comparing the meerkats

Posted by luke on Jan 12, 2009 in Blog | 1 comment

Simply genius.

I was going to write a longer analysis of why i think this is a superb campaign, but most of it has been done very eloquently on the SEO Optimise blog.

Compare the meerkat works as a campaign for one key reason, it sets them apart from what has become a very competitive sector where the offering and price (ie free) is essentially the same for everyone.

How else would you compete in this market? Superior offering, better customer usability/feedback or huge market awareness?

A simple clever play on words, with a good social media marketing strategy (facebook fan page, twitter etc) and a simple mock website equals brand recognition though the roof.

The only thing I would of done differently would be to make it possible to link to specific meerkats on the site, if you find one that amuses you, all you can share with friends is the options that you chose to find that meerkat – people like to share the specifics too.

is technology changing politics?

Posted by luke on Dec 15, 2008 in Blog | 0 comments

Following on from the Obama blog the other day and having finished 2 books by Patrick Dixon in the last week or so – I’ve been thinking a lot about the future of politics. (Yes, I’m aware I need to get out more)

As the pace of change increases people seem to be looking for things that make them feel like they can make a difference in this uncertain world.

On twitter today, from 10-11am David Cameron was giving a new conference at Reuters, you could ask a question by using the #askdc hashtag*- mine was: “Do you think that the strength of single issue politics has made the current political party system useless?”

*hashtag – the # character and a short sequence of characters that acts, like a tag allowing you to easily group tweets from a variety of people on one subject. It allows you to create a conversation for a specific theme or event i.e. conferences often use tags like #myconf09. You can then search and see replies to that specific hashtag, which is a lot easier than wading through pages with relevant words that might not be related to that specific idea. you can use twitter search to find #tags or hashtags.org.

Technology enables single issue politics.

Take the Baby P example – the issue prompted people to sign up to facebook groups (2000+ I believe in one local group related to baby P) and generally soak up the media “outrage” (I hate using quotes but I do feel these were heavily stoked by sensationalist reporting) without actually doing much.

Of the 2000+ people who joined the dorset march for baby p facebook group, around 20 people showed up to the actual protest. Is this mobilisation of the masses? Hardly.

You often hear people say that more people vote on a big brother final than in a general elections (Not true btw: 2.7million vs about 18million) – this is possibly true for younger age groups where it is ESTIMATED that more young people aged 18-34 voted on BB than in the last election.

All of these things do add up, technology has created a world where issues are picked up and shared at such a pace, it must be almost impossible for politicians to keep up.

Voter apathy is caused by the politicians responses to these single issues rarely differing and the perception (and reality) that most political discussion is just shallow point scoring on detail and scandal.

Would it not be better to enable the masses to vote on single issues in some central way and just have MPs as representatives of their local area only and not as an illusion of some political ideal?

Or would this be creating a state by mob rule, based on sensationalised news bites?

UPDATED: X factor voting – 16.5million votes cast across the series – be interesting to know how many voters that was.

the power of the network

Posted by luke on Nov 24, 2008 in Blog | 1 comment

I needed to tap into my network of people across a few social networking sites today, to recruit a part-timer for a project and to see if anyone could help find a home for the Social Tech Solutions empire.

In total my update went out to around 750 people across three platforms (Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter) – through a status message I sent out a simple request for people to get in touch.

I’d hoped for 10 or so, during the day…

…within 30 minutes I had 30 replies.

Wow.

THAT is the power of the network, to be able to broadcast out a simple message – in this case on twitter, which automatically updated my Facebook status (would be nice if LinkedIn status could be done via twitter too – hint hint, any techy friends listening?) and get 30 replies in 30 minutes.

An hour later, I was visiting an office space with a friend/business partner of mine which we’ll likely rent together and I have plenty of likely candidates.

In further evidence of the power of the network: I noticed a business contact had changed their LinkedIn status to mention they were working on a particular project… which I was writing an article about for here (to be published later in the week – when its finished) a quick email exchange later and a meeting is set up so we can collaborate.

Within 2hrs my network has provided:

A good group of potential employees
A business partnership
and Office space

My “Springers final thought for the day” – courtesy of GrindVision:

the most successful people are great networkers and in in this day and age the most successful businesses are great at social media

I couldn’t agree more.

why YOUR business needs to consider twitter

Posted by luke on Nov 7, 2008 in Blog | 1 comment

I’m a geek, I think we established that… as a geek, I like to try new sites and applications when they come out, often discarding them if they don’t offer any real business benefit.

Twitter was one of those. I set up a personal account… I could see how it was useful for certain types of internet users, to share ideas… I got that sometimes it was the best way of rapidly publishing information when you need to share updates with friends/colleagues or customers – like live blogging from a conference to say “this is on at stand so n so in 20mins” – in the US the SMS updates are free – but I didn’t really get how it was useful to most businesses.

I realised something yesterday, and I hold my hand up, I should of pieced it all together sooner..

EVERY status update on twitter (some people call it a “tweet”) gets its own URL – take a recent update from us about GimPhoto for example.

Yes, the link has a “Nofollow” tag… but… there is plenty of discussion about how the different engines actually use nofollow.

I’m also pretty sure that my rapidly rising traffic isn’t just because of my amazing writing style (ahem), I’ll be having a dig in Analytics, but I’m sure Twitter has driven traffic to this site.

Add to this the following post about Twitter and SEO (You should all subscribe to Blogstorm btw)

It makes me think that Twitter is not only a great way to communicate to a wider group of people (it is searchable) but it must help with SEO.

I’m NOT an SEO guru, but I’d love to hear from some of you that are!

Twitter feeds to follow

Posted by luke on Oct 22, 2008 in Blog | 0 comments

We’d love to know about any twitter feeds you think we should be following, as well as your twitter feeds.

Please leave us a comment or drop us an email with your suggestions.