Unsurprisingly, QR codes have been around a lot longer in Japan than anywhere else, and it was Japan where I first saw them. I didn’t know what they were at the time, but everyone was using them. I was at a festival, and one of the tents there was offering a prize to people who used the QR code they had at certain times of the day. For Internet Week 2010, 11 different agencies with buildings in Times Square, New York, put up giant QR codes on billboards to advertise their businesses.

Now, they’re all over the place in most of the rest of the world. Although originally used for tracking vehicle parts, now they’re used in contests and adverts everywhere. They’re on the back of buses on MI5 adverts, on McDonald’s drinks and in magazines and newspapers. On some Youtube videos there’s a QR code next to the video so you can visit the mobile site. There’s QR codes in so many places it’s beginning to feel a little bit like I could be hallucinating them, like Tetris vision.

In the NHS, QR codes are being used in several different ways. They’re on patients’ wristbands, so that doctors and nurses can find out easier what medicine each person has been given and any other basic details. There’s also a website called Club Drug Clinic, and through the QR codes on posters and stickers in various clubs, people can gain access to information and help with drug problems.

Some schools are using them on their websites to link to surveys and other useful information for parents and students alike. Several tourism companies are adding QR codes to their maps so that tourists can access information about the area they’re visiting.

To make things more interesting, a lot of different companies are customising their QR codes to make them stand out more, like the BBC one there. There are multicoloured ones, ones with pictures, ones decorated with little flowers and all sorts. As long as you can still do whatever you need to do with it, it doesn’t matter what you do to them.

There is a difference between barcodes and QR codes. While both are used to scan things, barcodes are generally used to take inventory of stock in the manufacturing and retail industries, whereas QR codes – also referred to sometimes as 3D barcodes – are more about acting as a link to make various websites more quickly accessible to people. QR codes are also more easily used, since they can work when scanned at any angle; the three squares in the corners tell the scanner which way up everything’s supposed to be.

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1. Old Spice – Normally adverts for body washes and shampoos are quite irritating and full of women swishing their hair all over the place (It must be a nightmare vacuuming the floor after they’ve been filming the adverts – hairs everywhere). I’m not sure if it’s because Isaiah Mustafa never stops talking for a moment and never breaks out of the slightly sinister grin, which makes it even funnier, but I just know that if I had a man, I would buy him Old Spice so he could smell like a man, man. Silver fish hand catch!
2. Tippexperience – I’m actually quite impressed with what they’ve done. The first video is ‘A hunter shoots a bear’, which leads onto a Youtube page where part of the video name has been ‘tippexed’ out, so you can change the name of the video, which changes the story. Though I have found that typing some words in comes up with odd results, or just links to some of the other story options, I have yet to find an idea they haven’t thought of.
3. Will it Blend? – An advert for Blendtec blenders, where various different things are put into their blender to see if it will blend. Not normal kitchen objects like peppers and herbs, but weird things like glowsticks. Just so you know – iPads DO blend, so don’t be tempted.
4. TMobile flashmob – It’s fun to watch, although I think it would be quite unnerving to be walking through a train station and suddenly be blocked by a crowd of dancing people. But it is quite good at showing you what’s possible when you connect with people – which, of course, T Mobile are only too happy to help with.
5. Wolves in Moscow – at first, people thought that the clips of wolves running wild in Moscow and attacking people were real. It turns out, after some incredibly sceptical people went through the video frame by frame, that it is in fact part of a campaign for Eristoff vodka. I’m not quite sure wolves have to do with vodka though.

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Recently, there’s been a lot of talk about Pottermore, a newly, not-quite-unveiled idea that J.K. Rowling has come up with. It’s opening to all in October, but there’s currently a competition running where you can gain early entry by showing just how well you know the series and answering a question. Of course, since the world of Harry Potter is something that many people have grown up with and love, it means that many people (such as myself) have been depriving themselves of sleep to try and get to the website and answer the question before the day’s allotted places run out.

But what exactly is Pottermore? Well, nobody knows. As someone said on Twitter, ‘JK unveils Pottermore. The world responds with a resounding ‘Uuh what?’’. The idea is that members of the website can be Sorted into one of the four Houses and get their own wand. Rowling has also said she will be sharing the information on the Potterverse that she has been compiling over the years, and pretty much everyone –  from the fan fiction writers obsessed with staying canon (not creating random characters and elements of the story that aren’t originally there, for those of you unfamiliar with the term), to the people who just like to boast that they know more about Harry Potter than other people, to the people (again, such as myself) who believe that the owl with their acceptance letter is probably just stuck in a tree somewhere and will take any opportunity to pretend to be at Hogwarts – will jump at the chance.

