What are the latest trends in eCommerce – and how are they relevant to digital marketers of all stripes? To find out, I spend the day at the eCommerce Expo 2014, taking place in London in early October. It’s the go-to show for anyone in online retailing or digital marketing who wants to raise revenue,…
We are delighted to welcome some of the UK’s top online experts to the Brainstorm Digital blog, to share their insight into the rapidly changing landscape of social media. Today they tell us what trends you must prepare for in 2014 to keep up with the competition!
Click here to read what trends they believe dominated in 2013.
Businesses will stop looking down on social media as a marketing tool and start treating it as a lead-generation tool. Directors, particularly those in a sales role, have tended to treat social media as a time-wasting exercise where you engage in endless chatter with customers but don’t actually generate any business. That is all changing for two reasons:
At the Digital Marketing Show in London yesterday, one question came up again and again:
How does Google’s new search algorithm, Hummingbird, change our business’s strategy online?
We know what you’re wondering. What’s a search algorithm, and is this really something I need to care about?
The answer is that every so often, Google changes the way it calculates which pages are most relevant when people search for a particular term. If you want your website to show up high on Google, you need to understand as much as possible about how Google decides pages are important. That’s the algorithm.
In recent years, it has prioritised pages which contain appropriate ‘key words’ – so if you search, say, for ‘tall potted plants’, it will return pages which include that exact phrase. As a result, when people built their websites, they tried to figure out what their target market might search for – and included them in their content.
Hummingbird, which was announced in September, changes all that. Google’s new emphasis is on trying to figure out why you are asking the question, and then deliver the most appropriate links.
Register for our Google Hangout and FREE social media briefing on Thursday 28th February – we’ll contact you with instructions on how it works and how to join
So…what is Google Hangout? And why would I want to join it?
Google Hangout is a free video chat / conferencing service from Google+ (now the world’s second largest social network) which allows 1-2-1 or group chats or even meetings for up to 10 people at a time. It can be used for business or social (i.e. catching up with family and friends.) What is unique and attractive about Google hangout is that you are literally chatting face to face as the screen shows the faces of all attendees to everyone with a bigger portion of screen held off for the person speaking.
On Google Hangout you can…
I use Google Apps for my managing my email accounts. Until recently, I had a Google account separate from my Google Apps Account that I used for products like Reader and Analytics. This changed when Google forced users to consolidate their regular accounts with their Google Apps accounts. I had several so called "conflicting" Accounts due to
my use of the same email address for both Accounts.
Plans by Google to digitise millions of out-of-print books to
create the world’s biggest online library have been approved by British
publishing groups and authors. The new deal will still enable
tens of thousands of British writers to profit, as readers can search
millions of works, read extracts online and buy full copies. For more information about the deal, read here
It was recently reported that Google has started ranking webpages by the speed with which they load.
I found the following brilliant tip on www.bmyers.com about how to exploit Google Adwords in order to get noticed by employers. I thought I’d share it with you…
Alec Brownstein had the same problem, but found a solution.
