EveryCity Support Comic Relief

I’m pleased to say that we are supporting Comic Relief with their campaign.

Comic Relief Status App

 The Comic Relief Status donate application which lets you donate your status to Comic Relief to allow them to post a message each day to help raise awareness.  The application also helps promote the FunnyForMoney application which was the winner of the Hackathon (see below). 

The app was created by iPlatform who do great things integrating isolated brands social networks/hompages with Facebook, MySpace and other apps.

Facebook Developers Garage Hackathon

Not long ago there was a Comic Relief Facebook Developers Garage Hackathon. Three teams came together on a Saturday at Microsofts office in Knightsbridge to compete to create an application which would help raise money for Comic Relief.

The winner, FunnyForMoney, is an application which allows users to create jokes which get ranked according to how many votes they get.  For a user to vote they need to donate £1 to Comic Relief.

You can find more information and videos from the event @ www.comicrelief-hackathon.com

How we are supporting Comic Relief

EveryCity has been supporting Comic Reliefs facebook efforts by providing on-site support at the Hackathon as well as free hosting for the ComicReliefStatus App & FunnyForMoney application.

Who Else is helping

London Facebook Developers Garage - The London Facebook Developers Garage have been promoting the Comic Relief Hackathon as well as promoting the cause.

Adknowledge - A worldwide banner network they have donated 5 million ad impression to help promote both of the Comic Relief applications

Add comment March 10th, 2009

SEO & PPC Tip of the month: Landing pages

Landing pages are an incredibly effective SEO & PPC tool when creating websites. Especially if you have a certain aspect of your company which you would like to promote.
Two things that you might want to promote:

• A product/service range
• A specific service/product

Two reasons to create landing pages:

• It will increase your search ranking if done properly
• You will sell/promote more product, for free or less than its currently costing

Put very simply it is:
“Creating pages for individual products and tailoring the content for both the product and how your visitor has reached your page”

Landing pages for SEO

Let us take an example simple website: http://www.greatpeople4events.co.uk

This site has four pages: Welcome, about us, event staff & contact us.

Across these there is probably a limited scope for optimising against lots of different keywords. However by adding lots of sub-pages this company could appear on lots of searches.

Consider the following, the company may operate in one geographic areas, say London, and from the list of staff types at the bottom they have seventeen different types of staff. It might be sensible therefore to have the following:

A landing page for each type of staff in each geographic area:

• /london-registration-staff/
• /london-ushers-and-stewards
• /london…

These could be linked from the bottom of the first page on each of the job types. This would mean that anyone googling to the site would land an a page describing exactly the type of service that they want. This is proven to lead to higher conversion rates.

Landing pages for Pay-per-click advertising (PPC)

If you are paying Google/Yahoo/MSN.. for search you should definately have landing pages for each of your keywords. Consider the following examples assuming that you have paid for an exact phrase match on “London Registration Staff” and that you have a custom ad for it rather than a generic company one.

Example 1 - No landing page
Sponsored Google Ad:
London Registration Staff
We offer professional ad-hoc registration staff anwhere in London at short notice, click above to find out more. www.staffingcompany.com/event-staff/

Your visitor will be taken straight to your home page or maybe even your ‘Event Staff’ page.
Problems:

• They will not get a message which is customised to what they have clicked on
• Google will find your ad less relevant and may charge you more, lower position, higher cost

Example 2 - Landing pages for each service
Sponsored Google Ad:
London Registration Staff
We offer professional ad-hoc registration staff anwhere in London at short notice, click above to find out more. www.staffingcompany.com/london-registration-staff/

Your visitor will be taken to a page which details the service that they are looking for, hopefully with lots of relevant information which will make them want to buy from you.
Advantages:

• They will get a message which is customised to what they have clicked on
• Google will find your ad relevant and may charge you less, higher position, lower cost

Final considerations

Finally you may want to consider creating separate pages for the SEO & PPC landing pages. The reason for this is that your SEO’d pages are likely to be much more permanent than the PPC pages. PPC campaigns can change from month/week/day to month/week/day whereas SEO can take weeks/months to achieve your goal.
This theory can apply to any type of site from an e-commerce site to a site promoting a brand.

