Archive for September 26, 2011

James Carson | September 26, 2011
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A Useless Post: Facebook Audience vs. Community

This is useless. I’m so bored of Facebook bashing that I’ve actually decided to take a stand. Somehow this useless post garnered good levels of response from the Twitter community. I’m not entirely sure how such unbalanced views gather such attention.

Let’s just take the following statement:

“Do you want to base your community efforts upon a platform over which you have no control, which has one of the lowest response rates in history, where most of your updates wont been seen by the majority of your audience, where few individuals meaningfully interact with each other on branded pages, with little demonstrable ROI, and where the owner can shift the ground beneath your feet at any moment without warning?”

No I don’t, but then again, this isn’t really a very good quote of what Facebook really is. Neither does it provide any meaningful statistics to reinforce the argument.

Facebook success is dependent on vertical, brand strength, the manner in which you engage with your community (yes, I’ll use that word for reasons below) and a whole range of other things. Just to say it’s useless is completely irresponsible. In the aftermath of telling him his post sucked, RichMillington tried to explain that audience and community were two different things, although they are not.

Audience vs. Community

He claimed that Facebook was good for building audience, but not for community. He also seemed to base his definition of a community as one where users meaningfully interact with each other, and presuming from his post he felt that couldn’t happen on Facebook. I’d like to point him in the direction of SEGA’s Discussion Boards, where meaningful interaction does happen (along with countless other gaming communities), and that this definition doesn’t work anyway. You don’t need users to meaningfully interact to necessarilly have a meaningful community, if users are prepared to interact with your brand by creating content. Take Skittles, for instance, which have built a large marketing campaign from the weird workings of Trey Lewous, which were communicated through Facebook:


The interaction happens between brand and community; the fans are sharing a common ground with the brand and collaborating with Skittles. Audience is passive, community is active – the fan page is active!

Same with BMW, who have got a series of extremely creative films through collaborating with their community.

Not to mention that these brands have 19.3 million and 6 million Likes respectively. Even if there engagement percentages are low, their absolute figures will almost certainly be incredibly high.

Will it be possible, just one of these days, to get some stuff retweeted that has a balanced view when it comes to Facebook?

Category: Facebook, Social Media | Tags:
James Carson | September 22, 2011
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What Does Klout Score Mean? ReTweets & #BrightonSEO

There seem to be a lot of people out there who want to bash Klout. I’ve looked at it with a fairly open mind and tried to consider how useful it really is. As a general indicator it doesn’t seem to be too bad, although it undoubtedly is some way off on some stuff. Still, after years in the wilderness about ‘scoring’ influence, we’ve got something. I don’t think it really deserves the sort of Google Suggest box shown below:

There’s also some pretty dumb posts around (Klout does in fact take into account WHO ReTweets stuff) and I’m going to just explain the data I’ve received of late.

I’m a bit of a Twitter/blog/influencer noobie, most of it driven by having to speak at #BrightonSEO but having little Twitter or online content to back it up. I did, however, go into Twitter with a strategy. That strategy was to get influencers (those with 2k + followings) talking about my stuff and mentioning me as much as possible. With this in mind, I managed to game a Klout score of 55 within about six weeks of being active on Twitter. In the grand scheme of things, that’s pretty good, although it also suggests Klout is a little bit broken (I am not, for one minute, more influential than @patrickaltoft, but my Klout momentarily suggested I was). So here’s my data set:

James Carson Klout Score

Explaining the Score

So here’s my fairly rapid rise on Klout since August 22nd. initially, I was doing pretty well in creating content on my blog, but rarely was I getting it mentioned. Occasionally @kelvinnewman tweeted some things, but it didn’t get much traction. However, I’d yet to have a big break. I considered that hustle was a word used a lot by the people I followed at Distilled, and with that in mind I wrote A #winning 12 Stage Hustle Post for Link Building. This content was perfect for @tomcritchlow, and I mentioned him with the post asking if he could tweet it. He did, then I got a ton of other mentions – it’s by far the most widely read and succesful of the thirty or so posts on this blog so far. As you can see, the flurry of tweets that came in sent my Klout score shooting up to the mid 40s – and at this point I only had 90 or so followers.

