• Using Social Media to launch your website

    Using Social Media to launch your website

    A new handbag website launched on the Internet recently. Nothing unusual about a new e-commerce website launching you might think, but the people at Handbag Planet had a great idea to publicise the new site.

    Every hour for the first 24 hours they were giving away a free handbag and they made it easy to enter the competition.

    There were several ways to enter, you could visit their website and sign up, refer a friend and you got another chance to win. Or you could enter using a Social Media website.

    If you added Handbag Planet as a friend on MySpace or Facebook or write about them on Twitter you got 10 chances to win a prize. And if you had a blog you could write about them to receive 25 chances to win the handbag of your dreams!

    Now while I may not be into my handbags, honestly I'm not, I do like their use of the social side of the Internet. For very little work on their part they managed to get people to mention the new website across the Internet thus building up links to it.

    This shows the power of Social Media website as part of website marketing and how to get your customers to work for you.

    How would you use Social Media websites to market your website?

    By Alan Masterson
    Published: 20 October 2008
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  • Online Reputation Management is the new PR

    Online Reputation Management is the new PR

    Online Reputation management, buzz management or brand management are all names for a growing area of website marketing linked to social websites, and is fast becoming the new PR.

    Old school PR companies may have trawled through the tabloids to discover any stories relating to you. But what about the vast resource of the Internet?

    Before buying a product or selecting a service the vast majority of Internet users do some research wither it's searching on Google or reading posts on forums.

    But do you know what people are saying about you on the Internet?

    With the rise of social websites like Facebook and Myspace, blogging services like Blogger and twitter and many companies having there own blog, there is an increase in the chance of something negative being written about you.

    A classic example of this is Starbucks. If you search on Google for Starbucks you will find several sites with negative feelings towards the giant coffee company. (We quite like their coffee!)

    Online Reputation Management services can scour the Internet to find any mention of you or your brand and help you to counter any negative publicity.

    It's not all doom and gloom. Online Reputation Management will also find all that positive feedback about you. If you do find negative content about your company or brand what can you do?

    If the information is true don't ignore it or hide from it. Participate in the discussion by posting a reply or leaving a comment so you can get your side of the argument across. And on your own website issue a statement or correct the issue.

    If it is not true contact the owner and request, politely, that they remove or retract it. If that doesn't work it may be time to call in the lawyers.

    By Alan Masterson
    Published: 6 September 2008
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  • Brands poor at Search Engine Optimisation

    New research reported in today's Revolution shows that the majority of brand advertisers do not have an effective Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategy, negatively impacting on their natural search listings. Essentially, their sites are not search engine friendly, meaning that they rank lower on search engine listings.

    Search engine optimisation covers a range of things - from some technical stuff about how your site is built (e.g. sites built entirely in Flash severely restrict Google's ability to 'read' them), how the URLs of pages are set up, to the content and copy on your site, and how your headings show. All tictoc's sites are built with SEO in mind - we covered a bit about SEO in our most recent seminar, and we'll probably cover it again in future events.

    By Kate Wooding
    Published: 20 August 2008
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  • Search and online dating

    Perusing SEO-Chicks for the first time today, found this very clever way of explaining to people like me the finer points of keyword matching. Suddenly it all makes sense!

    By Kate Wooding
    Published: 2 May 2008
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