SEO Werkt!

16 days of intense competitions around Gold, Silver and Bronze medals in London are over. And to send us off into the ‘Time after The Olympics’ adidas UK have produced this fun little video in record time. It features many stars of Team GB miming Queen’s ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’. A nice and warm way to remind us of the joy and humanity of the events.
Strategically adidas linked the video to their overall Olympics campaign ‘Take the Stage’ with David Beckham top and tailing the video as a fictional director and the final hash tag #stagetaken.

I think Jessica Ennis and Victoria Pendleton show some serious star quality - and all of this in an unusual low-budget (by adidas standards) kind of production. There is more on the Making Of here on director Philip Bloom’s blog.

Client: adidas UK

Remember the S1 and S2 Sony showed us a while ago? Looks like the company is still thinking in unconventional terms when it comes to tablet design.

Images of the new Sony Xperia tablet have just been leaked (supposedly they’re press photos). We’re also hearing that the tablet may feature beefy quad-core specs, a Microsoft Surface-like peripheral keyboard, an Android operating system, and a tiered price tag ranging from $400 to $600.

The designs we’re seeing today show a super-sleek device that’s long and narrow, certainly a change of pace from the two standard tablet sizes and resolutions: the “overgrown smart phone” seven-inchers and the “iPad or similar” 10-inch devices. But the new designs suggest that Sony has abandoned the wedge shape it was playing with during the S-device stage.

Uniqueness aside, this outside-the-box kind of form factor is something app developers love to hate, since it can wreak havoc on how their work is displayed.

Still, Sony’s been known to throw device design curveballs in the past. In this gallery, you’ll see the new tablet pics, with a couple of S-tablet images thrown in for comparison. You can see the dual-screen, foldable, candybar-style design was clearly “out there” by anyone’s standards.

We’ll likely know more about this device later this month; it could be released as early as September. Stay tuned!

Filed under: mobile

The following is an excerpt for the forthcoming book, Attack of the Customers: Why Critics Assault Brands Online and How to Avoid Becoming a Victim, by Paul Gillin and Greg Gianforte. The target publication date is late 2012. I’ll be posting a few excerpts here during the next few months and would appreciate your comments.

We’ve all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true.

Berkeley professor Robert Wilensky uttered that memorable quote in 1996. Were he speaking it today, he might refer instead to Twitter.

Twitter is the enigma of social networks. It’s limited to text messages of 140 characters. It doesn’t support photos, videos or applications natively. Instead of friends, it uses the simpler connection metaphor of follower or subscriber. Even its website is so weak that only a minority of its members use it.

How does a service with so little going for it create so damn much trouble?

The answer lies just above the number 3 on your keyboard. The hash tag (#), which was created by the Twitter community to help bring order to the service’s inherent chaos, has become one of the Internet’s most powerful organizing and amplification tools. It’s helped Twitter become a core utility for arranging everything from book signings to mass protests.  It’s also established the popular microblog service as a prime channel for customer complaints and a favored tool of the critics we call “Casual Complainers.” The #fail tag, which denotes poor performance by a person or company, is monitored by millions and is not one you want to see next to your name.

Order From Chaos

More than five years after Twitter launched, we still hear questions all the time about its value. To the uninitiated, it’s a cacophony of voices sharing mostly useless information. And to a large extent that’s true. The low barrier to entry and ease-of-use are two of Twitter’s most endearing points. People can share anything and they do. The power of Twitter comes from filtering out the junk and focusing on what’s important to you.

Twitter’s simplicity and accessibility are it strongest features. Messages can be sent and received on nearly any cell phone. Updates are instantaneous, which makes Twitter a valuable news tool. When seeking updates on a breaking news story, Twitter is often a much better source than the traditional media. Instead of relying on just one channel for information, you tap into the collective reports of many. Within a few seconds of news breaking anywhere, it’s on Twitter. People with large Twitter followings can quickly magnify a complaint with a single retweet, and the media has learned to use Twitter both as an amplifier and a leading indicator of developing news.

While Twitter has occasionally been used to originate major attacks, its 140-character message limit doesn’t permit much poetic license. Attackers are more likely to post their gripes on a blog or Facebook and use Twitter to extend their reach.

Twitter, Facebook, e-mail and other social networks are all amplifiers to some extent, but Twitter is unique in that its content is public. Facebook members share messages and links mainly with people they already know. In contrast, following a hash tag enables you to see all messages from all Twitter users about that topic. As a result, awareness can spread more quickly on Twitter than in any other social medium.

