Gazel is an Excel Add-in, (co-created by Chad Summerhill), that allows you to draw your Adwords data directly into Excel, without downloading it manually from Google. It allows you to create reports and dashboards, from scratch or in customisable templates.

Having only used Gazel for a few weeks, this is by no means a technical interrogation of the tool! However, I have reviewed the add-in and here are my findings:

• Quick and Fast (Like a Gazel)

The loading times were a pleasurable experience as downloading accounts and custom reports didn’t leave you snoring. The whole point of using a new PPC tool is to save time and this is a massive plus. The custom reports also aid in time saving; they are great for taking data directly from your account into Excel and there are lots to choose from.

Personally the one I used most was the Search Query Report – a quick and easy way to look at your terms and identify areas for refinement.

• Simple and easy to use

At first glance the best thing about Gazel is how easy it is to. Once installed the product is incredibly user friendly, with simple step by step instructions to download accounts and an easy to navigate interface.

• A thumbs up… but it isn’t revolutionary
  

On the whole, Gazel gets a big thumbs up; in terms of usability and simplicity it ticks the boxes… However, at the moment I just can’t seem to integrate Gazel into my daily routine – maybe I am just stuck in my ways (and I have only used it for a few weeks) but I already have report templates and I’m used to downloading directly from Adwords.

Therefore, Gazel isn’t some revolutionary PPC tool, that will completely change the way you manage accounts, however, this tool is useful for time management – particularly with its ability to customise reports and dashboards.

• Recommend giving it a try…

With all this in mind, I would recommend trying it (maybe you aren’t as stuck in your ways as I am). I think it would be easier for people who are new to account management, or just handling an in house PPC account, to integrate it into their daily routine.

Overall, this is a handy tool to use and the reports available give you a great overview of the areas you should be analysing across your PPC accounts. I am looking forward to looking further into using Gazel and customising my own reports.

Got any advice on using Gazel? What do you think of the software? Which PPC tools couldn’t you live without? It would be great to hear from you – why not get in touch by commenting below, or via our contact page?

Want to know what else makes our PPC team work their magic? Give them a call – they won’t bite

The post An Inside Interrogation Of Gazel (The Excel Add-in NOT the Antelope) appeared first on Custard.

One of the key, and often over looked, areas to conversion optimisation is having a good landing page. The landing page of your advert can mean the difference between your visitor turning into Alice, falling deeper into that sales funnel shaped rabbit hole, or becoming Mr. Bounce…

Landing page optimisation does not need to be exhausting and time consuming; you don’t need to entirely redesign your website just to get better results. If your website already represents your brand and products beautifully, you don’t need to start redesigning it – you could create a simple A/B test like the example below.

To get the best results from your PPC landing page optimisation the key thing is to -

Implement a strategy!

Identifying your goals & expectations – What do you aim to achieve?

Set your time frame - The volume of traffic to your site will determine this, it important to choose a period of time that will provide results that mean something.

Testing – Decide on a testing method and implement changes in line with your goals.

Monitoring your results – How will you gauge your success, what metrics will you use, what are your baseline metrics/parameters and importantly, stick to these for the duration of the test.

Analyse & Repeat – Remember the art of PPC is continual refinement, if you stay safe once you have achieved results you will never know the full potential of your paid search campaigns.

Keep in mind – landing page optimisation is just one area that you can improve your campaigns performance. The user interaction doesn’t stop here – after successful testing, try to use the insights you have gained to further optimise the user experience.

Continual testing and optimisation of conversion paths, from your initial search query and triggered advert, right down to your landing page and sales funnel is essential to achieving the very best results from your PPC. Don’t be lazy, but at the same time don’t overdo it, if you try to change and monitor everything at once you will have no baseline to compare your data sets to.

Finally… We understand not everyone is lucky enough to have designers and developers working alongside them like we do here at Custard, so if you need help when it comes to testing your landing pages why not get in touch!

The post How to supercharge your PPC landing page. appeared first on Custard.

With Google’s Search share reportedly hitting a five year low last month (let’s face it, it’s still dominating the market), is it time to look at Bing’s position in the UK paid search market?

Google’s drop below the 90% mark in the current UK market sees their 88.35% share perhaps making room for Bing, which was up 0.19% between Nov & Dec 2012.

The search market trends in the US show that Bing increased its share in 2013, and the Yahoo! Bing Network alliance is currently boasting a 30% US Market share. The US market trends are an insight into the opportunities that Bing & Yahoo could hold for your business.

Through experience with Bing, we have found there are some industries that work better than others on the search engine, but essentially there is one big PLUS to using Bing – it is cheaper! (and we are all looking to save money – right?!)

With the increase in market share for the Bing & Yahoo search alliance, we believe that it is worth the investment to duplicate PPC campaigns onto Bing and find out how your advertising performs on the search engine. You may find that although there is less traffic, this could in fact lead to cheaper cost per conversions/CPA’s.

So is it time to start exploring Bing’s advertising potential for your business? What do you think? Let us know! Do you currently run your PPC campaign on Bing? We’d love to hear how it is performing.

The post Is Bing on the Rise? appeared first on Custard.

Spiders, whilst being horrifyingly creepy nightmares, aren’t stupid enough to get themselves in such a manner. So how did this mis-information become supposed public knowledge?

It all (allegedly – ironically, I can’t actually find the original source!) began in 1993 (bloody hell, that was 20 years ago) when Lisa Holst, a columnist for PC Professional, created an article detailing similar facts as part of a story looking into how quickly information can spread thanks to the internet. Bear in mind, back in 1993 we didn’t have the social media channels we do today, so this information was mostly relayed by chain-emails and discussion boards.

But now, we can readily share this information contained within a single tweet or Facebook post, not just to our social circle but to the public. A vast majority of updates on the London/Manchester riots of 2011 were relayed through Twitter, Facebook and raw footage uploaded to YouTube.

BBM played an integral part in the London Riots, both in reporting, as well as organising where to riot. But it was probably less dramatic than this picture implies.

Obviously with the potential rumour mills of Twitter, as evidenced by the numerous ‘## is dead’ posts, internet users become more inquisitive and demanding of source materials. However, this has been quite quickly addressed by self-proclaimed social aggregation site, reddit, among others. Essentially, the breaker of the news can post to this hub of listeners and they can all evaluate whether it is worthy of being shared, and thereby inform their respective social networks.

However, it’s not flawless. Jeff Goldblum is likely still a bit miffed at the amount of ‘Jeff Goldblum dead’ posts, especially one that stuck after he ‘fell off a cliff in New Zealand’. This post was created by Global Associated News, a parody site that somehow, was interpreted as fact… however, the trend continues, particularly with the infamous ‘The Onion’ (see Literally Unbelievable for evidence of those that were fooled).

There’s a well-known theory that we are all connected within a maximum of six degrees and this has become increasingly relevant within social media, so it only takes a single post to be shared amongst friends for them to share it and the story to snowball. According to a study by Saarland University, it is thought “a rumor started at a random node of the Twitter network in average reaches 45.6 million of the total of 51.2 million members within only eight rounds of communication”.

Social networks have even become seen as a fountain of knowledge despite often not providing any kind of proof or source, as it has become increasingly important to have the latest tidbit of information even without the evidence to support it.

This extract is taken from David J Krajicek’s ‘The Social Media Revolution In Breaking-News Journalism’,

“When a big crime story happens now, every reporter and producer attacks Facebook for information and sources,” says Paul LaRosa, a CBS News producer. “It’s the first thing we do, and everybody does it.”

Why? Because Facebook worldwide includes more than 700 million users searchable by names, occupations, hometowns, schools and interests.

Each page is a potential lode of the biographical information that journalists crave. It also provides links to friends who might serve as secondary sources.

And while one reporter scours Facebook, a colleague is likely plugged in to TweetDeck, monitoring Twitter feeds about a breaking-news event, with the same scrutiny and trained ear police reporters once gave to police radio transmissions.

“Twitter is our wire service today,” says Mo Krochmal, a journalist and founder of Social Media News NY.

….

During breaking-news coverage of a shooting on the Virginia Tech campus on Dec. 9, 2011, a tweeter tried to lure news outlets into falsely reporting 7 that the shooter had killed a second law enforcer at a location far off campus.

His Twitter handle was an indicator of his lack of credibility: Drunken Bastard. “

However, with social media being seen as the fastest and most efficient way of sharing information, would this false information have been reported if the username hadn’t lacked credibility? There have been a number of stories that were broken first by Twitter, but there have been an equal amount of mis-informed stories leaving news outlets red-faced – see HERE, HERE and HERE.

So what’s there to do? It’s not like information will stop being shared – people love attention and the brief celebrity status they may get from breaking news, and new outlets will always be fighting to break the news first in the spirit of ratings.

So, whilst we know we’re not eating 8 spiders a year, there’s still a chance that someone will report it… like The Daily Mirror.

The post Social Media And The Spread of Mis-Information appeared first on Custard.

Holographic beads lighting up @caradelevingne‘s last look #MatthewMagnified vine.co/v/br9Q2unqAXn

— Matthew Williamson (@MWWorld) February 17, 2013

Distracting, right?

Saying that, some important things have happened recently. Something in particular that a lot of brands can learn from.

Well actually, you’d think brands would already know about this kind of thing. But reiteration can’t hurt anybody can it?
So DKNY have made a boo boo.

While dreaming up the visual merchandising for their SS13 shop displays, the design team thought it would be all nice to use the artwork of an up and coming sartorial photographer based in New York called Brandon Stanton.

Seemingly, they felt that the images reflected DKNY’s brand image and its New York roots perfectly.

Which they probably do.

Brandon is from Brooklyn and owns a very successful photography blog called Humans of New York. He focuses on street fashion and the New York lifestyle. Including snippets of short stories and quotes from the people he’s photographed.

The 28 year old has a giant Facebook following of 569,000 and his heart warming images could never fail to raise a smile. Even from the steeliest of souls.

That’s probably why DKNY liked them so much, and offered Brandon $15,000 to use 300 of his photos for their store window displays.

However, he believed that “$50 per photo was not nearly enough to receive from a company with hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue” so asked for more.

The fashion brand refused and the whole deal fell through.

Simple enough.

But this is where DKNY used some pretty bad judgement. They used the photos anyway.
They pulled images from Humans of New York and plastered them all over one of their stores in Bangkok.

That’s bad isn’t it? I mean, they could have quite easily created that content themselves couldn’t they? They’re DKNY for heaven’s sake! Presumably they have a pool of photographers just begging to work with them.

They could have used Instagram to rally fan photos. Hosted a photography competition and generally harnessed the power of creative crowd sourcing, not to mention social media, to produce a successful visual and probably much more viral campaign.

But they didn’t. They just nicked some stuff. Which isn’t nice.

Despite being bitten pretty hard by a huge multinational brand, Stanton still kept his calm and insisted that despite having grounds to formally complain, he would rather;

“DKNY donate $100,000 on my behalf to the YMCA in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. That donation would sure help a lot of deserving kids got to summer camp.”

(Read the full Facebook post here.)

DKNY responded quickly and issued a formal apology, stating that they’ll be donating $25,000 to Stanton’s local YMCA.
They admitted that the images had been used without permission, and used a rather thin excuse claiming that the Bangkok store had used initial ‘mock ups’ that were only intended to show the direction of the spring visual program.

Quite nice of them to donate though, even if it is only a quarter of what was requested.
A lovely ending to quite a serious matter…

But I can’t help but wonder what might have happened if somebody had used DKNY’s images without their permission. Or any large brand for that matter.
Would they have been so lenient? Would they have suggested donations to charidee?

The post DKNY Face the Wrath of the Blogosphere appeared first on Custard.

But… why?

Let’s have a quick look at how this started and how it likely will end…

Well firstly, goats are intrinsically pretty funny animals, because look at them.

But it seems to have been a fairly recent thing to see them all over YouTube. From what I can remember it began with an article on cracked.com called ‘The 9 Most Brilliant Pieces of Comedy Hiding on YouTube’, written by John Cheese.  Number 4 on the list focuses on two goats called ‘Bob’ and ‘Ed’ and their implied tragedy of losing each other – just watch

Now, this video dates way back to 2008 and garnered only a few views due to a pretty lacklustre title and rather niche content – and whilst it was certainly boosted by the readership of Cracked, this was far from the beginning of the ‘Goat Editions’.

It was a much more recent effort that began this phenomenon – and it was essentially started by a super-cut by the channel ‘RSVLTS’. Here’s the offending video:

Then came the song parodies – the inevitable song parodies. It happened with Gangnam Style (sometimes AWFULLY), it happened with Harlem Shake, and it happened with goats. But somehow, this reinvigorated it – it gave the goats a purpose rather than just being a funny clip, it became a viral sensation. This was no more apparent than with Taylor Swift’s song, which, whether being the first one to do it or not, was certainly the most popular, though my personal favourite is the Bon Jovi version.

But, it won’t last. Y’see the main issue and short lifespan of the Harlem Shake can be attributed to the ease of which it is to make – so if you search for ‘Goat Edition’ on YouTube now, you’ll be presented with around 5,000 results. Heck, there’s even YouTube accounts dedicated to it.

And when will this phenomenon die? Well, it’s already happening. There’s a saturation of videos out there that simply recycle the same format as used in Swift’s song and create nothing new of interest.

For example,

And what you may have found funny at the beginning of this blog is no longer funny.

But hey, that’s what happens when things go viral. Sorry about that.

The post Custard – Goat Edition appeared first on Custard.

So… we all know the standard Google tools used to effectively create, manage and optimise PPC campaigns, but there are a lot of tools out there other than Adwords, Analytics & Editor that are specifically designed to effectively enhance your PPC campaigns.

In the Custard office we are currently trialling Wordstream PPC Advisor and thought we would offer a brief overview of the product, highlighting what we found to be the most beneficial areas of use.

There are of course, all the standard functions you would expect from a PPC tool within Wordstream;

• Keyword Research Tools

• Campaign Builder

• Ad Group Builder

• Management Segment with historical data

But do they make it cost effective??

Although these tools are supplemented with some impressive Smart Tools; Negative Keyword Tool, Ad Group Splitter, Recommend Keyword Bid Tool amongst others – none of these particularly warrant the spend.

Heralded as being able to offer –

For us the money’s in Wordstream’s ability to save us time! As professional PPC Account Managers time is precious, so the key features we have found helpful in Wordstream are its 20 Minute Work Week & the Adwords Performance Grader which are centred around analysing your whole account in a short amount of time.

20 Minute Work Week

Wordstream’s 20 minute Work Week is a feature that offers suggestions on how best to optimise your campaign. This feature is very effective when campaigns are already set up and just need those little tweaks to perfect them.

They offer advice on -

• Negative Keyword
• Optimising Keyword
• BidsAdditional Keywords
• Optimising Adverts
• Reviewing Costly Keywords

We found this feature a really effective time management tool when used alongside established campaigns. It’s a great way to keep on top of the areas you need to continually optimise.

Adwords Performance Grader

There is an in-depth review of the Account Grader feature on SEOmoz, and on the whole, we tend to agree with their review – this feature does highlight some effective areas in which your account could be improved.

However… it is currently somewhat lacking in-depth analysis due to the fact accounts are grouped and ranked within cost boundaries, meaning campaigns with a spend of £15,000 are in the same boat as those with £999,999,999. Let’s be honest, this segment of accounts can’t be accurately rated against each other.

There is a free trial of Wordstream’s Account Grader which we think is worth running on your own account, but for us in the Custard office, Wordstream only warrants the spend if you run a large number of accounts and are looking for tools to help with your time management.

The Bottom Line 

The reason that PPC Managers spend so much time using Adwords, Analytics & Editor is because they provide vital tools and insight for the running of successful accounts. Wordstream is a great organisation tool when it comes to managing a large number of accounts, but if you only run a few smaller accounts we think Wordstream is an unnecessary additional cost.

Why not try the Free Account Grader trial and see how your PPC stacks up? What do you think of Wordstream? Do you need help or advice on improving your Accounts – Get in touch!

The post A Review of ‘Wordstream PPC Advisor’ appeared first on Custard.

Seriously, guys wearing Bluetooth headsets were mercilessly mocked in popular culture because it simply looked like they were talking to no one, but at least there was someone on the other end. Now, we’re just speaking to technology and over-friendly AI.

