I am Director of Product Development at Econsultancy, an entrepreneur and a long-term internet fiend.
Contact me via chris@econsultancy.com.
STUDY: Noise, promotion and spam will reduce your Twitter followers
Following somebody on Twitter is always a small leap of faith. Sometimes it just doesn’t work out, for whatever reason.
A couple of days ago I created an online poll to try to identify the common reasons for unfollowing people on Twitter.
More than 500 votes have since been cast and as such we can now start to analyse the results.
Start Me Up! A profile of Buffer
If you read my blog post about new tools for Twitter users then you may already be aware of Buffer, a fine productivity app that helps me to schedule the content I choose to share on Twitter. It's well worth a look.
I caught up with co-founder Leo Widrich, who focuses on customer experience and support at Buffer. He is also the marketing head who works on spreading the word about Buffer through blogging, social media and "other forms of hustle".
12 social signals from Twitter that could influence search rankings
We know that Google uses hundreds of ranking factors to determine where it places web pages in its index. We also know that social media sites are becoming increasingly influential on search placements.
Charles Duncombe explored the topic on this blog a few days ago, focusing mainly on volume-based signals. I think there’s probably a bit more to it than that, or at least there should be.
This is a think-out-loud ‘Friday’ post, rather than a definitive guide to the things Googlebot is sniffing out (for I know not what it looks for). It considers the possibilities, to explore what Google might be able to make sense of. I invite you to share your own ideas in the comments section below.
So then, what kind of social signals might it take notice of on Twitter?
How to be a formidable content curator: a 17-step guide
Over the past few years I must have heard the phrase ‘everyone is a publisher nowadays’ a thousand times or more. It’s largely accurate, due to the rise of social media, but I think we are mainly ‘curators’, as opposed to ‘publishers’.
Content curation is something that many of us will be familiar with, even if we don’t think of ourselves as curators. We instinctively find and share interesting content with our personal and professional networks. We follow others who share the kind of links that engage and entertain.
Yesterday the clearly charming Adam Vincenzini described my Twitter feed as "all killer and no filler". I know perfectly well that a bunch of my tweets can be filed under ‘utter rubbish’, but I must be doing something right.
As such here are my 17 tips to help you become even better at content curation, with one eye on Twitter, my platform of choice for sharing.
13 deeply unfortunate online ad placements
A couple of years ago my colleague Jake Hird compiled a bunch of horrible online ad placements, which amused and appalled us in equal measure. Since then we’ve spotted a few more. Some of them are the stuff of nightmares.
I’m a big believer in targeting ads, and I hate the shotgun approach that the majority of advertisers seem to be content with. The lack of demand for smart targeting is one reason why average CPM rates for display have fallen through the floor, though publishers haven’t helped themselves. They should be in the data / engagement game but most are too busy trying to increase page impressions, often artificially (paginated slideshows being among the worst sins committed).
As such, contextual targeting is the most popular - and easiest - form of ad targeting for publishers and advertisers. By matching ads to the content found on a page you can increase relevance and click through rates, though sometimes it doesn't always work out that way, as we shall see.
Here are 13 examples of online ads that have left the brands in question with substantial portions of egg on their faces. Many of these appear to be contextually targeted, though some may just be unlucky. The question is why leave things to chance? Advertisers should take a little more care about where their ads appear.
Enjoy!
18 reasons why your agency won’t get hired
We’ve been growing pretty quickly these past few years, and when that happens you often need external support. More often than not we’ve turned to agencyland to find help.
Sometimes we’ve needed to bring in an agency on a tactical level, to help us with a specific – and perhaps one-off – project. On other occasions we’ve taken a longer-term view, with the aim of forging a strong relationship and retaining the agency.
Finding the right partner is just as difficult as hiring the right staff, and just as crucial. It goes without saying that not all of the agencies we’ve seen have been successful in winning our business. Sometimes there is a real sense of disappointment, especially when you like the people and their work, when you talk them up, when you know they have the skills, and when they fail to deliver in the meeting.
So here’s a list of common reasons why agencies don’t get hired. Many of these points also apply to consultants and freelancers too. To win more work, try to avoid some of the following...
Customer experience strategy: 10 killer tactics for success
I’ve sat in on some really interesting customer experience talks over the past year or so. Most recently I participated in a roundtable at our Digital Cream event, moderated by Dr Mike Baxter, who asked the following question: “What’s the difference between the customer experience, and the user experience?”
Mike defined as the former as being “big picture”, whereas the latter is “an in-session, microscopic view”. Indeed, customer experience is a much broader church than user experience, though the two should be closely aligned.
How then can you set about improving the customer experience? In this post I have compiled a list of the areas that I think offer the biggest wins for anybody looking to delight customers.
10 hidden Easter eggs found on websites
Recently I listed a bunch of creative 404 pages, which a) made for light reading, b) show that it is possible to deal with problems in an engaging way, and c) goes some way to prove that an interesting 404 page is an easy way of generating some extra link juice.
Since it’s Friday here’s another slice of fun.
Finding Easter eggs used to be a case of running around the garden once a year. Then came along computer games, which included ‘Easter eggs’ in the form of hidden treasure. Some websites have Easter eggs too, and I thought I’d point you at a few of them.
A note: this post shamelessly references this thread on Reddit, which contains a number of other examples.
Enjoy!
Creative marketing: five innovative outdoor campaigns
I’ve spotted a few outdoor ads / campaigns recently that I think are worth sharing. They blend innovation, creativity, technology and interactivity in a number of different ways.
You may think that offline ads aren’t especially relevant to internet marketers, but some of the more successful viral ads have been based around offline events (the Carlsberg biker video, for starters), and often involve real people and real reactions. If I was in charge of brand marketing for a large company then I’d be ploughing this particular furrow with vigour.
These ads can generate an incredible amount of noise and love (as highlighted in the TNT example below). It’s telling that a big budget TV ad such as Volkswagen’s ‘The Force’ is seeded online first these days. In terms of a feedback loop, there is none better than the internet.
Anyhow, some of these ads contain sound, so you might need some headphones. Enjoy!
14 fantastic scrolling websites that tell a story
In the past year or so there has been a trend in web design towards the use of scrolling, which can help to engage visitors and provides a feeling of movement and animation.
These web pages are entirely static, and rely on the visitor to interact in order to generate the ‘movement’. Back in the day if you asked for this a developer would reach for Flash, but nowadays HTML5 (which has a <ParallaxScroll> tag), CSS3 and JQuery are usually employed to achieve scrolling effects.
I’ve collected a bunch of scrolling websites that are built with the arrow keys in mind. Some of these are more 'animated' than others, and some scrolling websites feel a little bit clunky, but all of them are interesting and creative web experiences.
I’m not yet convinced that scrolling is something that e-commerce companies should be embracing en masse, but it can certainly be used to support brand and product campaigns, given that the best examples are inherently narrative. Portfolio-based websites (such as the two agency sites I've featured) are another area where scrolling could come into play.
Scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, keep those websites scrolling…
