As reported by Mumbrella there has been quite a buzz online this week surrounding insights that came out of Rupert Murdoch’s recent interview on Sky News. Murdoch stated that once News Corp’s websites transition to a paid model (where consumers must pay to access news articles) it would  de-list its websites from Google.

Think of the amount of hits that News Corp’s websites receive from Google each day! Internet suicide some would say?!

But herein lies Murdoch’s point. Its websites may receive staggering numbers of hits from the search engine but what type of quality of traffic is it driving? Will it encourage loyalty to its many printed publications when similar if not the same articles are available free online? And does the revenue received for online advertising make its websites profitable? Murdoch suggests definitely not.

In Murdoch’s logic, a low level of engagement with one-time readers drawn in by an eye-grabbing headline on Google does not encourage loyalty or increase engagement, which are two factors that can affect the pricing structure of online advertising.

Mashable claims that the interview illustrates how Murdoch is out of touch with how news and information is now disseminated. The article also outlines that it is possible to have paid news content partly accessible to search engines, enticing web users to pay to read the rest of the story.

Digital commentator, Jason Calacanis suggested that de-listing from Google creates opportunities for other search engines such as Bing to gain a competitive advantage, offering News Corp 50% more revenue then they are currently getting from Google search referrals in order to be exclusively indexed on Bing.

So who is right and where is the future of online news headed? If you have an opinion, leave a comment and let us know what you think.

Previously we have written about protecting the image and reputation of your business. As reported by Bnet, in a world of social media which has led to the blurring of the lines between our personal and professional lives, it has become increasingly important to take steps to protect your personal reputation. It doesn’t take much for a smear campaign against you to quickly spread across the internet which can be seriously damaging to your career.

You can use the following tips for tracking and repairing your online reputation:

Tracking your online reputation

* Make a list of the most likely places your name would appear online to begin monitoring your online reputation. Identify blogs, forums, and social networking sites, such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, which anyone within your professional circle may also use. You can even track your company’s corporate site and previous places of employment.

* You can then set up your own individual Google alerts for the sites you want to frequently monitor at www.google.com/alerts. Other monitoring tools include Twinbox, which tracks comments made on Twitter through Microsoft Outlook.

Repairing your online reputation

* Although the above tips are useful, unfortunately they will not prevent online attacks. The first thing to do is examine what has been said about you and whether it is accurate or not. If not, you should correct them immediately. If it is true, you should apologise via the same medium as the message.

* If your professional realm is under attack, consider advising your employer as well as the legal department – especially if the comments made are defamatory.

Other useful information

An important aspect of creating your own personal brand online is to separate your business and personal social networking contacts. For example, you could use Facebook for personal networking and LinkedIn for business networking.

You build and maintain others’ brands every day, why not start doing it for yourself?

Create your own PR that reflects the real you – the professional you. By circulating positivity around your name, the likelihood of negative commentary being regarded is reduced.

Over the years we’ve built dozens of websites and run hundreds of email marketing campaigns. That equates to thousands of hours of design, coding and user testing. In that time, we’ve learnt a thing or two about getting digital content to appear consistently on different machines with varying screen resolutions, browsers and platforms and with different email applications.

So why do things end up looking different and what does it mean for you as a marketer? There are a myriad of factors that can affect how your recipients view your website or eNewsletters on their computers. We will explain a few of these in this post and what we do to overcome the issue.

Pixel width matters.

Why?
It’s all about screen resolution aka the number of pixels (short for picture elements) available on your users’ screens. Due to the many variants that determine how one views an email campaign, it is difficult to cater for everyone all of the time. So, as a rule we design for the masses.

Who are they?
Resolution                            % of Internet Users
Higher than 1024×768          30%
1024×768                           70%
800×600                              4%
Lower than 800×600          < 1%
Unknown                              3%

Note: These statistics were gathered from visitors to a website dedicated to web technologies, so there may be an over-representation of both higher resolution monitors and lower resolution handheld devices. Updated to January 2009 results.

Look at some of the most visited websites in 2009. What do they have in common?

