Facebook timeline for brands is available for pages worldwide from today. Brands are able to opt in to switch over timeline from today until March 30 when the changeover will be mandatory.  Facebook timeline offers an opportunity for brands to tell their full story to fans in an engaging way.

The important changes:

Content

-          Brands have the option to pin posts to the top of the timeline feed for one week.

-          Brands will be able to receive and respond to private messages from users.

Applications

-          Brands are no longer able to select a custom application as the default landing. All users (fans and non-fans) will be directed straight to the wall.

-          Apps have been relocated from the left navigation sidebar to the right side of the About section.

-          There are four app tiles above the fold, and the first is permanently occupied by Photos.

      Cover photos

-          The Timeline cover displays a giant 851 x 315 pixel banner across the top of your Page.

-          Covers may not display calls to action or references to Facebook features such as “Like this Page”, purchase or pricing info such as “40% off”

-          Cover photos may not display brand contact information.

Google also prompts you to thank a group of recommendations:

When you thank a person or group of people the normal Google+ popup appears over the search results as it currently does when you share another users post within your Google+ stream.

 Here we can remove a person from receiving any praise but also add individuals, circles or to just make it open to all within your Google+ stream where it just appears as a normal post.

After passing on my thanks I was worried what Google would take this to mean. I was wondering if  Google would assume I also now recommend this page and add a +1 from myself.

They did not! I was glad to see Google just gave you confirmation that the thanks were sent.

After going through the process I wanted to see if Google would remember me thanking a user(s) for recommending a specific site. Sadly they did not and instead allowing me to thank Andrew Hughes as many times as I wish for the same recommendation. That could get boring for him with several emails and posts being generated.

My initial thoughts are that it is a nice touch but is something that could get very annoying to the person(s) receiving the thanks if thanked multiple times over a short period of time. This would become more obvious to the Google+ users who are circled by thousands or millions of people and those who +1 lots and lots of search results.

Thanked By A Brand

I actually feel the benefits of thanks are for brands. How good would a user feel if they receive thanks from one of their favourite brands as the brand can now thank anyone who has +1’d their site and within their circles. Surely that would help spread some customer loyalty, increased traffic and hopefully conversions. I know several people who would definitely talk more about a brand both online and offline if they were thanked by the brand themselves.

I think this would be ideal for store pages or map listings due to the likelihood of the person actually visiting a store.

There is the down side however; a brand (or person) could also distance themselves from certain fans by constantly thanking the same people for site recommendations. This would surely annoy the users who could then distance themselves from the brand.

Thank a Brand

But a brand can also be thanked by a Google+ user. I think this is a great chance for the brand to reward the user by offering them a discount or a prize. As people can share very quickly over the internet it could create some great PR for the brand very quickly.

Whilst I do think the thanking is a nice touch, I’m not sure exactly why Google has done this. I think Google could be just trying to promote the use of Google+ further. I also think it could be abused in future but unsure to what extent at the moment. We really have to wait until it rolls out further and see the initial use before understanding more about this functionality.

Megan Aney

Community Manager

I’m in my lounge room; Emma & Cam are singing Gnarls Barkley ‘Crazy” with Kyle strumming his guitar. Emma is recording the jam session to upload to Youtube. Later Emma, Cam & Kyle will be convicted of piracy. The 23 year old who uses Youtube as an avenue to share her gift, to be a part of something bigger than herself will be reprimanded of giving joy. In a world where SOPA is passed globally Emma’s light will be left behind in Cronulla. She will never get discovered, she’ll never meet PJ Harvey, and she’ll live in the present not dreaming of the future. 

The reality of SOPA being passed as a law in Australia is a distant thought. But the potential after effects of deconstructing the online arts industry has been noted by the community. 

I’ve been asked all week “what do you think of this whole SOPA thing?” I’m not going to pretend I understand the full implications of the ‘Stop Online Piracy Act’ (SOPA) but I recognised the storm clouds forming. 

We’ve become accustomed to the freedom to redistribute content online. We’ve become more creative beings with the freedom to create content beyond our means. Emma doesn’t pay for the backing tracks she uses to practice singing. Would she be the same performer without A. the support from her Youtube subscribers or B. without the freely available resources she uses to become the best she can be? 

This week Wikipedia went into darkness, Google blacked out their logo, Grooveshark lowered the volume and the people cried out. If you are not sure what SOPA is Wikipedia says “The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is a United States bill proposed by U.S. Representative Lamar S. Smith (Republican) to expand the ability of U.S. law enforcement to fight online trafficking in copyrighted intellectual property and counterfeit goods.” (Thanks consumer created content Wikipedia)

I personally can’t see how they can limit redistribution of creativity, in an economy that’s based on reproducing people, goods and services. To grow something new you take seeds from an already flourishing flower. Rafael Bonachela (Sydney Dance Company Artistic Director) took inspiration from the music score from Oceans by Italian composer, Ezio Bosso. Did Bonachela pay a fee for the creative inspiration? Who inspired Bosso? 