It feels like designers actually took their inspiration from science fiction and thought, “what better way to control technology than by speaking to it?”

Or watched too much Star Trek.

Simply, there’s just too many reasons that this whole technology is flawed.

• DELAY

So the Glass demo video touted the ability to take pictures, but even in that video there’s a definite delay. I’m sure there’s ways to set up micro-expressions to take that picture, but taking control away from the digits of a photographer is a risky gambit indeed.

• ACCURACY

I can barely understand what people are saying to me most days – and I’m not overly confident that voice recognition has reached a stage of full comprehension. What if you’re wearing these Glasses in a noisy environment? Is it guaranteed to still work? And it’s touted that sounds and music will be conveyed through bone vibration, but how is this going to block out background noise?

• USABILITY

One of the beauties of smartphones is their ease of use – they’re practically pick-up-and-play devices, but Glass seems to want to take this away. So everything is voice-controlled but how can we be sure what voice commands will actually produce a result? And at the end of the video, the user clearly uses his finger to take the picture and share it… but how?!

Just makes me think of this.

Also, greasy finger smudges (ergh). And what about the blooming mobile game market?

• YOU’LL BE THAT GUY

This video absolutely nails it.

I admit, I’m still interested in the technology, but is it more than a gimmick?

The post Google Wants You To Talk To Yourself appeared first on Custard.

Name/Job Title: Lauren, Key Content Writer

What do you do at Custard? I am responsible for writing high quality, interesting content for our clients – including blog posts, press releases, landing page content, link baits and link building articles. The team get together regularly to brainstorm article concepts for our campaigns. I am also a ‘team leader’ and oversee all the admin in the content team; so I spend a lot of time in spread sheets. Oh and I also manage the office’s petty cash – I am a very busy bee!

What’s the best part of your job? I get to be super creative every day and write about everything and anything – from MMA fight gear, to baby gifts and toys.

What’s the worst part of your job? There are always loads of sweets and chocolate in the office – not very good if you are trying to eat healthily!

What do you do when you’re not @ Custard? I have a little black pug called Missy who enjoys lots of walks. I also love shopping, spending time with my husband and family, and I am expecting a little bundle of joy, so my time at the moment is pretty much spent getting ready for our baby.

What’s been your favourite Custard Moment? Well I’ve been here almost 2 and a half years, so there are just too many to choose from. Pretty much all my fave moments have involved Rick Walker saying something silly or epic, or when Sam did the splits on the dance floor on my first Custard night out. I should have known then what I was getting myself into!

What’s your best quote from a fellow Custard staff member? ”Exotic pets? Do you mean like dogs in bras?” – Rick Walker

What is your favourite made-up fact about custard? We are the Custard crew, and we are a force to be reckoned with.

What are your Custard predictions for 2013? One word; impressive.

If you could be anyone for a day instead of a Custard crew member, who would you be and why? Beyoncé because she is a GODDESS! I would definitely walk round singing all day (because at present I can’t sing to save my life), and I would definitely keep looking in the mirror at my ghetto booty.

Get in touch today to see what Lauren and the content marketing team can do for your brand.

The post Staff Member of the Week appeared first on Custard.

Y’see, though it clearly has the capability to run as a fully-fledged blogging platform, it typically runs as a microblog. This is thanks to a strong community of tumblr users, frequent updates and ease of re-blogging.

There was a time when everyone and their dog had a blog on the web – some went on to enjoy great successes and become influential figures in their respective industries, but most, inevitably, were abandoned and became relics of a sudden bout of ambitious productivity. The most common reason for any blog being abandoned is simply lack of motivation and willingness to put the effort in – tumblr solves this by making it ridiculously easy to add content, whether original or re-blogged from another blog, but we’ll get onto that in a bit.

That number at top right is reblogs and likes. Every time someone reblogs, they’re technically adding to their blog. Typically, 50% of the number is reblogs, so that’s over 50,000 blogs being updated with a picture of a tap. Each with the potential to be reblogged again.

It’s an undeniable fact that the most popular content on the web is imagery; whether in the form of GIFs, memes or cat pictures, images are everywhere, making a 500 word blog post thoroughly unappealing to read (yeah, the irony is not lost here). The internet user is progressively becoming fickler and desiring of ‘quick fixes’ – since 2000, the average attention span of an internet user has dropped from 12 seconds to 8.

Add to this is the fact that browsers will only read 49% of the words on web pages with 111 words or less, and 28% of the words on a page with 593 words – waffling content just simply won’t fly anymore. You need to hook your reader in the first sentence, or chances are, they’ll have already left – hence the ever-increasing density of sensationalist blog titles like “You Won’t Believe What Apple Have Done Now!” and any old tut you might read on MGID and similar sites.

All of this has inevitably led to the rising popularity of micro-blogging and with it, Twitter. But Twitter only offers so much – whilst we may get an occasional quick fix, it’s not readily accessible and requires filtering through to actually find the entertaining tidbits. And then there’s Tumblr.

Tumblr, for the unaware, is the holy grail of memes, fandoms and general cuteness – seemingly taking the best aspects of sites like reddit, imgur and WordPress and mashing them into an attention-span, never-ending stream of targeted content. Genius. And it’s quickly gained traction…

Here’s the search trends for Blogger (blue) and WordPress (red) since 2004…

And when you chuck in Tumblr (yellow), you get…

Crikey.

Heck, just chopping it down to ‘blog’ (Green) shows Tumblr to be a more popular recent search term…

A growing number of companies have embraced the tumblr platform for their business blog; however as a development platform, WordPress seems to be one of the most popular. Simply, whilst tumblr is ridiculously easy to use, WordPress offers considerably more customisation and messing around – but whether people will actually put in the effort to read a blog post anymore is debatable.

Combine this with the fact that many authors lack the motivation and attention span to sit down and write a full post and it all points to the conclusion that blogging is dying. It’s not even about having that personal space on the web where you can post your insights, opinions and thoughts – social media has that firmly covered. And with it, there’s an over-saturation of short Facebook updates, 140 character tweets and blogs comprised solely of images that has not only made authors lazier, but also their respective readers.

Compelling content has always been a mainstay of the web, but it is increasingly going to rely on design, sensationalism and the conveyance of the message within the first 30 seconds/2 lines.

Or quite simply,

Microblogging is the new standard and refined content is king.

The post Do We Actually Read Blogs Anymore? appeared first on Custard.

• 500 Million of Twitter users
• A Billion Facebook users
• 2.5 billion email addresses estimated by 2014
• Over 14 billion indexed web pages

In terms of numbers, it’s only getting larger and larger.  We’re talking Terabytes, Petabytes and even Exabytes of data. When you have to make up words to describe sizes then things are getting real.

The level of use that the internet is getting right now, and the use it will be getting over the next few years, is insane. Simply insane.

The internet of 2025 will be 100% Busey.

Of course, that was just a transparent ploy to show you a picture of Gary Busey. But getting back to it, the web is evolving. It started evolving the minute it was turned on decades ago. It’s evolving as you are reading this right now.

If you didn’t know, we are not even in the first stage of the “internet”.  Just in case you’re not au fait with the lingo, and please be aware that these are rough stage times:

Web 1.0 (1990-2001)

The early internet. You remember this. The days of CompuServe, mIRC and pages that loaded in the time it took for a scooter to get from Manchester to London. Static pages and a reliance on tables to position and align the elements of a page meant it was a reliance on presenting, rather than creating of, content.

Web 2.0 (2001-Present)

The current state of the internet. Fast, optimised and the cumulative changes/enhancements that comes with prolonged usage. Video and images as standard. User-interfaces to retrieve information are available, whilst a rich user experience is also par for the course. Basically what you are looking at right now.

If this is what you are looking at, you’re doing it wrong. Also, you are made of magic.

Web 3.0 (?)

Which leads to what happens next. Well, it’s not too much of a stretch to see ‘Web 3.0’ appearing on the horizon. What’s interesting to me is that one aspect of Web 3.0 is something called ‘the semantic web’.

This relates to the search aspect of the internet. So SEOs listen up because I’m extremely excited about this part.

On a basic level, it’s postulated that advanced algorithms will advance how we search.

And by ‘we’ I mean ‘the internet’.

Stay with me.

The web is envisioned as ‘understanding’ what humans want to search for. Complicated searches can be responded to, based on analysis and information about that human through the use of semantics. That’s the history of how we talk and type.

I’m always up for ‘semantics’. Arf Arf. Now stand still while I search for the best place to shoot you.

Let’s break it down:

Situation

Your social media platforms have detailed information about your personal life. Living situation, relationship status etc. The web also has access to your personal spending habits and purchase history via sites like Amazon and eBay.

It also knows where you live, given that you’ve probably entered your postcode or checked in at home on things like Foursquare or Facebook.

It’s only a matter of time before it knows if you are sleeping. Just like this guy.

Process

Combining this information, the semantic web can offer you search results specifically tailored to your needs. It can recommend things you didn’t even know you wanted yet.

For example, if the web knows that you’ve just had another child, but you only have a small washing machine, when the time comes to replace it, Web 3.0 can be all over it like cheap aftershave.

It could theoretically already know:

• How long it’s been since you’ve bought a new machine
• The size you need now you’ve just had another child
• Requirements and cost bracket for your next washing machine

Of course, there’s more to it than that according to web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, but it’s an exciting step towards the evolution of how we use and perceive the internet and the information we want from it.

What do you think? Is Web 3.0 viable within the next few years? Will it help or hinder how we search? Let me know in the comments.

Parting Shot

“The Internet is not just one thing, it’s a collection of things – of numerous communications networks that all speak the same digital language. “ 

-          Jim Clark

{Images courtesy of s1.ibtimes.com, images.wikia.com & us.123rf.com}

The post Web 3.0…or how I stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Semantic Internet appeared first on Custard.

Here in the Custard Office we have been debating the pros and cons…

Cons

In the short term this is understandably a concern for professionals (like us here at Custard!) who have been stripping out campaigns as best practice for a long time and will have to restructure accounts when the new Enhanced Campaign features are implemented in the next few months.

Aside from this, with reports indicating Google could make over £3 Billion from Paid Search Ads on Tablets alone in 2013, across the industry people seem to be agreeing – this change is not centred around benefiting Advertiser’s usability… meaning another downside to Enhanced Campaigns is that prices look sure to increase across Tablet and Mobile CPC’s.

Pros

However, with the bad comes the good and there are set to be some long term benefits brought to us by Enhanced Campaigns.

On the whole, there are some visible improvements:

Campaigns will be less fragmented

More advanced geo-targeting options

Option to add Sitelinks at Ad Group level

Scheduling available on Ad Extensions

Multi device tracking options

Overall… here at Custard we understand that intergraded campaigns are obviously a necessary evolution in our continually converging consumer landscape…however… we do feel that Google need to give advertisers more options when using the new Enhanced Campaign settings.

In aid of this we have signed a petition beckoning Google to loosen restrictions for Enhanced Campaigns and are urging others to support us in this cause – After all, Google listened when they made changes to the rotation of ads settings so why shouldn’t this one work?

What do you think Enhanced Listings will do to your campaigns?

Drop us a line, we’d love to hear from you!

Also in PPC…

Conversion Tracking is now live and available on Facebook PPC Campaigns. It is good to see Social Media Pay Per Click moving forward

(albeit with the pace of a snail)

Perhaps this is a step toward Facebook offering more advanced metrics and tracking on its campaigns, therefore allowing advertisers to gain enhanced insights into their campaigns and spends on social media aiding better optimisation.

We also saw the end of Google Shopping’s free listings this week – meaning that advertisers now need to create Product Listing Ads using paid search if they wish to keep their Shopping listings.

If you need advice on your Google shopping feeds why not get in touch, info@custard.co.uk – we would be happy to help!

The post Google’s Enhanced Campaigns appeared first on Custard.

Image source

SEOs often speculate how much weight Google puts into engagement statistics from Google Analytics. Google says they don’t use it… SEOs aren’t so sure.

There seems to be growing evidence that bounce rate and other metrics from Analytics are being used to rank websites. There are also glaring holes in Google’s argument for why they don’t use bounce rate.

Google says no…

Let’s put it out there – Matt Cutts categorically denied that Google use bounce rate at last June’s SMX Advanced conference. I wasn’t there myself, but thanks to the wonders of Twitter these nuggets of information are quickly circulated around the web.

So there you have it, end of story right?

Maybe not…

Evidence suggests otherwise

Here at Custard we’ve seen evidence that suggests the issue may not be as cut and dried as Google’s webspam chief suggests.

I don’t want to name and shame anyone here, but one of the frustrations of being an SEO is clients not wanting to invest in content. Once a page is ranking, then they consider it.

But by this time, traffic starts to come in and it seems like Google identifies a lack of engagement with the content on that page. Next thing you know, rankings slip again.

So why would this happen? Maybe Google sees low engagement and decides maybe this page doesn’t deserve to rank as highly as the algorithm first thought.

Maybe it looks at a high bounce rate as a sign that this page isn’t providing what users are looking for?

(Edit – thanks to Barry Adams for pointing out that this activity could also be down to this particular update)

Other SEOs agree

I recently chatted with Kristina Kledzik from Distilled’s Seattle office after her SEOMoz article on responsive design, where she mentioned in passing that without a good mobile site “your bounce rate will rise and your rankings will drop.”

Kristina mentioned that a lot of SEOs were seeing similar evidence and pointed me to a very assertive article by Tom Gregan on Google’s Panda and Penguin updates.

Tom’s article stated that Google is “taking time to assess signals such as bounce rate” when ranking websites.

Not that everyone agreed with Tom – Barry Adams over at Pierce Communications didn’t hold back in his rebuttal, calling Tom’s comments on bounce rate and other metrics “in all likelihood patently false.”

Why wouldn’t Google use it?

Waaaay back in 2008, Cutts stated that bounce rate as a ranking metric would be “not only spammable but noisy”. Five years later and he’s yet to really expand on this statement.

I also find this a little vague as a response, especially given that the whole algorithm centres around links, which are the most spammable metric I can think of. The noise surrounding links is almost deafening.

Quick reality check – the negative movement I’ve seen after a week or two of page one rankings could be explained away in a number of ways. I do believe however that the most likely explanation is low engagement metrics as a whole – including number of pages viewed and time on the page – are a collective factor.

Over to you

I’d love feedback on this issue. I’m certainly not brave enough to call out Matt Cutts on bounce rates!

Have you seen evidence of pages with high bounce rate being bumped from high ranking positions? Comments gratefully received!

The post Is Google using bounce rates to rank websites? appeared first on Custard.

And as Valentine’s Day looms, we’ve been taking a look at some of the world’s best-loved marriage proposals that have gone viral.

Here are our top 4 picks:

4) Lego Proposal

Walt kicks off our countdown with his crafty stop-motion lego proposal to lucky fiancée, Nealey.

So sweet, I could almost be tempted to alter my dating prerequisites; any prospective romantic partner must now hold proficient animation skills and a well-stocked Lego bucket.

A Proposal in Stop Motion from FIREPIT PICTURES on Vimeo.

Views to date: 281,000

3) Falling for the Girl

Brooke almost perished from a sudden heart attack before she made it down the aisle with devilish Josh, as he proposed by hurling himself from a 4-storey building.

All was well in the end though; Brooke dashed to the edge of the rooftop to find her future husband sprawled on a landing mat brandishing his heartfelt plea.

Josh’s antics have bagged him almost 8m views.

2) Issac’s Lip-Dub Proposal

In a performance choreographed to perfection, over 60 friends and family members joined Isaac Lamb in this theatrical proposal to fiancée, Amy.

The proposal, which saw the troupe lip-dub to Bruno Mars’ ‘Marry You’, is over five minutes long, and was thankfully well-received by both Amy and the YouTube community, accruing almost 28m views since May 2012.

1) The Greatest Marriage Proposal Ever

But we believe Isaac’s proposal has been pipped to the post.

Sorry Isaac.

Billed on YouTube as the ‘Greatest Marriage Proposal Ever’, Matt Still’s movie trailer magic was a hit with his fiancée, Ginny.

When Ginny went to the cinema with her brother, she was surprised to see a trailer featuring her boyfriend. After opening with Matt approaching Ginny’s Dad for her hand in marriage, the trailer proceeded to follow the cunning groom-to-be on his way to the cinema, before he dramatically entered the auditorium to propose in front of their family and friends.

