The battle for better targeted, more relevant, search results is truly on. While the Facebook Like button originated as a way to share content with your fiends, it is now embedding itself in Bings search algorithms.

Social signals are now being used to help rank regular search results, according to Danny Sullivan’s Search Engine Land. In particular, your stature on Twitter could help influence how a page ranks in web search.

What is Social Serach

Social Search, according to Google, helps you discover relevant content from your social connections, a set of your online friends and contacts. Content from your friends and acquaintances is sometimes more relevant and meaningful to you than content from any random person.

Google and the +1 button is Google’s latest attempt to grab a piece of the social pie. The +1 button is basically Google’s response to the Facebook Like button. A way for people to decide what is relevant online, in this case on Search.

Why is the Google +1 Button Important for Websites

It is very early days and while no-one can know at this time how successful +1 may be for Google, one thing that is certain is that Google is very very determined to make it work. In face, the entire staff of Google’s bonus are being linked to Google’s success in social this year.

Even more importantly for blog and website owners, you can be certain that +1 will become part of Google’s attempts to improve on the current state of search results it is serving up to prevent further erosion to the likes of Bing.

Sites that get in early will be giving themselves to best opportunity to maximise their +1 scores. This can only be a positive.

Adding Google’s +1 Button to a WordPress Website

Fortunately, adding the Google +1 button to your WordPress website is a breeze. Google has published Add +1 to your pages, which is a simple way to generate the widget to place on your site.

Even simpler, there are a number of WordPress plugins already available. We have incorporated the WordPress Plugin – Google +1 Button in this site, whoever a quick search for plugins for Google +1 button will yield a large array of alternative results.

While the Google +1 Button plugin will only allow you to position your +1 button at either to top or bottom of a post, not both, you can easily adjust the styling by tweaking the css settings.

Effect of Adding the Google +1 Button

Its very early days so some water is going to need to pass under the bridge before there is any real concrete evidence as to +1′s impact on websites. It is a very easy implementation, much easier than the early effort required to add like buttons to sites when they first become popular, so I would encourage all blog and website owners to get your +1′s working for you.

We hope this post helps with your implementation. If so, don’t forget to click the +1 at the top of the page.

Twitter is a leading social network which claims over 175 million registered users, yet as we reported about in our post Where Have All the Twitter Users Gone the actual number of active users is considerably less than this.

And, to be honest, it’s not surprising why?

Twitter is a crappy User Experience!

Twitter is no Apple when it comes to the user experience. You couldn’t imagine Twitter using this in their promotional advertising could you?

What is Twitter? Twitter is thin. Twitter is beautiful. Twitter goes anywhere and lasts all day. There’s no right way or wrong way. It’s crazy powerful. It’s magical. You already know how to use it. It’s 200,000 apps and counting. All the world’s websites in your hand. It’s video, photos, more books than you can read in a lifetime. It’s already a revolution and its only just begun.

Which is unfortunate, because Twitter technically does do most of that, it just does it in such a way that of 175 million registered accounts, less than 10% of those have been used enough to follow 64 other Twitter users.

This is why Twitter requires a Steve Jobs, or perhaps an enchanting Guy Kawasaki, Apple Computer’s former chief evangelist.

Steve Jobs with apples IPod, IPhone and IPads has changed the technology paradigm, taking tech from the geeks and giving it to the cool set. Twitter, on the other hand is a geek product that has enjoyed widespread adoption mainly with media and marketing types.

Now don’t get me wrong, I love Twitter, I think it’s very clever, and it can be a very useful tool, but it’s far from fitting Guy’s criteria for enchantment, being likeability, trustworthiness and a great product. Now while experienced Twitter users may end up being Enchanted by Twitter, how many people can honestly say they found Twitter to be likeable, trustworthy or a great product when they first tried it? Statistically in fact, that’s not the majority of registered Twitter users

To illustrate my point, let’s take a new user through the initial twitter experience. To Start with they arrive at the Twitter website to be greeted by,

Twitter – the best way to discover what’s new in your world.

Now, that sounds like a good promise, doesn’t it.

