Three’s X-Series is a media disruptor
Posted Wednesday, March 28, 2007 at 10:55am in Media, Technology | 2 Comments
Bought myself a X-Series phone from Three the other day and it’s definitely one worth paying attention to. I love it. Being a frequent user of the mobile web this is perfect for me. Three’s offering of the the X-Series places it far ahead of the other networks with regard to new media and how it’s evolving. If you haven’t seen it take a look at the X-Series website.
It comes in two options. The X-Series Silver (which I have) and X-Series Gold. For £5 a month (not including my talk and text plan) I get mobile Skype with free Skype to Skype calls which works perfectly. Called my mate in Australia the other day using it and the sound quality was perfect without any time delay either. All for free! It also has mobile MSN Messenger, free internet browsing, Mobile Mail, Yahoo! Search and Mobilcast.
Mobilcast is very cool. It allows you to listen to your favourite podcasts directly from your phone as opposed to downloading them to your computer and synching them to your mp3 player. Again, I’ve tested and it’s near perfect. Okay, a few stops of the stream now and again but apart from that I can’t fault it at all. So far, I’ve got For Immediate Release and the Chris Moyles’ podcast saved into my favourites.
If you go for the X-Series Gold (£10) option you’ll receive all of the above with an additional two applications: Orb, which allows you to view your music, photo and video files directly from your PC to your phone wherever you are. And Sling Media which, if you have a Slingbox connected to your TV at home, allows you to watch your TV on the go.
The X-Series is definitely at the forefront of the mobile media disruptors. The X-Series blog is asking for beta testers to test new applications. I’ve applied and maybe if I throw a few links their way they might accept my application. 
For a more indepth review the Digital Lifestyles blog has good run down.
First song I downloaded. This one.
Tune!
Youngie goes to New York
Posted Monday, March 26, 2007 at 2:09pm in Off topic | 8 Comments
Good news from down under. My Aussie mate, Paull Young, has landed a new job alongside Constantin Basturea at Converseon in New York as a senior account exec. Paull, who’s just returned from a world tour, starts his new gig in May (I think. Paull?) where he’ll be working in the digital/media/blogo/podo/conversation/sphere.
Paull’s a top bloke and a genuine down to earth fella. I’m sure he’ll do more than well there. Okay, his taste in sport is somewhat strange and his accent is funny to say the least. Not to mention the fact he’s an Australian that can’t take his beer … sorry going off on one.
Best of luck Youngie!
technorati tags: paul+young, youngie, constantin+basturea, converseon
7 ways to improve a blog’s SEO
Posted Saturday, March 24, 2007 at 1:29pm in Blogging, Media, PR General | 16 Comments
UPDATE: I’m now number one in Google for the search term ‘improve a blog’s SEO‘.
UPDATE 2: I’m now number one in Google for the search term ‘search engine optimisation and PR‘
UPDATE 3: I’m now number one in Google for the search term ‘PR and search engine optimisation‘ and 6th for ‘PR and search engine optimization’ (US).
It seems that Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a subject often overlooked by the online PR community judging by the lack of discussion it generates. Let’s be honest, it’s not being talked about much. In fact, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to predict that if ain’t being talked about by the more tech savvy PR people then it’s not being used a lot in the entire industry. Admittedly I’m no SEO expert, by a long shot, but the more I read up on it the more I believe it to be quite a fine art. It’s quite complex and, like PR, requires knowledge gained through experience. SEO is one of those things that take time and (cliche alert) is more a marathon than a sprint.
As of writing this post, 30% of my traffic in the past week has come from organic referrals (organic meaning through search engines). I think that’s quite a lot and I’m pretty pleased with it. Nearly 20% of traffic is ‘direct’. Direct meaning people typing your URL directly into their browser’s address bar or having it already saved in their bookmarks. Which is even better as your URL, which tends to be part of a blog’s brand, is implanted in people’s minds which, again, isn’t bad if you enjoy this type of thing like me. 
Here I’ll list 7 ways to improve your blog’s SEO. This is really top line stuff and is meant to be nothing more than that. Think of it as a beginner’s guide… Ahem, that beginner being me.
1. Write unique content
Or as I’ve heard Steve Rubel say “bake fresh bread”. It’s a bit of a no brainer I know and it’s been said by many a blogger. But, depending on how far you want to go with this, it can really take some time. If you’re writing about a particular subject and there’s a whole load of other people writing about the same thing, try and find an area which hasn’t been covered yet. As an example, SEO and PR. 
If you do write something unique, insightful and compelling then there’s a chance that you’ll receive a decent number of inbound links your way which will be referenced time and again. Thus, that particular post will be ranked high in Google (or any other reputable search engine) for its related keywords. And remember, because you’ve chosen a particular area that isn’t discussed all that often, the chances of it featuring well in the search rankings are high.
2. Choose the title of your posts carefully
The title of this blog is 7 ways to improve a blog’s SEO which, I would say, is a perfect title to describe the content. It is what it is. Post titles are held in high regard by search engines as they usually describe what the content is about. See a post I wrote about Innocent Drinks a couple of months ago near top spot in Google. But as well as making the title relevant to the content, which makes sense to do, I also carried out a little Google keyword research prior to see how many other people are using that particular phrase. There are none. Take a look. And if I break down the title to ‘improve a blog’s SEO‘ which is a pretty decent search term and one that you’d imagine would generate quite a few search queries you’ll see that only one search result appears. So in short, once this blog posts gets indexed in the search engines it’s between us two who gets top spot for improve a blog’s SEO. Frankly, I’ll settle for second.
P.S. You may have noticed I used the phrase ‘improve a blog’s SEO’ more than once in that last paragraph. Apparently if you want to feature in a search engine for a specific phrase it pays to mention it a few times in your content.
3. Place keywords/key phrases within your post content
If you do a specific search on ’search engine optimization and PR’ (US spelling) you’ll notice there are over 6,000 results in Google. Do the same using the English spelling - search engine optimisation and PR - and you’ll see only eight results generated. I don’t know about you but I’m English/British so I would always use the latter. Which, again, is better for me as the competition isn’t as tough. Obviously the downside is that people only who use only the (real!) English spelling of the word ‘optimisation’ will find it. Which I can live with. I’m British and the majority of my traffic comes from the UK anyway.
If I change the phrases around to - PR and search engine optimisation - you’ll see UK PR blogger, Antony Mayfield is top spot for that one and further down the ranks you’ll see the popular UK blog by e-consultancy. This is probably a tougher one to crack as both of those are high ranking blogs. However, if I do the same search using the US spelling - PR and search engine optimization - you’ll see that, compared with using search engine optimization and PR, the competition isn’t as bad. So who knows, I may feature well for both the UK and the US versions. We’ll see.
4. Link to content that’s relevant to your blog’s subject area
This is an interesting one. Did you know that a link from my blog to, say, Simon Collister’s blog would hold more weight than if I linked to something totally unrelated to PR? Search engines are aware of ‘Topical Communities’. I.e. Sites/blogs that contain the same subject content which interlink with one another and referencing one another’s work. So it’s more valuable to have links from blogs that are more related to your own blog’s subject area than from those that have little to do with it.
5. Make hyperlinks relevant
I’m guilty of it myself but how many times have you seen linking done like this:
I’m using Paull Young’s blog as a guinea pig. You can read it here.
This isn’t good because a search engine reads the anchor text (the text in the link that’s visible) and associates it with the link. So in this case I’m associating Paull’s blog with the word ‘here’. Which isn’t a good association whatsoever. What I should be writing is something like this:
I’m using Paull Young’s blog as a guinea pig.
Here the anchor text used is a lot more associated and therefor more relevant to the page (Paull’s blog) I’m linking to.
You can take this a step further by introducing the ‘title attribute’ in links too:
It just looks like any ordinary link but if you scroll your mouse over it you’ll see some additional text popping up. This text tells the search engine that not only my name ‘Stephen Davies’ is associated with my URL (www.prblogger.com) but also ‘The best blog ever’ too. Adding the title attribute looks like this:
Ordinary link:
< a href="http://www.prblogger.com/">Stephen Davies
Rel attribute added:
< a href="http://www.prblogger.com" title="The best blog ever">Stephen Davies
How scalable this actually is when you’re pushed for time and writing multiple blog posts a day I don’t know? Maybe someone could build a WordPress plugin for it.
6. Make your permalink URLs descriptive
If a person can tell what your post is about just by reading the URL then you’re onto a winner. So, for example, this post’s URL reads:
‘http://www.prblogger.com/7-ways-to-improve-a-blogs-seo’
Which isn’t too hard to tell what the content is. Search engines can read permalinks which will go toward improving your chances of being found. Much better than, say, if it read like this ‘http://www.prblogger.com/?p=97′. Plus if you follow point 2 you’ll also have your keywords in there too.
P.S. Apparently it’s better to have the words in your permalink url to be separated by hyphens (-) and not too many subcategories. E.g:
http://www.prblogger.com/blog/tutuorials/7-ways-to-improve-your-blogs-seo
7. Get links from the big boys
Why do people link bait with the influential bloggers? Yes it’s to drive more traffic and maybe gain extra subscribers, but a link from blog/website that a search engines deem popular holds a lot more weight than one that’s less popular when calculating PageRank. It would be great to get a link from Hugh MacLeod, I know he’s been giving links away lately.
