Blogstorm
It’s official: President Barack Obama will continue his journey on the long, steep road to recovery with America for four more years after brushing aside Republican candidate Mitt Romney in the 2012 US Election.
With blocks and bricks in his callused hands, Obama built a modern campaign that yet again relied heavily on the power of social media to keep his Democratic administration in the White House.
Social media delivers hope
If 2008’s US election was the most prolifically ‘social’ political event ever, this year was something else. It has famously been the most expensive election campaign ever, totalling $2 billion, with both candidates harnessing every resource available in their race to the White House.
Let’s take a quick look at how they have harnessed the ever-growing potential of social media over the course of their campaigns:
With the ever-increasing popularity of smart phones and mobile devices, it’s essential to consider the use of them in your digital and online marketing strategies, because not doing so could cut out a massive proportion of your potential audience.
The use of mobile devices also has a big part to play on the SEO side of things, certainly factoring in local search intent. Recently, we’ve been asked a lot about the best approach for working with smart phones, so with regards to developing a mobile presence, here are the three key approaches we use to deliver the content:
Friday 30th November
Our brand new calendar of Brunch with Branded3 sessions launches this month with an hour’s long Google+ Hangout led by SEO industry experts Patrick Altoft and Tim Grice.
We’re giving the chance for up to nine Google+ users to take part in the Hangout and get their SEO questions answered by Patrick and Tim, and we’ll also be taking questions live from those watching.
Our first Brunch with Branded3 session is at 11:30am on Friday 30th November, and all you need to do to be involved is send over your burning SEO question to brunch@branded3.com, and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible.
If you’re not participating in the Hangout however, don’t forget you can watch the session live as it happens on our Google+ page, and you can still be in with a chance of getting your question answered by commenting right there on our G+ page, by tweeting us, by emailing us, or by commenting on our Facebook wall.
So, if you can’t wait to get involved on Friday 30th November and you have an SEO question, send it on over to brunch@branded3.com, and we’ll see you for a spot of brunch at the end of the month!
Earlier this week, the Royal British Legion revealed plans for an innovative way for Twitter and Facebook users to get involved in this year’s Remembrance Sunday by instigating a two-minute social silence.
Update 14/11/12: Well, as I predicted (not that I’m gloating or anything …) it appears as though Comet has lost a lot of visibility this week for its terms.
Since my original post, Comet has been moving about which pages are displaying, originally a splash page on another domain was being used to inform users of the situation. Currently, a subdomain on comet.co.uk is being used to display legal notices.
Comet no longer ranks in the top 200 for washing machines, cookers or dishwasher where it did rank p1 before. It could well be that some of the rankings have transferred to the new subdomain which search metrics hasn’t picked up at the moment, but unfortunately Google is already losing trust in the domain.
We’ll keep an eye on the situation so keep coming back for regular updates.
Fake blood and white face paint aplenty, the Branded3 team have truly embraced Halloween and come to work today in all their gory glory!
Yep, the sight of a giant pumpkin in a wig sat typing and a zombie receptionist making tea is definitely one for the Branded3 memory bank, but just so you can all see our spooky efforts (and so we can forever be reminded of this surreal day) here’s a few snaps of our scary costumes:
We swapped our lively office in Leeds last Thursday for the luxurious Cumberland Hotel in London for the annual Chartered Institute of Marketing National conference, which boasted an itinerary packed full of marketing insights and advice from the most experienced and skilful marketers in the country.
Based around a theme of ‘Survive, Adapt, Thrive’; talks at the conference focused on the continuous struggle marketing teams face in the wake of the economic crisis, and increasing expectations from superiors who want everything ‘quicker, cheaper, better.’
As marketing enthusiasts, the CIM conference gave us the chance to keep our finger on the pulse of the marketing industry, giving us a better understanding of the challenges facing it, and more excitingly, the ways in which we can change and evolve to maximise our efforts and ultimately deliver better results.
All too often, brands involve agencies without a clear goal in mind and equally want more KPI’s than is necessary for indicating performance. In terms of SEO, brand marketing is something which is only coming in front of people this year now that the Penguin update has finally caught up with dodgy quick-win tactics.
We feel that quite often, outreach is overlooked as part of a brand’s messaging strategy, and equally brands are not using the value (20% according to Mike Ashton) of their brand to successfully impact their SEO.
So, after surplus amounts of coffee (and a few sneaky biscuits…) it was over to Anne Godfrey, the recently appointed Chief Executive of the CIM, to set the scene for the theme and structure of the day, and to introduce the much-anticipated speakers. With a wealth of experience and plenty of anecdotal advice; much of what the speakers told us was valuable guidance, but here are just a few of our best bits of the day, and the quotes which really stood out for us:
Scepticism has been coursing through the veins of SEOs everywhere since the inception of Google’s spam-beating disavow tool.
There was, needless to say, controversy aplenty upon its launch, with the most prominent question unsurprisingly being: does it actually work?
In our experience, we’d insist that ‘yes’ is the answer. The disavow tool is a great way to aid recovery from a penalty. It is not, of course, the only road to recovery but, as long as it is used wisely along with a few other simple procedures, a penalty-ridden website will be back on the straight and narrow in no time. If you want to know how to use the tool read Patrick’s post here.
Branded3′s round-up of the top SEO stories that have caught our eye from the last week.
Google is continually making tweaks to its algorithm as we all know and with this, link removals are becoming a way of life for many SEO agencies.
This being said, numerous agencies struggle to remove the bad links from a client’s backlink profile, this is due the time and effort required to remove links from sites.
We all know one of the biggest challenges in building links is keeping it interesting, not just as an SEO but also in terms of the type of content you generate and the sites you target in your outreach. It’s far too easy to find yourself writing OK content about the same old news and contacting the same type of blogs again and again.
That’s why, quite some time ago we put together this fantastic outreach brainstorming template and we thought, well, wouldn’t it be nice to share this with everyone else?
Here is Branded3′s round up of all the news surrounding the recent release of the Google disavow tool.
Latest from B3Labs
- Another milestone reached for Branded3 as it’s acquired by the
St Ives Group - The latest media consumer findings & what they mean for digital marketers
- Talk to Branded3 at @BuyYorkshire in Leeds next week!
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