If the implications of SOPA try and track creativity it’s going to be a never ending murder mystery. Do we have the capabilities to handle an influx of request for permission of redistribution of content? Who does Emma ask or pay to record a Jeff Buckley track? In an age where a new Youtube video is uploaded every second it would be impossible to police creative reproduced content. 

For now Emma is ok. But be prepared to draw your sword.

As Wikipedia said, we’re not done yet. 

In case I’ve ignited curiosity you can watch Emma’s Youtube video’s here. http://www.youtube.com/user/elbwow

 * This blog post first appeared on AdNews

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is about increasing traffic to a website by optimising it analytically and understanding its use from a consumer/customer perspective. In simpler words the website needs to be user friendly with relevant content, easy to navigate and provide requisite information to the user. Optimising web-pages for search engines and users may sound identical, but are very much different in principle. The main factors to be taken into account while optimising web-pages for users and search engines are:

1. Web page loading speed: Latency is important for a website and its optimisation. A search engine might also look at how quickly pages load and render in a browser. It also accounts in terms of how much time users might expect the page to load and how good experience it might deliver to their users. Faster sites are more likely to create happy users. However, if a site responds slowly, visitors might become impatient, spend less time and leave the page.

Reducing page load times can reduce bounce rates and increase conversion rates. Google has researched the impact on number of searches by slowing down the search results page by 100 to 400 milliseconds and found decrease in searches by 0.2% to 0.6 % for less than half a second’s time.

The speed of a page can be tested at https://developers.google.com/pagespeed/. A higher score in the speed test will require less improvement but, for a page with lower score, recommendations such as minimising URL redirects, combining images into CSS sprites, efficient coding and compressing images can save many bytes of data, are to be considered.

2. Content Allocation on Page:  In regards to content, both users and search engines have similar perspective; they want the information to be in-order and prioritized rather than being scattered.  As the users scan the page for the relevant information, similarly search engines prefer most relevant information at the beginning of the page with clear sign of the heading what the content is about. Thus the content on the page should be organized with appropriate headings, paragraphs and points.

3. Appearance of Content: It is preferred to have a right contrast of colour scheme, text size and style on the web page. Users should have the ease of reading and understanding the content on the page. If the content on a page is not formatted properly it might result in increased bounce rate and more likely less returning users. For example, if a page has 4 paragraphs and all with different font size, then the users might lose interest because of the unusual page structure. Also, it makes it difficult for users to read and consider that website as spam and more likely to leave the page which will result in higher bounce rate. Therefore, use of appropriate colour scheme, font style and size should be carefully considered.

4. Images on page: Communicating information through visual effects have a better impact on the users, as images are eye catching and are easy to understand compared to just text. On the other hand, search engine bots work on algorithms and they can’t index images. Therefore, it is required to add Alt attributes, keywords in the image file name, right anchor text, to images which gives search engines more information on the image content. Adding alt text gives the user a better understanding and description of the image.

5. Navigation: The navigation on your website should be clear and concise. The unnecessary complex website navigation might confuse users as they don’t want to think and try multiple options to find the information they are looking for. Make sure you use appropriate keywords and hierarchy to navigate to a product page. Similarly, search engines look for the keywords to navigate and index the pages accordingly. From search engine perspective, complicated navigation can result in poor indexing as crawlers might not be able to crawl all pages due to many internal links present on a page. Hence, too much confusion can lose the interest of both user and search engines.

Source: SEOmoz

6. Prioritize significant content: With increase of access to World Wide Web through smart-phone, tablets and other forms of smart gadgets, the website should be compatible on all form of devices. If a user is accessing website on a small screen or on a smart phone, they expect important content to appear in the beginning of a page. Similarly, to increase chances of indexing the page by search engines, the best practice is to place the important content in beginning of the HTML code of the web page.

7. Importance of Meta title: Title of the page is one of the key elements for both users and search engines. Self-explanatory and a descriptive page title will assist and increase the chances of users clicking on the web page when searching for a particular keyword. In addition, when users search in their bookmark for the website, it raises possibility of revisit. Likewise, search engines give a lot of consideration on the title of web pages which contains clear title with keywords as it helps in increasing the ranking for those keywords. Significant keywords should be covered in the title of a page to give clear understanding of the web page.

8. Web page URL’s: Everything related to a web page should make sense to users. A clear, concise URL increases the chance of recall by users. It should be short, clear, relevant to page and represent a clear flow of navigation and category. For example: www.example.com/services/social-media-optimisation/ implies that social media is one of the services provides by “example”.