I then bumbled along at a fairly mundane pace, contributing and hustling people, but not getting many ReTweets. I even felt pretty bored by it all at this stage because I wasn’t going anywhere. However, then I wrote A New Digital Structure, which was picked up by a few people who had started following me after Tom’s tweet. Then, along came #BrightonSEO where I had to speak in front of 300 online marketers. This was pretty well received, and I was away again. However, my ascent was much more rapid this time around (largely because my Twitter handle was linked to from a large number of decent agency blogs). It’s worth considering the rest of the data to see how this stacks up.

This makes some sense, although I’d say it leapt a little too highly after just one ReTweet, while I became far more mentioned on the days after #BrightonSEO. This one correlates very well. I made a big jump in followers after#BrightonSEO, but not a huge leap after Tom’s RT.

This one I’m most dubious about. I gained far more followers after #BrightonSEO and it’s hard to believe my network didn’t grow as strongly after this event as it did after Tom’s tweet.

Klout Shortcomings

A noticeable shortcoming for me is that your network doesn’t seem to correctly reflect your Klout unless you are active. Thus, if you are active for a sustained period and concentrate on being mentioned, your Klout will almost go up, if you are inactive, your Klout falls like a stone (think going on holiday, when I will certainly not be tweeting). A second shortcoming is in the upper echelons of the scoring system. I am 13 points behind Sam Crocker, yet he is only 20 behind Barack Obama. I can only think that the score is logarithmic, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense to do this on a 100 point scale. Additionally, you can get above forty pretty easily – probably too easily. Inactive people with low followers really ought to be nearer the 0 mark.

Klout Benefits

Shortcomings aside, I definitely find postives in Klout scoring. Firstly, the score does correlate to some fairly major events, so it’s comprehensible, although not necessarilly accurate. Second, I feel it’s a good encourager. If I work with a team and we’re looking to increase our social footprint, then Klout is an indicative number of that performance and it encourages the team to improve through being mentioned or ReTweeted. You’d be nuts to take it alone and as gospel, but when used in conjunction with other data (followers, traffic etc) I think it’s really quite useful.

Category: Analytics, Klout, Social Media | Tags: , ,
James Carson | September 21, 2011
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Ten Steps to Prove ROI on Social Media Spend vs. Traditional Media Spend

You don’t have to go far to find an article that talks about the RoI of social media (normally arguing the case for it). Anything regarding business change needs some sort of business case, which is fairly exhausting, and people have often found it daunting to prove the RoI of social media – myself included, although I have managed it to secure quite a lot of funding (it took pretty much three months though – what’s the RoI on that?).  There was a great article on UnMarketing a couple of weeks back that points out there’s a whole load of traditional business practices where we don’t need to prove RoI when perhaps we should.

Then, I think it was somewhere around the last couple of mornings while I was in the shower, it struck me. I think I saw a flash of something, but that could be the development of epilepsy. There is a seriously easy way to think of the RoI of social media marketing against traditional media.

Step One: Work out Your Media Spend

Get onto the marketing department (you may already be in it) and find out what the budget is for media spend. That shouldn’t be too hard – you may even be able to rustle up some documents of last year’s spend.

Step Two: Work out Your Media Reach

You’ve got the total spend, now look at the reach of the media where the spend is. How much does it cost to reach this amount of people? You could work out what the cost of reaching each person individually, but it’s not strictly necessary.

Step Three: Consider Effectiveness of Campaigns

Often clueless marketers spend all their money on half arsed campaigns in traditional media that don’t really work. It doesn’t help when they’re marketing a product that sucks. Delve into anything you can find where there was an apparent sales uplift as a consequence of media spend. If there is an uplift, then match that against spend and see if the campaign delivered RoI? If there’s no uplift, you’ll have a stronger business case for going social.

Step Four: Quantify Social Reach Costs

Now you’ll need to quantify the amount of money (think people) it would take to build the kind of social media footprint that would near or surpass the reach of your traditional media.  Say your traditional media reaches 80,000 people a week for a month at a cost of £40,000. Consider how much it would take to gain 80,000 social connections. If it would cost significantly more to achieve your social numbers, you’re going to struggle with your case.

Step Five: Consider Timing

You’ll also need to explain how long it will take to achieve the numbers. If you think it’s going to take five years, you should drop the case.

