HRO'C Blog

Twitters Traffic Generation

Simon Cox — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 08:31:16 +0000

As with any new ‘channel’ talk soon turns to how to make money from it, and Twitter is no different. Hitwise’s research director, Robin Goad, blogs on some interesting Twitter numbers here:

Twitter sending traffic to online media but not retail.

A couple of stand out paragraphs:

“One consequence of its phenomenal growth is that Twitter has become a key source of traffic to other websites. During May 2009 Twitter was the 30th biggest source of traffic for other sites in the UK, accounting for 1 in every 350 visits to a typical website. Over half of this traffic (55.9%) is sent to other content-driven online media sites, such as social networks, blogs, and news and entertainment websites. However, only 9.5% of Twitter’s downstream traffic is sent to transactional websites (i.e. travel, business and finance sites, plus online retailers). By contrast, Google UK (the country’s biggest search engine and source of traffic to other websites) sends 30.7% of its traffic to transactional sites, while for Facebook (the UK’s most popular social network), the figure is 14.7%.”

“The key to having a successful Twitter presence is to engage the community. Twitter is a great viral marketing channel, and for many users the aim is to have their story ‘retweeted’ – i.e. passed on by other users – as many times as possible. Although all of the newspapers have multiple ‘official’ feeds, these tend to be bland and have very low ‘retweet’ rates. Where journalists themselves are ‘tweeting’ themselves and engaging with the Twitter community, they typically have more success in creating viral stories.”

It’s like any channel, make the experience engaging and genuinely worthwhile and you will see the rewards… And if you aren’t really sure why you’re using a channel like Twitter, then don’t expect your audience to work it out for you…

The Sheriff and his Deputy are back in town

Sammi Edwards — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 08:30:48 +0000

Another series of The Apprentice has flown by this year and we are starting to get to grips with the types of candidates that Sir Alan is looking to hand over a six figure salary and swish London job to after a series of gruelling business tasks and boardroom bashings.

Do the words hard-nosed, deceitful, bullish and downright rude come into your head as well?

My interest is not in these latest recruits, all with their own eccentric ways (Pants Man – need I say more). My intrigue lies with Mr Sugar and one half of his dynamic duo on the show, semi-retired PR practitioner, Nick Hewer.

Drafted in by the big man himself at the very outset to assist with a “small” television project, we are now five series down the line and have seen, over time, more of his characteristics and personality bubble out.

Quirky facial expressions are his trademark, but I think it took a lot more than these simple twitches for Sir Alan to trust him with the public relations side of his multi-million pound organisation, Amstrad. Nick understood the needs of Sir Alan very early on and knew how best to handle his technological empire over the years, cementing both their professional relationship and friendship and ensuring the trust was of high priority.

This should always be the backbone characteristic of any PR practitioner – to have the ability to successfully communicate with his or her client in a way that seems unforced and fluid. Without telling every PR practitioner in the business how to suck eggs, it’s something that in this digital age of doing PR needs to remain as top priority.

Looking how we can maintain this in the 21st century Tweeting and Facebook communicating ways, we need to constantly ensure the client is happy and getting the most out of their PR. So, even if it’s just a simple phone call to see how everything is going, it could swing the relationship in the right way.

However, if there’s one thing we may have underestimated about Nick, it’s his apparent effect on the opposite sex. As noted by glamorous Apprentice finalist, Debra Barr appeal to the ladies – although I’m sure that wasn’t one of the main reasons why Sir Alan appointed him as a ‘close aide’.

Work Experience at HRO’C

Izzie Barber — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 08:34:09 +0000

When you hear the words ‘work experience’ in an all girls’ school, you get many different reactions to being “out in the real world”, as the teachers like to call it.

“Yesssss, no more school for two weeks.”
“I’m going to the zoo because I want to be a hippo.”
“Oh no, I’ve got to work with my dad at his office where everyone is over 60 and grey.”
“Good, a chance to buy some more clothes”

Nevertheless, we were told to be organised in the middle of September for something that we would be doing, what, 9 months later? So, as usual, there were the incredibly over-organised ones who came in the next day with it sorted and there were the others who had only just been accepted into their placements last week. Amazingly, I was not the latter.

