Wellbeing day goes very well

Well it has been a positive month for eskimosoup, we have some nice new clients, we have some opportunities to work on some great new projects and we finish the month with a great session with Developing Impact.

Developing Impact offer a variety of services specialising in helping companies and individuals achieve new levels of success through positive motivation.

Mike Roby at Developing Impact tailored a session on workplace stress, showing us how to recognise it and control it.

Mike if you are reading this thank you for a great session and staying around all afternoon to speak to everyone on a one to one basis.

"Amazing New Website"

It's always good to hear when our clients like the work we do for them, and even better when they tell all their friends.

Rich Mckeating of RMK Fitness and Wellbeing was so proud of the new website eskimosoup created for him he let all his friends know about it by setting his facebook status to, "I am happy because my amazing new website is now live!!".

Well Rich it was our pleasure, the whole of the team here enojoyed working on your website and we'll look forward to working with you again soon!

:o)

Wellbeing day at eskimosoup

eskimosoup is having a wellbeing day in our ongoing mission to have the best working environment possible. Helping us out is Mike Roby of Developing Impact Mike has put together a programme enabling us to understand more on stress and the physical and psychological effects it can have on us, what we can do recognise these effects and what we can do to deal with them ending the session with simple exercises that help us beat stress before it beats us. eskimosoup is part of the Mindful Employer initiative which is aimed at increasing awareness of mental health at work and providing support for businesses in recruiting and retaining staff.

It's a big thank you from our new stratigic partner and a bigger waist line for Chris

It's with great pleasure we accept this basket of quality chocolate from Upright Solutions as a thank you for completing their new Hull based Internet marketing specialist website

Luckily for the eskimosoup team and MD Chris' waistline we managed to prise the basket from his hands and distribute the chocolate around the office.

Anyone interested in incredibly delicious chocolate Buy Chocolate Online from The Chocolate Society

Anyone for some more customers?

Celebrating A True Goal Orientated Alliance

Internet marketing, Search Engine Optimisation, Pay per click marketing, and Social Media Marketing is an area of marketing that as businesses and consumers we don’t all quite ‘get’ just yet.

Most of ‘get ‘traditional marketing and advertising. You push you message on to as many of your targeted audience as you can afford for your budget and hope that the message sticks with enough people so you can get a return on investment. We have refined this technique over the past 100 or so years and as business people and consumers we understand it (mostly).

Internet marketing or good internet marketing does not work like this. It is not another TV channel; it is not another place to stick our advertising banner, radio advert etc, although we can (with limited success).

The true power of the internet is permission marketing, that is we allow clients and customers to find us when they are interested in our products / services. Google Adwords is a good example of this. If you sell frisbies we can run an advert for those who are looking for frisbies only those looking for frisbies will get the ad and no one else. It’s the same with organic searches using search engine optimisation techniques (SEO) we only want to market our frisbies to people who are interested in frisbies and no one else.

Social Media Marketing allows us to take it a step further allowing us to open a dialogue (talk) with our prospective customers and with the help of facebook for example we can now sell our frisbies to a very targeted audience, males, 18-35, single living in Manchester.

Now finding the right organisation to work with on a goal orientated internet marketing strategy is not easy we have always felt that an honest and upfront approach to how we do things helps and we try and see as many people face to face (see post on free social media marketing event we are putting on). But even we need good suppliers to make it happen.

This is where Upright Solutions comes in. We have been working with Upright Solutions for a number of years and the results have been excellent a very personal service with a no jargon honest approach to getting lots more business via the web.

Marketing Agency in Hull - Eskimosoup
Search Engine Optimisation in Hull - Upright Solutions

Free Social Media Marketing event for Hull Businesses

In association with Hull Business Improvement District we are putting on a free workshop on how to increase sales through effective marketing using social networks

Social Networks (Myspace, Facebook, Bebo, Twitter, Youtube and the rest) are communities of millions of people, all revealing who they are and what they do and do not like. There is clearly great potential for business and, with the right knowledge, you can make the most of the massive opportunity social networking represents. This workshop will show you how your business can reap the benefits of the social networking phenomena - with just a little time and effort and, best of all, practically no cost.

Date: Thursday 10th September, 2009
Time: 2pm – 4pm
Venue: Hull & Humber Chamber of Commerce, 34/38 Beverley Road, Hull, HU3 1YE

Who is this event aimed at?
Owners, managers, and marketing teams of private businesses serving consumer and business customers, and who wants to find out more about the potential benefits of marketing through online social networks.

This is an information-led event with practical tools and tips that delegates can take away and use themselves.

You will learn how to profit from:
• Newsfeeds • Blogging and Microblogging
• Forums • Online Business Networking

Speaker: Chris Middleton, Managing Director

Chris has presented on the topic of utilising social media throughout the UK and has driven campaigns in the private sector with the NHS.

To register your place, please email katie@eskimosoup.co.uk or call 01482 223866

Place are limited, so early booking recommended.

We hope you can make it.

Five easy ways to make your business website more social

Social media is an increasingly important part of the internet. But many businesses are still trying to decipher what it's really all about and how it can relate to their bottom lines. Naturally, not everyone is jumping on the bandwagon and throwing all their resources at Twitter, Facebook, et. al.

The truth is that for many businesses social media makes sense -- in moderate doses. If you're a small business owner, chances are you don't need to hire a full-time social media manager and the only thing social you're likely to get from social media experts is a lot of smooth-talk.

If your company is on a budget and doesn't have the time and money to invest in tweeting and poking, a great way to get involved with social media is to make your website more social. The good news: this doesn't need to be complicated. Here are five easy ways to make your website more social without spending and arm and a leg or putting your neck on the line.

Social Links

You almost certainly hope that the content on your website is of interest and use to somebody. And chances are that it is. So make it easy for those who find your content to be of value to share it with others. Thanks to services like AddThis and ShareThis, it's easy to give your users the ability to share your content with friends, family and on popular social media websites. Just add some JavaScript code to the desired pages and you're set.

Comments

Depending on the focus of your website and the type of content you have, allowing users to leave public comments in certain areas can be a really good idea. If you're using a CMS like WordPress to run your website, comment functionality is already built in. If comment functionality isn't native to your CMS (or you're not using a CMS at all), comments still don't have to be difficult. If you don't want to build functionality from scratch, you can use something like JS-Kit's ECHO offering to embed comments and real-time conversation to your website.

A Blog

A blog is a great tool for posting relevant, meaningful content for your website's users. Whether your company uses a blog to demonstrate its domain expertise through thoughtful posts about its industry or your company uses a blog to make management more accessible to customers and prospective customers, there are a lot of great ways to take advantage of a blog. Thanks to open-source platforms like WordPress and Joomla, setting up a blog doesn't require a degree in rocket science.

Forums

Although forums/message boards might seem very 1990s in this age of the social network, the truth is that forums are a great way to provide for customer interaction -- with each other and amongst themselves. There are a number of free open-source forum platforms, including phpBB and Simple Machines Forum. Or you could go with a popular paid option in vBulletin.

Photo Galleries

If you sell physical product and have customers who love to show off, adding a user-generated photo gallery to your site may be a worthwhile endeavor. Here again there are free open-source solutions at your service, such as Coppermine and Gallery.

source taken from econsultancy.

A nice little Twitter

I updated our twitter yesterday "Writing a website proposal to market a brilliant new piece of kit to help the blind read anything they like (1%of the blind read Braille)". A BBC Journalist picked it up and got in touch with us to find out more. We spoke to our client and now they are in discussions to have TV and press coverage. not bad for one little twitter. P.S we got the job.

Daredevil Dawson

Is it a bird…?
Is it a plane…..?

No it’s our very own daredevil Katie D…

She is jumping out of a plane at 15,000 feet, although she is strapped to a man (I think Katie secretly hopes he is very, very hunky).

You might think she is completely bonkers, well she is, but aside from that the jump is for a charity that is very close to Katie’s heart and in memory of her friend Matt.

She is helping raise money for an ECG machine in memory of Matt who suddenly passed away in 2006 at the age of 25 from Sudden Adult death syndrome.

Sudden Adult Death Syndrome is the adult version of Infant Cot Death, there is no warning, no cure and no real explanation as to why this happens to seemingly healthy people.

With the use of ECG tests and Echo screenings most cardiac abnormalities can be diagnosed, patients helped and research collaborated.

They are working hard at raising funds. Hopefully Katie’s contribution will put them even closer to their target and also help make sure, less families and friends have to suffer losing someone.

During office hours Katie D is our marketing consultant, often thinking up of new and fantastic ideas to help our clients have that market edge. Dedicated, always ready for the next challenge and a general little star there is no wonder she is happy to risk life and limb for a good cause.

Katie D will be jumping on Saturday 22nd August at 3pm, at Hibaldstow Airfield near Brigg. Please feel free to come down and watch her jump. It should be a great afternoon out.

If you would like to find out more or sponsor Katie’s charity sky dive then please visit

http://www.justgiving.com/katie-dawson/

Rachel Galtrey, Client Care

Increasing Blog Traffic

1. Choose the Right Blog Software (or Custom Build)
   The right blog CMS makes a big difference. If you want to set yourself apart, I recommend creating a custom blog solution - one that can be completely customized to your users. In most cases, WordPress, Blogger, MovableType or Typepad will suffice, but building from scratch allows you to be very creative with functionality and formatting. The best CMS is something that's easy for the writer(s) to use and brings together the features that allow the blog to flourish. Think about how you want comments, archiving, sub-pages, categorization, multiple feeds and user accounts to operate in order to narrow down your choices. OpenSourceCMS is a very good tool to help you select a software if you go that route.
   
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2. Write Title Tags with Two Audiences in Mind
   First and foremost, you're writing a title tag for the people who will visit your site or have a subscription to your feed. Title tags that are short, snappy, on-topic and catchy are imperative. You also want to think about search engines when you title your posts, since the engines can help to drive traffic to your blog. A great way to do this is to write the post and the title first, then run a few searches at Overture, WordTracker & KeywordDiscovery to see if there is a phrasing or ordering that can better help you to target "searched for" terms.
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3. Participate at Related Forums & Blogs
   Whatever industry or niche you're in, there are bloggers, forums and an online community that's already active. Depending on the specificity of your focus, you may need to think one or two levels broader than your own content to find a large community, but with the size of the participatory web today, even the highly specialized content areas receive attention. A great way to find out who these people are is to use Technorati to conduct searches, then sort by number of links (authority). Del.icio.us tags are also very useful in this process, as are straight searches at the engines (Ask.com's blog search in particular is of very good quality).
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4. Tag Your Content
   Technorati is the first place that you should be tagging posts. I actually recommend having the tags right on your page, pointing to the Technorati searches that you're targeting. There are other good places to ping - del.icio.us and Flickr being the two most obvious (the only other one is Blogmarks, which is much smaller). Tagging content can also be valuable to help give you a "bump" towards getting traffic from big sites like Reddit, Digg & StumbleUpon (which requires that you download the toolbar, but trust me - it's worth it). You DO NOT want to submit every post to these sites, but that one out of twenty (see tactic #18) is worth your while.
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5. Don't Jump on the Bandwagon
   Some memes are worthy of being talked about by every blogger in the space, but most aren't. Just because there's huge news in your industry or niche DOES NOT mean you need to be covering it, or even mentioning it (though it can be valuable to link to it as an aside, just to integrate a shared experience into your unique content). Many of the best blogs online DO talk about the big trends - this is because they're already popular, established and are counted on to be a source of news for the community. If you're launching a new blog, you need to show people in your space that you can offer something unique, different and valuable - not just the same story from your point of view. This is less important in spaces where there are very few bloggers and little online coverage and much more in spaces that are overwhelmed with blogs (like search, or anything else tech-related).
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6. Link Intelligently
   When you link out in your blog posts, use convention where applicable and creativity when warranted, but be aware of how the links you serve are part of the content you provide. Not every issue you discuss or site you mention needs a link, but there's a fine line between overlinking and underlinking. The best advice I can give is to think of the post from the standpoint of a relatively uninformed reader. If you mention Wikipedia, everyone is familiar and no link is required. If you mention a specific page at Wikipedia, a link is necessary and important. Also, be aware that quoting other bloggers or online sources (or even discussing their ideas) without linking to them is considered bad etiquette and can earn you scorn that could cost you links from those sources in the future. It's almost always better to be over-generous with links than under-generous. And link condoms? Only use them when you're linking to something you find truly distasteful or have serious apprehension about.
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7. Invite Guest Bloggers
   Asking a well known personality in your niche to contribute a short blog on their subject of expertise is a great way to grow the value and reach of your blog. You not only flatter the person by acknowledging their celebrity, you nearly guarantee yourself a link or at least an association with a brand that can earn you readers. Just be sure that you really are getting a quality post from someone that's as close to universally popular and admired as possible (unless you want to start playing the drama linkbait game, which I personally abhor). If you're already somewhat popular, it can often be valuable to look outside your space and bring in guest authors who have a very unique angle or subject matter to help spice up your focus. One note about guest bloggers - make sure they agree to have their work edited by you before it's posted. A disagreement on this subject after the fact can have negative ramifications.
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8. Go Beyond Text in Your Posts
   Blogs that contain nothing but line after line of text are more difficult to read and less consistently interesting than those that offer images, interactive elements, the occasional multimedia content and some clever charts & graphs. Even if you're having a tough time with non-text content, think about how you can format the text using blockquotes, indentation, bullet points, etc. to create a more visually appealing and digestible block of content.
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9. Cover Topics that Need Attention
   In every niche, there are certain topics and questions that are frequently asked or pondered, but rarely have definitive answers. While this recommendation applies to nearly every content-based site, it's particularly easy to leverage with a blog. If everyone in the online Nascar forums is wondering about the components and cost of an average Nascar vehicle - give it to them. If the online stock trading industry is rife with questions about the best performing stocks after a terrorist threat, your path is clear. Spend the time and effort to research, document and deliver and you're virtually guaranteed link-worthy content that will attract new visitors and subscribers.
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10. Pay Attention to Your Analytics