Matt’s Oscar-worthy performance has won him just over 26m views since May 2011 and a special place in the heart of women everywhere.

But sadly, not everyone enjoys such a happy ending as Matt…

Foul Play

To date, over 1.7m people have shared in this guy’s excruciating pain (0:16s).

Still, least he’s a hit in the world of viral entertainment.

So there you have it, our cream of the virtual proposals crop. What do you think – which of these inspired offers were enough to melt your heart?

Video can be a powerful tool; but for that to so, people need to see it. If you’ve got great video content but just don’t know how to get it out there, get in touch with Custard today.

The post Valentine’s Virals: the best online marriage proposals appeared first on Custard.

“Engagement is a crucial and viable method of gaining more readers and visitors for your content. If you are not doing this then no one will put the effort in to read your content.”

You don’t just hit publish and forget about a piece of content. You should promote it over the web and interact with consumers; and if by some divine miracle someone comments, whether good or bad, you need to acknowledge it and reply. Build up a dialogue peeps!

Blog commenting matters and therefore it is imperative to take charge of your blog’s comment section. What if someone says something nasty about what I’ve written? Do I want to open myself up to a world of criticism? The answer to both questions is yes.

How are you growing as a writer and marketing yourself efficiently as a business, if you don’t engage with the online community in real-time, with real dialogue?

How do you do this? Here’s how, in 6 simple ways:

• How welcoming are you?

Just as Socialmediaexaminer writes, does your blog have a welcome door mat for comments? If you come across as hostile and stand-off-ish, no-one will interact with you.

It can be difficult to receive criticism, but the World Wide Web is full to the brim of different opinions and there’s nothing wrong with this. Yes someone might disagree with one of your points, but how do they back it up?

Every one of my colleagues would probably write this blog concept differently to me. That’s not to say I am doing it right, or that one of them would be doing it wrong; it’s just another viewpoint.

To cut a story short; embrace the comments that you get, be friendly, and others will follow.

• How easy is it to comment?

Can the reader comment easily, or are your settings complex? You don’t want to open yourself up to the thousands of spammers online, but you can set it so only those that are legitimate can comment.

If you have a WordPress blog, ensure that people only supply their name and email address. Turn on the setting so that the comment must be approved by the administrator, before being made visible to everyone.

• Make checking your blog, a daily routine

If you don’t keep on top of your comments, before you know it you could end up with hundreds of comments that you have to sift through. This is boring and a waste of your precious time.

You can avoid this by regularly checking your blog on a daily basis, to keep comments at a manageable number. Turn on the setting that emails you every time a comment is published, and is awaiting approval.

This is a helpful alarm to indicate when comment administration is needed.

• Have you asked for comments?

Just as the grand old saying goes; if you don’t ask, you don’t get.

Have you asked readers to comment on your work? Have you enticed them to post their thoughts on the subject matter? What is their personal experience on the topic?

Don’t just ask people to comment below; be unique and offer words of encouragement such as ‘What do you think?’ Or if all else fails, do what this man is doing and shout for feedback.

• What’s your blog policy?

As with anything in life, there needs to be rules that are set in stone. This makes everyone feel safe and puts boundaries in place, to keep order. The same applies to your blog.

You need to have a policy for blog commenting; you can define this however you so wish, but what matters is that you make all readers aware of the guidelines.

Can consumers use profanity language? Do comments need to be written in proper English, with correct grammar? Are people allowed to promote their own business?

Here are some examples of blog commenting policies to use for inspiration.

• How quick are you at responding?

Whatever the comment is, you need to respond to every comment. Even if the comment is disagreeing with your point of view, you need to reply to it and quickly.

This shows the online community that you are active and on the ball, just like the fast-paced society that we live in.

You do want to think about your response but don’t dwell over it for a long period of time; try to respond within at least a couple of days.

Think about it logically; the more you converse with your consumers the more likely you will build a relationship with them, and the more trustworthy and caring your brand will appear to consumers.

Content is key; do you need help with your blog writing? Get in touch with us today. Do you do something different to the tips mentioned above? Let us know what you do, to get more consumers to comment on your blog.

The post Learn How to Take Charge of Your Blog’s Comment Section in 6 Easy Steps appeared first on Custard.

It’s true

 If you’re reading this and you work at Custard, then you’ve probably seen me buzzing about the office. If you’re not from Custard and you’re reading this then let me paint the scene for you..

Imagine you’re a Custardian and you’re getting along with your daily workload in the warmth and safety of your cosy office. THEN-all-of-a-sudden-there’s-a-hyperactive-alien-in-your-face-asking-you-a-million-and-one-questions-at-the-speed-of-light. You feel propelled to answer, but you’re not really sure what’s going to happen with the information you’re divulging. Is it an internal investigation? Who knows!

Super-Custard

Inferior companies might have been a tad alarmed, but not these guys. These guys are super-pros and nothing (not even a total grilling) throws them. Mainly because they’re so clever and they know all the answers.

My mission in being here was to soak up some skills, and whilst I have used the word “infuse” to describe the process, others have used the less graceful term “sponge”.

Regardless of the terminology, on my journey to get to grips with the technical side of digital marketing: link-building, SEO and key word finding, one thing is for sure: I’ve been really lucky to be fortunate enough to have access to such a team of geniuses who add sunshine and wisdom to the otherwise dreary landscape.

Happiness is having unexpected visitors at the office. 

Not only did my visit give people a chance to show off their hospitality skills (Custard make the best coffee), but it has been refreshing to be in an environment where people are so engaged in what they’re doing that they’re overbrimming with ideas and innovation… and they’re happy to share.

I only hope that I was able to offer some helpful insights in return! Thank you Custard!

Other insights into Custard:

 •They love PCs.

•They have beer at 4.30pm on Friday. Every Friday.

•They have a pool table.

•They’re all about the banter.

•Everything is orange.

It’s back to Manchester on Monday, but not without first experiencing Friday afternoon drinkypoos.  Keep in touch guys.

The post How safe is your office from alien invasion? appeared first on Custard.

What’s Graph Search?

If you haven’t heard of Graph Search (shame on you!), it’s Facebook’s shiny new toy. With it, you’ll be able to search up pretty much anything to find pictures, videos, posts, notes and everything in between that relate.

For instance, you could find:

-          Friends that went to London in June 2009

-          Friends with pet lizards

-          Friends that listen to Led Zeppelin

-          Friends that like chocolate

And anything else you’re interested in finding out about your friends. As it’s Facebook’s very own search engine, it’ll spit out all the information relating to your search and, if there isn’t anything available, it’ll work with Bing to bring results from the wider web that may be what you were looking for.

Didn’t I hear there’s a privacy issue?

Yes and no. There’s a lot of concern surrounding the privacy issues that Graph Search could throw up. The blog Actual Facebook Graph Searches has come up with some surprising results, such as ‘people who like racism’ and the (very stalkerish) ‘single women who live nearby and who are interested in men and like getting drunk’ search.

That’s the main concern really – will it give internet stalkers yet another tool? And, will it make the rash of employers firing employees over their online presence even more widespread? On the flipside though, as long as you ramp up your privacy settings you won’t appear in other peoples’ Graph Searches.

How does Graph Search compare to Google?

On the face of it, you might think that Graph Search and Google are worlds apart. Wrong.

The world is turning into a sci-fi novel. Okay, maybe not ‘1984’ or ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?’, but definitely something akin to sci-fi. We’re all glued to our mobiles, we drive hybrid cars, we travel on super-fast trains (when they work), and we’re ruled by social media. Take a look at these stats:

Facebook – 750m monthly users

Twitter – 250m monthly users

LinkedIn – 110m monthly users

Pinterest – 85.5m monthly visitors

Myspace – 70.5mmonthly users

Google+ – 65m monthly users

And that’s just the main social networking sites in the UK. There are many, many others out there.

With this in mind, it’s easy to see just how important social networking is becoming, which means Graph Search definitely has the upper hand when compared to Google.

Let me use this excellent infographic to show the many benefits that Graph Search has:

Click to view larger image (©gggadgets.com)

Is Google ready for the fight?

Yes, undoubtedly.

In the real world, Google and Graph Search are after the same thing – to create a serendipitous search engine.

This means they want to create a search engine that provides you with the answers you didn’t even know you were looking for. Google’s been working on a search engine like this for some time now, and its many algorithm changes are helping to steer it in the right direction.

The main issue with Google is that it’s still based on keywords, rather than the natural language that Facebook’s Graph Search will use. This limits it quite a lot, which isn’t good when faced with Graph Search’s endless possibilities.

Final verdict

Facebook’s Graph Search is a viable contender for Google. There’s no doubt about it. With Facebook’s innovative search style and the sheer number of users that will take to it, there’s no way it won’t put a dent in Google.

But, I don’t think it’ll be a significant dent. At the end of the day, people like convenience. It’s convenient to go to Google every time you want to find something online. It isn’t convenient to learn how to use a new search engine.

Open Graph will use your friends to recommend shops, stores, boutiques, restaurants, cafes, coffee shops and absolutely everything else. These personal recommendations are definitely stronger than the random, spammy reviews companies can buy on Fiverr.com.

The big drawback is that Facebook only has access to actual users, whereas Google has access to the entire internet. You could say that Facebook’s partnership with Bing will counteract this, especially as it beat Google 2:1 in the ‘Bing it on’ challenge, but old habits die hard. It’s my belief that people will continue to use Google, even if there are better options out there.

Images courtesy of Fortune Spreads, Mashable, Bloom in Business.

The post Facebook vs. Google: Will Graph Search break Google? appeared first on Custard.

For any business, keeping open and clear lines of communication with your target audience is imperative. Failure to do so will only result in upset and confusion – particularly in a game as passionate as football.

When former Blackburn Rovers (BRFC) owners the Walker Trust sold their share of the club to Venky’s London Ltd in October 2010, chaos, it seems, would ensue.  A series of well-documented misdemeanours have long since resulted in the loss of a well-established board, a host of experienced and committed back room staff, key players, and most importantly, the trust of the club’s key stakeholder: its fans.

Headline by headline, the relationship between club and fans has broken down to the point of no repair.

Let’s take a look at how it happened…

“The fans should trust us” Mrs Desai, December 2010

The Venky’s begun their time at the helm by immediately compromising fans’ trust when they presented their inherited – proven – manager Sam Allardyce, with his P45.

The media coverage went something like this:

November 26^th 2010: Venky’s chairwoman, Anuradha Desai: “We want results and Sam has taken up the challenge. He deserves a chance. To this end, the group have promised manager Allardyce funds to spend in the January transfer window”

December 13 2012: Sam Allardyce is sacked

Coming into the club and immediately making an unpopular decision is a risky game. But one, it seems, the Venky’s were prepared to play.

At any point in the football season, sacking a manager is a bold move, but doing so seemingly without any sort of plan in place, is reckless – and the fans were all too aware.

 “I had never watched a football match in my life. Cricket, yes; hockey, sometimes; but never football” Mrs Desai, December 2010

Wildly unrealistic and ill-advised ambitions for the club were continually expressed via the media, much to the fans’ increasing sense of alarm. Amongst them were mutterings of marquee signings including Ronaldinho and David Beckham, naïve proclamations of Champions League success and aspirations for a top ‘4 or 5’ finish. The reality was a season-long struggle at the foot of the table.

The release of Venky’s TV commerical featuring Rovers legend David Dunn scoffing a chicken wing with a host of his teammates, once again placed the club firmly in ‘laughing stock’ territory.

And then there was the rumour that, until it happened, the Venky’s were blissfully unaware of the concept of relegation.

Frustrations amongst fans of the club were running high, and with every new headline came a new wave of discomfort. The establishment of action groups, online forums, pre- and post-match protests all stood to demonstrate the extent to which the Venky’s had allowed their relationship with the fans to fragment.

But it wasn’t just the owners who struggled with their media communication, as Sam Allardyce’s replacement keenly demonstrated.

 “We’ve had monumental results this season, including back-to-back clean sheets” Steve Kean, May 2012

There simply isn’t the time to type out the multitude of media blunders made by Steve Kean. Luckily, most of the best ones are detailed here.

When footage emerged of Rovers’ beleaguered manager lambasting his predecessor, Allardyce, it seemed his position had become untenable. Within hours, the hashtag #SteveKeanlies was trending on Twitter, and mounting speculation of his imminent departure was rife. By now, Kean had spent significant amounts of Venky’s cash, seen the club relegated, and had promptly led his employers into a legal battle.

Meanwhile the club remained silent, and despite the rampant speculation, Kean kept his job.

At this point, it was clear that the club needed serious help to turn around its fortunes and win back the fans’ trust… enter new ‘Global Advisor’, Shebby Singh.

 “Sorry – I am too honest for my own good” Shebby Singh, August 2012

When Singh was appointed last summer, he immediately won cheap points with fans after claiming he would see Steve Kean sacked should he fail to achieve a pre-determined run of results.

Unfortunately, he upset fans less than ten minutes later with a damning appraisal of Rovers’ longest-serving player Morten Gamst Pedersen as a ‘pensioner’.

Needless to say, fans took a dim view, and ‘Shabby’ Singh as he’s aptly nicknamed failed to win the trust of the Ewood Park faithful.

Managerial Mishaps

When Steve Kean’s resignation eventually came, it brought renewed optimism to Ewood Park.  But the circus, it would seem, was still in town.

Kean was a prime example of what can happen when an unaccomplished manager is handed an opportunity too great for his ability. The fans derision towards their chosen leader was persistent and sometimes extreme.

So the obvious next step would be to appoint a manager that the fans would approve of. Perhaps to win a few of them round?

Or perhaps not.

Four of 707 fans indicated that they felt Berg was the man for the job on a Lancashire Evening Telegraph poll

Following weeks of erratic speculation and wild guesswork amid a search shrouded in secrecy, Blackburn Rovers finally appointed Henning Berg as their new manager. Though a well-respected former Rovers player, Berg’s managerial experience was underwhelming to say the least.

Berg lasted just 57 days at the helm, during which time he managed to find himself in hot water when the media got wind of his early departure from the annual club Christmas Party.  He had allegedly refused to don a Michael Jackson wig and perform the ‘moon walk’ for fellow party-goers.

In recent months, protests at Ewood Park have cooled. But a 40% decrease in average game attendance (from 23,000 in 2010 to just over 14,000 in 2012), and diminished corporate sponsorship this season speaks for itself.

What Now?

How the market perceives your brand is fundamental to success. So far, the Venky’s campaign at Blackburn Rovers, shrouded in uncertainly and haphazard decision making, has achieved nothing but to compromise the trust of its fans.

The only way back for the club now is clear communication, honesty, and positive PR to inspire faith where it has been lost.

The post Blackburn Rovers FC: How not to handle sport PR appeared first on Custard.

It’s obvious that content is not hard to come by when surfing online. Heck, it’s all content by definition. But chances are however, the majority of it is bad content. Or, even worse, it’s great content, but it’s just not getting read.

By anyone.

Except this guy.

Let’s take a look at why that might be. Chances are that it’s one or maybe even all of the following.

Too vague

What you are talking about needs to be completely and wholly focused on something. Just blithely creating content for quantity’s sake just isn’t going to cut it. Not today.

Finding a niche market that benefits both your creative needs and the needs of a readership is difficult. But if can be done. Here is an article which highlights the benefits of finding a viable niche.

The engagement is off

A piece of content doesn’t end when you hit ‘publish’. There might be the situation where people actually read your work and feel they should comment on it.

Positive or negative, this is a good thing.

But if you’ve never actually bothered to check if people are talking about your stuff, then you need to change your ways. It’s as simple as that.

The simple ways are often the best ways. Just ask this man’s beard. Or her basket. Which is possibly full of beards.

Engagement is a crucial and viable method of gaining more readers and visitors for you content. If you are not doing this then no one will put the effort in to read your content.

You know when you watch a film and it’s so good, you just have to nag your friends to watch it as well?

Same deal. Only this time, Bruce Willis should be thanking you for watching ‘Die Hard’ for the 18^th time. You must
-          Engage
-          Interact
-          Comment
-          Say thanks
-          Include a call to action at the end to provoke this engagement

Don’t do this, and your content will die a quick cyber death. Also, it’s worth mentioning that a specific schedule must be set up when it comes to releasing content.

