#UnitedWelcome – Manchester United’s Social Faux Pas

With news of Sir Alex Ferguson retiring on Tuesday we were shown social media at its most powerful with reports of David Moyes taking over. To our surprise on Thursday we managed to find a link that was to a tab on the Manchester United Facebook page and the text read – ‘#UnitedWelcome – Send your personal welcome to our new manager David Moyes’. This was up on the site before any confirmation of the appointment of David Moyes and news confirming the reports didn’t come for a couple of hours after this was leaked. The leak was caused by United’s only official Twitter (@Manutd_PO).

The power of social media strikes again, showing how sometimes preparation for announcements can go wrong and lead to the unveiling of a whole campaign before its actually live. The app is still yet to be published on the Facebook page, so our guesses are… Who did they fire for leaking the information too early? After they spent so long searching for a Social Media Campaign Manager in December. 

Tuesday’s announcement led to unprecedented interest in Sir Alex Ferguson and his retirement, the Guardian via Twitter said they received the biggest ever day of traffic, even bigger than the Pope’s retirement!

The power of football. Biggest day ever for traffic on @guardian website yesterday (bigger than the Pope)

— Daniel Taylor (@DTguardian) May 9, 2013

YouTube Trends 

This week YouTube launched its Trends Map, which provides a statistical breakdown of the different kinds of content that are popular in the United States. The dashboard allows you to view statistics based on shares, views, city region, gender, and age. Lets hope they make this a worldwide feature at some point soon!

Solaborate – Social Network for Tech Professionals

This week saw a new social platform being released into beta, targeted at tech professional to interact with other tech professionals. Based on the early previews and videos/pictures we can see it allows professionals to share documents and presentations, publish questions, conference, chat, video and best practices.

Solaborate even allows for collaboration on the other social platforms such as Facebook, Google+, Twitter and LinkedIn.

If you’re interested in signing up to Solaborate you can request a Beta Invite here.

Viber Desktop

Viber is to challenge Skype’s dominance by launching a desktop app which would enable calls, texts and video calls.

Dubbed Viber 3.0 the desktop release is coinciding with major updates for Android, iOS and Blackberry versions.

Viber chief executive  Talmon Marco said;

People spend a substantial amount of time on their smartphones. However, a lot of that usage takes place at home or in the office, where they have laptops or desktops close by.

Bing using Klout as ranking factor

Klout has expanded its partnership with Microsoft by bringing its search results to the top of bing.

Questions that are put on Bing that have long been unanswered will be answered by ‘experts’ who are appointed by Klout ‘influencers’.

CEO of Klout Joe Fernandez said

People are starting to be interested not only in finding information, but also knowing where that information is coming from. When getting advice on how to take care of your garden, for instance, you’d probably much rather get advice from an influencer in the subject rather than someone who was just getting started gardening.

We know what questions people are asking, so we’ve curated the best questions and tied them back to the topics where people are influential.

Users could then +K with the answer if the answer was useful, adding to the experts Klout score.

SAScon

The keynote speakers for the upcoming SAScon have been announced. They are Clancy Childs and John Veichmanis.

Clancy Childs is a Google Analytics’ product manager and is in the know regarding the most crucial tool for marketers. John Veichmanis is Expedia’s VP for Global Paid Search.

SAScon co-founder Simon Wharton said

SAScon is about the accountable modern marketer, digital is at the heart of any modern organisation. Bringing together speakers not only of this notoriety but of this extreme calibre in such a high level conference. It is a real statement of intent from SAScon. 

SAScon is the perfect conference for both the client side agent and the in house marketer.

SAScon takes place on the 6th/7^th of June 2013 and tickets can be bought here.

That’s the end of the roundUP this week we will leave you with this funny VIne that we saw.  You can see more here

The post Digital RoundUP 13/05/2013 appeared first on PushON Ltd.

• Average shopping cart abandonment across all devices is 72%.
• Most delivery problems originate from a poorly optimised checkout.
• 50% of customers will not shop with you again if you do not deliver on time.

Our top ten essential tips will all be revealed at 5pm on the 16th of May as PushON will be hosting a Webinar with Postcode Anywhere where we will be discussing 10 Essential Tips To Improve Your Checkout.

The webinar will feature Postcode Anywhere’s Senior Account Manager, Tom Gurney and PushON’s Digital Director, Sam Rutley.

Registration for the webinar is free and can be found here.

We hope you can join us for what will be a highly informative webinar!

The post Sign up for our free webinar – ’10 Essential Tips To Improve Your Checkout’ appeared first on PushON Ltd.

Log In with PayPal, previously known as PayPal Access, aims to simplify online check outs. It has everything that the retailer and the consumer require to create an account and make the purchase; this includes billing information, shipping details and account holder identification.

According to one of PayPal’s users:

“Log In with PayPal adds tremendous value to Gigya clients by streamlining registration and providing merchants with a great way to reduce shopping cart abandonment.”

PayPal rolled out the optimised Log In with PayPal during the 2013 Future Insights conference, taking place in Las Vegas this week. PayPal believes the new integrated solution will ease the frustration felt by consumers when attempting to purchase online vie their mobile devices. Ultimately, PayPal believes Log In with PayPal will make online shopping easier.

PayPal claims to have over 128 million registered accounts across the globe who trust it to manage their financial transactions, safely and efficiently, on a daily basis.

Using Log In with PayPal means consumers need only remember one account and password for online shopping. If it is successful it could see mobile purchases become easier and more common globally.

The post PayPal optimises mobile log in to ease mobile shopping woes appeared first on PushON Ltd.

This month we’re beginning a new series of posts that we’re calling FocusON. Each month we’ll focus our posts on a different aspect of digital marketing, and we’re kicking off by talking about Pay Per Click advertising.

To celebrate the launch of FocusON, we’re giving away a Google Chromebook to one lucky reader. Simply visit the PushON Prizes app over at the PushON Facebook page and follow the three simple steps to be in with a chance of winning. HINT: You may want to read FocusON: An Introduction to PPC Marketing first!

Keep your eyes peeled on Facebook and Twitter for updates throughout the month, and don’t forget to share this great opportunity to be in with a chance of winning a Google Chromebook with your social chums!

The post Win A Google Chromebook with #PushONPrizes appeared first on PushON Ltd.

Engage 2013

Engage 2013 took place this week in London at the Hilton London Metropole hotel.

If you were lucky enough to attend or watch on the live stream, social updates were being published using the hashtag #Engage2013.

This social event included top speakers from companies such as Twitter, Nestlé, KLM, SAB Miller and Adobe.

Here are a few of the top talks we enjoyed in the PushON office:

Jan Rezab, CEO of social media analytics company Socialbakers. Jan talks about how social media has evolved in the last few years and where will be heading in the future.

Lionel Lassalle, Social Marketing & Co-Branding Manager at KLM, explained the successful social strategies that have proven invaluable for KLM. Lassalle also demonstrates the social tools used and future innovations with software and campaigns used to combine social with the flying experience.

‘Happy staff = better service = happy customers’. #Engage2013

Jeremy Waite, head of social strategy at Adobe, talks about The “Like-Cycle” in social media. The “Like-Cycle” encourages 5 social media challenges, Insight, Content, Loyalty, ROI and Media, with an emphasis on a solid social strategy. The slides can be found here.

Mozilla PENALISED by google

Mozilla the company behind most notably Firefox internet explorer, Thunderbird and other apps were penalised by Google.

The reason, according to a penalty notification:

“Google has detected user-generated spam on your site. Typically, this kind of spam is found on forum pages, guestbook pages, or in user profiles.

As a result, Google has applied a manual spam action to your site.”

Spam in this instance resulted from spammers abusing the blog section for the Mozilla.org site. John Mueller of Google suggested a need for spam filtering and comments being monitored before they go online. Mozilla had 12 megabytes of spam from 21,169 different comments, Matt Cutts (Google celebrity) said those spam comment pages ‘cause users to complain to us about’ and thus ‘action’ was required. 

Although Mozilla got fined by Google, they were never told which page was causing the offence which seems like an incredibly frustrating policy if the offending site has many pages. This is yet another example of Google flexing its muscles in its fight against spam!

UK Government passes Instagram Act – Now All your pics belong to everyone

As of this week, millions of amateur and professional photographers that upload their work on the Internet will be stripped of their rights to their images. The new Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act passed by the UK government amends the copyright law to allow commercial exploitation of images that contain no information identifying the owner. Most digital images floating around on the Internet today contain no metadata, making them ‘orphan-works’, meaning they can now be exploited for commercial use so long as the user performs a ‘diligent search’.

To keep from being ripped off, photographers will have to either remove their work from the Internet, or register it, a costly and time-consuming activity.

