Nick Baggott's CRM and Digital Marketing Blog

How to get Blog Links

Thanks to Barry Anderson of it-shortlist for this link. It is a blog article showing good ways to get more people to link to your blog and improve your SEO as a result. I'd add another simple one - make sure you have your blog url in your email sign off. I have had surprising success from that!

25 tips to get blog links

DFID Climate Change Blog Action Day

Happy to oblige by promoting this and linking to their blog. Blog Action Day for Climate Change

Marketing as it should be in 2009

Saw this on the train yesterday - poster for "This Festival Feeling" mag. A mag full of users views and reviews, promoted on facebook and twitter. For a free copy text your email address to the shortcode. Great!

Real Time Search

Interesting announcements recently in the world of real time search? What is that i hear you say? Well, if you are a Twitterer, then you will know that you can search for terms used in anyone's Tweets. So for example, if you search for "Nick Baggott", it won't just find me, it will also find anyone that has mentioned me in one of their recent tweets (their status updates).

For a while, this has been one of Twitter's killer app's. But now Facebook have developed a similar app that will allow you to search your friends' status updates for any comments that they hyave made about whatever it is you are searching for. So, if you were to search for "Manchester United" it would find any updates from your friends about the boys in red (good or bad).

There are definately some long term privacy issues around this if you can search anyone's status updates, but assuming you can only search your friends, then this could be a popular and neat tool for users. How it can be used for marketers is more of a challenge - certainly useful for research / checking what your fans are saying about you, even if nothing else as yet. Here is a simple article to bring you up to speed with the news....

real time search

Twitter Tips & Tools

Just read a great little book - "The Twitter Book" by Tim O'Reilly & Sarah Milstein. It is practical, simple and pragmatic. It also has lots of useful tips and suggests loads of free tools.

Here are some highlights, I have been updating my Twitter feed with Twitter related stuff, so you can check that out too. My twitter name is njbaggott.

First tool is Twhirl - I am now using this to manage my Twitter account - makes the business of sending personal messages, retweeting etc much easier

Twist does the same job as google Insights for search only on Twitter, just put in a name, word or phrase and Twist will tell you how many times people are using them on Twitter. Great for looking at trends. The example on the link abovew shows how the word "Flintoff" has been used more and more as the Ashes cricket takes centre stage in UK sport.

Tweetstats looks at any Twittterer and provides some useful stats on post frequency, content etc. The example is showing a Tweet Cloud for Will Carling's Twitter feed.

There are some great tips for using Twitter for business in the book too and i'll probably post those later if i get the time....

Google's free web tools

Thanks to Dave Chaffey for reminding me...

Here is the Google Agency Toolkit page that lists all of the tools that they offer for free. Insights for search is the most well known and useful, but a good range here to try...

Microsoft's brand new answer to Google's Insights for Search

Microsoft has just launched a new tool that plugs into Excel that allows you, not only to count how many people are searching for your brand (or your competitors') on Windows Live Search, but also to learn more about them.

It uses your Microsoft Live ID (used to be called a Microsoft passport) to add demographic variables. Everyone that has a hotmail, or MSN Messenger or Windows Live Spaces account, will have a Live ID, so the sample is pretty representative.

As the number of users is lower than Google, then i would recommend using Google to define absolute numbers, but if you are a big enough brand to show up on the stats in the Microsoft tool, then this a very useful free tool.

The neat thing is that as it is an Excel plug in (and is free) then you can take the data and manipulate it, graph it, rank it, combine it etc.

Why not check it out for yourself (proving you have Office 2007 as it doesn't work on previous editions - but you can download a free trial copy of 2007 on the site).

It has a vanity URL and is called "let search make you smarter" at the moment.

Launch of Nick Barley's new consultancy

My great friend and long time client, Nick Barley has set up his new marketing consultancy Twofingers. We'll be working together moving forward, I am sure. Nick is a brilliant operator with wonderful experience heading up marketing at Microsoft, Oracle and CA. He knows what's what and how to make things happen in Marketing. He is a visionary, no nonsense marketer, who gives it to you straight.

Men follow men on Twitter

Harvard Business Review has just published the results of a huge research project on Twitter and in particular, who is tweeting and following who? This is not an insignificant piece of work, HBR looked into 300,000 Twitter accounts. The results can be found here, in their article "men follow men and nobody tweets".

Here are some highlights:

- There are more women then men on Twitter (55/45) 

- But, men are much more likely to follow other men

- Women are also more likely to follow men than other women

- 10% of users account for 90% of tweets.

There is loads of good content in the HBR artice. Check out the link above to find out more....

Baltic Tour

I'm on the 3rd and final leg of my speaking tour of the Baltics - pretty much sold out each day with 100 people at each event. Well done to Best Marketing for arranging it!

The groups have been enthusiastic and open minded so far and seem pleased with the sessions based on the number of facebook and Linked In friend requests received so far.

I am very impressed by the fact that every city / airport / hotel so far has had free hi-speed wifi internet available. Makes working so easy. Also flying about is so quick and efficient on Baltic Air. The flight from Talinn to Riga actually left 20 mins early and landed 10 mins after the scheduled take off time!

Here are some pics from Talinn. First some touristy ones....

 

 

And now some pics of the event...

 

 

I must go on a diet!

Best have now booked for me to do a similar event in Croatia later this year.