Full Title: Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day
Author: Dave Evans
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 2008

“Put the buzz about your business to work for you. This comprehensive, perfectly paced guide will teach you how to make social media an active part of your marketing plan so that you can turn customer conversations about your brand, product, service, and company into a sustainable competitive advantage. Learn how you can tap the Social Web and amplify your current marketing efforts by listening and participating in conversations that drive measurable results.”

Buy on Amazon

SEO Moz: The SEO Pyramid

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – The SEO Fundamentals Pyramid from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

Google Analytics
Learn more about where your visitors come from and how they interact with your site. You’ll get the information you need to write better ads, strengthen your marketing initiatives, and create higher-converting websites. Learn more about the benefits. Google Analytics is free to everyone, whether you are an advertiser, publisher, or site owner.

Keywords
A ‘keyword’ campaign needs to be selected very carefully, and form the basis of content, meta-tags and search-marketing campaigns.

Link Popularity
Search engines rank websites according to other sites which link to them, and not all sites are created equal! A number of factors come into play in this, of which the main is still quality, relevant content.

Google Alerts
Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic.

There is also be some helpful information in the blogs I follow.

Love Life, Live It!

In 2008, Yaz El-Hakim, Hugh Bassett-Jones and Dominic Northcott, all staff at the University of Winchester, had a vision for “the best, most comprehensive, most intuitive and free of charge directory for anyone wanting to take part in any extreme or adrenaline sports anywhere in the country.” . Facing stiff  competition from others at the University of Winchester, Super Fun Days Out was one of only two successful businesses in the November 2008 rounds for new business start-ups, and the funding has been put to good use.  Read more.

In April 2009, I checked over the website and gave the guys some advice on how it could become more interactive, and the potential for using social media to encourage repeat visitors! In July 2009, I was asked, along with Helen Owten, to come on board as social media strategist, with a particular responsibility for Twitter (at that time standing at 11 followers), setting up a blog (which is gradually coming to life), and bookmarking through sites such as a Delicious (which is still really awaiting its turn!), whilst Helen was responsible for Facebook, YouTube and Flickr. I’m really enjoying the challenge of being more structured in my approach to a blog, and looking for ways to encourage engagement… and using that knowledge in improving my other social media strategies!

Read more:

• Super Fun Days Out website / adrenablog
• Super Fun Days Out Twitter (623 followers and rising!)
• Super Fun Days Out Delicious
• Super Fun Days Out YouTube
• Super Fun Days Out Facebook
• Hugh Bassett-Jones website (Hugh undertakes all the web development)

The Gathering: An Experiment in Church

At North Winchester Community Church we’ve been discussing the idea of a ‘new’ type of service, once a month, on Sunday evening’s, around the theme of a Pub Church (within the style of Fresh Expressions).

So, welcome to “The Gathering“, to which you can find out more details on the website, launched last night! I am naturally a night owl, and gained inspiration after our inaugural test-run on Sunday, as to where I could see this website fitting in a bit more… not that any of us really know how this service is going to turn out, as the whole point is that it’s experimental, and ready to be shaped by its members! The website is therefore fairly experimental and more explicitly a ‘work in progress’ than other sites that I have done.

Blog Content

The blog is structured with 3 basic pages for static content: what is the gathering about?; who can people contact to find out more?; where can people continue the discussions? For the remainder of the blog, the expectation is that the remainder of the entries will be blog/diary entries, listed in reverse order, with strong use of keywords/categories (although as we’re so experimental, these aren’t entirely clear, but we will monitor their evolvement) to allow visitors to filter the content that they desire. Of course, it wouldn’t be one of my sites without search (apparently the online world used to be 50% search, 50% through navigation… I think that balance has tipped in favour of searchers!)

WordPress.com Theme

Pressrow by Chris Pearson, a nice clean design, which allowed me to design my own header (using a collage of images from sxc.hu), and appears to have the features we need. The current NWCC site is moving across to self-hosted WordPress, so this may end up upon here, we’ll see how transferable it is, but I think it shows up the stunning pictures well!

Multi-Author Blog

This is my first attempt at using WordPress for a multi-author blog, but we want to get at least the organising group involved in blogging on the site, and then encourage others to engage and comment upon the site – maybe we need a touch of the polemical topics!

Social Media

Other than the blog itself, we have set up a Twitter feed, a Facebook group,  YouTube (no content yet) and Delicious (also no content), which seems approrpriate for a church which plans to not base itself around ‘sermons’, but other styles of discussion and interaction – including mix/match of online/offline…. as we said, all very experimental!

As I have built up my web design skills, I thought it was worth building up a portfolio of work, attracting attention from those who will be interested in my skills, particularly my content writing and information architecture skills, once the the PhD was completed.I wanted something contemporary and clean looking, whilst providing useful information.

• The portfolio section of the site is the key section of the site, explaining the rationale for each of the sites.
• Quite a lot of resources content on the site overlaps with the /designproject site.
• I am more interested in the research side (finding and structuring information), and writing content, than programming the site.
• In future I will actively search for free software, image and other sites to recommend.
• Hosted by 1and1.co.uk. The URL www.digital-fingerprint.co.uk also redirects to this site.

Visit: http://www.mydesigna.co.uk

Currently in the process of moving this content across to this site!

Previous Design: