5 Social Media Mistakes

Everyone makes mistakes, but it’s not very often that those mistakes are seen by millions of people, incite user revolts, or create multi-million dollar lawsuits. In the world of social media, however, this can happen if a person or company is careless or too defensive. With that in mind, the following are some of the most notable blunders in social media, as well as lessons to take away from each event.

Hopefully companies and individuals can learn from these disasters and become more productive and engaged in social media rather than becoming the pariah of every tweet or wall post.

1. Facebook News Feed Controversy

Facebook launched one of the most revolutionary features in social media during September 2006: the Facebook News Feed. It's launch however, didn’t go so well – within a week, 750,000 users were protesting the feature. After several days, Facebook added privacy controls and created a Facebook group to discuss privacy and news feed issues.

The Lesson: Prepare users for major changes and be proactive in responding to criticism. Facebook launched news feed as a complete surprise, throwing off many users. Now Facebook rolls out new features gradually... but even to this day they are not always well received.

2. Sony BMG Copy Protection Scandal

Sony decided to place copy protection (XCP) on its CDs to prevent pirating. However, the XCP software created new vulnerabilities on computers that malware could exploit. Blogger Mark Russinovich broke the story and launched a wave of bloggers and criticism against it. Worse, Sony tried to stonewall bloggers instead of being upfront, fanning the flames. The result was millions lost in class-action lawsuits.

The Lesson: Two lessons here. Number one; don’t try to fight against user behaviour using ill-advised malware. Lesson number two is be upfront about mistakes. If Sony had been up front and apologised immediately, the results of the scandal might have been far different.

3. 'Motrin Moms' ill advised advertisement

Medicine manufacturer Motrin decided that it would be a great marketing plan to launch a social media campaign for International Baby Wearing Week by producing a well-made YouTube video. However, they didn’t anticipate the backlash. Mothers everywhere were not pleased with babies being made into fashion statements and Motrin got an earful from the Internet community.

The Lesson: Understand your audience before engaging with it. Had Motrin done some research, it probably would have anticipated such a backlash. People don’t mess around when you talk about their kids.

4. Astrospace Twitter Account

Twitter user Astrospace, now Astronautics, simply flipped out against Twitter and his followers. After astrospace/astronautics lost his cool, he deleted his account, which was quickly snapped up by somebody else. Eventually he did return with most of his followers on his astronautics account, but with far more confusion and far less credibility.

The Lesson: Keep your emotions in check. You may get really angry or depressed over events in social media, but like any public situation, tempered emotions will prevent embarrassment on your end.

5. Facebook Terms of Service

Facebook has had it's share of social media issues. It's most recent one was the change to Facebook’s terms of service that was soon reverted after users and bloggers cried out in protest. Instead of dragging its feet however, Facebook quickly responded to user concerns and created an open forum for discussing changes to Facebook.

The Lesson: Proactive engagement with your users and customers during controversy helps address concerns. Facebook has clearly learned from its past mistakes and made a visible effort to incorporate user information. This helped keep the terms of service controversy from blowing up into an even bigger mess.

When building a brand, engaging customers, or just communicating with friends, it is vital to remember how quickly even a single update can go viral in social media. People value honesty, being upfront, and listening to others. Employing these principles can prevent social media blunders from turning into lawsuits and PR disasters.

The science of SEO - 3 tips for great Google rankings

With a title like that, I can hear you all yawning now! But keep reading, you will learn something... I promise!!

Many people ask us 'How can I be number one in Google?' We all want to know don't we? And there are many companies out there who will guarantee it... as longs as you part with your hard earned cash of course.

The truth is, NOBODY can guarantee you a number one placement in the all important Google rankings... not even those nice people at Google themselves.

But what we CAN do is abide by the rules and monitor your rankings for results... and make changes as necessary.

Websites are like plants when applying SEO (search engine optimisation) techniques. Without enough attention they wither and die, but with tender love and care and enough attention, they flourish!

So, what are the techniques we need to apply to see results then? Well, the bad news is, there are over 200 of them! But the good news is, we don't need to apply every single one to see great results...

So, here are the first 3 (in our opinion - as Google produces next to NO guidelines on this - but more about that in a later post)...

1. Copy and Keywords

GREAT copy (text and content on your page) is priceless. The best thing you can do to optimise your site is to fill it with informative text that makes the nature of your site very clear. When Google sends out 'spiders' to crawl the web (ie when it's software inspects the pages of new and old websites) it looks at text. In fact, the spiders pick out key words from the text and gages there and then what your website is about.

The best thing you can do is research your keywords - and really research them. If you have a shop selling shoes in Brighton, you need to know how your customers will find you. Will they all type 'shoe shops in Brighton' into Google? Will some type 'Shoes Brighton', 'mens shoes brighton', 'ladies shoes brighton'... will some have bad spelling 'mens shows briton'...?

There are various tools online to help you select keywords, Google themselves have a great Adword tool which suggests alternatives, and tells you how many people have searched using specific terms each month - check it out here

Optimise different pages for different keywords, and make sure that your keywords make up between 2 - 3% of your overall page text.

Check your keyword density here

2. Tags - Title, Images, Keywords, Description and Headers.

These tags are what any good web developer will include on each of your web pages.

They should contain your keywords. Include them in your page title and your header tags. Do not repeat keywords in one tag.

The Keyword Meta tag doesnt carry as much weight as it used to, but its still good practice to include it.

The image tag should describe the image but if you can include a keyword or too in there (as longs as the text still makes sense) then all the better.

3. Links

It is very important to get other relevant websites to link to yours - especially one way links.

Think of the Web as literally a spiders web, with every website linking to each other so that the spider can crawl from one website to another.

It is valuable to have your keywords included in the link text that comes back to your page. I.E rather than just a 'click here for more', have 'view shoes in Brighton here'. Get it?!

This is just a small part... we will touch on more great SEO tips in a future article. In the meantime, check out our great SEO rates on our website.

Feel free to ask us any questions! :-)