Lord Sugar has just promoted Viglen on Twitter to his audience of almost 2 million followers (2 hours ago). His message read – IT purchasing managers – how about buying from a British company with great service. He then included a bit.ly link and an email address.

The email address is interesting, because people can click on the email and email viglen directly. He used an email address that is probably unique to the twitter campaign but I am not absolutely sure. Either way, he did not want responses on Twitter.

Lord Sugar has been building up an audience on Twitter steadily over the last few years getting wide appeal from his TV program.

It is interesting that someone has chosen to promote Viglen (a company lord sugar is involved in) on Twitter when the target market for this IT company is so narrow. Let’s face it, IT managers aren’t on every street corner, are they?

The message has to be simple on twitter because it is so limited but why waste space talking about it being a British company and miss out the company name (although it was in the email address). Also, is Lord Sugar saying that companies in other countries don’t offer good service?

Personally, I don’t get it… Wrong audience, wrong channel, wrong message…

But then what should he have done?

Well, keep the focus of the twitter messages on Piers Morgan – they seem to rub off on each other nicely. If you must use twitter because you have 2 million people reading your messages and Viglen needs some exposure then make it subtle. A sponsorship campaign promoted via twitter perhaps, a survey and so on. Outright marketing appears desperate.

The benefit to Viglen from this campaign will not outweigh the damage an irrelevant message can cause. Abuse this channel and loose your audience is my point.

I am not saying you can’t cross talk but it must be done with care, and this wasn’t.

Although I would still like it if Lord Sugar could retweet me to 2 million people from his mobile phone in the back of his limo whilst he passes me at the bus stop…

Enough said! Now where is that bus?

With Google Chrome finally becoming the dominant browser do we need to change the things we do or the way we work?

Peronally, I love Google Chrome – especially the login functionality – Over the weekend I plugged the whole thing into iCloud from Apple and saw a nice merging of my work and personal resources.

Google Chrome Leapfrogs Internet Explorer as the Webs Top Browser.

About 2 weeks ago I received an update to my facebook page from a friend talking about how addicted she was to Pinterest. I then tried to download Pinterest that night to my iOS device but it said I already needed an account in order to get it working, so it would not work.

The next day I went to the Pinterest website to sign up but the site said I couldn’t – it did however say that my name would be added to a waiting list and I would be informed as and when I could join the service.

Since that moment I have been wanting to join, if for no other reason to see what all the fuss is about but I can’t and that is leaving me feeling ***** off!

As a digital marketeer I realise that this is clever marketing but could it work for all brands – Pinterest have apparently reached 10 Million U.S. monthly uniques already which is faster than any standalone site – EVER!

We call this the hockey stick moment and apparently it is all down to 18-34 year old upper income women from the American heartland which coincidentally describes friend perfectly.

Techcruch state that according to comScore, the average Pinterest user spends 98 minutes per month on the site. The only sites with more user time are Tumblr at 2.5 hours and Facebook with 7 hours.

What sparked the hockey stick moment for Pinterest? Is anyone here using it? If so, tell me what it is all about, please…

I browsed a LinkedIn profile yesterday and on the home page was an “infographic”- if you have heard of inforgraphics and are currently using them, great – if not, then you should take a look. If you are geeky or creative you will like them, a lot.

An Infographic is a graphical representation of information. When several infographics are then brought together on a single page the viewer can gain a good understanding of your information quickly and easily.

This might benefit a LinkedIn profile where you are trying to show information about yourself such as your age, number of clients you have, number of big deals you have completed, percentage of blue chip companies you have worked with and so on.

A website that gives some examples of good inforgraphics I found on the web last night is as follows:

http://dailyinfographic.com/

Please share back with me an examples of your own as I am now building a few and would like to see as many examples as possible.

D.M.W. Gledhill

I have often been asked to look at digital marketing strategies by managers/clients alike and it always interests me to see where these managers/clients have themselves started before asking me to get involved.

For example if you run a website that sells flooring do you:

A) Go straight to Google Keywords External Tool to see what keywords are the most popular then edit your website content accordingly hoping you will hit number 1 on page 1 and become a zillionaire.
B) Go to your existing customers and ask them what they searched for to find you in the hope that they can even remember that far back (one of my favourite customers has been using one of my companies for almost 10 years – whilst I can remember exactly how he found me, I doubt he can)
C) Examine your competitors websites for the keywords the are using then copy. (Cheat)
the list goes on…

Most marketing strategies need to start somewhere with some sort of intel that can help guide the decisions we live by.

Sometimes, I like to start at the end – pick my top 20 clients, clients who have for one reason or another already chosen to work with us, perhaps you will list yours by revenue or profit, brand name or general niceness – eitherway – choose your top 20 then send them to a company like Experian or MarketSafe and ask this company to profile them for you – it costs a few hundred pounds.

The resulting profile report nearly always reveals something to me about my customers that I did not previously know. The more information the better and with the information revolution well under way we will soon be able to generate client profile reports that we could only ever dream about before the likes of Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn came along.

For example, imagine knowing that 16 of the primary contacts within your top 20 client list have a passion for motor racing, live in London and have 2 kids under the ages of 12 and 18. Would your next event still be a beer swilling late night bash at Club Dizzy or would it be a family track day at Silverstone?

Food for thought isn’t it?

It looks like Facebook spotted Google+ coming over the mountain a while ago, sent out their trailfinders to see how the market would react to a float and are now making for the valley for the shootout at noon.

Who will win?

First lets look at who is fighting, is it Google+ and Facebook or is it Google and Facebook? Lets face it, if it is Google+ that looses its grip then Google will probably follow… so…

- Google has money (so now does facebook)
- Google has lots of users (so does facebook)
- Google is loved by people (so is facebook, if not more than google)
- People trust google (people trust Facebook more)

oh dear, this is not going so well is it…

Could we really see Google implode? How will we know who is winning? We could look at users , earnings etc… I think we should measure it in time – how much time do we spend on each platform. We only have so much time in our day, we only have so much time to spend duplicating everything – eventually one will have to give. Only time will tell.

It is however critical that Google+ continues to grow sharply, a jitter in its growth of users could suggest a peak.

D.M.W. Gledhill

This is an awesome little resource for those of us with little time to spare but lots to achieve…

Small business social media cheat sheet.

When I got home on Friday night my wife told me that my daughter had somehow managed to transport our lawn from the garden to her bedroom on the soles of her new shoes but not to worry as she we had called someone to come and clean the carpet.

Phil arrived and started work on my daughters carpet straight away. He asked me in a general way what I did for a living and I replied that I was in “marketing” – he then asked me if I could build him a website on “Google” – straight off, no messing… I like Phil.

At first I must have appeared to be a little dim – did Phil know about Google+ Business Pages already, even though most of my peers are yet to understand it? After a short chat it struck me that Phil thought Google was the internet, not just a list of websites on the internet.

When I asked him about Facebook he told me not to worry as he had already done that and was number 1…

Phil considered Google to be the internet and Facebook to be something else.

What is Facebook if it is not the internet? Or is Phil just wrong?

This process works for me… Before starting you must create an account with Google+, to do this check out my tutorials section.

1) I uploaded 322 contacts into my personal account on Google+.
2) Google+ sent all these people a notification informing them that I had added them to a circle – this notification was sent by email to those that did not have a Google+ account by Google+, not me!
3) I then created a Google+ page for Digital Entrepreneur on the Google+ network.
4) I then went into my Business Page>Profile and clicked on “Share this Page” and selected the contacts circle on my personal Google+ account.
5) I then created a blog post providing relevant information I thought my contacts would be interested in and uploaded a link to the page on my website.

I then monitored the hits to my site using Google Analytics.

I am refining the whole marketing piece behind this – the information must be relevant etc but it worked for me, my site got hits and people downloaded my content about GLOOP and so on.

When registering for Google Apps you may have inadvertently signed up to Google Apps Premium Version – this is an excellent service that offers a variety of services that are very cost effective however, if like me you don’t require these services then you can downgrade your Google Apps account to the free version by following the steps below:

1 – Login to your Google Mail account.
2 – Select from the cog image “settings” on the right “Manage this Domain”
3 – Select “Domain Settings” from the tab menu at the top
4 – Select the “Subscriptions & Billing” tab
5 – Click the “Cancel Google Apps for Business” link
(If you have more than 10 users this will not be an option)
6 – Click “Yes, cancel the free trial”

Once you have completed this process you will find that your Google Apps account is restored completely but with out the following services:

1 – Email storage will be downgraded to Google Apps limits per user account.
2 – Existing email archives will be stored by Google. Users exceeding their storage limit cannot send or receive new mail.
3 – Some advanced tools such as migration and API access will no longer be available.

Digital Entrepreneur