And you need to stick to it. It’s the only way to ensure a constant readership. Mess with the schedule and you mess with a/your reader’s trust.

Your title does not bring all the boys to the yard

See what I’ve called this article? To save you from scrolling up it’s this:

5 Reasons Why No One is Reading Your Content Right Now

That title needs no explanation. It is expressing itself quite well. When people are searching for why no one is reading their content, this is something that answers that question quite nicely.

Your title is the encapsulation of your entire content. People are not going to read your content first.

They are going to read the title. If it’s boring. If it doesn’t entice, excite or educate, then it’s going to get passed over pretty quickly.

Although, add this and just try to watch people ignore it. Moth to a flame.

Choosing a title that works and will come up in search engines is about knowing what people are going to be searching for.

Which brings me nicely onto the next reason why no one is reading your stuff.

It’s not even close to being SEO optimised or promoted

A grounded understanding of how SEO and social media work is very important today. Simply creating amazing content isn’t enough. Like engagement, you have to go the extra mile and make your content as easy to search for as possible.

I’ve said this before. I’ll say it here for the cheap seats.

People are inherently lazy.

No one reads your content because it’s on page 6 of Google search results. It’s on page 6 because you haven’t optimised it for better and more effective searching on these engines. People will generally only look at the first, maybe the second page of results. After that, you’re losing people.

Here’s a great beginner’s guide to SEO by SEOmoz. Read and put into practise if you are not already doing so.

And promote your content. I’m not saying jam everyone’s news feeds but you need to be posting a link to your stuff on the major networks; Facebook, Google+, Twitter. Again, it’s just common sense but you’d be surprised how many websites don’t do this relatively simple thing.

And the final reason here today as to why no one is reading your content?

Your content is as relevant as a coal miner’s left nipple.

Which is to say, not relevant at all. Well, except to coal miner porn enthusiasts.

It’s a very specific niche. But there’s an audience.

Not to sugar coat it, but one very real reason why people are not into your content is because it doesn’t fulfill a need.

People should want to read your stuff because it will enhance their understanding of a subject or topic. It answers a question. Or gets them to start asking questions themselves.

Talking about kittens and how much you love them is fine. Talking about how to look after them, or maybe the ways you can adopt a kitten is going to be read by far more people because that’s relevant to them.

They want to know this information because it benefits them. It helps them. 

This is in no way a definitive list as to why people are not looking at your content. But I hope it helps a little.

Have you had problems with your content? What did you do to fix the situation?

Parting shot

“What is written without effort is, in general, read without pleasure.”

-Samuel Johnson

{Images courtesy of nursing322sp10.files.wordpress.com, uncyclopedia.wikia.com}

The post 5 Reasons Why No One is Reading Your Content Right Now appeared first on Custard.

So it’s only fitting that I write a blog about the health risks of social media…

Firstly, some Honourable Mentions: Allegedly, it gives you cancer (thanks for being consistent, Daily Mail!) and also mystery illnesses…

And now, on with the real list!

5. Spending time at your computer can lead to heart disease and diabetes.

Great news for office workers like us, as it turns out that “Just two hours a day sitting in front of the computer increases your risk of developing type 2 diabetes by 20% and your risk of getting heart disease by 15%.”

You’re probably thinking that this has nothing to do with social media – it’s just a sedentary lifestyle… and yeah, you’re right. But when you consider that people are now spending approximately 8.5 hours a day looking at a screen (more if you’re me), we’re definitely becoming lazier.

4. Social Media makes you want to snack more

Go to Facebook – how many of the posts you see are completely banal and dull? Chances are it’s a high percentage, so your brain is simply going to be under-stimulated (unlike when, say, you’re reading a blog) and you’ll inevitably reach for the biscuits.

3. It causes addiction

Yep, ‘Facebook Addiction’ is a real thing. For a large percentage of people, Facebook is the first site they check when browsing the internet, and many will spend a considerable amount of time checking pictures, statuses and updates from their friends, without even posting anything themselves. A number of countries have even accepted Internet Addiction Disorder (IAD) as a true psychological diagnosis.

The addiction is based around the feeling you get from socialising online, working along the following process:

2. It can make you suspicious of the tiniest things

Who’s Joe Bloggs and why has he liked your post? Does he fancy you? Bet he does… then follows the frantic Facebook stalking, checking what he looks like and unavoidable paranoia. Facebook has actually lead to the breakup of one of my previous relationships due to this unwarranted suspicion, but she was a horrible person, so I’m not too fussed.

Add to this the passive-aggressive vagueness of a number of Facebook updates, and this paranoia can cause frayed friendships and a whole lot of arguments.

Facebook stalking is a culturally-recognised activity that we’re all probably guilty of at some point, but it’s effect on the mind and our trust in people has been irrevocably altered.

1. We forget how to be social 

Doesn’t really seem right does it? Overuse of social media making you forget how to be social? Well it’s depressingly true.

Whilst we might feel some sense of satisfaction from sharing an update with our friends, we spend far too long simply observing others – unless you’re actually using the (still annoyingly buggy) Facebook chat, the actual level of social interaction is incredibly low.

Sherry Turkle, MIT professor and author of ‘Alone Together’, said,

 “technology is threatening to dominate our lives and make us less human. Under the illusion of allowing us to communicate better, it is actually isolating us from real human interactions in a cyber-reality that is a poor imitation of the real world.”

Stephen Marche, writer for the Atlantic, weighs in with

“social media has made us more densely networked than ever. Yet for all this connectivity, new research suggests that we have never been lonelier (or more narcissistic)—and that this loneliness is making us mentally and physically ill.”

Dang.

Now, for companies, social media has massively increased customer communication, as well as ensuring that businesses are on best behaviour as their interactions will be entirely public… which, when poorly maintained, isn’t always that good of a thing.

However, despite all this, social media remains an integral part in world communication, news sharing and within digital marketing, and no more so than at Custard.

So, maybe head over to the Custard Facebook and give us a Like eh?

It won’t kill you.

The post The Top 5 Health Risks Of Social Media appeared first on Custard.

Very exciting.
Ask people what they think of Facebook’s current search and most of the words involve the letters *#@!.
I, personally can’t find my own friends on Facebook when I’m already friends with them. Even when I type their actual full names in. So what hope would anybody have finding anybody else..? Ever?

Well, Facebook quite obviously did some market research, came back with their clipboards full of expletives and sat down for a long meeting.
“We need something to rival Google.” They must have thought. Did they succeed?

When Graph Search comes out of its beta stages and becomes available to the masses, it should be a pretty good start to the rivalry. And here’s why:

• Graph Search is a ‘more advanced internal search’ – we might actually be able to find what we’re looking for within Facebook now!
  We’ll be able to search for everything within our own social graphs. Including people, places, photos and interests.
• While Google is keyword based, Graph Search uses ‘natural language’ to help you find what you’re looking for.
  You type the way you speak. So for example, anybody looking for me could type “Photos of friends who have been to cocktail bars in Preston” in to the nice looking box at the top of the page and a lot of photos of my mush would pop up. A lot.

  

But enough about me, what will these changes to Facebook mean to you and your business? Well that’s quite exciting too as it happens. Graph Search will seemingly be quite rewarding to brands and businesses. But it’s important that your brand is ‘likeable’.

• Now is a good time to start trying to increase the ‘likes’ on your Business Page. Graph Search is essentially about connections. So the more connected you are, the higher you’ll land in the search results.
• As a local business, setting up a ‘Place Page’ would be the next step. These kind of local pages give users the ability to check in and like your page. Then they can comment on your overall excellent service or the amazing coffee they’ve just had with their toasted panini.

Graph Search is going to love recommendations so encouraging your users to leave feedback, ratings and testimonials will see your page whizz up the organic Facebook search rankings.
To learn how to merge your Business Page with a Place page, take a quick tutorial from the Facebook powers that be.

It seems that Facebook is making the art of social become even more social. And here at Custard, we’re fully prepared for everything the internet has to throw at us.
We’re more than interested in what the future of Graph Search means for your business, as well as ours. And we’re fully committed to maximizing your reach via Social Media!

What do you have in mind for Graph Search? There’s a world of possibilities out there! Keep us in the loop and we’ll definitely return the favour!

The post What does Facebook Graph Search mean for your business? appeared first on Custard.

• A Brief History of Memes

 While memes have impinged on the mainstream, with many receiving high-profile news coverage from bemused journalists, knowledge of what exactly they are isn’t common.

As is commonly stated, the concept of a meme was first described by Oxford biologist and professional atheist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. He used the term to describe the way cultural information is transmitted, but it’s more likely to be familiar to internet denizens as a definition of stuff like this:

Image used under Creative Commons 2.0 courtesy of boldmagicpizza on Flickr

Essentially, the term has come to describe any concept that spreads quickly through the internet. But why is the power of memes so hard for marketers to harness?

• A Meme is Born

One of the most crucial aspects of an internet meme is its origins. While each meme’s birth is different, there are some common themes that run through their creation.

For instance, a video-based meme could spring from a well-spotted piece of news footage or amateur video. Picture-based memes spring from an eclectic variety of sources and then go on to be endlessly remixed by the dwellers of sites like 9gag and Memebase.

Image used under Creative Commons attribution license courtesy of David Silverman fraktala on argazkiak.org

This is especially true of the sub-genre known as Rage Comics. These crudely-drawn shorts usually utilise a set of pre-made cartoon faces that express a simple human emotion (although new ones are adopted into general use every so often).

Their explosive popularity stems from their ability to put a humorous spin on shared experiences and custom comic creation applications ensure that new ones are churned out ad nauseam. Celebrities posing with apt expressions have been also mercilessly co-opted into the trend and used to great effect.

“A perfect example is the sad ‘Okay’ face. Just looking at that face gives you a pretty good understanding of how that person feels. Expressing that exact same feeling in words would take some creative writing,” Dan Awesome, webmaster of custom comic creation site Rage Maker told Ars Technica in a recent interview.

In the not-so-distant past, it would have been easy to say memes were the product of hip or edgy internet hubs like SomethingAwful, Reddit and 4Chan (and indeed many were), but as memes have been brought into the mainstream, so has their creation.

No matter where they originate, memes have a few key things in common:

They have spontaneity – While not all memes are spontaneous, all provide a snapshot of that ‘flash of brilliance’ or dare I say ‘random’ moment – or moments – that immortalise them (which in internet terms means they knock around for a few months then are occasionally looked upon fondly in the future).
They’re insightful – The old adage of a picture painting a thousand words really comes into play with image-based memes especially, although the added text tends to bring this up to 1,010 or so.
Or funny – While not always ‘laugh out loud’ funny, successful memes will usually at least generate a wry smile or nod of knowing humour in the recipient.
They’re ‘sticky’ – In his bestseller The Tipping Point, author Malcom Gladwell suggests ‘stickiness’ is one of the three rules governing whether a trend will become ‘epidemic’. He loosely defines this as a special quality that embeds a phenomenon in the minds of the general populace and memes seem to have this in spades.
They’re spreadable – A good meme lends itself to being copied and remixed. More on this later.

•  How a meme spreads

Replicating viral content’s ability to quickly spread has become a holy grail in the world of marketing and efforts in this area have seen both success and failure on an epic scale.

The cultural impact of memes is hard to ignore, but one of the key issues with using or hijacking memes for marketing is their short half-life. Jumping on news stories to generate publicity is a tried and tested marketing staple, but trying to do the same with memes presents difficulties.

As David Meerman Scott notes in his book Newsjacking: How to Inject Your Ideas into a Breaking News Story and Generate Tons of Media Coverage, the best time to capitalise on a news story is between when it breaks and when public interest in the occurrence grows.

The same is true of memes, but the main problem marketers face is that by the time they cotton on to a meme and work out a way to use it for their own purposes, it’s usually well past its sell-by date.

If we use the above diagram as a template, a meme ‘breaking’ is its creation or discovery. Unlike a news story, which is inherently discoverable – in their initial stages, memes are typically confined to their place or channel of their birth.

From this position, they are spread and remixed from person to person until they reach critical mass and hit the public domain or ‘peak’. At this point, bewildered journalists report on these bizarre new crazes (typically in the ‘also in the news’ section), the meme spreads outside of its usual channels and quickly begins to wither.

• Transmission

Different types of meme spread at different speeds and how popular they are seems to be proportional to how fast they die out. The ‘coolness’ factor arguably comes into play here as well, with memes losing social currency once they enter the mainstream and your mum starts sharing them on Facebook.

For instance, behavioural memes like planking last a veritable eternity when compared to niche, picture-based memes like Arrow to the Knee.

Video-based content is arguably the most shareable and quick-spreading type of meme. Our growing obsession with smart, hand-held gadgets has made it easier than ever to share clips both person-to-person and on social channels. Similarly, the ability to remix and respond to such content in the same format is extensive thanks to the near-ubiquitous spread of video capture technology.

• Harnessing the power of Memes

As mentioned, many brands have made forays into using the power of memes for marketing purposes and despite a few cases of triumph, more often than not, this has been ineffective if not actively damaging.

Memes are more of an art than a science and there’s no guaranteed formula to ensure success. However, there are definitely a few dos and don’ts that can apply:

-          Do - Engage the public via Twitter at a live event.

-          Don’t – Do this if your shady dealings have been recently exposed by the mass media.

-          Do – Co-opt a popular word, phrase or image into your marketing campaign

-          Don’t – Do this if you don’t completely understand the word or phrased you’ve used.

-          Do – Encourage sharing, remixing and even creation of your meme by promoting it on social media channels and internet hotspots like Reddit.

-          Don’t – Appeal to the internet to help create your marketing campaign if there’s any risk this can backfire.

Most importantly, once your meme is in the public domain, be prepared to let it fly free and un-accosted – even though this will leave you with significantly less control than in a traditional campaign. There’s no guarantee your efforts will be successful and even popular (hundreds of newly-created memes never get off the ground) and the finished product may not look anything like the material you started with.

But while the risks associated with meme-marketing are certainly high, they’re proportional to the potential payoff. Successfully co-opting memes into a campaign can help spread your message at a pace that would put wildfire to shame.

So what’s your experience with memes and marketing? Give me a shout in the comments and if you found this worth a read, please give it a share on your social channel of choice.

The post Marketing and Memes (or Content: Y U No Go Viral?) appeared first on Custard.

What’s up for grabs? £50 baby! Yes you heard me right; fifty smackeronies!

 Simply follow us on Twitter @custardhq, retweet the post above and tell us what you think the real colour of custard is. It couldn’t be easier and you could win £50 worth of Amazon vouchers.

It’s not a trick question (or maybe it is…) we really do want to know what you believe #realcustard looks like.

The prize draw is only open to UK residents and those that are aged 18 years and over. So if you fit in with these terms and conditions, enter out Twitter competition today. What do you have to lose?

What would you buy with fifty quid?

I did a quick survey with some of my colleagues to find out what they would do…

• Sam: “A new guitar amp”
• Halit: “A new pair of trainers and some Blu-ray DVDs.”
• Gerald: “A solid state drive.”
• Laura: “Urban Outfitter’s Cambridge Satchel Company Tan Satchel”
• Aurora: “Some Jean Paul Gautier perfume.”

As for myself, it would definitely have to be some Kurt Geiger shoes. A girl can wish!

And here are is all the legal, technical stuff that we have to include:

Terms & Conditions for Twitter Competition

This prize draw is only open to UK residents aged 18 years and over.

1. The competition is not open to employees of Custard and anyone else involved in the operation of selecting the winners, their agents, families or partners.
2. To be entered into this prize draw, you have to:
   1. Follow @custardhq on Twitter
   2. Use the #realcustard hashtag with your entry answer
3. You will be entered into the competition until the closing date of Jan 31^st 2013.
4. The winner will be selected at random. The judge’s decision is final and no correspondence will be entered into in this regard.
5. The competition will run from 18^th to 31^st January 2013. The winner will be notified via an e-mail to their provided address and a post on the COMPANY BLOG.
6. There are no alternatives to the prize offered.
7. By entering the competition, entrants agree that, if they win, their name may be published on the Custard Blog page or made available to anyone requesting details of the winner.
8. Custard reserves the right to cancel the prize draw at any point.

The post What Would You Spend £50 on: a New Pair of Shoes… a Night Out? appeared first on Custard.

There have been a ton of posts written about why creating a great piece of content works or ways to get your content noticed.

