London, 8 June 2010 – Experian Hitwise, the leading online competitive intelligence service, today reveals that social networks now receive more UK Internet visits than search engines. During May, social networks accounted for 11.88% of UK Internet visits and search engines accounted for 11.33%. May was the first ever month that social networks have been more popular than search engines in the UK.

This isn’t really ground breaking news, a while back this was reported in the US when Facebook recieved more visitors than Google so it’s just been a matter of time before it happened in the UK.

So what does this mean if your a business that only works with Google?

Your business isn’t going to to decrease, the services provided by social media platforms and search engines are not the same and they can live side by side. So if your doing well on Google for SEO and PPC then continue doing what your doing, but now is time to make sure you get your brand marketing is happening on these platforms. Even small businesses should be on the popular social networks building their brand and delivering their ethos to their customers.
Using social media to grow your business is very differant from using search engines, it’s all about targeting the right people with the right message rather then being listed number one, it’s the long game, it’s about using new technology to talk to people, does your business have a public figure like Paddy Power? Does your business think video is the way forward to advertise? Advertising on tv works but is expensive, using new techniques and online platforms you can replicate the delivery of tv advertising for a fraction of the budget.

I suppose the big news here, in between the lines, is that people are now communicating in differant ways and the next step for these people will be to use businesses that make it easy for them. Is your business Social Media Ready?

Outstanding, new music is out there, it is all around us.  Everyone has at least one song or album, tucked away on I-tunes from an unsigned band.  Every time that song comes on you congratulate yourself, on not following the crowd and having a fine taste in music. Then you start to think why isn’t this band or song in the charts or headlining festivals?

The truth of the matter is that new music even the very best, has to cut through massive amounts of competition.  New bands need to get their music heard they need to build up a following.  The more people that hear, love and spread the word, the more chance that song or band have of cutting through the flack and getting noticed.  Original, credible music has to reach a critical mass where the big guns can’t afford not to take notice.

The traditional trajectory of a song getting played on Radio 1 is arguably  -

1.       Song written

2.       Song played to friends

3.       Song breaks on internet

4.       Song pops up on specialist radio shows

5.       Songs popularity grows

6.       Song gets play listed on local radio

7.       Song sticks and popularity grows

8.       Song get play listed on Radio 1

This is by no means and exhaustive model  of success in the music business.  Lets for arguments sake look at this model and pose the question  -

How can social media marketing help this process and help bands and artists compete with the frightening budgets of Lady Gaga et al?

Straight away the answers is stage 2 and stage 7.  Imagine if you could identify people on line that have an interest in a certain genre of music, that actively participate in conversations about a certain genre of music, that are seeking new and original music.  Once the people in the appropriate target market have been identified, can you imagine the power of engaging in the conversation and presenting them with a link to the new song or video.

On a mass scale delivering quality music to the right people at the right time could break a song or band on the internet.  It will create a groundswell around the band.  If enough of the right people start talking about the new band.  The gate keepers and opinion formers on the specialist music shows can’t afford to ignore it.

Once the song is beginning to take hold the scope of the online campaign can be widened to deliver the song to even more people, growing the songs popularity increasing the viral effect and building towards the big radio playlisting.

Here at Boyd Digital we have been experimenting with cutting edge techniques, honing out technique.  We are just about to put this into effect for a brand new client.

More news soon . . . .

A few weeks back we had a problem with Bit.ly finding the stats for some of the shortened url’s that we wanted to track and from this we decided that we should have our own url shortening service. After some research we found that some twitter user just don’t trust a lot of the Bit.ly and TinyURL url’s that they see so we set about building a url shortener that people can trust and from this www.safe-url.org was born.

The aims of Safe-URL.org are to provide a trusted and safe url shortening service by:

• Scanning all url’s for unsatisfactory links
• Ban affiliate links
• Ban offensive links
• Ban the use of obscene terms in the links

By using Safe-URL.org as your url shortening service you will achieve highier click volumes to your blog and website from social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook as user seeing your links will identify them as being safe and trusted.

Whats next:

In the coming months we have plans to expand the service to include a blog to twitter feed that uses Safe-URL.org and provide high level stats on the performance of your links.

Give it a go! Safe URL Shortener

We aimed to achieve the target of delivering 500 people to the video within the time frame of the football match and helping to spark conversations about the video and the product.

Our plan was simple, find people that tweeted either about Inter Milan or Bayern Munich showing an interest in football and send them a highly targeted ad to watch the new unseen video.

Within 20 minutes of kick off we had 200 visitors to the video landing page and achieving an 80% view rate. By the end of the match we had 650 people that had visited the video landing page and 66 retweets causing further conversation.

We openly tracked the clicks using bit.ly to give everyone transparent analytics, the current stats can be found here http://bit.ly/cuuEqR+

This project was a great succes for Adidas getting in on the UEFA Champions League Final in a differant and cost effective way. We set the campaign up as a pay per click project to give us the incentive to create lasting conversations within the social media space, as of Monday morning the click count is still increasing slowly and over 700 people have visited the video landing page.

This is the video that we promoted: Adidas F50 The Fastest Boots Ever.

Then I looked up at noticed it was an Eddie Stobart lorry and at that moment another lorry over took me and the Eddie Stobart lorry, broke the speed limit and went round a roundabout on the inside lane. I didn’t catch the name on the other lorry but tried to look for a “How’s my Driving” sticker on the back, which it had but couldn’t be read due to being covered in mud.

I then looked at the Eddie Stobart lorry and noticed it didn’t have a “How’s my Driving” sticker, strange I thought at first but what if Eddie Stobart expects his drivers to act impeccably while representing him, his company and his customers while on the road?

Where I grew up there was a massive Malcolm lorry depot and as a kid when we went on holiday to England I’d see other Malcolm lorries and think they had come from Scotland. Malcolm had our attention as kids and lost it somewhere but Eddie Stobart is doing things different and in a very competitive industry he stands head and shoulders above the rest.

Quite remarkable that Eddie Stobart caught my attention this morning above all the bill board road side ads and radio ads, doing the right thing gets you noticed.