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.

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Adria richards and that ‘joke’

When is a joke between two people private? The answer it seems is never.

Last week in the United States at a PyCon programming conference a developer who worked for PlayHaven made a joke amongst other things about ‘dongles’.

Adria Richards, a developer for a company called Sendgrid, was sat in front and tweeted this;

Not cool.Jokes about forking repo’s in a sexual way and “big” dongles.Right behind me #pycon twitter.com/adriarichards/…

— Adria Richards (@adriarichards) March 17, 2013

The developer was thrown out of the conference and subsequently fired from his job.

This act led to the lynch mob on the internet attacking Richards on Twitter with a flurry of offensive comments. Pressure was put on SendGrid to fire Richards and a few days after the original incident they relented. On Facebook they wrote;

Effective immediately, SendGrid has terminated the employment of Adria Richards. While we generally are sensitive and confidential with respect to employee matters, the situation has taken on a public nature. We have taken action that we believe is in the overall best interests of SendGrid, its employees, and our customers. As we continue to process the vast amount of information, we will post something more comprehensive.

So at the end of it all two developers lost their jobs and the internet was outraged. This could have all be avoided had Richards turned round and said to them that the joke was inappropriate. The fact that she tweeted their picture and publicly shamed them was not the smartest idea and made her position untenable.

Once something hits the web there is no going back, think before you tweet.

Google Keep

In the wake of announcing the demise of its Reader service, Google last week launched a new product – Google Keep. The note-taking app was released last Wednesday for Android devices, to mixed reviews.

Keep was immediately thrown into the ring with the likes of Evernote, although I don’t necessarily think Google is going after the note-taking giant. If they were, surely they would have released it across all platforms. I agree with Danny Sullivan’s take that it’s simply a service for Android users to sync notes across different devices, like you can with the iOS Notes app. It’s something that was missing from the Android setup.

So what’s the app like? Being an Android user myself I was looking forward to testing the app as most of my life is synced to Google anyway. My initial thoughts were that it’s a typical Google product, simple, clean interface, easy to use, and did the job. There are a variety of ways to enter a note; you can add a standard note, a list, take a photo or speech input. There is also an ‘Add quick note’ textbox at the top for additional simplicity. The notes appear as tiles that can be colour customised, re-organised, and synced to Google Drive.

The app looks good, but once you start using it on a day-to-day basis you realise that there’s a few things missing. The lack of a sharing function is a bit of an oversight, if I want to send a shopping list to my girlfriend for instance, there should be an option to share it across to her Keep account. There is also no way to set a reminder for a note, which is very annoying. This is a bit of a dealbreaker because it’s such a basic feature for an app of this kind, I couldn’t replace Any.DO or Google Calendar without this functionality. It’s also hard to access your notes on the web, I was expecting a ‘Keep’ tab to have appeared on Google’s black bar but instead I have to manually type in drive.google.com/keep/. I’m sure there is an easier way, but the fact is it’s not intuitive.

In my opinion, Google have got an opportunity to make a really good app out of Keep, but it’s not there yet. I’m sure there will be numerous updates in the next couple of months that will make all of these improvements.

Have you tried Keep yet? What do you think?

Dropbox buy Mailbox for $100M as reservations reach the 1 Million Mark

Early in the week, reports were going around that Dropbox were launching a bid to buy Orchestra, the company behind Mailbox. It was reported in a blog by GigaOm, that Dropbox paid more than $50 million for Orchestra. However, this was questionable with other sources saying the fee was much closer to $100 million.

On the official Mailbox blog, they wrote about moving to the new office move after being bought by Dropbox. They also announced that they reached the 1 million reservation mark after six weeks of being available in the Apple store. After our blog on release, the demand still remains high for access to app. With this benchmark they also released version 1.1 of the app to fix a few bugs and adds “shake to undo” to its feature set.

“Today we’re releasing an update to Mailbox in the App Store. Among hundreds of fixes and improvements big and small, we’ve added shake to undo—the feature our users asked for most. You can download the version here if you haven’t already updated.”

What will Dropbox do next with Mailbox? Rumours circulating around a file attachment integration with Dropbox’s own services.

TWITTER TURNS SEVEN

Twitter reached the ripe old age of seven this past week, and it looks like its popularity is going to continue to grow.

When did you first tweet and how often do you use it?

And We’ll leave you with this Chrome Experiment called Maze to keep you busy during the week – Try it on the PushON Homepage! 

The post Digital RoundUP 25/03/2013 appeared first on PushON Ltd.

I hated McDonalds with a passion, and I wasn’t alone. Eric Schlosser had written Fast Food Nation which, along with the movie Supersize Me, revealed to the world that food priced cheaply and made quickly might not be too good for you or ethical; the McLibel case had revealed that corporations obviously only interested in making money were only interested in making money; and the quality of Happy Meal toys declined sharply (serious, what is this?!).

To counteract this ill public feeling, McDonalds reinvented itself, introducing all manner of healthy options and, in what turned out to be a very shrewd move, opened the Make Up Your Own Mind website. This site served as a public relations exercise to combat all of the negativity that existed towards the company, inviting members of the public to ask questions about McDonalds food and business practices. It was essentially a business Twitter account before its time.

Crucially, however, McDonalds took the time to ensure all variety of questions were answered. So, for instance, a genuine question about what goes into a Big Mac patty would receive the same straight-faced response as questions like “is it true big max are made from childrens lol”. An example of this (or perhaps feedback on an ill-thought-out milkshake promotion attempt) can be seen below:

The Make Up Your Own Mind website became viral, and I remember spending daft amounts of time reading through all the questions at my then-new SEO job. And I wasn’t the only one. But the site wasn’t just about gaining traffic, it was about improving its public image. McDonalds had made themselves a laugh, and had proved they didn’t take themselves too seriously.

