Google what?

After years of sitting back and letting Facebook (and to a lesser extent, Twitter) dominate the social networking market, Google appears to have finally figured out how to make a social network that people actually want to use. They tried a couple of times with products that were largely incomprehensible (Google Wave) or privacy-invading (Google Buzz) but this time it looks like they have absolutely nailed it.

Google Plus has a number of big advantages over both Facebook and Twitter.

• You can filter your news stream much more easily, so you don’t need to see all the stupid spam updates from people playing Mafia Wars or companies hawking their products.
• You can follow celebrities like in Twitter, but they can send much better updates that aren’t restricted to 140 characters and really good discussions can develop.
• Videoconferencing becomes ridiculously easy, especially compared to Skype. I believe this is its real killer feature!

Will Google Plus lure people away from Facebook with its promise of a less spammy and more useful experience?

If you’re not a member of the Facebook/Twitter generation, you probably don’t care, but you cannot ignore the numbers. The graph above shows the incredible growth of Google+ compared to Facebook and Twitter (who admittedly had to build their user bases from scratch). As of  July 28, 2011, Google Plus already has more than 20 million members - and it hasn’t even been released to the general public yet! 

The last couple of days have seen some unhappy Google+ users, as Google has suspended accounts set up as business pages. Google says that Google+ is only for individuals at the moment and you’re supposed to use your real name when you set up your account (so no parody accounts like you see on Twitter or business pages like on Facebook). Facebook is using Google+’s no-business policy to attract businesses by announcing Facebook for Business, a step-by step guide to using Facebook to market your business. But Google will definitely let businesses use Google+ once this initial testing period is over.

And then it really will be game on!

Right now, I’m loving Google Plus – and if you want an invite, please let me know.

A gravatar is an important part of social media marketing. It’s a portable avatar that follows you around the web, allowing you to brand your social media updates.

Riiight. So what’s an avatar?

An avatar is an online representation of yourself. For most of us, that means something like your Facebook profile picture or your Twitter icon, i.e. it’s the little picture that appears next to your Facebook updates or tweets.

Not surprisingly, most people use a photo of themselves as their avatar. It’s pretty sensible on a network like Facebook or LinkedIn where it’s all about personalities. This way, people know straight away that it’s you (N.B. it also means that Facebook, and whoever they choose to share their data with, knows what you look like too).

On Facebook, many women choose their best wedding day photo (this is usually because they’ve been on a diet and they’re looking their best). Other people choose photos of themselves doing ‘extreme’ sports or otherwise showing off. Others, who lack such exhibitionist tendencies, choose pictures of their children. Or their pets. Or celebrities like Elvis.

Many online forums also allow you to upload an avatar image.

Since the explosion of social media as a business tool, many business people have cottoned on to the fact that they can use their company logo as their avatar, thereby branding all of their social media activity. This gives them extra brand exposure if they’re using social media as a marketing channel.

But what if you want to extend your social media marketing beyond just Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter? What about all the other websites that feature discussions where your target market hangs out, like blogs and news media websites? These websites nearly always allow you to place comments and take part in debates. If you comment without an avatar, you lose your branding power and your personality and become just another name.

That’s why Gravatar was invented. With Gravatar, your avatar appears wherever you place a comment, write a blog post, or update your status – as long as 2 conditions are fulfilled.

1. You must enter your email address.
2. The website must support Gravatar.

Not surprisingly, Gravatar is massively popular. It has millions of users and 29,000 gravatar images get served up every second!

If none of this is making any sense to you, you can go to fruitbowl.co.nz to see how gravatars work.

The people who have set up gravatars have their face or their company logo showing (cool). Anyone who hasn’t set a gravatar just has a blank silhouette instead (boring!).

To find out more, head over to http://www.gravatar.com/ and set up your own gravatar today.

Google doesn't like these

If you’ve got a website and you pay attention to where your visitors comes from, you’ll probably see that search engines like Google provide you with a huge proportion of your traffic.

