Many companies have jumped onto the Facebook application bandwagon. Most of these apps bomb and the ROI must surely be negative. However, there are some great apps out there. Here’s a case study about an app we found that ticks the right boxes.

A blogger by the name of Derek Powazek recently ranted about how Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is “poisoning the web”, and that it “should not be undertaken by people with brains or souls”, which wasn’t a very nice thing for him to say.

Derek followed up his post with an FAQ, in which he offers an explanation (he’s stopped smoking) and a few clarifications. Both articles are worth reading, because they’re very entertaining and well-written.

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We send out a lot of newsletters for clients, as well as our own newsletter. There’s a lot to think about for each one – how many articles, what images to use, what’s on the banner – but the most important part of every newsletter is literally one of the smallest.

The headline.

Think of it this way: if you’re anything like me, you receive a lot of emails on any given day. You prioritise a lot of them by looking at the sender, and then you go through the rest in some kind of order. Anything that looks unimportant or dull goes straight to the recycle bin, because you simply don’t have the time for it. Most newsletters fall into this trap.

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Social Media is undeniably a powerful tool in the hands of patients, enabling them to give immediate feedback to doctors, pharmacists and marketers.

Patients are able to exchange vast amounts of information and insight into their conditions through a range of social media tools, providing valuable perspectives. For example, people who suffer from diabetes can engage with online communities and cover areas related to their condition, such as how successful their medication or glucose meters are. Discussions like these provide a support network for patients and allow healthcare providers to listen and engage with their target audiences.

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It’s pretty common for a client to ask about having a Flash intro on their website. My immediate reaction is to suck air through my teeth like a plumber who’s been quizzed about the cost of fixing a boiler – not because I know it will be expensive, but because I know that it is a bad idea.

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Social media. It is thought of by many companies as the domain of the clinically bored, and by many marketers as being actively dangerous towards the corporate image.

In the right or wrong hands, social media (that is, blogging and the use of social network sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube) can be the difference between a company being accepted as cool and being a laughing stock. When marketers only use social media to throw out the company line, they quite often miss the point of the medium.

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More and more healthcare companies are building their presence on Twitter. Johnson & Johnson, Novartis, Roche, Astra Zeneca, GE Healthcare and Boehringer Ingelheim are all tweeting and being tweeted at. Some companies are even using Twitter to promote specific branded treatments: Novo Nordisk call attention to their Novolog and Levemir diabetes treatments.

In spite of all the hype surrounding Twitter, it looks like these early adopters might be on to something. Whilst still small in comparison to Facebook, Twitter offers something unique: it attracts a lot of content creators and critics – the minority of people who actually create content on the internet as opposed to the majority who merely browse and consume content. These creators are the ones most likely to discuss your brand, either on Twitter itself or on other social networks, such as blogs, message boards, YouTube and so on. For companies, the benefit of Twitter is clear: it’s about seeding your message to the creators so that it finds its way all over the web. It’s all about PR.

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An Englishman, Irishman and a Scotsman walk into a bar. The bartender turns round and says, “Is this some kind of joke?”

I’m sorry: terrible gag. I don’t know any good jokes. However, love it or hate it, would you put it on your company website?

One of the hardest things to get right with online content is tone. A lot of content – both on intranets and the internet – is written in a formal ‘company’ voice, thick with information and respectability. More light-hearted styles of writing are often shunned for coming across as inappropriate.

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What is a user persona and why do we use them?

A persona is a detailed profile of a user – whether that person is a user for a website, an intranet, an animation or a widget. It turns them from being just “the user” into “Roger Moore, retired, 65 years old, partially-blind, challenged by new technology”: it puts a face on the target audience of the project you’re working on.

Personas are used across marketing. We use them to help us understand the audience of a project we’re working on. This is important because as digital media gurus with a high degree of familiarity with digital technology, we can become removed from the way the general public actually uses, navigates or searches. Similarly, our clients, who know their own product or service inside-out, can also forget that the general public has a different perspective. So personas are about walking a mile in someone else’s shoes – putting the user’s hat on, and asking the questions that they would ask. Would Roger Moore notice that button, and know to click on it?

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Often a common error by UK companies when creating keywords for a non-English site is to either leave keywords in English (a big no-no) or to try and use a tool to translate them.

The latter doesn’t work, as anyone who has tried using a translation dictionary may have found: words which may be correct are not necessarily the words a native speaker would use.

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