On the other hand the URL: www.example.com/services/232social_d.aspx is a complex URL structure, as it is difficult to remember by users and it provides few information for average users as what actually the page is about.

In addition to the usability benefits of structured URLs, SEO can also gain benefits. URLs containing topic related keywords have a constructive result on search engines as they can help in improving keyword ranking, increasing traffic and indexing the web page. For example, www.example.com/used-cars-sydney/ can target both “used cars” and “used cars Sydney” keywords in URL and can help in improving the ranking.

As mentioned in above 8 factors, it is very important to optimise a website from both users and search engine perspective. A well optimised website is more likely to achieve high traffic, increase in conversion rate with a good user experience. Optimising a website is not about putting bulk of content, colourful images, and using complicated navigation with many options. It’s more about providing relevant information with the right structure, choosing appropriate title and many other factors as discussed above.

What’s new (from SAI Insider, http://read.bi/vg18Lw)

• Personal profile pages. Every Twitter user will get a new profile page that contains everything about them — all their tweets, followers, favorites, images they’ve uploaded, and so on.  “Tell more compelling story for you.”

• New home timeline. The new timeline page will embed everything about a particular tweet right in the tweet — retweets, favorites, and added content. Twitter will also put an embed code into every tweet, so Web sites can take entire tweets and put them on Web pages, just as they do with YouTube videos and other content.

• #Discover. A new # option at the top of the page will take you to a list of interesting stories related to people you’re following, or people Twitter thinks you might be interested in. (The relevance algorithm isn’t that great yet .

• @ names are now the shortcut to people. A new @Connect item at the top of the Twitter home page will let you see everything that is happening related to your username — all retweets, direct messages, and so on.

Why should you care?

Twitter is currently at 1.5-2million Australians, but with these changes and new, rich features the platform will become much more accessible to new users and they might finally increase time spent and engagement (the number one gripe from media planners.)

Clients should be considering Twitter social plug-ins to their website as embed codes will make tweets more track-able and shareable, not to mention SEO benefits.

Australian roll-out should happen sometime in early 2012.
Read more http://on.mash.to/vIky8w

We get asked by clients all the time what steps they need to take before jumping in to the dynamic world of social media. Below are some quick tips to keep in mind when developing your crisis management.

1. Don’t Reinvent the wheel (unless you don’t have one)

o   Crisis management for social media should work alongside your existing CRM and overall crisis management systems that every company should already have in place. Something extremely simple like having a list of contacts for each department, with back-ups, is often overlooked.

2. Think about your employees.

o   Many companies spend so long thinking about what consumers think of them that they don’t consider how employees will react to social media. Designing policies and guidelines for employees is critical.

3. Resource social media properly

o   If you don’t have enough people, or enough of people’s time, it is impossible to think that you’re going to be able to manage a crisis that crops up in social media. Whether internal or external, make sure your social media team understands what is expected of them.

4. Value your Community Manager (CM)

o   The CM is your brand gatekeeper in social media and needs to correct training, background and skill set. If you don’t have someone monitoring your social communities, you won’t be able to put out fires before they burn the house down. This means don’t get the intern to do it.

5. You can’t plan for everything.

o   Remember that social media is a living, breathing system that will bring you the unexpected- both positive and negative. Set expectations within your organisation and make sure the people at the top “get” social media.

It has only really been in the last few years that mobile smart computing has really taken hold. The success of the Apple iPhone and iPad suggest that people are more than willing to pay out for exciting new high tech devices such as these so long as the price is reasonable and the product offers a real convenience or entertainment factor. Now, with the release of the new Sony/Google Smart TV from just US$300, it looks like digital convergence and highly anticipated concept of Web TV and the Networked or ‘Smart’ Home may finally, be on our doorstep.

Sony-Google-SmartTV

Ubiquitous computing involves intelligent learning capable systems that provide a personalised digital service to the end-user. In SEO, the personalisation or socialisation of search and advertising are popular terms of late. Google, Facebook and Microsoft are clearly interested, very aware that this technology will provide a range of new ways to attain and provide much more relevant and personalised information in so many new ways. The partnering of Facebook’s social and Bing’s search services matched against Google’s +1 Button highlights the emphasis these companies are placing on developing a more personalised or informed search experience. In some recently published research regarding Facebook and Google, it is revealed that although Facebook is still the most prominent service in terms of social links and social plugins, Google’s +1 Button is gaining in popularity.

Having been lucky enough to be an intern at Reprise media this week I’ve been studying more data than I could shake a stick at and now having learnt enough to know what at least some of it means.