    Visitor tracking software can tell you which posts your audience likes best, which ones don't get viewed and how the search engines are delivering traffic. Use these clues to react and improve your strategies. Feedburner is great for RSS and I'm a personal fan of Indextools. Consider adding action tracking to your blog, so you can see what sources of traffic are bringing the best quality visitors (in terms of time spent on the site, # of page views, etc). I particularly like having the "register" link tagged for analytics so I can see what percentage of visitors from each source is interested enough to want to leave a comment or create an account.
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11. Use a Human Voice
    Charisma is a valuable quality, both online and off. Through a blog, it's most often judged by the voice you present to your users. People like empathy, compassion, authority and honesty. Keep these in the forefront of your mind when writing and you'll be in a good position to succeed. It's also critical that you maintain a level of humility in your blogging and stick to your roots. When users start to feel that a blog is taking itself too seriously or losing the characteristics that made it unique, they start to seek new places for content. We've certainly made mistakes (even recently) that have cost us some fans - be cautious to control not only what you say, but how you say it. Lastly - if there's a hot button issue that has you posting emotionally, temper it by letting the post sit in draft mode for an hour or two, re-reading it and considering any revisions. With the advent of feeds, once you publish, there's no going back.
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12. Archive Effectively
    The best archives are carefully organized into subjects and date ranges. For search traffic (particularly long tail terms), it can be best to offer the full content of every post in a category on the archive pages, but from a usability standpoint, just linking to each post is far better (possibly with a very short snippet). Balance these two issues and make the decision based on your goals. A last note on archiving - pagination in blogging can be harmful to search traffic, rather than beneficial (as you provide constantly changing, duplicate content pages). Pagination is great for users who scroll to the bottom and want to see more, though, so consider putting a "noindex" in the meta tag or in the robots.txt file to keep spiders where they belong - in the well-organized archive system.
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13. Reveal as Much as Possible
    The blogosphere is in love with the idea of an open source world on the web. Sharing vast stores of what might ordinarily be considered private information is the rule, rather than the exception. If you can offer content that's usually private - trade secrets, pricing, contract issues, and even the occasional harmless rumor, your blog can benefit. Make a decision about what's off-limits and how far you can go and then push right up to that limit in order to see the best possible effects. Your community will reward you with links and traffic.
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14. Only One Post in Twenty Can Be Linkbait
    Not every post is worthy of making it to the top of Digg, Del.icio.us/popular or even a mention at some other blogs in your space. Trying to over-market every post you write will result in pushback and ultimately lead to negative opinions about your efforts. The less popular your blog is, the harder it will be to build excitement around a post, but the process of linkbait has always been trial and error - build, test, refine and re-build. Keep creating great ideas and bolstering them with lots of solid, everyday content and you'll eventually be big enough to where one out of every 20-40 posts really does become linkbait.
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15. Make Effective Use of High Traffic Days
    If you do have linkbait, whether by design or by accident, make sure to capitalize. When you hit the front page of Digg, Reddit, Boing Boing, or, on a smaller scale, attract a couple hundred visitors from a bigger blog or site in your space, you need to put your best foot forward. Make sure to follow up on a high traffic time period with 2-3 high quality posts that show off your skills as a writer, your depth of understanding and let visitors know that this is content they should be sticking around to see more of. Nothing kills the potential linkbait "bump" faster than a blog whose content doesn't update for 48 hours after they've received a huge influx of visitors.
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16. Create Expectations and Fulfill Them
    When you're writing for your audience, your content focus, post timing and areas of interest will all become associated with your personal style. If you vary widely from that style, you risk alienating folks who've come to know you and rely on you for specific data. Thus, if you build a blog around the idea of being an analytical expert in your field, don't ignore the latest release of industry figures only to chat about an emotional issue - deliver what your readers expect of you and crunch the numbers. This applies equally well to post frequency - if your blog regularly churns out 2 posts a day, having two weeks with only 4 posts is going to have an adverse impact on traffic. That's not to say you can't take a vacation, but you need to schedule it wisely and be prepared to lose RSS subscribers and regulars. It's not fair, but it's the truth. We lose visitors every time I attend an SES conference and drop to one post every two days (note - guest bloggers and time-release posts can help here, too).
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17. Build a Brand
    Possibly one of the most important aspects of all in blogging is brand-building. As Zefrank noted, to be a great brand, you need to be a brand that people want to associate themselves with and a brand that people feel they derive value from being a member. Exclusivity, insider jokes, emails with regulars, the occasional cat post and references to your previous experiences can be off putting for new readers, but they're solid gold for keeping your loyal base feeling good about their brand experience with you. Be careful to stick to your brand - once you have a definition that people like and are comfortable with, it's very hard to break that mold without severe repercussions. If you're building a new blog, or building a low-traffic one, I highly recommend writing down the goals of your brand and the attributes of its identity to help remind you as you write.

