Cones as you may have realised aren’t interesting, they’re not funny, sexy, or appealing in any way, how then do you market one to the general public?

As a manufacturer of traffic management products we’re not exactly on trend, or in high demand. Basically cones are boring, and as a business to business company we didn’t think social media would benefit us in any way. After starting the Search and Social Media Marketing course though I thought why not try setting up a twitter and see where it gets us.

Before I set up the account I looked into other social media campaigns for boring products. The most successful one I could think of was Will It Blend?If you haven’t seen the videos, they’re advertising blenders but instead of just blending food or showing you a picture of a blender, they blend tablets, phones, toys, marbles, and a big mac, almost anything you can think of to show the power of the blender.  The campaign really took off and the guy behind it all became somewhat of a minor celebrity in America. There’s also the Got Milk? campaign, Milk has got to be the most boring product imaginable but the campaign was so successful that it has been running for over 20 years, there’s been celebrity endorsements and even merchandise, who knew an advert for milk could be so successful!

Another really good social media campaign is that of Vitamin Water, they asked people to tweet them with what’s currently boring them, then Vitamin Water would come back with a response to make it brilliant. They even went to a town In Oregon called Boring and put on loads of events and gigs, the whole thing went viral and there followers on twitter went up 100%.

There was more of online presence in our field that originally thought, so we set up our twitter account, @MelbaSwintex, designed the page around our theme from the website, followed the relevant people and waited for a miracle, but as we quickly realised, planning needed to go into running a social media platform.

We currently have three people with access to our twitter, a designer, a sales rep and me, so a wide variety of people, luckily we all have our own personal twitter accounts, so we knew the basics, we just didn’t know what to tweet about! Firstly we laid down the rules of what can and can’t be tweeted, we decided to discuss tweets before we posted them so we didn’t get any repeat tweets and so that non of the tweets were offensive, spelt wrong, or incorrect.  For us humour seemed to be the best way to go with, nobody wants to follow someone on twitter who blurts out facts about the first road cone or how to properly lay your road cone on the road. After only a couple of tweets we had a council ring us up and want to start a 2 year contract with us, just because I’d followed them on twitter, which is very encouraging.

Currently we’re tweeting about new products that we have coming soon, innovative design ideas that we are pursuing, particular tools that people can use on our website, and re-tweeting local news. We’ve currently got 31 followers, which doesn’t seem like many but to be fair it is a twitter account about cones.  According to our Google analytic’s profile, the twitter account is already generating more views to our website. Hopefully this will generate more interest in us as a company!

Thanks for reading and if you need any cones Melba Swintex is the place you need to call!

Melba Swintex

SEO & Social Media Marketing Essentials

Wednesday 24th July – Book Now

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Social Media Optimisation (SMO) are no longer an optional choice for many organisations competing for the increasingly internet savvy consumers. Do you have a digital strategy and a social media policy? Do you know that if you don’t manage your social media presence chances are your customers will manage it for you and not always in a most favourable way.

As part of the University of Salford’s commitment to delivering the best digital training available, Salford Professional Development have developed a one day ‘SEO & Social Media Marketing Essentials‘ course. This course is aimed at busy executives who want to have theoretic understanding as well as some basic hands on practical exercises which will highlight the essentials in SEO and Social Media Marketing. This knowledge will enable you to develop a better understanding of your customers behaviour online and help you to develop long term plan and implement basic techniques for management of day to day social media engagement. Working from your business objectives you will be able to draft some key performance indicators for your online presence, identify key social networks for your organisational use as well as conduct some basic Social Media Optimisation. The main focus on this course is to offer you a broad overview of search and social media marketing and help you to start working on your long term digital marketing strategy as well as plan for use of techniques.

Tutor:

Aleksej Heinze – http://businessculture.org

The course will be taught by Dr Aleksej Heinze, Aleksej is a co-director for the Centre for Digital Business which is part of The University of Salford’s Business School. He currently works on an international projects Passport to Trade 2.0 which helps businesses to understand International Business Culture and develop new business opportunities in Europe using social media networks.

Guest Speaker:

The course will also feature Martin Cozens who is the Managing Director for Banc Media. Based in Old Trafford, Manchester, Banc Media are a Search Engine Marketing company providing Pay Per Click & Search Engine Optimisation. They specialise in a measured & transparent approach, focussing on ROI for our clients through researched search engine marketing.

Martin Cozens: “We develop close relationships with our clients, proving to become an integral part of their business, smashing targets set by them and showing real return on investment in the products we supply and the search results they gain. Developing these relationships is what makes our business stronger and helps our team grow further to providing the very best service.”

Their clients include:

• Lufthansa’s business rewards air miles scheme SACP
• Cruise1st – a leading cruise holiday provider operating in the UK, Ireland & Australia
• FADS.co.uk – the nationally known online furniture retailer that was on the high street in over 800 stores
• Breens Solicitors – a renowned law firm operating out of Merseyside for both private and business clients.

Venue

SEO & Social Media Marketing Essentials is based and delivered at the state of the art teaching and training facilities in the heart of the UK’s Media hub at MediaCityUK, University of Salford. This cutting edge facility is on close proximity of the BBC, ITV and many other top digital and media agencies.

Price

This course costs £299 + VAT.

Want to know more?

If you wish to enquire about this course, simply get in touch with Robert Goodison at Salford Professional Development on 0161 295 5407 or email R.Goodison@salford.ac.uk.

In collaboration with Fast Web Media Limited (FWM), Salford Business School has been awarded a Knowledge Transfer Partnership. The project’s aim is to develop and implement a Dynamic Campaign Management Tool (DCMT) for integrated media and digital marketing campaign management.

Primarily based at the company premises in Media City Salford, the successful applicant will manage the project supported by the experienced staff from both Fast Web Media Ltd and the University of Salford.

FWM is an award-winning digital marketing agency turning over £2 million per annum. They are involved in the design and development of digital marketing services, specialising in search marketing, search engine optimisation, technical development, social media and mobile.

The UK’s digital advertising market is currently worth over £4bn (25% of the total UK advertising spend) FWM has identified a need for a Dynamic Campaign Management Tool (DCMT) that would allow precise monitoring, tracking and management of campaigns across the full spectrum of digital media properties.

Purpose and key responsibilities of job

The industry faces a number of specific problems – a consequence of its relative immaturity. For example, the ability to quantify the effectiveness of different types of digital advertising.

The KTP will develop an integrated online system with a holistic Dashboard interface enabling a summative view of an entire campaign across multiple channels and the capability to adjust campaigns in real time to respond to live events thus influencing buyer behaviour. E.g. a campaign which uses Google TV channel initiates a lot of twitter activity about a product, the tool will allow a company to monitor and engage in this interaction; thus adverts can be strategically positioned on the particular social media channel such as Twitter (minimising pay-per-click time) for a critical period to capitalise on public interest.

The DCMT will offer specific benefits to campaign management and decision-making. Sophisticated tracking and access to live trends will enable more precise calculation of Return on Investment (ROI). FWM will lead and contribute to the reputation of the digital marketing industry by developing a transparent solution which will offer unparalleled access to information and offer opportunities to interact with campaigns; be able to predict the performance of campaigns.

The project will develop and implement a Dynamic Campaign Management Tool (DCMT) for integrated media and digital marketing campaign management through:

Objective 1 – Development of a Dynamic Campaign Management Tool (DCMT) conceptual model
Objective 2 – Develop and implement a workable beta prototype version
Objective 3 – Develop and implement full release DCMT
Objective 4 – Digital industry commercialisation
Objective 5 – Review and Evaluation

Qualifications, skills and competencies required

The following criteria is essential when applying for this post:
– A good undergraduate degree (minimum 2:1) in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology or similar quantitative and analytical discipline
– Experience in Digital tracking and reporting tools such as Google analytics, Social Media etc
– Business knowledge in digital marketing campaign management or accounting or financial modelling
– Excellent IT/IS Skills and competence in continuously updating skills in the dynamic environment of technological change
– An effective communicator both orally and in writing with excellent interpersonal and analytical skills
– Empathetic approach – enjoy meeting people and able to motivate and inspire a range of people from different background
– Ability to undertake multiple tasks, work under own initiative and/or as part of a team, and lead a team.
– The ability to be assertive and to drive the project forward and lead staff at all levels through a programme of change
– Professional attitude

The following criteria although desirable are not essential when applying for this post;
– Experience of a contemporary programming language (preferably object orientated)
– Experience of interactive website development, especially in a small size enterprise
– Some commercial experience
– Experience of third party APIs and data sources
– IT project management
– Web analytics

• Contract type: Fixed Term
• Duration of contract (state number of weeks or months): 24 months
• Hours: Full time
• Closing date: 3 Feb 2012
• Salary: £20,755 – £22,253
• Location: MediaCity Salford

For further information and online application form please visit University of Salford Human Resource pages

After completing the Search and Social Media Marketing course late last year I got involved in the Analysis Exchange – a free initiative to connect non-profit projects with SEO analyst experts and students.

Via the project I work on – Plings (about Places to Go and Things to Do for kids) – I was lucky enough to work with Tom Betts, Head of web analytics at FT.com.

Along with Stewart, our Analysis Exchange student, we really benefited from some great insight and compelling actions to implement. So, with this in mind, I asked Tom a few questions for the Search and Social Media Marketing course blog:

As head of the web analytics team at the Financial Times, what is your main role and task?

“I am responsible for the use of data to make decisions at FT.com. Unlike many businesses, online is our entire business at FT.com, meaning that we provide services to a wide internal client-base. My team and I get stuck in to analytics projects for:

• Editorial (identifying which content is popular with what audience and why)
• Marketing (figuring out how to sell online subscriptions to access our content, attract new audiences, how do we effectively spend marketing budgets etc)
• IT (determining site problems, capacity planning and the like)
• Advertising (to understand who our readers are, what interests them and how we can paint a better picture of our audience back to advertisers)
• Finance (to analyse the profitability of our products and services)

…and the list goes on.

It is an extremely diverse role which spans everything from just telling people what is happening on site, what is performing well / not so well, to developing analytical models to predict future behaviour (what topics of content interest people who go on to subscribe?) and measuring the ROI of search engine marketing spend. Our executive team are heavily reliant on our insights to make product changes.”

Why did you get involved in the Analysis Exchange?

“I already manage an analytics team but wanted to see how I could help a wider selection of students to move their analytics skills up a level. As an industry, web analytics is a little bit chicken-and-egg. There seem to be endless roles for analysts, but only for people with relevant experience. It’s tough to gain that experience and Analysis Exchange is the best way I know of to obtain experience with real data on real-life projects.

Additionally, I spend most of my day thinking of the best way to use analytics for profit and felt I wanted to help some non-profit making organisations.”

What helped you make a success of your first Analytics Exchange project?

“Being on top of student and organiser to ensure that we were sticking to time and scope. I tried to tie the scope down as much as possible from the outset since the single largest reason I see projects delivering late is due to scope creep.”

Crystal ball time – but what is your analytics thing-to-watch for 2011?!

“I have two for this:

1. Predictive web analytics – the area of ‘predictive analytics’ is already mature in many fields, but not yet in web analytics. Using web data to predict what a user might be interested in or what they might buy next is still quite pioneering in our industry. But not for much longer.
2. Multichannel analytics – we’re seeing a huge and rapid shift in consumption from desktop PCs to access content to a wide variety of mobile devices. The development of apps, where the user experience is far more native to the device, poses big challenges but exciting opportunities for web analytics. All of a sudden, you are measuring much more than just the web.”

Finally, what tips would you give those studying on the #SSMM course?

“Find some real data and get stuck in! The Analysis Exchange is a great place to start and some experience there would land you in good stead for any digital marketing, SEO or analytics role.

Read around, and definitely check out the work of Avinash Kaushik. Simply by reading and understanding his ‘An hour a day‘ book, you’ll be well ahead of many practitioners in our field!”

Tom will also be speaking at the forthcoming SAScon 2011 conference in Manchester.