Google is probably the most useful website in the world, and one of the things that makes it so good is that it’s very efficient at clearing out pages that don’t exist any more. Ask yourself, when was the last time you clicked on a link in Google and got taken to a blank page?

It hardly ever happens, and when it does happen, it’s usually because a website has just changed and Google hasn’t cleared out its data about that website yet.

So what do you do when you’ve got a website with hundreds or thousands of pages … and you want to scrap the whole lot and move to a new system?

Will your old pages disappear forever from Google? The ones you’ve spent years optimising for high Google rankings? Will your hard-earned search engine traffic disappear?

The answer is “probably yes, and you’ll need to wait until Google finds all your new pages” – unless you use the power of the redirect.

Let me explain…

On the web, when you try to connect to a website and load up a page in your browser, the other computer sends your computer a code to tell it whether your request has been succesful or not.

There are quite a few of these status codes, but here are the most common ones:

200 – OK
301 – Moved (permanently)
302 – Moved (temporarily)
401 – Unauthorised
403 – Forbidden
404 – Not found
500 – Internal error

You’re probably most familiar with the 404 error. This is what happens when you try to browse to a non-existent page. You can see examples of them on most good websites.

Check out our 404 error page here: http://www.mogul.co.nz/404

Facebook’s 404 page is here: http://www.facebook.com/404

And here’s Amazon’s 404 page: http://www.amazon.com/404

If Google finds a link to a page that gives this error code, it deletes that page from its index. So your pages that don’t exist will disappear from Google’s search results.

How to ensure a smooth transition to your new site

Often when you create a new site to replace your old one, your pages stay roughly the same and you just want to redirect people (and Google) from the old pages to the new pages.

So what you need to do is use the ‘Moved (Permanently)’ codes (301) to point Google in the direction of your new page if they follow a link to the old page.

A few of our clients have required this on a pretty massive scale, e.g. Kennedy Park Top 10 Holiday Resort and EIT.

There are two ways you can do set up redirects:

1. If your pages have simply changed their filetype (e.g. page.html to page.php), you can set up a rule to redirect any page ending in .html to its equivalent page ending in .php.
2. If the structure of the site has changed significantly, you’ll need to do it the hard way: i.e. set individual redirects for every page you want to be redirected. A good way to do this is to list all the old pages in the first column of an Excel spreadsheet and then in the column next to it, put the page that you want each one redirected to.

Then someone (like us) who knows their way around a web server will be able to set up these redirects and when you switch the site over from the old one to the new one, Google won’t dump all of those old pages. They will be replaced in the Google index by the new pages. They might move up or down in the rankings, but at least they’ll be in there.

The added benefit of this is that your internal links will still work and links to your content from other sites will still work too.

Simple!

The Playstation security breach has been a massive embarrassment to Sony. It looks like the personal data of over 20 million people has been stolen, along with another 80 million who may have had their credit card details leaked. Lawsuits are sure to follow and Sony’s reputation has probably suffered irreparable damage.

If you’re taking payments online, the moral of the story here is “Don’t EVER store your customers’ credit card details on your own system”. Outsource it to someone with better security than you, like a bank.

It also raises a very unsettling question -

“What if Facebook got hacked in the same way tomorrow?”

Or today. Facebook users are being told to change their passwords because 100,000 Facebook applications have accidentally been leaking private data for years. Dodgy!

Facebook has over 600 million users, so imagine if hackers gained access to everything anyone has ever put on Facebook. All the data about your friendships, ‘likes’, relationship status, etc. Not good.

Come to think of it, the owners of Facebook have already got access to all of that stuff…. ? Let’s hope they don’t abuse our trust.

And last but not least, Microsoft have just bought Skype, the free Internet phone business, for US$8 billion. That is a lot of cash (you could completely rebuild Christchurch with it). Let’s hope they don’t ruin Skype. We love Skype.

Cheers,
Matt

How to write for the web – the easy way

On the web, you are what you publish. Your written content is often the most important thing a potential client has to judge your company.

We know that content is king and you need to be publishing new content regularly, otherwise you will sink down the Google rankings and your competitors with their fresh content will rise above you.

