Google+ Why we have helped our SEO to SEE

We’ve been keeping a close eye on the developments at Google and in particular the positioning of Google+ in relation to the organic search algorithm. It’s not a revelation to SEO teams that social signals are an increasingly important part of the ranking factors affecting your positions within the organic search results, but the announcement by Google this week could be a game changer.

Bloom has been providing SEO services since 2000 and Social Media marketing since 2006 and we can only see the closer integration as a good thing, why?

1.    The rise of the importance of social signals means that those who rely heavily on link acquisition for rankings will see diminishing returns
2.    Building ‘social links’ is a more creative and we would argue far more enjoyable endeavour than many ‘traditional’ link building techniques
3.    A greater reliance upon an honest link/signals profile driven by effective brand communications and consumer sentiment should result in more relevant search results

In the last ¼ of 2011 we got our various teams together to debate the impact of this trend and a new concept evolved which we have called Search Engine Engagement or S.E.E. We think the future is social and effective SEO needs to properly incorporate social media marketing. We’re not talking about lip service but properly managed strategic campaigns that are valuable in their own right; the SEO benefit is just one way of measuring the ROI. On the flip side effective SEO will increasingly need effective social media campaigns to deliver great results.

The final piece of the puzzle for us comes in the form of social media analytics and we’re very excited about a project we are working on with grant support from the Technology Strategy Board.. more on this to be announced in the summer.

If you’re not feeling quite up to speed on Google+ I’ve listed some good references below.. if you’d like to know anything else drop me a line.

Google Information:  Create your Google Plus Brand Page,  Google Pages Connect

Adweek’s take on it

Mashable’s take on the launch of brand pages.

Influence: Klout have updated recently to include Google+ and other social networks to deliver a more accurate online influence footprint.

For an example of of a Klout person page here is our Social Media Manager’s Klout profile @clairehs based on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, YouTube

Here is Bloom Agency’s Google Plus brand page

Firstly I’d like to start by thanking the guys at distilled for inviting me to present.. I’d also like to thank those that tweeted their appreciation for doing so and also everyone that came and spoke to me afterwards.. got to be honest talking infront of 300+ people was a bit nerve wracking and the positive feedback meant alot.

As promised I have embeded my slides below along with a copy of our ecommerce project lifecycle and site launch plan.. I’ll be adding the 20 point check list from my presentation as a word doc shortly.

Integrating SEO into Development Presentation

Ecommerce lifecycle

Bloom Media ECommerce Process Flow

ECommerce Website Launch Plan v2.0 (for Launch on 14 October 2010)

Thanks again to all those interested and hope you find these useful.

Alex

Just a quick post to let you all know I will be speaking at this years London Pro SEO training seminar on the 25th and 26th October.

Talking about “Integrating SEO into development” I’ll be providing the benefit of my own and my agency’s experience of delivering SEO projects using our own development team and also working with client in-house and 3rd party agency teams. It can be a tricky and at time fraught relationship between SEO and development and I’ll be aiming to provide you with some really usefiul insights about how to implement a process that can lead to a sucessful and fruitful relationship.

As always there is an amazing line up of speakers for what it undoubtedly the highlight of the UK SEO calendar, more information and how to book tickets below:

Tickets are selling fast (in fact, the VIP breakfast has already sold out) so if you’d like to join us on 25th / 26th October at the Congress Centre in London’s West End, book your ticket now.

The details:
Where: The Congress Centre in London’s West End
When: October 25th and 26th
Price: £699 +VAT

Hope to see you there!

Alex

Hi to all interested in our agency.

As you may be aware we moved offices over the weekend from our old home in Roundhay back to town in the Holbeck Urban Village next to the Round Foundry Media Centre.. we”ll be uploading some time elapsed video plus something a little more creative in due course but workloads amongst the after effects guys are going to mean thats not forthcoming for a while.

In the meantime I thought I’d share these pics to give you an idea..all welcome to pop in for a look and to say hello!

View from accross the Midnight Bell Courtyard

On the whole I’m neither a great fan nor believer in the FMCG ‘brand experience’ website.

The first and only time I have visited the Persil website was just before writing this post and having visited it is safe to say it’s likely to be the last time. Similarly, If you’ll excuse the pun, it’s hard to give crap about your toilet paper brand isn’t it, so why would you go to look at the Andrex website? (oh alright it’s got cute puppies on it but you get what I mean right?!)

It would seem most UK consumers agree.. this unscientific look at traffic volumes to FMCG brand website  shows very low traffic volumes to these sites despite some of the largest above the line advertising spends in the UK.

