Interesting news from the ACCC who say that Consumers consider blogs as reliable and as influential as mainstream media.
Sounds like call to action for online reputation monitoring :P Its also interesting to consider how the ACCC see's its role in new media. Will they try to control and censor australian bloggers and online review sites.
"CONSUMERS who get their news from the internet are likely to trust a blog for reliability as much as a mainstream media site, the competition watchdog said today.
"For a growing base of users, these are all equally valid sources of news, information, entertainment and gossip, and users are not necessarily discriminating between traditional and new sources.""
This is very cool but also scary, what has made the internet great is its total freedom. Will that be eroded by Australian governments and what can we do to ensure that bloggers cannot be held legally liable if they critisise an Australian Company online.
Source: Courier Mail
Labels: Blog, blogs, consumer, conversations, internet, Marketing, online, pr, PR 2.0, reputation, reputation management, reputation monitoring, sem, seo, social media
Posted by Nick HaC @ 6:29 AM
Share on Facebook
Email this
Add to del.icio.us
Digg thisAt Shifted Pixels, we deliver services that leverage the measurable business benefits of the online engagement.
Give us a buzz! We want to talk to you!!!
The Web is a Big Place. People are talking about you online and they arn't censored in what they say. They can slander you in a second, and it you dont catch it in time: your bad press will end up in traditional media.
So how do you manage and monitor your online reputation?
First of all. Who is interested in Online Reputation Management.
- PR Agencies
- Marketing Departments
- Brand Managers
- CEO's and Strategists
If you are interested in Sydney Online Reputation Management then feel free to contact us for a chat. We wont bite, promise :P
Labels: online blog monitoring, Online Reputation Management, online reputation monitoring, reputation, reputation management, sydney media monitoring
Posted by Nick HaC @ 6:22 AM
At Shifted Pixels, we deliver services that leverage the measurable business benefits of the online engagement.
Give us a buzz! We want to talk to you!!!
Your Search Engine Rankings don't just depend on how good your site is.
They depend on the quality of your competitors' sites as well.
As a result, keeping an eye on your competition should be a regular part of every Marketers tactical plan.
Use these 25 tools to get the lowdown on your competitors sites.
Or hold on tight and keep an Eye out for the Shifted Pixels SEO Reporting Suite, KeyRankReports, Coming soon...
Labels: reputation, reputation management, search, seo
Posted by Nick HaC @ 1:01 AM
At Shifted Pixels, we deliver services that leverage the measurable business benefits of the online engagement.
Give us a buzz! We want to talk to you!!!
Seriously, why is spam illegal and so bad that you can go to jail for it?
Direct Mail is the real crime!
We checked out mail today and it would have had a kilo of junk mail in there.
Here's why DM sucks soo badly
1. Direct mail wastes precious natural resources (paper, manufacturing, energy), on the otherhand, Spam is just a bunch of zeros and ones in a server somewhere.
2. Junk mail creates soooo much paper/trash waste for councils/landfill/garbagetrucks, spam makes none of this.
3. Collecting mail can now be very frustrating and we have to sort it out which takes time and thought. You can also miss REAL legitimate mail, or dont get a letter in time cause it is burried in junk. Just like spam, but without the spamfilters! (Lightbulb... new business idea.)
We're not hippies or anti marketing or anything, just damn frustrated and even angry at the crap these brands expect us to put up with.
I wouldn't tolerate direct email if it was email spam, would you?
Labels: advertising, branding, consumer, Email, Ideas, reputation
Posted by Nick HaC @ 7:10 AM
At Shifted Pixels, we deliver services that leverage the measurable business benefits of the online engagement.
Give us a buzz! We want to talk to you!!!
We have seen an explosion of consumer choice, a new level of scarcity of consumer attention, the growth of abundance of options and masses and masses of online consumer review and comparison sites.
Under 30's have grown up with advertising, and are fully aware of the processes that corporate marketers use to sell them products.
Are there are more products than consumers need? Just go to the supermarket, you have 20 types of peanut butter, 200 types of cheese and 80 types of toothbrushes.
Want to but a tshirt online? Which one of the 10 million sites do you choose?
We could speculate that consumers and businesses make more choices based on social recommendation than advertisements.
We could also speculate that are seeing the end of the media-industrial era, and the rebirth of the pre-industrial era consumer run Market Place (this time with global, realtime efficiencies).
This new era is the market place of the people for the people. Of course there will still be a strong need for insustrial processes, but these will become commoditised as platforms, just like electricity and the railroads have become.
If you are selling a product, a service or an idea... spreading your brand will soon strongly rely on person to person social reccomendation.
But with so many products and features on offer, how do you get noticed? Instead of selling based on pure functionality, as a coat functionally keeps you warm, the new market is about style! So what defines style or fashion, social influence and reccomendation?
The drivers of social reccomendation are the early adopters, the merchants of cool. Those who take early risks and by breaking the norm send waves through the social landscape. Sometimes they succeed, and sometime they miss the mark. Aside from the risks of this space, this is the source of new social influence and trends. And this space must be recognised.
Dont think this only applies to consumer goods, business to business services and products follow the same rules. Business communities and social networks are potentially even closer, tighter and more intimate than those of the consumer social community. Is it possible that the tightness of the business community creates an even stronger desire to use the hip process or service or business practice?
The rules of consumer influenced have changed. Has your businsess shifted?
Labels: advertising, behaviour, branding, communities, consumer, design, internet, Marketing, online, pr, reputation, social networking, technology, viral, web 2.0
Posted by Nick HaC @ 5:46 AM
At Shifted Pixels, we deliver services that leverage the measurable business benefits of the online engagement.
Give us a buzz! We want to talk to you!!!
A client of ours recently asked for a brief explanation as to how Search Engine Optimisation works, we couldn't resist but share this on the blog. Leave a comment and let us know what you think?
SEO is a combination of keyword research, onsite optimisation and offsite link building.
Keyword Research
Keyword research involves finding the right keywords to optimize for, in the context of SEO Budget and Keyword competition. For example "Resume Template" receives 10 times the search volume of "CV Template', thereby making it a more attractive keyword to rank for.
Onsite Optimisation
Onsite optimization requires tweaking the placement and density of specific keywords on your website, as well as ensuring page names, file names, internal links and alt tags are targeted to your chosen keywords.
Basically if you want to rank well for a keyword, eg "ipod fitness" you need to ensure that this phrase is in the page title for your website, and appears in with an appropriate "Keyword Density" throughout your website copy.
Link Building (Offsite Optimisation)
This process involves researching and building links from contextually relevant external websites that have as high a Google Page Rank as possible. It is often necessary to buy high quality inbound links to achieve rankings for competitive keywords.
Posted by Nick HaC @ 2:26 AM
At Shifted Pixels, we deliver services that leverage the measurable business benefits of the online engagement.
Give us a buzz! We want to talk to you!!!
In the golden age of branding, several guests at the party held sway: brand, PR, marketing, external relations (ER), research, and the agencies. On top of that, we had a few occasional attendees, such as consumer affairs, investor relations, and community relations.
Today, in the golden age of consumer empowerment, we have the same party guests, but their sway is being challenged in a very big way by an aggressive, sometimes rude and abrupt new guest at the party: the consumer influencer.
I'm talking about the loudmouths everyone hears and reacts to. These folks really move the needle when it comes consumer generated media creation and spread. They write the power blogs, lead the communities, organize the forums, create the boards, upload the most viewed videos on YouTube, lead mini-revolutions on Facebook, and more.
They may have accrued influence over time or have situational influence (e.g., they were first to try and review the iPhone, hence setting off a broader chain reaction). That influence often spills from the online zone into the offline or vice versa. Indeed, today's uber-influencers are largely platform agnostic, except they tend to have a more quantifiable digital trail of results online. Put another way, if you search their names, you'll find evidence of something they said.
Who manages and converses with these influencers?
Is there a defined person, department, group, or entity within your organisation charged with influencer management? Should there be? Equally important, what are the risks of too many folks going after the same constituency?
Our advice is to engage a partner like shifted pixels to monitor, engage with and report on thesee internet conversations. Engaging a blogger or high profile forum members requires a very different set of techniques than traditional PR. Keen to know more, call us for a quick chat.
-------------------
Update: 11 July 2007
Ok so we must confess we have been caught out for copy pasting (see comments) from one of our favourite websites for the majority of this blog post. They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and whilst that is true, if your gunna copy other people stuff, you really should to give credit to your source.
We were in the wrong, and we definitely were not practicing what we preach. Sorry readers...
Thanks Richard (http://richardstacy.wordpress.com), sorry bud, sometimes we just get so excited with the ideas out there we cant help but publish them, and its very easy to want to own that idea for yourself.
Labels: communities, consumer, Marketing, pr, reputation
Posted by Nick HaC @ 12:34 AM
At Shifted Pixels, we deliver services that leverage the measurable business benefits of the online engagement.
Give us a buzz! We want to talk to you!!!
Every single day, someone, somewhere is discussing something important to your business; your brand, your executives, your competitors, your industry.
Are they hyping-up your company, building buzz for your products? Or, are they criticizing your service, complaining to others about your new product launch?
A great brand can take months, if not years, and millions of dollars to build. It should be the thing you hold most precious. It can be destroyed in hours by a blogger upset with your company.
A new product launch could take hundreds of TV commercials, dozens of newspaper ads, and an expensive ad agency.
It can also spread like a virus with the praise of just one customer, at one message board.
A company can dominate market share, throttle competition and hold the #1 brand in the world.
It can also crash in months if it fails to listen to what its customers want.
By now, you should have an understanding of just how powerful consumer generated media (CGM) is. Your next action could be the difference between your company’s success or failure. Do you click the back button and ignore the conversation, or; do you engage a partner who can help you manage and interact with this new online community?
Shifted Pixels is managing online reputation for some of australia's largest companies, call us for a quick chat to let us know about your online reputation.
Labels: branding, communities, internet, Marketing, online, pr, reputation, social networking
Posted by Nick HaC @ 6:36 AM
At Shifted Pixels, we deliver services that leverage the measurable business benefits of the online engagement.
Give us a buzz! We want to talk to you!!!
Our friend Trevor Cook, a well known blogger and PR guru, has released a fantastic online guide to Social Media.
What is Social Media?
The online communities, technologies and practices that people use to share news, opinions, insights, experiences, and perspectives.
The paper includes lots of new stuff on emerging communities such as second life, wiki's, twitter, myspace, facebook aswell as "traditional" social media - blogs, rss, podcasts and more.
Check it out - Guide to Social Media
Labels: Blog, communities, consumer, mark, Marketing, online, pr, reputation, social networking, web 2.0
Posted by Nick HaC @ 6:46 PM
At Shifted Pixels, we deliver services that leverage the measurable business benefits of the online engagement.
Give us a buzz! We want to talk to you!!!
Basically, reputation management (online) is the business of monitoring what the marketplace is saying about your brand. It also means responding to situations before they run out of control. Venues include blogs, discussion threads, forums and social networking sites. A simplistic forumla is to allocate a proportion of resources to reputation management in relation to how important your brand is to your overall business.
Monitoring how consumers talk about your brand can provide early warning signs for product or service issues as well as promotion opportunities that can be leveraged. Companies can start by subscribing to RSS feeds of search results on their company name from blog and news search engines, set up a Google Alerts account or use Conversation Trackers.Shifted Pixels offers Online Reputation Management, Contact us for more information
Labels: branding, Marketing, online, pr, reputation
Posted by Nick HaC @ 2:37 AM
At Shifted Pixels, we deliver services that leverage the measurable business benefits of the online engagement.
Give us a buzz! We want to talk to you!!!