Churches, schools, airports, “boring old” offices, zoos, banks, shops, car dealers, estate agents, garden centres, hotels, vets, hospitals, doctors, BBC, law courts, theatres and the sewers are just a few of the weird and wonderful work experience placements that come out of Sutton Coldfield Grammar School for Girls each year.

Some people get great places such as Cosford Air Base or Kerrang Radio but with the tight grasp of Health and Safety of my school, there are only a bunch of places where you can actually be hands-on. Hopefully the one poor person at the sewers is thanking their lucky stars for the over-protectiveness of schools. Then, there are those poor few that get stuck with something the school sort out like stacking chairs in a church or filing papers in the school office. Ha.

Luckily, I think mine is definitely more towards the “great places” end of the stick. I bet you everyone else has to wear a suit and, hey, there are no boring old people over 60!

Initially, I imagined HRO’C to be quite formal with lots of old people in grey business suits and briefcases in a huge office with big, clumpy computers at every desk, but instead of big, clumpy computers, everyone is “down with it” and has a MAC.

As I am interested in either journalism or medicine, which are completely different careers, having a week at HRO’C has been a very valuable experience. I have done things I wouldn’t have otherwise done and learnt things that I wouldn’t have otherwise known. Did you know that the horse food market is very competitive?

The thing I like the most about HRO’C is the very informal and laid back atmosphere around the office. Also, if I hadn’t had a place in such a great company as HRO’C, I would have worked with my sister at her office. Guess what she does?

She works in PR.

Diary of a displaced cat in a cruel digital world – Part 1

Mark Cheatham — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 09:22:46 +0000

Just the other day, some account handler innocently enquired how, at my age, I managed to stay up to speed with all the myriad digital developments.

Er, at my age?

Somehow resisting the urge to dispatch the impertinent upstart to the account handler graveyard in the sky with a conveniently close hole punch, whilst at the same time reminding them of my director status and their impending joblessness, I instead found myself recalling a conversation I’d had a couple of years before.

Well, when I say ‘had’, what I probably mean is ‘skirted round the edges of’. During one particularly long internal meeting, just as I was beginning to master the fine art of dozing with my eyes open, I suddenly found myself in the midst of a conversation about breadcrumbs.

‘I don’t like them.’ Someone said.
‘I’m not a fan.’ Said another.
‘Don’t mind them myself.’
‘Take them or leave them.’
‘What the !?!$! is everyone talking about breadcrumbs for?’ I thought.

But on it went. Six people sitting in the same room as me expressing, with no small degree of animation, their respective sentiments towards breadcrumbs.

It took an uncomfortably long time for it to dawn on me that these ‘breadcrumbs’ were not of the small, crumbly, dough-based, invariably-found-down-the-back-of-a-sofa variety. The topic of discussion was, in fact, yet another of those digital terms that had, at that juncture, managed to avoid my radar.

And it wasn’t the only time it happened. As what you might call a traditional creative of many long years’ experience, whose sole remit had been to put large black N60 scribbles on nice clean crisp layout pads, this whole digital revolution had come as quite a shock. I know we’ve seen change before in our industry. Hey, life before Apple Mac anyone? But now, with digital, the pace of change, the extent of the ramifications for our industry, seems to grow exponentially each and every day.

You’d think I’d be more geared up than most for that change. After all, the HRO’C Group is, and always has been, full service, offering the whole gamut of marketing disciplines. Including a digital operation that’s been in place virtually right from the first moment that the world of website and email started to impact on communications. When you’ve got a thriving digital department one small flight of stairs away, you’d think, if only through a process of osmosis, it’d stand me in good stead for the digital challenge ahead.

And yet, even now, a couple of years on, there is still the occasional breadcrumb moment. I suspect that, for some creatives, the journey has been a difficult one with many feeling displaced by the whole process. Left behind. A creative anachronism.