Looking at some data today suggests that TV adverts do still have a part to play when a large firm is considering where to spend their media budget. As arguably do the other traditional forms of advertising.

We are also told in the press that these traditional forms don’t have as big an impact as they once did. This maybe true but now we have the ability to scrutinise at least website traffic in minute detail and this is where a clearer picture of what consumers are doing after viewing or listening to an ad because after they have done this the likelihood is that they will go straight to the internet with a thirst for more knowledge before they make a decision on purchasing (ROPO, Research Online Purchase Offline).
This isn’t always the case but I would imagine there is research out there that adds weight to my theory.

Now, armed with the minutia of data targeting demographics we have this wonderful capacity as media experts to make advertising campaigns so target-audience-focused that the customer is going to get more bang for their buck, thus sharpening the seemingly blunt tool of traditional media.

So, what I’m saying is that brands shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bath water with regard to traditional advertising  (I’m sure most don’t), which still has an influential role on your brand. Until we can replicate what TV does is there any other way to mass advertise in the same way?

With the way digital media is headed, our viewing of TV, internet and the like will all be linked to a man or woman in a chair stroking his cat with streams of code running down the walls!

Imagine the power of that person where spending advertising budget is concerned.

Consumers beware!

1. Consumer Purchase Process
2. The Five Elements of User Experience
3. Visual Vocabulary of Information Architecture

Being my favourite marketing model, this first article will focus on the Consumer Purchase Process.

Consumer Purchase Process

What is it?

Consumer behaviour was the most despised subject from my uni days. However, I began to learn how essential this subject was when I got into the industry. The consumer purchase process is a model that shows the journey a consumer goes through when purchasing a product to address a problem or situation.

The Process

This model represents a complexity topic, but here are the basic steps:

1. Situation – can include temporal persona related influences such as mood, hunger and energy and non-persona related situations such as ethnicity, education, gender, etc.
2. Problem Recognition – occurs when a discrepancy between actual state and desired state is identified. This includes the role of advertising (amongst other activities) to either create or emphasise this discrepancy to consumers.
3. Information Search -can be conducted in several ways depending on the amount of financial risk and the amount of knowledge an individual has about a topic. For example, an individual will go to much more effort and education purchasing their first property compared to subsequent purchases. In comparison, the purchase of a chocolate bar can be made in seconds.
4. Evaluation Criteria – involves the creation of evaluation criteria as a result of information search. For example, someone may decide after some online research on TVs that HDMI is a must-have feature. Any TV that the individual assesses from this point onward will be categoried as follows:
   1. Evoked Set – products that meet evaluation requirements and may be purchased
   2. Inert Set – products that have not been fully evaluated or evaluation is difficult
   3. Inept Set – products that will not be considered for purchase
5. Purchase – is when the consumer believes they have made a decision. They now select the provider and attempt purchase. Situational influences at purchase (such as POS or salesperson) may change purchase decision.
6. Post-Purchase – includes product related features (such as warranty, support and adhering to feature claims) and emotional activity of the consumer. Emotional activity may include post-purchase dissonance which is a feeling of regret from continued product evaluation after purchase.

The San Diego State University has comprehensive notes on a model similar to the one shown above.

The sky is falling in

Some people will claim this model is dead with the introduction of social media, but I completely disagree. What they’re actually referring to is the sales funnel, which I have always thought to have similar value to a post-war currency. Below is an image of the traditional sales funnel (a.k.a. “purchase funnel” and “marketing funnel”) courtesy of GFK Custom Research North America.

traditional 'purchase funnel'

The consumer purchase process is based on psychology, not on technology. For example, our friends at We Are Social declared The Purchase Funnel is no More in 2009 (read the blog comments for some humour). As the article states, Forrester Research made an early attempt to kill the purchase funnel, but “… it failed to provide a model that was easy to visualise, and it failed to catch on”. To me, this is obviously because the model doesn’t do what a model is supposed to do; represent complex real-world environments in a simple format that the human brain can understand.

Forrester Research Conversion Funnel

McKinsey was the next to attempt a re-birth of the funnel with their Consumer Decision Journey. The reason why I previously mention “re-birth” is because this model involves the same elements as the traditional model. It’s basically the same as the consumer purchase process, the difference being the cyclic representation of the process steps. Despite this, I still find the linear process easier to comprehend when developing strategies.

McKinsey Consumer Decision Journey

Relationship Between Consumer Decision Process and Search

Have any of you thought of producing your website based on the consumer decision process? You might be making sales, but if users can’t find your support or store locations, then you might be contributing to post-purchase dissonance. We’ll focus on this more in the next two posts.

Robert Lloyd works in the Sydney branch of Reprise Media as a Senior SEO Analyst.