Six years on and McDonalds has built on this approach to become something of a digital marketing trailblazer among corporations. This week’s Blogworld event in New York saw Rick Wion, director of Social Media for the brand, gave a few hints as to how he believes companies should behave online. He said they should look to be funny, so long as its in context and fits the brand. They should look to steer away from standard ‘corporate messages’, and they should always be willing to evolve and try different methods of gaining success.

The Make Up Your Own Mind website has long since ceased operations, replaced instead with a simple FAQ page. Its legacy, that of being one of the first companies to truly engage with its critics via digital, can easily be seen in the corporate Twitter accounts of thousands of companies worldwide.

For more on the McDonalds digital strategy, read this Econsultancy piece.

The post Lovin’ It: McDonalds’ Digital Strategy Then & Now appeared first on PushON Ltd.

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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The Feed 2 was about Social Media ROI and was debated vigorously in our new venue, Revolution on Oxford Road.  This new venue tripled the capacity of  The Feed 1′s venue, yet the event was still a sellout! In order to pull things together, we’ve created a new on-line home for The Feed.

And the best way to launch a new website at a social media event called The Feed?  Why, social media cupcakes of course! Not only were the cakes (supplied by Hello There Cupcakes) mouthwateringly tasty, but the QR code ones were scannable and took you to our new website.

It will be an evolving site, so if you would like to see something on it that we haven’t got already, let us know. Also if you’d like to contribute to content or events, give us a buzz.

The post The Feed has a new home appeared first on PushON Ltd.

We had some great training recently from Craig McGinty on Online PR, because it’s an area we’re dealing with for our clients more and more.

We worked specifically on how to write compelling press releases, and some of the more traditional aspects of PR that us geeky digital types often miss…

It’s all well and good knowing how to seed an article, but if the article’s not much good in the first place then it’s bound to struggle.

Craig reminded us of the Five Ws (and one H) that we learned at school a couple of years ago (ahem)  :

• Who
• What
• Why
• Where
• When
• How

He also spoke about the inverted pyramid method of writing used in journalism; where you give the most important piece of information clearly and concisely first, then move on into further detail.

This is something I don’t make a conscious effort to do, but after thinking about it, it makes perfect sense in a digital world.  Because people don’t read a blog or a website in the same way they read newspapers – they scan quickly in a series of horizontal movements, then vertically down the left hand side (as shown in the diagram below from Jakob Nielsen’s useit.com.

The post Online PR appeared first on PushON Ltd.

Paul Fabretti from KMP in Stockport gave a great presentation on the reputation monitoring and online sentiment tool he uses.  We had our ears pricked up for this one in particular because we’ve been using a reputation monitoring tool to help with our organic online marketing campaigns.  We’re particularly interested in analysing the data to shape online marketing plans, but also in using it to tackle negative and ride on the wave of positive PR.

There was also discussion about whether we need a professional body specifically for our industry.

I personally don’t think the British Computer Society covers what we do in the slightest, and as for Marketing, although the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM), and the Institute of Direct Marketing (IDM) do courses for Digital and Online Marketing, it’s perhaps a bit of an afterthought.

I’m sure there was a branch off for digital from one of these institutions a couple of years ago, but it looks like nothing came of it. (If anyone has any information on this, please let me know).

Cathy Parker suggested a Digital Marketing Institute would help represent businesses working in our industry.  For example, in the case of Government Legislation – a professional body would more likely be called on for input.

This was all very interesting, and then we watched Spain versus Russia in the pub and carried on drinking… poor Julia’s not too pleased with the result.

The post Digital Marketing & Drinking Social appeared first on PushON Ltd.

Amazingly, all these types of holidays are offered by the dedicated bilingual team at Undiscovered Alps who have recently become the client for PushON. This is a France-based family business specialising in activity and adventure holidays for groups, families and individuals in a relatively small region in the south of France. We’re working on their campaign together with Tekin Suleyman and a number of media and PR companies in Manchester to optimise the existing marketing campaign for Undiscovered Alps, as well as to develop it further. At PushON we absolutely believe in organic and Social Media marketing, and Undiscovered Alps seem to be the right type of client to benefit from it.

The valleys of Champsaur and Valgaudemar form the southern edge of the Ecrin massif in the French Alps. The region includes three of the cols on the route of the famous Tour de France, ideal for biking. Skiing activities are hosted at Orcieres 1850, a well-known high altitude Alpine resort, and surrounding villages. On our client’s website, in addition to the expected information about the region and types of activities, you can find a choice of reliable accommodation, the destination routes, and even kit lists for different types of holidays and a booking form for ski hire.

…and if you can’t ski, swim or bike, and aren’t a fan of walking, you can paraglide. With Undiscovered Alps, sky is indeed your limit!

The post Account Win for PushON: Undiscovered Alps. Activity and Family Adventure Holidays in the French Alps. appeared first on PushON Ltd.

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The article I found most useful to me was about how to write a social media press release; it has some do’s and don’ts for writing for social media, and an explanation of why traditional press releases don’t work for this medium.

I learned this the hard way – as some of my first social media press releases fell flat on their faces. I learned the correct way to write a press release equates to how not to write for social media.

Social media press releases are much more conversational and personal. So boilerplate, marketing headlines, facts, figures and quotes are generally seen as spam.

I also found that writing under my own name as opposed to on behalf of my company, with branding and logo, attracted kinder constructive criticism than writing as a fairly faceless writer. The Newsvine* community seriously let the dogs out when PushON had something to say!

In summary – when you’re writing for social media, you write personally, thinking about your audience and whether it’s relevant or useful to them. This is my opinion, and I think you’ll find this interesting because….

*Newsvine is an excellent place to read, distribute and comment user generated news.

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