But chances are, you probably know all this. I’m not here to talk about the whys and ways.

I want to talk to you about the ingredients themselves. Not all of them. Like I said, I’ve written about this before. So here’s just a taste. A couple of things that you always should keep in mind.

These are the little pieces of a much larger pie. A pie that should taste delicious and fill the creative stomach of anyone who wants a piece.

This is what should be going into every piece of content you put out there. Now, I’ve spoken before about how to write great content. This is just a refresher course on the ingredients that you absolutely have to check are in each piece you write.

A headline that works.

Copyblogger said this first, but it’s something worth knowing. On average, if 10 people happen to click on your piece, then chances are that 8 will read your headline. But only 2 people will read the entire piece.

This clearly indicates that the strength of your headline is something you need to consider wisely.

The headline should really feed into another point I want to get across.

Your content should answer a question.

What you are writing should be telling people something they don’t know and maybe should.

Your headline should be telling people that what you are writing does that.

The juicy chunks of content filling.

If you’ve managed to turn those 2 people into 5, or 6 or hopefully 11, then be aware of the following.

People are inherently lazy.

We get bored easily and when it comes to reading on the web, we scan rather than read. Huge chunk of writing?

No thanks.

This is why you need to spice things up with:

• Images
• Graphics
• Pictures
• Video

These are the morsels that make your content ripe and succulent. Those quick and easy digestible pieces of content food will go down much better than a big old slab of food wordage.

Pictured: what happens when you swallow your prose whole.

The right amounts. From the right shops.

Sometimes, buying your ingredients from the pound shop will not cut it. It won’t taste nice. It won’t bake right. It’s going to be a terrible pie.

Use quality ingredients. Source your information and content from accurate and reliable places. Want to see an example of bad content?

Take a look at the Daily Mail. In 2012, they wrote content on Carol Vorderman renting a luxury yacht based on this:

Vorderman only meant the tweet as a joke, yet this story was then printed as being fact a few hours later, without proper reporting and sourcing being done.

The bottom line here is -

research, research, research.

The bottom line here is simply bottom.

It’s not hard to create really interesting content if you use the right ingredients in the right proportion.

Agree? Disagree? Think there’s more to it? Want more pictures of classy older lady Carol Vorderman?

Let me know your thoughts.

Parting Shot

 “In the writing process, the more a story cooks, the better.“

 - Doris Lessing

{Images courtesy of Shutterstock and Daily Mail}

The post Baking the Perfect Article : What Needs to Go into Your Content appeared first on Custard.

Every digital agency has at some point come across a client’s website which features duplicate content. This is bad….very bad.

Deliberate duplicated content that has been created to manipulate search engines will result in penalisation. Your website could be removed altogether and you may have to submit a reconsideration request to Google.

Obviously not all content is copied maliciously and there are times when multiple pages have a lot of identical content such as;

• Store items linked via multiple distinct URLs
• Discussion forum
• Printer-only versions of web pages

However, to improve your rankings and avoid a penalty, you MUST endeavour to re-write the web copy to be unique and conversion-friendly.

Step 1: Identify duplicate content

In order to check that your site does not feature cloned copy, there are a number of steps that you can use.

Here at Custard, we use tools like Xenu or Screaming Frog which basically exports a list of all the pages on the website. But there are a number of tools that you can use and here is a breakdown;

• Copyscape

 

This checks if your content is original and searches the web for exact matches. It is fantastic for individual pages and articles, but it’s not the best if you plan to check through an entire site.

• Xenu

 This is a handy app that checks if there are any broken links on your website.

Once you have a list of all the pages on the website, you can sort through them in ascending order and very quickly identify if pages have duplicate URL’s, meta titles, and meta descriptions. It then creates a good base to go into the page itself and see if the content on there is also duplicated.

Just take the below screen shot as an example:

When looking through the Custard site, our SEO executive Jamal found that there were two separate pages with the same URL. This is worth investigating to see they are two separate versions and to ensure the content is unique.

Step 2: Implement measures to avoid duplicate content

• 301 redirects
• No Index, No Follow tags
• Setting URL parameters

If you have restructured your site, use 301 redirects to redirect the user and Google to the correct page.

• Avoid publishing stubs

No we do not mean the ends of cigarettes. Stubs are empty pages that do not have any real content on or significant existence. If you do not have a page ready with meta descriptions and content, simply do not publish it yet; or use the noindex meta tag to block it from being indexed until you are ready.

• Minimise boilerplate repetition

You can have a piece of generic text that features on the bottom of every page but you can be penalised for this, as it is duplicated content. Instead, why not include a very brief summary at the bottom of the page that links to the main page that has more details.

• Make sure every page is unique

There are times on a website when there can be two or three pages that are very similar. For example, here at Custard, a page about SEO and a page about content marketing may feature similar information on both pages, because they are related.

As an alternative, you can either merge the two pages into one about SEO copywriting, or simply expand each page to only contain content on each topic.

Step 3: Re-write content to be unique

Finally, you have identified all copied content and you have applied tools to ensure it doesn’t happen again. Now what? Well, if you have found any duplicate content on your website, the key is to take the page down ASAP or re-write it immediately.

Either way, it cannot stay up there because sooner or later, the fiscal friends at Google will punish you. Need someone to re-write your web pages so they are creative, SEO-friendly, well optimised and MOST IMPORTANTLY unique?

Get in touch with us today to enquire about our innovative, awe-inspiring content team!

The post Fiscal Friends: How to Combat Duplicate Web Content appeared first on Custard.

As a self-confessed cat lady, I must admit that I was practically gleeful when I heard about Catmoji. It’s just what I’d been looking for all along – a place where I could post up all of my cat pictures without being judged.

However, I’m not so naïve as to believe that Catmoji isn’t just a little bit weird. While it claims to be a social network for cats, it isn’t really. It’s a social network for cat-obsessed people to come together to revel in their cat-love together (hm, that sounds dodgier than I meant it to).

Click the image to see a larger version.

Catmoji has essentially just taken Pinterest and made it much more specific, with only cat and cat-related images on it. From magnificent moggies to pretty pedigrees, you can find, like and share all kinds of pictures.

While Pinterest only amuses me for a short space of time (I usually go through bursts of using it and ignoring it), I’m genuinely hooked on Catmoji. It’s tapped into something I love, and now I’m constantly checking to see if people have responded to pictures of my cat Jack. I also enjoy that I have somewhere to post funny cat pictures I find on the web – posting them to Facebook just fills my timeline with cats and makes me look strange.

Here’s what the main Catmoji page looks like:

Click the image to see a larger version.

If you thought social networks devoted to specific hobbies and interests stop at Catmoji, you’d be ever so wrong.

I’ve managed to find three other interest-related social networks with just a quick search online, so there’s no telling how many there are out there.

As an example of how insane the internet is getting, here are some weird and wonderful social networks that you might want to join:

Click the image to see a larger version.

The Bear Club

It’s not nearly as dodgy as it sounds. It’s just a bit, well, sad.

The Bear Club is a social network for your teddy bear. It’s not just teddy bears on there though, you can also find Trolls (remember them from the 90s?), BJDs (ball jointed dolls) and other non-bear examples. People can sign up and post profiles of their bears. Their bears can also have blogs which, slightly scarily, a lot of people write as though they actually were their bear.

I’m backing away slowly now.

Click the image to see a larger version.

Trot ON

This social network is just for people that love horses and horse riding. I must admit, I like the name of the network, and it’s much less weird than some of the others out there. There are sections on Trot ON for posting videos and photos of horses, as well as finding out how to train horses. Registered users can also browse the shop to buy horse riding clothes and horse equipment. Users can also share notes with one another to stay in touch with, as the site says, ‘horsey’ friends.

Click the image to see a larger version.

UFO Social

Do you believe in little green men and ghostly goings-on? You need to join UFO Social then, the social network for paranormal research. The site gives users a chance to record sightings and the possible uploads can include:

- UFOs

- Aliens

- Ghosts

- Orbs

- Crop circles

- Pyramids

- Artifacts

- Bigfoot sightings

Users can upload pictures and videos of their sightings as proof, and to give other users a chance to catch them as well.

The real truth is that social networks stretch much farther than Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and Pinterest. There are thousands of social networks out there, so if you have any specific interests you can guarantee there’s a site you can join to share image and videos and to meet likeminded individuals.

Do you think Catmoji is taking social networking a bit too far?

The post Catmoji – a social network too far or a cat-spiration? appeared first on Custard.

Experts predict that digital sales will account for 45% of retailer’s revenue by 2014 and whatever your feelings on the death of the high street, there’s no denying the potent power of ecommerce.

To get a better idea of what’s important to those shopping on the internet – we delved into the issue with our own survey.

•  No Dicing With Pricing

 One key finding was the significance of a clear pricing structure. Of those we polled, more than half claimed that they wouldn’t buy if delivery prices weren’t clear from the outset.

How important is it that the delivery charge is shown next to the price of the item on the product page?

•   Content to Browse

Given the growing importance of content, we also examined where these shoppers liked to get their information from. An intriguing, but somewhat intuitive, finding that emerged was the weight they placed on the opinion of others.

Nearly 60% of respondents revealed they would rather get the low-down from user reviews, as opposed to the manufacturer’s product description (24%) or the website’s product information page (18%).

User reviews also trumped supporting information like return policies, payment options, delivery times and size guides.

When reading about a product, which of the following would you prefer to read?

• A Picture Paints a Thousand Words

Our surveyed shoppers were certainly keen – and discerning – when it came to visual content on an ecommerce site. When browsing pictures, image quality was noted as an important factor to 66% of respondents.

The ability to view products from a range of angles came in a close second, with nearly half of those polled claiming that this feature played a significant role in their purchasing decisions.

Images are also of paramount importance when it comes to product information. A whopping 59% of those we queried wanted to see a combination of text and images. However, despite the growing popularity of online videos only 9% of respondents wanted these to feature alongside text content.

What is important to you when looking at product images?

• Take-Aways

So what practical advice can we extract from these findings? Well, when it comes to running an ecommerce site you need to:

-          Be transparent about pricing – More than half of shoppers are put off by hidden delivery charges.

-          Implement user reviews – People trust the opinion of other shoppers over the retailer’s description or that of the manufacturer.

-          Provide quality images – Given how important it is to complement text with pictures, it’s well worth investing in professional photography to showcase your products in the best light possible.

If you’re looking for ways to improve your ecommerce offering, get in touch with Custard today. We offer a bespoke service and can help provide insights, analysis and answers to your marketing questions.

We shy away from off-the-shelf products and provide a range of tailored services, including ecommerce site design, PR and optimisation for those looking to improve their return on investment.

The post What’s important to online shoppers? appeared first on Custard.

The David Beckham of the 1800’s. Image from art.com.

Today, this is a totally new beast. Recently advertising certain items or brands has had its perks for the sports stars. However, there’s a flipside to everything.

Turkish Airlines – Kobe Bryant and Lionel Messi

Something that springs to mind more recently is the new Turkish Airlines advert. Some of you may not have seen this advert before, well luckily for you there’s this thing called YouTube. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great ad and works well for Turkish Airlines but alongside four time world footballer of the year Lionel Messi, is Kobe Bryant the wisest choice?

You may have heard about Kobe Bryant’s assault case back in 2003 when a 19 year old woman accused him of assaulting her. Now next to the squeaky clean Lionel Messi, Bryant looks like the devil. The case was subsequently dropped, however a separate civil case came around which Bryant and his accuser settled out of court. Part of the settlement included Kobe publicly apologising to his accuser.

Good versus Evil? You decide. Image from elitedaily.com.

Lucozade Sport – Mo Farah

Aside from a BBC Panorama programme categorically stating that heavily advertised sports drinks have little or no sporting benefit to the consumer, Lucozade still teamed up with eventual double Olympic gold medallist Mo Farah to advertise that theirs are the drink to get if you want to go ‘Faster. Stronger. For Longer.’

All of these sports products that claim to be performance enhancing, according to the Panorama programme, have a distinct lack of evidence to back up their claims. However, people still buy these products and by the time London 2012 rolled around, Lucozade were laughing all the way to the bank when Mo Farah won gold in both of his individual track events, easily justifying his £500,000 sponsorship deal with the company.

No thanks to Lucozade, obviously. Image from sports.yahoo.com.

Paddy Power – Nicklas Bendtner and Euro 2012

Denmark striker, Nicklas Bendtner is an example of how a brand can get people talking. During Denmark’s 3-2 defeat to Portugal at the European Championships last summer, Nicklas Bendtner scored twice for the Danes to level the scores at 2-2, this led to something a little naughty on Bendtner’s part.

When the towering forward netted the equaliser for Denmark he ran off and celebrated by lifting up his shirt to reveal a pair of pants with Irish bookmakers Paddy Power embroidered on them.

The only party to be affected in all of this was Nicklas Bendtner as he was ordered to pay a fine of £80k (100,000 euros) and was also banned for one competitive international fixture for revealing the sponsored underwear.

Paddy Power on the other hand saw a jump in revenues and profits after the stunt but I think Bendtner will be reluctant to partake in anything like that again.

Here, have some profit, Paddy! Image from dailymail.co.uk.

Various Big Brands – Tiger Woods

Tiger Woods was, in 2009, confirmed to be the first sportsman to make a billion dollars in career earnings. However, things quickly turned sour for Woods in ‘09.

With claims of an extramarital affair with a New York City nightclub manager coming out in the press, it was only going to get worse for Woods before it got better.

As well as his golfing talents, he was also the face of a number of big name companies around the globe. When the news of his affairs broke, yes affairs, not just the one, he lost a lot of big money deals. Some of the companies who dropped him from their advertising campaigns were:

• Accenture.
• AT&T.
• Gatorade.
• General Motors.

Gillette suspended all advertising featuring Woods and TAG Heuer dropped him from advertising in December 2009 and then ended the deal when his contract expired in 2011. However, Nike and Electronic Arts both stuck by him. In 2009 a study estimated the shareholder loss from Woods’ affairs was between $5 and $12 billion. That’s a lot of billions.

True story, Tiger. True story. Image from perthnow.com.au.

So, to wrap up (something Tiger should have done). I think we’ve all learnt that sports and advertising can work very well together, just look at David Beckham. He does EVERYTHING! However, this isn’t to say Beckham is an angel, remember the Rebecca Loos fiasco? Anyway, as beneficial as it can be for a company, it can also be costly for either the company or individual involved.

Take the Nicklas Bendtner story. He suffered from it by getting fined and banned but Paddy Power really reaped the benefits. There are some advertising campaigns which we are yet to see any backlash from, the Kobe Bryant/Turkish Airlines ad, but that could prove to be costly in the future or it could prove to be beneficial.

I think it would be a wise idea for any big brand to really look at all aspects when it comes to a new advertising campaign and try to avoid any backlash where possible. Admittedly, there was nothing the likes of TAG Heuer and the likes could do about the Tiger Woods one.

Do you think any other should have been included or is there anything you can take away from the above? If so, let me know in the comments below.

As Mark Twain, the American author once said “Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.”

The post The Power of Sports and Advertisement appeared first on Custard.

But for every Tweet we find ourselves glad to have read, there must be at least ten that we could have done without the ill-fate to stumble upon.  Though admittedly personally compelled to sift through dross snippets of insignificant others’ lives (I’m looking at you, Helen Flanagan), one arena that really can’t get away with spouting the inane, is the corporate sphere.

An avid Twit for some time now, I myself have been subjected to a wealth of ill-executed rubbish, generated it would seem, because ‘Sharon in Marketing’ felt it was about time.

Pleasantries about the weather, shout-outs to ‘lovely followers’ or snaps of what the team are having for lunch is all very well.  But is this really what the People want?  Or could it be that they’re crying out for something funny, unpredictable and frankly, insane?

Well, yes it could.

Take a bow @BetfairPoker, you utter delight.

What they do?

Refreshingly unexpected, Betfair Poker treat their followers to such irreverent musings as:

So blatent and determined are they in their avoidance of anything remotely poker-related, the Betfair persona reels in its target audience by offering them content that they actually want to connect with.  And pushing 25,000 followers at time of writing, you can bet your bottom dollar that the account is generating a nice word-of-mouth response.

How can this success be imitated?

Don’t be afraid to be cavalier.

