After one too many bad experiences with Brighton club-promoters Howard Kaye and Jamie O’Mara came up with the idea of “This Is Brighton” idea, a mockumentary to Brighton’s Nightlife scene.

Most promoters in Brighton are sleazy and arrogant, and the series was founded to exploit these promoters to people that would have no clue. The series focuses on the well known company ‘Air Promotions’ in the run up to the launch of their club-night ‘OMG LOL’. The team behind This is Brighton have created the series to appear like The Office, or Curb, and in true mockumentary style comes across comical. There are 6 characters that represent the promoter, DJ, Photographer, and the promo girls.

This is Brighton – Episode 1

Episode one was released at the end of February 2013, with another episode uploaded every week until the launch of the club night on 19th March. The people behind the series only thought it would be popular with friends. The targets for the videos that were being uploaded to YouTube were only around 5000 per video. It was hoped that with this amount of views that the series would be a success and hopefully become Viral in Brighton. The YouTube Channel has seen a vast amount of views and traffic since the series begun with the first video currently around 30,000 views. The video spread virally on Facebook through links and sponsored posting from the ‘This Is Brighton’ Fanpage. This is Brighton has their own Fanpage, Twitter, and YouTube channel to interact with their viewers and drive traffic to the videos on YouTube. DJ Flame who is the Resident DJ on the show also has his own Twitter, which proves an added dimension of interaction to the viewers.

This is Brighton – Solomon Explains OMG LOL Launch 

Jamie O’Mara Shot, Produced, and starred in the webisodes as Solomon, a pervy photographer from Bradford. In the video above he is updating the viewers with the details on the tie-in club night. He references the Facebook event and the giveaways on the night all intended to increase traffic to the facebook Fanpage and event.

Argus Article about This is Brighton 

To great delight, ‘This is Brighton’ has also been approached by magazines and a newspaper for interviews about the idea behind the show and the club night. The Argus Article above, which was included in the newspaper, is a positive account of what the show is trying to achieve and includes a brief interview with the shows producers. Spindle Magazine have also published a write up on the YouTube series.

The series is proving to be a success on YouTube and garner a lot of virality on social media with everyone wanting to add their comment on whether it’s real or fake. This could be the start for a new reality TV show straight from the sunny shores of Brighton.

YouTube Channel

Facebook Fanpage

DJ Flame Twitter

Health is an important topic to most individuals, a fact known and seized upon by the popular media. Consumers are obsessed with thinking they know what is good for them and what will cause them harm, because that of course is the secret to why we’re living so long, and why we take such good care of ourselves. Being able to opine “you shouldn’t do that, it’s bad for you” is part of the know-it-all’s core skillset. But where do these speculations typically come from?

Methodology

One way to tap into the erudite health expert’s knowledge base is to analyse the search positioning of major UK newspapers for a group of health terms. By selecting a fairly long list of nouns and verbs, and appending ‘causing cancer’, we can track these across the most-read (but least peer-reviewed and scientifically scrutinised) popular media outlets.

The list I’ve selected is fairly random, with a few completely random terms thrown in. These include some fruits (apples causing cancer, bananas causing cancer, etc), some cosmetics (deoderant causing cancer, lipstick causing cancer, etc), lots of foods (soup, honey, etc), as well as the wildcards that I didn’t expect to really position (climate change, fibre, crayons, shaving, marriage, etc). The media outlets I selected were mainly the core national newspapers, based on readership, with the BBC news website also thrown in. These were put into our new visibility tools, which quickly and effortlessly aggregate the positioning of websites over large groups of terms.

Results

The visibility we are measuring is of a similar nature to Figure 1 below. We take the list of terms and measure where the newspapers appear:

Fig 1: An example of a major newspaper positioning for a cancer causing term

Our new visibility tools aggregate these positions across long lists of terms on multiple search engines. The result is a graph such as the one below, which over time shows the trends and visibility of lists of sites in the SERPs. These can be quickly filtered down by search engine, group of terms, and groups of sites, to gain quick insight over vast amounts of data.

The visibility of major newspapers in the SERPs, on a long list of cancer causing terms

Fig 2: The visibility of major UK publications on a long list of search terms relating to cancer links

The results provide the following conclusions:

• There’s a comprehensive victory for the Daily Mail, who manage to position for every single term in the list of 52 selected
• The Times do well to rank bottom of the list, showing perhaps their core subscribers wouldn’t be too enamored with an unknown ‘expert’ suggesting that the ‘internet’ causes cancer
• It’s impressive that the Daily Mail (along with several others) are gaining in rankings, perhaps with the aim of one day becoming the definitive source of pseudo-science and sensationalism
• The Sun and The Mirror position badly for the high level intellectual terms such as baldness causing cancer and electricity causing cancer, suggesting that their health sections are in need of aggressive expansion. Though with The Mirror doing well to slot ‘celebrity gossip’ into their meta and title tags, their focus of resources may be shifted elsewhere. A similar experiment with the formula of <person who has few discernible reasons to be famous> + <scandal/affair/plastic surgery> may see these newspapers shine

Contradictory advice

Lastly, though not part of the original visibility analysis, it’s always good to see some conflicting advise being given to the popular consumer. The search below indicates that at least for now, it’s impossible to know if you can buy bread for your family without endangering their wellbeing.

Fig 3: Unclear consumer advice from the popular press

Take The Kardashians for example. No matter how much you despise something or know how damaging it can be to the bigger picture, they always come back, to your annoyance. Well, in the SEO community (in the financial sector in particular), we’ve seen an ugly friend rear their ugly head once again – the EMD. Although, not to be confused with a digital sexually transmitted disease, the EMD is an acronym for ‘Exact Match Domains’ – so websites that rank well, simply by having the name of the keyword within the domain itself.

We also have a PMD (a not so serious one), which is ‘Partial Match Domains’, who have also come juggernanuting back into the fold. Here, I am to explore the return of the EMD in the UK within different sectors and offer some possible insight into why this may have happened.

Ok, lets just clarify before an angry keyboard warrior attacks me with a Dudgeons and Dragons mousemat – if a company offers a superb service and has a well optimised website, then of course it should rank highly in Google. My problem, along with many other SEOs, is that you should not gain any additional weight for simply having the keyword within your domain name. Agreed?

Lets take a look at some real data to see if this is the case. Please note, an EMD takes the following format – www.keyword.(cc)tld or www.key-word.(cc)tld:

To be honest, that doesn’t give much away. Three keywords chosen at random show that I’m 66% right. A more in depth study is required, but my experience within the financial sector tells me something dodgy is going on. Below is a chart highlighting the movement of the four EMDs in test subject one for a financial keyword term:

Chart showing four EMDs shoot up in rankings for a financial keyword term.

This movement does seem very unnatural for this sector, especially considering the red line has a vast number of unrelated backlinks pointing to the domain. ‘Drug rehab centre’ and ‘Exercises belly fat’ are a common occurrence in the 2007 style blogroll setup. But, the keyword is listed within the domain name. Lets see how it does for the exact match compared against similar keywords that it becomes a PMD:

A chart showing how an individual EMD does for an exact match keyword (red) and two keywords where it becomes a PMD

The domains rise over the past two months may be down to backlink accumulation, but looking at the historical tab on SEO Majestic; that has only ramped up in the past month or so:

Screenshot taken from Majestic SEO showing the backlink accumulation of the EMD used in the chart previously

Now, this is the big decider. Is this surge of EMDs restricted to a specific sector rather than a universal change? There has been discussions in the past regarding different algorithms for different website and sectors – so could this be the case in the financial industry? Look at the same keyword a few months earlier and the sharp rise and inevitable decline for a few PMDs:

For the same keyword in test subject one, two PMDs rise and fall dramatically at the same time

Now, any SEO that has been in the business for a while will know that both of these domains didn’t dramatically improve their organic visibility and then dive into a pool of helplessness, on the same day. Oh, and both domains were registered three weeks before their surge up to page one in Google. But am in fact discussing an issue within the financial sector alone, rather than all of Google?