I hope you have found this useful!

Legal Disclaimer: I/We take no responsibility/liability for the results of implementing any of the actions suggested above. It is possible to reduce your google rankings as well as increase them and if you are in any doubt I would suggest talking to an SEO expert.

1 comment March 10th, 2009

EveryCitys New On-Demand Scalable Hosting Platform

It’s very rare that I talk about my work on this blog and indeed I think it might be the first time ever. We have launched a new on-demand managed hosting platform, so below is a quick pitch of what it is.

Why do I need scalable on-demand hosting?

If you are running a campaign/website/application that could get very busy then you face two challenges, unpredictability of visitors & cost.

Currently most agencies plan for busy sites by paying for lots of
servers to be set-up which costs lots of money.

The way to avoid this problem is to use a scalable on-demand platform.

What does this mean?

Simply said we are able to scale your websites & applications very easily and in a large number of cases, without you even having to change any code.  The most important part to you is that you don’t have to do anything as this is a fully managed service.

What we are offering

The solution to agencies, applications & businesses who want to harness on-demand computing and make use of flexible contracts to help their businesses save costs & improve service.

Classic vs On-Demand

Under a classic model if you had a 3-month campaign or busy period then you might have to buy a full load balanced infrastructure.

Cost Comparison

What it looks like - Classic vs. New

Our on-demand service works just the same as a normal dedicated server with additional benefits.
In the On-demand diagram the two extra servers are whited out as you can use them as needed.

Advantages

Flexibility

• If you need to upgrade you let us know and restart your server
• You can change your infrastructure on a month-by-month basis
• Add zones/instances to scale whenever you need

Cost & Time Reduction

• Pay for what you need when you need it rather than x-times more
• Rather than having to plan months in advance, decide on the day

Zero-Hassle

• We offer a fully managed service, set-up, monitoring backups..
• A team of experts are available to help you with your app/site

Disadvantages

• You won’t get to sign off those huge hosting budgets anymore

Add comment March 10th, 2009

ScaleCampLondon - Planning & delivering high traffic websites

Last week we ran an interesting event called ScaleCampLondon in our offices at London Bridge.  The theme of the event was to address and educate people about how to build websites & applications which could potentially become very busy or grow quickly.

There are a few key principles that account managers & project managers need to understand in order to ensure that their developers or agencies are doing what is needed.

Who needs to scale (or plan to scale) and why?

If you anticipate growing, plan the growth but don’t go overboard with infrastructure. Work out a rough number of visitors you expect on your site, and the period you expect they will visit over.

Do you need to think about scaling equation:

Number of visitors expected per day / number of hours you expect them to visit in.
e.g. 100,000 visitors / 5 hours = 20,000 visitors per hour

Most typical servers can cope with around 20,000 ~ 50,000 visitors per hour depending on how efficient the website is. If you have over 20,000 visitors/h you may need multiple servers to cope with the load.

I’ve heard that load balancing is the solution, is it?

This depends entirely on what your goal is and what risk you want to mitigate.

I just want to protect against lots of visitors:

Usually most sites can get away with simply splitting up what each server does. I.e. having a separate Database server and a Web server. Servers are extremely powerful these days, and a well written website can cope with a large load. However if your application is highly dynamic, and each page request incurs many database queries, you may need to consider spending time optimising your website. Alternatively, it may be quicker and/or more cost effective to simply use more powerful servers. If this isn’t enough, you may wish to spread the load over multiple servers by utilising load-balancing.

I just want to protect against lots of visitors & against server failure:

If you are investing heavily in a campaign, you may wish to hedge against server failure. To do this, you will need a load-balanced solution, that will spread traffic across two or more servers. There are a number of ways this can be done, some are cheaper than others. It also may require code changes to make your application load-balancer aware.

I want to have video & large images on my site

People believe that video and images are a challenge to put on a site and often envisage needing many servers and spending lots of money to do it. This is simply is not true.