New to Twitter? Easy, free, and instant updates. Get access to the information that interests you most.

OK, I am sold Step 1, lets register.

And we are in!.

So, Step 2, follow 10 people that interest me. Hmm, lets go with Twitter’s recommendations.

My 10 recommended people to follow are:

1. @Rove1974 Rove McManus
2. @KRuddMP Kevin Rudd
3. @mpesce Mark Pesce
4. @DoctorKarl Dr Karl
5. @KateKendall Kate Kendall
6. @Wil_Anderson Wil Anderson
7. @paulverhoeven Paul Verhoeven
8. @mariekehardy Marieke Hardy
9. @joshthomas87 Josh thomas
10. @GetUp GetUp!

All followed and in the spirit of expediency I am going to skip all steps involved with creating me a new profile and move right onto the end result of our adventure into the wonderful world of  Twitter.

So, here we go:

First up:

Boy, do I agree with you @joshthomas87 Josh Thomas

Go @Devops_Borat, I love you too! Give my regards to your sister.

Hmm, maybe once we get to know each other a little better @mariekehardy Marieke Hardy

@mpesce Mark Pesce, Hmm, well if I was one of the half a million short statured people living in the USA, I may get offended a little at this.

@paulverhoeven Thanks Paul, there’s something I didn’t know.

@mpesce Mark Pesce well seeing as you dislike Dwarves so much.

@paulverhoeven Actually, Kwanzaa is an African-American holiday about the festival of the first harvest of the crops. Nothing racist there.

@mpesce Beheadings and titties? Must be viking hour.

@mpesc I am sooo glad that you clarified that.

and finally…

@paulverhoeven I hope that’s consensual!

You know, I honestly couldn’t have made this up better than what has greeted my new Twitter user tonight. What do you think Steve Jobs and Guy Kawasaki?

I was going to make a video of my wife setting up a new Twitter account instead of simply typing this post. Kind of glad I didn’t really as I think I would have scared her right off Twitter.

So perhaps Twitter isn’t for the faint hearted after all. Or perhaps Twitter needs to take a look at it’s user statistics and try and work out why the majority of registered users never actually use the thing. Perhaps they can think of how they can create a truly great Social Networking platform by working on a great user experience.

OK, so flame me!

It’s very well accepted that Facebook currently has over 500 million worldwide users and that 50% of Facebook users log onto the platform on any given day. We know this because Facebook tells us so on the Official Facebook Statistics Page.

That’s actually a phenomenal stat on user engagement and what has given Facebook a critical mass great enough to have other tech greats such as Google begin to worry as users spend a greater share of their time online within the Facebook ecosystem. With a reported 9.5 million Australian’s having registered a Facebook account, that’s 9.5million reasons why businesses need to be establishing themselves with Facebook’s closed environment.

And what of the other social networking great, micro-blogging site Twitter. Well Twitter has just celebrated its 5th birthday and has a reported 175million users. Futher, Twitter released stats on its 5th birthday today including the following:

Twitter users now send more than 140 million Tweets a day which adds up to a billion Tweets every 8 days by comparison, it took 3 years, 2 months, and 1 day to reach the first billion Tweets.

While it took about 18 months to sign up the first 500,000 accounts, we now see close to 500,000 accounts created every day.

Kiss metrics put together the following infographic on the official released Twitter statistics.

Sounds and looks impressive doesn’t it? Well I certainly thought so until I heard of an unofficial report into the Twitter numbers by BusinessInsider.com favourite tech podcast TWIT (This week in Tech).

The Business Insider report is based on data provided by someone with full access to Twitter’s API who took it upon himself to have an engineer look at follower/following statistics, to see how many users are following or are followed by a certain number of people.

This is what the article went on to say:
Using data that is now just one month old, he found out that:
There were 119 million Twitter accounts following one or more other accounts.
There were 85 million accounts with one or more followers.
With these figures, and Twitter’s claim of 175 million accounts, a little subtraction shows us that there are 56 million Twitter accounts following zero other accounts, and 90 million Twitter accounts with zero followers.