Step Six: Consider Engagement

There’s a slight issue with the last step around engagement. It’s difficult to quantify engagement rates, but if you can find anything out about it, consider the data. The bottom line is these are different types of media – lots of people ignore adverts in magazines and can’t remember them, but lots of people ignore messages within social media too.

Step Seven: Consider Permanency

Perhaps a better and easier case for social media than considering engagement is that once people are connected to your brand, they’re not all that likely to leave in the short term. That means you have a semi-permanent influence over social media connections when all you have in the traditional space is influence for the length of the campaign. Thinking about social media in the context of a campaign isn’t too clever. It’s a permanent thing, and that’s why I think it has an advantage vs. traditional.

Step Eight: Business Case

So you know traditional media spend and ROI vs.  the cost and timeframes of building your own audience via social media. You need to demonstrate that you can lower the cost of media spend via social media (by building your own permanent audience) over a time period. You may want to make a case for extra money, but it may be worth asking for investment from the budget which fills the traditional media spend. You won’t get success by saying social should have all of that spend; first of all, companies are rarely this rash and radical and you’ll get laughed out, and secondly, you still want to reach some people in traditional media, even if you have a social footprint.

Step Nine: Presentation

Be as factual as possible. The more cold hard data you can present in terms of your bottom line, the higher the chance of your executives opening the purse strings for social. It’s an entirely logical process: if you can build a permanent community which has as large a reach as traditional media over a good time period for a lower sum of money than traditional spend, it seems highly likely you will gain some traction. Think of the value of reaching 19 million people. Now think that Skittles has that value every time it updates its Facebook page.

Step Ten: Execution

You’ve probably spent a considerable amount of time proving the business case for social media, now you have to execute this plan. It is easy to be excited initially, and then the interest to wane if things don’t necessarily go to plan. Don’t be disheartened, keep at it. Brand building and social media can take la lot of time.

Category: RoI, Social Media, Strategy | Tags: ,
James Carson | September 20, 2011
3 comments

Thinking Small in Content Strategies and Inbound Marketing

One of the things I recall from reading Seth Godin’s Purple Cow, is that we shouldn’t go into business with the ambition of satisfying ‘most people’. What he suggests is focusing on innovators and earlier adopters, because if they like your idea then they will be the ones who distribute it to the masses. In short, these are the people that will get your idea to ‘tip’. It’s something Apple seems to get right time and time again.

Innovation Curve

It’s a powerful concept to use when considering a content strategy. While we’re not necessarily looking to find early adopters to distribute radical ideas, we can use the concept as the basis of thinking small, carving a niche and building an audience.

Why Thinking about the Masses is a Bad Idea

Approaching a content strategy with a broad brush, thinking you’re going to appeal to a mass market when you have no audience to start with is a bad idea. You’ll find yourself broad, unfocused, overstretched and ultimately frustrated. There’s a reason why audiences for lifestyle magazines are declining – they are too broad and generic vs. the quickly accessed often deeper free content available on the web.

How to Build an Audience

Even if you don’t want your brand to be known about specified knowledge in a niche in the long run, you’ve got to start somewhere, and you can broaden out as you grow. First of all you need a recognisable community – it could be just a few people on Twitter or it could be a forum – but it’s good to start small. Godin suggests that you need to be the best in the world at one specific topic.

You also need to be sure that you can become a recognised authority on your given topic. Once you’re confident of this, you need to find some influencers within this community (although not necessarily the biggest), and then create content that’s specifically for them. Then get them to tweet about it or link back. Let them write a section of your content and get them involved – they’ll almost certainly talk to someone about their experience, and your tribe will grow in size. Once you are perceived as a strong authority, you can branch out, in an effort to find a larger audience. In the second stage you can focus on something else related that you can also become an authority on. Rinse and Repeat.

To use an analogy, you could watch this video on cell division. A cell becomes strong enough to divide, thus exist as two. This process repeats to create growth.


Two Caveats of Granular Niches

So Godin says to be the best in the world at a topic. This suggests that it’s a good idea to go extremely granular – there’s just a couple of issues with this.