Will this new Act make you think twice before uploading photos to social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter?

Tweetdeck apps closing may 7th

This week, we heard news that Tweetdeck mobile app’s are officially closing on the 7th of May and disappear from the Google Play store, according a blog post from the TweetDeck team. Along with this the twitter team will also remove Facebook integration from the apps.

That’s the end of our RoundUP for this week - we will leave you with exciting news for May! Keep your eyes peeled for our competition this month:

Please tweet us @pushonltd or write a comment below, see you next week!

The post Digital RoundUP 29/04/2013 appeared first on PushON Ltd.

Are you sitting comfortably? Then I shall begin.

Let me tell you a story. However unlike other stories you have read, or been told, this one will not contain any lions, witches or wardrobes. I shall not weave tapestries with my words of knights in shining armour or dragons that must be slain. Which I suppose is a shame really, as I’m sure some out there would find that a far more interesting read for a Friday afternoon.

It’s as I type this second paragraph that I realise I may have taken Nichola Stott’s talk at ionSearch yesterday a bit too literally. You see one of the key takeaway points from her talk for me was that when you choose to follow the much championed “content led” model or strategy for your business, the content you produce must tell a story in some way, shape or form. As by telling a story you create engagement with your target audience, which is the key to making your strategy work.

When this little gem of wisdom was revealed to me, I asked the obvious question. “What’s a story?” Obviously it’s not what I started to write at the start of this post, even though that’s the traditional thing you think of as a story. A story nowadays, in the context of creating great content for your audience, tends to be things that measure things or are evocative or emotive. What’s great about thinking like this, which Nichola pointed out as part of her presentation, is that you can use your clients existing “stuff” to create these stories. Nichola suggested that people find out what their clients are doing currently, find their USP and look at consumer groups. If at all possible use all of this to give people “the warm fuzzy wuzzies” as part of the story.

One great example Nichola gave as part of the presentation showed how you can create something out of nothing if you dig deep enough. One client they had sold thermostats, not exactly the most evocative of markets. Yet upon digging further they found that they were selling thermostats to the NHS. The NHS was in turn using these thermostats in the production of incubators for babies. This all meant that they now had a fantastic, emotive story that they could create content around to share and gain both visibility and (hopefully) links.

Now while all of these great hints and tips were shared with us all at ionSearch, and in turn I have now shared with you, I couldn’t help but notice something. A lot of what Nichola had been talking about sounded to me like traditional PR work. Now this does go hand in hand with the way I believe offsite SEO to have been heading for the past two years, and the way I have been working here at PushOn, but it does lead me to wonder if PR’s and SEO’s can continue to cling to their love/hate relationship. Or will it cause them harm as the few who can let go and just love each other tear ahead of the competition. Simon has shared his own opinion on the matter here at the wallblog, which seemed to cause quite the ruckus, and it’s well worth reading both the piece and the comments to form your own opinion if you haven’t formed one yet.

Hm, I think I can see my next story to tell you on the horizon.

If you want to read a general overview of ionSearch day one, there’s a fantastic one here, written by my colleague Jonny.

Images courtesy of the BBC and me.

The post ionSearch – Let Me Tell You A Story appeared first on PushON Ltd.

This past week Google announced that it will give its users a ‘digital will’ option for their online data. The premise behind it being that users can decide what happens to their online account after they die.

It has been dubbed “data-after-death” and lets users tell Google what to do with emails and other data if their account becomes inactive.

Google email and YouTube posting can be deleted after three, six or twelve months of inactivity. Alternatively they can choose to give access to the data to specific people.

This got me thinking, what happens to all your data when you have gone? What about your Facebook page or Twitter? Social media usage has been increasing at an exponential rate but no one has considered the implications to the data on there.

Both Twitter and Facebook have policies in place to allow users to request that an account be deleted in the event of users passing. Twitter users can obtain a permanent backup of all tweets from a designated account.

What if you do not want to close your Social Media accounts? How about carrying on your social media activity even after you have died?!

Here are a couple of options;

Dead Social

Dead Social enables a user to send out messages after death from various social media accounts.

The key features are;

• Send messages directly to your private Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin account
• Send out a final message and / or series of scheduled messages
• Release unseen video and audio messages

DeadSocial covers all the post-death social media options, scheduling public Facebook posts, Tweets and even LinkedIn posts go out after someone has died. The free service will publish the text, video or audio messages directly from that person’s social media accounts or it can send a series of scheduled messages in the future, say on an anniversary or a loved one’s birthday. For now, all DeadSocial messages will be public, but the company plans to add support for private messages in the future.

