Archive | Online Marketing

The Best Harlem Shake Videos We Could Find

Move over Gangnam Style, there is a new kid on the block (remember them!).

In the last 17 days a new Internet Meme has been created by five teenagers in Queensland, Australia called The Harlem Shake.

The Harlem Shake was a song released by Baauer in May 22nd, 2012, and featured in a skit by a vlogger named Filthy Frank. This was then replicated by The Sunny Coast Skate chaps from Oz.

The basic premise appears to be:

• One person dances to the first 15 seconds of the song (usually wearing a helmet or mask – but not always).
• Everyone else in shot goes about their days work or business.
• At about 15 seconds the bass drops and then….
• Crowd goes mad, mad props, loss of clothes, crazy outfits and awesome dance moves ensue.

There have been over 40,000 Harlem Shake videos uploaded to YouTube already (within 17 days!), and views of these videos has already surpassed over 200 MILLION views – this is massively more than Gangnam Style picked up when it was first released.

What is interesting is that it is the first real “crowd sourced” video to significantly drive sales of a song, with the Harlem Shake reaching #1 in the US iTunes charts and #2 in the UK & Australian iTunes Charts.

We hope you enjoy the collection we found!

The first video is the original by Filthy Frank

The second video is by The Sunny Coast Skate who were the first to create this internet meme.

Then the US Marines, Navy & Airforce all got in on the craze!

US Airforce

US Navy

The US Marines

Another set of soldiers – Norwegian??

And even our own British Army

The Harlem Shake then spread to offices all across the world…

The Office of Break.com

KISS FM

The Fixed Fabric Corporation (We think!)

IGN Offices

And Riot Games

Not to be out done, news rooms from around the world got involved..

including KSLA News

A news room from Kosovo

And various Fox News shows..

This spread to sports teams and competitions
UGA Dive Team

Epic Gym

and the Georgia American Football Team

The Florida Gators

Professional MMA fighters

Our very own Lincoln Rugby Union

Even the “conservative” sport of snooker has got in on the act!

And then? Well just about everyone wanted to do their version of the Harlem Shake!!

From Universities..

Wilfrid Laurier University

Clemson University

Manchester University

London Ravensbourne

Birmingham University

And our very own Bishop Grosseteste University

From Fire Departments

To Grandmas

Cool parents

Through to anyone with a video camera and an imagination!

Lovely ladies

In the Snow

Super Singhs shop (what a name and logo – love it)

Pool parties

and just simply workshops

Asian dance crews

and even puppies!

And how you can tell something is going REALLY viral is when gaming versions start to appear including

Super Mario

and the League of Legends

And finally – one video that shows the power of this type of viral video and how far reaching it can become is the “around the world Harlem Shake“

What we found interesting, and what pricked our interest to put this blog post together was this blog post by Mark Suster – discussing how broadcast trends are changing and how they will change even further. If you get the chance please have a read.

Well with only 17 days since this launched and another 800 million PLUS views to go before it catches Gangnam Style we are sure we will be revisiting this topic when more people get more creative with their ideas!.

Happy shaking.

Introduction To The New LinkedIn Profile

LinkedIn suddenly appear to have found their thinking caps with new updates seemingly arriving on a weekly basis! Which is GREAT news for those people who are active on LinkedIn. The latest addition to their development is the New LinkedIn Profile design.

LinkedIn have three core strategies in mind when they are redeveloping their platform:

• Simplify
• Grow
• Everyday

For anyone who has been using LinkedIn for the last few years, that word “simplify” will mean an awful lot.

LinkedIn has been full of some fantastic features, ways to showcase how good you and your business are, ways to meet new connections, and ways to share your own industry knowledge. The problem has always been that it has been so bloomin’ confusing to do so!!

With the launch of the new profile design, things could be about to become MUCH easier to edit, build and discover your profile and LinkedIn relationships.

LinkedIn have built the editing of your profile from scratch – in the past there were just so many different editing routes into your profile that it just became confusing.

Their redesign is aimed to fulfil three requirements:

• Enable Simplified Editing
• Build Relationships
• Offer Rich Insights

Enable Simplified Editing

There will now be an option to enable you to add industry or profession specific sections to your profile such as:

• Projects
• Test Scores
• Courses
• Languages

Things that until now would be tucked away in a profile summary (and simply lost in a mountain of text).

You will also be able to see how “complete” your profile is, with the 100% bar replaced with a sexier completion score that doesn’t give you a percentage,  but does give you a visual – “the complete circle” and a handy completion compliment “All-Star!”

Build Relationships

One rather Google Circles-esque addition to your profile is the section showing you how you are connected to your LinkedIn network. This helps you to understand your network “reach”, as well as answering the question – What is it that you share “most” with your connections?

This could be:

• A company you are working / have worked for.
• A school, college or university you have both attended.
• Simply your location (awesome for building local relationships)
• The industries you are in

Having these additional insights will allow you to understand better the relationship you have with people, and hopefully, how you can improve on that relationship.

Offer Rich Insights

The everyday element of LinkedIn’s strategy has seen “recent activity” becoming much more prominent in the LinkedIn profile pages. All recent activity will be posted at the top of people’s profile pages.

For many, LinkedIn isn’t a “daily” visit in the same way as people use Twitter & Facebook. However by adding more rich snippets of information, and making them more prominent, it is LinkedIn’s intention to try to get more eyes on their platform more often.

What we have found with LinkedIn is that it is very much “business” information that tends to get “shared” and this can be a very powerful way of getting on to the radar of people within a particular industry.

Conclusion

We are LOVING the updated direction that LinkedIn are taking, with recent(ish) updates such as LinkedIn today, Company Page redesigns and Endorsements, we can see this becoming an ever more active social network that business owners will want to get their teeth into. Nobody on LinkedIn is here to play games, or share their family photos. It is very much about business, and is probably the best online representation of an actual business networking meeting.

The people who put the most effort into LinkedIn are the people who tend to get the most out of LinkedIn.

What are your thoughts? Please feel free to comment below.

Google Webmaster Update – Clean Up Your Backlinks

A recent video from Matt Cutts, head of Google’s spam team explains how to use a new tool your Google Webmaster toolkit to actively disassociate your website from “spammy” links.

Why is this needed?

With the initial release (and continual update) of the algorithm change code named “Google Penguin“, websites with links that came into their website from other “non relevant” websites, usually with a specific “Anchor Text“, suddenly found their Google rankings were beginning to suffer. In some cases the web owners were receiving warning messages from Google regarding an un-natural link profile.

Back links have long been an essential part of the Google Algorithm, with Google itself initially nicknamed “back rub” as a result of its reliance on the trust it placed on the links pointing to a website. When this was “realised” by web developers and the search engine optimization community, people would actively build 1000′s of links into their website with little regard as to where the link was coming from.

Websites offered “add your url” services and made the process easy for even the most untrained web owner. People disregarded whether the link would be of value to THAT website visitor and simply added their URL with an anchor text they wanted their website (or a particular page) to rank for.

Other website owners used services that would “comment spam” or “article spin” – these services would MASS produce spam comments which would be placed on any blog that would allow them. Often the user name or content within the spam comment would point back to the users website. Articles could be written once and then “spun” – meaning the article would be automatically re-written 1000′s of times and sent to article directories.

Suddenly, web owners were able to “manipulate” the search positions in Google by getting seen through stronger “back link” signals than previously.

As you can imagine, this has been a particular bug bear of Google (and those web owners who didn’t participate in these practices) – hence the Penguin algorithm launch.

Therefore, as with almost everything in Google Webmaster Tools (to us, one of the best signals as to what Google is deeming “important” to your website and therefore your Google ranking), the ability to remove links that have no relevance to your website is vitally important. This could also be a response to a rather worrying appearance of “Negative SEO” tactics, which whilst Google has never admitted could be a problem, most certainly has been viewed with alarm by the SEO community.

Should you just start using this from the beginning?

In a word no. You should exhaust all channels of having the link removed from the website(s) first. This means trying to contact the webmaster or web owner and politely asking if they will remove your link. We have done this for clients in the past (who have come to us because their SEO rankings had dropped) and have had mixed results, so this additional tool is a welcome change.

How do I know which links are “spammy”?

Ask yourself these questions:

1. Does the link add value to the website that it is currently sat on? If your link is on page 5 of 100 all called “links 1, links 2 etc” then is this REALLY adding value to that website’s visitors?
2. Is the website your link appears on RELEVANT to your own website? What is the point in a link about “football boots” appearing on a website that is about “cloud computing”? Answer – none.
3. Is the website you appear on called “better search engine listing .com” or “page rank booster .com”? The website name can often be the most obvious indicator that the site is simply not relevant to either you, your business or to anyone!
4. Is the website in your native language? It might seem obvious, however when people have used external link building companies, they do so without knowing where these links will be built from. Having an english website, with an english entry (link or spam) and an english anchor text, on a Russian, Polish, Chinese etc. website is an instant indicator that your site isn’t relevant to that web community.

How do I use the tool?

Matt Cutts describes it much better than we can in the video above and to be honest the facility isn’t appearing in our Google Webmaster Toolkit at this very moment. We do expect this to be added shortly (hopefully!”).

He also mentions that this absolutely shouldn’t be your first stage of removing links, it should be the last.

We were also going to do a do’s and don’ts list but Portent did one (and it’s much better than we could do!).

 

Examples Of How You Should Use Split Testing On Your Advertising

(If you have any of your own ideas, please feel free to share them in the comments section)

This is a great infograph giving you great examples of the different ways you can (and should) be split testing your online adverts.

 

AdChop – More Profitable Ad Campaigns

Any other examples of split testing – or any that people want to share? Please comment below.

Your Facebook Timeline For Business Set Up Guide

My favorite blog posts are the one’s I can reuse in a fraction of a second, yet prove to be REALLY, REALLY useful!!

Below is a Facebook Timeline For Business “Cheat Sheet” – please share if you like it