When the audience you’re trying to reach is duelling with a bombardment of information online, the question is: how can you get your content noticed?

The trick is to give your followers something they aren’t getting elsewhere.  Ok, Betfair’s bereft accounts employee may not be to everyone’s taste, but the chances are his inane ramblings will leave you stifling sniggers behind your computer screen.  And stifled sniggering leads to sharing.

Whilst Betfair lead the parade, others are beginning to join the fun too. @WaterstonesOxfordSt and @ArenaFlowers, are both doing a fine job of thinking outside the 140-character box and treating their followers to a little daily brilliance.

Here at Custard, we believe that quality content is all about looking at ways to take a fresh and innovative approach.  The purpose of content marketing is to engage the audience first and foremost.  Generate conversation, pique interest, and give people something to share with their mate, Gary.  Then they won’t mind when you slip in a cheeky reference to your excellent current promotion on fish.

What do you think? Are there any other Twits out there worth their weight in gold?

The post Twitter Tips: why @BetfairPoker are getting it right appeared first on Custard.

What blows my mind even more is that a lot of those whacky gadgets actually exist in the real world.

So, here are four real-world sci-fi gadgets that you might not have noticed before:

1) Video calling

You might think you look like a bit of an idiot when you FaceTime your friends in public, but you’re actually fulfilling the dreams of more than a few sci-fi fans out there.

The Star Trek series in particular showed off the technological advances of the future, one of which was the ability to speak with someone via video link no matter how far away they were.

There are actually quite a few ways for people to video call in the real world, starting with your mobile phone or tablet.

iPhone users can FaceTime each other, and you can also use Google Talk and Skype on all mobile devices, as well as on Macs and Windows PCs.

2) Mobile phones

Another prop used in Star Trek was the flip-up communicator, which could be seen as the first mobile phone. With it, Star Trek’s characters could communicate with each other or with members of the crew still on the ship.

The inventor of the mobile phone, Martin Cooper, actually said that Star Trek was his inspiration. I find it amazing to believe that he managed to take something out of a sci-fi screenwriter’s mind and turn it into a reality.

3) Self-driving cars

Autonomous vehicles are another staple of the sci-fi genre. In October 2012 news broke of Google’s new driverless car, which was being test driven around San Francisco.

Other car companies are looking to jump on the bandwagon now as well. Toyota and Audi are set to unveil new self-driving cars. While they may only be available for the rich and famous, it shows that we’re finally catching up with the future of sci-fi.

4) Universal translators

In The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, if you wanted to understand another language without having to learn it, you just stuck a Babel Fish in your ear. A Babel Fish is a small living animal that feeds on brainwaves and translates any language into the one you understand, so you can communicate with pretty much anyone.

No, Babel Fishes haven’t been invented. But we do have the sci-fi sounding Phraselator P2. It’s been used by military personnel working in Iraq, Afghanistan and Southeast Asia to help in communicating with locals and is said to be over 70% accurate.

Simply choose the language you want to translate to and then speak into it. It then finds the correct language files and plays them for the other person, so they can understand.

5) Big brother – with a difference

It’s estimated that the UK has over 4.2 million CCTV cameras monitoring our every move. Many of these cameras are equipped with facial recognition systems much like the one seen in Minority Report in order to identify criminals.

New laws will also allow for internet surveillance to combat serious crime, terrorism and paedophilia in the UK, and the USA has a similar system in place with the FBI.

Over 56% of people also use social networks, which broadcast their views for all the world to see. Not only this, but we can also use SEO and social media techniques to track user demographics and search terms to target specific audiences.

While the Big Brother of George Orwell’s 1984 was a totalitarian dictator, our Big Brother is much different. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that it’s a good thing.

Many of today’s surveillance techniques can be used to fight and even prevent crime, which is very sci-fi of us. Nothing you do online is private anymore, but who says that’s bad? With targeted advertising, SEO and social media, we’re making the internet a better place. Rather than stumbling through pages and pages of useless information, we can now create useful, informative pages that get users to react.

Maybe we all misunderstood George Orwell’s Big Brother?

So there you have it – five sci-fi gadgets and technologies that you probably thought were still in the realms of impossibility. Do you know of any others?

Images credited to berglondon.com, StephenGroves, psiaki, cdrummbks and Shutterstock.

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What point am I trying to make? I’m getting to it…

Writing for the web in 2013 is different; it requires much more creativity, passion and skill. Whilst there is plenty of advice that we can reel off to you to enhance your copy, here is THE one almighty tip to boost your writing wizardry.

The web is full to the brim of thousands of articles. The chances are whatever industry you work in and whatever concept you are writing about, there will be an article already written on the exact same topic.

For this reason, you need to think outside of the box to offer something new. It can prove difficult to be original when there are millions of other bloggers out there but where this is a will, there is a way.

Headlines

This is the MOST important aspect of an article. If you don’t grab the reader’s attention straight away and jump out at them from the screen, then writing the rest of the content is pointless.

Here is an example;

Type ‘Step-by-Step Guide to Revamping the Bedroom’ into Google and you get almost 4 million results. That’s a lot of DIY articles to compete with.

However, you can alter the headline to be different. Here are some great ideas that are fun and imaginative.

Why you need to revamp your Bedroom

How to jazz up your Boudoir

How to Revitalise your Bedroom

From Bleak to Chic – Transform you Bedroom

From Drab to Fab – Bedroom Renovation

Design Flourishes that will make your Bedroom Stand Out

Where your Bedroom is Going Wrong

Why not check out the Google Keywords Tool for creating high search titles?

Mix it up

Content is not just a 300 word post published on a client’s blog, or a long piece of landing page on a website. Ask yourself;

• Could I turn this into an infographic?
• Would it make a great image?
• Can I link or embed a video?
• Can I use bullet points instead of a long paragraph?
• Would sub-headings break the text up for the reader?

Be niche

It can be easy to suffer writer’s block when creating lots of informative, interesting content but the possibilities are endless. The key is to take your industry and keyword which you hope to rank for, and then apply it to various other categories.

For example; children’s toys and gifts

TV- Most successful child TV actors

Eco- The best eco-toys for 2013

Finance- Preparing the Nest Egg: Securing Your Kid’s Future

Music – Why your baby needs musical toys

What concepts can you think of for the rest of these categories?

• Home and garden
• Technology
• Celebrities
• Food
• Fashion
• Myths
• Travel
• Marketing
• Animals
• Sport

Now you have some ideas to help your creative juices flow in 2013. Got another tip which you think is worth mentioning? Let me know peeps!

The post Top 1 Copy Writing Tip for 2013 appeared first on Custard.

What is viral content?

For those that are unsure of what I mean by ‘viral’ videos though, I’m simply referring to videos that gain huge popularity on the internet in an incredibly short space of time. You could say that they spread like a flu virus, hence their quirky name.

We spoke some about viral videos back in 2010 in our post on the Most Viewed Viral Brands of 2010 but a lot has changed in the two years since then. Many companies have tried to harness the power of viral videos in the past, but unfortunately it isn’t always as effective as they’d hope.

Be natural

The thing is, when it comes to creating viral content, it seems to work best when it has good intentions. By this, I mean that content which is completely unique and which hasn’t been created with a view to going global is usually better received. Take the cute viral videos such as those from Maru the cat and Boo the Dog, for example. Their owners probably didn’t set out to have the entire world aww’ing over videos of their pets, but it happened nonetheless.

And just how did that happen?

Well, the key aspect of viral content, whether it be videos, pictures, written content or online games, is that there’s always a social aspect to it. One of the best examples of this at the moment is the incredibly catchy song ‘Gangnam Style’ from PSY.

As of August 2012 it was the most-watched video on YouTube, overtaking Carly Rae Jepsen’s ‘Call Me Maybe’, and it’s also the most-viewed K-pop (Korean pop) music video. It’s thought that rapper T-pain was one of the very first to kick-start the global spread of the song when he linked to the video via Twitter. From there, the music video uploaded by OfficialPSY has been watched 878,538,594 times.

Viral content and social media

However, Gangnam Style will diminish in popularity before long and, once that happens, the next big thing in viral content will quickly take its place. Companies that are looking to increase their brand image through the use of viral marketing may not be able to manufacture a viral video very easily, but what they can do is ensure their content makes the most of social media.

Why do people share content?

Nowadays, if someone reads, sees or hears something they like, they instantly want to share it with their friends. Social Media Today has an excellent article on the reasons why people feel this urge to share, and it says that we do this because we want:

-          to bring valuable and entertaining content to others
-          to define ourselves to others
-          to grow and nourish relationships
-          for self-fulfilment
-          to market causes or brands

So, if people have this need to share what they like, companies should cash in on this natural instinct. However, this does mean that, more now than ever, all sharable content needs to be of the highest quality. Marketers should invest in unique, original and interesting copy and video marketing that will really make their company stand out from the crowd, so that they can be the next big thing on the viral web.

Make it funny yet meaningful

Before I leave you with this nugget of advice though, I thought I’d provide you with an excellent example of intentionally created viral content in action.

It appeared on YouTube on 14th November 2012 and the version uploaded by user DumbWays2Die has now received 30,555,923 views. And why did it work? Because the marketers thought outside the box with it and instead of simply creating a dusty old video of people being cautious around railroad crossings, they use colourful animation combined with black comedy and a catchy song to get people to watch and listen to their message.

Do you have any tips for marketers looking to create sharable content?

The post How can businesses use viral content? appeared first on Custard.

Great strides have been made in this area lately, as demonstrated by the likes of Apple’s Siri and Google’s advanced voice search application and the function seems to be inexorably linked to the future of search. But what powers this enigmatic technology, why has it taken so long to arrive and how will it affect the way we interact with the web in the future?

• Why Do We Want It?

Voice recognition is an area with many applications and has been sought after for more than a century. Alexander Graham Bell and his contemporaries arguably made the first forays into the field with research that eventually led to the Dictaphone and telephone.

Bell aimed to create a device that could signify sound to the deaf and hard of hearing and many of the obvious applications of voice recognition technology are as an aid for the physically disabled.

However, in today’s ever-more-connected world, accurate voice recognition can have a profound effect on the way in which we interact with technology and the web. This is especially true when taking in to account just how attached we are to our mobile computing devices.

But don’t just take my word for it. In a recent media presentation Google revealed how much weight it’s placing on the field.

“If we are going to build the search of the future, we will have to solve difficult technology issues like speech recognition and natural language,” it said.

• What’s The Problem?

With all the interest, you’d think voice recognition (also called automatic speech recognition or automatic speech understanding) would have shown up a lot sooner. So what’s the hold up?

There’s an array of problems when it comes to teaching computers to do something that comes so naturally to us. For a start, there’s the issue of dialects – and not just regional ones. It turns out that we have different social dialects depending on who we’re talking to. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Some other stumbling blocks for speech recognition include slang, background noise, the disparity between spoken and written language, the length left between words (known as word boundary ambiguity), the recording hardware used, variability of speech within a single speaker, the sex of a speaker and the speed at which we talk.

• Advances

Voice recognition technology has ploughed valiantly forward over the years, but only started creeping into the mainstream in the 1990s, mainly due to the computing power required. One of the most recognisable early applications took place in call centres. The AT&T Operator line was a pioneer in this field that helped these facilities route calls to the right place via automated voice recognition.

However, this unglamorous application was a far cry from the human-machine interaction made famous by the likes of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Star Wars. In fact, it was only in the late 1990s that we saw the introduction of software that could be used on your average PC.

The 21st century has seen major advances in the field. Voice recognition applications no longer need to be arduously trained to attune to a specific user and in addition to Google and Apple’s offerings, there are a range of apps that enable relatively straightforward tasks to be completed via a voice interaction-powered assistant.

• The Future

The repertoire of tasks that our mobile voice recognition assistants can perform is only set to grow and search will remain one of their most important functions. The growth of semantic search, which would enable software to better-understand the meaning behind queries, could have wide-ranging effects on the field.

Imagine, for instance, your personal assistant being able to not only find you a top-rated, local take-away but actually order you a meal. Similarly, while you’re currently able to find a taxi with Siri and co, in the future, you’ll be able to have them autonomously book one for you.

“Our young children and grandchildren will think it is completely natural to talk to machines,” Microsoft’s Eric Horvitz told the New York Times.

Microsoft has been one of the forerunners in the field and the coming years could see the company break down language barriers. Back in November, Rick Rashid demonstrated a really impressive real-time voice translator on behalf of the firm, which could open new realms of possibilities for the field.

• SEO-killer?

Voice interaction is an arguably inevitable evolution of our relationship with computers. However, despite all the recent advances in the field there are still a lot of creases to be ironed out and unclear implications for the technology.

One such issue is how the user will interact with search. Assuming we one day get to a point where voice recognition-powered assistants are sophisticated to the point of being ubiquitous, how will information be imparted?

This could be fairly straightforward in cases where the query has a clear-cut answer. For instance, you could ask “when is Easter this year?” and receive a concrete date. However, when asking something like “what were the causes of the American civil war?” how much detail would be required? Similarly, how will search engines rank results and monetise a service where answers are simply spat out as needed?

Such problems are by no means insurmountable, but it’ll be really interesting to see exactly how they’re overcome.

Voice recognition and interaction are genies that are firmly out of the bottle and it’s hard to envision a more intuitive way of interacting with our gadgets. And when considered alongside exciting augmented reality products like Google’s Project Glass, it’s easy to imagine a future where technology takes a less visible but increasingly important role in our lives.

If you’ve any thoughts on the future of voice technology, be sure to hit me up in the comments and if you’ve liked this post, don’t forget to share on your social media of choice.

Images used by permission under the Creative Commons Licence courtesy of Custard Media.

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One thing is for certain; our success is down to all the hard-working team here at Custard HQ. In tribute of all our creative contributors that have poured their heart, blood, sweat and tears into our blog, we are turning back the clock and going nostalgic.

I have scoured all the blog posts of 2012 (all 74 of them) and picked out the top 10 posts that are the cream of the crop.

Please enjoy reading our fantastic articles and we wish you a Merry Christmas and a great New Year!

•  How Much Should A Digital Media Agency Charge For SEO?

In this article, Lauren pays tribute to an infographic published by SEOMoz on the pricing set by UK digital marketing agencies. The survey analyses the rates of agencies that offer search engine optimisation (SEO) and explains Custard’s point of view on our price packages.

• Google Updates: The End of ‘Easy’ SEO

Google has been extremely busy this year, releasing a number of algorithm changes including Panda, ‘Above the Fold’ Update, Penguin and Author Rank. Although each one has been dedicated to a specific cause, overall the SEO for thousands of businesses has been affected. Here, Matt Fielding discusses the concept of ‘easy’ SEO and how businesses can safely improve their SEO without jeopardising their site’s current rankings.

• Why Is Good Link Building So Hard To Do?

Content marketing and SEO techniques have evolved over 2012 but one marketing tactic still remains crucial for any business; link building. It is the backbone, the bread and butter of a great marketing strategy that ultimately improves rankings online. Here, Matthew Bessent explains why good link building is so hard to accomplish but why it is the future.

• Save PPC Spend with Careful Keyword Bidding

Tom, the newest member to the PPC team here at Custard, shared some of his knowledge that he learnt during training. In this post, he enlightens us on the best way to manage keyword bids to ensure maximum click-through rate (CTR), whilst also keeping spends to a minimum.

• 4 Twitter Tools I Couldn’t Live Without

In this article, Matt Fielding share’s his infamous wisdom on the four killer apps/tools/extensions that make Twitter a lifesaver. There are hundreds of tools on the World Wide Web that can help you get the full potential out of the platform but here Matt whittles it down to just four.

• How Bloggers can Avoid Infringing Image Copyright

Here at Custard we just love writing. Words are our A-game but as anyone knows, a picture tells a thousand words. Lauren shares her knowledge on how bloggers can stay safe when using images in a blog post. Plagiarism? Not an issue.

• Creative Marketing? Simples.

Sophie, our resident social whizz, was set loose onto the Custard blog a short while ago and in this post she talks about her favourite-ever marketing campaign. It of course involves Aleksandr Orlov, the renowned meerkat and household name for insurance comparison site comparethemarket.com.