LivesOn

This caught my attention because I read about the service and watched an episode of Black Mirror that contained very similar themes.

Essentially LivesOn analyse’s a user’s tweets and learns about what is frequently tweeted and the style of tweets. The idea being that in time a tweet from LivesOn would be identical (or as close) to what the original user would tweet. Tweets will begin to populate on your LivesOn feed. A user has to nominate an executor for the account and they can decide whether to keep the account live.

LivesOn’s slogan is;

When your heart stops beating, you’ll keep tweeting

Legacy Locker

The previous two examples specifically dealt with social media accounts, Legacy Locker deals with your online presence as a whole. Legacy will manage your Facebook, Paypal, Linkedin, iTunes and Gmail to name but a few.

There are different levels of accounts from free to $30 a month. The free account will store and hand over 3 logins to one beneficiary and send out a farewell message to your loved ones, the top tier account has unlimited access.

Would you be interested in any of these services? It would be great to know your thoughts.

Please Tweet us @PushONLTD

The post When life logs you off, how to stay online appeared first on PushON Ltd.

Twitter Music

We were given a glimpse of Twitter music over the weekend but only via the site – http://music.twitter.com. On Friday, rumours were going around about the launch of the new Twitter Music app, with Wiz Khalifa, Black Shelton, Soft Reeds, Pete Yorn, The Glitch Mob and Ryan Seacrest all saying how good the new Twitter music app is. The launch was expected to be on Friday, however, updates suggested that the weekend was the target, to be launched with the on-going Coachella festival.

If you now try to log into the site, you can grant access to your account but then the site will take you back to the original page.

What will the Twitter music app look like? Will it spell the end for Spotify? Only time will tell, we can’t answer any of these questions until Twitter release some more information about the App.

Blab - Social Media Conversation Predictor

News broke this week about an exciting new tool called Blab that can be used to predict social conversations that would emerge within 24,48 and 72 hours of them happening.

Blab can also track real-time conversations in any language and allows you to see what content, images and videos are being shared most within your social audience.

Using this information, Blab can improve key areas that your brand can benefit from, including Consumer Insights, Content Marketing, Pre-emptive Brand Protection and Search Engine Optimisation.

We look forward to testing this tool out, and predicting the social trends for the PushON social audience.

At Blab we’re mapping the conversation canvas to give you the most up-to-the-minute understanding of your brand’s audience—who they are, where they are and what they are talking about. Then in 24, 48, and 72 hour time frames, we’re accurately predicting how those conversations will grow and where they will migrate.

Foursquare 6.0

The latest update from Foursquare (6.0) adds an ‘Explore nearby’ search box and map to the main page of the app. This works perfectly to help find out what your friends are doing and shows what’s going on within the local area.

The update also allows for more accurate check-ins and trending popular locations while recommendations and further away goings-on are shown in a separate section.

Universal Analytics

Online marketing and off-line marketing collides. LovesData have hosted hack day using the Google Universal Analytics beta. The applications they have demonstrated strongly suggest that ‘big data’ will rule the roost in not just online, but also offline marketing very shortly.

Google – Map Maker

Google expanded its Map Maker edit tools to cover the UK this past week.

The software allows users to add details to specific sections of Google maps such as information about buildings, national parks and other details that may be of interest to its users.

Any suggestions or amendments are reviewed by other users and Google itself before they are accepted.

Map Maker users can edit and add four types of content:

• Places – such as a restaurant, gym, cinema
• Roads, Rivers and Railways – such as bicycle routes
• Building outlines – use of 3D images for houses, monuments
• Natural features and Political Boundaries – lakes, parks and natural structures

Another feature called Map Maker pulse allows users to see real time updates and displays submissions made by other users. The more users are active they get more ‘confidence’ which means future submissions will be subject to less inspections. 

This is another example of how crowd sourcing has cut costs to map areas by its own users rather than paying to get it done from a company.

That’s the end of the RoundUP for this week, we will leave you with this – GOOGLE STREET VIEW Hyperlapse: This tool allows you to creates a warp-speed Street View back and forth between a pair of points on a map. Give it a try!

The post Digital RoundUP 15/04/2013 appeared first on PushON Ltd.