Adopted from 21 Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic by Rand Fishkin

Not even the Big Hitters can avoid sites going down from time to time...

Micro-blogging service Twitter and social networking site Facebook have been severely disrupted by hackers.

Twitter was taken offline for more than two hours whilst Facebook's service was "degraded", according to the firms.

The popular sites were subject to so-called denial-of-service attacks on Thursday, the companies believe.

Denial-of-service (DOS) attacks take various forms but often involve a company's servers being flooded with data in an effort to disable them.

"Attacks such as this are malicious efforts orchestrated to disrupt and make unavailable services such as online banks, credit card payment gateways, and in this case, Twitter for intended customers or users," said Twitter co-founder Biz Stone on the company's blog.

The service was restored shortly after the blog post, but the companies have had to continue to fend off the attack.

Facebook said its service was reduced but not taken offline.

"No user data was at risk and we have restored full access to the site for most users," spokeswoman Brandee Barker told the AFP news agency.

"We're continuing to monitor the situation to ensure that users have the fast and reliable experience they've come to expect from Facebook."

Poster Child

Both sites have previously been targeted by hackers.For example, in January this year Twitter announced that 33 accounts had been hacked, including those belonging to US President Barack Obama and singer Britney Spears.

The latest attacks are what is known as a denial-of-service. These often use networks of computers - known as botnets -under the control of hackers.The strategy is often employed by protestors against, for example, government websites, said Roger Thompson, chief research officer at security firm AVG.

"Twitter has become a poster-child for our always-connected, always-on internet culture," he told BBC News.

"With the eyes of the world's media all trained on Twitter at the moment, those behind this latest attack may be using it as a means of highlighting the vulnerability of the sites we take for granted.

"There is no profit to be made from DOS and those who do carry out an attack like this will lose their botnet, showing there is no gain to be had."

Both sites now have millions of users worldwide.

Facebook claims more than 250m active users whilst a ComScore study suggests that Twitter had around 45 million users worldwide as of June 2009.

However, as many users interact with the service through mobile phones or third-party software, the actual number of users is likely to be higher.

The sites recently garnered worldwide attention when they were used by Iranians to co-ordinate demonstrations following the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president.

Many protestors believed there was electoral fraud and opposition leader Mir Hussein Mousavi should have won.

Twitter chose to delay upgrade work during the protests to allow communication to continue.In a BBC interview, co-founder Evan Williams denied the move had been a response to a US State Department request.

source taken from BBC News

for more information, hints and tips, go to www.eskimosoup.co.uk/facebook

Retailers Why Blog?...

If you have any expertise in the products you sell; you should blog. If your retail brand represents anything to do with trust, advice, or experience; you should blog. If you wish to push forward into online any authority and authenticity you have developed in-store to advise and influence people; you should blog.

The reason is blogging will bring you new customers, reinforce and strengthen your brand, and bring you more sales. But you must do it well.So to help you do it well, expert blogger on Lasoo Caroline Warnes has kindly put together the following tips. You can view Caroline’s Savvy shopping blog here.

Blogging tips

1. Have a blogging presence: It’s the age of social media and it’s important to have a presence in as many arenas as possible. Blogging gives your brand a human face and can establish you as an opinion-maker in your field.

2. Blog only about what you know: Credibility is very important online. Decide what you know, and blog about that. Don’t get distracted in something off-message.

3. Blog regularly: Decide from the start how often you can afford the time to blog, then stick to this schedule – whether it be daily, weekly, monthly (or multiple times daily, if you’ve got the luxury of lots of time). Readers are more likely to return when they know when to expect new content – and if it isn’t there when they visit the site, they will get frustrated.

4. Have a point of difference: You won’t attract a lot of visitors if you’re offering nothing new. Rather than rehashing what’s already out there, you should decide what will set you apart from the rest. This might be devoting the blog entirely to an aspect of your field that is rarely covered in-depth, it might be having strong opinions (and not being afraid to share them), it might be having a unique sense of humour – in fact, the best thing you can do is to let your personality shine through, rather than making it dry commentary.

5. Understand the community: Identify the other blogs that are relevant to your area and make a point of visiting them regularly (and leaving comments on them). It’s also a good idea to link back to entries on other blogs and offer your opinion on them. This exchange of links with other relevant blogs is a great way of building your own traffic and credibility in the blogging community.

6. Use social media: Using social media such as Facebook and Twitter to promote new entries on your blog is another great way to enter the community and grow your traffic.

7. Clean up your writing: Blog entries don’t necessarily need to be Shakespeare, but they should at least be readable. Run a spellchecker over your entries before you post them if you don’t trust yourself, or get someone who is good with spelling and grammar to read over them. Nothing is more of a turn-off than a poorly written blog.

Blogging is an investment. It won’t pay dividends to your retail business overnight – but it will deliver a very strong payback in the medium term when done well.Paul Marshall - CEO

original source from http://www.insideretailing.com.au/Latest/tabid/53/ID/5952/NEW-POST--Why-Blog.aspx

For more Social media marketing hits, tips, articles etc. check out our facebook page www.eskimosoup.co.uk/facebook