But this was certainly not the case in the STEAK office; with new recruits added to the herd, office expansion, and a winter party to top all celebrations – STEAK was the place to be seen in January…

The new STEAKites joining the team include Charly Dove- our Marketing and New Business Director, SEO genius Jon Cheng as Account  Manager, and Stefani Stamatiou, a fresh addition to the social team. It was a fantastic start to the year.

As our team grew, so did our geographical reach – through the opening of yet another American office in LA – massive congratulations to the US team; especially Mark and Norm!

Whilst we’re talking of travel, our Directors flew out to the Dentsu HQ in Tokyo for the Global Digital Summit to discuss all things, well…digital. All in all, an exciting week and a great opportunity to integrate with fellow staff and marketing experts across our network.

And then there was Disney…! What can we say, a bit of a rollercoaster from start to finish… a truly incredible weekend. Some photographic evidence below…

I attended the first IAB Social Media Debate of 2012 yesterday afternoon. It was also the first since STEAK joined the IAB’s Social Media Council. The motion was as follows:

‘The online marketing industry is too easily distracted by the latest ‘shiny technical object’, reducing its effectiveness and ability to achieve results’  

The event was chaired by the ever-entertaining Tom Ollerton (@mrtomollerton) and featured John Pritchard, Jules Duncan (@juliusduncan) and Jon Bishop (@jonin60seconds) arguing for, and Rob Salmon (@rsalmonuk), Liz Scarff (@lizscarff) and Alex Tait (@astait) arguing against.

The debate’s subject matter apparently arose, quite unsurprisingly, out of a conversation about Google+ (ah, good old Google+). 

The team defending the motion quickly adopted the position of the frugal pragmatist, arguing that there are now simply too many social media platforms to spend time on – and dedicate resource to – all of them (Brian Solis’s mind-warping Conversation Prism was faithfully pulled out to demonstrate the point, with the accompanying claim that if you were to spend just two hours researching each of the platforms represented you would lose half of your working year – I looked into this and it’s not quite true: there are 108 tools and platforms in the Prism giving a grand total of 216 hours which divided by a working day of 7.5 hours is actually more like a month and a half. For the sake of fairness, however, I should point out that that Solis’s illustration is now 4 years old and doesn’t include Google+, Pinterest or Quora or any number of the other 50 million social start-ups that have kicked off since 2008. Point made and taken.) They argued that resources simply can’t stretch forever and that tried and tested options, with transparent analytics are the safest options for responsible marketers. ‘Don’t be first, be second’ was the buzz-motto proposed by PayPal’s Jon Bishop.

To counter, the team arguing against stated their belief that ‘…keeping up with the latest technical developments is essential to stay relevant in today’s communication landscape.’ A position that is really quite difficult to contend with these days. They used specific examples of businesses and projects that have both succeeded and failed due to their approach to innovation and change (including the late great Kodak). Perhaps most illuminating was Liz Scarff’s case study of her work with Save the Children in which AudioBoo played a key part in securing coverage of her #Blogadesh campaign on the Guardian’s live online coverage. She was challenged on this a number of times on the basis that the project story and content was really behind the success but she remained steadfast, maintaining that the Guardian simply would not have taken on the story in the same way had AudioBoo not been employed. Rob Salmon was particularly entertaining and to be fair had warned us that he was thrown out of the last debate he was involved in (at school) for getting ‘too excitable’. He cited the example of his work with Carling in launching the ‘iPint App’ on iTunes to demonstrate how being first on a platform can lead to newsworthiness and exposure.

All in all it was a lively debate, some very interesting points made by all involved and it was well worth attending.

Where do I stand? Well personally I think the idea of ‘bonfires’ and ‘fireworks’ is useful here. Social media gives us both long-term and short-term opportunities and both are woven in to the most successful strategies. Investing considerable amounts of time and resource into unproven platforms is certainly risky (especially when we’re blind to success metrics) and won’t be for most organisations. On the other hand, as every brand out there starts trying to ‘behave like a publisher’ using the big four platforms there’s the ever-present issue of how to achieve cut-through – how are you going to get noticed if you don’t do something markedly different from your competitors? There are lessons to be taken from both sides of the argument, but ultimately playing it too safe for too long is a surefire way to drive your brand into eventual obscurity.

