Facebook IPO

The Facebook IPO has been a topic of discussion for the last few months and we’ve mentioned it a couple of times on the blog. It is believed that CEO Mark Zuckerberg will ring the bell to signify the opening of the Nasdaq remotely from the Facebook headquarters. The company will trade under the ‘FB’ symbol and the opening share price will be $38. Yesterday alone, before trading had even commenced, Facebook raised over $16billion, thats more than eight times more than Google’s IPO in 2004.

To celebrate the momentous occasion in the company’s history a 24 hour hackathon began on Thursday at Facebook HQ where alcohol and food are being served. The IPO is set to make a large number of Facebook employees with stock options millionaires over night and there are some worries that many will fly the coup and use their new found riches to start their own companies.

I for one am glad that the whole thing is over with, it seems the rumours and coverage regarding it has been going on forever. There’s no doubt that it’s a massive occasion in the internet world though and it will be interesting to see what Facebook do with this new huge level of financial backing.

Samsung Galaxy S III (Update)

A couple of weeks ago we wrote a post about the latest and greatest Android phone from Samsung. The device whilst not being mindblowing in design is clearly the next flagship Android device. This is backed up by reports of over 9 million pre-orders already. Your move Apple…

Google UI Update

Right on the back of its Penguin algorithm update which caused much stress in the online marketing community, Google is soon going to roll out an update to it’s user interface. The update will introduce a couple of key features, first of which is the option to filter results for ubiquitous search terms. This means if you search for something that could have a number of meanings you will be greeted with a prompt to select which meaning you are interested in.

The second addition is an information pane on the right hand side of the page that will collate information on specific search terms. For example if you were to search for a famous person you may be greeted with their picture, date of birth, personal profile etc. This will allow for people to find many answers to questions they have without ever leaving the Google results page.

To start with the new UI will only roll out to US based users but other countries will no doubt shortly follow. Google is still the biggest search provider by a long shot but is facing tough competition from not only other search providers such as Bing but also from social media. Often times people find it easier to ask a question on Facebook or Twitter rather than searching for it themselves.

The Big Day

This one isn’t technically internet related but what can you do! You may have noticed a slightly different tone to the HeadRed blog this week. That’s because our usual blogger is absent for the next few weeks.

David and his bride to be will get married in a church ceremony tomorrow surrounded by their closest family and friends, and will no doubt party into the night! Let’s hope that unlike his stag do, David won’t be the one in the dress this time!

Good luck to both David and Beverley for tomorrow and have a great time on the honeymoon. I hear there will be lion riding, or at the very least walking with them! We do hope he will hurry back the Coventry SEO world soon after though, this blog isn’t going to write itself!

With this in mind I’d planned to do a unique article comparing the characteristics of the different members of The Avengers to the different social media sites in a witty and humorous blog post. But as is the way with the internet it has already been done. So instead, here’s an internet news roundup…

Google Penguin Causing Panic

First it was the Caffeine. Then came the attack of the Panda. And now? It’s the Penguin that’s been causing chaos with the latest Google Search algorithm update. Since its launch towards the end of April, the Penguin update has been punishing sites that Google deems have been ‘spamming’ the search results. The aim of the update was remove sites that had been undertaking bad practise with techniques such as keyword stuffing, cloaking, unnatural anchor text backlinks and other practises that breached the Google Webmaster Guidelines. In the wake of the Penguin its certainly been interesting reading on the blogosphere about the panic among certain SEO-ers that’s been caused. Safe to say though that HeadRed’s SEO optimisers only employ techniques that are Google friendly so our clients haven’t fallen foul of the Google Penguin.

Facebook App Centre

The big blue social giant Facebook has announced a new app centre, simply called ‘App Centre’, which will allow paid apps for the first time on the site. The aim of the centre is to help developers get their apps noticed and discovered by more people with spotlights on both free and paid for applications. An interesting factor of the app centre is that success on there is tied to the quality of the app. Factors include user ratings and engagement and this seems like a clever way to separate the great from the average and the good from the bad.

Curator of Content

Have you seen the social content site Storify? Combining elements from the leading social media sites and the internet in general, the site is focussed around combining items from websites and YouTube with Facebook comments and Tweets to create what is called a ‘story‘. It’s a very simple to use site that allows you to create a story combining a variety of elements in a matter of minutes. This idea of ‘content curation‘ allows you pull items from across the web together in one place to present your view on a given subject. An example is the recent backing of gay marriage in the US by President Obama. Users of Storify have been combining sites and opinions from the web to show their stance on the issue. It’s a great way of presenting opinions and we’ll be watching to see whether these ‘stories’ have any effect for our SEO Coventry clients.

Avengers Assemble

Oh and finally, if you were disappointed by the lack of Avengers in this blog post I’ll leave you with this…

Avengers get their weapons taken away

Have a good weekend y’all and prepare to assemble for another working week on Monday.

Have a look at the full article on searchengine watch.com, where you can even download a lightsaber badge to go on the bottom of your blog to match where you sit on the SEO Wars Force circle.