Top 5 April Fool Digital Jokes

1. Bing

This is what happened when you searched for ‘Google’ on Bing:

2. YouTube – ‘YouTube’s ready to select a winner’

YouTube released a video saying the service would be coming to an end and they will be picking the “best video”:

3. Google

Google were to introduce a search-by-smell feature called Google “nose”

4. Google Treasure Map

Google added a new feature onto the Google Maps page, allowing for the World to be viewed in a ‘Treasure Map’ format.

5. Virgin Atlantic

Virgin Atlantic launches a glass-bottomed plane

Mashable created a list of the 2013 pranks, which can be found here:

The Ultimate Roundup of 2013′s Biggest April Fools’ Day Pranks

Facebook updates

Facebook’s messenger app has added VOIP which has now become available in the UK, following on from the US and Canada.

The option appears on active Messenger users’ profile page as ‘Free call’. I have checked this and it has not arrived on my screen yet but I imagine it will be rolled out soon. The call will be placed via WiFi or 3G.

Although the idea is great in theory in practice it will take a while before it takes off, why would you use an app to call and text when there are plenty already out there?

Will you be using it?

Facebook Phone

Screenshots of a phone rumoured to be announced by Facebook has been leaked ahead of an event on Thursday.

 The hardware will be produced by Android and have dedicated ‘Facebook’ style graphics and homepage.

The post Digital RoundUP 02/04/2013 appeared first on PushON Ltd.

We’ve all been there. For the past couple of years it’s been a nightmare for us developers to spend hours either changing our CSS or HTML mark-up just so Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) can render our webpages correctly.  Since the launch of IE7 back in 2006, web technologies and web standards have changed significantly. Whenever I develop websites for clients, I usually don’t have any problems in regards to testing it cross browser, 98% of the time my websites work seamlessly on pretty much all the modern browsers until I’m asked to test it on IE7.

It is understood that most developers (including myself) still optimise websites for IE7, simply because there happens to be a small minority of users who still use that browser. Latest stats as of February 2013 show that usage of IE7 has dropped to less than 4% globally. The question we need to ask is, is it still worth putting in the effort to optimise websites for IE7 for this minority of users?

Based on my previous experience, it takes an enormous amount of time to make a website or web application optimised for IE7. Due to these problems, and the very small percentage of people who even use the browser, it doesn’t make it worthwhile as far as time, effort and money is concerned. Yes, it would be nice to have a website that is compatible with all browsers, but what are the chances of your visitors (target audience) accessing your website using IE7?

Why should we stop optimising for IE7?

Big name websites such as Google and Facebook officially announced last year that they no longer support older browsers like IE7 because they don’t have the capabilities to handle today’s modern web browsing needs. Google has urged people to update their browsers for a better and safer browsing experience. Facebook’s timeline has been completely phased out from IE7. When users visit their Facebook profile page they won’t see the timeline, but instead will be presented with the old profile page.

Some ecommerce websites have even started charging an ‘IE7 tax’. Australian retailer www.kogan.com was one of the first websites to come up with the idea of charging their users with an extra 6.8% tax. The website detects when visitors are using IE7 and issues a pop-up warning about the tax if the users purchasing goods from their website. The purpose of this approach is to encourage their users to upgrade to a modern browser for a better browsing experience of their website, thus avoiding the extra charge at the same time.

Why are people still using IE7?

One of the biggest reasons people are still stuck with IE7 is because some of them are still using Microsoft’s older operating systems. IE7 came pre-installed when Windows Vista was first launched in 2006, an operating system that many PC owners still use. Microsoft has also used several methods in an attempt to get its users to upgrade, but some organisations find it very expensive and time consuming to get all of their PC’s upgraded to modern standards. Most importantly it is our fault as developers as in the past we have spent hours optimising websites for IE7. This has only encouraged IE7 users to continue their browsing experience with IE7.

What can we do encourage users to upgrade their browsers?

• We can use similar tactics like the Australian retailer “Kogan”.
• Create landing pages that can detect if the users are using IE7 and provide them with a warning and upgrade solution.
• Use badges and small banners somewhere on your website to encourage users to upgrade. Last year a website called “The IE7 Countdown” launched to dedicate the countdown of IE7. They provide code snippets that can be easily embedded on your website to display tiny badges and banners. www.theie7countdown.com

I think it is time to stop spending unnecessary time fixing IE7 bugs and instead using that time to do something more productive.

The post Is it time to bury Internet Explorer (IE7) for good? appeared first on PushON Ltd.