Instagram & Facebook – Why?


A few hours ago I read that Facebook had acquired Instagram for $1bn… aptly enough, this news came to me via my Facebook feed. There’s also an official release here from Mark Zuckerberg My first thought once I checked the legitimacy Read more

Return On Influence: The New ROI


There is not a single activity in business which is exempted from a query regarding return on investment.  Focused strategic planning and expenditure to optimise your e-commerce mix is known to be an investment worth making for product and Read more

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Social Media

Generate UK Receives Prestigious Awards

Posted on May 10, 2012 by Mike in Digital Marketing, Social Media, Web Design, Web News | Leave a comment

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Excerpt: Generate UK recently won not one but two awards for website development projects. We’re obviously very proud to be recognised in this way and delighted to be working with such great customers, such as The Poppy Factory and Universal Networks. The full press release announcing our wins is below. ## Digital marketing company receives best in class and outstanding achievement awards from Interactive Media Council. Newbury, Berkshire, UK (PRWEB) May 4, 2012 – While buzz surrounds concepts like email marketing and social media solutions, one company is not only well ahead of the pack, but has the awards and accolades to prove it. Generate UK, a digital marketing agency, was recently honoured with two coveted awards from the Interactive Media Awards, one for Best in Class in the Data Network category and one for outstanding achievement. “We are extremely proud to be recognised for these awards, especially with such high scores and in such competitive categories,” said Mike Robinson, director of Generate UK. “It is a testament to the quality and professionalism of our team.” The Best in Class award is the highest given by the IMA. It represents the best in planning, execution and overall professionalism. To be awarded, a site had to successfully pass through a comprehensive judging process and achieve very high marks in each of the judging criteria; this is an achievement that only a fraction of sites in the IMA competition earn each year. The award for Outstanding Achievement is the second highest bestowed by the IMA and is challenging to win. The…


Instagram & Facebook – Why?

Posted on April 9, 2012 by Mike in Blogging, Digital Marketing, Featured, Social Media, Web 2.0/3.0 | Leave a comment

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Excerpt: A few hours ago I read that Facebook had acquired Instagram for $1bn… aptly enough, this news came to me via my Facebook feed. There’s also an official release here from Mark Zuckerberg My first thought once I checked the legitimacy of the story was to tip my hat to the founders of Instagram…. I can’t imagine how they are feeling right now after picking up such a large cheque (with stock) for an application that was until very recently an iPhone only app. Fair play to them! They’ll be a lot of noise now about whether Facebook have overpaid, that might be the case; however for me it’s a pointless argument because the fact is that Facebook have paid because they perceive a value in Instagram, so I was keen to look into this in more detail. Instagram The Facts For those of you not bit by the Instagram bug or indeed users of any other mobile device apart from iPhone; Instagram is a free photo sharing application that allows users to take a picture, or use one from their albums and apply a filter and then share said picture. The picture is shared with your followers on Instagram and via other social platforms you choose to integrate with, for example mine is connected to Facebook, Flickr and Foursquare. Below are some quick facts to provide you with a general understanding of Instagram: Instagram launched on the App Store in October 2010 Instagram has 13 employees In April 2012 Instagram announced it had 30 million accounts When Instagram…


SMO Periodic Table and App Map

Posted on March 30, 2012 by Mike in Blogging, Infographics, Social Media | 1 Comment

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Excerpt: Anyone who has gone through school knows about the periodic table of elements. InMotion Hosting has recently taken a spin on this popular table and made the SMO (Social Media Optimisation) Periodic Table and App Map. You can easily post this on your website or print it out. But, just how effective is this table? Going on Facebook or Twitter and posting your heart out only works for so long. If you really want to make the most of your social media presence, then you need to do a little more to impress your followers. Not only that, but you need the right apps to back you up. Otherwise, you will spend hours and hours doing what an app can do in several seconds. When you look at the SMO Periodic Table and App Map, you can easily see what you should be doing to gain followers and credibility. This table will also show you what apps help you do the most in the smallest amount of time. While there are a lot of icons near the top of the table, there is a handy legend at the bottom that will make translating the icons much easier. While the table is rather crowded and a little hard to look at initially, it will get easier if you sit down with the table and understand all the icons and messages. The ideas presented by this table aren’t new, but they are useful and they have worked for years. If you are trying to do better…


Sticks and Stones: Why Managing Online Reputation Is Important

Posted on March 28, 2012 by Mike in Online Reputation, Social Media | Leave a comment

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Excerpt: Online Reputation Management (ORM) can make or break you in terms of business success. Your online reputation can do much to drive traffic to your website or deter it depending on what your customers can find out about your organisation online. In exactly the same way as negative word of mouth can spread faster than wildfire, so too can negative comments, blog posts or feedback about an individual, product, service or brand.  The key difference with online reputation is that the Internet has a far longer memory and span of reach which can do some serious damage to your digital marketing efforts for a long period of time… especially with Social Media playing such a vital role in many businesses. A search check of Google will reveal if there is an issue.  And if you find nothing?  That’s great news. But what if you do find something, what should you do to address it? What if you have created this content yourself in the form of a comment, post or social media discussion that reflects poorly and is one that you wish you could remove? If you are like most businesses you may have been unprepared to uncover negative mentions of your organisation and uncertain as to what steps are required to remedy the situation and get you back on track to a clean online abstract. The Internet has a long memory.  So does Google cache. Timing Is Everything Search Engine Result Pages (SERPS) are easily reviewed to determine harmful content.  Keywords such as personal…


Return On Influence: The New ROI

Posted on March 21, 2012 by Mike in Digital Marketing, Featured, Infographics, Internet Marketing, Social Media | Leave a comment

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Excerpt: There is not a single activity in business which is exempted from a query regarding return on investment.  Focused strategic planning and expenditure to optimise your e-commerce mix is known to be an investment worth making for product and service based organisations.  We know that social media performs but for Marketers around the world, the new ROI is Return on Influence. So what is your social media influence worth? Or more importantly how does that influence translate into sales or distribution growth?  What is the bottom line benefit of your digital marketing and how do you measure it?  SEO quantitative analytics and a qualitative evaluation of engagement provide the answer. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is designed around website metrics and engine algorithms that specifically measure the result of activities on web traffic and customer interactions.   The science of it creates measurable analytics that report the success of protocols intended to increase exposure and traffic to your website.  The more traffic you have the more business opportunity you can generate in a similar way as word of mouth generates sales leads and product endorsement. I thought the following infographic, originally from The ODM Group was a good visual reference. Source: infographicsposters.com via Mike on Pinterest How to Evaluate Return on Influence Page Views vs. Unique Visits An impressive business website has a large number of unique visits each month.  But a closer look at the individual page view rate for the site may give a more valuable insight as to the efficacy of the content and overall information engagement. You…


The Top Five Content Aggregates

Posted on March 19, 2012 by Mike in Internet Marketing, Social Media, Web 2.0/3.0, Web News | Leave a comment

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Excerpt: In a previous post “Curating Content for Niche Authority” we discussed the benefits of using software to collect and distribute relevant content to your website and social networks. The predominant benefit to creating a newsletter type feed by sharing syndicated content is to provide interesting news items and articles for discussion within your niche to demonstrate knowledge and authority. In other words, choosing to curate content within your industry clearly demonstrates to your customer that are you are “in the know” when it comes to your specific product or service sector and thought leadership. As media print publications such as newspapers and magazines continue to wane while the amount of content (and access to content) increases exponentially, news aggregates and article sharing is poised to dominate as an optimal alternative. I asked our team at Generate UK to share their favourite content aggregate sites and to share their insight into what makes that specific software popular with our clients. What follows are the top five aggregates according to Generate UK team members. HubPages A convenient and fast way to publish content without having to edit or manipulate page   layout or complicated settings. The popular platform gives you feedback on the success or popularity of your content by awarding Milestones and a score is assigned to provide a metrical ranking of the publisher. An effective and easy to use software package but advanced users may be disappointed at the lack of brand theme or customisation available for the individual HubPage. Joe’s Top Tip: Adding keywords…


Social Media. The Facts!

Posted on March 6, 2012 by Kim in Blogging, Digital Marketing, Internet Marketing, Social Media, Web News | 2 Comments

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Excerpt: Social Media is still very much the buzz word of the moment but actually understanding what Social Media Marketing really is and how your business can embrace Social Media, should be at the top of your agenda.  Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc. are great tools for communicating and pushing out content. I recently found a great video and found out some amazing facts about just some of the main social networking platforms that are out there. I couldn’t possibly keep them all to myself. Facebook now gets more visits than Google with 11% of the world’s population signed up to the the site.  There are even more Facebook users than there are motor vehicles and in 2011 Ferarri sold 5329 cars. However, they managed to get 5.267.365 fans on thier Facebook page. 50% of these active users log on to Facebook in any given day, and spend an average of 55 minutes using its services. Twitter has become one of the most popular social networking services and has created many business opportunities. Although you can only use 140 characters in a Tweet (which often doesn’t feel like enough) the average Tweet only contains 40 and the average user has 115 followers. Lady Gaga is the most followed person on Twitter with 15.864.378 followers. The average person spends 15 minutes a day on YouTube. 88.3 billion clips were viewed in October 2011, which accounts for two in every five videos viewed online and LinkedIn gets two new people signing up to it every second. Oh…and one last…


Digital Marketing Seminar

Posted on March 5, 2012 by Mike in Events, Internet Marketing, Seminars, Social Media | Leave a comment

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Excerpt: On the 6th March, Generate UK will be running the next leg of our successful digital marketing seminar series. These events are all about sharing the fundamentals of marketing your business on the Internet. Our objective for the events is always to share and engage with our attendees, who are a mixture of existing customers and others whom we would welcome the opportunity to work with. When preparing for the event, we were discussing our approach and what our key message was going to be this time.  Our challenge is to come up with a set of presentations that engage with an audience that is at all levels, from an experience perspective. When you break it down like that, it is less about marketing and more about sharing a process, a set of fundamentals that can be applied offline as well as online. A great example of this is an infographic from Salesforce.com below: Source: salesforce.com via Harold on Pinterest   When you break it down like this it actually starts to make sense, my perspective is as follows: Listen – When I first started in sales, working for software companies; my sales director constantly spoke to me about having “two ears and one mouth” and using them in that order. It sounds basic, however it does apply to marketing your website, what are your customers talking about, what are their challenges. Also, it’s not just about what your customers are saying but what they’re are not saying about you… who are your ambassadors. Engage – One of…


Tips to Improve Your Klout Score

Posted on February 26, 2012 by Mike in Digital Marketing, Internet Marketing, Social Media | 1 Comment

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Excerpt: Before reading this post, if you’re not sure what Klout is, then you may want to visit our previous post about What is Klout all about. We also posted a follow up commentary about a change to the Klout algorithm in November. Ok, welcome back… At the end of 2011 Klout had reached over one hundred million users worldwide who were interested in understanding the analytics of their social media interaction and online influence.  The directory continues to grow exponentially and with it a number of new applications and reasons to get on board with Klout. Maintaining a Klout score takes a moderate amount of online interaction on a daily basis.  Some have commented that retaining Klout scores can be something of a full time job, requiring input on a variety of social network sites in order to build a higher score.  Inactivity on social media networks does cause the Klout score to drop dramatically, which is consistent with the fact that its sole intention is to measure online influence.  If you aren’t contributing to information streams or digital community on a regular basis you are not going to be influential at all.  It takes a level of participation to achieve a high score in Klout’s qualitative measurement model. Is Klout it worth it? CBS News New York created an excellent piece evaluating who is using Klout and outlining some very practical purposes.  What exactly does having Klout mean?  It can depend largely on the industry with Justin Bieber achieving the impossible perfect score of…


What is Viadeo and should you be on it?

Posted on February 23, 2012 by Mike in Business Development, Digital Marketing, Social Media | Leave a comment

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Excerpt: Hot on the heals of our recent post about marketing to women with Pinterest, which seems to have become the hottest website on the planet; we thought we’d remind ourselves and our readers that there are other social platforms out there.. many with a much larger user base than Pinterest. Today’s post is one such site… today we are going to explore Viadeo. Viadeo is a 40 million member social network site. It is available in 7+ languages and is set up on five continents. They claim to ‘network and socialise’ which gives them an edge to LinkedIn, more heavily weighted to networking, and Xing which focuses more on being social. Viadeo provide a strong network system enabling you to get in touch with people you don’t know through people you do, but they also provide a variety of social features; groups; communications; sub-communities; agendas; and chat. Founded in Paris, France in 2004 it actually grew from a different network. A small site called Agregator was started in 2000 aimed at entrepreneurs to exchange experiences, ideas and contacts. However, the creators noticed a niche in the market and so made a more versatile sister company which they named Viadeo. The sister company began to take off and before long they were taking in more new members a month than LinkedIn. To accelerate their growth, Viadeo made many acquisitions changing the new company’s logos/branding but changing them onto the Viadeo platform. They joined with Tianji in China, Apna Circle in India and ICTNet in…


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