Here’s the weird thing though. For me, the feeling has been just the opposite.

Far from feeling ostracised or like some quaint outdated unwanted advertising relic, this whole new digital revolution has actually given me a whole new lease of life.

How so? Well, the moment you stop fretting unnecessarily because you can’t tell your hashtags from your tweetups, the moment you cease to worry about what that latest digital acronym stands for, is also the moment when you stand back, see the bigger picture and realise that digital is not some inaccessible, impenetrable, esoteric universe.

Digital is, in fact, just another space.

Just another space to fill with a concept. Another space to fill with words and pictures. Another space to fill with a big idea. Just another layout pad to scribble on.

It’s also the proverbial moment of blinding clarity when you realise that our skills, the traditional creative’s skills, are in fact completely transferable.

And my job, the creative’s job, is the same as it ever was. But now I’m just as likely to be doing it for a website banner as I am for a double page spread in a home interest publication. I’m just as likely to be creating a viral film to spider out through the Internet as I am a TV commercial. I’m just as likely to be conceiving an email campaign as I am a direct mail piece. I’m just as likely to be writing for a website as I am for a brochure.

It’s not the technology that matters. It’s the interaction. The ability to move someone, make someone do something. That’s what really, really matters.

Mind you, yesterday I found myself in a meeting where, quite suddenly, everyone became rather heated on the subject of ‘mashups’.

Best go Google it.

Bing was Live & Live was Dead

Mark Shergold — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 16:20:47 +0000

Within the search industry, talk is always turning to the fate of MSN and Yahoo in the search engine wars that are dominated by the heavyweight champion of search: Google. Recent attention has focused on MSN with its many management changes and developments, and, in particular, on its newly branded search engine called Bing.

On 3rd June Bing was live and all users redirected from MSN’s previous reinvention of the wheel www.live.co.uk to Bing. So, like the rest of the industry, I have been keen to see what changes MSN has added to the newly branded search engine. The answer is: very little. On the surface you are greeted with a nice picture and generally the same feel as you would get from Live. What’s more, the search results are formatted the same as they were on MSN & Live. So, at this stage, I am a bit puzzled about the reinvention.

Following any new update from the search engine giants, I am always keen to see if there will be any impact on my clients and their search strategies. Recent Google additions, for instance, tend to be pushing hardworking SEO rankings down under maps, products and videos!! After a few searches, I did come across two interesting things.

The One and Only Argos!

Upon searching for Argos, I found that Argos itself was the ONLY advertisement showing. Hopefully, this is just a teething error. When I searched for other big online stores I found the usual lengthy listings. Hopefully this is not part of some bigger plan, otherwise I can here the cries of despair from the Argos affiliates now.

Follow the Yellow Dot

The other addition I found to the listing is a little feature that allows you to see information about the page within the listing. Next to each natural search listing, if you hover over the advert, you see a yellow dot appear. Hover over this dot and it gives you a snippet of information. Is this any use and will people find it? Personally, I don’t see how this will help users choose which listing to click on. Initially it appeared and I could not see how it happened; it took me a few minutes to track down the link again. Case for more effective usability, I think.

To me, Bing just looks like the same old shoes, but with a bit of a polish; it’s certainly one thing I will be keeping an eye on to see what Microsoft has in mind. Personally, I want to see them go after Google and really try to be innovative, but I remember when Microsoft released adcenter and how bad the interface was initially. 2 years on, many of the same issues still exist.

Sunny Friday

Simon Cox — Fri, 29 May 2009 08:46:49 +0000

What better way to start a lovely sunny Friday than reading Experian’s latest report on the state of UK plc…

Now I know I’m not selling it particularly well, but I’d recommend giving it a read. It covers the landscape for SME’s, what will drive recovery, and the implications for brands. It also looks at the impact of ‘user generated content’ as a tactic for increasing website conversions.

