Being in the industry – in fact growing up in today’s world of Smartphone’s and tablets, it’s not hard to realise that the Internet, and more specifically, social interaction influences us heavily in everyday life.

From tweeting on the fly, to checking-in at fascinating venues around the world, to liking a video or image that has gone viral, social interaction in here to stay in a big way, and is only get stronger and stronger.  If you are a business owner you want to, and really should, squeeze every opportunity and jump on the social bandwagon.

Here at AsOne, a day doesn’t go by when we’re not discussing social media and integration. In fact earlier on this year we wrote a piece on five reasons to use social media for business, it’s benefits and the many doors it can potentially open in helping market your company.

But a question that rears its head now and then is “Does social interaction help improve page rank to my website?” – i.e. does it help my website climb up the Google ladder.

Yes and No. Confused?

The No 

Without engrossing you too much in the jargon that is SEO and losing you at this point, if you have a website that receives incoming links from other reputable websites, it influences the page-rank (PR) of your website.  Links via social networks like twitter or Facebook do not, because it is automatically tagged up as a no follow (rel=”nofollow”) link. This is to inevitably stop spamdexing.

The Yes

However, observers in the SEO field believe there is a direct correlation between Google ranking your website and the amount of people that communicate on social networks.  Google scans and indexes billions of pages across the Internet, notices trend and will appropriately reward websites that are being mentioned on social networks.

With surrounding content, if people want to appropriately link back to your website via blogs, forums and social networks, Google will see that as being genuine and think – “…well, exampledomain.co.uk is mentioned a lot here, here and here so lets increase their page rank…”

At AsOne, our approach is to set-up a Facebook/twitter account no matter what – something we do very well as part of our Innovation Club. The reason is not primarily for SEO purposes, but to create a community to help interact with your customers and fans which will inevitably divert traffic to your website – which is what you want.

As of Sunday 27th May 2012 The ICO (Information Commissioner’s Office, UK) have enacted a EU Mandate nicknamed “Cookie Law”. You can find out more on their website from their recent blog post with updated guidance; http://www.ico.gov.uk/news/blog/2012/updated-ico-advice-guidance-e-privacy-directive-eu-cookie-law.aspx

There has been a lot of confusion over what methods of compliance are in fact compliant and the recent update goes some why to clearing it up. Look around at your favourite sites and you will see various attempts at compliance as well as some sites doing nothing simply waiting to see what happens.

AsOne have created our own version of a ‘working to compliance’ solution which we are offering to all our customers (and anybody else who wants to use it) We are making our solution available free of charge to those who are comfortable editing their own HTML code and for a small fee we will implement the solution on your site for you.

On sites with less than 25 pages we have a flat fee of £50+VAT, for larger sites please contact AsOne Design for a quotation.

Since there is no single definitive solution, AsOne’s solution (cookie compliance demo on our own website) is attempting to fulfil the ‘making steps’ towards compliance part of the rules. As more clarity regarding cookie compliance and the cookie law emerges we will update the solution and as always will remain proactive.

If you have any concerns or would like to have the cookie compliance code added to your website please contact us on 0161 3689100 or email here@asone.co.uk. If you are comfortable and confident crafting code you can copy our carefully created cookie compliance creation below. Add it just before the close head tag and requires jQuery.

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.asone.co.uk/_cookie/asonecookiebar.js"></script>
<link href="http://www.asone.co.uk/_cookie/asonecookiebar.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />

It seems all of the news stories have a photo of a cookie so heres a video of a Junior AsOne’er in a Gingerbread costume …

Please note (some legal stuff): If you use our code yourself AsOne will accept no liability for any problems, issues, damages, claims you encounter. Code is supplied as-is and no warranties or guarantees are made as to its function, compliance or stability. In other words use at your own risk. Of course, if we add the code for you (it’s only £50+VAT) we will make sure the code and your site is working and is making reasonable steps towards cookie law compliance. As with all legal issues AsOne always recommend you seek advice from a professional legal practitioner and ensure your privacy policy and website terms and conditions are correct.

