With this in mind I’d planned to do a unique article comparing the characteristics of the different members of The Avengers to the different social media sites in a witty and humorous blog post. But as is the way with the internet it has already been done. So instead, here’s an internet news roundup…

Google Penguin Causing Panic

First it was the Caffeine. Then came the attack of the Panda. And now? It’s the Penguin that’s been causing chaos with the latest Google Search algorithm update. Since its launch towards the end of April, the Penguin update has been punishing sites that Google deems have been ‘spamming’ the search results. The aim of the update was remove sites that had been undertaking bad practise with techniques such as keyword stuffing, cloaking, unnatural anchor text backlinks and other practises that breached the Google Webmaster Guidelines. In the wake of the Penguin its certainly been interesting reading on the blogosphere about the panic among certain SEO-ers that’s been caused. Safe to say though that HeadRed’s SEO optimisers only employ techniques that are Google friendly so our clients haven’t fallen foul of the Google Penguin.

Facebook App Centre

The big blue social giant Facebook has announced a new app centre, simply called ‘App Centre’, which will allow paid apps for the first time on the site. The aim of the centre is to help developers get their apps noticed and discovered by more people with spotlights on both free and paid for applications. An interesting factor of the app centre is that success on there is tied to the quality of the app. Factors include user ratings and engagement and this seems like a clever way to separate the great from the average and the good from the bad.

Curator of Content

Have you seen the social content site Storify? Combining elements from the leading social media sites and the internet in general, the site is focussed around combining items from websites and YouTube with Facebook comments and Tweets to create what is called a ‘story‘. It’s a very simple to use site that allows you to create a story combining a variety of elements in a matter of minutes. This idea of ‘content curation‘ allows you pull items from across the web together in one place to present your view on a given subject. An example is the recent backing of gay marriage in the US by President Obama. Users of Storify have been combining sites and opinions from the web to show their stance on the issue. It’s a great way of presenting opinions and we’ll be watching to see whether these ‘stories’ have any effect for our SEO Coventry clients.

Avengers Assemble

Oh and finally, if you were disappointed by the lack of Avengers in this blog post I’ll leave you with this…

Avengers get their weapons taken away

Have a good weekend y’all and prepare to assemble for another working week on Monday.

Have a look at the full article on searchengine watch.com, where you can even download a lightsaber badge to go on the bottom of your blog to match where you sit on the SEO Wars Force circle.

According to a report by The Next Web, Google will launch it’s long rumoured cloud storage solution next week. Google Drive, as it is expected to be called, will allow users to store all of their files in the cloud in addition to syncing them between all of their devices.

The service will work similarly to Dropbox the current most popular option in the area but Google’s free level of service is expected to give users 5GB of storage compared to 2GB from Dropbox. In addition to competing with services such as Dropbox, Google will be looking to bring functionality to their smartphones similar to what Apple offers with iCloud.

Tupac Back from the Dead

All of the buzz at the start of the week was about a performance over the weekend at the Coachella music festival. None other than deceased hip-hop star Tupac Shakur took to the stage in hologram form alongside Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre. He rose from the ground and shouted “What the f- is up, Coachella?” before proceeding to perform with the other two artists.

Reaction has been mixed with some people considering it a fantastic tribute whilst others have argued that it was unnatural and unethical to put words in the rapper’s mouth. Whether you approve of the performance or not it’s difficult to argue that it wasn’t very impressive. Some of the more intoxicated onlookers believed that it was actually Tupac standing before them.

Facebook IPO is Close

If all goes to plan for Zuckerberg and co. Facebook will be going public on 17th May. Details of the company’s initial public offering have been getting more and more frequent in recent weeks and it seems that is the date they have chosen, so long as the SEC approve the paperwork that has been filed, including that regarding Facebook’s recent Instagram acquisition.

As a Coventry SEO company we pay particular attention to the world of social media and Facebook only seem to be going from strength to strength at the moment. They are expected to be valued at $100 billion and could raise as much as $10 billion with their IPO.

The point of these graphics is to try and get them to go viral and get uses interested in your product, brand or company and pinning them on Pinterest can be a good way to drive traffic to your site. The image begins with a large header that details what the image is about and then continues with the information or instructions. Sometimes you may find that the text on these images is too small to read on the pinned image and so will have to click it to visit your site, which will hopefully get people checking out the rest of your site whilst they are there.

If you’ve made a funny, interesting or useful image then people will hopefully repin it and thus your image and link to your site goes viral. Have a look at an example here for Pure Invitation who have created a funny image of “A Simple Guide to the Different Members of a Wedding Party”.

This week Facebook bought the smartphone app Instagram for a staggering $1 billion dollars. That’s pretty impressive for an app that was only launched in October 2010. For those who don’t know, Instagram is a free to download app that was originally just for the iPhone but now also available on Android and lets users add effects and filters to their photos before sharing them across different social media sites.

With over 30 million users and over 5 million photos uploaded every day, the popularity of Instagram is clear to see. What isn’t so clear is the effect the takeover by Mark Zuckerberg’s company could have on the existing user base. Fans of anything that help make something popular, to then see it taken over by a bigger company, can be very protective of what they see as something they helped to make successful. If Facebook changes Instagram in any way, such as adding paid ads, then they could face a backlash from the existing Instagram users and alienating them could be very negative for the new Facebook/Instagram partnership.

One thing that is clear though is that the employees of Instagram are set to become very rich indeed.

@headredmedia

Are you following @headredmedia on Twitter? If not then you should be as our Twitter commander has been Tweeting some great links and updates over the last few weeks. Covering everything from search engine optimisation news that could affect our Coventry SEO campaigns, engaging social media campaigns being employed by companies all other the world and other humorous web related nuggets, we’re definitely worth a follow so why not come over and say hey.

Derek

Did anyone watch Ricky Gervais’s new comedy, Derek, last night? Set in an old people’s home, Gervais plays the titular character of Derek who is, as Chris Harvey from the Telegraph put it, “of low mental acuity, with impaired language skills and a facial mannerism”. You may think that this just means it was half an hour of Gervais poking fun at vulnerable members of our society but the one-off comedy turned out to have many touching moments and showed a different side to his usual comedy shtick. The program also featured Karl Pilkington in his first acting role, and I use the word ‘acting’ very loosely, but that isn’t to say his caretaker character wasn’t enjoyable.

Rickey Gervais is a prevalent Twitter user, @rickygervais, so has been receiving lots of feedback from other Twits, with a lot of it being positive. There are the usual ‘Gervais haters’ though that were damning the program before it even aired but there seems a lot of love for the program across social media sites and blogs.

I personally hope this gets made into a full series, so if you missed it why not check Derek out on 4OD.

Linkin Park Web Campaign

I’m a fan of online marketing campaigns that engage users in different ways and one such campaign that caught my eye this week was by the brilliant Linkin Park. With their fifth album scheduled for release sometime over the coming months, the hype train has gone into overdrive as they tease fans with information and snippets in the build up to the album.

The campaign started with a new landing page for their official site which featured a number of sliding tile puzzles. Once each of these was completed, they built up to unveil the cover for the first single, Burn It Down. An interesting twist to this was that buried in the HTML code of the puzzle were numbers which were a puzzle in themselves. Users of popular fansite LP Association got busy in cracking this code which may have revealed the name of the new album. The puzzles have now continued with a game taking the place on the homepage which reveals snippets of the new song as you play. These kind of pre-launch campaigns are a great way to get a fan based engaged in the build up to a new release and the use of social media has allowed these campaigns to become more engaging for users.

Any kind of engagement on sites such as Twitter and Facebook is a great way for any band, film, product or business to gain exposure, such as the Facebook photography competition we are currently promoting for one of our clients, which has seen their Twitter likes rise from 6 to over 900 likes within two months.

An Internet meme is something that spreads across the Internet, with the most common form being an image with a funny caption, such as the above mentioned lolcats. These images are spread virally across the net via social sites like Facebook and Twitter, people see them, they laugh and then they too share them to all their followers. There are always new memes popping up and there are some which have been going for years and show no signs of becoming old.

So how do you utilise a meme for your own online social marketing campaign? First of all you need to find an existing meme, know the market and audience you are targeting and have a sense of humour. The above image is an example of the de-motivational posters meme, targeted towards people in the search engine optimisation industry. By doing a quick Internet search you will find the basic meme image to add your own caption to and once you’ve created a funny caption that taps into your industry, you will have your very own funny meme to spread across the net. The first place to post your meme will be your blog and Facebook, Twitter and Google+ accounts, which should then be liked, re-tweeted, commented on and shared by all your friends and followers. There are also social bookmarking sites that you can post your image to and some of these sites are very good for determining which memes are currently popular so you can make sure the one you create is relevant.

So how does having a funny image on your blog help with search engine rankings? Well, as the image (hopefully) gets noticed by people and reblogged, shared, liked and everything else, it will be providing links back to the blog page where you first posted the image. These links help tell Google and other search engines that your site is relevant and all the likes and comments on the social networks are a good thing since they are having more and more of an effect on rankings.

To discuss how an SEO Coventry campaign could utilise search engine optimisation and social media to benefit your business, get in touch with HeadRed.

