Web Design | Web Development | SEO | Analytics | Small Business | Ursus Media Blog » twitter http://www.ursusmedia.co.uk/blog Thu, 02 Sep 2010 06:20:23 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 en hourly 1 Amateurs are more expensive than professionals http://www.ursusmedia.co.uk/blog/2010/07/amateurs-are-more-expensive-than-professionals/ http://www.ursusmedia.co.uk/blog/2010/07/amateurs-are-more-expensive-than-professionals/#comments Thu, 15 Jul 2010 08:00:17 +0000 Adam Moore http://www.ursusmedia.co.uk/blog/?p=621

Twitter is an infinite source of information, amusement and just occasionally some very simple home truths:-

“If you think hiring a professional is expensive, try working with an amateur”
- Red Adair

Need I say more?

Ursus Media are a professional web design, development and online marketing company based in Swindon in South West England.

Thanks to @essentialryan and @TLC_Tweets for the quote.

]]> http://www.ursusmedia.co.uk/blog/2010/07/amateurs-are-more-expensive-than-professionals/feed/ 0 Twitter Weekly Updates for 21-05-2010 http://www.ursusmedia.co.uk/blog/2010/05/twitter-weekly-updates-for-21-05-2010/ http://www.ursusmedia.co.uk/blog/2010/05/twitter-weekly-updates-for-21-05-2010/#comments Fri, 21 May 2010 18:01:00 +0000 Adam Moore http://www.ursusmedia.co.uk/blog/2010/05/twitter-weekly-updates-for-2010-05-21/

]]> http://www.ursusmedia.co.uk/blog/2010/05/twitter-weekly-updates-for-21-05-2010/feed/ 0 Still think you don’t need to be online? http://www.ursusmedia.co.uk/blog/2010/05/still-think-you-dont-need-to-be-online/ http://www.ursusmedia.co.uk/blog/2010/05/still-think-you-dont-need-to-be-online/#comments Tue, 11 May 2010 07:00:35 +0000 Adam Moore http://www.ursusmedia.co.uk/blog/?p=489

If you think that your business doesn’t need to use social media or that it doesn’t even need a website then the following video from the clever and talented people at Socialnomics is going to make you really uncomfortable. Er… sorry.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQZAmr_-WVI

Still, not to worry; getting your company in front of some of these people isn’t rocket science. Here’s an easy to follow plan:-

  • Decide what you want to achieve
  • Get yourself a well designed and coded website (get it right and your site can grow and evolve with your business)
  • Make sure you have some analytics installed on it (putting your efforts into your online channel is pointless unless you can measure the results)
  • Write an online marketing strategy (a medium to long term plan that will make sure that you do everything for a reason -- you can tweak it as you go along)
  • Learn how to use the right tools so that you’re not wasting time but make sure that you devote some time to this.

Finally some free of charge top tips (are we mad* or are we the kind of people you want to work with?):

Top tip #1: Find somebody in your organisation who is using Twitter, Facebook or maybe writing a blog and make them your social media ambassador. Give them some clear guidelines and a little time everyday and they’ll love you for it.

Top tip #2: We can help. Engage Ursus Media to design and build the perfect website for you and then let us help you join up all the elements of the what is now a very social web.

*Not mad. Absolutely the people you want to work with.

]]> http://www.ursusmedia.co.uk/blog/2010/05/still-think-you-dont-need-to-be-online/feed/ 0 Simple social media marketing http://www.ursusmedia.co.uk/blog/2010/05/simple-social-media-marketing/ http://www.ursusmedia.co.uk/blog/2010/05/simple-social-media-marketing/#comments Fri, 07 May 2010 07:30:50 +0000 Adam Moore http://www.ursusmedia.co.uk/blog/?p=39

Social media marketing is a black art for many companies.

Engaging with your customers online can be very scary if you haven’t done it before. Although it has its challenges it can offer brilliant insights into what they think of you. It can also give you the opportunity to head off issues before they get out of control and win support from a sophisticated and sceptical audience.

Beyond the simple idea of talking to your customers in the way that suits them best (which has to be good), it also extends the reach of your organisation way beyond the bounds of your own website and can add a lot of value in terms of search engine optimisation (SEO), which is something I’ll discuss in a later post.