• 4 Tips to Write Effective Web Friendly Content

How do you write creative, quality content for the internet, that will simply blow your socks clean off? Here, Halit shares his intuition on writing effective, web-friendly content. *Opinions stated are strictly from the author and do not represent Custard.*

• The 6 biggest PR blunders of 2012 (Part One)

Before 2012 is well a truly done with, our newest recruit Aurora put pen to paper (so to speak) to revisit six of the most ridiculous, laughable and face-palm-inducing PR blunders of the year.  But she there were so many bloopers to choose from that she split the post into two, for you to enjoy some more.

• Music’s Marketing Moments

Sam, our resident Morrissey lookalike, has taken to the blog to talk about his two passions; writing (of course) and music. In this article, he checks out some of the most memorable marketing exploits over time. Be prepared, there will be some girl power!

From everyone here at Custard, all the best for 2013.

The post The Cream of the Crop: Our Top 10 Posts of 2012 appeared first on Custard.

In October this year, there were almost 80 million Tumblr pages and almost 57 million WordPress blogs.

Each one of these millions of pages has content. Some of it is bad, some of it is good, and some of it is positively brilliant. It doesn’t matter if it’s an image, a video or the written word. The majority of blogs are made for a specific reason.

Someone has something to say.

I have something to say. Ok, it may be saying that we have something to say, and this may sound like the most obvious thing in the world, but ask yourself this. Was I told to write this? No. Did I want to write this?

Yes.

And that’s important. In fact, it’s crucial for any writer of online content to want to write the thing they are writing about. At least, in a way that they want to.

It comes down to one thing – Passion.

This was a close second.

Having that desire to create something is what separates a great piece of content from something that’s lazy, unfocused and ultimately, worthless.

What’s the point of putting something out there that no one really cares about? Not even the person who made it?

Having the spark of passion in your content is much more than just liking the subject. You need to go deeper. What makes this article, or blog post, or photograph so special? What need does it fulfill, both for yourself and the audience you want it to reach?

We’ve gone on about this before, both here and here. These articles talk about what to do when you’ve actually sat down and took the first steps on your planned journey.

I’m here talking about planning that journey in the first place.

You are how you eat

When you want to do something, you want to do it well. That’s human nature. No one goes out intentionally to do something the wrong way do they?

Perish the thought.

Look at it like this. When you eat a Subway sandwich, do you put it on the table and launch your face into it?

Hopefully not.

You’ll try to eat it in a way that ensures you get every piece into your mouth, with the least amount of fuss, stress and problems. You want to do this because the alternative is messy and frustrating. You want to eat that sandwich, and you want to do it right.

So should it be for writing. You should want to do it in a way that excites and sparks the creative flame in you. If you have an idea, it should be something you genuinely feel a pressing need to talk about.

Ideas can come thick and fast. It’s the process of sorting those ideas out into manageable portions that won’t end up all over the table that’s the important part.

But you should want that sandwich.

You shouldn’t be able to live without it.

Like food.

Ask yourself this. Where does your passion lie?

 Parting Shot

“One person with passion is better than forty people merely interested.” 

– E. M. Forster,

Do you agree? Disagree? Let me know.

{Images courtesy of Red Bull and tvguide.com}

The post Do You Have Passion When Writing? appeared first on Custard.

Without any further ado then, here’s part two of the PR blunders roundup for 2012:

4.      McDonalds’ #McDStories McFail

Way back when in January 2012, McDonalds wanted to generate some good PR for itself, and so some marketing whiz-kid came up with the #McDstories twitter campaign.

The idea was that people would tweet gooey stories about how eating McDonalds helped to bring their family together, or how their kids are happiest when tucking into a Happy Meal. Unfortunately, that did happen.

It all started with this tweet from McDonalds:

How can we learn from this?

Know your enemy – if your brand has an equal measure of lovers and haters, be aware that a backlash may occur.

 5.      Starbucks’ tax dodging

McDonalds’ fail clearly didn’t teach people about the wrath of Twitter users, as Starbucks found out.

The coffee giant is just one in a long line of major corporations that have managed to slink past the taxman – Amazon and Google have also had the tax avoidance spotlight on them in the last month.

The coffee company’s tax avoidance hit the headlines in October 2012, when an investigation by Reuters revealed some puzzling numbers. Somehow, Starbucks paid just £8.6m in corporation tax in 14 years, even though it reported sales of £3bn.

Because big numbers have a tendency to confuse me, I’ll let this handy video explain what happened:

Starbucks set up a live Twitter feed on an enormous monitor at the ice rink and advertised the #spreadthecheer hashtag so that people could appear on-screen with their festive tweets.

Rather than Christmassy tweets about Santa and Rudolph though, those still enraged by Starbucks’ tax avoidance hijacked the live feed:

How can we learn from this?

It’s simple – don’t be a tax dodger. Starbucks clearly didn’t anticipate such a furious backlash, which shows poor planning on their part. They at least managed to pull the campaign reasonably quickly, but you should always be ready for a negative outcome.

6.      Todd Akin’s ‘legitimate rape’ comment

And finally, we get to the truly awful PR fail that was Todd Akin’s horrific ‘legitimate rape’ comment.

First of all, for those thinking ‘who the hell’s Todd Akin?’ He’s a republican representative for Missouri that was in the running for the 2012 senate seat. After his eye-popping remark though, he unsurprisingly lost.

Here’s exactly how it went down:

How can we learn from this?

Vet each and every one of your representatives to make sure they don’t make any catastrophic blunders on live TV, in print or on the internet.

What do you think – should I have included any other PR mishaps? Or do you have any additional suggestions on how we can learn from these companies’ mistakes?

The post The 6 biggest PR blunders of 2012 (Part Two) appeared first on Custard.

Before the year is out though, I just thought I’d go through some of this year’s biggest PR and marketing blunders.

Why? Because they’re all ludicrously funny in a ‘what were they thinking?!’ way, and because we can all learn from them.

In no particular order, here are six of the most ridiculous, laughable and face-palm-inducing PR blunders of 2012:

 1. American Apparel’s ‘Sandy Sale’

In October 2012 the Franken-storm that was Hurricane Sandy slammed into North-eastern USA. In total, the storm caused 131 fatalities and $63 billion of damage.

However, some smart cookie at American Apparel thought there couldn’t possibly be a better chance to cash in on such a well-timed natural disaster. In order to make the most of it, the retailer knocked up the following:

Unfortunately, they weren’t the results American Apparel was hoping for. The campaign completely bombed, with thousands of people taking to Twitter to berate the retailer for its very poor marketing choice.

How can we learn from this?

Don’t use natural disasters as a way to increase sales.

2.    Virgin Mobile US’ chloroform ad

In early December, Virgin Mobile US (which was bought by Sprint Nextel in 2009) geared up its Christmas ad campaign. This included an image that seemed to definitely made light of rape:

Despite the backlash on Twitter, Virgin Media US kept schtum until Richard Branson stepped in:

How can we learn from this?

Employing people with a little common sense would probably help. Other than that, make sure that everyone in your marketing department understands that rape should never be used as a theme for a jokey ad.

3.      Thomas Cook UK’s inability to understand good PR

Who knew it – there’s a man called Thomas Cook living in the UK, and he had the good sense to contact holiday provider Thomas Cook UK. Why? To ask for a free holiday after all the pain and suffering his name’s caused him, of course.

It went something like this:

How can we learn from this?

When offered an opportunity such as Thomas Cook UK’s one, take a step back, consider the benefits and then act rather than instantly dismissing it. It could give you an impromptu viral marketing campaign that essentially pays for itself (as was lowcostholidays.com’s outcome).

Since there’s so much to say concerning the top 6 PR blunders, I’ve decided to split this post in two for easy-reading. Stay tuned for the next three mishaps!

The post The 6 biggest PR blunders of 2012 (Part One) appeared first on Custard.

The brand now has over 500 million users registered and the impact it has had on society has caused ripples across the marketing world.

One simple tweet can rock the twittersphere so much so, that it grabs the attention of thousands from all round the world.

In honour of such a special year, Twitter has revealed the most famous tweets of 2012.These have had the most retweets than any other tweet, and been mentioned more times amongst users.

Let us have a look at some of the most popular tweets of the year as well as the most outrageous online comments that have caused a stir.

• @BarackObama: “Four more years”

The US president tweeted on 17^th December about the fact that he had been re-elected into the White House. His message, ‘Four more years’, was retweeted over 810,000 times in more than 200 countries and had over 300,000 favourites.

• @justinbieber: “RIP Avalanna. I love you”

The teen pop icon sent a tweet to one of his fans who had been suffering from a rare form of brain cancer. Avalanna Routh, only six years-old, had passed away and the message received over 220,000 retweets as well as over 100,000 favourites.

• @helenflanagan1

Soap star Helen Flanagan caused outrage after posting a picture of herself on her Twitter account with a gun pointing to her head- on the same day the victims of the Sandy Hook massacre were laid to rest. The Coronation Street actress published the photo with the message ‘Head f***’, just days after the tragic killing in America.

• @GwynethPaltrow: “Ni**as in Paris for real.”

In June this year the actress caused a storm of controversy when she tweeted ‘Ni**as in Paris for real’ whilst partying in Paris with pals Kanye West and Jay-Z. The Twittersphere erupted with accusations that Paltrow was racist but she rebutted the claims saying: ‘Hold up. It’s the title of the [two rappers] song!’

However, the rapper The –Dream later stepped forward to say that he sent the tweet on Gwyneth’s phone.

• @TeamGB: “29 gold, 17 silver, 19 bronze- We finished 3^rd in medal table after most successful Olympics for 104 years.”

This year the world has been abuzz around the fantastic London 2012 Olympic Games. It has been the most-talked about topic online; so when Team GB posted this tweet on the site about its achievements; it generated a lot of attention. The message had over 67,000 retweets and over 5,000 favourites.

• @SallyBercow: “Why is Lord McAlpine trending? *innocent face*”

In November, the wife of the Speaker of the House of Commons, Sally Bercow, sent an allegedly libellous tweet, about Lord Alistair McAlpine. The former Conservative politician had been wrongly implicated in connection with sex abuse claims by a BBC show and many users on Twitter repeated the allegations.

Bercow, who has almost 63,000 fans on the website, has reportedly refused to back down after McAlpine has demanded £50,000 libel damages and an apology. Instead, she tweeted: “*gulps*”. Then “I guess I’d better get some legal advice then. Still maintain was not a libellous tweet – just foolish.”

• Ched Evans

Under British law, no victim of sexual assault or rape can be identified. They have complete anonymity but early this year cruel internet bullies named the rape victim of footballer Ched Evans on Twitter.

They posted vile abuse about the 19-year-old calling her a ‘money grabbing whore’ and a ‘poor little victim’ who made the attack up. Nine people who illegally named the woman were told to pay her £624 each in compensation. Some of the criminals did not name her themselves but retweeted her identity.

So there you have it; the top 7 tweets of 2012 that caused a Twitter storm. What will 2013 hold? We’ll just have to wait and see. If you need help with your social media, get in touch with our socially-savvy team today. Simply put- it rules the internet.

The post Top 7 Tweets of 2012 That Rocked the Twittersphere appeared first on Custard.

Simply put, semantic search aims to enhance the accuracy of search through a better understanding of the contextual meaning of a query and the intent of the searcher.

OK, perhaps that wasn’t simple enough.

Let’s break it down. Semantics is the study of meaning, applied in this case, to the meaning of a word, phrase, query or sentence.

• Semantics and Search

Traditionally, if you put a phrase or query to a search engine, it would take away the various sections, run them through an occult algorithm and return associated results.

However, a truly semantic search engine would work more like a human brain – recognising natural language, noticing contextual relationships between the elements of the query and proffering results from a wealth of relevant and related sources.

Anphicle offers an excellent example on this in the form of Obama’s Dog. But wait, don’t the likes of Google et al already do this? Well yes, that’s because…

• It’s Already Here

As search engines and sites refine themselves to enhance their operation, semantic elements have been creeping into the field for years now.

Image was used by permission under the Creative Commons Licence courtesy of officerdibble on Flickr

These days, it’s rare for any search query to go entirely unanswered and Googlewhacks are largely a thing of the past (sorry Dave).

We now take features like auto-complete and the offer of related results for granted. These have also become a desirable feature for ecommerce sites seeking to avoid dead-end searches.

Google has been a forerunner in refining search, with updates like Panda and Venice emphasising relevant content and localised results, respectively. It’s also been a pioneer in tying social features to search in an effort to enhance relevancy.

• Doing the Knowledge

However, Google’s premier offering in this area has been the introduction of the Knowledge Graph. This feature is the backbone of Google’s semantic offering and aims to provide a plethora of contextually relevant information to address as many of the potential aspects of a query as possible.

It does this by polling information from a wide variety of sources, including an array of databases and data from the search requests of others.

“We’ve always believed that the perfect search engine should understand exactly what you mean and give you back exactly what you want. And we can now sometimes help answer your next question before you’ve asked it,” said Amit Singhal, Senior Vice President of Engineering at the search giant.

Not to be outdone, Microsoft has also been pushing semantic search. Earlier in the year, Bing paired up with Encyclopedia Britannica to offer semantic suggestions alongside its organic results.

• SEO is Dead, Long Live SEO

So how do these changes impact SEO? Writing for Mashable, Erin Everhart, director of web and social media marketing at 325 Media Group, summed up one of the key difficulties the field faces. She explained that despite major changes to best practice over the years, SEO has remained consistently driven by keywords.

When it comes to semantic search however, optimisers face a whole new ball game.  

“Keywords are easy to manipulate; intent, not so much. In order to rank well in semantic search, you don’t just have to put your keywords in the right places, you have to figure out the actual meaning behind those keywords and create content around that,” Ms Everhart said.

While the jury is still out on just exactly what the fallout will be, it’s clear that marketers will need to strive for relevancy. Building authoritative and relevant content around a topic is likely to become a key concern, while scraping sites and other black hat techniques could go the way of the dodo.

• The Future

Only time will reveal the shape of things to come, but it seems semantic search is here to stay. And offerings like Apple’s Siri and Google’s advanced voice search application may hint at the Star Trek-type relationship we’ll have with our computers in years to come.

We’re also moving to a smarter, more connected world. Figures show rampant growth in tablets and smartphones, as well as a move away from the traditional desktop-PC setup.

More and more of our personal information is being analysed, which could have profound implications for when, where and how marketing efforts are deployed.

Similarly, as it becomes cheaper to put a chip in objects, the so-called ‘internet of things‘ is only likely to add to the amount of accessible data we spew out.

• Big Brother is Watching You

These trends raise some valid concerns over privacy and misuse. Big Data has the potential to provide companies with previously-unseen correlations, whose applications can range from the epically cool to the scarily invasive.

By feeding all this data to the internet (and if you believe in intelligence as an emergent property in systems of sufficient complexity) there’s the slight danger we might inadvertently kick off the singularity. But I, for one, will welcome our new machine overlords.

While semantic search is steadily making its way into the mainstream, a number of questions remain around how it will impact search and our interactions with the web in general.

Whatever the future holds, semantics is an exciting field that is bound to have dramatic applications, both within search and beyond.

Images used by permission under the Creative Commons Licence courtesy of Custard Media.

The post Semantic Search and What It Means for SEO appeared first on Custard.

Google is constantly updating, tweaking and amending its algorithms. These changes always impact SEOs, but unlike many other marketing professionals we’re actually quite fond of Google’s pandas and penguins.

What would we do without Google’s changes?

What we all need to realise is that, in changing its algorithms, Google is making the internet a better place for everyone.

According to Google’s mission statement its main objective is to make the internet a safe, fair and easy-to-navigate place for all users.

Shouldn’t all digital marketers want that as well?

Through its on-going algorithm changes, I believe that Google is actually helping us, not hindering us. Google is like a giant hand that’s always gently guiding us in the right direction.

Without these changes the internet would be a very different place, and finding the answers you’re looking for would probably be incredibly difficult and eternally infuriating.

Google Panda

The whole point of Google Panda was to make sure that Google was able to provide users with results that were actually useful.

No one wants to be confronted with a results page full of information that’s really scraping the bottom of the content barrel. So Google went about fixing this issue.

It told SEOs that if you use duplicated content, you’ll get penalised. Those using black hat methods such as web scraping, keyword stuffing and unnatural link building were instantly pushed down the SERP rankings, and many found it hard to climb back up again.

Now, thanks to Google Panda, users can expect to be presented with results that will actually be of use.

How does this benefit us?