You can clearly see that brands which struggle to enjoy an emotional attachment, such as washing powders, receive far less traffic than brands that have succeeded in bridging this void.

Up until now FMCGbrands haven’t had much choice but to try and provide, somewhat tackily in some instances, games and other “fun” things to attract & keep site visitors, after all, there really wasn’t any other reason to visit their sites.

Recently though we have seen more and more FMCG brands approach us to start exploring the role social media can play in their online activity, and what we’ve been seeing could be really exciting for the future of FMCG online. Social media finally gives digital a leading role to play in the promotion of, and emotional engagement with FMCG brands!

So how and why is social media changing the game? Here’s a quick introduction to how and why your FMCG brand should take a serious look at social media:

Why?

1. Establish an emotional connection with your brand!

Most FMCG brands are not related to things were are naturally emotionally connected to, social media enables brands to align themselves to causes that fill this void, have the potential for huge reach and enable a dialogue between the brand and consumers.

1. Enable word of mouth marketing

Successful alignment of your brand with issues and causes that people care about means your brand will be carried along with the cause. Social media tools such as Facebook enable people to quickly share events such as the charitable cause they are embarking upon, if you have thought carefully about this mechanic then your brand will get carried along too!

1. Drive sales

Successful use of social media marketing will drive an uplift in sales, if people care about your brand they will use you they will switch to you and you will make money, this is of course the only real reason to do this.

How?

1. Find a big idea!

You will know what your brand stands for, so look for causes, events, charities etc that make sense for you to get involved in (you may already support these through your CSR activity) and that have the broad or niche appeal required to achieve your ambition

1. Integrate

As an FMCG brand manager you are probably lucky enough to have a significant above the line marketing budget, you can use it to ensure that this is a success. Once you are clear about your ‘big idea’,  promote it! An integrated campaign will ensure that this builds to a critical mass.

1. Measure

There is a return on your investment to be had here, it may seem hard to correlate the uplift in sales to the social media campaign but there are plenty of ways in which to ensure that the campaign can be measured and its ROI calculated.

Image credit http://www.flickr.com/photos/earlysound/2186172726/

We have a new vacancy within Bloom (see below) we are happy consider candidates that are on their way to becoming this rather than perhaps being there already.. what we do want is someone really bright, really motivated & excited by the social media revolution and its impact on digital/SEO & PR, really straight talking and personable.. this is a new discipline for us so we are looking for someone from a PR agency background who can add new strings to our bow!

Digital PR vacancy

Bloom Media is a leading digital agency in Leeds west Yorkshire, we are enjoying a buoyant start to 2010 and are expanding our team. Last year we won a prestigious Dadi award for an innovative social media campaign and are looking to strengthen our digital marketing offering with a specialist in online PR, content strategy and social media marketing.

You will be an online and digital PR specialist, you will love online PR and social media like it is your very own offspring! You will be an budding online PR and social media expert with at least two years experience in this field and an excellent understanding of the evolving digital landscape. You will be a digital evangelist, who are able to demonstrate the effectiveness of online PR to existing and potential new clients, as well as helping the agency as a whole stay at the forefront of digital innovation and trends.

You will have solid proven experience working on website content/copy, social media and digital campaigns and understanding of how to develop relationships with key online opinion formers and brand evangelists. A brilliant nose for news and experience working on crisis and issues would be useful as well as the ability to drive and direct campaigns to support traditional PR activity. Bringing blogger contacts would be advantageous and as would stakeholder and media relations and management experience/exposure.

The Role
You will join an existing team: setting the direction for all online PR activity within the agency, working closely with the SEO and development teams on new business pitches, and developing existing client relationships. The ideal candidate will have an excellent knowledge of relevant UK online media.

You will have:

- Great communication skills, both over the phone and face-to-face
- Excellent copy writing skills
- The ability to meet strict deadlines
- Proactive approach with the ability to use own initiative
- Ability to deal effortlessly with several tasks
- Excellent telephone manner and team working skills
- An obsession with digital media!

The Agency
We are vibrant digital agency with a great blue chip client base including some of the UK’s most innovative online brands. We’re passionate about digital and love our jobs, we’re looking for someone who shares this and wants to thrive in an environment full of likeminded individuals with a great team spirit.

Update: Sorry – this position has been filled!

Keep checking back for future opportunities.

We think we’ve excelled ourselves this year with our very own version of ‘Little Drummer Boy’ (eat your heart out Wogan & Jones).. I think its safe to say that Bloom isn’t a hot bed of vocal talent but those of you who know us, we hope this brings a smile to your face and i suspect a tear to your eye for those who don’t well this might be a little wierd..