Experian Insight Report Q2 2009 [PDF]

At the heart of the report is a call for brands to get back to the basics of what makes them relevant for consumers:

“The winners will be those brands obsessive about delivering the right price, properly rewarding loyalty and providing great customer service every day”.

“The key tenets for marketing in a world that has shifted gears from conspicuous to conscious, concerned and considered consumption, will be price, loyalty and (most importantly) service”.

No recession can ever be welcomed, but if this one gets us away from concentrating on marketing fluff, and puts the focus onto real marketing – a deep focus on understanding customer need, and an obsessive focus on customer service – then that’s one small mercy.

Right.… back to subconscious BBQ planning…

It’s Tweeting darling!

Sammi Edwards — Thu, 28 May 2009 15:32:03 +0000

“To tweet or not to tweet” is indeed a question that Mr Shakespeare couldn’t have even begun to predict about the future of communicating. What seemed like a gimmick in the first instance to simply ask people ‘What are you doing?’ has now transformed into one of the most important social networking tools that a public relations practitioner could use.

Admittedly, I’m a novice and still getting to grips with the concept of the Twitter community. However, I believe that with time and, luckily, a knowledgeable group of digital experts inhabiting offices just down the hallway from me at HRO’C, I could take to it like a duck to water!

So, whilst I’m feeling like a foreigner in this cyber world trying to learn a new Twitter language including tweets, hashtags and tweetups (I have definitely moved on from the days of learning GCSE French), I have been looking at its obvious benefits and hidden gems as to what is now being perceived by the industry as a key online PR tool.

Ultimately, it provides any PR agency with the ability to monitor, participate in and initiate conversations for your clients. Okay, so you’re limited to writing up to 140 characters in the text box at a time to shout out about the latest updates, but surely that’s what good PR is all about – grabbing your audience’s attention in the opening sentence.

So, as you’re spreading the word about existing clients and their fabulous new products and services, it’s a great opportunity perhaps to chase up on some new business whilst you’re logged in.

A great new buzzword that will be gradually swarming the PR Twitter scene is a twitch (a Twitter PR pitch) recently made famous by Confused.com’s PR Manager Kelly Davies. The whole notion of pitching online to a client gives a clear indication of Twitter’s vast potential. Riding on the back of an ever increasing desire and commitment to making communication more and more immediate, it’s no exaggeration to say Twitter could play a major role in, and perhaps revolutionise, the way in which public relations agencies operate going forward.

I’ve only scratched the surface of online PR and Twitter as one of the many platforms that can be utilised for this cause – surely there isn’t much else out there, is there?

HRO’C Public Relations are on Twitter and can be found at: http://www.hroc.co.uk/pages/pr/

Image by Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten.

Life in the year 2009 CC

Steve Sherran — Thu, 28 May 2009 10:54:45 +0000

The last five years has seen the media dominated by the big CC. The big CC, of course, being Climate Change. The environment, renewable energy, carbon emissions, carbon trading, the nuclear or coal debate, energy labelling, ex presidential candidates making movies about polar bears, we heard and saw it all. And the media hyped us all up into a frenzy, promising that our children and our children’s children would reap what we’ve sown. You could see people putting down deposits on houses in middle England with the view that in the next ten years or so, you could have a seaside cottage in the Cotswolds.

And it wasn’t just in the newspapers. In boardrooms up and down the country, energy efficiency moved rapidly up the agenda. Should we change our light bulbs? Do we need an energy manager? We’re not doing this to save money said the MD to finance director, we’re doing it as part of our corporate social responsibility and for the benefit of the polar bears. Lots of earnest conversations, lots of assurances that the investment is worth it long term, lots of corporate feel goods as the last one out switched off the lights to save not money, but carbon, and the polar bears obviously.

Then, some guys in pinstriped suits got caught playing Monopoly with real money. Someone threw a four instead of a six and Climate Change was rapidly replaced with the new CC. Credit Crunch.

Pretty much overnight Climate Change ceased to matter. Polar bears? Toxic Waste? Toxic debt more like. And why should it? Let’s face it, the best way of reducing carbon emissions in, say, the house building market is not to build any houses. Can’t say fairer than that. No building, no emissions.