Content with No Community

Say you sold Coarse 5mm Metal Wingnuts – you could interpret Godin’s words as a pointer to become the biggest (or only) authority on this particular type of wingnut. The issue here of course is that there is unlikely to be a community around this particular product. You’re thinking too small. You need to think of how this product can be used and who would use it. The first thing that came into my head is technology teachers. You could focus on creating guides of how to use your products within GCSE coursework and syndicate them to teachers. When it comes around to restocking their workshop with wingnuts, they might consider you.

Dead Ends: Content Which Isn’t Scalable

You also need to ensure that your content strategy is scalable. Once you become an established authority on a particular niche, will you be able to find enough related niches around your initial niche to scale (divide and grow, like in the cell video)? You don’t want to find yourself in a dead end where you can’t easily move into another niche. Fortunately most worldly objects are related to something, so you can normally get around this. However, what if you don’t sell products in your related niches? Your strategy would be in a dead end.

I’d be wary about surveying these niches and wanting to create a content strategy, because not enough of the related niches support products. One way to get around this of course is to offer further products related to niches, once you have satisfied one niche sufficiently. Marketing and product align nicely – you can see the need to sell a product because you can see a certain niche community where you could become an authority.

DVD Website Example

If you’re a DVD website which sells a wide range of DVDs, it would be a bad idea to start doing film reviews on any films you felt like. This will make your content unfocused, and sites like Rotten Tomatoes and Empire Online will almost certainly do a better job. You won’t be able to take their audience by being generic. But what if you could find Japanese Horror fans within the communities of these websites, and you stocked enough Japanese Horror to satisfy them? You could write content on this subject, make it more compelling than what’s offered on the larger sites, and eventually form your own community and take away some of the larger sites’ audience. Once you’ve become an established authority on Japanese Horror, divide your cells and move into something else (which you also stock) – Samurai films, for instance.

Car Website Example

With a website that deals 2nd hand cars in a local area, a bad idea would be to try and appeal to the most people straight away by writing about Formula One. Like film reviews, there are a vast amount of content creators out there that will almost certainly do a better job than you – the BBC springs to mind. Instead, do your research on what motoring events occur in your local area. It could be banger racing. If it was, then you could run a blog that publishes content on those events – there will almost certainly be a community who would like to access that content, but might not necessarily publish it themselves. You happen to sell 2nd hand cars as well – perhaps you could run an offer for banger racing purchases to own that community even more. Scale out to further local events (a dead end here might be motorcross, unless you sold bikes) and find racing niches.

But What about My Brand?

At this point you might be thinking to yourself, “But I don’t want my car brand associated with banger racing – people will think we sell a load of bangers.” If you’re in the DVD business, you might think, “People will only think we sell only one genre of film.” What I say to this is “get over it” – the bottom line is that most people won’t be particularly interested in this niche content, and you can quite clearly see that you sell a lot of other stuff too. It should just look like a bit of fun on the side – it doesn’t need to be plastered all over your homepage! Just make sure your adopters can find it easily. Building a community that doesn’t focus on niches will take a long time, building something niche is far easier.

The Benefits of Thinking Small

If you succeed in these niches, you’ll have created your own media which promotes your products to an engaged audience. In the case of the car website, you’d have effectively have become principal sponsor of the event, without even paying a dime! The ultimate objective of inbound marketing is that you create your own media and audiences so you don’t have to pay to work with the big traditional guys. There’s certainly an RoI in that!

Category: Content, Inbound Marketing |
James Carson | September 19, 2011
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I Want to Learn PHP and Data Visualisation – Please Hit Me Up

Right then people. I am getting tired of my lack of web development or design skills and want to get tooled up. I would like to learn the following:

Basic PHP

Enough to make applications that can call data from social networks. For instance, getting Facebook Open Graph data and Google Analytics into the same table. I can use XPATH, but it’s not much good for OG or GA.

Saying that, I’m not even sure PHP is strictly necessary, I’m curious though.

Data Visualisation (Design)

So I’m distinctly average to poor on a scale of poor to good on photoshop and other design tools. I’d like to be able to take said data (from above) and create reasonable infographics or presentations.

If you are awesome at either of these, and would like a student, then let me know. If you know someone who would be interested, let me know. I’m open to offers of skills trades and reasonable payment for tuition. As much as I’d like to learn code on my own, I don’t really know where to start.

I need to meet you in person, so you need to be London based!

Either leave a comment or hit me up at Mrjamescarson.

Category: Courses | Tags: ,
James Carson | September 19, 2011
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Content for Links? What Ever Happened to Content for an Audience?

When it comes to content, I’ve got to say SEO rarely gets it right. Every conference I attend, speakers talk about great content that attracts links. The closest I’ve seen to an SEO conference really considering content with regard to audience, was at the most recent Brighton SEO, with Rosie Freshwater’s peta kucha Market Research: Informing SEO and Link Development (bottom of the page) describing how customer insight could inform building content which builds links. This entire guide by Distilled, while quite useful and comprehensive is also about links. Links, links, links, links, links. This is a great post about link bait from Search Engine Land, which explains:

“For SEO purposes, we are interested in sharing. You want people to write about your link bait on their websites, blogs and on their social media accounts. It would be a shame if 10,000 people saw your link bait yet none of them actually linked to it.”

That’s fair enough, but I don’t think it’s that much of a shame if 10,000 people still see your stuff. If 10,000 people saw this blog I couldn’t really give a hoot about whether or not someone linked to me. My audience would have gone up and I would have grown in community stature.

Links vs. Audience

The SEO industry never talks about content as a means to build audience, which is how every major media organisation would consider it. Of course, content which builds links builds search rankings, which technically builds audience, but it’s not exactly a way of thinking that puts people first. Since I’m a proponent of loving the people f rather than worrying about algorithms, I’m keen to change this mind-set.

Writers are Not Link Builders

Creating content as a means the end of building links is not something a writer will particularly enjoy. I was a writer in an SEO agency before – we wrote content with the objective of building links and it totally sucked.  Our boss even told us to try and not be creative and noticeable, because then the clearly paid for links would be less likely to be found. I lasted eight months. Much more pleasurable is seeing that people are actually reading your stuff, and then a % of those people are sharing it as well. It makes your writers happier. Think about creating content around a niche to build an audience and a community. Don’t go about thinking that your content should always be attracting links. People first, algorithms second.

Benefits of Building an Audience

The benefits of building an engaged audience and community can be wide ranging (I suggest reading Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies), but building an audience who are engaged, brand loyal and thus more likely to come back are in the end more likely to buy your stuff. You should gain customers who repeatedly buy from your business, have a view on your business, and can help you (and are prepared to help) by providing insight. Once you have this, your advocates will recruit more customers through word of mouth. Think about how you can make your content interactive, how your audience can be involved with the creation of that content – build the audience and you’ll have more people who will share your stuff. Ultimately, you’ll get more natural links through this distribution.

Category: Algorithms, Content, Inbound Marketing, Link Building, SEO, Social Media | Tags: , ,
James Carson | September 15, 2011
2 comments

How to Rank on YouTube… (Including Channel Data)

If I really loved data, I might bang on about how YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine in the world, how more content is uploaded in 60 days than all the major US networks could air in 60 years and how 3 billion videos are viewed a day. I might do that, or then I might just suggest you go to YouTube and check these stats out for yourself.

I might also think that someone who is allowed to write for econsultancy wouldn’t miss out some important factors about the YouTube ranking algorithm, particularly when these are readily available in the YouTube  Content Creator’s playbook. I often feel most of the information we actually need to do our jobs is actually provided by Google/YouTube themselves, but for some reason we need to get the CTO of another company to completely miss out channel data from ‘How to Rank Highly on YouTube Searches’, even though it’s pointed out as a ranking factor by YouTube. Very strange. Alas, the document is below and you can see for yourself.


How to Rank on YouTube (a more comprehensive guide)

Now, because the post on econsultancy is incomplete, I’ll go through the ranking factors in a bit more detail. First of all, I’d like to point out a couple of posts that gave me some depth while doing the research – it’s just they were written near 2 years ago:

Now, we’ve these two post’s backing, a little common sense and what YouTube tells us, there are five key factors to YouTube search:

  • Keywords
  • Engagement
  • Time based
  • Channel strength
  • External

Now these can be broken down further so that we have a bit of a clearer understanding:

YouTube Ranking Factors

I’m slightly uneasy about the idea of inbound links to your video causing it to rank higher on YouTube. It sounds like the sort of Causation vs. Correlation debate you regular see in SEO, and I don’t really feel I’ve seen enough evidence. Additionally, I don’t think it’s that sophisticated. All the same, it may be a factor, but not one I’d pursue. I’d be most concerned with getting keywords right, making sure the video is engaging (pretty much the creative part) and getting it up quickly and thus making it topical. So, breaking it down, I really think (at the top level) the algorithm is something like this:

YouTube Algorithm

I haven't based this on cold hard data, more my own observations and a sprinkling of common sense - let me know if you disagree!

But I wouldn’t lose sleep over the makeup of this anyway. Video virality relies on strength of creative, distribution and a lot of luck. Search is a useful sub factor within distribution, but it’s not the most important thing in video. I don’t think ‘Charlie Bit My Finger’ really got where it was by having great keywords in the title. The same could be said with most of this list.

Category: Algorithms, SEO, Video, YouTube | Tags: , , ,
James Carson | September 12, 2011
One comment

Saying Stuff is Dead, is Dead: Five Flawed ‘X is Dead’ Arguments

I’ve heard a lot of ‘X is Dead’ statements of late and it’s making me feel depressed. ‘SEO is Dead’, ‘Email is Dead’, ‘Big Brother is Dead’, ‘Sunday Lunch is Dead’. If everything was as dead as people say it is, we’d probably be living in a world akin to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

To escape this constant feeling of death, I went to the pub with David Williams, but we ended up discussing what else we thought was dead. ‘Fish and chips,’ he replied, ‘too much cholesterol.’

I nodded solemnly, had a little think, and pointed out, ‘Soup is dead. Everyone is drinking smoothies.’

Both statements are utter nonsense, and there are so many more out there that it’s killing me. Here are five of the best (or worst) ‘X is dead’ statements that exist in digital marketing – I’m tasking myself to point out how all of these statements are wrong.

Toilet Says Stuff is Dead

SEO is Dead

SEO is dead seems to be the favourite. I’ve even written a post on the subject (although SEO is not dead, I think it needs redefinition because it has become a catchall for a wide range of disciplines). SEO is also commonly used to define ‘search’, but they’re not really the same thing. SEO is about optimising websites, search is simply the practice searching for stuff on the Internet. The standard claim is that social media is the new boy and SEO and search is oh so dead.

Anyone who says social media replaces search is missing the point. People who make such statements can’t really claim to understand the Internet. In Web 1.0 the web is well defined as a huge library of information. Search allowed users to sift through that information and find answers to queries quickly. In Web 2.0, there are far more connecting tools – so it is not just a huge library, but now more like a huge bookstore with a ton of coffee shops where people talk. You still need search to find information quickly, and you need it to find products. Search is not dead, SEO is not dead. You can search and then have conversations about what you’re searching for. Neither is going anywhere soon. I could provide you with a load of data to say how much companies are spending on both natural and paid search, but I’m thinking data is dead right now. @badams has created this site – seoisnotdead.com in case you feel that data isn’t dead.

Email is Dead

In an era of search and social media, it gets all too easy for people to make the statement that email is dead. Even the WSJ is up to mischief. Then emailisnotdead.com tells you a wide range of facts to explain email is not dead. I completely agree. I get the vast majority of my work information through email. I get very useful email communication and white papers via email all the time. Pew Internet Research sees that sending or receiving email is the most common Internet activity. 92% of Internet users send or receive email on a typical day, only 62% of those sampled used social networking tools.

The Walking Dead

The Walking Dead is not dead, but it is a very good TV series

When I worked at SEGA, in my naivety I felt that email was dead. I thought it was a depleting form of communication that would become obsolete due to social networks. I believed my time was better invested growing something on Facebook rather than investing in the significant email database we had. How dumb was my thinking? Very. The newsletter I developed drove 20,000 visits back to our site every month – more than all the social networks put together. Now I can see that email sends around 125,000 visits to FHM.com every month. Growth in that database has stalled, while Facebook is gaining ground, but it is not dead.

Facebook is Dead

Facebook appears to be the media’s favourite whipping boy. While there are plenty of posts out there about its success, Facebook gets a huge amount of negative press about privacy. Facebook is dead posts are nowhere as popular as SEO is dead posts, but there are a few kicking around, and I’m sure there will be a lot more to come. Amazingly, 3.24% of Facebook users are dead, but since there are 30 million + other users from the UK alone who aren’t dead, I think it can be fairly well concluded that Facebook is not dead. It is very much alive and kicking.

The alarm bells are ringing as Facebook had a tough summer, with a decline in users for successive months. But this isn’t really that surprising – Facebook is a mature platform, and now some users who don’t use it that often, or are just a bit bored with it are going. Big deal. Facebook is not Myspace, it is far larger and with a far better business model. Google + might kill it eventually, but when I have 450 friends and 1,200 photos of myself sharing experiences with those friends, I’m going to find it pretty difficult to leave just for nostalgia reasons.

Offline Media is Dead

Newspapers and magazines are not having a great time at the moment. They seem to be wrapped in a long term state of decline, and it’s proving difficult for them to bring in the revenue online. Circulations, audiences and revenues are being squeezed – particularly in the men’s market. But they are still not dead. FHM may have declined 19.2% YoY to August 2011, but its circulation is still 155,000 a month. That isn’t dead – that’s worrying decline, but not dead.

I don’t think offline media is likely to die any time soon. It may appear to be in a problematic free fall right now, but the idea everyone is going to have an iPad and only read digital content by 2020 doesn’t hold up. Civilisation has been using paper for thousands of years; the mass media has existed for one hundred years. The large corporations formed around this won’t collapse in a decade. People still want disposable papers and magazines – one of the reasons I don’t invest in an iPad is because I would have a constant fear of losing it. Circulations and advertising revenues for offline media won’t be as big in 2020 as they are now, but it’s not going to be dead.

Content is Dead

I’ll save the best till last. At Brighton SEO the other day I heard the most ludicrous ‘X is dead’ comment ever. It was ‘I think content is dead, it’s all about data now.’

Now I understand that data presentation is becoming more prevalent online, but that fact that it needs to be presented means it is content. Also, data presentation is nothing new. For some reason marketers seem to be talking like the Internet invented the infographic, when actually infographics have been around for years in offline media. Additionally, the presentation of data can be traced back hundreds of years. I rather like this explanation of the relationship between various states of information:


data cake
Now let’s turn back to ‘content is dead’. Let’s think about some of the media that creates content: TV, magazines, newspapers, billboards, radio, digital. You see 3,000 marketing communications a day and are constantly surrounded by content. Content isn’t dead. It never will be. Wherever art and writing has existed there is content. This is not going anywhere. Content is king in media and it always will be.

Conclusion

Digital marketers are clearly a macabre bunch.’ X is Dead’ appears to be the easiest blog title in the world. But we’re missing the definition of dead:

‘No longer living.’

If something has a pulse, it is living. I know we love to get our content shared far and wide with sensational statements, but it’s really lazy writing. Can’t we say ‘X Needs Redefinition’ or ‘SEO is Changing’ rather than just stating that its dead? Interestingly, if everyone followed my advice, the ‘X is Dead’ post would be dead. I hope it dies a horrible death.

Category: Facebook, Lifestyle Publishing, SEO, Social Media | Tags: , ,
James Carson | September 11, 2011
2 comments

Dr Social Love: My #BrightonSEO Presentation

James Carson Presenting at Brighton SEO

Thanks to @christian_wilde for this Twitpic

On Friday I spoke at Brighton SEO run by Kelvin Newman of Site Visibility. It was my first external presentation, so I couldn’t help but feel pretty nervous; there were about 300 people in the audience who worked in the industry and knew what they were talking about. Anyhow, the delivery went pretty well and once I was up there it was easy really. I’d rehearsed it to death so it was going to be quite hard to cock it up. Here’s the presentation in full – it’s got links to content on this blog give the slides a bit more depth. There will be a video of the presentation shortly, in case you weren’t there / were asleep / were playing on Twitter.

Here’s me in a dark room doing the presentation to a camera:


Dr Social Love: Or How I Learned to Stop… by mrjamescarson

Thoroughly enjoyed speaking at the day and hope to be speaking at more events soon (SMX would be nice!). Here is some of my feedback (seemed I hit the right notes then):

Category: Facebook, Inbound Marketing, Social Media, Social Posting, Strategy, Twitter | Tags: , ,
James Carson | September 11, 2011
One comment

Further Education in Digital Marketing – 8 of the Top Courses

Guest Post from Genial Joe of Think Genial.