It’s never been easier to create your own content online. Nearly all of our clients have a content-managed website or a blog, and a large number have Facebook pages too, but most people get very nervous about publishing content online because they don’t know the ‘rules’.

So how do you write content that…

• people want to read?
• people want to share with their friends?
• makes people take action?
• is easy to find in search engines?

Read on and I’ll give you some advice we’ve learned over the last ten years.

Hastings-Napier

TRACTA-MOGUL COLLABORATION

For those of you who think that amalgamation is a pipe dream, we’re showing that Hastings and Napier can work together – on digital marketing projects anyway.

We’re really pleased to be working closely with Andy and the Tracta team over in Napier.

• We’re rethinking NZCU’s approach to digital marketing.
• We’re working with The Institute of Accredited Business Consultants NZ to strengthen their online presence.
• And there are other exciting projects and campaigns we’re collaborating on that we hope to share with you next month.

Current Mogul Projects

On the go at the moment…

We’re flat out at the moment with a wide range of work, helping a wide range of clients with some cool strategic initiatives.

• We’re really enjoying working with EIT using digital to encourage more potential students to come along to their Info Day.
• And we’re are delighted to be working with Hawke’s Bay Tourism and Hastings District Council to develop their digital marketing strategies, and were fortunate to be able to attend a strategy workshop this week with a number of Hawke’s Bay’s leading digital people, as well as David Simmons, Air New Zealand’s General Manager Online & Leisure, and Pat Verryt, Web Manager at newzealand.com.
• We are doing more work for the The New Zealand Human Rights Commission, RDCL, Grieve Diamond Jeweller, Homeworx and Wineworks and we welcome GrowHR, the Hawke’s Bay Maori Business Network, Oil Imports, Wellies.co.nz, Chris Patterson and Taradale High School to the Mogul stable.
• Working from our office here in Hawke’s Bay doesn’t stop us from doing work out of region. We’re currently doing work for 3 customers in Auckland, one in Christchurch, one in Wellington, one in Dunedin, one in Canada – and one in London!
• We’re designing the website for the New Zealand Gala Fundraiser. This is an exclusive black-tie event held at the Savoy Hotel in London on July 5. Neil Finn will play a private concert, Sean Fitzpatrick and Zinzan Brooke are going to be waiting table, and it’s hoped the event will raise 100,000 pounds for earthquake relief in Christcurch.

Words of wisdom

Really smart thinking

Tell me, and I will forget.
Show me, and I may remember.
Involve me, and I will understand.
- Confucius, 450 B.C.

Until next time, keep your eyes firmly on the data!

The Team at Mogul

You probably know from experience that when you look at an email, the name and subject line play a huge part in whether or not it you decide to open it.

When you look at the messages in your inbox, or a new notification flashes up, the first thing you see is who sent it. Then you read the subject line and quickly form an opinion about whether it’s spam or a legitimate email.

Do you want it to be from you personally, or from your company?

Sorry – there are no shortcuts here. The answer is… it depends – and you need to test it. Of course, if you’re using good email marketing software, A-B split testing is easy (and fun).

(Actually, here’s a quick bit of advice… Don’t EVER put your name or subject line in ALL CAPS. It’s a dead giveaway for spam).

Example: Michael Carden from performance assessment software company Sonar6, told us at Accelerate 2011 that they test their email marketing extremely rigorously and have found that they have achieved the highest open rate by using the sender name ‘Michael J. Carden’. He’s not sure why ‘Michael J. Carden’ achieves the highest open rate, but it does. Bear in mind that Sonar6′s audience is predominantly American, and maybe Americans tend to see the middle initial as conferring authority on a person -or maybe they associate it with Michael J. Fox. Who knows?

Michael J. Carden from Sonar6

Michael J. Fox from 'The Future'

But it can also be insanely frustrating, hard work and if you want to do it well, you need to really put your back into it.