There are currently two main ways of putting video on your site:

A - Use a service such as YouTube, Vimeo, Viddler, Flickr..

These are generally well known and I recomend Googling if you haven’t heard of them.

Advantages: Often free or near free
Disadvantages: Slower page load times, may lead your audience away from your site, less professional

B - Use a Content Distribution Network (CDN), in conjunction with your host

A CDN (of which there are many) is the Rolls Royce of delivering content very quickly to your audience irrespective of where they are. CDNs provide a network of global servers, and requested content is served locally, rather than potentially across the world.

Advantages: Allows you to deliver any video/image content including HD
Disadvantages: Costs slightly more, usually £0.25 ~ £0.35/GB

Is there any way that I can test the capacity of our site?

Yes there is. You can conduct load testing, either internally, via a dedicated load testing firm, or with assistance from your hosting provider. The idea is to mimic lots of users using the site at the same time to ensure that everything is sufficiently optimised for your needs. This usually incurs a fee which can vary from £250-£1000+ depending on how comprehensive the testing is.

Some of our sites load slowly, what can we do?

There are a number of ways that you can improve this and it could be for a number of reasons. A few quick easy fixes are below:

• Get your developer to add caching to your site (watch video below for more info)
• Use a CDN
• Get a more powerful server

Videos from ScaleCampLondon

Below are some of the videos from the event, some are a little technical but they should give you a good overview of the technologies you need to know about if you’re building big websites.

Caching & Content Distribution Networks (CDNs)


Load testing

Add comment March 6th, 2009

Building B2b & B2c brand equity using executives & directors

Making a company well known within a marketplace is undoubtedly one of the most important goals for Directors, PR & marketing departments as well as agencies of those companies.

An often missed gem of this is using the companies own management as superstars and heroes of their industries. Most people know Microsoft and Bill Gates, Apple and Steve Jobs, these companies have very strong brands but they also have a team of execs who are portrayed as super heroes.

What is often found is that the execs already have a wide network of contacts, clients and suppliers however what is required is to join this already well known person with the brand and they will boost each other.  It inspires confidence in clients as they see the people whom they are dealing with in a different light and it boosts the brand by putting real human faces to what can often seem a large corporate.

One barrier to achieving this is that it really needs to be done in a way in which the person seems like a human which a strong personality.  Whereas many PR companies, departments and directors when first presented with this idea go for the far too unoffensive and uninteresting grey robot which is all to often found in annual reports.

One thing that is all to often forgotten in the world of business be it b2b or b2c, is that people by from people not just brands.

Add comment January 20th, 2009

Two free tools to measure online brand social media effectiveness

Here is a quick overview of two very easy to use tools which can be used to measure and monitor online social media presence and effectiveness.

For the purpose of this blog post we’re going to use two well known brands: Sony Playstation & Nintendo Wii

Tool #1 - Addictomatic

Addictomatic is not very measureable, however it is very good to see where your brand can and cannot be found.

It’s very simple to use, all you have to do is go to the address: www.addictomatic.com and type in a topic of your choice, in this case “Sony Playstation”  & “Nintendo Wii”

The results can be seen here:

• Sony Playstation

• Nintendo Wii

From these two you can see that these two very well known brands appear in all of the main stream social media channels.  Looking at the content on both of these two pages the more experiences marketeers will be able to spot the different messages that are getting through and those that aren’t.

Tool #2 - Twitter League

This is a relatively simple yet very effective tool to measure the number of followers on twitter across a number of twitter accounts.

Simply by visiting the site & logging in, in a number of minutes it is possible to create a comparison list which is kept up to date for you live, making those reports easier to fill in at the end of the month!

As you can see from above, the code can also be embeded into blogs and there’s even an option to get the raw XML which if you know what you’re doing you can use for anything you like.

It’s worth noting that I couldn’t find an official XBox 360 user on Twitter only the unofficial ‘fanboy’ user..

Add comment January 9th, 2009

What is Twitter? and how is it useful?