The media coverage on climate change disappeared completely. What was the number one issue facing the world has simply been forgotten. Not just in the press but in the boardroom too. No more earnest conversations about carbon emissions, lots of conversations about bad debt, reducing overheads and vanishing profits.

As no one is talking about it, I’m assuming it’s gone away? Problem solved? Of course not, it’ll be back and the media will be on the case for the polar bears just as soon as they’ve finished exposing the remaining MP’s expenses. As for me I’ve put down a deposit on a nice semi in Chipping Norton.

Site explorer footer links

Kevin Rapley — Tue, 19 May 2009 14:10:20 +0000

A site explorer is used on large corporate websites in order to assist navigation around the website and also improve SEO by deep linking to otherwise hidden areas.

A site explorer is a relatively new addition to the web interface tool kit. I first saw its use on the re-design of the Waitrose website. Since then they have been used on a number of large commerical websites, and for good reason. Firstly, they are a great way to assist with navigation. Links to a dedicated site map can sometimes get lost in the footer and the page itself can be uninspiring. Some information architects will tell you that a site map is a cop-out on creating a good navigation structure. They encourage the use of sloppy navigational structure or experimental processes that rely too heavily on the safety net of a site map when users get lost.

The site explorer however has, in the case of the Waitrose website, become an item of beauty as well as functionality. Waitrose have worked it into the design with topic headings for the menu lists within the site explorer. It does not replace the traditional site map, but certainly improves the user experience by assisting navigation. Web visitors quickly become familiar with its location towards the bottom of Web pages and with the help of clear headings are able to orientate themselves.

Secondly, the site explorer enables deep linking into otherwise hidden web pages from every page of the website. The site explorer can occupy a large area of screen real estate as it sits underneath the page content, ideal for grouping large menus of links by topic. These links are descriptive of the underlying page content as well as being a persistent menu on each page which is a great asset for search engine spidering.

Internet Explorer 8 effects on your website

Kevin Rapley — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 14:37:51 +0000

Summary:

Web browser, Internet Explorer 8’s release means we will be developing websites differently. Microsoft has finally kept their side of the bargain to build a web browser which complies with the standards set out by the WAI. Up until now web developers have had no choice but to hack their way through to producing modern design layouts. With IE8, we can begin designing and developing more complex grids. But a new problem now arises, support for IE6 and IE7. On a case by case basis we must decide to A). Go the extra mile for these older versions, adding extra code to make them look the same as IE8, FireFox, Opera, Safari and other compliant browsers. B). Create extra stylesheets for IE versions up to and including IE7 which serve a dumbed down version of the design, acting as a gentle poke to upgrade. C). Decide not to create versions for IE up to and including IE7, the content will still be readable but the design will be visibly broken.

Microsoft’s latest version of their web browser Internet Explorer will mark a new dawn for the way in which we design and develop websites. For years web developers have been lobbying Microsoft to write a version of IE that fully obeys the standard for cascading style sheets (CSS), the coding language used to manipulate the visual presentation of a web page.

IE8 delivers, catching up with other web browser vendors such as FireFox, Opera and Safari, meaning the CSS tool kit has increased. IE, with such a large market share has dominated the way in which we have designed and built websites. In the early years of the Internet when websites were built using tables to layout, grid columns within the design could run alongside each other easily and at the same length. Then a movement towards web standards developed. Web standards made us build more accessible web pages, banishing table based layout ensuring that tables were only used to display tabular data. We did this through semantically written HTML and separating content from design with external CSS.

Unfortunately not all browsers handled the CSS specification as they should have. Many of the issues arose from IE, which either mishandled the specification or did not cater for certain areas of it at all. Talented CSS developers found ways to manipulate the specification, hacking ways to build the kind of deigns that were available to us in table based layouts. This didn’t come without its problems. Column lengths would not line up, extending only to the length of their containing content. To overcome this we use background images to fake the appearance of equal length columns. This is the most obvious visual problem to overcome, but underlying within the code we were either floating these columns beside one another to create the appearance of columns of giving absolute coordinates to where each content block should be with pixel perfect precision. Both ways are effectively a hack.