The phone features voice control, wireless beaming of content and a heap of exclusive apps. The hardware consists of a massive 4.8inch AMOLED screen and packs a huge 8 megapixel camera on the back of the phone, with an additional 1.9 megapixel front camera for making video calls. In competition to the iPhone’s Siri application, the S3 includes the S Voice which allows you to activate your phone through speech, as well as gesture control but isn’t as advanced as the Siri application.

The phone will be available in marble white and pebble blue.

The quality of Samsung manufactured phones and the dominance of the iPhone has turned the smartphone market into a two horse race between Samsung and Apple and it will be interesting to see which company comes out on top with the release of the S3 at the end of May.

Devices such as smartphones, tablets and internet enabled gaming consoles are all portals to your business website, so it’s important to make sure it displays correctly. If you were looking for a new website design then it’s important to know how your site will look on these different devices away from the desktop. The number of people using their smartphones and foregoing the traditional desktop computer for all their internet needs is ever increasing with more and more people doing all their working, shopping, gaming and social media-ing on their handy pocket smartphone.

And with devices such as the Galaxy S3 being launched, who can blame them?

The first doodle appeared on Monday and was a joint celebration of it being St. George’s Day and the 30th Anniversary of the ZX Spectrum computer. The two were combined into a doodle that featured St. George and the dragon recreated in ZX Spectrum graphics. The second doodle of the week was an interactive one to commemorate the 132nd birthday of Gideon Sundback. For anyone who doesn’t know, Sundback is the inventor of the zip and Google created a very fancy doodle that featured a zip running down the length of the search engines homepage, which users could interact with by clicking on the zipper and dragging it down to reveal the search engine results.

Think you can do better than these two doodles? Well the job of head Doodler is currently being advertised at Google’s Mountain View headquarters in California so why not apply.

Search results showing the Google Doodle zip falling victim to a zerg rush.

Today saw a new Google easter egg start trending on Twitter with the instructions being to enter the search term “zerg rush” into the search engine. Upon doing so, the screen is invaded by tiny little o’s that attack the search results until they disappear. Users must fight back though by clicking on them until they are defeated and there is an on screen counter to keep track of how you do. So what’s the meaning behind this little time wasting game? Well if you’re a fan of role playing video games, and in particular StarCraft, you may have already heard of the term. Within these types of games, to rush your opponent means to send in multiple battle units at once with the aim being to overwhelm your enemy. In the game StarCraft this is a popular technique of the Zerg alien race.

So that’s the meaning behind the term solved but what’s the meaning behind the actual game? Well, there isn’t one apart from that it’s fun. And aside from making money, isn’t that the main point of the Internet?

Now go forth to Google loyal followers and fight the ‘zerg rush’.

According to a report by The Next Web, Google will launch it’s long rumoured cloud storage solution next week. Google Drive, as it is expected to be called, will allow users to store all of their files in the cloud in addition to syncing them between all of their devices.

The service will work similarly to Dropbox the current most popular option in the area but Google’s free level of service is expected to give users 5GB of storage compared to 2GB from Dropbox. In addition to competing with services such as Dropbox, Google will be looking to bring functionality to their smartphones similar to what Apple offers with iCloud.

Tupac Back from the Dead

All of the buzz at the start of the week was about a performance over the weekend at the Coachella music festival. None other than deceased hip-hop star Tupac Shakur took to the stage in hologram form alongside Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre. He rose from the ground and shouted “What the f- is up, Coachella?” before proceeding to perform with the other two artists.

Reaction has been mixed with some people considering it a fantastic tribute whilst others have argued that it was unnatural and unethical to put words in the rapper’s mouth. Whether you approve of the performance or not it’s difficult to argue that it wasn’t very impressive. Some of the more intoxicated onlookers believed that it was actually Tupac standing before them.

Facebook IPO is Close

If all goes to plan for Zuckerberg and co. Facebook will be going public on 17th May. Details of the company’s initial public offering have been getting more and more frequent in recent weeks and it seems that is the date they have chosen, so long as the SEC approve the paperwork that has been filed, including that regarding Facebook’s recent Instagram acquisition.

As a Coventry SEO company we pay particular attention to the world of social media and Facebook only seem to be going from strength to strength at the moment. They are expected to be valued at $100 billion and could raise as much as $10 billion with their IPO.

The point of these graphics is to try and get them to go viral and get uses interested in your product, brand or company and pinning them on Pinterest can be a good way to drive traffic to your site. The image begins with a large header that details what the image is about and then continues with the information or instructions. Sometimes you may find that the text on these images is too small to read on the pinned image and so will have to click it to visit your site, which will hopefully get people checking out the rest of your site whilst they are there.

If you’ve made a funny, interesting or useful image then people will hopefully repin it and thus your image and link to your site goes viral. Have a look at an example here for Pure Invitation who have created a funny image of “A Simple Guide to the Different Members of a Wedding Party”.

This week Facebook bought the smartphone app Instagram for a staggering $1 billion dollars. That’s pretty impressive for an app that was only launched in October 2010. For those who don’t know, Instagram is a free to download app that was originally just for the iPhone but now also available on Android and lets users add effects and filters to their photos before sharing them across different social media sites.