Receiving a link from a site like the BBC, Guardian or New York Times and you’re laughing. Which reminds me of this post I made on online news and how some people in the industry still don’t think an online hit is of any worth. If you’re promoting something like a client website then I’d much rather have it in the online version of, say, the Guardian than the print version.
As mentioned, this is just basic stuff. I haven’t taken in to consideration other elements such as design, CSS validation, usability and navigation. I’m sure other people can add to it or indeed criticise it.
Go for it.
technorati tags: SEO, SEO and PR
ITV Digital Conference - panel transcript
Posted Friday, March 23, 2007 at 11:55am in Blogging | 1 Comment
Below is the transcript of the panel discussion I was part of at the ITV conference on Wednesday. Copy accredited to Tom Barber at ITV.
Panel Session
Jemima Kiss, Guardian
Simon Gunning, Yahoo!
Gerd Leonhard (futurist)
Stephen Davies, prblogger.com
Nick Adams, Mindshare
Pele Cortizo-Burgess, ITV Imagine
It started with first thoughts of what has happened in the day. Jemima Kiss was quick to advise ITV that we need to get out there and explore these different spaces and think about how to do things differently. She says: “It’s rarely disastrous when you take risks”.
Gerd Leonard also praised ITV, saying: “This is a great starting point, I know a lot of big media companies haven’t even thought of putting on an event like this. There’s been some great ideas but the difficult bit is how you get there now.”
Stephen Davies said: “He learnt a lot himself. He talked about a lady who has set up the Corrie Blog and asked the question “How will ITV engage with those types of people.”
Pele added: “Viewers are more creative and want to get involved. Owners of the brand need to engage with those people.”
Having heard the panels initial thoughts from the day the first questions was:
Does the digital age signal the end of newspapers?
Jemima Kiss from The Guardian responded: “I don’t think papers will die out completely” but it’s “not about the paper it’s printed on. It’s all about the content.”
Gerd believes that newspapers are only just waking up to the opportunities open to them. “They could have created Digg, but none of them did. They now need to look ahead and do something different.”
Stephen Davies argued that “Old media simply adapts. Radio didn’t kill TV and this is the same for newspapers. Digital content can work alongside the traditional format. One can enhance the other.”
Pele said “It’s not one or the other. They each have a different role to play in people’s lives.”
Will it become more important to get a scoop on a news website or in the
physical newspaper?
Jemima Kiss told us that one third of The Guardian’s traffic comes from people searching for archived news. The website compliments the newspaper well, but you do have to think about what’s going on the website though.
Would you advise using online promotion for shows or stick with more traditional methods? How do you get a buzz going about a programme? The panel all agreed that you have to use the appropriate medium for the
right type of programme. Stephen Davies said that you “have to find the best fit”.
Gerd expanded by saying when using online promotion “you need to create a place people enjoy visiting and they will then come back.” If it genuinely engages the viewer, they will keep coming back and tell their friends about it.
Will bloggers become more important that TV Critics?
Simon Gunning launched straight into answering this by saying: “Critics associated with a brand eg Guardian are well thought of and people value their opinions. But there are two distinct roles there. People will still discuss and write their opinions online for people to read, but people will still turn to their favourite critics.”
Do we need to be concerned with the amount of negative online advertising with invasive techniques to catch your attention? Do we need to be careful how we use such techniques?
Nick Adams started by saying: “If a target audience is relevant, then it can work well. Most companies do not use these negative campaigns anymore.It’s usually only companies advertising things like credit cards
that do it in a wrong way. But disruptive marketing can work very well, particularly for things like film and TV, again in relevant places.”
Simon Gunning said “Yahoo tracks your web usage and provides adverts relevant to you to create more directed advertising for the user.” Jemima Kiss agreed, saying: “Adverts aren’t invasive anymore. There is a huge potential to provide interesting, exciting things on behalf of brands.”
Gerd continued to be slightly controversial by saying: “Traditional advertising would be dead in five years.”
Simon Gunning was quick to disagree: “Traditional ads get seen by many people. There are many ways of advertising, including online promotion but that 30 second advert will be at the centre of all other parts of advertising.”
Pele added: “It’s about creating a deeper experience with the brand.”
To provide forums for our viewers, should there be any sort of editorial control over what’s being written?
Gerd started by saying things “need to be balanced. The point of control is flexible; you have to decide what control you actually need.”