* facebook.com
* au.yahoo.com
* youtube.com
* ebay.com.au
* ninemsn.com.au
* wikipedia.org
* News.com.au
* realestate.com.au
* commbank.com.au

All have been built with 1024 maximum resolution in mind.

Note: If you are one of the 70% at 1024 resolution the sites will take up all of your screen, here’s what you would see if you had a higher resolution.

What does this mean for my email?

Outlook, Apple Mail, Hotmail, Gmail all fit their various navigation panels and toolbars into the screen real estate. Meaning that at best you’ve got about 600 pixels in width to play with.

OK, so how long should my eNewsletter be?

Our scientific WAG model suggests users fall asleep, or at least lose interest, after 2000 pixels in length (just think “a couple” of scrolls of the mouse wheel).

Still not sure why fonts and layouts aren’t consistent?

The programs your subscribers use to visit webpages and read email can render different results. While standards have been put in place to help reduce the issue, other measures to protect email user privacy, increase security and reduce SPAM completely conflict with what the those standards set out to achieve.

For example, Microsoft Outlook now uses Word to display HTML while webmail solutions like Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail all use the web browser but strip out different elements of email template code…and we haven’t even mentioned the version offered by ISPs like BigPond, Optus or iiNet.

What else do I need to think about when creating an email campaign?

* Are you going to print the email?
* What about people with ‘text only’ readers?
* Most email programs block images by default, are you getting your message across if people opt not to download images?

So there you have it, when it comes to creating a successful email campaign there can be a lot to consider. We wouldn’t blame you for thinking it all sounds a bit too hard. After all, that’s why we have a couple of resident geeks!

With these guys on the job, email is still an exceptionally effective way of staying in touch with your customers and prospects on a regular basis.

Connecting Images configures your email campaigns with all of the above considerations in mind to ensure that your digital communication looks great, gets read and achieves results. Give us a call today on (03) 9819 2566 to arrange to come in for a coffee and discuss your digital marketing needs.

We came across this article by Lee Odden, which is a guide to assessing if your PR agency is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and social media ready.

We are pleased to note that we have been implementing the suggested SEO and SMO strategies for our clients for some time now.

So how do you know if your PR agency is SEO and social media ready? Odden proposes a six question quiz. The main points are below.

* You need both social media and SEO strategies.

* As discussed previously on our blog, Social Media Optmisation (SMO) can be integrated with SEO strategies to increase your business’ online visibility, particularly through organic search on search engines such as Google.

* When it comes to SEO keyword optimisation, the keywords you have been optimising for on your web pages and in your blog posts should also be optimised for in social media content, along with links back to your website pages on these particular topics.

* You need to get to know your target audiences so that you can customise online content to their interests. A good way to do this is by conducting a survey including questions such as: what social media sites do you visit and how often? What type of search do they use for story research? etc. This should ideally be the first thing you do, in order to assist with developing a blog content plan.

* Develop a blog content plan that not only includes content on your company but also industry specific topics that will be of interest to your target audiences, including journalists and bloggers. Ideally, you want blog content to reach social media news and bookmarking sites and this is where providing quality content can help.

* Have good quality, keyword optimised blog posts on your website as well as interesting and useful content on your social media profiles.

Odden also speaks about establishing your PR agency’s true core competency: traditional or digital PR. We believe that with a highly qualified team with experience in varying fields, it is possible to have a PR agency that can operate competently within both areas.

This week we came across this video on the importance of social media in today’s society. While this remains a contested area of discussion, Eric Qualman author of Socialnomics and creator of this video argues that it is perhaps the biggest shift since the industrial revolution. What do you think?

We’ve all heard the speculation and at times cold hard facts. The sales of print media are down, particularly in the US and the UK and the popularity of online advertising is increasing!

According to an Online Advertising Expenditure Report, compiled by Price Waterhouse Coopers for the quarter ending September 30, 2008, “Online advertising has experienced a 30% growth year-on-year, with advertisers spending a record $450 million in the third quarter of 2008′.

These figures suggested that advertisers did not pull back on their online spend as the global downturn took hold. ‘In fact advertisers spent over $100 million more during July to September 2008, than they did in the same period in 2007′.