While the number of links shared on Twitter is less than one-third the number shared on Facebook, Twitter links are clicked on about 12% more often, according to a study by ShareThis, Starcom MediaVest Group and Rubinson Partners[1]. Sharing a tweet with one’s followers is a two-click process on most PCs and mobile devices. This ease of sharing is why Twitter’s amplification power is so great. About 40% of messages on Twitter include a URL. This makes Twitter a rapid vehicle for spreading long-form content like videos and blogs.

Another distinguishing – if not unique – value of Twitter is its speed. Messages can be fired off in a few seconds and instantly reach a global audience. The combination of speed and hash tags has made Twitter an effective medium for managing crowds. During the Occupy Wall Street protests in New York in 2011, for example, the #needsoftheoccupiers tag made it possible for supporters to identify and respond to requests from protesters for everything from books to pizza[2]. Organizers were able to move protests fluidly around the city by posting new locations to the #OWS tag.

Twitter has attracted an enthusiastic audience but not a very diverse one. The service is particularly popular with professional communicators, journalists, marketers, technology professionals and social media enthusiasts. Celebrities have embraced it as a way to connect directly with their fans (for example, more than 1,700 NFL players are on Twitter, according to Tweeting-Athletes.com) and media organizations have adopted it en masse to get bonus visibility for their coverage before it hits the newswires.

Acceptance by such visible people has perhaps made Twitter’s influence disproportionate to its actual numbers. In fact, most Twitter members use the service very little. A 2009 study by Sysomos reported that 85% of Twitter users post less than one update per day, 21% have never posted anything and only 5% of Twitter users produce 75% of the content[3].

However, even that small number can unleash a breathtaking amount of information. Dell Computer, for example, monitors about 25,000 messages per day in social media, most of them from Twitter, says Richard Binhammer of Dell’s social media group. Dave Evans, author of Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day and Vice President of Social Strategy at Social Dynamx sums it up: “When you really stare down the Twitter firehouse and see what’s coming at you, it’s scary.”

Bottom line: While Twitter may be the small compared to Facebook, its vocal and influential member base can create trigger a storm of controversy with amazing speed.

Early-Warning System

Twitter has played an amplification role in nearly every social media attack of the last four years. Journalists monitor trending hash tags to detect stories bubbling up through social media. Many create filtered tweet streams of the companies, government agencies and celebrities they cover. You should do the same for your own company and brands.

Although major attacks rarely begin on Twitter, the service is a good way to identify problems before they get out of hand. One reason airlines watch Twitter so closely, for example, is that frustrated customers take first to their smart phones when delayed on the tarmac or frustrated at the ticket counter.

Twitter was the vehicle director Kevin Smith used in February, 2010 to express outrage about being denied seating on a Southwest Airlines flight because airline personnel claimed the 300-plus-pound Smith wouldn’t fit in a single seat. Smith tweeted his attacks for days and continued the criticism on his podcast. Southwest stuck to its guns and arguably suffered little from the incident, but media attention kicked off a bigger debate about America’s obesity epidemic and the responsibility of businesses to accommodate oversized customers.

Brandjacked!

One unique form of Twitter attack is “brandjacking,” or false accounts that appear to be real. The critic may use an account name that’s substantially similar to a visible person or brand to post satirical or embarrassing messages.

The most notable example of Twitter brandjacking was @BPGlobalPR, which popped up during the 2010 Gulf oil and began skewering BP as the oil company desperately struggled to stop the Deepwater Horizon spill. The account attracted 160,000 followers – more than four times the following of BP’s real North American Twitter account – and generated huge amounts of media coverage. The fact that the author remained anonymous until months after the crisis ended contributed to public curiosity[4].

A rogue employee at publisher Condé Nast created an account that relayed bizarre comments overheard in the elevator. @CondeElevator was quickly shut down, but not before its follower account exceeded 80,000. A similar account about elevator gossip at Goldman Sachs was still active and being followed by more than 260,000 people as of this writing. It’s doubtful the investment banker would want its customers to hear comments like “Retail investors should be circumspect of any offering they’re able to get their hands on. If you can get it, you don’t want it,” but private conversations like that are now public record.

Twitter has cracked down on parody accounts that deliberately misrepresent a brand, but the policy doesn’t apply to individuals, and variations of brand names are still allowed. Celebrities like Hosni Mubarak, Roger Clemens and William Shatner have been portrayed by fake Twitter accounts and brand variations like @ATT_Fake_PR and @FakePewResearch provide satirical and often very funny sendups of their targets. If you’ve been brandjacked you can appeal to Twitter directly, but be prepared to wait. If the satirist is working within Twitter’s guidelines, you have to take a more conventional crisis management approach.

Best Defense

The best defense against a Twitter attack is to listen. Free Twitter clients like TweetDeck and HootSuite do a good job of catching mentions of your brand or products. If the volume of mentions is large, or if you want to filter for sentiment to detect a surgeon negativity, you’ll need a paid listing tool like Radian6, Lithium or Sysomos.[5] Listening is easy and low-risk, but think twice before you let your branded Twitter account wade into a conversation. The precedent you set may come back to haunt you when people begin to expect response. Unless you’re prepared to devote resources to engaging on Twitter every day, the safest course is just to keep your ear to the ground.

We can’t think of a good reason why every company today shouldn’t have a branded Twitter account. Even if you only use it to disseminate press releases, it at least plants a flag in this increasingly critical community. If you do need to engage in a discussion, at least be familiar with the culture and style of the participants. Know who’s influential so that in a crisis you can get messages to people with the broadest reach.

If an attack appears to be forming, look for the following:

• Trending hash tags that include your company name (most Twitter clients display the top trending tags by default; Whatthetrend.com can give you more detail);
• Keywords that indicate high levels of emotion or that refer to serious problems that are unique to your product category;
• Complaints directed specifically at your company (denoted by messages that begin with your company’s Twitter handle)
• Retweets of negative messages by people who are influential in your market

Standard crisis communications rules apply to your response, with some twists that are unique to Twitter:

• Use a consistent Twitter account to avoid confusion. It’s fine to retweet via other accounts that you own or influence.
• Address affected parties, not spectators.
• If the problem affects just a few people, ask them to follow you, then send a direct message with an e-mail address or phone number to resolve the issue out of public view.
• If you know nothing about the issue being discussed, send a tweet stating that you’re looking into the problem. Then tweet follow-up information as you receive it.
• Show empathy, but stick to the facts. Don’t debate hecklers.
• If the problem is systemic (such as an outage or recall), create a Web page or blog post with details about the situation. Post updates there and tweet them under your account(s).
• If there are people with large followings involved, consider tweeting updates directly to them. It’s OK to ask for a retweet.
• For a problem affecting multiple customers, consider creating a unique hash tag for updates.
• When the problem is resolved, tweet that.

Many consumer-focused companies are now using Twitter for front-line customer support. Twitter can be a great tool for such purposes, but be aware of what you’re getting into. When you set the precedent of addressing complaints within hours or minutes, customers will come to expect the same service all the time. Failing to deliver it can actually create a problem.

Consider this case: In 2009, Paul tweeted a complaint about his credit card provider and was pleasantly surprised to get a nearly instantaneous response from a representative of the company. The rep asked Paul to contact him privately via direct message, which Paul did. He never heard from the rep again.

Several months later, Paul was attending a reception at the South by Southwest conference when he ran into the very same credit card rep. The man told him that at the time of their original Twitter exchange, he was the only employee of the company – which is one of the largest financial firms in the world – authorized to communicate on Twitter. Swamped by the thousands of messages customers were tweeting every day, he had simply stopped responding. Do not let that happen to you.

[1] “ShareThis and Starcom MediaVest Group Collaborate to Release First Comprehensive Study on Sharing,” ShareThis press release, June 6, 2011, http://blog.sharethis.com/2011/06/06/sharethis-and-starcom-mediavest-group-collaborate-to-release-first-comprehensive-study-on-sharing (accessed July 18, 2012)

Helping people everywhere answer the nagging question, “What’s that song?,” Shazam today celebrates its 5 billionth tag, meaning that the company’s audio fingerprinting technology has been used more than 5 billion times to help mobile users identify songs and television content.

“It took Shazam 10 years to see its first billion tags, then 10 months to achieve the second billion. And in just a year, we have gone from two billion tags to five billion,” Shazam CEO Andrew Fisher said in a statement.

Pink’s song “Blow Me One Last Kiss” marked the 5 billionth tag, the company said.

Shazam started as a small-time text message service for song identification in the U.K. in 2002. It has since become the definitive music-tagging application, with 225 million mobile users who use the app 10 million times per day. The company’s rise to recognizability — Shazam is often used as a verb — can be attributed, in part, to releasing early on mobile with an application for iPhone in July 2008.