So let’s say an “active” Twitter user is someone who follows at least 10 other accounts. How many such “active” Twitter users are there? Our source’s API data shows that there are 56 million accounts on Twitter following 8 or more accounts. There are only 38 million following 16, and just 12 million following 64.

The following infographic puts all that in to context.

As someone who has been putting in a larger effort to date with clients to increase their influence on Twitter, while I still appreciate the value in the network, I will be placing a much larger emphasis on Facebook again until the numbers tell me something different.

The Client

Focus Cambodia is an Australian registered charity doing amazing work to change the life of impoverished communities in the republic of Cambodia.

The Problem

Focus Cambodia required a solution for promoting its charitable activities, attracting new supporters and engaging with existing supporters, and raising much needed funds through the sale of items handmade by many of the communities it was supporting.

The organisation required the solution to be simple to self manage and take advantage of wider audiences on popular social media services such as Twitter and Facebook.

The Solution

Outsmart developed a social media marketing strategy for Focus Cambodia which included a website and blog which was tightly integrates with a twitter and Facebook page.

The website is highly dynamic and allows focus Cambodia to report on its activities, successes and challenges, which can be flag to featured on the site home page so that its is constantly fresh and up to date.

Not being particularly web savvy, Outsmart created the system so that by simply creating posts and selecting appropriate check boxes, the posts can be featured, shown non the home page, and published by RSS feed, on its Facebook page and as a Twitter feed.

The Results

Focus Cabodia has reported that the website has become central to the promotion and reporting of its activities as well as allowing it to create a wide and highly engaged supporter base.

Supporters are engaging with the organisation on Facebook, Twitter and directly on the site, and its customer base for its handmade crafts is expanding exponentially.

Interestingly, a secondary impact of the success of the strategy is that the organisation now has a highly effective archive of its activities which has improved accountability and supported engagement.

Keywords

Web design, social media, social networking, internet marketing strategy, Twitter, Facebook

The Client

Coffee Shrine is a Perth based reseller of coffee related equipment, services and supplies. It markets its products and services nationally across a number of distinct coffee related markets.

The Problem

Coffee Shrine wanted to expose its business to a much broader audience than existing customers and customers searching for specific products that it sold. Believing that it could significantly expand its business if it could create engage with a wider audience of coffee lovers, the company needed a solution for expanding its reach.

The Solution

Outsmart developed a strategy for Coffee Shrine which involved the creation of a new “independent” industry brand. Love of Coffee, which was Coffee Shrine’s tag line, was a coffee news blog & website which positioned itself as on of Australia’s most important coffee resources.
The blog uses a magazine format, and includes industry news, café reviews, product reviews and information on coffee machines.
The Love of Coffee website also publishes aggregates feeds from a range of other trusted coffee sites and is very tightly integrates with Twitter and Facebook

Coffee Shrine places subtle banner ads on the site to promote its related products and where relevant has some keyword linking back to its ecommerce website.

The Results

The Love of Coffee website is a top ranking Australian coffee blog.
It is generating a significant volume of new traffic for the Coffee Shrine website as well as third part endorsement for many of its products.

Importantly, the Love of Coffee website has had a significant impact on Coffee Shrine’s search engine rankings for its primary ecommerce website, with new products launched simultaneously on the ecommerce site also being featured in the Love of Coffee blog.

Keywords

Internet marketing strategy, blog, social media, Twitter, Facebook, SEO

The Client

fruut is a new and exciting brand of innovative and stylish toy storage products created by Australian company Live Play Create, designed to make it easy to store, play and pack away.

It is a system that is comprised of fruut sacks, a toy bag which opens up to become a toy play surface particularly suited to toys with multiple small pieces, and stylish hangers or racks such as the fruut tree, a beautiful piece of wall art with hooks on which the fruut sacks and other items can be hung.

The Problem

The owners of the fruut brand needed a way of promoting the brand and its unique value proposition to its target market of Australian mothers of young children which have a passion for unique and stylish home décor.

