SEO Seeding – Electronic Arts Website

What a fascinating (and logical) way to gain higher volume traffic to your newly designed website – Electronic Arts www.ea.com – jumped right onto the Ashton Kucher vs CNN battle, publishing this press release on 16th April 2009:

In supporting Ashton in his efforts, EA is offering Kutcher’s 1,000,000th follower on Twitter a copy of every game EA makes in 2009 for the gaming system of their choice and, to have a character based on them that can be played in The Sims 3 if Ashton wins.  The Sims 3 will also donate 5,000 mosquito nets in the name of the 1 millionth person who follows Ashton on Twitter (REGARDLESS of a win).

Earlier this week, actor Ashton Kutcher announced via YouTube that the number of his Twitter account followers rivaled that of the CNN Breaking News Twitter feed, and that upon beating them to the 1 million member milestone, he would punk CNN founder Ted Turner if the Internet made it happen.  (Click here to watch the video that started it all.)

Specifically, he said he would ding-dong ditch Ted Turner’s house and post the video of it if he won the showdown.  To sweeten the deal, Ashton also promised to donate 10,000 mosquito bed nets to charity for World Malaria Day on April 24.

Check out this update on EA’s offer by Ashton: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ma8AcfKGaEI

Follow EA on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/EA
Follow EA on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/ea
Follow EA on FaceBook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/EA/68678914189
Follow The Sims 3 on Twitter: http://twitter.com/thesims3
Join the race to be Ashton Kutcher’s millionth follower: http://twitter.com/aplusk

The above content, whilst short and succinct, hits every hallmark of good SEO & wider marketing/public relations:

• Keywords – Ashton Kutcher, CNN, Twitter, were some of the hottest search words around at that point in time. Relevance.
• Cross linking to high volume, highly spidered sites like www.wikipedia.org and www.youtube.com and linking to the cross promotion points on Twitter & Facebook and EA’s own Twitter pages
• Inserting the title [Sims 3] of a game which in itself is under high search keyword scrutiny and offering the coveted position of having an avatar of yourself created in one of the most popular games of of ALL time – the modern day equivalent of immortality personified – i.e. the 100 story skyscraper, with your name on the plaque at the bottom.
• EA throwing in themselves and donating 5,000 mosquito nets in the name of the millionth follower to the www.malarianomore.org campaign. Another chance of immortality and celebrity.
• The incidental prize of all 2009 EA Titles, is really just appeasing the products division – on the weight of the other PR & promotional activity, this pales in significance.

Full coverage and the new EA site here:

EA Supports Ashton Kutcher in Twitter Showdown - http://www.ea.com/news/ea-supports-ashton-kutcher-in-twitter-showdown
Malaria No More - http://www.malarianomore.org/news/features/twitter_aplusk.php

And for the record, I personally prefer the look of the older EA site…. the new white background is a sorry trade off for the cool black of the preceding site, although funtionality wise, the execution of the new site is outstanding. Maybe it’s because I spend alot of time looking at MS Word doco on the screen today, my poor eyes prefer the soft tones of black….

www.twanalyst.com

My first reaction was to laugh. The second was to frown. The third response was: “Damn it! Since when have I been described as bloody UNREMARKABLE?!”

My excuse is that I’ve been onboard for only 2 weeks. So there.

Once I was over my fit of apoplexy, I went back and Twanalysed a few other well known peeps, celebrities, friends and random. I don’t feel so bad now considering some of the descriptions that @aplusk, @oprah and others have got and most importantly the recommendations which were offered are actually relevent, useful and pertinent.

	PERSONAL INFORMATION:
	Name:	TheCultureMind (Colin Yeung)
	Location:	Melbourne, Australia (Time zone: Melbourne)
	Description:	Active – mountain biking, digital at www.areeba.com.au, house renovating + family: wife / baby son.
	URL:	http://www.theculturemind.com
	STATISTICS:
	Account Created:	09 Apr 09
	Status Updates:	38
	Followers:	19
	Following:	39
	ANALYSIS:
	Tweets per day:	2.7
	Readability index: (?)	10
	% conversations:	24
	% links:	14
	% content:	62

(This page for theculturemind has been viewed 7 times)
Your Twitter personality (click to tweet it!)
Personality: ordinary sociable unremarkable Style: chatty coherent VOYEUR

Tips for your tweeting…

• Work on making your tweets more interesting to attract more followers
• If you retweet others, hopefully they’ll retweet you back
• Use hashtags to join in popular discussions or online events

The Age: How much did THAT cost?

The Age Online tonight has ventured outside the square and opted to start showcasing outside border advertising in sky blue and with nicely styled creative, promoting Telstra’s BigPond broadband network. In all the years I’ve had The Age Online as one of my Home pages, I’ve never known them to yield such a large (and noticible) advertising space. Whilst simple, to regular visitors like myself, it is an effective and pleasant change. The technology used here is (without knowing exact details) likely to be Eyeblaster – as you can imagine, it isn’t exactly cheap, but hell if you want to smack your audience between the eyes, it’s pretty darn effective.

The Age Online - Telstra BigPond Wireless Screen 1

The Age Online - Telstra BigPond Wireless Screen 2

The Age Online - Telstra BigPond Wireless Screen 3

What every “404 Error” Page should have

404 Error Pages are a necessary part of the web and you just have to accept they crop up from time to time. However we should be mindful of helping our site visitors gain the information they seek as efficiently and painlessly as possible.