I very much look forward to the next IAB Social Media event.

@adigoodsell

Looking for a huge numbers of fans? Can’t wait a second longer? Then read on, this blog post is for you…

1. Buy your fans
This is definitely the easiest way to guarantee a following fast; decide how many ‘fans’ you want then simply go to any dodgy-looking site (probably via a Facebook ad) take your wallet out (remember to stick your head in the sand) et voila, success! But wait a second; by definition once you directly pay for a relationship what does that relationship become? What does it really mean? There’s a very obvious analogy here, one that doesn’t involve any love at all…

2. Give away loads of free stuff
Giving away free stuff sometimes isn’t a bad idea. It doesn’t really make a lot of sense to give away a 3D TV if you’re an outdoors pursuit’s specialist. Clearly your fans are more likely to be couch potatoes than bouldering dedicatees. I recently heard of a company that gave away 30,000 pairs of their not-so-cheap product and now have somewhere near 45,000 Facebook fans. They don’t do much else in the social space and the giveaway didn’t involve anything other than a straight ‘Like in exchange for the product’* mechanism. At least they now have a ‘following’** and they know that following is interested in what they sell (which already beats the companies that have decided to go with the first tactic in this list).

* Now, of course, forbidden by Facebook’s fun-killing Promotions Guidelines.

** I use the word in the loosest sense of its meaning.

3. Do something really stupid
One ‘positive’ by-product of doing something so stupid that it ends up as the latest in a litany of high-profile social media #fails is that you get a short-term boost in following. Unfortunately this boost tends to be reasonably short-lived (and is the equivalent of people rubber-necking as they slowly creep past a car crash before they speed off, glad that it wasn’t them). It’s no use kidding yourself; they’re there for the spectacle and may even have started following you to join in the social media fury. Not good fans.

4. Be something (or someone) that everyone wants to follow who’s not already on social media
A footballing deity, a deranged former Governor of Alaska or a self-proclaimed drug-addled superhuman. If you’re one of the most famous entities on the planet and you’re not yet on social media you have a landslide of fans waiting for you. We didn’t mean you Gary.

5. Run a spectacularly innovative, successful campaign
Every now and then we see a great campaign achieve unprecedented, wholly-deserved cut-through and people flock to them like some kind of messiah. These campaigns are rarer than celebrities and quickly become fixed aspirational benchmarks for marketers everywhere. They are unlikely, difficult to predict and usually the result of a ‘eureka idea’ made real though serious hard graft, planning and (often) significant budgets. So many great ideas get lost, distorted and drowned but every now and again one makes it through.

By now I hope you’ve got my point. Usually there are no quick wins; that is the very nature of social media. It builds over time, if you do things well and keep at it. Smart campaigns will give you injections of followings if they hit the mark, but be prepared to experiment. Some brands will never have huge followings but if they can build quality followings they too are realising the opportunity.

The more we try to force old habits on to this new landscape the more we destroy the opportunity to do something really valuable. 

@adigoodsell 

What is influence? It’s a massive question in the world of social media. Thousands of man hours are being pumped into companies who are trying to solve the problem in the hope that one day, you’ll be able to search a category and an application will spit out exactly the 5 top influencers you need to be communicating with to push your product.
I’m in the lucky position whereby I could be classed as an ‘influencer’ in a field (not social, sadly!), so I can quickly decipher which tools work and which don’t. I’ve tried blog ranking systems, I’ve had a go on Klout and I’ve used bespoke services. The commonality between all of them?

They’re all useless.

It’s not their fault though. It’s the fault of online influence and all its amazing intricacies / variables. The simple fact is that you’ll never be able to have a perfect system that analyses influence; you’ll always need human intervention. Why? Because anything that has an algorithm involved can be gamed and is open to error (the banking industry felt the full force of over dependence on algorithms first hand).