If you are interested in getting into digital marketing, here’s a quick rundown of the general areas of expertise within a digital marketing company…

Sales and marketing
Nothing new here. Selling stuff is still the cornerstone of business (no customers = no business). Find a prospective customer, ask them and understand their needs, and provide the right solutions for them. Although we work mostly online, sales in this field is still very much about building trust and relationships on a personal level.

Strategy
Once you acquire a new customer, you need to think about all the possible ways you can help them to move towards their goal. Don’t just suggest a website with ‘Home’, ‘About us’, ‘Contact us’ and a Facebook page. You’re not at school now. Those things are a tiny subset of an integrated digital marketing strategy.

Imagine you’re in a helicopter. The commander of an army needs to see the whole battlefield, including how the enemy is organised, what the weather is doing, and what the mood of the troops is. Ask questions, read news and books about your customer’s industry. The more you understand their business, their customers, their competitors, and the trends in their industry, the better the results will be.

Web design
If you decide to make a website for someone, it has to look good and be easy to understand and use. That’s a lot more than being a whiz on Photoshop and Dreamweaver. A website is a marketing tool and the design needs to reflect where ‘the money’ is for the customer. You need to know HTML. And code it by hand. And you need to be schooled up in usability, colour theory, and typography. Throw in some client-side scripting, preferably a JavaScript library or two, Flash, and you’re starting to look like a useful web designer.

Web development
The grunt work. Designers get the glory, developers are expected to make stuff work. Relational databases, web servers and server-side scripting make the World Wide Web go round. We use PHP and mySQL, but other skills can include Ruby on Rails, Python, Perl, and the old Microsoft .NET/SQL Server approach. The more languages the better, and we like to see a track record of projects. And contributions to open-source projects are even better. If you don’t know what open-source is, leave the room now.

Content creation
All of this stuff is meaningless if there is nothing interesting for the customer to look at or read about. People come to a website to find answers to questions, find out about great deals, or be entertained. Can you give them great information that makes them want to come back, share it with their friends, or pick up the phone and contact you? If not, then your online presence is boring. People don’t like boring, especially on the Internet, where the ‘Back’ button and ‘Next’ button are always a quick click away. Don’t give them a reason to click on it.

Account management
Customers need to be looked after, especially in an industry that changes as quickly as ours. Websites date quickly and new communication channels come and go, so it’s really important to keep your customers abreast of the latest developments. It’s more important to give them the best advice based on the latest world research. If you’re an account manager, you need to be your customer’s eyes and ears. If you’re not giving them ideas and advice, someone else might be… ouch.

Project management
Managing a web project can be like nailing jelly to a wall. If you can hold simultaneous conversations with people as diverse as non-techy customers, eccentric creatives, Spock-like programmers, while juggling 10 balls and being the master of the whiteboard, you might enjoy this role. And if you don’t like lists, forget about it…

Training
Digital platforms are getting really easy to use these days, but users still need to be trained in how to use them. This can include everyday things like how to resize and compress photos for the web, to more intricate things like the most appropriate way to deal with negative feedback on social networks. If you don’t train users well, they will get frustrated and your support people will cop it.

Support
The least glamorous but most valuable members of the team. If something’s broken or has been hacked, you need to fix it. And fast. Murphy’s Law stipulates that when something goes wrong, it’s most likely to be in the weekend or while you’re on holiday in Fiji. Too bad. Fix it.

Business development
This is about extending your reach through partnerships and alliances with other companies and organisations. An entrepreneurial approach is key here. You need to think about how your products or services complement someone else’s so everybody wins. In our business, we generally look to work with advertising and marketing agencies who need to provide their clients with digital marketing expertise. Good business development makes it easier for your salespeople to find new clients.

If you think you’re got the skills (and especially the character) to fill one or more of these roles, we’re keen to hear from you.

Most website owners have experienced it – you go to have a look at your site and it’s just a blank screen. Maybe it’s got an error message on it, or maybe there’s a big sign saying ‘Warning – infected with malware!’. Everyone else’s websites are still running OK, so it’s something wrong with yours.

What’s causing it and what can you do?