Twitter is a relatively well known microblogging tool. Most normal people will be lost at ‘microblogging’.

Misunderstanding
The main misunderstanding of Twitter is as a result of it’s marketing which says: “Twitter is based on the simple question of ‘What are you doing right now?’”.

What people typically use Twitter for?
What Twitters front page it should really say is:
-For when you want to send a message to someone but don’t know who, so send it to everyone
-For when you want to share information or links with friends and colleagues
-For when you want to poll opinion on an idea/topic of interest to you or your followers/friends
-For when you want to promote something that you or your organisation has just done

Who Cares?
Initially no-one. First you have to make your presence known by looking for people you know, these might be through work or social or both. You can then ‘Follow’ them, this is a little like adding a friend on Facebook except that by default they are accepted.

People who you follow are notified by an email (assuming they haven’t turned this feature off, most don’t), and can then if they think you might be interesting follow you.

What if I have private stuff that I want to say?
Twitter is like your own little press release news wire. If it’s private there are many many alternative modes of communication you could use like email.. This is especially worth noting as Google tends to like indexing everyones messages aka ‘Tweets’

If you are interested in what I have to say, check out my twitter@ http://www.twitter.com/duncan_m/

Add comment December 19th, 2008

LeWeb08 - How to build a community - Gary Vaynerchuck of Winelibrary.tv

Gary Vaynerchuck is a very well established entrepreneur who has built a multi-million dollar wine business from scratch.

From his talk at the largest European web conference LeWeb I took some very important points which although I’ve heard before, can’t be impressed on too importantly for Agencies, SMBs and Brands alike.

-You’re a clown if you’re not using Tubemogle to upload video,  as it is the best way to distribute and track video online.

-You have to love your audience, care about your community, and be authentic with content that you understand.  Caring, answer all your fan mails in a serious and authentic way.

-Two things matter: Word of mouth - Now instead of a maximum audience of 100 now people have audiences of thousands if not tens of thousands & Customer service will prevail, if it’s good.

-If you can build a personal/people based brand you should as it will add value to yourself and the company you are working at.  A company/brand with a board of celebrities is always going to be more valued by a customer base than one which is invisible.

Live Video streaming by Ustream
Gary @ LeWeb in Paris 2008

Source: Gary Vaynerchuck, Winelibrary.tv

Add comment December 18th, 2008

LeWeb08 - Fotolia an innovation in Royalty Free Photos

If you’re looking for a breath of fresh air from iStock and Getty, check out Fotolia A US based stock photo site, they have 4,6m online royality free images.  What is unique about Fotolia is that it’s actually a marketplace where professional photographs are able to sell their photos.

The companies key goal is to provide only very high quality images which they screen.  One thing that came through from the interview is their intention to start offering stock video by the end of January 2009.

Watch the interview above. Source: -Interview with Oleg Co-Founder & President of Fotolia - Intruders.TV

They have a very simple pricing model of between $1 and $10 which gives you rights for print and at the top end $10 you can use for resale on items such as t-shirts and mugs.

-www.fotolia.com

Add comment December 17th, 2008

MediaCampLondon#2 - Tailoring content to your audience

This weekend I listened to Pete Wailes at MCL#2 on digital content.  Most of the things he covered are general knowledge for those writing blogs and creating content but here were a few of his key points:

-Tailor to your audience: Create personas, look at who you are targeting, Age, Sex, Location, Level of intelect, Technical understanding..

-Make it scannable: Keep massive blocks of text to a minimum and break up with bullet points and images E.g. ProBlogger.

-Title is king: For attention and SEO

-Multimodal content: Some people prefer to digest their information in different formats, podcasts, PDFs, Videos.. The more you consistently offer the better you will cater for your audience.

-Video: Don’t be scared to do it, but keep it moving and interesting and if possible fun e.g. YourGeekNews, Newspepper…

-Focus on a niche: E.g. Gamers/Who like Xbox/Who like shooting games/

Source: MediaCampLondon, Pete Wailes ‘Explosive Content: the art of creating content for digital audiences’

Add comment December 16th, 2008