I don’t want to share the dark arts of social media with you; needless to say, with a bit of elbow grease and some solid hours, you can quickly create the impression you’re an influencer on various platforms. Why would you want to do that? Well, now businesses know that the power of recommendation is a powerful marketing tool, they want to montize that.

For me, this goes against the basic fundamentals of social media. It’s the one area of marketing where a business had to become better if they wanted to engage with people. It’s been a land mark business leveller that once again put the customer in control of the relationship, now I fear we’re endangering that power by allowing ourselves to become part of the machine. Klout and their long term vision of rewarding influencers for talking about their products with gifts, vouchers and treats is a horrible concept.

We’ve seen first-hand that people don’t like being sold to by celebrities when they’re flogging chocolate bars via their Twitter accounts. I felt kind of betrayed when Jack Wilshere insisted on plugging a computer game via his Twitter account before Christmas. How would I feel if my friends were plugging high street coffee? Disgusted.

Dave from Chafford Hundred might have a lot of friends in my social network, but please, don’t think he has a clue when it comes to coffee, and don’t think because he’s recommended it in a status update I’m going to rush out to Starbucks, regardless of what his Klout score says. Creating a game out of influence wedges a block of mistrust into an arena that has predominantly, resisted marketing messages unless they were relevant and well thought out.

My hope is that influence is left in the hands of those who truly are influencers in their field. I hope that we don’t pay people to sell to their friends and I hope that we just accept that sometimes, the human eye is a more powerful tool than a fancy algorithm when it comes to identifying what is important to people.

@PeterWood33

Social media has clunked its way through many evolutions over the years. The past four has seen the digital world settle into a social rhythm. Facebook being the daddy of them all, Twitter is the cooler, younger kid on the block, and LinkedIn taking the lead as the place to hang out to talk serious stuff. The commonality with all of those platforms is they are essentially for everyone. The barriers to entry are extremely low. Most tech savvy people will generally have those three, even if they’re not active in all three (I bet everyone who reads this has all three).

For me, the above spaces are the terrestrial TV channels of the seventies. People were given three that catered to everyone in the UK on a basic level. This year feels like the year satellite TV made the break through, I’m not sure how it worked for the rest of the world outside the UK, but BSKYB gave us something we’d never had before… choice. If you wanted Sport, you had it 24 hours a day. If you wanted cooking, you filled your boots with as much Delia as you could stomach. If it was holidays, there was a place for you to indulge your passion.

This is the year that social goes satellite; the year the world finally has a dedicated home to indulge their interests. We’ve already seen a huge amount of buzz for social network Pinterest. I was desperate not to fall in love with yet another time drainer, but I have. A visual-based social network geared around your interests. Or how about the yet to be designed Manchester United social network that Sapient-Nitro are building? Talking football all day in a place designed specifically for that need. Instagram has been about for a while, but it’s really taken to the masses over the past 12 months with photography fanatics filling the space with arty snaps of their pugs. How about Path, the social network for sharing moments with your closest friends and family? Far more private than Facebook and slightly more intimate.

There are countless examples of smaller and more specialist social networks setting up all over the place. The question for marketeers globally is which networks work best with your product or service. My feeling is that 2012 social success is going to be more about pioneering ideas in new social spaces, the spaces where people might be more susceptible to brand messages, the places people aren’t being bombarded with different spins on tired ideas.

Which up and coming social networks are you keeping an eye on this year?

@PeterWood33

After a year’s delay, Microsoft adCenter will start to power the PPC results on Yahoo UK in Q2 of 2012. Discussion of its potential for success aside, here are some useful links and an action plan for preparing UK campaigns.

Recap on UK Search Engine Market Shares

Yahoo/Bing face a major battle for market share in the UK – more than in the US. Google holds a dominant 91 percent of searches (Hitwise, 4 weeks to Jan 21st), with Yahoo and Bing at 2.28 percent and 3.83 percent respectively; less than the 4.80 percent of UK searches that take place on Google.com. There are more market share resources in this article.

