Andy wrote a great blog post yesterday about a family in a dire situation being locked into a contract with LA Fitness. The news spread like wild fire on Twitter. To the point where LA Fitness told them they didn’t have to pay. A little too late though, the corporate image has been severely dented.

In stark contrast, I came across another large brand capturing the voices of social media users. This time it was Sainsburys on Facebook.

As I scrolled through the barrage of messages from friends, I noticed this letter from a 3 year old asking Sainsbury’s why it calls its tiger bread tiger bread when it looks  like a giraffe.:

Then straight afterwards, a second letter. This was a reply from Sainsbury’s agreeing with the child and offering £3 giftcard.

When this story was first put on Facebook, it had around 15,000 shares with a few hours. Now there is a Facebook fanpage dedicated to Sainsburys Toger Bread, made by a fan.

People bang on about “making something viral” or “how do we get more likes”… here’s the secret guys… ready ?

Do Something Worth Talking About

It didn’t take long to write the reply to the girl’s letter. But it could have eaily ended up on the ‘to-do’ pile.

Stop thinking about your own company and start thinking how you can overdeliver!! You never know, people might even talk about it.

In the olden days (about five years ago), if your big corporate company was nasty to someone, the only recourse was to write an angry letter to the local newspaper and hope their ‘consumer champion’ could take it up on your behalf. Sometimes, fearing the bad publicity that could come from such articles, many companies would concede and hold out an olive branch of hope.

Often though, knowing that advertising-hungry newspapers were unlikely to bite the hands that feed them, they’d simply point to their terms and conditions and flick a couple of corporate fingers up to them.

Social media has changed all that. Read the rest of this entry »

Google Plus was one of the new things that launched itself last year and within days of it arriving it was being called a failure many reviewers. Because it wasn’t being used by as many people as Facebook and the media had called it “the Facebook killer”, it was written off as another Google cock-up.

But were they too hasty? Read the rest of this entry »

It’s fair to say that 2011 was mental as far as SEO is concerned. Every week something new would be announced that says “hey guys, do this in order to beat Google” and “you’re doing that still? You’re soooooo January, c’mon, it’s the middle of February now, that doesn’t work!”

It’s enough to make the average man in the street (well, the man in the street with a website and the Internet) to think that it’s absolutely impossible to rank on Google anymore because nerds have taken over. Have you seen “SEO For Dummies” on Amazon? Over 400 pages!! Who’s going to read that!!?? Read the rest of this entry »

“Facebook will boost your brand”

“People are making fortunes from Facebook”

“A Facebook fan-page brings massive return on investment”

These are just some of the absolute cock-and-bull statements that fall from the turgid mouths of people who promote themselves as “Social Media Consultants”. Yes, they do exist, you’ve seen them and I’ve seen them. Heck, I’ve even met a couple in the flesh which is why I keep a bottle of that steriliser spray in my top pocket just in case I have to shake their hands and pretend to tolerate their sweaty pale skin. Read the rest of this entry »

Remember Google Buzz? Eh? Remember it? The social network style chatty-thing that was going to be a Twitter-like tool to allow us all to communicate etc.? Use it? Nahh, nor me. Well, you can scratch it off the ‘To-do’ list because it’s gone away, gone the way of the Dodo. As a method of social networking (or whatever it was) it is no more.

Tossed into the rubbish bin like so many other failed attempts to get the masses to interact using a new, more streamlined and efficient platform. Problem was, though, nobody really used it. Read the rest of this entry »

OK, it’s an old subject but one which up until this week has been a pain in the backside for many people. You want to transfer files from one PC to another, sometimes in the same room, sometimes across the world but either way, it’s never been point-and-click easy. You fumble about for memory sticks, CDs, you try emailing them (but they’re too big) and then you attempt to use Microsoft’s networking and sharing effort in Windows.

After the screams you vow to find another way – and now there is!

Read the rest of this entry »

You type into Google what you company does, you don’t find your site on there. You get frustrated, fed up and disillusioned. You’ve probably tried a few things that people suggested, but nothing has worked.

I’ll be honest, there’s a LOT of reasons why Google isn’t putting you on the front page. So this is the first of a series to help you get the results you need.

Here’s the first three things you need to look at.

Don’t be emotional about it, just look at it with a cold hard mindset. If you resonate with any of the points then work out a strategy for changing that aspect.

1. You’re making it hard for Google.

For Google to asses the quality of your site, it needs to be able to ‘crawl’ through your site. Crawling simply means having a good look around. A bit like going into a large hotel and checking out all the rooms.

In the same way that rooms with locked doors and a broken lift would stop you searching the whole hotel, there are many ways you can block Google from crawling your site correctly.

If you want to check if Google is indexing your pages, go into google and search “Site:yoururl.com” for example, if we we’re checking to see if our site was indexed, he would type in “site:CallowayGreen.com” into Google. If it says you don’t have any pages, you need to fix that quick.

2. You’ve got low volume, poor quality backlinks

If you don’t have many sites that link to yours then you are unlikely to rank in Google’s search results.You’ll probably get found for your own company name, but that’s about it.

You need to be consistently building high quality links to your site. If you have the right tools you can check how many links your competitors have and then you’ll have an idea of the work that is ahead of you.

3. Your content is poor!

Google continually strive to get the best content ranked the highest. The reason they do this is that people will get quickly fed up and stop using Google if all the sites they find on their search are poor quality thrown together spam sites.

You may have heard of sites in the past six months that were greatly affected with Google’s infamous Panda update.

My advice is to take that extra time to write higher quality stuff. Your website should be full of information that people can use, learn from, implement and make a decision whether you are the kind of company they want to engage with.

That’s enough for now… Please leave a comment below when you’ve had chance to look at your site.

A few weeks ago I discussed how the rise in tablet PCs and the ongoing battle between Apple and Adobe on the use of Flash meant that if we didn’t make sure our website worked for non-Flash browsers we could be potentially losing customers (here).

Customer experience is everything and if we want to make sure we squeeze every single drop of potential out of a customer visit, we need to make our sites as user-friendly as possible. Of course, there was a bit of a backlash because, regardless of how many people are now using iPads to browse, the vast majority of PC users are still viewing the web with Internet Explorer of which 95% apparently have Flash installed.

But that’s all about to change… Read the rest of this entry »

Way back in the 1970s, Douglas Adams created the “Hitchikers’s Guide to the Galaxy”, a science fiction book that was quite ground breaking. Not only for the style it was written but also for the subject matter it addressed and much of what he wrote still resonates today. Like many historical novels (and dare I say it, The Bible) it actually contains thought provoking views on life and I want to discuss one of those today.

You see, one of the stand-out sections of the book for me is the bit where the white mice (it’s more detailed than that, but you can read it yourself!) create a computer called “Deep Thought” with the sole purpose of coming up with the “Answer to The Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything”.

After seven and a half million years of calculation it cam up with the answer: Read the rest of this entry »