s to get away with bad practices.
Apple invite media to iPad mini event
The rumours are true after all. Following all the various leaks and rumours coming from all the tech blogs you can find, Apple have finally announced their latest events where they will unveil the iPad mini. If you believe the rumours going around this week, there could be even more on show.
Since last year, Apple have dodged question after question about the impending release of a smaller iPad. Steve Jobs famously said that any tablet smaller than 10 inches wouldn’t be bought by the public.
Branded vs Exact Match Domains: Search or PPC?
For a long time now (especially since Panda) I have been against exact match domains, just because I think a branded site is going to convert a lot more. Think about it if two sites are listed in similar position then are you going to click onto www.cheapsofas.com or www.dfs.com? That said I’ve recently started to think a little differently…
A former colleague of mine informed me that a keyword match domain might not convert very well through organic searches but for PPC it can out perform a branded website. But why is this the case?