Unsurprisingly, UK PPC campaigns on Yahoo and Bing receive less love than AdWords, although their combined research states their audiences are 41 percent more likely to convert than the “average” UK searcher.

Step 1: Shorten Your Yahoo Ads by February 1

Yahoo’s Panama system switched to ad lengths similar to Google some time ago – but they’re longer than those on adCenter. All new or modified ads on Panama are required to have an ad title of 25 characters (instead of 40) or less, and a display URL of a maximum 35 characters on February 1; ready for migration across to adCenter. Descriptions should also be shortened, from a maximum of 71 to 70 characters.

Existing ads that meet these requirements will migrate over to adCenter but will be truncated and paused – so I’d suggest editing all your ads sooner rather than later.

Step 2: Map Your Accounts

You may have accounts that live on Panama which are not on adCenter – take some time to compare and see which need migrating across, or what’s already in place. If you have a Yahoo or MSN rep, they’ll help with this process.

Best practice is to keep your adCenter account and build it out – not replace it by transferring over a larger Yahoo account; the systems are different.

Step 3: Know the Differences Between Panama and adCenter

The two systems work differently. This webinar explains how on the Search Alliance website – watch from 10:30 minutes onwards. There’s also a comparison guide.

You can view training videos as well and study for the adCenter exam.

Step 4: Allocate Time to Adjust, Expand Campaigns

After reviewing the above steps, there are several areas of your campaigns you will need to work on, including:

• Editing copy and display URLs 
• Expanding keywords 
• Reviewing negatives and the levels they are applied at 
• Adjusting match types 
• Adjusting geo-targeting 
• Reviewing dynamic insertion parameters

Consider spending time on campaigns already live on adCenter, too, as there may be keyword variations searched for on Yahoo than never had searches on Bing, and aren’t currently in your adCenter account.

There might be an opportunity here to improve targeting – adCenter has more granular targeting options than Panama down to city or metro areas, as well as region and country levels.

Step 5: Adjust Your Bid, Budget Strategy

AdCenter has higher minimum bids – £0.05 compared to £0.01 – and requires you to set a monthly budget (unlike Panama); you’ll need to incorporate this change into your workflow going forward.

Step 6: Review Your Landing Pages

This is always best practice – review your pages against the keywords driving traffic to them: are the keywords in the page, and is the content relevant? This is factored into rankings.

Step 7: Manage Expectations

Some U.S. accounts saw increases in performance post-transition; others saw the opposite. So communicate that there is a change coming and the waters may be choppy; not just because of the migration of accounts, but because of consumers seeing different ads and performance changing.

Watching Brief

Following the above steps, working closely with your search engine reps and maintain a watching brief should put you in a good position to cope with the change.

 @DuncanParry

One area that search engines have made a number of significant advancements in recent years is in how they evaluate content on a website. So what does a perfectly optimised page look like in 2012? Let’s look at 10 elements.

1. Title tags are still important, but it’s not a good idea to over-optimise them. 

2. Descriptions still don’t appear to add much ranking value, but can help encourage clicks. 

3. Header tags still need to be relevant. 

4. URL still ideally mentions the keywords. 

5. Content is now about semantically relevant supporting keywords, not multiple mentions of the keywords. The example chosen is a recipe, because in order to make béarnaise sauce there are specific ingredients that are 100 percent relevant to the eventual outcome. One way of checking what keywords Google might consider as relevant is to do a ‘~keyword’ (or tilde) search. Other ways, let’s be honest, involve nothing more than common sense and knowing your subject. 

6. Video and other ‘rich’ content can be useful on a page to increase engagement levels, reduce bounce rates and also to appear alongside results as illustrated.

7. Internal links need to follow the “reasonable surfer” patent. It makes sense in the “perfectly optimised page” example above to link to peppercorn sauce as an alternative to béarnaise. 

