2009 Immediate Future

Archive: 2022

Summary Sidewiki allows consumers to leave public comments on a sidebar attached to your organisation’s website You have no ability to delete or moderate these comments You can respond to comments, and as the owner of the website you can post a message which will always be displayed at the…

Just for fun I thought I’d use Google Trends to compare the leading social networks in terms of how much traffic they’re getting from UK web users. This first chart shows that Bebo and MySpace both declined at a fairly similar rate over the past 12 months, while Twitter has…

You might have heard a lot of chatter about real-time search recently, with Facebook buying Friendfeed (a microblogging service with some strong real-time search technology) and Google unveiling Caffeine, a more real-time focused version of its own search technology. Although real-time search is currently…

You might be aware that Twitter recently updated its terms and conditions, so we thought it was worth highlighting what these changes might mean for brands that use the micro-blogging site. Advertising Although no specific announcement has been made regarding advertising, the new terms make it clear…

You may have read that Facebook recently added a new feature which allows you to ‘tag’ other users in updates, which works in the same way as Twitter’s @ reply feature. We think this will have a significant impact on brands which are active on Facebook. How does the new…

I read an interesting post at SEOmoz about the different factors which influence how valuable a link is in terms of improving the target page’s search engine rankings, and wanted to share it with my colleagues. But being a busy lot I knew they probably wouldn’t have…

Last week Google quietly added an interesting new feature to its Insights for Search tool, predictions of future search trends. If you don’t already use Insights, you should, it’s a useful tool for monitoring search trends in order to get a good picture of how consumer interest…

On the surface, URL shortening services such as https://bit.ly are a great idea, because they can turn long, messy web addresses like this: https://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/support_services/article6788774.ece Into nice tidy addresses like this: https://bit.ly/g4ol9 This is especially useful for posting to Twitter, since it…

Following the release of our Truth about Twitter report recently, we were contacted by Guy Stephens, the Online Help Manager of mobile phone retailer, The Carphone Warehouse, who wanted to highlight some of his company’s experience of using Twitter to support its customer service operation. Since we’re not planning to…

Here at immediate future we think that the best way of measuring how well you’re doing on Twitter is by looking at the number of times you get retweeted. As we’ve previously written, retweets are the means by which messages spread virally across Twitter, so the more interesting your conversations…

Newspapers, as everybody knows, are still struggling to get to grips with the internet. For a few years they threw all of their resources into establishing a strong online presence and trying to pull in as big an audience as possible, under the optimistic belief that if enough people were…

According to the latest predictions from research firm, Forrester, social media marketing spend in the US will rise from $716 million in 2009 to £3,113 million in 2014. The accuracy of these figures may be up for debate – all the research in the world isn’t going…

Over the past year social media gurus have been banging the Twitter drum very loudly, and everybody in the PR and marketing industry must by now be at least dimly aware that they need to pay attention to the service. But apart from the small handful of high profile case…

A lot of people in the PR industry view search engine optimisation (SEO) as something of a voodoo dark art and, consequently, are afraid of tackling it. The main problem with the SEO industry is that unless you already know a lot about the subject, it’s kind of hard to…

There’s been a huge amount of discussion about how Twitter can be used most effectively for online PR and marketing, and there’s no shortage of interest in the subject since the mainstream media became obsessed with the platform. The only problem is that most of the current analysis is either…

One of the most interesting changes taking place as the PR industry evolves into an online discipline is the increased emphasis on measurement. In the old days of offline PR, little attention was paid to systematically analysing the relative success of campaigns, because measuring PR is hard to do. Measures…

There seems to be a lot of confusion about the purpose of online PR these days. Too many people think that the sole job of online PR is improve the client’s search engine optimisation and help drive traffic to their website. Granted, SEO and online PR do go hand in…

Flog Definition: When a marketing bod pretends to be a 12-year-old computer nerd and leaves made-up reviews of his own products all over the blogosphere – it’s known as a fake blog or flog. Like fake hair, fake nails and fake tans – fake…

Whilst reading the econsultancy.com online PR benchmarking report, it struck me that PRs and brand marketers were still talking a different language. Clients wanting increased brand mentions online are met with agencies delivering blogger relations. Those asking for brand reach are offered optimised…

Let’s be honest about this, on the whole the PR industry is not welcome in social media. People consider their blogs, Facebook pages and Twitter streams to be their personal space, and they don’t want us oily spin-merchants barging in and shoving our brand messages up in…

If you’re still struggling to understand why Twitter might be a useful PR tool, you should probably take a moment to understand the concept and implications of the phenomenon of re-tweeting. It’s a very simple premise: John finds something he likes on the internet, so he writes a Twitter post…