Blog

May 2011

Should you be blogging?

BloggingA lot of people struggle to find the time to write blogs, but could it help your business if you do?

These days blogs are not something you can afford to ignore; it’s free advertising for your business, so why would you let that pass you by?

Blogs can be used to sell your products and services, or for you to share your views on topical subjects.

Topical blogs are a great conversation starter and you are likely to receive a lot of exposure as a result of covering a wide variety of interests. Even though you are not directly selling your services, people are still visiting your website and are likely to view other pages.

How should you write your blogs?

Always try to keep your blogs simple and to a suitable length. The majority of people will be put off by long and overcomplicated text, so just remember the audience you are writing for.

Search ranking

Many people are under the impression that you need to pay to receive hits; this is not true. Organic SEO has proved time and time again that it works. This is especially true for smaller businesses that don’t have the money to compete against multi-million pound corporations.

Companies are conscious of their search ranking, so what better way to make sure you stay up there than frequently uploading fresh content. The addition of content on a regular basis can help you maintain a high placement on the major search engines as your site will be crawled more, leading to the most recent content being picked up more often.

If you blog, you should be looking to be receiving some inbound links to your site; this is good for your SEO as it sends positive signals to the search engines about your websites importance.

Any optimisation is good optimisation, and images are no exception. Although it may seem like a small thing, re-naming any pictures with your keywords will also help.

Blogs are a great and FREE way to drive people to your website.

Social

You can’t speak about the marketing and advertising world without mentioning social networking, and blogs give you a great platform to connect with people.

Social networking is all about communicating and sharing. Posting your blogs on sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn allows people to leave comments and involve themselves in discussions. This is also one of the best ways to increase traffic to your website.

The great thing is that no matter what type of blog you go for, there’s always an audience. A lot of users aim their more general blogs to the Facebook and Twitter crowd, while business blogs go down well on LinkedIn.

Will blogs improve your profit?

As everyone knows, hits don’t equal sales. Blogs aren’t a guarantee to improve profit, but how will you know if you don’t try? If you have the product or service they want, they’ll buy it. If not, they may continue to read you blog and pass the link on to a friend, who in-turn may pass it on to someone else.

It’s true you have to invest time and effort in to blogs, but if it drives extra traffic to your site isn’t it worth it?

Are UK retailers not responsive enough on social networking sites?

facebook twitter iconsEconsultancy conducted a survey last month looking in to the behaviours of companies on social networking sites.

Key sites such as Facebook and Twitter were measured to show how companies responded to questions and comments from customers.

Twitter

  • Statistics show that 20 of the top 25 retailers had an account on Twitter, with a reported average of 69,000 followers.
  • Despite the researchers actively engaging with the brand and asking questions, none of the retailers followed them back. This means customers can’t get in touch to provide details to help get their problem sorted out, or to move the discussion to another channel.
  • Only 25% of retailers with a Twitter account responded to a question directed at them.
    While 20% responded to negative comments which had been directed at them, compared with 10% that replied to positive ones.
  • For those that replied the average response time was 94 minutes, which isn’t bad. By comparison email response times were 10 hours on average, which says a lot about the quality of email service.

Facebook

  • Fewer (72%) of the 25 retailers had a Facebook page, but the average number of fans was higher, at 258,000.
  • Retailers responded to questions more promptly on Facebook, an average response time of 78 minutes, while 88% gave a helpful answer.
  • When it came to responding to positive or negative comments, the figures were different. Just 17% responded to a positive comment on their wall, taking an average of 112 minutes to respond. Just 11% of brands responded to a negative comment left on the wall.

 

So, why don’t companies feel the need to engage with customers via social sites?

If businesses aren’t generating sales out of social networking, they are less likely to take valuable time out of their day to comment.

Is that the right way to think though? Social networking isn’t something that you should think of purely for sales; it’s about maintaining relationships with your customers.

Sometimes it’s worth outsourcing the service; this way you are not ignoring customers, but your also not using up valuable internal resources.

The report also revealed that only 52% of retailers have a blog on their website and 12% a YouTube channel.

Companies are using social networking as a way to bombard people with marketing, when in reality it should be looked at as free advertising. Millions of people around the world use these services and a simple comment can help provide a positive image for your company; for this to happen though, communications must be mutual.

Gowalla and bmibaby combine to offer loyalty programme

bmibaby logoBudget airline bmibaby has joined forces with location-based network Gowalla to reward customers through a loyalty programme.

Check-in locations have been created at 34 destination airports and five of their main airports including Manchester Airport, Birmingham Airport, Cardiff Airport, East Midlands Airport and Belfast City Airport.

The idea is for customers to check-in before and after their bmibaby flight, and in return they will be entered in to a prize draw with winners being announced each month.

The company are looking to expand the service even more for their most loyal customers. This would include offering gold, silver and bronze pin rewards, with each pin unlocking a new reward.

Julian Carr, bmibaby Managing Director, had the following to say:

”We are pleased to be working with Gowalla on this customer reward scheme. At bmibaby we embrace new social media initiatives. We believe this is a fun way in which we can offer our customers something extra.”

Could this could be the tool to expand Gowalla’s fanbase as it aims to compete with Foursquare?

PlayStation Network Attack

PS logoOn Saturday 16th April, Sony’s servers were illegally accessed, leaving 77 million customer accounts vulnerable. An old database of credit card data was accessed along with current personal user information including, login data, passwords, emails and home addresses, with the only data encrypted being the credit card data.

Once Sony became aware of the breach on the 20th, they shut down services immediately and informed developers that the site was down due to ‘emergency maintenance’. After users started to complain that they couldn’t access the service, a message was sent out explaining that they were looking in to the problem but didn’t have a timescale.

Although Sony had told users it was investigating the cause of the outage, it wasn’t until the 22nd that they were told the problem was caused by an external attack on the system.

On April 26th, Sony sent an email to its users asking them to check bills and remain vigilant as they continued to look in to the issue, but stated that there was no evidence that any information had been taken.

The company announced on the 30th that they would gradually begin to restore services to its users, but this statement was soon withdrawn as just two days later Sony shut down their servers for a second time, releasing the following:

“In the course of our investigation into the intrusion into our systems we have discovered an issue that warrants enough concern for us to take the service down effective immediately”.

Today the company sent out a mass email to 24.6 million online users stating that their data was compromised on 16th April.