— Unique content is better content. It’s more engaging, interesting and relevant, which makes users more willing to read it. This also helps to keep them on the site for longer.

— It helps to make your website stand out from the crowd.

— We now know that Google favours websites with skilfully written content, making good content one of the staples of SEO. Content may not be the only king anymore, but it still wears a shiny crown.

The ‘Above the Fold’ Update

This update was designed to target websites that had hardly any content ‘above the fold’ – this is the upper half of the page that’s visible without having to scroll down.

By downgrading these websites and therefore encouraging them to realign their advertisements, sites are now much more user friendly. Visitors can instantly see whether the information they want is on the site.

How does this benefit us?

— Bounce rates decrease as users don’t see lots of adverts and instantly decide to look elsewhere

— Users are able to navigate around the website easier and so have a better user experience, which increases the chances of a repeat visit.

Google Penguin

Image was used by permission under the Creative Commons Licence courtesy of Guwashi999 on Fotopedia.

The Google Penguin update was essentially a follow-on from Google Panda. Rather than simply aiming to make the user experience better, Google Penguin penalised websites using pretty much any kind of black-hat SEO technique.

Even post-Panda, a lot of black-hat SEO users were still ranking highly, despite the fact that Google’s algorithm was supposed to be targeting them. Penguin works as a net to catch the last of the marketers using bad techniques.

How does this benefit us?

— Those that quickly shifted to white-hat techniques after Panda managed to glide through the Penguin update mostly unharmed.

— It’s no longer the case that it’s easier to be bad in the world of SEO. It used to be that black-hat techniques could get you near-instant results without any drawbacks, but now Google will notice use of these ‘bad’ methods lightning fast and there will be repercussions. White-hat techniques are now the sure-fire way to get onto page one.

AuthorRank

Okay, technically it isn’t an algorithm chance, but I thought this one deserved a mention.

This update gave content writers a chance to get their face out there by using the rel=”author” tag. Previously, unless author information was provided on the website, writers were never credited. I don’t know about you guys, but that irked me.

How does this benefit us?

— Writers now get the chance to get their name out there alongside their work.

— SEOs implementing AuthorRank see a higher click-through rate – this is because AuthorRank makes sites more visible within SERPs.

— Users see content using AuthorRank as reliable and credible, so they’re more likely to visit them.

— Users of AuthorRank can get increased information within Webmaster Tools. This will show everything from impressions to click-through rates, making it easier to monitor traffic.

So what does this all really mean?

Well, rather than the old black-hat SEO techniques used when writing content, Google’s algorithm changed the face of SEO copywriting.

Now it’s all about:

— Making content engaging

This is done by writing on current topics and thinking outside the box when choosing content concepts.

— Ensuring content is informative

To do this, copywriters can reference reliable sources within the copy.

— Using keywords sparsely

This makes content flow much more naturally, rather than having seemingly meaningless keywords dotted all over the place.

— Using multimedia

Today, websites rarely have a solid page of text copy. Instead, content is set around images, YouTube videos, infographics and more. This gives depth to content and also makes it more enjoyable for users.

— Making title tags and meta descriptions better

Title tags and meta descriptions are no longer just an endless stream of keywords. They can now provide an informative description of the page and its contents.

— Increasing content above the fold

This gives a better user experience and also keeps visitors on the site for longer, as they aren’t confronted with a mass of spammy adverts that scare them off.

Google always plays its cards close to its chest in terms of new algorithm changes. Many SEOs would probably agree though that the changes to date have helped them to kick the black-hat SEO habit.

White-hat SEO is the way to go if you want to stay in Google’s good books, but it’s doubtful that any of us would be on the straight and narrow without Google’s tough love!

The post Why we love Google’s algorithm changes appeared first on Custard.

Which is a shame for both of us.

A number of social platforms have come to the forefront of our lives over the past few years. And a few more have made their merry way out again. Branded passé and virtually out of touch, Myspace went away with its tail between it legs and has come back with something that can only be described visually stunning.

New Myspace is by invitation only nowadays, and if you’re not on the list, you’re not getting in. At least not for now anyway. Priority is being given to those who signed up their interest a couple of months ago. In other words, those with their finger on the pulse.

In other words… us.

A couple of Custard’s finest are signed up and ready to go on their brand new community pages. Signed up as ‘Creatives’ ‘Photographers’ and ‘Journalists’, it seems that talent is being rewarded here.

And what a fantastic place to showcase your talents it will be, when Myspace opens its doors to the masses. With a magazine style, editorial feel and a modern, refreshing side-scrolling function.

In their own words, Myspace is “Staying true to our roots in one important way—empowering people to express themselves however they want.”

If, like me, you were sure that the social platform was now strictly a place for emerging bands to upload crackly versions of their live music tracks. That nobody else ventured on to the pages, and if they did, they’d hit that ‘back’ button faster than Superman after 6 Red Bulls and a Dubstep gig.

Well, you’d be partially right.

The rework has placed music at its centre. Essentially connecting people through music. We might be looking at Justin Timberlake’s influence here.

The musical heart throb, the dancing dreamboat, The Social Network actor has taken a stake in Myspace and has a “major role” in the new direction of the site.

“Art is inspired by people and vice versa,” said the former N Sync star.
“So there’s a natural social component to entertainment. I’m excited to help revitalise Myspace by using its social media platform to bring artists and fans together in one community.”

Somebody (probably Justin) has taken the best bits of all the other networks and squashed them together to create the new Myspace.
The side scrolling function has the ‘endless content’ feel of Pinterest, without the babies wearing hats or feminist memes.
There is a limit to the number of characters you can use to post a status, similar to our friend Twitter.
And the recommendation tool that monitors your activity, taste in music and connections has a flavour of the Facebook about it.

But I’m excited about this. I’m likening it to Tumblr for people who aren’t American teenagers. There’ll be access to our favourite artists and brands like we’ve never had before. And it’s a fantastic platform for showcasing talents and shareable content.
From photography, to video… even for infographics.
New Myspace has come back fighting and has certainly succeeded in becoming more interactive than any of the other social platforms knocking about right now.

Will you be signing up to the new kid on the block? Or does the thought of more social networks to manage just give you that sinking feeling?
I don’t know what you’re waiting for to be honest. I’ve not been this excited since Nigella Lawson replied to me on Twitter… Get in the queue.

The post New Myspace – What We Think appeared first on Custard.

*Although there has been the odd occasion when I have in fact changed in town as soon as I have come out of the store, because I just couldn’t wait to wear my new purchase!*

I don’t like to admit it, but I am influenced by retailer’s marketing efforts. When I flick through my weekly magazines, I become infatuated with the latest beauty product or hair accessory. When I turn on the television, I am subconsciously inclined by the adverts, between my favourite programmes.

Every person is subjected to marketing by big-named high street brands; we have been for years, going as far back as the 1890’s when Coca-Cola created its first advertising poster. Over time, there have been some huge success stories, as well as a number of outright fails.

Here are some of the most memorable retail marketing campaigns, to feast your eyes on:

• John Lewis

This year, retailer John Lewis made history by spending a whopping £6 million on its biggest-ever advertising campaign. The company confessed that it is in a bid to reposition itself against its rivals Debenhams, House of Fraser and Marks & Spencer.

And the ad, which features a snowman’s quest to buy a present for his snow lady, has been voted as the top festive advert.

• Dominos

Dominos Pizza, an international pizza delivery company, suffered untold damage back in 2009 when a video was posted on YouTube. The shocking footage showed an employee sneezing on food, and shoving cheese up his nose. At the time, the firm tried its best to combat the bad publicity and the store, in North Carolina, America, was closed to decontaminate it.

Check out the disgusting clip below! We can’t guarantee you won’t be put off your food…

• Asda

Just like John Lewis, supermarket store Asda has launched its new multi-million advertising campaign for Christmas that has the tagline- ‘behind every great Christmas there’s mum’. What should have been a heart-felt, sentimental marketing effort has backfired.

There have been over 30 complaints from viewers to the Advertising Standards Authority watchdog, that the advert is ‘sexist’. At present, the commercial clip places the whole responsibility for the festivities on mothers, and complaints have been issued that it is offensive to men and women.

Asda bosses have condemned this. What do you think?

• Halifax           

High street bank Halifax made one of its employees a household name when it decided to feature Howard Brown as the face of the company. The sales ambassador, who is renowned for dancing and singing, was blasted on billboards and television screens across the UK.

The company had decided in the year 2000 to involve their own staff in a series of adverts. They would sing about the bank, to the backing tune of famous music tracks. They sung everything from ‘Just a Little’ by Liberty X,’ It’s a First, at Last, My Extra Thing’ by Barry White, and ‘Something Good’ to the tune of Herman’s Hermits ‘I’m into Something Good.’

So there you have it- some of the biggest success/blunder stories, in retail history!

Get in touch with the experts today and let us help, by producing an integrated marketing campaign that will put you ahead of your competition.

The post Imitate John Lewis, Not Asda for Marketing Success appeared first on Custard.

If someone was to break down the entire contents of the internet they’d probably find that it was 80% pictures of cats, along with a whole load of other stuff. Okay, so maybe there wouldn’t be such a high percentage of cats, but it’s fair to say that there are definitely a lot of them out there on the World Wide Web.

It’s not just cats either – it’s also pictures of fluffy dogs, fat hamsters and even lovable bunnies. No matter what makes you go ‘aww!’ you can guarantee there’s a picture out there for it. But just why do people share these pictures and videos, and what makes them go viral?

To understand this concept, we need to look at some cute pictures.

Maru has a lot of talents as well, namely his specialism of comically jumping into big boxes.

I give you Exhibit A:

So, why do we love Maru so much? Well, in my opinion it’s because he’s just so unique. Whoever heard of a cat that enjoys sliding around the room inside a box?

The fact that Mugumogu is never actually seen helps – in a lot of funny cat videos on YouTube the owners barge in our enjoyment of their cats, laughing and squealing with delight as their pet does something silly. Mugumogu just quietly holds the camera and has minimal interaction with Maru, allowing us to feel as though, just for a minute, this beautiful tabby cat is ours.

The videos are also edited by Mugumogu and include short text introductions to the action. They aren’t always perfectly translated from Mugumogu’s first language, Japanese, which can make it quite endearing.

Boo the Dog

Boo the Dog is an incredibly cute Pomeranian dog with a swish haircut. Boo’s popularity started out on Facebook, when his owner made him a page. There was a little bit of controversy when people found out that his owner was actually a Facebook executive, leading people to believe that his popularity was manufactured rather than Boo naturally going viral. However, it’s really just a chicken and the egg argument, since there’s no way Boo wouldn’t have been popular, even if his owner was a nobody.

Boo’s popularity really just comes down to the fact that he’s so ridiculously cute. Fans of absolutely anything cute were instantly sharing the almost painfully cute pictures taken by his owner, along with pictures of his long-haired Pomeranian companion, Buddy.

Again, we also like to see how much Boo and Buddy’s owners dote on them, as it gives us a faith in humanity moment.

Here’s one of the cutest things you’ll see today:

Colonel Meow

Colonel Meow is an insanely fluffy cat. I honestly don’t know how his owner manages to keep him from turning into a big tangled ball of fluff. He’s relatively new to the viral web, having only been put up on Facebook on 9th August 2012. He’s already gained a following though, with his owner Anne Marie Avey posting up cute/funny pictures and statuses for him. He’s had over 107,000 likes on Facebook, which equals to an absolutely massive increase.

However, trust me when I say that if this cat had opposable thumbs he’d take over the world.

While this Himalayan Persian cat isn’t exactly stunning to look at in a conventional sense, he’s certainly got a lot of character. Whether he’s really such a meanie in real life, only his owner will know. His Facebook statuses calling for his ‘minions’ to follow him instead of worshipping Boo the Dog, while enjoying his favourite drink, Black Label whiskey, are certainly entertaining though.

I think people love Colonel Meow for the comedy factor, and because he’s a nice flipside from the cute overload of Maru, Boo and the many other fluffy animals I haven’t got round to yet.

So what does viral content mean for marketers?

Viral content is the new SEO technique that every marketer out there is trying to recreate in order to make their brand go global, but the first step to harnessing this power is in understanding it.

Knowing what makes your audience tick will be the first job – for these cute cats and dogs it’s all about giving people a hit of happiness, and relying on their need to share this with their friends and family via social media. No matter what you’re creating, as long as you make it funny, relevant, interesting and possibly just a little bit cute, you should be onto a winner.

The post Why are pictures of cats so sharable? appeared first on Custard.

We all have a song, artist, album, riff, lyric etc. that makes us feel connected with the artists we love. Whilst most 13 year-olds were enjoying all the hits 2004 had to offer (who the hell was Steve Brookstein?), I’d just got my hands on my first, of many, Morrissey albums.

But as time has progressed and technology continues to influence our lives, artists are exploring the many ways in which they can connect with, and attract fans.

Here are some of the most memorable musical marketing exploits.

Girl Power!

The 90s gave us the Furby, PlayStations, ‘The Fresh Prince of Bel Air’ and ‘Hey Macarena!’

But more than anything, this decade will be most remembered for the arrival of Girl Power.

The Spice Girls were unlike anything the music industry had seen before, arguably music’s first manufactured girl band, churning out hit after hit after hit. Posh, Scary, Sporty, Baby and Ginger took over the world with their new brand of feminist pop, bringing girls to the fore like never before.

But they didn’t just use music to connect with their fans; they used the Spice Girls brand to sell dolls, jewellery, make-up, hair extensions and even released a movie, Spice World.

Without Mel B and the girls, we wouldn’t have had B*witched, Girls Aloud, The Saturdays or All Saints………….cheers ladies.

Definitely scary

The Vaccines and Instagram: the perfect remedy

The Vaccines are currently the darlings of the British indie music scene. Although they only formed in 2010, it’s frightening how far they’ve come, considering they will be headlining the 02 Arena next year.

I’m a HUGE fan of this band, and at each of the five gigs of theirs I’ve been to, no song gets repeated louder by the crowd than the bands sixth single, Wetsuit.

For the video to the single, The Vaccines created something never seen before. They asked fans to submit their festival pictures via Instagram, and then used these stills within the production of the video, leading to thousands of fans scrambling to get their face in the video.

Arcade Fire? In my house?

Being Canadian and releasing music that’ll stand the test of time doesn’t usually go hand in hand (sorry Celine), but Arcade Fire are an exception.

Their refreshing ‘big band’ anthems sang so amazingly by the effortlessly cool Win Butler, has made them indie rock gods. Their popularity grew even further with the release of their third album The Suburbs, which catapulted them into the mainstream.

To continue the neighbourhood-friendly, homely feel that The Suburbs possessed, when it came to making the video for We Used To Wait, the band used one of the coolest things to ever come out of the internet, Google Earth.

By using the link thewildernessdowntown.com, it allowed fans, or anyone who cared, the opportunity to incorporate their childhood into the video. By simply typing in your childhood address, We Used To Wait would be played over images of the street you grew up on, provided by Google Earth. Try it is amazing, although I don’t think Arcade Fire had Wigan in mind when creating the video.

That’s just a few examples of the amazing work marketing can do for a bands fortunes. It just goes to show that you don’t even have to be any good to be thrust into the spotlight (crazy frog quickly comes screaming back to me).

As almost everyone is now the proud owner of a smart phone, accessing new and exciting music is easier than ever. Now letting thousands of others fall in love with a band exactly the same way you did is only a hashtag away.

The post Music’s Marketing Moments appeared first on Custard.

Every time I attend an SEO conference, I’m guaranteed to return to the Custard office with two things:

1)      A huge backlog of emails
2)      A boatload of new ideas to help our clients

More often than not, these ideas require a long-term investment of time and a lot of retraining to reinvent the wheel where our processes are concerned.

Fortunately the Custard team are always open to new approaches, but at the fantastic SearchLove event earlier this month, I picked up a few link building tips that don’t quite require a strategic revolution.

These tips are, as the title suggests, quick-wins. They’re easy. And the best part is that unlike some easy SEO practices, they’re 100% natural and Google-friendly.

1)      Google image search

Chances are people are stealing your images. Thankfully Google’s image search allows you to crawl the web for copies of your pics.

Rather than steaming in with the empty threat of legal action to get the images taken down, use this as an opportunity to build relationships by reaching out to the blogger, as shown below: