The Insider’s Digital & Technology Awards celebrates the region’s most innovative of online businesses.

The judges chose Fusion Unlimited as the overall winner in the social media category because of our strategic approach across multiple platforms, using;

• Facebook commerce integration with an existing mobile app competition
• Twitter discount voucher rewards
• YouTube advertising

The Judges said “Fusion took full advantage of existing technology to help cut costs for the client, with social media at the very heart of the campaign.”

By adapting the campaign message and content management to suit different social channels, we’ve ensured the communication was inclusive and targeted to the most loyal and active online communities. Which ultimately has lead to an increase in brand awareness and driven a measurable increase in sales.

We also worked with our inhouse web development partner, MadeByPi, to design and build the social media applications to help us run competitions and track the results to improve performance. MadeByPi were also successful in the Yorkshire Digital Awards, picking up the award for ‘Best Web Design Team’.

If you’d like to find out how we can help you to maximise the potential in social media marketing, then get in touch:

James Pearson
Tel: 0113 226 2263
Email: jp@fusionunlimited.co.uk

I thought this was some kind of spam at first but on closer inspection I noticed the newly added “Thank Them” button sat comfortably beside my fellow +1ers.

This update once again shows Google’s tenacious attitude towards Google Plus as it continues to incorporate new features of Google Plus into its other products.

Whether or not they plan to keep this update or incorporate it in other ways is unseen but it somehow feels more intrusive then a FaceBook ‘Like’.

Google normally keep tight-lipped about their updates until days or even months after they have rolled out, but in an unusual change of habit Mr. Cutts explained that Google were planning to roll out a major algorithm change in an attempt to “level the playing field a bit”.

Barry Schwarz over at SERoundtable provided the following transcript of the Head Googler’s comments.

“What about the people optimizing really hard and doing a lot of SEO. We don’t normally pre-announce changes but there is something we are working in the last few months and hope to release it in the next months or few weeks. We are trying to level the playing field a bit. All those people doing, for lack of a better word, over optimization or overly SEO – versus those making great content and great site. We are trying to make GoogleBot smarter, make our relevance better, and we are also looking for those who abuse it, like too many keywords on a page, or exchange way too many links or go well beyond what you normally expect. We have several engineers on my team working on this right now.”

So what does that mean for those in the SEO industry? Well, that depends on the approach you have been taking.

Judging from Mr. Cutts statements about how the algorithm aims to target those who “abuse” SEO we can assume that this forthcoming update will penalize sites with large un-natural looking link profiles that contain a high volume of exact match anchor text links, or paid links. He also touched on other over-optimisation techniques such as keyword stuffing.

So If your SEO efforts have been whole-heartedly honest – relying on high quality content, natural link building through guest posting and community building then you have nothing to worry about. Your efforts will not have been in vain and you can continue working as you were, in fact you may even be rewarded for your honesty and hard work [again this is speculation – we can dream can’t we?].

For those black-hat SEO’s out there… be afraid.

What do you think this update will include? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Google have released an official statement explaining what this change means.

 “When you’re signed into Google, we add SSL encryption to increase the privacy and security of your web searches. The change encrypts your search queries and our search results page, which is particularly important when you’re using an open, unsecured Internet connection.”

Your average Google user will undoubtedly welcome the change, which paves the way for a more secure online experience. However, the new encrypted search will prove a real headache for webmasters and those in the SEO industry.

Previously when using analytical tools such as “Google Analytics” webmasters were able to see the exact phrase that a user typed in to a search engine before arriving at their website.  The benefit of this is that webmasters and SEO’s are able to see what their users search intent is, as well as how well certain phrases may be performing within Google and other search engines.

When armed with this information webmasters can make improvements to the site to benefit the user experience.

With the new changes in place webmasters will only see a “(not provided)” description tag from any users who are  signed in to Google at the time of making their search, therefore leaving webmasters and SEO’s alike scratching their heads as to what exactly the user has searched.

When these changes rolled out in America last year SEO’s reported seeing anything from 10% to 40% of searches appearing as “(not provided)”.

So, what do you think this change means for SEO? And what other signals can we use to determine how a user found a page? Social signals? In-site searches? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

The arrival of brand timelines has created a big talking point for marketers. The imminent changes (which go live on the 30^th March) provide you with a short window of opportunity to act now! It’s time to reconsider your profile page design, archive and protect your content, making best use of the new features to plan future campaign strategy and analytics to measure your success.

We’re already underway advising and guiding our clients through these changes. We feel it’s vital that you know exactly how to use your timeline to ensure you gain its full potential. Therefore we have developed an informative visual guide to help you quickly get to grips with all the changes.

For inspiration take a look at these creative examples of brand Timelines: http://awe.sm/5h8u6 

Alternatively contract James at jp@fusionunlimited.co.uk or tweet us @fusionunlimited for ideas and advice.

(Click image to enlarge)

The “Google Venice” algorithm update focuses on local results. Historically, a generic keyword search e.g. for “fitted kitchens”, would most likely return a Google Places map result with some local listings, alongside some generic non-local standard organic results. However, we are now seeing many generic searches that generate a Places map result and generic results, as well as featuring some local results in the main organic listings.

In the example below, you can see there are four localised organic results for a generic search (“fitted kitchens”), which all reference Leeds.

Google Venice algorithm in action - results for "fitted kitchens"

Google uses a number of methods to detect where a user is based – most notably, the user can set their default location in their search preferences, and Google will also look at IP address and to some degree past search history.

This is big news on two fronts. First of all, there’s a clear advantage for businesses with a local physical presence to gain visibility for generic phrases amongst searchers in their area.

Secondly, bigger nationwide companies who have strong visibility for generic phrases despite not having a physical presence in the searcher’s area will most likely lose visibility, at the expense of local businesses.

Any business with physical and online presence must consider this as part of their search strategy if they weren’t before, at a local SME level as well as national multi-store retailers. Our recommendation would be to first identify searches relevant to your product and service which may trigger the Venice algorithm, and to ensure that on-page optimisation elements target those products/service combined with location. For businesses in one location this will most likely be your homepage, whilst multi-store businesses should scale this across individual location pages. The big challenge for multi-store businesses will then be tracking results for multiple phrases across multiple geographic areas, and it remains to be seen how effective standard off-site SEO practises will be in improving Venice results.

Increase exposer to your store

Firstly, before someone gets the wrong idea about this, I don’t mean spam your fans with links to your store front and news of additions to your product lines. Nonetheless for F -commerce to operate successfully it is important to lure customers to your page so they can see that you offer a retail functionality and thus generate interest in what you have to offer. A high level of engagement doesn’t necessarily mean that fans are looking at your pages, as they will often simply be conversing directly from their news feed. It is therefore important to give customers a good reason to visit your page, whether it be for competitions, for follow up information or for content not shown in posts.

Offer something new

One of the common weaknesses of F-commerce ventures is that they stand identical to their E-commerce counterparts except for the different URL. Companies have long been offering exclusive online only offers so why not apply this idea into exclusive social offers? Latest research from e-Consultancy showed that 67% of users hitting Brand page ‘Likes’- do it for exclusive offers!

There is huge scope for differentiating the retail channel here with unique product lines, sales and offers. By ensuring that your social store is not the same as other outlets, you will be able to give a genuine reason for people to use your F-commerce function.

Develop relationships and install trust

In a conventional shop setting, you wouldn’t go up to a customer and push a catalogue in their face.  Nor so should you do so online. Instead you should befriend your customers, share with them what you think they might find interesting, listen to what they have to say (after all it might be useful!) and in this way build relationships and trust. I cannot stress enough the importance of trust when it comes to F-commerce.  If your customers know you or at least feel they can talk to you, they are likely to feel comfortable buying from you. One of the key reasons for slow adoptions in social commerce is a lack of trust (which extends into security concerns). However, if people feel they can trust a company, they will trust the services it offers, including the payment systems on their page.

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication

Regardless of size, companies often slip up when it comes to this issue. Most fans don’t want to be bombarded with complexity of content, which is likely to be boring. Nor will they necessarily expect instant replies to their comments.  They will understand that you may not have the resources to give immediate responses. What is imperative for F-commerce to work is that you do indeed give them a response. By responding to them you are giving them an incredible thing, a notification.

I see this as offering double advantage…

• first, you have created a direct link to your Facebook page (in order to see your response) which will be exposed to your store and
• Second, building the vital relationships discussed above and creating the much needed trust.

So it really is a win-win situation!

What’s to be expected from social commerce?

Without doubt, social commerce will become a huge feature of social platforms in the coming years. As the technology develops we can surely expect increasingly positive personalised shopping experiences through social channels.  A targeting method like that used in social adverts, could easily be translated into the selling of product through social media. This could produce astonishing results as pin pointing Facebook users’ interests and likes has now become so accurate.

My Conclusions

Zig Ziglar, a renowned author and salesman once said “Stop selling. Start helping”. Well I’d like to adapt this slightly to make it more applicable to social media…

“Stop selling. Start Conversing”.

To gain a return on investment from F-commerce you don’t need to be clever, you don’t need to dedicate vast amounts of time or even money. All you have to do is to imagine what you would want if you were in the shoes of the customer and what would encourage you to visit, browse and purchase. Unfortunately this is something that businesses often manage to forget to do when it comes to using social media.

Click here for more statistics

This is great for anyone wanting to track said search engines but even better as it goes towards fixing a long standing bug within Google Analytics, as all data that contained the word “search” and contained the parameter “q” would be defaulted into coming from “search.com” this of course lead to inaccurate reports with traffic from search.com being wildly inflated.

The search engines that have been added to the default list are as follows:

• http://rakuten.co.jp

• http://biglobe.ne.jp

• http://goo.ne.jp

• http://www.startsiden.no/sok

So what does this mean for your data?

These changes help to clarify that the smaller site-links are indeed a part of the site above. Previously users reported being confused as to whether the single line site-links would direct them to a new search or to a sub-page of the link above.

This is just a minor change that will have no impact on search engine rankings. It simply demonstrates how Google is trying to make its search engine more user friendly.

The adoption of technology is often limited by the skills required to operate it. As these become less and less, more and more people can begin feeling its benefits. Therefore the primary consideration of my predictions isn’t technical or business developments, but rather what will continue to aid the internet’s ever growing ubiquity, main stream crossover and human experience.

Even More Frictionless Sharing
The majority of the developed world consumes content via the internet. A small majority chooses to share this. How do you close this canyon between consumption and sharing? Make the experience as frictionless as possible.

Introduced at their F8 Conference in September, Facebook announced that users who browsed content within their platform would automatically have this information posted to their new ‘Ticker’ feature. Although met with uproar from the privacy brigade, like many of their other new features, the initial cries fizzled out when people discovered it’s not actually all that bad.

Twitter has also begun making steps into broadcasting your social activity to your followers. Their aptly named ‘Activity’ tab now includes a lot more than tweets, but now when someone you follow has favourited a tweet, followed someone or retweeted something.

But where this trend will really find it’s feet is location. Imagine not having to pull out your phone to check-in to your favourite store, but still receive a discount because you’ve been highlighted on their in-store social CRM system as an influencer? They’ll head over to the checkout, swipe their phone and ‘Hello Mr Smith, for the good words you’ve said about us on Twitter have a lager on the house’. The business potential this offers will mean there’s a vast deal of thought and resource put into making this dream a reality.

Besides social media, businesses will realise that metrics such as time on site are no longer important as people revolt against wasting their time on inefficient retail experiences. People don’t want to waste their time on a website or in a shop when they could be out with their friends, sharing experiences with their family or consuming meaningful content. The more frictionless the commerce experience, the better the brand perception. Ever wonder why Apple now lets you walk in and out of their stores with a product without even talking to any of their staff?

Facebook Ticker

Twitter Activities

Geoloqi App

Apple Store App

Connected Things

Creating, sharing and amplifying real life experiences. Driven by the adoption of engineering platforms like Ardunio, the process of connecting appliances to internet APIs will become effortless and widespread.
Different to the quantified self in that the things aren’t particularly interacting with yourself but rather with each other, connected things offer the opportunity to bring the benefits of digital to the real world.

Poke, the London based agency set up by the now W+K director Iain Tait, recognised that whilst the real-time nature of Twitter would be the perfect place to announce fresh-out-of-the-oven bread, the dough riddled hands of a baker wouldn’t fair too well with a keyboard. Connected appliances offer the chance for interactions with the internet that wouldn’t have been possible before, but not only with the internet, but with each other too. Check out this infographic by Cisco that does a brilliant job explaining its potential.

Poke’s Baker Tweet

Hyper Naked’s Nokia Push

Breakfast’s Instaprint

Mint Digital’s Olly

The Conveniently Quantified Self

To me, the idea of gamification never really resonated. I can see how playing a branded game increases the exposure of your brand but 99% of the time, much like TV advertising, they fall short of their non-commercial counterpart. Ultimately, this leaves you with an experience that hasn’t quite fulfilled your appetite. I do, however, see the desire humans have to track their conquests and the potential digital applications have to supplement this. Ranging from finance tracking applications to a retailers barcode scanning app that tracks the amount of money saved by shopping with them, to more complex applications like Jawbone’s Up. Saying you’re a retailer that saves someone money is one thing, but being able to display this dynamically would hold much more weight in the mind of the customer. And this, my friends, is how advertising must adapt. With increasing customer savviness, messaging is no longer enough to get someone to buy into your brand.

Despite the Quantified Self movement having been around for some time, like most things, it won’t see widespread adoption until practicality issues are resolved. Smartphones have done much resolve this, but you’re still required to pull out your phone and input some data every time you do something that may seem trivial, yet it’s vital towards providing the data applications need to offer life-improving solutions.

Expect to see a host of periphery products entering the market designed to pair up with your mobile phone and optimise your life.

Jawbone’s Up
Nike’s Plus

The Re-emergence of Broadcast Media

One way broadcast media is social in a way demand media isn’t in that it provides a simultaneous experience. Twitter becomes a hot bed of activity when shows such as The X-Factor and The Apprentice are showing on TV, and whilst people may be isolated in their living room, they can be sharing their predictions with friends across the world. After all, where’s the fun in wanting to speak about something no one else has any opinion on or the interest has already been and gone?

Facebook has unsurprisingly been one of the first social networks to try and harness this trend but their implementation is still someway off. The simplicity of watching TV whilst tweeting from your iPad is an experience hard to beat. Whilst TV will remain, devices like AppleTV are going to bring it even closer to the internet and I’ll eat my hat if social isn’t baked in at the very core. Eventually, I’d expect communities to schedule, watch and comment on media simultaneously, providing the benefits of both broadcast and on-demand. Imagine inviting your brother in Australia to watch the next episode of The Apprentice at a time that suits both of you.

AppleTV

GetGlue