The most common causes are…

• your domain name has expired
• your site has exceeded its monthly bandwidth allowance
• your web hosting company is having an issue, such as downtime for maintenance, or one of their servers has crashed and needs to be restarted.
• someone working on the site has accidentally deleted an important file or made an error in the code
• your website has been compromised by malware, so your ISP or Google is blocking it

What to do about it:

First of all, don’t panic. We’ve seen this happen hundreds of times – and we’ve never lost a website.
Contact your IT expert, web developer, domain name provider, or hosting company to find out what’s happened and what’s causing it.
Most of the time, this happens because your domain name has expired or you have exceeded your bandwidth for the month.These are easy fixes.

Domain name expired
To check your domain name expiry date, just go to a site like Free Parking and look up your domain name’s WHOIS information. It will show you the expiry date for the domain.

Bandwidth exceeded
To check whether your bandwidth (data traffic to and from the website) has been exceeded, either log in to your hosting control panel or ring your hosting provider. If you’ve gone over your allowance for the month, you might need to pay to go up to a bigger plan.

If the domain name is OK and the bandwidth is OK, then maybe your web hosting company is having an issue. This could be scheduled maintenance, or maybe one of their servers has crashed and they have had to restart it. This stuff happens all the time, even with the most reliable providers. Remember that 99.9% uptime means that, in the course of a month, that’s about 45 minutes of downtime. If your web host has a Twitter account, you should check it to see if there are any reports of downtime or issues. Twitter is great for this because, even if your web host disappears completely, their Twitter cccount will still be active. I’ve seen a situation where all of a web host’s websites went down, including their own site, and their phones (!!)

Human error
Your website might have disappeared due to human error, i.e. someone (maybe you – or someone editing the files on the site) has put a mistake in their code or accidentally deleted an important file. This is potentially very bad, because web servers don’t usually have an ‘Undo’ button. Hopefully your web hosting company or developers will be making regular backups of the sites they host (make sure you know how your backups are being managed).

Hacker attack
And now, the last and most damaging reason for a site disappearing – the hacker attack. We’ve seen that it’s becoming increasingly common for hackers to gain access to websites through older versions of content management systems, especially if the site has a poorly secured contact form, or login form. In this case, Google usually spots an infected site very quickly and blocks access to it. Another telltale sign is that your browser suddenly takes you to what looks like an anti-virus site and starts downloading files or running some sort of scan of your computer. This is all part of the scam.
If you see this happen, unplug your computer from the Internet immediately and run a virus scan on it. Contact your web hosting company or your web developers IMMEDIATELY. They should be able to see the telltale code that has been injected into your website by the evildoers. Hopefully if they have a backup plan, they will be able to roll the site back to a clean version, and update the software to stop the infection happening again.

Conclusion – pay constant attention
So… it’s really important that you pay constant attention to your website. This means

• making sure your domain names are up-to-date
• keeping an eye on your bandwidth to ensure you’re not exceeding the limit of your plan
• following your web host’s Twitter feed
• having a backup plan in place, or paying someone to make regular backups for you
• keeping your content management system up-to-date
• keeping your own computer’s anti-virus up-to-date

It’s a big bad world out there, but with these tips, you should be 99.99% OK.

We know that content is king and you need to be publishing new content regularly, otherwise you will sink down the Google rankings and your competitors with their fresh content will rise above you.

It’s never been easier to create your own content online. Nearly all of our clients have a content-managed website or a blog, and a large number have Facebook pages too, but most people get very nervous about publishing content online because they don’t know the ‘rules’.

So how do you write content that…

• people want to read?
• people want to share with their friends?
• makes people take action?
• is easy to find in search engines?

Read on and I’ll give you some advice we’ve learned over the last ten years.

You need to tailor your content to your audience and the action you want your reader to take, but some things apply to any type of content you publish.

