Facebook is today launching Places Deals in the UK and Europe, I posted on Facebook Deals in early November launching the the USA with Gap and Starbucks, amongst others. Well, as of this week it's in the UK. Facebook users will be able to get discounts and targeted deals in shops and eateries by checking in on Facebook Places using their smartphone. European partners include Starbucks, Yo Sushi, O2, Argos, Debenhams, and Alton Towers. All making offers based on Check-Ins. To remind you, the concept is simple enough "€“ users look for the yellow icon when they Check In using Places. You then click on the deal to claim it, and simply show it to the cashier to cash in. Deals that a user claims will also be shared on your Facebook News Feed, which will allow your friends to reap the same benefits should they want to.…

How organisations have to change mindsets to reap the benefits of social media marketing

"If you approach social media with the hope that you can either discipline or control it then you really shouldn"€™t approach social media at all. It"€™s wildfire. You need enough confidence in your brand and in what you do to be resilient to the slings and arrows of online users "€“ they won"€™t like everything" This quote from Matt Thompson, the group marketing directer at Trader Media Group really resonated with me since I've listened to so many frustrated marketers who know the potential of social media, but the HiPPOs in the organisation or corporate communications don't have the confidence in their brand and don't seem to realise the potential missed. Those who seek to minimise the potential reputational damage from social media by excluding other social media activity don't seem to realise: The importance of social channels - these are…

How do Fans really interact with Facebook and how can/should you interact with them

You already know that, along with everything else on your plate, you need to develop Facebook as a valuable marketing tool in some shape or form, so how will you do it? There are a number of ways to leverage Facebook as marketing technique and you need to have 'a reason'"€¦ A place to interact with your consumers and potential consumers - brand building in its crudest sense A means to manage customer interactions and feedback A source of relevant traffic to your commercial web site A means to build a list of potential consumers interested in permission-based communications In terms of applying those goals you need a fan page, and a Facebook marketing plan.

The challenge

Though your window is your Facebook Fan page 96% will come not come back to it after first 'Liking' your brand, in fact Brand Glue estimate…
As part of my series of blog posts on link building techniques I have decided to look at how we can use tools and build a process to analyse a competitors backlink profile to help create a list of target sites for you to approach. After all, if your competitor can be on that website then why can't you?! If you're new to the term "backlink" it's simply a link from another site to yours which Google may count to boost your ranking if it considers it's a quality link. The key to this process is getting the appropriate data about yours & your top 5 / 10 competitors (in search) back links so you can filter & prioritse the actions off the back of it. Both you and your competitors are going to have backlinks which do very little for your website…

An introduction to user testing reviewing 3 options from Skoda to Porsche to Rolls-Royce?

No matter whether you work for your yourself, within a start-up business with 1 member of staff or you work at a multi-national blue-chip corporation, understanding your customers is one of the key ingredients to making your business and proposition work. From lead generation and e-commerce websites to web applications and intranets, user testing is one of the most powerful, insightful and actionable techniques you can use. You move beyond thinking of your website/app/intranet from your own perspective to seeing how people who aren"€™t involved in your business browse, experience and interact with it. From my experience user testing should very much be on the agenda for all businesses, for a number of reasons explained within this article. Critically, where user testing used to be considered an expensive, luxury service for only big businesses, new tools and techniques have…
A new infographic (we do love them at Smart Insights!) to have in mind for your planning this year. I think that the Facebook registration volumes in 2010 compared to total Facebook registrations is a real eye-opener, as is the 35 hours of video being uploaded to YouTube every minute! Like you needed another reason to ensure that social and video are two major considerations for your marketing this year ;-) [caption id="attachment_3935" align="alignright" width="600" caption="Infographic from Focus.com"][/caption]…
Importance: [rating=5] Our commentary: Here we're alerting you to an exciting new information-sharing and learning technology. It's very early days for the service - it's in a closed alpha and launched around November 2010. But it's already getting rave reviews and satisfaction ratings from users and I found it interesting to take a look. So what is Qwiki? Qwiki describes its technology capability as "to evaluate and enrich any static text "€“ transforming it into a beautiful, interactive experience with zero human effort "€“ it can be applied to virtually any corpus of information. Here's an example for an individual: TEDx SF 2010 - Juan Enriquez from Qwiki on Vimeo. View more examples of Qwiki. For me, Qwiki looks to be a great visual way of learning - think of it as a combination of Wikipedia or Google Knol with a TV documentary. The voiceover is very futuristic - like from a Sci-fi…
The question in question is "Tell us what you think!". Surveying customers has always been popular, but the new opportunities for gaining feedback from customers is one of the most exciting aspects of engaging customers through digital channels for me. It's also an underrated aspect of web analytics. So when I was reviewing the 2011 cScape engagement report, the section on adoption of technology for product development and innovation caught my eye. Feedback through analytics or surveys about customers"€™ online experience, whether it"€™s website, mobile, email or social is always useful to improve the way we design experiences. But what interests me most are the opportunities for learning more about how we can improve our brand offering to customers by innovating core or value-added products or services. The classic example of this is the Dell Ideastorm approach where customers suggest product innovations and then other customers rate or comment on these. Smart! Particularly…
This report contains useful perspectives from a range of engagement specialists which are useful to review. There are also statistics from over 1,000 client and agency side respondents. Here are the main results from the research: Email newsletters (72%), presence on social networks (48%) and micro-blogging (46%) are the tactics most likely to result in a tangible improvement to companies"€Ÿ online customer engagement. Significantly more companies than last year are planning to increase investment in usergenerated content (+13%), on-site branded communities/forums (+9%) and rich on-page interactive experiences (+8%). The vast majority of company respondents (73%) are planning to invest in the mobile channel in 2011. This compares to 60% who said they planned mobile investment at the same stage a year ago. The vast majority of company respondents (73%) are planning to invest in the mobile channel in 2011. This compares to 60% who said they planned investment at the same stage last year. Less…
We know that email subscribers, and now social media followers, are so valuable since they've given permission to receive communications. The problem is that vanilla flavoured, promotional messaging en masse will fail - the different audiences in those channels most likely have different information needs. I read an interesting case study that's similar to another project I have been working on. It's a US business effectively combining email and social tactics creating 120% increases in traffic - and to the right web pages. I thought I'd share the summary here. The good news - this case study is not a mega brand like Starbucks or Oreo, so it's a bit more real, the company is a much smaller cookware and cake decorating business called Wilton, an established business of 80 years, one that has grown adept at push marketing via email . The business had two realisations (I hope more companies have…