Another batch of students are about to enter the world of work (I am assuming they ‘chilled out’ over summer, though I am probably ‘out of touch’), but for those with a thirst for knowledge and a healthy dislike of the 9-5 world there is the Masters!

The most astute amongst this group IMO will be doing digital marketing courses. Here is a selection I found on t’internet. Incidentally I didn’t find any undergrad degrees in digital marketing.

1. London School of Business and Finance – MSc in Digital Marketing

Entry Requirements:

Undergraduate degree or equivalent

3 years of full-time work experience recommended prior to joining the programme

The Course:

Term 1: certificate in Marketing, term 2: diploma in Marketing, term 3. MSc in Marketing

Facts:

  • Degree is validated and awarded by the University of Wales, UK.
  • Campuses available: London – Campus, Manchester – Campus & Online
  • Class diversity breakdown Aug 2011 29 students from 20 countries (All Marketing MSCs)

Fees: Home £8,500, overseas: £11,500

2. Manchester Metropolitan University – MSc Digital Marketing Communications

Entry Requirements: A good British honours degree (or equivalent) in any subject.

The Course:

Covered: Customer Acquisition and Conversion Concepts, Integrated Marketing, Customer Management and Retention Concepts, Social Media, Advanced Search Engine Optimisation, Advanced Email Marketing, Mobile Marketing

Facts:

  • UK’s first Masters in Digital Marketing Communications
  • In conjunction with e-consultancy.com
  • Full time students will have the opportunity to apply for internships and work placements with a number of organisations in the UK.
  • Full Econsultancy membership for the duration of your studies – £295 per year

Fees: Part time: £9,450 + VAT, Full Time: £8,950 + VAT

3. University of Southampton – MSc in Digital Marketing

Entry Requirements: First- or upper second-class honours degree from a UK university, or equivalent

The Course:

Core modules: Consumer insight; Data-driven marketing; Information systems strategy; Innovation and creativity; Digital marketing communications; Introduction to marketing; Key personal skills; Strategic marketing decisions; Strategic marketing intelligence; Web analytics; Web applications

Facts: Accreditation by Institute of Direct and Digital Marketing

Start date: End of September

Fees: £6,550, more for intl students

4. London Metropolitan University – Digital & Experiential Marketing (MA)

Entry Requirements:

A good honours degree, minimum 2:2, in marketing, communications, a business discipline, computing, or other degree with relevant business experience

Applicants who do not hold an undergraduate degree will require a minimum of three years of marketing experience within industry.

The Course:

Core modules: Digital Marketing Fundamentals, Experiential Marketing, Data Mining Business Applications, Brand Equity, E-solutions and Digital Media Applications, Marketing Research

Facts:

The course explores the nature of Digital Marketing and Experiential Marketing as distinct specialisations; while recognising that the two specialisations are inextricably linked.

no official closing date for this course

Programme ran for the first time from September 2010.

Fees: UK and EU students: £7,110, International students: £11,340

5. London South Bank University – MSc in Digital Marketing

Here’s a prospectus look at the course

Entry requirements: Must hold the Institute of Direct and Digital Marketing (IDM) QCA Level 7 Diploma in Digital Marketing.

Core modules: Research Methods, Marketing in the Digital Environment

Options: Digital and Social Media, Public Relations, Emerging Issues, Global Operations & Logistics, Market Driven Marketing, Social Marketing Strategy or International Marketing

Facts:

  • Accredited by: Institute of Direct and Digital Marketing
  • Course run by the department of Management, Human Resources and Marketing

Fees:

home/ EU £3531

Overseas: £4925

Other ‘Short Courses’

University of Salford – Search & Social Media Marketing

Foundation course – 4 days next – Starts 22nd Sept

Professional 6 days next – Starts 20th Oct

Fees: Foundation – £1000, Professional – £1500, Both – £2000

City University of London – Digital Marketing, An Introduction

10 weekly classes, next starts Monday 3rd Oct,

Fees: £330

Chartered Institute of Marketing – Digital Marketing

3 day course, monthly,

Fees: £1,597 – £1,975

I hope you enjoyed this short roundup. If you have done any of these courses please let me know what they were like in the comments below.

If not then what are you doing to educate yourself in digital marketing?

Category: Courses, Inbound Marketing, Permission Marketing, Social Media | Tags: ,
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