In a previous post I discussed talking to your customers with Twitter. In this superb article, originally posted on Marketing 2.0, Lois Kelly offers another 12 ideas to try.

“Many companies still think of Facebook or blogs when they hear ’social media’.  Here are 13 approaches and my assessment of their value and cost.

Shareable content

1. Social tagging: add social media bookmarks/functionality on every page of your site. This will increase your keyword relevancy and organic search rankings, reducing paid search costs. Value: High/Cost: Low

2. Social mediafy your campaigns: create content people want to share; tap into right social media rigger points, places and people. This will increase viral effect, getting greater reach for less than paid media, traditional PR. Value: High/Cost: Moderate

3. Badges, widgets, ringtones: make it easy for people to promote your company ‘wearing’ badges, sharing branded music. Value: Low/Cost: Low

4. Embed customer reviews/recommendations in your site: Online reviews are second only to personal advice from a friend as the driver of purchase decisions. So why not make it easy for people to decide when they come by your site? Value: High/Cost: Moderate

5. Create a YouTube channel, strategy: We live in a video world. Marketing needs to, too. Value: Moderate/Cost: Moderate to High

6. Take blogging to the next level: move from corporate mouthpiece to more of an online media property with high value to customers and prospects. Value: Moderate/Cost: Moderate

7. Use social sharing sites: Got great content? Share it and tag it where people can find it. Like on Slideshare.net. Value: Low/Cost: Low

Engaging

8. Create a Twitter channel, strategy: There’s a reason why Twitter, which has grown from 4 million 54 million users ini the past year, is disrupting Facebook, email and blogging. Head on over to Pistachio to get all the stats and good business cases on this trend. And then just get on so you experience what it’s all about. Value: Moderate/Cost: Low to Moderate

9. Create ambassador programs: So many of your employees and customers want to help your company by commenting on blogs, Twittering, facilitating communities. Figure out a way to make it easy for people who love you to share the love. That’s word of mouth at its best and social media makes it easy to activate. Value: High/Cost: Moderate to High

Insights/Ideas

10. Create a system to monitor social media conversations: Track issues and trends good and bad to be able to react; ’see’ how campaigns working or not and adjust; get competitive insights, nip problems before they’re big problems; inject Web 2.0 into customer service function. Value: Moderate to High/Cost: Low to Moderate

11. Tap into the wisdom of your crowds: hold webstorm brainstorming sessions and online raves to get ideas from employees, customers, partners on how to solve problems small and big, how to do things better, how to stop doing things that aren’t so valuable. You’ll be able to cut costs, prioritize more easily, find new ideas. Plus when people participate and feel heard they’re more likely to share positive word of mouth about your company. Value: Moderate to High/Cost: Moderate to High

12. Map your social media ecosystem: use social analytics to understand what’s being talked about in your industry about your company; your social media hot spots; who your advocates and detractors are, and what content your audience likes. Value: Low to Moderate/Cost: Low to Moderate

Communities

13. Bring people together: develop specialised communities for like-minded people to share advice, get help, offer help, learn, solve problems, be entertained, create new business models, or change the world. One of the secrets to community success: tapping into deeply-felt and/or widely-felt issues. Check out The Tribalization of Business site, with results from last year’s study and the 2009 survey to learn more about communities. Value: High/Cost: Moderate to High”

Most of these ideas cost very little and present little or no risk to your organisation. Some might not be for you but I would suggest that at least one or two of these things should form part of every company’s social media strategy.

Ursus Media can develop your digital marketing strategy, help integrate it with your overall marketing approach and help you engage with your customers in many different ways. If you’re not sure where to start we run regular courses in social media for business and can teach you how get the maximum benefit from your social media efforts.

]]> http://www.ursusmedia.co.uk/blog/2010/05/simple-social-media-marketing/feed/ 0 Beginners Business Tweeting http://www.ursusmedia.co.uk/blog/2010/02/beginners-business-tweeting/ http://www.ursusmedia.co.uk/blog/2010/02/beginners-business-tweeting/#comments Wed, 24 Feb 2010 08:28:24 +0000 Adam Moore http://www.ursusmedia.co.uk/blog/?p=255

Unless you’ve been swanning around on another planet (and if you have, welcome back), you’ll have heard of Twitter. I guarantee your customers have heard of it.

Twitter is a social networking tool that effectively allows for small talk on the web. Using it has been likened to being at a cocktail party full of interesting people, all of whom are happy for you to introduce yourself and have a chat. They’re at the party themselves because they’d like to chat to someone they find interesting and so on and so forth.

On the face of it, it’s a pretty frivolous idea but people are doing exactly what they do at parties. Some of them have a laugh, some of them are silly, some of them are sharing great ideas and some of them are networking.

It has the potential to help you open dialogues with customers on their terms and is at the same time an effective marketing and customer care tool. But you have to get it right.

DON’T PANIC

Let’s deal with the marketing value of Twitter first and I’ll revisit the customer care aspect in a later post. There are lots of people and organisations using it to sell products and services and increase brand awareness. Inevitably some are good and some are bad.

If you use Twitter in the right way you will have an open, welcoming and visibly growing audience at your finger tips, providing you with constant, quality feedback and helping you spread the word about your business.

If you get it wrong you have the potential to alienate millions of people who between them have a massive web presence.

again DON’T PANIC

Although you can get it wrong it’s quite hard to do. You have to remember that Twitter is a conversation. As soon as you try and broadcast, unless you have a genuinely useful stream of information, people will tune out and they’re gone. This is a simple and (at least for the moment), free way to engage with millions of people. The key word here is engage; announcement after announcement about how great you are won’t work. No matter how great you are.

So what you need is a strategy. Ideally you already have a social media strategy, perhaps as part of a wider marketing strategy, which will outline your approach to the various social networking sites. If you don’t, don’t worry, you can hire us to write it for you.

I’m not going to write a strategy for you here; partly because we do this for a living and like to get paid for our work and partly because I don’t know anything about your brand or organisation. That’s no reason for you not do dip your toe in the ‘twittersphere’ so here are seven completely free tips for you to try:

  1. Twitter is free but not effortless: You will get out of it at least as much as you put in but you need to devote some time and therefore resource to it.
  2. Think about the tone of voice for your tweets: Twitter is informal but it’s not generally rude and it’s like (I know I’ve said it before) being at a party. It’s a party with your customers or people who know your customers. They’re enjoying the witty banter but they are paying attention and they will remember that they’re your customers so you must too.
  3. Share: Twitter is a community which means people share things. Share information with others. If you add a web page, write a blog post or even just stumble across a piece of news (even vaguely) related to your sector, share by tweeting a link. Comment on it if you like but share it.
  4. Follow people: You don’t have to wait for people to follow you before you can follow them. Work out if they’re a customer, a potential customer or in a related field and follow them. Say hello at the same time – it’s only polite.
  5. If someone follows you, follow them back: They’ve voluntarily engaged with you so you should return the favour. There are tools available which allow you to do this automatically but I’d suggest that you check that they’re real and that they engage with other real people. I’m proud to say that I’ve been followed by Barack Obama (I’ve still got the email to prove it) and although I know it was probably automatic, I’ll choose to believe that he followed me because I’m cool.
  6. Talk to people: This is all about the conversation. You must engage with people and try and answer every question. If someone asks for your opinion and you feel it’s relevant and appropriate give it. If you can’t answer a question, for whatever reason, don’t be afraid to say so or to suggest an appropriate alternative.
  7. Ask for things: If you want to know something – a bit of impromptu market research for example ask people, need bit of testing of a new product or service – ask. This is part of the give and take of a community.

If you want to try Twitter you’re welcome to start by following us – just remember to say hello and mention that you read this post.

If you want to learn more about using Twitter for business Ursus Media run courses to help you get it right first time. We’ll help with your accounts and provide all the necessary tools and instruction to ensure that you and your team can use Twitter efficiently and effectively. Just give us a call or drop us a line.