Enjoy!

Video’s below.. sorry only got it to work once Nas was well on her way but she was without doubt a natural.. Norton… well.. not so much..

[youtube]so_93ETEM58[/youtube]

[youtube]xkzuXNpSh24[/youtube]

image credit Love in a cold climate… Valentine’s Day message in the snow. Photograph: Anil Dayal/AP www.guardian.co.uk/…/feb/14/sayitwithpoetry

Following our recent .. ahem ‘award win’ for best use of social media we’ve been on a whirlwind tour of top 100 UK brands in Britain talking to them about the use of social media for their organisations. During these visits a familiar feeling came over me which will give away my age a little here. So first a little diversion before I get back to the point of the title of this blog.

When I started out in digital we used to have to persuade companies that they should get a website, they’d read the news, heard the hype, everyone was telling them to get one so they were listening.. sort of. After websites it was (and still is to a degree) the importance of SEO, now its social media. Meeting clients we can see that they are responding to the ‘hype’ around social media, some of them can also remember the process I’ve just listed so are resigned to the ‘fact’ that they should probably engage with this, after all the ‘hype’ was right about the website and was right about SEO. It’s a bit more straight forward because most clients have a facebook account whereas they didn’t have a website.. but still I can see the ‘fear’ on their faces and in most cases what can be best described as a grudging acceptance that they are going to have to get their heads around another complex digital concept and technology shift.

.. anyway back to the title..

The other day I was asked a direct question by a UK based car manufacturer, where in their organisation we felt that ‘social media’ should fit “ is it PR or marketing?” it’s a simple enough question right? And the answer is simple enough too but the implications are actually pretty far reaching I think (btw the answer is both, it sits across both) and poses a significant challenge for agencies wishing to offer social media campaign management to their clients.

Social media campaigns are challenging because they touch on so many parts of the Marcomms Mix and influence or rely upon so many different technologies. It occurred to me that both digital and PR agencies are seeking to claim this space as our own.. but look at each other with cynicism about the others ability to offer the best solution.

In a nut shell, those of us in digital look at PR agencies and are dubious about their grasp of the technology, particularly the overlap with SEO, I think we are also cynical about whether PR agencies really get ‘it’. By this I mean that PR historically has been based around pushing messages whereas Social Media is about conversations, we’d argue that we understand the medium in which these conversations happen ‘properly’ and therefore are better placed to advise upon their use. Finally we’d tag on points about measurability etc and consider the argument won.

In retort I get the impression that PR agencies look at the importance of social media to PR and crisis management and are cynical about our ability to produce the ‘right’ messages and rightly I think they’d be highly dubious about our media relations skills when advising a client upon crisis management issues. There are probably other points to add to this so I’ll extend an open invitation to PR’s to get stuck here on the comments.

Over the last 10 years I’ve had many causes to work closely with my clients media & marketing agencies, I’ve received briefs instigated by PR agencies but so far have had little need for the type of regular communication or even partnerships that I have enjoyed and still enjoy with my clients Media/Marketing agencies. BUT I sense this is changing.. looking at my followers on twitter and those I follow there are a lot of PR agencies engaging and rightly so.. looking at the social media campaigns we are running and being completely honest I increasingly yearn for a stronger basis in traditional PR and see some real opportunities here for us with our clients. From here it isn’t a huge leap of logic to see why finally I am finding myself thinking about PR agencies and my lack of strong relationships with you.. could it be that social media has finally brought us together?

If you’re a PR/PR agency and you are reading this I’d like to hear your thoughts I can’t help feeling that we could work well together here and that through collaboration offer a really solid service to our clients.. what do you think?

Digital Account Executive – Leeds

A leading & successful digital agency currently require a Digital Account Executive to join our expanding team. Due to continued success, our fast paced & fun agency have won several projects & have many more lined up next year.

The Digital Account Executive should have 6-12 months experience of online marketing or working in a digital environment, however being truly passionate about digital is more important. You will be responsible for liaising between clients and in-house teams to ensure digital projects are delivered smoothly and to an excellent level. Joining a team of developers, designers, and online marketing specialists, you will have the opportunity to work on major UK brands!

Digital Account Executive should have:

* Customer/client facing experience
* Confidence to take, understand briefs, and relay those briefs to in-house teams
* Solid knowledge of online marketing (seo/social media)
* (Desirable) Knowledge or usability/web design/development processes and methodologies.

This is a fantastic and rare opportunity to get involved with a young, dynamic and successful company. Applicants from a non-agency background will be considered for this role, provided they match the above criteria.

I have interviews available immediately so apply now to avoid disappointment!