It does seem a little bit geeky and maybe a bit childish, and the non-believers are probably already pointing and laughing at how stupid we look because they think it’s cool to not like Harry Potter (au contraire. They’re in denial of their empty, Potterless lives), but they’re just daft Muggles and nobody who’s anybody is listening to them.

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Well, my answer is pure and simple… After a fantastic 13 months with the amazing team at PushON I have decided that I am moving to Kenya to join a volunteer program in the Bombolulu slums in Mombasa. While there, I will be supporting education for some of the world’s most vulnerable children and orphans. I will be working as a classroom assistant supporting local volunteer teachers and will be helping them in raising environmental and social awareness in an area with high HIV prevalence. I have no doubt that it will be an experience of a lifetime, working with incredible people and experiencing their culture and way of life by joining in with (and running!) community sport and arts projects for local families that have little or no income, something which sadly can lead them into situation where they turn to substance abuse, prostitution or crime.

The reason for this blog post is simple, I need your help to get out there! I have created a video as a requirement for a competition with Richard Turner Associates and the Diana Award who are offering up a grant of £650 to the person. To win I need to get the most votes on my video, so if you have a second please go here and vote for Ned! Do it quick too voting closes July 25th.

I will be self funding joining the program, paying for anything from my flights and the required immunisations to my accommodation and food while there. I will be hoping to raise funds around £1500 to assist me getting out there, if you would like to help out then please visit my donation page or contact me directly via email on Lixion@gmail.com.

May I just take a short moment to say a HUGE thank you to all of my lovely clients, I will whole heartedly miss them all, and to the whole team at PushON, I’ve learned an incredible amount while I’ve been here and have made genuine lifelong friends from my colleagues; I cannot extend my gratitude to them enough.

If you have any questions about the program that I’ll be joining, what I’ll be doing while out there or anything else then please feel free to leave a comment below – I promise to respond to them all!

The post Please Vote for Ned to Help Him Volunteer In Kenya! appeared first on PushON Ltd.

Kristal kicks off proceedings talking about Welcome to Yorkshire

• First FourSquare branded page for local constituency in Europe
• “They got this because they asked nicely…”
• Spent a long time uploading tips all over the region
• Empowering users means that people are using FourSquare – uploading photos, tips etc

Why did they do it?

• Like to innovate
• Most popular brand on Foursquare (?) over 9,500 friends on FourSquare
• Higher level goal of moving Yorkshire online

How did they do it?

• Trained over 1,000 Welcome to Yorkshire members on social media over 3 months in 2010 – Concentrated on Twitter, Facebook and how to claim their assets on these networks
• Created a Tumblr account and got members to send pictures of window clings (‘check in here’ on FourSquare stickers)
• Offered incentives – Free brownie after 5 check ins, 50% off entry

17% of social media users actually use location apps (most people are worried about privacy)

63% of people that are doing this are aiming to engage with big brands (US Stats)

Good points made in discussion:

• Watch offering coupons too much, some people are devaluing their brands…
• Voucher sites (and apps) need to look at segmenting their audience (this could be done through location based services…) so that we’re not all getting offered IPL Hair Removal

Good/interesting points by Richard Dennys, Chief Marketing Officer, QYPE

• Qype buy POI databases on new areas that they move into
• “You have ‘social status’ people and ‘value seekers’ and they’re very different people. If we can get these people to act the same then we’re winning!”

Jenny Simpson continues proceedings, after arriving late as she was misinformed about start time

• Multiple touchpoints increases the importance of location
• Mobile use is a gamechanger – People trust their mobiles as much as they do their laptops (surely more these days?)
• 95% of smartphone users have searched for local information
• Ensure that if you’re a brick’n'mortar company then claim your assets! – Search will inevitably continue to get more and more localised in the future…
• Include your local listing’s are included on your marketing materials – get reviews & attract links!
• “GroupON’s margins just aren’t realistic for travel…”
• International Localisation, don’t be lost in translation – ‘Apres-Ski’ doesn’t translate the same or hold the same meaning
• Local can drive PR and Social Media campaigns – Press releases should include location, people will pick up on this

The post SAScon 2011: Location, Location, Location appeared first on PushON Ltd.

Paddy Moogan kicks off proceedings… “It’s obvious, but only measure metrics that are actionable & only measure metrics that get shit done”

Metrics that are actionable

• Report on the customer voice

Ecommerce Sites:

• % Visitors that view product pages (benchmark and improve over time) – These can be improved by internal navigation, site search and featured product widgets
• Average order value – Think ‘how can I get this site more revenue’, they rarely look at the traffic thats already there (but these are the easiest to win over!) – Add upsells wherever you can, look at keywords that get higher order value, look at traffic sources that get higher order value
• % People who search then exit – Use images and make sure results are clear, test your search results on site, include deals & discounts in results.
• Conversion Rate – Don’t look at ecommerce conversions for the whole website, it’s meaningless! Segment by relevant dimensions and highlight which are the best

Good Tip: Lots of CMS’s don’t include related keywords, consider singular and pluralized versions & ensure that your CMS caters for these!

Non Ecommerce Sites

• Page Load Speed – Track this using the new google site speed check, bug your developers
• Custom Variables FTW – Record rel=canonical, is the page inked to sitewide? (measure the traffic from Google and see what effect it has), tag ‘types’ of pages and see how they perform

Good tips: Use Custom variables to measure/record changes and measure their success
Measure people copying text on a page (and make them internal links)

• Beat Panda! Measure content such as reviews and see if they are effective
• 4q Surveys worthwhile to use
• Measure your share of search landscape - get a top 100 keywords and see what percentage each competitor (other website) owns – use this tool to do it
• Form Field Tracking – Check which fields confuse people, improve or remove them then track as events in analytics
• Measure Branded vs. Non-Branded traffic – “Helps you justify the SEO spend”

Metrics that get shit done

• Explain the value of content to the client – show them the growth of content against the past. And of course, if they are losing content (deleting content) ensure 301s are in place
• “Developers don’t like SEO tasks” – The way their mind works they can’t see the immediate result… So show them the increase (traffic, conversions etc) based upon changes

Notes from Paddy’s talk can be found here

———————————————————————–

Tom Betts is now going to show the examples from FT.com and how SEO & Analysis is being taken very seriously

Always ask yourself…

• ‘So what’ – What is the point of reporting this?
• What is the point reporting at all? Is anyone going to use it…?

Remember these things about your metrics:

• Customers aren’t all the same, don’t treat them that way!
• Segment your audience and understand your audience (95% of your site visitors may be passing visitors, try to capture these!)

Measure customers in the context of ‘the customer’ not the devices/browsers that they use or their cookies

• Cookies are unique to device/browser, deleted, blocked and generally unreliable (ComScore said that 2.4x cookies were present per user per site in one month)
• Consider instead using a (persistent) customer ID instead and conversion attribution – Provide context, combine with behavioural information, then tie this in to their lifecycle
• Then, add a layer of value over this – Consider the different devices that your customer uses. Is the new channel (app etc) actually making you more money OR is it just moving your existing users…?

Deal with emerging channels now!

• Use a single platform for cross-channel analysis

Benefits

• Clear line of sight from app usage to revenue via customer
• Holistic view of customers and how the like to consumer their content (do your customers like to rea their news in the morning on their iPad then on their PC at lunchtime…?)
• Figure out how much to invest in mobile – And help you to identify new channel opportunity and upsells ;-p

The post SAScon 2011: Analytics 2.0 appeared first on PushON Ltd.

SES London

We discussed how State of Search have been live blogging SES London where some of the highlights included:

Keynote from Jeffrey Hayzlett from Kodak talking about the challenges of transforming the company, an update on the Bing and Yahoo search alliance and going beyond the numbers to judge the success of an SEO campaign.

There were many people talking about the event and one of the round-up blogs that we thought was particularly interesting was from Wordtracker called “130 takeaways from SES”.

SEO Latest

The latest in SEO included a blog from Wiep on 10 years of link building, Patrick Altoft’s post about overstocked.com being penalised, SEO Moz showing us how to turn rankings into traffic and 3 articles from Search Engine Journal on Google’s latest algorithm updates:

• New Google PageRank Algorithm Debunked

• Google Updates algorithm around content farms – there is a lot of talk around this subject and many people in the industry have their view on it. Undoubtedly it will clean up the internet in terms of what people are searching for, however many people will have to think differently now that these changes have come into effect.

• Google’s Action Against Paid Links Continues: Overstock & Forbes Latest Casualties; Conductor Exits Brokering Business – after the recent JC Penney penalisation Google has been continuing their clamp down on paid links. 2 more large companies have been caught up in the controversy.

Social Media Latest

The most interesting articles we saw this week that affect the future of social media were:

• A great piece on The 3 Phases of Social Media Strategy

And

• Search Engine Land reporting on “Bing Integrates Facebook Likes Further into Its Search Results”.