Being a new concept in toy storage, the company needed to create an awareness of the product as it developed its retail channel which included both its existing toy retailers but would extend to children’s boutiques, home furnishing specialist as well as interior decorators and commercial designers.

The Solution

Outsmart worked with Live Play Create to develop a grass roots online strategy for the company to compliment both its exisiting online campigns as well as its offline marketing initiatives.

The strategy included the following elements;

• Website design: a fruut brand specific micro site, which promoted fruuts features, benefits and brand promosition
• Video: as the product was so unique, video was embedded into the fruut websites home page, company youtube channel and embedded as a viral facebook video
• Blog: a series of blog articles on the companys blog, which were syndicated onto the fruut website and published on its twitter and facebook profiles
• SEO: the website was optimised around key serach terms such as toy storage, toy storage systems and shildrens storage
• SEM: the website was promoted on a large number of online directories, shopping comparison sites and its blog and social media updates were keyword enriched and promoted so that they would rank in erach engine results
• Shopping comparison sites: the products were submitted to all of the major Australian shopping comparison sites such as shopping.com, getprice, nexttag, myshopping.com.au and shopbot.
• PPC: A google adwords PPC campign established around keywords realted to toy storage
• Social Media – Facebook a very active campign on the Live Play Create facebook fan page interacting in particulalr with a lage number of complimentary facebook pages and mum bloggers.
• Facebook ads; in addition to the social networking campaihgn on facebook, an intensive 8 week facebook ads campaign was created to build the companys brand avocates.
• Social Media – Twitter: creating awarenewss through interactions on titter with influencial twitter avolcates and mum bloggers
• Social Bookmarkeing – an extensive campaign of social bookmarkeing of the fruut website and blog posts related to the brand on a wide range of social networking sites

The Results

Live Play Create report that a lot of interest has been created in the new brand from both expected and unexpected sales channels. This has led to the creation of a wide retail distribution channel as well as the product being used by commercial interior design firms for creating unqiue spaces for children.

The brand has been widely promoted by pro bloggers and social media champions

The brand’s video has been viewed over 10,000 times and website is ranking number 1 in google for toy storage system and on page 1 for toy storage as well as for its brand names.

At a recent trade show the company was amazed at buyer awareness of the product, reporting they had been exposed to the concept particularly in the social media and in industry blogs.

Keywords

website design, video, blogging, seo, sem, ppc, directory submission, shopping comparison sites, social media, social networking, twitter, facebook, social book marking, website design, website development

The Client

Austin Developments is a developer of stylish and unique outdoor living environments. Based in Perth, Western Australia, the company has a strong reputation for its quality and creativity in outdoor pergola, patio, cabana and timber decking designs.

The problem

Austin Developments had identified that its potential customers had shifted from using traditional directories such as the Yellow Pages towards online sources of information.

To better take advantage of this shift, Austin Developments wanted to create a Internet Marketing Strategy which would give it a greater and more effective presence online.

Frustrated that a considerable portion of its marketing budget had been spent on Yellow Pages style campaigns and that their corporate website was expensive to modify every time they wanted to make a changes, the company approached Outsmart to help it create a more effective internet marketing strategy.

The Solution

Austin Developments are artisans in their field, the creation of exemplarity outdoor living spaces and had an impressive portfolio of work to its credit. As such, we decided that their online presence needed to take maximum advantage of visuals of its great work.

First and foremost was the recreation of a website which had a simple to use and maintain content management system. A system that was easy for the owners to manage themselves and upload each new project as completed to expand their online portfolio.

Video was created and integrated into the website to give visitors an experience of the lifestyle improvements that was accompany an investment in an Austin Development lifestyle space.

We created a rage of high quality image galleries so that users of the website could get inspirations for their own projects as well as demonstrate the company’s track record.

A blog incorporated in the site allowed the owners to write about each project as completed, talking about the design briefs, challenges which needed to be overcome and how they arrived at the specific solution.

An integration with social media sites such as twitter and Facebook mean that Austin developments could be exposed to a wider audience and take advantage of some of the viral benefits of things such as the Facebook like buttons.

