Where do you turn when your business slows down or reaches a point where it stops growing? Well that is the question I asked myself, working on an organic vineyard in the beautiful south west of France and a in a wine shop in Hale, a few months ago. Well grab a glass of wine, sit back and look no further guys, organic marketing and social media are the answer.

Nowadays, most social businesses don’t use their capacity to their advantage. It’s easy to employ a marketing company, spend a lot of money, and not see any results. A friend of mine has a successful optical instruments online business and decided to outsource his Google ads campaign to a marketing company. After 6 months of paying high management fees he decided to end it and he saw no difference in his sales or website visits. This is why I went out there and studied SEO at the University of Salford as you are never better served then by yourself. read more

Have you ever wondered why certain online digital marketing campaigns go viral? As part of our MSc Marketing course at Salford Business School we created a video and tested how Jonathan Berger’s STEPS concept works in real life projects.

We were introduced to Jonathan Berger’s idea of STEPS during our Search and Social Media Marketing module guest speaker’s Denise Brooks presentation.  Berger suggested that going viral is not just luck, its science based on psychology of talk.

Jonathan Berger’s STEPS concept

The key 6 STEPS in creating a viral video using Jonathan Berger’s idea of STEPS are: read more

(credit to opensourceway)

“Content is King.” Since Bill Gates coined this term in 1996, it has become the golden rule of SEO (as well as one of its most pervasive clichés). Matt Cutts of Google has repeatedly said that quality content is key to getting to the top of the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS).  And the bods at Bing have also said that “all SEO signals revolve around content.” But what do we mean when we talk about ‘content’? How do search engines differentiate between good content and bad content? And, in the land of the SERPS, is content always king?
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So, you’ve decided to embrace the world of social media…

Perhaps you’re an organisation who has heard all the buzz about Facebook and its ilk, and feel that you’re missing a trick not being on there too. Maybe you’re a freelancer who feels that getting social would lead to a fatter contacts book and more juicy commissions. Or perhaps (like my Dad), you’re a fifty-something with too much time on their hands who likes the idea of Twitter because it allows them to keep tabs on their children (sorry Dad). But now, after registering on all of these sites – choosing a pithy user name and a swanky avatar – you’re not sure what to do next. read more

Applications on mobile devices – are they turning us into anti-social individuals? How many applications are there now? There is no point in counting, as more will be created before the day is out. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, FourSquare are many of the current forms of social networking mobile applications turning us into a group of anti-social individuals, lacking the proper social skills; similar to “hoodies” for the 21st Century. Head down, feverishly tapping away on your device, not paying careful attention to what you are doing, or what is around you, for the need to be kept up-to-date with the latest information. Companies, in particular, now see the benefit of being able to do business within the mobile marketplace in a blog written by Raam Thakrar, the CEO of Touchnote He raised a number of key areas of benefit for the SME marketplace in "Taking advantage of mobile phone technology" with one being M-Commerce. He believes it will only be a matter of time for customers to make safe transactions on their mobile phone as the mobile phone is the only form of technology they have close to them at all times. However the issue of security is raised as mobile phones does not offer the same level of protection as a computer when buying online is concerned, plus it needs individuals to be confident of making these purchases in this manner, despite high levels of physical theft or misuse. read more

`Brands must be useful and confer status on the user.'