“The 3 phases of social media strategy” article was particularly interesting and if you take elements from it into your own campaign and make it work for you then you won’t be far off a successful social media strategy.

Any other Business

Does your Press Release pass the “Who Cares?” test?

Apple rumoured to be holding an event on March 2 to announce the iPad 2

How to use QR codes for event marketing

SEO strategies for Google News

We owe the internet for changing the world. Now let’s learn how to turn off

If you noticed anything we didn’t spot or find anything from here useful then get in touch, we love to hear from you. We’ll be back next week with another round-up. Thanks for reading!

The post SEO Weekly Round-up from PushON appeared first on PushON Ltd.

The Next Generation of Ranking Signals – We discussed a great post on SEOmoz exploring the The Next Generation of Ranking Signals. This delves into the future of ranking signals, exploring different ways that search engines could rank results to avoid obvious gaming of results, such that was made all too clear by Google’s recent penalties on J.C.Penny. In summary there are 3 ways that could be used for future ranking signals, these are:

• Brand Signals – Using associations from the brand to avoid a situation like with J.C.Penny where they are dominating rankings for items that they may not even be selling.
• Entity Associations – Search embracing the metaweb more by associating obvious terms such as ‘governator’, ‘Kindergarten Cop’ and ‘Arnold Schwarzenegger’ to produce cleaner organic results.
• Human Quality Raters – Search changing from the algorithmic + crowd model into something more integrated and advanced. This is very much a nod towards the Wikipedia model. With Facebook Connect spreading at a rate of knots a huge amount of user data is becoming available. A way to utilise this effectively could make a real impact on search and also allow us to see accurate, richer universal search results.

When Are Penalties Lifted? - Matt Cutts stepped up to the plate and answered a question that many SEO’s have been wanting answering in light of the penalties given to J.C.Penny. The video is well worth a watch and explores the difference between algorithmic and manual actions that Google take and how to resubmit your site should your site be penalized.

Google Spamming SERPs again? – A interesting article cropped up exploring Google spamming search results again, using Google News as the example and reminding us all to pull our socks up and keep an eye on our robots.txt files.

Humans.txt – While we’re on the subject of robots.txt files an interesting new movement has began for adding humans.txt files to your sites. Don’t know what a human.txt file is? Well, in short it’s a file that operates much like a robots.txt but is targeted at us humans, documenting who built the site and how the site was built; providing us geeks with the information that we sometimes want to know. A good example can be seen here.

SEO’s Vs. Domainers FIGHT! – People are starting to discuss whether Google Chrome are going to scrap the address bar and, if they do, will Microsoft (Internet Explorer) follow? Will Google Chrome to Scrap the address bar? Really? What do you think?

Is Google Changing our Title Tags? -

This image was created using this cool ransom note generator.
An interesting post showing that in some instances Google is reserving the right to change title tags.

Finally, the grammar police are in town so please let me apologize for the typos in Mark and Kieron’s previous posts. We will continue with our weekly ‘Round-up’ next week.

Have you seen any news that’s interested you this week? Get in touch and let us know, we’re always open to learning and sharing new things…

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I was surprised to see www.google.co.uk appear as number 2 in the listings. I removed “Manchester” and the listing disappeared, and the same happened when removing “plasterer” and indeed “ernie”. It made me wonder was this listing put there by Google as a placeholder for a recently removed website. Why else would they appear there? It doesn’t take you through to a local page listing or anything remotely relevant to what the search query was.

I searched in Bing and Yahoo! But there was nothing similar, so it must be a one off. I search for a few name variations such as “james plasterer Manchester” but it wasn’t showing Google anywhere. Does anyone have any ideas where this may have come from?

The post Google promoting itself for random search query appeared first on PushON Ltd.

Tree Accountancy are a Manchester-based accountancy firm based in the Northern Quarter. They provide assistance to others in accountancy with services such as tax and auditing, whilst also providing them with entrepreneurial services in strategic finance and growth, corporate finance and franchising. The ‘tree’ in Tree Acountancy is based on the way they aim to help their customers grow in a straightforward 7-step process.

Tree Accountancy Manchester operate in a competitive search space, with many global giants as well as Manchester-based accountancy firms dominating the rankings. This means that we will have to conduct in-depth analysis to highlight contextually relevant opportunities and work hard to optimise the site to take advantage of these. The search campaign will include making continued improvements to the site, conducting analysis to develope an understanding of the competitive environment for link-building and other activities.

We are really excited to have won the contract and over the next few months intend on increasing their search engine visibility, so that we can help Tree to increase conversions and grow their business; that we know they deserve.

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