More recently, the London-based company has migrated to bigger screens, enabling its technology to recognize television content and advertisements to provide viewers with enhanced second screen experiences.

The first Shazam-enabled TV commercial aired during Super Bowl XLIV in 2010, and since then the company has worked with brands and media companies, including American Idol and the London Olympics, to make television content taggable.

Photo credit: caribb/Flickr

Filed under: media

This might be an obvious point to many SEOs but Pierre Far from Google clarified that if you have specific landing pages for the same product but targeting different languages/countries, you can change the title tag of the page without concern.

Pierre Far from Google posted this on Google+ saying:

In my last webmaster office hours hangout I got an interesting question: When a webmaster uses rel-alternate-hreflang annotations to mark up a cluster of equivalent pages that target different language-country combinations, can the titles be different for each country?

The answer is yes, use a title that makes sense for your users and your site.

I go more into detail about how to handle these specialized annotations over here.

Pierre Far then gives some more examples of how this applies on Google+.

Forum discussion at Google+.

This might be an obvious point to many SEOs but Pierre Far from Google clarified that if you have specific landing pages for the same product but targeting different languages/countries, you can change the title tag of the page without concern.

Pierre Far from Google posted this on Google+ saying:

In my last webmaster office hours hangout I got an interesting question: When a webmaster uses rel-alternate-hreflang annotations to mark up a cluster of equivalent pages that target different language-country combinations, can the titles be different for each country?

The answer is yes, use a title that makes sense for your users and your site.

I go more into detail about how to handle these specialized annotations over here.

Pierre Far then gives some more examples of how this applies on Google+.

Forum discussion at Google+.

A topic I’ve written about frequently here is QR codes, those square, random-looking black-and-white images that are meaningless to the eye but content-rich to a cameraphone and some barcode-scanning software.

These little barcodes are popping up everywhere these days, and how they’re being used by marketers attracts praise and derision in almost equal measure.

Given my glass-half-full approach to such matters, I love discovering imaginative uses of these powerful little tools.And here’s an interesting one – QR codes as an integral element of a new service describing itself as “the next generation global lost-and-found service.”

Finnish/US startup Belongs launched its service in beta last month. What it does is simple as its launch announcement says:

[...] Order free tag stickers from the Belon.gs website (www.belon.gs), claim them online and stick them to your valuables. When your item gets lost, the finder can scan the tag’s QR code with their smartphone or access the web address on the tag. The owner is automatically notified, and anonymous chat is established between the two parties to arrange the return of the lost item. To further incentivize the returning of valuables, Belongs supports setting rewards for found items through PayPal, and the Belongs technology will streamline the transfer of the reward from owner to finder.

The service is free for individuals – there is a paid service for businesses – so I signed up and ordered some free tag stickers, which arrived in the post from the US a few days ago.

Setting up an item with a tag and sticker is simplicity itself. What you do is use one of the QR code stickers for a valuable (a netbook computer, for instance), go to the Belongs website via your computer or mobile device and describe that item in your Belongs account, and stick the rectangular sticker to the item. The stickers are quite small, about one inch by half an inch (about 25mm x 13mm).

The image at top shows one I did, stuck to a netbook just beneath the sticker with the Windows product information. If you scan the QR code – a unique one for each of your valuables – with your smartphone or go to the web address shown on the sticker, you’ll get a description page about the valuable with information on what to do next.

You can offer a reward if your item does get lost and someone finds it and makes contact with Belongs via the QR code sticker, which I did; setting that up via PayPal is also a simple procedure.

So you have your stuff tagged and stickered and you venture out on your travels with confidence! Belongs says its job is to “encourage good deeds” where basic honesty will prevail when someone finds your valuable that you’ve lost.

They describe such altruism thus:

• Enabling you to tag your items with our high quality personalized tag stickers
• Letting you offer a reward for your item
• Making it possible for finders to receive a reward for the good deed
• Offering full anonymity for everybody
• Offering our services internationally and multilingually
• Making it as easy and trustworthy as possible
• Giving Belon.gs tags for free for the people

I’d like to think the same although I also have a pragmatic view where if you do lose your netbook, iPhone, iPad, camera or whatever it might be, file an insurance claim rather than only wait for a Good Samaritan to get in touch with Belongs.

I’ve been wondering where the monetization for Belongs lies, and clearly that must be primarily in the paid service for businesses that enters into the realm of enterprise asset management. For individuals and small businesses, the free service would be fine (and you can donate to Belongs if you wish to, which I did).

Time will tell how successful Belongs will be (and how honest people are), But I love the idea and imagination behind the use of QR codes in this way.

Are we there yet? Not quite, but a new report shows that more people are tagging their locations on their mobile devices as a way to connect with their friends on social media sites.

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

My Creative Team has a weekly feature highlighting the latest information on creativity. This post selects – in no particular order – the 50 best creativity posts that they have featured this year.

Here’s a sample to get you started with a link to their complete article below.

Creativity Boost #1 - Creativity is one of the key topics we discuss here at THINKing. So, we decided to develop a series of posts that focuses on ways to boost your creativity. Today’s boost: the mindtrip.

Creativity Boost #2 - Today’s boost is about an urban photo adventure to inspire your creativity, and we’d like to see examples of your work. So, let’s use the Flickr tag creativityboost.

Creativity Boost #3 – Today, we’re heading to the dictionary for a creativity boost.

The 5% Creativity Challenge – Most of us don’t have the staff and resources to disappear for weeks on end, but we all have the ability to schedule two, one-hour thinking sessions each week (5% of a 40 hour week).

How To Boost Your Creativity Quotient – Want to be more creative in your thinking and your life? Try these techniques to increase your creativity quotient.

10 Commandments For Creatives - 1. Give space, time and energy to your creativity.

And lots more great tips from My Creative Team.

See on www.my-creativeteam.com

The post THINKing » Top 50 Creativity Posts appeared first on Content Marketing Today.

Because we’re in need of some brighter NFC-related news today, Flomio, a TechStars-backed startup, and makers a platform for building NFC and RFID enabled applications, has closed a seed round of $525,000. The round was led by RMR Capital, and included participation from TechStars, the Cloud Power Fund, Matthew Lally (Augme, Pickflair), and Clint Watson (FASO).

Based in Miami, Florida (“Silicon Beach!”), Flomio has a different approach to NFC, which will be reflected in a website redesign going out next week. In short, it wants to humanize the technology. Originally a side project from founder Richard Grundy, Flomio was recently accepted into TechStars Cloud, the cloud computing-focused incubator which held its first demo day in April.

If you had checked out the Flomio website in the recent past, you may remember that it was touting how its technology could be used to build NFC applications, and it offered a store where you can buy NFC tags and readers. While it will continue to sell tags, stickers and hardware devices, the company’s focus going forward will be on targeting consumers and specific vertical markets (e.g., art) in order to make NFC technology seem more accessible to normal folks…and even fun.

Flomio competes with another NFC startup we’ve previously covered called Tagstand, but has a different point of view about the space, according to company founder Grundy, whose background includes 12 years at Motorola. “We have a different approach,” says Grundy. “We’ve done events, just like they have. We’ve done outdoor deployments just like they have, but what we focus on the most is on this instrumented space model which is all about using peer-to-peer to allow people to engage physical spaces.”

Grundy explains that NFC had been traditionally modeled around passive tags – that is, a combination of a reader and a tag that responds when excited, e.g. by waving your device over the tag or tapping it. But what really inspired him about NFC’s potential was the newer “peer-to-peer” technology, which was introduced in 2009. This allows two readers to talk to each other. The newer technology could enable wild, sci-fi stuff. For example: “if you want your cell phone to talk to your microwave, and download a recipe about how to bake a potato and it just programs the microwave for you,” explains Grundy, “that sort of use case can only be enabled through a peer-to-peer solution. We were enabling developers to put that to action,” he says.

Unfortunately, though, developers weren’t biting. “That’s so far ahead of what people are doing today, we found difficulty gaining traction,” Grundy admits. So now the company is dialing things back a bit…for now. Instead of targeting developers, they’re going to focus on popularizing NFC with users, in a number of different ways. Some of these details are still under wraps for a few more weeks, but the long and short of it is that they’re going to help make NFC fun, not scary, not confusing, and not geeky.

As CXO (that’s “Chief Experience Officer”) Timo Ronan explained to me, “we understand the human side of life, we’re not just engineers.”

“We figure if Touch is the next wave, it conceptually needs to permeate our brand. We want to be real people to real people. We just happen to be pretty smart and stuff,” Ronan says.

OK, then.

Here’s a sneak peek at the new website, to give you an idea:

;

And here’s a concept video of a tag they’re working on:

And just for the heck of it, here’s a video, entirely unrelated to product, of something awesome they filmed the other day: