Social Media blog

News that Facebook use is spiralling out of control in the UK is of no surprise. It’s also fairly understandable that over 50% of UK employers banned Facebook in the office. So far so expected.

It is nonsensical however to hear that Siemens is leading a corporate relations plan for it’s 6,430 employees on Facebook, not only encouraging them to use the site but also linking Facebook with corporate and staff blogs. They must be insane, right?

Unless Siemens realised that a company’s employees are it’s best marketing ambassadors (as the old marketing saying goes) and giving them the right to use Facebook will boost the company brand image and spread it like a virus. Clever forward thinking or what?
They must be laughing.

The Google AdSense network is not the best place ever. There are thousands of very strange looking sites with questionable traffic. Google’s answer to this self inflicted mess is the site-targeted campaign option in Google AdWords.

You can select from a list of better quality and traffic websites and see the pageviews and conversions increasing.

The Cost Per Click is not too bad either.

Finding a good domain to register and kick-start your business with was never easy. Things have however become much worse recently. There are many reasons for this.

If we are going to start naming and shaming we have to start with ICANN. These are the people that control the rules around domain registration and them being an American company they seem heavily preoccupied in protecting the rich and the wicked. The rules around domain registration and ownership are not just difficult to understand but also extremely vague and impossible to reinforce. In this way a company that goes after a domain registered by one of ICANN’s approved resellers has no chance in winning in court. This is simply because they can easily prove that the parked domain was registered in ‘good faith’ and it is being withheld until the company decides to spend too much money (A link of their mambo jumbo can be found here).

Second culprit is Google offering AdSense ads. Read more

With Facebook opening it’s doors to widget development there is one more reason to think of the widget war. The number of websites using widgets and the amount of users interacting with them is increasing rapidly. Companies are already gearing up to enter the social networking space with widgets leading to their products and services. However widgets are never a guaranteed success and even if so, difficult to prove their return for investment. Read more

Looking at the funny side of this is not easy, because there isn’t one. The technology powering video uploads for Hi5, Bebo and Dogster does not support Windows Vista. I am by no means an advocate of Bill Gate’s evil monster Microsoft but common sense says that most of the new PC’s will be shipping with Vista. Which also means that Vista users cannot upload any videos to their favourite networks currently.

If this is not a major disaster fro VideoEgg don’t know what is!

If you are using AdWords but can’t see the SEO vs PPC traffic go to your AdWords campaign ‘My Account’ tab, click on ‘Account Preferences’ and then enable ‘Auto tagging’ under ‘Tracking’.

A problem is that, for some reason, you will still get PPC keyword data attributed to your ‘organic’ traffic. This seems to be a bug and not a widely reported one. However you can get a much better overall picture of your spend and traffic trends.

Without any warning Google has released a brand new interface for Google Analytics. It is evident that the new release is not focusing on adding extra features but concentrates in displaying the same information in a new light.

At start, the interface takes some getting used to as the Analytics team has really shaken things up. There is more information per screen and the graphical representation takes centre stage. When looking at the keywords report for example you see a graph but also visits, average time on site, bounce rate etc. This helps you to focus on the bigger picture whilst looking at the detail. Read more

LinkedIn, the business networking website has reached 10 million users in April of 2007. This is not only significant for its effect on the business and recruitment communities but also as another driving force in social media. Networking has never been easier online and LinkedIn safeguards against abuse make it a clean environment to meet genuine professionals at the top of their trade.

LinedIn is another internet success story and it is likely to be bought soon for yet another astronomic amount from one of the giants. The question is how much?

We have just soft-launched the Social Media website. There are still some parts missing but we are working around the clock for the final release. For the techno-freaks the website is build in PHP and running on Apache server. The design is heavily based on CSS, keeping the HTML clean and tidy.

We are always looking for feedback on the look and feel so if you think that something could be better please drop us a line.

Thanks and welcome