• You should always have social media sharing buttons. These increase your readership by making it really easy for your readers to share your article with their friends. The most common and effective buttons are:
  • Like this on Facebook
  • Share this on Facebook
  • Tweet this
• Use short paragraphs – no-one likes huge blocks of text
• Make use of graphics – but avoid stock photos if possible. They always look contrived.
• Narrow columns are easier to scan – just like a newspaper or magazine
• Bullet points
• Numbered lists
• The headline is vital, so make it good. As David Ogilvy said “On average, five times as many people read the headlines as read the body copy. It follows that unless your headline sells your product, you have wasted 80 per cent of your money.” People seem to like headlines like ’7 social media tips I learned from Elvis’
• Always finish the article with a call to action, e.g. Buy now , sign up here, fill in your details, place a comment.

If the purpose of the article is to sell something:

• Use questions just like you would if you were selling to the reader in person.
• Demonstrate the benefits of your product or service using facts and figures. You will improve your results by 60% if you do this (sorry, I just made that up, but you see what I mean).
• Make sure you include testimonials from satisfied users, a money-back guarantee, and if possible, the offer of a free trial.
• Don’t bore the reader. Don’t give them a reason to click the ‘Back’ button.
• Don’t distract the reader with links to other websites (they might not come back!).
• Give the reader a clear call to action: e.g. “Buy now” or “Start your free trial”.

If the purpose of the article is to inform

• think of the article as answering a specific question, and stick to answering that question
• use sub-headings to break up your article
• provide links to further reading
• at the end of the article, use a poll that asks ‘Did you find this article helpful? Yes or no’

If the purpose of the article is to entertain

• make it entertaining! If you’re lucky it might go viral on the social networks (yeah right!)

And lastly, a word about search engines. You might think that you can fool Google and leapfrog your competitors in the rankings by stuffing your site full of keywords. But wait a minute… Do you really think that you can pull the wool over the eyes of a company worth US$200 billion that makes its living from delivering accurate search engine results? Dream on…

Just sprinkle keywords throughout the article like you normally would. and make sure the headline of the article is in the HTML title of the page, and then go out and tell the world about it. The more people that link to the article, the more Google will like it.

Simple.

We’re a digital marketing and web development business, so we’re always looking for faster broadband speeds. A high-speed connection helps us do our work more easily and quickly, and that translates into better, faster, and more cost-effective projects for our clients. Also, faster broadband makes it easier for us to use services like Skype so when we have free Skype phone calls with our clients, the call quality is higher as a result.

In this job, it’s also really important that you’re using the best software, so we need to make sure that we constantly updating Windows, Office, graphics programs like Photoshop and inDesign, and the latest operating system updates for iPhone and iPad (and of course iTunes). Now that high-speed broadband is becoming the norm overseas, it seems that software applications are getting bigger and bigger. It’s not unheard of to be required to download 500MB files. Even a couple of years ago, this would have been absurd, but with VDSL, it’s no big deal at all. Whereas a couple of years we would need to order a CD if we wanted to buy the latest version of Photoshop, which could take ages to arrive, now with VDSL we just download the software and we’ve got it within half an hour.

If we want make a backups of one of our clients’ websites, it’s really easy to download it straight onto our server. In the past, downloading a site like EIT’s new website, which is 400MB, would have taken all day and slowed everything down for everyone else, but now it’s no problem at all. It only takes half an hour at the very most now.

Another great thing about VDSL is that it allows you to work in the cloud much more easily, but still use the best desktop apps like Outlook to do it. For example, you can sync your Google Mail with Outlook. We keep every email we’ve ever sent or received, and that starts to get pretty massive after a few years. I’ve got 2 gigabytes of email in my Google Mail account. When you first run Google Apps Sync for Outlook, it can take forever just for it to download the first gigabyte of mail into your Outlook so you can start using it. But with VDSL, it only takes a short time before you’re good to go. And if you want to send big files around, applications like Dropbox become very useful indeed.

If you’re thinking about using VDSL, you should definitely do it. Even if you’re not as reliant on the Internet as we are at Mogul – if you’re using email, file sharing, Skype, and cloud services, you would be crazy not to be using the fastest speeds you can get your hands on. It definitely puts you at an advantage over your competitors.

So talk to the team at Airnet today.