This brings us to the present. IE8 has caught up. We now must ensure that we write our code differently to keep our side of the bargain. Using what is known as CSS tables, we can create content columns that behave like they did when they were in table based layout. But, this time it is all handled by the CSS. We make the columns behave like tables but without writing them into tables, which are purely semantic markup for tabular data. This creates a structure which is future proof, browsers from here on in will always support CSS tables, layout structures are also hack-free and behave in the same way across all modern browsers. An additional plus, development is made easier.

Hang on a moment, what about IE6 and IE7? Not everyone has made the switch from these older browsers yet. IE6 has been a problem browser since its conception with particularly buggy support of the CSS specification. It is getting very close to the time when IE6 will finally stop being supported. We have all been keeping a close eye on the web analytics to see how many web visitors are still using IE6. There have also been some public campaigns within the industry to call time on E6. When we say we will stop supporting IE6, what we mean is that we will no longer code to make IE6 appear the same as a design within a modern browser. The website will be accessible but it will not look the same. Then we have IE7. This is the main crux of our problem. Many people will still be using IE7 for some time to come. Businesses that were on IE6 will upgrade to the next stable version, which in their eyes will be IE7. IE7 does not support CSS tables, which means we must on a case-by-case basis discuss with our clients what they wish to do about this browser.

The 3 options

Ignore older browsers
Provide a simplified layout
Reproduce the layout with older techniques

Ignore older browsers

Commercially, this is not a viable option. If, say you were a self employed photographer then you may consider this as you could make assumptions that your client base would be using a modern browser, and probably not the Microsoft offering. Anyone who is using IE6 or IE7 will still be able to access the website; however no effort would be made for these older browsers so designs would appear visually broken.

Provide a simplified layout

A much more commercially viable option is to serve a separate CSS stylesheet to IE6 and IE7. The stylesheet provides a simplified layout to these browser versions so that although they will not contain content within grid columns, the content is styled to look as though it should exist within the website, for instance spanning the whole width of the web design layout rather than only taking up the width of one column in the enhanced design. Content blocks then stack one after another vertically. This method gives the web visitor a gentle poke to upgrade to a modern browser without affecting the overall experience. This solution is also cost effective with little extra development time required to cater for older IE versions.

Reproduce the layout with older techniques

There will be some clients who will insist that the webdesign layout must look as close as possible in every browser. They will insist this because either their core audience uses IE6 and IE7 or there is a large enough percentage of their readership to justify the added expense. The added development time increases the timescales and cost of the project to serve separate CSS stylesheets to IE6 and IE7 which reproduce the CSS table’s layout with older techniques.

But why should we build a website in CSS tables if the older techniques are working? CSS tables provide further opportunities for more complex design work and because they provide support for forwards compatibility of browsers, we must keep our side of the bargain and build websites that use the CSS specification to the best of the browsers abilities to ensure the vendors further develop compliant browser technology. Even if this means writing extra code to support websites that are required to reproduce the layout with older techniques. IE6 and IE7 won’t be around forever, once their usage levels drop through the floor we can easily remove the separate stylesheets.

HRO'C Blog

Twitters Traffic Generation

Related posts

The Sheriff and his Deputy are back in town

Related posts

Work Experience at HRO’C

Related posts

Diary of a displaced cat in a cruel digital world – Part 1

Related posts

Bing was Live & Live was Dead

The One and Only Argos!

Follow the Yellow Dot

Related posts

Sunny Friday

Related posts

It’s Tweeting darling!

Related posts

Life in the year 2009 CC

Related posts

Site explorer footer links

Related posts

Internet Explorer 8 effects on your website

Summary:

The 3 options

Ignore older browsers

Provide a simplified layout

Reproduce the layout with older techniques

Related posts