At the back-end of last month, Google announced it’s latest update - Google Penguin. 

Google Penguin is the latest algorithm (mathematical code that is used in helping Google rank websites) that specialises in targeting artificial link acquisition - i.e. link spam.

Without getting too technical, link spam manipulates link-based ranking algorithms, giving websites higher rankings the more highly ranked websites link to it.  Link spam, or spamdexing, can be found numerous ways from spamming in blogs, where ‘spammers’ place a desired keyword in their hyperlinked text that refers back to their website, to link farming - a community of webpages referencing each other, falsely giving the impression that they are important.

So, what have Penguin done?

It’s hard to know for certain, since Google doesn’t reveal details. But a few things are clear:

• Penguin actively penalises sites that Google believes engaged in link spam. This is new. Until now, Google generally took away ill-gotten link authority and penalised sites that were selling links.
• Penalised sites generally plunge out of the top ten for their own brand names, as well as any other meaningful terms.
• Links that are part of artificial link networks will trigger a penalty.
• If a huge percentage of your links use the same, commodity-related anchor text, you’re in trouble. So, if you sell toilet paper, and 75% of the links pointing at your site have the link text ‘toilet paper’, Google will get suspicious. 
• If a huge percentage of your links come from blog comments, forums or site footers (all common places for spammy links), again, Google gets suspicious.
• Google sent out warnings to some, but not all, Penguin-targeted sites.

Our advice

If you know you’ve got a lot of link spam pointing at your site, clean it up and fix them a little bit at a time. Make sure you get reputable high-quality links while almost removing the spammy ones. 

Don’t panic and still pay attention to SEO best practices: Visibility, authority, relevance. Make sure all three are in good shape.

(Source: portent.com)

I am not sure if it was the over load on cakes or the volume of questions that pushed the event beyond 5PM but despite running over a little on our agenda, yesterdays seminar was a sucess. We trust our members found the event informative and useful, providing practical guidance on further developing their websites and marketing.

For those Innovation Club Members who were unable to attend on this occasion, we look forward to seeing you at the next event. Remember, your monthly and quarterly reports provide you with detailed ways to improve your ranking, marketing and conversions. These reports are specific to your website and your business therefore the techniques and actions we recommend in the reports and summaries in particular are unique to you; make the best of them and continue to achieve great results for your hard work. 

If you would like more information about innovation club or would like to join take a look at www.innovationclub.co.uk or call us on 0161 368 9100

Looking forward to welcoming our guests for our Innovation Club Seminar at the Tameside Centre For Enterprise today. Expect an afternoon of facts and information to guide you on your way to a more productive online presence.

The London 2012 Olympic Organisers are preparing to bring London and the UK’s reputation back to Dickensian times with a ban on being social.

Have you bought tickets for the London 2012 Games? If you have - have you read the Terms and Conditions? Probably not. Who does?

Take a look at the following extract from the ticket terms and conditions:

19.6.3 Images, video and sound recordings of the Games taken by a Ticket Holder cannot be used for any purpose other than for private and domestic purposes and a Ticket Holder may not license, broadcast or publish video and/or sound recordings, including on social networking websites and the internet more generally, and may not exploit images, video and/or sound recordings for commercial purposes under any circumstances, whether on the internet or otherwise, or make them available to third parties for commercial purposes.

Notice the line that says “[a ticket holder may not] publish video and/or sound recordings, including on social networking websites and the internet more generally”? 

When the next Olympics come around in Rio in 2016 you can bet they will embrace social networking as a way to bring communities together, share the spirit and the games around the world instantly.

What is the UK thinking?

Shhh, dont tell the world the Olympics are on.

Thankfully most attendees will be blissfully unaware of the ban and will continue to promote the UK and the games using the worlds best communication and marketing tools available.

For businesses equally worried or unsure about Social Marketing AsOne are here to help navigate you though the sea of opportunities and coach your business to a gold medal position. Don’t hide your head in the long jump’s sand pit like the UK’s Olympic Organisers, embrace the power of social networking.

For more details about how you can get ahead with your digital marketing contact AsOne on 0161 368 9100. or visit our Innovation Club website for more information on the ways we can help with your social marketing, Search Engine Optimisation and digital marketing.

(Source: tickets.london2012.com)

Some of you may have businesses to run, and hopefully a successful website to go along with it. You also may, or may not, understand how integral social media has become in today’s technological world, but if you are constantly active with the likes of Facebook and Twitter you will be aware, with everything else going on around you in business, it can be a drag and sometimes time consuming updating status and tweeting each individual social network you wish to advertise on. So consider TweetDeck….

TweetDeck is a social media dashboard – an all in one program that can be downloaded (for free) from the Internet, and will help you manage the ‘big’ social networks – Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin – in one sitting.

Originally developed by Iain Dodsworth in 2008, Twitter obviously saw the use and potential in this product and bought it for a rumoured $40 - $50 million in May last year. Kudos to Mr Dodsworth!

The beauty of TweetDeck is the ease and accessibility you get in managing your entire social networks in one single interface. And if you prefer, you can combine multiple twitter accounts – like personal and business. Once downloaded you are presented with “core” columns that you wish to see on your dashboard – is it friends’ updates? Mentions? Trending Topics? It’s up to you. Once you are set up, you are ready to go.

All you do is type in what you would like to share with your followers and then select the different networks you wish to share it across. It’s as simple as that.

TweetDeck though, is not the only ‘all in one’ social media dashboard available. Hootsuite is another, and is actually used by some of our team members here at AsOne - it usually divides opinion in the office as to which one is the best to use.

But don’t take my word for it, have a look for yourself at both www.tweetdeck.com and www.hootsuite.com and see if it can help you!

We all know social media is an important tool for brand awareness and customer acquisition — but how exactly are you supposed to convert random Twitter and Facebook users into real-life customers?

1. Get your search on — There are 340 million tweets sent per day and odds are that a few of them are referencing your brand, though you may not realise it.  One tip for finding new customers is to see who’s engaging with your competitors.  If someone just started following or tweeted at or checked in at another bakery in the neighbourhood, you could tweet at the person to come check out your cupcakes. They customer will appreciate the shout-out and the fact that you handpicked them to be your customer. Get clever with searches that are relevant to your business and offerings to help you target potential customers — then reel them in by being charming and human, not salesy.
2. Use images to engage — A picture is worth a thousand words. Photos drive twice as much engagement as text posts do on Facebook. So if you’re looking to attract some new fans, start snapping pics. But the pics need not be product-focused. Think outside the box.
3. Host a competition — Nothing gets customers going like some swag, so contests are a great way to boost your followers and engagement. But be strategic about what you’re offering, or else you could attract the wrong followers. First, build in actions that allow the fan to share to their social networks, as this will increase vitality  Second, stay true to your brand. Third, tweak the contest to fit the platform on which you’re running it — On Facebook that means sharing photography, on Twitter it means wordplay hashtags.
4. Make it personal — No one like a mass message. Consumers like to feel as if they’re the only ones being spoken to. You should know your customers and speak to them in personal ways to establish touch-points that build relationships and create loyalty.  While you’re browsing sites for comments to respond to, don’t ignore negative feedback.  Addressing the complaint is an opportunity to convert an unhappy customer into an impressed brand ambassador.

(Source: Mashable)

Being connected socially with either Facebook or twitter has now become second nature to us, and is as regular as brushing your teeth or putting your shoes on. And when you think, I wonder how social interaction can go further – welcome Pinterest!

Pinterest is the latest fad in social interaction and is one of the fastest growing social services in the world, connecting millions of people through their common interests! Not only can you share your own work or ideas, but you can browse other ‘pinboards’ for inspiration.

Recent reports suggest that Pinterest drives more traffic to blogs than twitter. 

Could you be increasing your product or service’s visibility by using Pinterest?