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Does Hyatt provide a five star digital experience?

Hyatt releases its Q3 results today, so I thought I’d pre-empt the webcast and take a look at the company’s digital efforts.

Is its digital marketing as good as the hotels? And how do its efforts compare to some big name competition?

It turns out Hyatt is fairly solid, online. I didn’t get mad trying to use the website, and everything was easy to find, with a good mobile presence.

To take it to the next level, Hyatt would have to redesign its website to match the modern design of RoomKey or Top10.com.

It would also be great to see more rich content on the Hyatt website, rather than simply its social channels. This would allow more of the atmosphere of the hotels and the ethos of the brand to suffuse the browsing and booking process.

Let’s have a look at the brand’s paid, owned and earned digital content.

Hawksmoor and the future of search for small business

It’s a great time to be a big brand. They have nothing to worry about when it comes to search, and have it all: top page ranks, multiple links.

Google is even currently testing overlarge banner ads for big companies in its search results. Big brands will be fine.

It seems that Google is doing more and more to support big brands, filtering out the flotsam and jetsom of the internet and providing users with ‘trusted’ big name brands they recognised, pushing the more dubious websites further down its SERPS.

But what about the little guy? The little guy who makes a great product or provides a quality service. How can this valuable but tiny start-up company possibly hope to compete against the giants of commerce?

At Searchlove yesterday, Distilled’s co-founder and CMO Will Critchlow used the London based restaurant chain Hawksmoor as an example of a successful local business to provide his own insight and guidance on how your small business can market itself in the face of staggering adversity.

Start Me Up! A profile of Moovd, turning your words into animated video

For years, video has been a pain in the bottom. Video production companies know it, and they charge handsomely for it.

Increasingly, start-ups are trying to disrupt professional video production, to provide an easy solution for marketers to create their own none-too-shabby work.

Moovd is the latest of these companies, and turns text into animated text videos. Try it yourself, you can make videos in a few seconds (I’ve been making childish videos all morning).

Why copy is Amazon’s secret sauce

Many experts assume the social recommendation system is its killer feature.

But what exactly about this feature makes it so? What in fact is the magic sauce of Amazon?

Sure, there is some predictive value in keeping track of many different variables. There always is. It’s Amazon’s best kept secret.

But I am guessing it’s not only a secret for people outside of Amazon. If you would ask me what the most persuasive ingredient is of the sauce, I would say it’s copy.

The smartest algorithms make sure you get to see products that you love (to buy). A recommendation engine knows what you really want, what you really really want. Computing thousands of variables is the key to predicting consumer behavior.

Nah, I don’t buy it. The black box probably does have an impact, but I know for sure the copy has.

Is your digital marketing ‘lost in translation’?

The ultimate differentiator for businesses isn’t product or brand. It’s the one thing that can’t be copied or stolen: relationships with customers.

Retail has long known that. Astute retailers covet their relationships through personalization and targeting and approachable, consistent, authentic salespeople.

That’s because, as people, we know how to form relationships really well in the physical world. We can see each other’s face, we can hear voice rising and falling, we can see body language. Only we aren’t doing that in the digital world.

Rather, marketers are simply using digital as another distribution channel when what people really want (it’s a basic human need) is what they get in the physical world from businesses: a relationship.

Therefore digital marketing, by focusing on distribution of messaging rather than forming relationships, is lost in translation.

So you have a mobile site. What happens next?

57% of users won’t recommend a business if they have a bad mobile site, a simple statistic that speaks volumes about the current landscape in mobile commerce.

Global mobile web usage is increasing exponentially and most businesses know they need a mobile strategy.

Building a mobile-friendly website is just the first step. What happens after that? 

At Searchlove this morning, Distilled’s digital marketing consultant Bridget Randolph provided her own insight and guidance.

Twitter network analysis: identifying influencers and innovators

In my last post I introduced the Econsultancy network, a map of the follower relationships between 3,930 users talking about the brand, sharing links, and tweeting at the official @econsultancy account.

I pointed out that it was pretty remarkable that all these users talking about Econsultancy are bound together in a web of follow relationships, despite not necessarily sharing anything else in common. 

But how can we use this network data we’ve gathered to give us some more concrete insights we can use in our campaigns?

For example, to identify influencers, segment audiences, and understand what content is interesting to them. 

ppc

PPC agency payment models: percentage of spend

This time last year I scrutinised a number of SEO agency payment models, concluding that many of the pricing structures and commercial arrangements offered by agencies are outdated in the context of today’s organic search landscape.

PPC is generally accepted as an ‘easier buy’ compared to SEO. However, you need only do a search on Google for ‘PPC services’ to be confronted with a baffling array of offers:

Start Me Up! A profile of Famigo, family-friendly device managment

Security is big, as always, but arguably bigger than ever. Famigo is an app that provides mobile content for the family in a secure environment on a phone or tablet.

Famigo has been around for four years or so, which somewhat qualifies it out of our start up category of three years or less. However, I’ve made a rare exception, because Famigo is worth knowing about.

We asked the Famigo team about the product’s USPs, and the goals and challenges they’ve met so far.

Twitter revenue per visit up 300% year on year: stats

Twitter and Pinterest have experienced the biggest rises in revenue per visitor (RPV) over the last 12 months, though Facebook continues to dominate the share of social referral traffic to ecommerce sites. 

These findings are from Adobe’s first annual Social Media Intelligence report, which looks at social media trends  based on data across retail, media, entertainment, and travel websites. 

Here are a few highlights from the report…

Defensive SEO is all you need to know

While practising for my driving test, my instructor was always spouting jewels of wisdom. He also smoked too much and once nearly drove us into a traffic light but I guess nobody’s perfect.

Anyway, one of the themes that came up again and again was ‘defensive driving’, which Wikipedia helpfully defines as ‘driving to save lives, time, and money, in spite of the conditions around you and the actions of others’.

As a PR, I’ve spent a little time over the years considering how I’d describe my recommended approach to SEO, and I think a similarly ‘defensive’ approach is what works best for me.

Eight of the most interesting social campaigns from October

As November is only days away it’s time to round up some of the most interesting and noteworthy social campaigns we’ve seen this month.

This time it includes efforts from Cadbury, Doritos, Coke and Visa, as well as a flurry of Twitter Q&As.

If you’ve spotted any other decent social campaigns in October please flag them up in the comments…

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