Finally, we implemented a highly targeted SEO campaign to improve the companies ranking in the major search engines.

The Results

The company has reported that it has decided to reduce its large expenditure on Yellow Pages advertising as it starts to receive the benefits of new online marketing strategy.

Customers are spending more time on their website and they are using it as a marketing tool while in customer presentations.

The ability to manage their own online content rather than rely on a web dev elopement firm means they are now updating this on a regula basis and it has become an integral part of its marketing mix that it now has control of.

keywords: seo, social neworking, blogging, website design, web development, wordpress

In the first major shake up to the Shopping Comparison Site market in Australia for some time, NexTag have announced that Australia is now a major focus of their expansion.

NexTag is focussing on a major puch into the Australian Shopping Comparison Site market

While Australian’s may not be that familiar with the NexTag brand, online merchants should to be aware that NexTag were recently rated as one of the top Paid CSEs (Comparison Shopping Engines) in the United States, sending online retailers the most traffic and revenue of any of the US Shopping Comparison Sites.

Outside of the US Market, NexTag operate in 8 international markets and Australia is their next major market focus.

Importantly, NexTag do not aim to be a just another player in the markets in which they operate, they are extremely capable and well capitalised and aim to be market leading Australian shopping comparison site.

Listing with NexTag offers Australian online merchants the following benefits:

• Low risk – It costs just $50 to set up your account, and this is a prepayment on the “clicks” that you receive. Importantly you can cancel your account at anytime if you aren’t satisfied, and any money left in your account will be refunded.
• Easy and not time consuming for you – NexTag simply browse a feed from your shop which is the same as the Getprice.com data feed.
• Fast -The registration process only takes a few minutes
• New/Quality traffic – Low audience overlaps with competitors.
• Accountability – You can track your results and using the NexTag ROI optimizer you can track the number of sales generated by NexTag leads.

If you are considering ways to improve your Search Engine Marketing (SEM), NexTag will offer high exposure to potential customers for a very low cost.

About the Author:
Outsmart is a Perth based Internet marketing company which specialises in search and social media marketing strategies.

Live Play Create required a scalable Internet Marketing Strategy to accommodate its growth from a single product small business to a large international operation with a portfolio of products and brands.

Client :Live Play Create www.LivePlayCreate.com

Product : Developer of unique, stylish and functional toys and children’s lifestyle products

Campaign : Online Marketing Strategy – Website Design and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Background :Live Play Create is an Australian company which develops and markets a range of stylish and unique toys and children’s lifestyle products.

Founded by Cathy Ballardin, a West Australian mum with a passion for sustainable design, the company had grown from a single product to a portfolio of successful brands.

Challenge: Live Play Create had grown from focusing on a single product which it marketed through its own website, to a portfolio of products and brands marketed through a large retail network.

The company wanted to ensure brand integrity by operating the top ranking website for each of its products and brands, have an online presence for customers who did not have access to one of its retail distributors, yet did not want to complete with its retailer customers.

Internet Marketing Strategy: After meeting with the team and discussing their objectives, budget and resources Outsmart presented Live Play Create with an Internet Marketing Strategy which included website design and search engine optimisation (SEO)and would meet all of its desired outcomes.

The strategy was to develop a hierarchy of websites as follows:

Live Play Create needed an internet marketing strategy to cater for its growing portfolio of brands

• A corporate site at the top of the hierarchy comprised of general information on the company, information on the respective brands and a corporate blog.
• A suite of brand specific micro-sites which would be used the communicate products and brands and allow customers to easily locate their nearest retailer, and
• An online shop where customers could purchase any of the company’s products online if they did not have access to its retail network.

Results:

• The company’s brand websites are ranking #1 in Google.
• The company’s corporate website is ranking #2 in Google for its respective brands.
• Transactions through the company’s online shop have increased by 27%
• There has been an increase in traffic across the hierarchy of sites of 32% above the traffic from the previous standalone website.
• The company is more effectively diverting customers to its retail partners.

About the Author:
Outsmart is a Perth based Internet marketing company which specialises in search and social media marketing strategies.