]]> http://www.ursusmedia.co.uk/blog/2010/02/beginners-business-tweeting/feed/ 2 Webs 1, 2 and 3 for Beginners http://www.ursusmedia.co.uk/blog/2010/02/webs-123-for-beginners/ http://www.ursusmedia.co.uk/blog/2010/02/webs-123-for-beginners/#comments Tue, 02 Feb 2010 08:30:05 +0000 Adam Moore http://www.ursusmedia.co.uk/blog/?p=47

Ok, let’s start with the basics.
Terms like Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web are regularly bandied around by ‘web gurus’, but for us mere mortals what do they actually mean?

Web 1.0 is in fact just the web. It’s a term that’s only been in common use since the term Web 2.0 was used by Tim O’Reilly to describe a step change in the way in which people and organisations are using the web rather than a new version of the internet. Technologies have grown up to facilitate this and take advantage of it but you should really just think of it as the natural evolution of the internet and the ways in which people use it.

Sadly for those of you hankering after a return to the black ash and chrome of the ‘80s Web 2.0 doesn’t mean a black background and ‘glassy’ buttons for your website. Users of the internet had always used it to communicate with each other but over time they started to do something else. People started to share information, to collaborate not just with one other person but with lots of people. Developers and designers responded to this by building and designing websites that made this easier, faster and in some cases more entertaining.

So a Web 2.0 site allows its users not just to read content but to interact with each other and even provide content. Right now you are looking at the Web 2.0 element of the Ursus Media website. I’ve provided content to you, you can comment on what I’ve written (the box right at the bottom of the page), other readers can comment on what you’ve written and suddenly there’s a whole new conversation going on.

I think the following video from the nice people at notinwords.com describes it really well:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bc0oDIEbYFc

Web 3.0, more commonly called the Semantic Web, again describes a natural evolution of the internet. This is where as well as millions of people linking together in lots of different ways; all the billions upon billions of pieces of information and devices will be linked together as well.

Things like search will be revolutionised, shopping, communicating, learning; in fact just about everything will change. The web will be more efficient and more useful. If you think the internet is a great resource now, just you wait.

Currently information is brought to you online because its content and code is seen by applications such as search engines. As the Semantic Web evolves not only will the search engines see this content and code they will also understand its meaning, intention and relationship to other pieces of information.

In this next video thought leaders STI International describe in more detail the Semantic web:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=off08As3siM

Hopefully between me, notinwords.com and STI International we’ve managed to give you a good idea of what these things mean.

If you still have any questions about the different flavours of web I’d encourage you to leave a comment and then I can reply and so can the wider web community (very Web 2.0) or you can simply email me and I’ll do my best to help.

What this all means for your business and how you can take advantage of the ever changing web will be the subject of future posts. If you want to keep up, you might want to subscribe.

Remember if you have a project coming up: anything from a new website to some help with a social media strategy, we’d love to help.  Contact us and we can talk it through.

]]> http://www.ursusmedia.co.uk/blog/2010/02/webs-123-for-beginners/feed/ 0 We Love the Internet http://www.ursusmedia.co.uk/blog/2010/01/we-love-the-internet/ http://www.ursusmedia.co.uk/blog/2010/01/we-love-the-internet/#comments Thu, 21 Jan 2010 14:53:09 +0000 Adam Moore http://www.ursusmedia.co.uk/blog/?p=7

We at Ursus Media love the internet. It’s what we do for a living. We make new stuff for the web, we make old stuff on the web better and we pay attention like a bunch of eager puppies when something shiny and new comes along. And then we make it work for business.

One of the coolest things about the web is the sharing side of it: sharing stories, sharing clever applications, sharing photos and sharing information. This blog is where you’ll find us sharing information: the stuff we know and the funky new stuff that we find out about. It’s not entirely frivolous though. We want to help you make your business, whatever that might be, thrive online.

So, what are we going to talk about here? Some upcoming subjects, not necessarily in order (just be grateful – this is free*), are:

So if you want to follow the Ursus Media blog and learn about the best ways to make the web work for you, you might want to subscribe using the RSS feed.

Remember if you have a project coming up: anything from a new website to some help with a social media strategy, we’d love to help and it costs nothing to contact us.

*And Swindon’s more expensive than it looks.

Related items:

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