8. Facebook/Twitter/other login comments are a way of sharing the content on other platforms. The direct SEO benefit may be debatable, but it never hurts to get your content in front of a large amount of people. With Google Search Plus Your World, it could be that adding a Google+ login is more important than anything else.

9. User reviews add regular content to the page, which can also be coded to include microformatting instructions and add extra elements to your listings in search engine result pages (SERPs).

10. Newsfeeds only share content that already exists elsewhere, but they contribute to an overall impression of the page changing on a regular basis.

It’s worth noting that the “perfectly optimised page” above won’t be perfect for all verticals, or for all brands – not everyone has the ability to add customer reviews to their product pages (e.g., insurance comparison sites).

Although there’s no one-size-fits-all solution, hopefully the above list will give you some guidance on how to perfect your on-page SEO.

@garethowen1

Schwartz says, “As STEAK’s footprint grows worldwide, it has become apparent that the West Coast represents the largest opportunity for continued business expansion. Having a client-facing organisation in the Los Angeles area will allow us to offer our customers more flexibility and provides us with a direct sales channel in an incredibly strategic growth market.”

Facebook insights. Dear oh dear. I’ve got to come out and say it – I’ve found their new and “improved” suite of analytics entirely perplexing, lacking in usefulness and extremely complex to explain, aggregate and apply to the real world.

I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one in the industry who has been using the old Insights page to report back successes to clients. I’ve been living in hope that they’ll never switch it off , but the time has come – the old insights page is still an option, but it’s not recording new data. I haven’t felt this down since I said goodbye to my Bebo account…

What are my gripes about the new Insights page and why do they matter?

The first problem with the new Insights landing page is that it doesn’t have a date range. What made Facebook take away the date range option? All you have access to is the last 30 days of data, so unless you do all your reports on the 1^st of every month (so many ruined weekends Facebook!), you have to look for more creative ways of accessing the data. I rang Facebook and was told that means exporting a report.

You can set the date range you want there. Then you’re greeted by a spreadsheet that has a total of 35 tabs with names like “28 days viral reach by story”, “Daily Total frequency distribution” and “Daily Page consumptions by type”. In the key metrics tab, there are 68 columns worth of for you to sift through. Yep, 68.

These are a heady mix of, ‘what the hell does that mean’ and ‘how could I possibly use that as a metric’, followed by… ‘these figures don’t even add up’.

Some of the data is cumulative, some of it is chronological snap shots and some of it is completely bizarre. Nowhere does it give you a summary report – you have to work it all out yourself, which, as I mentioned earlier is difficult because numbers don’t correlate within the spreadsheet.

The additional tabs “Likes”, “Reach” and “Talking about this” all give you a nice demographic split and some additional information, but it’s not particularly user friendly and least of all, I don’t find it particularly useful. What is “talking about this” and how can I use it as a proper metric? What does “Friends of Fans” mean in the grand scheme of things? Which businesses takes that seriously? How many of the 150 or so “friends” you averagely have actually engage with you on a daily basis or even care what you have to say?

Why can’t Facebook give us a proper summary about the metrics that really matter (with a date range), including:

• How many likes did I have this month?
• How many comments did I have?
• How many people shared my content?
• How many people posted on my wall?
• How many people did my content reach?
• Average time a fan spent on my wall
• Fans engaging via wall vs Engaging via their own newsfeed

I’d like that all in a nice table, with month-on-month and year-on-year data –  the rest can wait.

My overriding issue with this problem is that Facebook and their flouncy metrics are bad for social media as a whole. If Facebook can’t give us simple, easy to understand metrics to work with, it makes a social media professional’s job much harder when justifying business outlay on the platform.

For me, if Facebook wants to be taken seriously long term in the same way Google is with its analytics package, it’s going to have to drastically improve it’s technology and the data it collects and presents. Google+ are pulling every trick in the book to force us onto their new platform and you can bet your bottom dollar when their brand page proposition matures its metrics, it will be crystal clear and far easier to understand.

Come on Facebook, do us all a favour and sort out your metrics!

@Peterwood33