There is some extremely odd movement in areas such as ‘payday loans’ and indeed ‘quick loans’ as highlighted by the graph below:

Payday loan websites randomly appearing within Google UK for ‘quick loans’ before dropping out suddenly

Now! That looks odd, no? A number of domains themed around ‘payday loans’ rising up the Google rankings, only to drop out a few days later. This is a phenomenon that has been accuring week after week for the past year. Are Google trying to fix this issue or, have the big guns not got the foggiest idea what is happening over this side of the pond? After all, the US results for ‘quick loans’ look ok, no!? -

The ‘normal’ Google results from a US IP address for ‘quick loans’

To conclude

Here are my concluding points on the EMD study into the financial sector:

• In the financial sectors we monitor, there has been a sharp rise in EMD/PMD websites.
• This hasn’t been the case for a number of other sectors.
• I’ve never seen anything like the movement in the ‘payday loans’ or ‘quick loans’ sector in Google UK.
• This movement has not been reflected in the US.
• Does Google even know this problem exists in Google UK?
• Or are they or are they actively trying to resolve this issue by adding weight to external anchor text?
• Which as a consequence – improves the positioning of EMDs/PMDs.

I’m sure you’ll agree, there is a lot of odd movement within a number of charts that I’ve presented. My philosophy on SEO is that it is a way of life. You can get quick wins, but shortcuts won’t last forever. You may see a website rank on page one that you know shouldn’t be there and in time, Google usually get it right. But it would be refreshing if they acknowledged this problem via a Google webmaster video, rather than Matt Cutts pretending to be a dinosaur.

To understand why the high street is being impacted we need to look at sector-by-sector shopping figures to ascertain our purchasing behaviours and see which industries are most likely to be attractive to online shoppers. 

Some of the biggest names to have gone into administration have come from the electrical, video & music or book sectors. It’s been estimated that over the last 12 months more than 800 major electrical chain stores have closed with the lion’s share of these coming from the Comet and Jessops closures. Furthermore Dixons and Argos are consolidating their survival as they look to close 162 stores and focus their resources on where the demand lies.

Closures of UK High street stores in the electrical, musical and book sectors:

• Zavvi – 125 stores – music
• Woolworths – 820 stores (once a major music retailer)
• Borders – 45 Stores – books and music
• Micro Anika – 7 stores – electronics
• Jessops – 193 stores – cameras
• HMV – 238 stores – music
• Comet – 236 stores – electronics
• Blockbuster – 528 stores – videos
• Best Buy – 8 stores – electronics
• Cecil Jacobs – 19 stores – cameras

It is therefore no surprise to see recent data from Verdict Retail that isolates the UK’s online spending patterns by sector. For some sectors, online sales have hardly made an impression at all on the high street, while for others, it looks like there is no turning back.

Electricals and music online boom meant High St bust

In 2003 5.5% of electrical purchases were made online, that figure has now risen to 43.3%, it is therefore no wonder that the High Street has taken a bettering in this particle sector. Furthermore with 81% of music and videos being bought online it is almost surprising that HMV and the others even lasted this long. In fact by 2017 the High Street’s share of music and video total sales is expected to be a paltry 2.3%.

Why are Health & Beauty online purchases so low?

Interestingly, only 5.5% of all Health and Beauty products are bought online. Is this because we prefer testing a product before we buy it? Or is the whole event of buying perfume, hand cream or dental floss so much more joyous to do in person? For example if you go to Boots or Selfridges and buy from the Clinique counter (as i have done many times), you are rewarded with a very nice shopping experience; your products are gift wrapped by a very pleasant Clinique employee. Plus you are given all the information about compatible products as well as current promotions. This type of service can not be easily replicated online.

The Amazon Effect

It seems no surprise that the major sectors that Amazon covers are also the sectors that have the highest share of online purchases and indeed the largest amount of high Street companies that have gone bust. So the combination of Amazon offering extreme cut prices alongside dubious taxation activity has seen this sector change considerably over the last five years. Amazon therefore have placed themselves in the ideal sector. They are able to manage their taxes in their distribution model while offering the types of products to consumers who don’t need to try them before buying them. However, with a recent move to increase their commission on reseller sales they may have become too greedy and in the next few months we shall see whether this price hike will trigger a mass exodus or whether, like many times before, they simply put up with this dominant simply put up with the price hikes.

Groceries sector set to Boom

With just 5.5% of all grocery shopping being done online, it looks like the supermarkets have still got a lot to do to convince us to do more home-delivery shopping. It is obviously part of our culture to do the weekly shop, to feel the fruit and veg in our hands and then cue for ages at the checkout. However, this sector is set to boom over the coming years. Forrester says that by 2017, shoppers across Europe will spend nearly €10 billion online for food and drink. With major superstores such as Morrisons not even having an e-commerce platform, it seems that the sector can do nothing but grow.

Despite the worldwide slump and recession hitting many countries, 2012′s Global e-commerce spend saw a growth of 21%. The three biggest nations, in terms of total spend were USA, UK and Japan, with China set to take second place over the next couple of years. In terms of region growth, Asia Pacific, with a surging China and newly active Japan, is set to overtake a recession hit western Europe.

The UK’s online Dominance

It goes without saying that the US would have the highest e-commerce sales in the world. But more surprising is the UK’s online sales prominence as the largest online economy in Europe and the third largest in the world. By 2013 it is estimated that UK online sales will be almost 3 times more than Germany’s. This is astounding, based on the fact that Germany has a bigger economy generally, a larger population and better estimated GDP growth figures over the next couple years.

UK – Biggest online Spenders – per person

It seems that the consumer mindset in the UK to shop online, is much maturer than that of the rest of Europe. Or perhaps much more frivolous.

Here in the UK, we would happily purchase a holiday or a second hand car online whereas those larger purchases are less common in the rest of Western Europe. So much so that on average the UK digital buyer spends more than in any other country in the world, with Australia coming a close second. This year the spend per head is expected to reach $3,878, which is twice as much as Japan, and more than Germany and France put together. The latter two countries on average spend less than Spain and Italy – two countries that have experienced recessions this year.

China online spend to surge in 2013

In 2011 the UK B2C sales were double that of China’s ($109 Billion to $57 Billion), but In 2013 China will jump ahead of UK by $40 Billion in B2C sales ($142 Billion to $182 Billion). The increase in online sales in China is just staggering and will most probably be palpable. The spend per head per year is still relatively low (just $501 for 2012), but it’s the sheer number of people and integration with technology and the emergence of availability of broadband which is pushing this massive increase.

Note: Table 1 is from emarketer link above. Article by Sam

Our clients love using our SEO software almost as much as the results they get from them.

How does it work?

We deliver monthly natural search recommendations to our clients, which are supported by our unique SEO tracking tools and software. We have a proven track record of delivering the results our clients are after through better, more effective SEO and social interaction.

That’s why brands such as Marks and Spencer, L’Oreal, AXA, Alitalia, Eurobet and Siemens work with us and use our technology.

Whether you’re after an increase in traffic, ROI, lower acquisition costs or any other KPI, we have experience in achieving the results and helping your website work to its optimum in delivering more sales, greater brand awareness and more page impressions across hundreds of competitive keywords. Ultimately we want our clients to profit from greater site optimisation.

SEO Software and recommendations delivering success

Here’s just some of the headline results we have achieved for clients over the last few years.

• We gave Blinkbox (before they were acquired for millions by Tesco) an unfathomable 6,000% ROI
• In the preceding years, Blinkbox gained triple figure % traffic increases, year after year after year
• 70% increase in UK traffic, 40% increase in Italian traffic for Alitalia
• Alitalia have also achieved page one positions across multiple major purchase keyword terms
• BSkyB enjoyed 272% traffic increase on their product websites from our SEO recommendations
• 400% growth in SEO traffic overall to Sky sites
• For 36 months, on the trot, Sky enjoyed traffic growth
• Plus Sky achieved a substantial ROI on all their sites (25 in total) with a 5p average CPC for SEO traffic

Our SEO Tools showing success

Here are some of our results showing huge climbs in Natural Search positions for multiple keywords over several large corporations. To gain these results our Search Engineers offered daily or weekly recommendations to the clients, who implemented them to their sites. This rise in positions in Google gave the clients increased traffic and revenue.

Blinkbox SEO – owning the Online Movie sector

The Sun Newspaper – Football Club Success

Within a week of offering recommendations to The Sun, their site appeared for multiple premier league football team news searches, offering them a substantial increase in traffic.

Alitalia owning the “Flights to…” market for Italian Airports

After given onsite recommendations to the Alitalia UK site, the Italian airline’s presence in Google climbed significantly. Here are just some of the position increases in Google UK:

We’ve got lots and lots of new stories every day highlighting our results and big rises in search engine positions, if you would like to know more we’d love to talk more about them.

That rise equates to 2.7billion searches with an increase of 400million searches made by people in the UK on search engines such as the dominant Google plus others such as Bing, Yahoo and Ask.

There was a slight drop from December 2012 of 0.2%, which is obviously expected as the Christmas period typically out performs any other month in the year.

This increase in searches year on year in the UK search engines, could be attributed to the impact of smartphone usage across the industry. This could also be the reason why Google’s share of the market, which is still dominant and accounts for 88% of all searches made in the UK, dropped 3.18% this year.

Microsoft’s search sites had a slight recovery of 1.41% to 5.19%. Yahoo and Ask also enjoyed an increase in their share with rises of around 1% and 0.68% respectively.

Google pays for new search audiences

Google, ever aware of its market share across the globe made a strong-arm move on the smartphone market recently by offering a deal worth $1bn to Apple. For this amount, google will become default internet search engine on all IOS devices in 2014. This will include the iPhone ad iPad.

This acquisition of audience on Apple devices is coupled with a further $2.5bn the search engines spends to be the default search engine on other third party software. Google also pays Mozilla, with its Firefox browser, $400m a year.

It has been estimated by Morgan Stanley that Google will play close to $6.8bn a year for traffic acquisitions such as this. Current reported Google revenue is around $50bn a year.

Blogger outreach by Journalists

Well, journalists today often simply tweet a question or a story idea and hope their re-tweets will land on the Twitter-lap of the perfect story. But that’s just a Tweet and hope.

Another way is to enter a forum of the relevant community and ask straight up. And where better to go if your story is about child-care and the health of UK kids than Mumsnet?

That’s what Daily Mail journalist Zoe Brennan did yesterday when she asked Mumsnet members’ opinions on whether GPs too readily send kids to A&E.

The Daily Mail Question

Title: National Newspaper seeking stories of children sent to A&E inappropriately by GPs

“I am writing a feature for The Daily Mail about the increase in the number of children being sent to A&E. Figures released earlier this week show an increasing number of youngsters are sent direct to hospital, because GPs are reluctant to treat children. Babies in particular. This means long waits, and inappropriate care. Has your child been sent to A&E with a common infection or minor injury by your GP or NHS Direct? Have you an opinion on this subject, as a parent?”

It seems that she was not prepared for the backlash and almost torrent of reaction to the question. Mumsnet followers didn’t seem to hold back in being critical of her question, her previous articles and the newspaper she writes for.

The Mumsnet Responses

The first response from “PetiteRaleuse” set the ball rolling.

Another comment from “VivaLeBeaver” summed up many thoughts:
Why don’t you write an article you could actually be proud of Zoe? A proper piece of investigative journalism rather than all the drivel of cheap shot crap stories in the link below.

I’d love to see you try and do a difficult, responsible job like been a GP!

Though it wasn’t all anti-Daily Mail, most of the 250+ comment did expose the community’s dislike for such pieces and the newspaper itself. It will probably dictate future action by certain journalist factions on who they should approach.

This was a comment that stood out:

The company information has also been altered to read: “BURGER KING® USA official Twitter account. Just got sold to McDonalds because the whopper flopped =[ FREDOM IS FAILURE℠.http://mcdonalds.com”

Who Hacked the Burger King Twitter account?

It seems that the site has been hacked by Anonymous, the globally renowned collective of hackers who have been responsible for previous hacks on PayPal and Mastercard as well as most recently disclosing thousands of banker’s email addresses. However, other hackers were mentioned in the Tweets, plus the comments that were made did not carry the same wit or even political messages of previous Anonymous hacks. It is though a fluid collective of hackers so any type of personality could be involved.

The relatively non-sensical, unhumorous Tweets were being written by the hackers while many other Twitter users checked out the activity. As a plus BurgerKing managed to acquire 30,000 + new followers.

Interestingly someone somes up the sudden interest in BurgerKing’s Twitter account, (which was re-tweeted by the hackers) that “They may be hacked, but when was the last time ANYBODY talked about @BurgerKing this much?”

Twitter Hacker Update

Within a few hours, BurgerKing had managed to get Twitter to take control of the account and freeze it. This morning BurgerKing were back online, with the knowledge that they were yesterday the talk of Twitter, had 30K more followers and the Hackers that took over the account did not have the humour or wit of previous Anonymous ventures.

It’s quite ironic that Burger King have come out of this all quite well.

How long are Twitter Vine videos?

Six seconds. It works in a similar way to the 140 character ethos you get on a post in twitter, in only having a maximum of 6 seconds per video. But what’s best about the video offering is that you are able to take stop-motion videos, thus condensing more imagery into one video.

How do I get Twitter Vine?

If you have an iPhone, you just need to go to the Apple App store and download the free app. Currently the Twitter Vine app is only available for Apple iOS devices, such as the iPhone, but it won’t be too long before available on other operating systems, such as Android, Windows and Blackberry. We’ll update this post when Twitter Vine is available on Blackberry handsets. 

How do you use Twitter Vine?

Twitter Vine is extremely easy to use. You can make a full 6 second video or a cleverer stop-motion video (think Wallace and Gromit animation). It is as simple as touching the screen to start recording, and when you remove your finger from the screen, it stops.

So to do multiple, stop-motion images, you simply tap the screen, move the object, then tap the screen again. Once you’ve finished recording the video

Simple steps on How to Use Twitter Vine:

• Download Twitter Vine App from the IOS App Store
• Log-in to Twitter Vine with your Twitter account
• Touch the video camera icon in the top right of the screen
• You will now be able to make a video. To do so touch the screen for as long as you want to record. (Finger on the screen is recording, finger off is not recording).
• Once the video finishes you are given the option to write a caption next to the video – this is advised
• You are also given the option to share the video on Vine, Twitter and Facebook.
• The video is also saved to your phone’s photo library.

It’s as easy as that.

Here is Sam Cope‘s daughter’s first video – Say hello to Rabbity…

This one show’s us that you don’t have to use stop motion in all your videos. Here’s Sam’s other daughter Tabitha having breakie..

Will Twitter Vine be successful?

We believe that Vine will become a major part of the way we will Tweet in the future. Maybe we won’t all be doing creative stop motion videos, but we will be sharing our 6 second videos all the time. This really is a great fun innovative service.

The launch hasn’t been completely successful as yet. There has already been controversy regarding the app, after some users have complained about a “microporn” video that appeared on its “Editor’s Pick”, which features on the homepage. The video, which was covered only by a warning notice, has now been taking down. A company statement said,

“A human error resulted in a video with adult content becoming one of the videos in Editor’s Picks, and upon realizing this mistake we removed the video immediately.”

Twitter Vine on Facebook?

The porno video is not the only problem that Twitter has had to face. The continued rivalry between themselves and Facebook has meant that Vine can not have its own application on its rival’s site. Facebook did not mention Twitter’s Vine specifically, but a spokesman had this to say,

“For a much smaller number of apps that are using Facebook to either replicate our functionality or bootstrap their growth in a way that creates little value for people on Facebook, such as not providing users an easy way to share back to Facebook, we’ve had policies against this that we are further clarifying today”

These teething problems for Vine doesn’t necessarily mean it will fail, in fact 99% of apps have bugs when they are first introduced. I think after the success of Twitter and other sharing apps like Instagram, I have a feeling it will be a big success.

Is Vine Right For You?

As mentioned Vine is great fun. Making the stop-motion videos is easy and kids (of all ages) love it. Already Vine users are putting their creative hats on and making some pretty cool videos. Vine is in it’s early stages, the best thing you can do is download the app and see if it works for you. It’s highly unlikely after the first few weeks of an app that all of its kinks will be ironed out.

Should your company use Vine?

It’s a great opportunity to show off products you have for free and in video format. It does depend on your business, but you have the opportunity to show how your product works and how your customers can get the best out of them. On top of that it is a excellent chance to show customers that you’re has a fun side.

Here are some brands having fun on Twitter Vine

McDonalds Creative Use of Twitter Vine

Marks and Spencers creative use of Twitter Vine – Percy Pig

There are brands that are already using Twitter Vine as part of their social media campaigns to attract and convert new customers. Twitter Vine allows consumers and brands alike to exercise their creativity and make something unique, sharable, and tangible. This could be an excellent opportunity to do this in a different way.

What other apps can you use with Vine?

Even though it’s in the early stages, there are already apps becoming available

– VineGifR is a Mac app that turns a Vine URL into an animated GIF file.
– Just Vined is a page that lets you see the last 20 videos posted on Vine