Jemima Kiss added that the number of ‘trolls’ - which is what people call those who ruin message boards by posting rubbish - are few and far between. “You can’t hide from people opinions, so don’t be scared,” she said. “These communities become trong and generally police themselves.”
Nick Adams warned that quite often during the promotion of a show there is lots of money around, so the forums are very active. But the money dries up after airing and the community is left high and dry which “can fuel negativity towards the brand”.
Jemima Kiss also asked whether ITV needs to create its own communities when there are people out there already doing it themselves?
We constantly hear content is king. Should we allow our material on other sites?
Simon Gunning was quick to say: “You should give your promo material away to the likes of google, yahoo, YouTube etc.
Jemima Kiss agreed saying: “It’s a no brainer. You always get better results using this type of material on the internet.” She used the example of the Daily Show which is shown only in the US but now has an international following thanks to it being made available on YouTube soon after it airs. There isn’t any money in it at the moment but it will come later on.
The panel were then asked for their final words. They included “Make it personal, make it relevant” “Allow two days a week for employees to be creative” “Engage your online advocates” and “Be obsessive compulsive”.
The questions could have continued all afternoon, many different points were being raised and it was creating a juicy discussion but there was a schedule so it had to end there.
ITV Digital Conference - Dr Jim Purbrick, Linden Labs
Posted Wednesday, March 21, 2007 at 1:36pm in Blogging | Leave a Comment
Creating marketing opportunities with virtual worlds - an introduction to the corporations, branding & marketing in Second Life.
Introduction: “Hello everyone, I’m a software engineer at Second Life.” [Explains what a virtual world is and what you can do in virtual worlds and the differences of Second Life.]
“The business model is different with SL. SL is free to use and you only pay if you want to have virtual land or if you want to use the other services Linden Labs provides. Most importantly, SL is not a game it’s a virtual world although people can build games inside SL. [Shows example of the golf and tennis games in SL.]
“The most interesting game that’s been developed in SL is Tringo (cross between Tetris and bingo). This is proved to be wildly successful in SL. People also do a lot of experimentation in SL. Recently people have been doing live performances in SL.” [Explains live performances that have happened previously and how the music has been streamed from live radio.]
“Bands can play a gig in SL and you can have an audience that’s global. And another thing that is happening in SL is movie making. You can build your sets; get your friends to be actors and you can buy clothes and film it inside SL.”
“Lots of people are doing interesting stuff with conferences in SL. What we’re seeing is people creating mixed reality conferences. People attending a conference both in the real world and in SL.” [Shows example].
“Education is becoming a big thing in SL now. Harvard now has a presence and there’s a big culture of learning. People are teaching each other how to build stuff in SL. This is amazing because people are spending an enormous amount of time to teach other people how to use it. It’s amazing! The culture has blossomed into a real world of learning: art, business studies, etc.”
“Charity is also a big thing in SL. [Shows his avatar with red nose for Comic Relief]. Charities are doing sponsored walks in SL and raising lots of money”
Stats
* 41% are female
* Median age is 33
* 68% international (as opposed to being US only)
* 10% of residents are from the UK
* 54% active residents are European
* SL is 6.5 times the size of Manhattan
* Approaching 5m members
* 116 residents earn >$5000 a month
* $5m a month exchanged
* 12m user hours per month
“We’re currently in a rapid growth phase and we are receiving a lot of media attention [Shows Business Week cover]. We also had corporate interest; in 2004, UK company Rivers Run Red was the first corporate organisation to buy land in SL. They did Radio 1’s Big Weekend which was streamed into SL which, in the real world, the event lasted a couple of hours; in SL it went on for 24 hours.”
Examples:
300 (movie) - You can buy the costumes of the characters in the film
AOL Pointe - They’ve built a bunch of cool stuff and branded it with AOL
Sears - Built by IBM and they’re looking at the potential of v-commerce websites.
The L Word - Most popular real world brand space in SL. Reasons being is they keep running events and have meetings. They have a number of shops to buy haircuts etc.
Big Brother - They created a virtual world of BB. Avatars stayed in a virtual house for so many hours of the day.
“Why would you want to stream video into a virtual world? Because you can watch it collaboratively which is more of an experience of watching a movie at the cinema.
“Why are businesses investing in SL? It’s certainly not for the money… Not just yet. [Shows example of American Apparel and how you can buy t-shirts in the real world and get the same one for free in SL].
“Virtual worlds are not going away. They’ve been growing for the last 10 years and will continue to do so for the next 10. SL if going to become far more of a platform; in the future corporations will be able host part of the SL grid. We’ll see more corporations in SL.