Show me the money – NMA Salary Survey June 2011

Posted in Jobs, Press on June 28th, 2011 by Angelina

This month, the very first issue of New Media Age’s (NMA) supplement, Digital Professional was released. While NMA focuses on the effective use of digital media, Digital Professional focuses on the job itself and kicked off its first issue with the NMA Salary Survey.

Matthew Oxley, our Head of Search, spoke to Digital Professional about the strong demand for digital specialists within service providers and how employers have to compete for the very best employees.

Matthew states that “People with more than five years experience are still rare and I don’t expect that to change for some time”. As much as this poses challenges for recruiters, digital specialists have an opportunity to negotiate a wage increase due to supply and demand factors.

According to the NMA Salary Survey, salary levels at service providers are relatively low considering the specialist knowledge required. The graduate/trainee level ranges between £16-20,000, managers are earning between £35-40,000 and director level respondents spanned between £60-70,000.

However, the survey also revealed that more than 60% of people working in this sector don’t expect to change their jobs in the next year, which shows that salary isn’t everything. One suggestion as to why individuals stay in digital marketing jobs longer is because they are given jobs that they actually enjoy. It is also suggested that they have more responsibility, which leads to them learning new things and being able to develop themselves. These factors are all crucial in this industry, where the pace of change is rapid.

You can read the rest of Matthew’s thoughts and the full report in the latest Digital Professional magazine.

Content Farmers beware, Google releases Panda 2.2

Posted in Google on June 27th, 2011 by Matthew Read

2 months ago hundreds of websites instantly lost first page rankings and visibility in Google when the new Panda update classed their sites as being full of low quality content. Overnight, sites such as suite101.com, hubpages.com and articlesbase.com saw a huge percentage of their articles drop from 1st page rankings down to the farther reaches of the search results where users seldom venture.

This update had an instant and devastating impact on many content based sites, which lost rankings, traffic and in some cases a huge amount of revenue from the Google ads on their sites. By removing what it deemed to be ‘farmer content’ Google claimed that the new update would help search results be more accurate.

However, although the original Panda update did remove a lot of bulk, low quality content from Google it was criticised for also demoting a lot of original, interesting and useful content from search results, which was supposed to be promoted by the Panda update.

Panda 2.2
After receiving this criticism, Google’s Matt Cutts commented on the update at the recent Search Marketing Expo in Seattle, and said “don’t consider it finished”, proclaiming that the Panda update would be refined throughout the rest of the year in order to make sure it was more effective in singling out poor content.

Well, without warning and to the surprise of many, Google have this week confirmed the release of Panda 2.2, which will continue to penalise content farms but will do this in a more refined way.

Who will win and lose this time?
According to Google, the new version of Panda will still hit content farms but will also put more focus onto sites scraping content. What this means is that blogs and article sites that simply copy content from around the web will start to be completely dropped from Google’s search results by the new update.

Panda 2.2 will also apparently favour sites that have used strong SEO techniques. Basically sites that have large levels of content on say a blog or news page will not be hit, as many were with the first update, if the content is original, fresh, well optimised and not spammy.

So once again there will be hundreds of websites owners holding their breath as they check their rankings this week but at least this time around it should only be those filling search results with useless content that lose out.

+1 Arrives on Websites but can it compete with Facebook & Twitter?

Posted in Google, Social Media on June 10th, 2011 by Matthew Read

Less than 2 months after the Google +1 feature made its first appearance in the US search results, Google has released +1 buttons that can be placed directly on web pages. Using a small snippet of code, the button can be placed on a web page in a similar fashion to the Tweet and Facebook Like buttons.

The idea behind adding the +1 feature to the Google search results is to make each person’s results more personalised and also more social, promoting sites in their results that they and they contacts have liked with the +1 button.

With the new +1 button directly on sites this idea continues, with people being able to +1 individual pages and pieces of content on a site, as well as the actual site itself within the Google search results. But will people use it?

Competition with Facebook and Twitter
When it comes to the Google search engine, the +1 button can completely dominate as neither Facebook nor Twitter can add their buttons to the search results, and therefore the only option to like or promote a site will be through +1. However, when it comes to actual web pages, the Google +1 button may struggle to compete with the Facebook Like and Tweet buttons.

The idea behind the Facebook and Twitter buttons is to allow users to share the piece of content amongst their friends, through their own personal profiles. So, for example, the web browser sees a great blog post about a new Google feature, Tweets it, which puts a link to the post into their Twitter stream, and then the users followers can go straight to the recommended piece of content.

It is the same concept with the Facebook Like button but with +1 the idea seems to fall away slightly. Yes if you hit the +1 button people within your Google address book will be able to see it but you are not really promoting it on a profile or sharing it in an open format.

Sharing Content or Promoting the Site?
With +1 you are essentially saying you approve of the site and are promoting it in your personal search results, whereas with Tweet and Like you are sharing it. +1 then doesn’t seem to really fall in line with the Twitter and Facebook buttons and so may receive less attention because of this.

In fact, it is only early days, but if you look at sites that have already integrated this new +1 button, alongside Tweet and Like, you can see that it is not generating nearly as many clicks.

Of course as people become more aware of +1 and it becomes common on sites it will be used more, but will people develop a greater affinity to +1 than Facebook and Twitter? Google are dominant in practically every area of online but, for now at least, they are 3rd place in the rankings for social.

A picture is worth 1000 words

Posted in Social Media, Twitter on June 7th, 2011 by Angelina

In one of our previous blog posts, we explained the importance of Twitter and how it is growing. At the beginning of this month, Twitter announced its plans to roll out a feature that allows tweeters to upload photos alongside their tweets, directly from Twitter.com (hosted by Photobucket).

Having a photo sharing feature on Twitter may encourage businesses to connect with their customers more, as they will be able to upload their photos easier, whether they are tweeting pictures of what events are happening, what people in their organisation are doing or what’s new at the company, without actually having to leave Twitter to use a 3rd party application to do so.

Third party photo sharing applications

Many people have already been sharing photos on Twitter via 3rd party applications such as Twitpic, Flickr and Yfrog. These applications have already allowed businesses to get some statistics to track the response and who has looked at their photos. Not only will Twitter also have the same features, but they will also appear in the results page when consumers click on a trending topic or when they search for something related.

With Twitter having their own photo sharing service, 3rd party applications are worried that they will be pushed out. However, a spokesperson from Twitter explained that “Twitter are still supporting other third-party photo services in our desktop and mobile, therefore users can choose the application that works best for them”.

Who actually uploads photos and what application do people use to do so?

Sysomos, a social media monitoring company recently launched a report to show which services tweeters are using to share photos and how often they included photos in their tweets. The tweets were analysed on 30th May 2011. Sysomos found that Flickr only had a contribution of 2.1% of the photos shared on Twitter for that day, whereas Twitpic was the most popular application (45.7%), followed by Yfrog with 29.3%, Lockerz with 17.4% and Instagram with 5.2%.

Of the all the tweets from 30th May 2011, only 1.5% contained a link to a picture from a photo sharing application and 14.9% of them contained a link.

Why share photos on Twitter?

Sharing photos is a great way to engage with people and potential customers on Twitter. People are generally interested to know what’s going on around the world and being able to see what other people see. If they like it, they’ll usually re-tweet it and share the photo with their followers.

It’s a great marketing tool for different types of businesses. For example, restaurants and foodies can upload pictures of their latest creations, making consumers want to buy and taste the food. Fashion magazines could upload a picture of their staff’s ‘outfit of the day’ which might start up a discussion, or cosmetic brands could upload pictures of their makeovers or their latest product, encouraging people to go out, buy and try their products.

As previously mentioned, even though Sysomos found that only 1.25% of tweets contained a link to a photo in their research, with Twitter having their own photo sharing application, it will build more of an opportunity to make photo sharing a more common activity.

Kevin Taylor discusses natural search with Insurance Age

Posted in Press, SEO on June 6th, 2011 by Angelina

This week, Gravytrain’s CEO, Kevin Taylor, talked to Insurance Age about natural search. In the article, Kevin explains that consumers rarely show brand loyalty to brokers or insurers and that they are mainly price focused when searching for their insurance, often through aggregator websites.

As Kevin points out, the competition is fierce between insurers and brokers. He outlined the importance of SMEs making natural search a priority as part of their online marketing, as even though paid-for search is relatively well understood, natural results appear in search engine listings because of their relevance to the consumers search term.

He states that “Because websites are ranked on quality and relevance instead of how much they are willing to spend, it provides the ideal solution to competing with the big boys”.

You can read the full article and the rest of Kevin’s thoughts on natural search in Insurance Age’s June issue.

Third party photo sharing applications

Who actually uploads photos and what application do people use to do so?

Why share photos on Twitter?

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