With over 30 million users and over 5 million photos uploaded every day, the popularity of Instagram is clear to see. What isn’t so clear is the effect the takeover by Mark Zuckerberg’s company could have on the existing user base. Fans of anything that help make something popular, to then see it taken over by a bigger company, can be very protective of what they see as something they helped to make successful. If Facebook changes Instagram in any way, such as adding paid ads, then they could face a backlash from the existing Instagram users and alienating them could be very negative for the new Facebook/Instagram partnership.

One thing that is clear though is that the employees of Instagram are set to become very rich indeed.

@headredmedia

Are you following @headredmedia on Twitter? If not then you should be as our Twitter commander has been Tweeting some great links and updates over the last few weeks. Covering everything from search engine optimisation news that could affect our Coventry SEO campaigns, engaging social media campaigns being employed by companies all other the world and other humorous web related nuggets, we’re definitely worth a follow so why not come over and say hey.

Derek

Did anyone watch Ricky Gervais’s new comedy, Derek, last night? Set in an old people’s home, Gervais plays the titular character of Derek who is, as Chris Harvey from the Telegraph put it, “of low mental acuity, with impaired language skills and a facial mannerism”. You may think that this just means it was half an hour of Gervais poking fun at vulnerable members of our society but the one-off comedy turned out to have many touching moments and showed a different side to his usual comedy shtick. The program also featured Karl Pilkington in his first acting role, and I use the word ‘acting’ very loosely, but that isn’t to say his caretaker character wasn’t enjoyable.

Rickey Gervais is a prevalent Twitter user, @rickygervais, so has been receiving lots of feedback from other Twits, with a lot of it being positive. There are the usual ‘Gervais haters’ though that were damning the program before it even aired but there seems a lot of love for the program across social media sites and blogs.

I personally hope this gets made into a full series, so if you missed it why not check Derek out on 4OD.

Linkin Park Web Campaign

I’m a fan of online marketing campaigns that engage users in different ways and one such campaign that caught my eye this week was by the brilliant Linkin Park. With their fifth album scheduled for release sometime over the coming months, the hype train has gone into overdrive as they tease fans with information and snippets in the build up to the album.

The campaign started with a new landing page for their official site which featured a number of sliding tile puzzles. Once each of these was completed, they built up to unveil the cover for the first single, Burn It Down. An interesting twist to this was that buried in the HTML code of the puzzle were numbers which were a puzzle in themselves. Users of popular fansite LP Association got busy in cracking this code which may have revealed the name of the new album. The puzzles have now continued with a game taking the place on the homepage which reveals snippets of the new song as you play. These kind of pre-launch campaigns are a great way to get a fan based engaged in the build up to a new release and the use of social media has allowed these campaigns to become more engaging for users.

Any kind of engagement on sites such as Twitter and Facebook is a great way for any band, film, product or business to gain exposure, such as the Facebook photography competition we are currently promoting for one of our clients, which has seen their Twitter likes rise from 6 to over 900 likes within two months.

The program was promoting ‘#BGT’ as its hashtag from the beginning of the show which is understandable and helps fans of the program to see all tweets relating to the program. As the program progressed though, other hashtags were displayed such as ‘#feelthebenefit’ in relation to David Walliams telling a singer in boyband, The Mend, to take his coat off otherwise he wouldn’t feel the benefit. There was also ‘#noname’ which was a reference to a song sung by a young lad and ‘#nowwithwings’ as a man singing a ballad grew giant wings from his costume.

My issue with these hashtags is that social media is that the people watching at home should be the ones who decide what they want to talk about, not forced upon by the shows. By constantly displaying different hashtags, it feels like the makers of the show are trying to dictate what gets the most mentions on Twitter. Social media is about the natural conversations and comments that people are making and companies shouldn’t try and force multiple hashtags upon people. Having one for the whole program, #BGT, is more than enough from the program makers, the rest should come from its audience.

It will be interesting to see how many and what kind of hashtags are displayed during tonight’s episode.

The adverts focus on the benefits of Google+, such as "Hangouts".

Google wants to increase its active user base so the aim of the adverts is to highlight the differences that Google+ offers over other sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Do you remember the “Dear Sophie” advert that Google ran to advertise Google Chrome? Or how about the “Jamal Edwards” advert which detailed how a London teenager created the biggest youth media empire using Google’s services? Google likes to advertise its products by exploring people’s personal experiences with their services and showing how things like Google Chrome and YouTube can be integrated into people’s lives in many different ways. This seems to be the tone they are continuing with the “That’s the Plus” adverts for Google+. The adverts look set to focus on a range of different people of different ages and how the features of the site, such as the Hangouts and Circles, can be used in a more “real life” way compared to other sites.

With this new UK advertising campaign, Google is looking to improve its number of active users on Google+ and highlighting its unique features is in all probability the best method to try and get users from other sites. Facebook has such a massive installed user base that are unlikely to move to another site without reason. Google needs more users to make its social site more social and showcasing the best features of Google+ during the break of programs such as Britain’s Got Talent should make the UK more aware of the benefits and fun to be had on Google+.

And if this advert from America for the site doesn’t make you want to Hangout on Google+, then nothing will…

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