Finding a way for your company onto Youtube

Obviously, you want your company to be on Youtube. It’s a great engagement medium with a massive population.

But how? My company is boring, what will we make videos about?

Blendtec, is still the best example of this. Take a boring blending company, throw some cool gadgets into  their blenders, and blend the hell out of it and you’ve got a classic series of Youtube videos.

My first foray into Youtube for Gumtree has been to make user guides which gives us a valid reason to be on Youtube and benefit from the exposure but also more importantly, it helps educate users on using the site correctly and safely. We even set up a dedicated page on Gumtree using the Youtube API, which was fun, here: http://guide.gumtree.com

If a blending company can find an entertaining angle to make videos for Youtube, so can your company!

Does Twitter marketing work?

It’s still a big question, does Twitter marketing work? Well if you’re Gumtree, you want lots of traffic so that there are lots of buyers for the posted ads so one of my tasks is to drive traffic from Twitter and it is working great!

I’ve started Twitter accounts in a few Gumtree cities and only started tracking the results half way through October but as you can see from the graph below, its really starting to pull in quality traffic.

At this rate, we would have pulled in 350 000 hits per quarter via Twitter to which we can put a cash value, making Twitter a very valuable tool for us.

 

Patience is the key to social media marketing

It’s been 6 months since I’ve joined Gumtree to take on their social media strategy. One of the things I did well was to manage the expectations of my peers right at the beginning of the process, by saying that they shouldn’t believe the hype when people talk about viral, the mass reach of social media etc because this is going to take time.

And time it has taken! 6 months down the line and only now am I happy to show results to my peers and my colleagues. My favourite graphs so far are the ones in this post. (Yes they are the same as the last post, apologies but it’s a good graph!)

The lesson: Social media will not show results tomorrow, you won’t have 50k fans on Tuesday and don’t chase ‘viral’. Viral is a very natural process that will happen when you consistently create and share quality content. 

The Gumtree groundswell

It’s been a quiet few months for me while we knuckled down and put our Gumtree social media strategy into play. It’s great to see the results starting to come through now.

One of the tactics we implemented was to engage with the community on a natural, one-to-one basis (the basics of a social media strategy) which we have been doing since around May. This in theory should create a groundswell effect online, I.E. the more we talk and engage (using best practice engagement techniques of course!) the more other people talk about us.

The only way we can measure this is to blanket measure increases in traffic from social media sources to Gumtree and the results have been surprisingly good! See the graphs below.

The lesson: Simply talking naturally to your community can bring strong results for your comms / engagement campaigns.

I love the web 3

I love the web because it brings you the best lawyer's name ever:

http://failblog.org/2009/09/09/lawyer-name-win/

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I love the web 2

I love the web because it has ninja kitties with 'skills' that Napoleon Dynamite would have been proud of:

http://icanhascheezburger.com/2009/08/10/funny-pictures-video-kitteh-string/

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I love the web 1

I love the web because it has amazing pictures of Cape Town, making me excited about my trip there in April!

http://www.capetown.travel/winter/vote/

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Friday Fun on the Gumtree blog

I've been having some fun this week using my Scroobl experience to develop a cartoon for the Gumtree blog. The trick this time is that I got someone that can actually draw! Have a look and tell me what you think in the comments:

http://blog.gumtree.com/cartoon-jim-olly-part-1/

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Chrome OS is coming

Is anyone suprised by this announcement? I'm certainly not. Creating an operating system for computers always seemed to me to be the next natural step for Google after they created the Android OS, aimed more at mobile devices.

It also feels like Google's most aggressive move yet towards cloud based computing as most applications (if not all!) will be web based meaning that the device and the OS are simply a means of contacting and working from 'the cloud'.

It raises immediate questions of compatibility as new OS's always do. Will I be able to open my MS office documents in Chrome without losing the formatting? Will I have the same trouble with Flash and Java as on uBuntu?

Is this the death of uBuntu?
uBuntu is a great project and a step in the right direction towards free OS's. But it just doesn't quite work well enough for me yet. You would imagine that a Google operating system would not have these kinds of problems somehow. So Chrome really should be a free, fully working OS, addressing the above compatibility concerns which makes it a definite uBuntu killer for me. I wouldn't re-install uBuntu for a while but I would definitely be keen to install Chrome and based on Google's history of excellent platforms, I don't think I will be disappointed.

There are some questions I still need answer however:

• Chrome seems very browser based. What happens when I don't have an internet connection?
• What happens when I visit SA and am on slow connection speeds?
• Will we be able install Chrome on current Windows machines
• Can Chrome and MS run alongside eachother like uBuntu does?

Either way, as someone who operates almost entirely in the 'Google cloud', its a very exciting project doing things the right way: open source, virus free, fast and light.

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Trending competitions are rubbish

I've noticed that the #moonfruit hashtag is still at number on the the trending topics on Twitter this morning. This pisses me off.

Moonfruit are bribing Twitterers to use their hashtag in every conversation they have on Twitter by (supposedly) offering a macbook pro a day to someone who does. So yes, the campaign reached its objective of getting to number 1 on the trending topics like #squarespace did a few weeks ago.

But there are two reasons this pisses me off:

1. So Moonfruit got to the top of trending topics. The problem is that it was done with an unrelated hashtag in random conversation so anyone browsing through the trending topics still doesn't have a clue what Moonfruit is or what they do. I also very much doubt it did much to the traffic on their website. So the campaign didn't drive traffic and didn't drive true awareness so what is the point.
2. These competitions will stuff (and I really want to use a stronger word) up what hashtags are meant to be for and thats aggregating conversation so people can find related content. IE, lots of people were taking about Tweetcamp on the weekend so Tweetcamp trended (which was exciting for me!) and people browsing the trending page could get an idea of what it was about and related links. Moonfruit is trending but when you browse through the trending page the conversation is complety random. "Feeding my cat #moonfruit". What the hell is the point of that?! No one walks around in real life going "Good morning mate. Coca Cola".
   

So to sum it up: Clueless, old school, BS marketers stop stuffing (and I mean something else) up a very good system that is very helpful when used the right way. And if you were one of the guilty ones that got sucked into this and used the hashtag, shame on you. You're encouraging the clueless ones to do it more and eventually trending and hashtags will just be a pointless mess.

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