Taking the Picture Frames Express photo competition as an example, the details about the competition will spread naturally throughout the Internet as people tweet, like, post and blog about the competition. People will want to inform other budding photographers about a chance to show off their photographic skills so it will spread via word of mouth across the web. This is a great way to build up natural links from a range of sources which should have a positive effect on your search engine rankings.

Picture Frames Express blog about their upcoming photo competition.

A large range of different companies utilise social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube for clever online marketing campaigns. Kit Kat have been using Facebook to get people to vote for their favourite Kit Kat flavour out of four limited editions, with the winning one being crowded the ‘Chunky Champion’ and staying in shops. This is a great campaign to get people involved with the brand and talking about it so that their favourite flavour stays in shops. Personally I’m voting white chocolate. A completely different example is the ‘Shoot my Truck’ campaign to promote the PlayStation 3 video game Twisted Metal. Users were invited to visit a YouTube video where they had the chance to fire live bullets from a machine gun at a real life version of one of the characters vehicles from the game. This interactive element led to people discussing both the campaign and the game which leads to great exposure.

Not all campaigns are successful though, with Microsoft receiving a lot of negative feedback after directly attacking Google’s Gmail service in a video originally posted on YouTube and then reposted on Facebook. The Gmail Man viral video mocked how the Google email service used keyword search methods to display targeted adverts to its users but the campaign led to more people criticising Microsoft’s own email service and for being juvenile than agreeing  with the content of the video.

Social media is becoming more intertwined with SEO so it’s important to utilise it in the correct way to garner the best results for your business. You could target a local area with an SEO Coventry campaign or a larger audience with a more nationwide focussed campaign but either way, you want to ensure people are talking about your products, services and business in a positive manner because with the social web, everyone has a voice.

A good example of how Pinterest can be a useful tool is for when planning a wedding. The planning and preparation can be a time consuming and stressful time as you browse the Internet looking for inspiration for everything from venues, flowers, dresses and wedding cakes. Using Pinterest, you can create a wedding pin board and as you are browsing sites and come across something you like, you ‘pin it’. You could create boards for each different area of your wedding planning and then friends and family can see your ideas and help with comments and opinions. The visual nature of the site makes browsing for ideas a very easy process. Have a look at my wedding Pinterest board to see the site in action.

An example of a Pinterest wedding board.

So is this going to be the ‘next big thing’ and will the ‘pin it’ button be a common sight sitting alongside the Facebook ‘Like’ and Twitter ‘Tweet’ buttons on all sites? Well if the stats from America are anything to go by the answer will be yes. Last month the site had 11.7 million unique visitors per month in the US and interest in Pinterest is growing in the UK too with many news and blogging sites discussing the benefits, flaws and potential of the pin board site. There has been one high profile user already making use of pins and pin boards with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg setting up his own set of boards covering topics such as movies, what building inspires you, overwhelmingly spectacular and for my mouth. You have to wonder though whether he is using the site for personal reasons or having a look at what a competing social media site is offering, ready to plan something similar for Facebook.

The simplicity of creating an online collage away from ‘status updates’ and ‘checking-in’ is a very simple yet enjoyable time-consuming activity. Whether it’s a pin board of your favourite bands, the best cooking recipes for beef based dishes or your portfolio of digital work from across the web, the potential of Pinterest is clear to see.

HeadRed’s social media and SEO Coventry team will be keeping an eye on Pinterest to see what, if any, benefits ‘pinning’ will have with regards to search engine optimisation over the coming weeks. So if you like it, why not try sticking a pin in it?

Social media is very important with regards to search engine optimisation for our SEO Coventry clients so get in touch to find out how HeadRed can help you and your business.

@misskatieprice
‘Great news about China’s latest GDP figures!!’
‘Large scale quantitative easing in 2012 could distort liquidity of govt. bond market. £justsayin.’

@rioferdy5
‘Can’t wait 2 get home from training and finish that cardigan,’
‘Cardy finished. Now 4 the matching mittens!!!’

Rio Ferdinand enjoying his Snickers after "supposedly" knitting a cardigan.

A follow up tweet, “You’re not you when you’re hungry @snickersUk #hungry #spon”, was then sent but investigations are underway to see whether the campaign broke advertising rules because the initial tweets didn’t make it clear that it was actually an advertising campaign and whether the ‘#spon’ in the final tweet was enough to make it clear that it was. Under the 2008 consumer protection regulations, celebrities cannot seem to be promoting products without it being perfectly clear that it is an advert. The Office of Fair Trading can actually seek a court order which could possibly lead to a criminal prosecution and an unlimited fine.

There have been many examples of large companies getting social media marketing wrong, another of which being McDonalds ‘#McStories’ campaign, so if you’re in the Midlands it’s important to have a social media and SEO Coventry agency guiding your online activity in the right direction.