Meanwhile a 2009 market forecast by Frost and Sullivan indicated that for the first time “… advertisers will cannibalise their traditional media budgets, particularly print, to spend more on measurable and accountable online advertising, as opposed to increasing overall budgets.” Source.

Established online advertising methods like pay-per-click (PPC), think Google Adwords, and targeted banner advertisements on high traffic media properties are still gaining popularity, and their cost increasing inline with increasing demand. However, with social networking quickly increasing its chunk of eyeballs with advertiser competition still relatively low, the channel is fast becoming ‘the place’ for some advertisers to allocate their budget.

Is Facebook advertising right for your business?

Consider this case study, which came to us via Ken Burgin of Profitable Hospitality.

The ads he recommended produced some amazing results for retail and hospitality businesses targeting the lucrative 18-30 year old market.

‘I just thought I would let you know about some results I received with Facebook advertising after following your advice.

Previously, I have run out like most other businesses and spent significant money on glitzy ad campaigns to appear in the local paper and TV advertisements.  Little did I realise at the time that the kids and diners who i was trying to advertise too were either a) dining out with my competitors or b) on Facebook.

I have been running a Facebook campaign (linked to our websites) for a restaurant and also a clothing shop.  I have targeted this campaign specifically to the geographic market (quite easy to do on Facebook when you have a play with it) and to my surprise, we have had a significant number of visits to our restaurant’s website and last night for example, our $$$$ were up by over $1000 in the till. The shop has had record sales with revenue up by 80%…and the cost? About $0.05 per click.

“I was blown away by the response I received to these campaigns and even more blown away by the number of people who actually read Facebook adverts.”

Need assistance to determine what type of online advertising would best suit your business? Give Merilyn or Cal a call on (03) 9819 2566 and arrange to come in for a coffee and a chat.

Google has recently updated its searching function to include features of ‘real time search’, according to Smart Company.

So what does this mean?

A greater emphasis has now been placed on the importance of regular and fresh content being added to websites, which allow users of the search engine to categorise search results into time relevancy (E.g. past 24 hours, past week etc).

Although most Search Engine Marketers (SME’s) are concerned about what ramifications this may have on the SEO of websites, as it has so significantly increased the need for frequently updated, fresh content; this feature also allows your business to effectively monitor your reputation over the internet.

Online reputation management is becoming increasingly important when recent communications crises such as that of the Dominos video are considered.

One of the most conflicting aspects of the internet is the power of the user to contribute to a social forum on a range of topics. In one way this empowers those that may not necessarily have had their voice heard in traditional media. However, it also opens a Pandora’s box in terms of protecting the image of an organisation or business.

Furthermore, traditional media now refers to blogs and social media websites as reliable information sources when reporting on breaking news stories.  Due to the immediacy of the internet, blogs etc. can often be the first sources for breaking new stories as they can publish information before traditional mediums have had a chance to respond.  This has increased the power of the internet, as a reliable source of information, which means online attacks can be particularly damaging to your company’s reputation – particularly if the story is later picked up by traditional media.

Read more on online reputation management here.

If you have been reading our blog regularly, you will be aware by now of the changing face of the media; a general decline of the use of traditional media, and the significant increase of internet use.

The internet is a virtual equivalent of the real world through which people and companies can publish information, much like they do through traditional media, share them with others, comment on various topics or alternatively seek information.

It is important to remember that the online world is populated by people, it is not just a one-way telecommunications channel. Therefore, all the Public Relations and Marketing activities you are currently undertaking offline should also be included online – and increasingly being highly visible online is becoming ever more important.

Online media releases can also do more than just boost the results of a traditional media relations campaign. Submitting your keyword optimised online media release to press release submission websites, with a link back to your company’s website, is a powerful way to enhance effective Search Engine Optimisation.

How is this so?
Google weights links to your website from other reputable sites a vote for your level of authority on a particular subject. The more inbound links from websites and articles containing content on your subject matter, the better your site will rank for particular targeted  keywords.

Want to improve the Search Engine Optimisation of your company’s website but don’t know where to start? Call Merilyn or Cal on (03) 9819 2566 and organise to come in for a coffee and a chat.