1 – Brand Recognition?
Design the page so that it is recognisably the business/website the user is looking for and is consistant with the brand. Keep the Primary navigation in place – don’t hide it. This will aid those who clicked an expired URL in an email or referenced an outdated publication to navigate back to your home page, key product or services pages. The below page from www.thefwa.com represents a standard Windows IIS Server 404 Error page and realistically isn’t really useful to anyone – the second Apache Server page is even less useful. In both instances if you are navigating around a website and hit a snag, you have to hit the back button on your web browser – to many users this is very disorientating and many might not be even sure if they are on the correct website or not.

Standard Windows IIS Server 404 Error Page

2 – You were looking for?
The small step of actually displaying what the users typing efforts inputted into the URL address bar assists in the user being able to validate their typing – and desired destination. Representing the URL in the window can allow a second inspection to take place by the user, as it could reveal a typo in a link supplied in an email. Remember, not everyone has the address bar visible (Full screen F11 browsing) all the time.

3 – Key site areas:
People visit websites for specific reasons – you can identify key areas of interest by way of your site analytics package. Offering a breakdown of these key site sections into a neat array of alternatives on a 404 Error page is an excellent way of  guiding your users to their chosen area of interest. The www.apple.com website is very well setup in this regard.

Apple - 404 Error Page

4 – Search:
If your website has a search facility, placing this within the framework of your 404 Error page will allow users to start looking for what they are after within your site. Particularly if you have predictive search enabled, then this will further assist wayward site users in finding what they are after. Highlighting it like the www.dailymirror.co.uk is a nice and visually subtle way to draw attention to the facility.

5 – Offer Instructions, Tips & Guidance:
Don’t be shy – offer instructions about what a site visitor can do to improve their search, including use of operators like “and”, “or” and use of “quotations” to help put into context word groupings etc. On that, direct people to the search e.g. “Site search is located in the top right hand corner of this page” – it doesn’t hurt to state the obvious.

6 – Offer access to your Site Map::
A general layout, again as illustrated by the Judicial College of Victoria website below will prove useful in guiding your users to finding the appropriate area of the site they are interested in.

7 – Be open to Feedback:
The nature of modern web systems is that many people may be involved in the day to day maintenance and management of the environment. It is entirely feasible and plausible that those tasked with looking after the site might not even be aware of the error in missing content in the first place. Offering the immediate ability to offer feedback by way of a feedback/contact form is a great way to defer the responsibility of site content management. Many people  are quite conscientious about reporting small errors to site content.

8 – Most recently searched items:
If someone is visiting a website, chances are they actually are looking for something they have either heard the business does or they want to find out something they heard recently about the business. Offering the 5 top search items, generated by popularity is a helpful way to offer possible relevance to the site visitors.

9 – News/Cross Promotion:
Just 3 headlines will do. It won’t hurt search engine ranking and page update relevance. Based on the idea that someone is specifically looking for information in relation to your organisation, the fact that the latest news is presented, increases the likelihood of engaging users directly with what the business is currently communicating.

10 – Offer some light-hearted humour:
People can take things too seriously at the wrong times. Consider injecting some humour into your 404 messages. Obviously this approach needs to be treated with care and consideration to the end user audience and the representing website.

Technorati: State of the Blogosphere 2008

Technorati’s 5th annual report commenting on that which it focuses on so well – Blogs – citing a pot pourri of mind boggling statistics, insights and conclusions around the “State of the Blogosphere“.

The reports comprehensive nature was delivered across a 5 day period, and split across a host of areas looking at variables such as background, time commitment, income, influence and value both in the blog itself and the erstwhile Hemmingway types who dilligently peck out on their keyboards thoughts, observations and other such eloquent turns of phrase.

• Day 1: Who Are the Bloggers?
• Day 2: The What And Why of Blogging
• Day 3: The How of Blogging
• Day 4: Blogging For Profit
• Day 5: Brands Enter The Blogosphere

I was particularly interested in this, seeing as I have really only been commited to blogging on a regular basis for the past 6 weeks or so. I’ve been slowly pooling together content from a range of different sources which have made their presence known over the years – A neglected Travel Diary from 2003/2004, an experimental Image Gallery and an Areeba Facebook Page. Most recently – and most interestingly – the vast bulk of my literary inspiration has been my job, prompted by work colleagues and clients who have seen fit to pick at my thoughts from a professional work context point of view. With the hopeful intentions of applying some discipline and order to this “stream of consciousness” is the presence of this blog, which is forcing me somewhat more quickly than originally anticipated to articulate what I am hoping to be a rationale, clear, concise and engaging dialogue. Cripes.

So reading such observations within the State of the Blogosphere apparently:

Bloggers are…

• Not a homogenous group: Personal, professional, and corporate bloggers all have differing goals and cover an average of five topics within each blog.
• Savvy and sophisticated: On average, bloggers use five different techniques to drive traffic to their blog. They’re using an average of seven publishing tools on their blog and four distinct metrics for measuring success.
• Intensifying their efforts based on positive feedback: Blogging is having an incredibly positive impact on their lives, with bloggers receiving speaking or publishing opportunities, career advancement, and personal satisfaction.

On this basis, I profile myself as part of the Professional and Corporate Blogging set, but I’ve thrown in some personal stuff for good measure. It’s a mess really, by this definition.

I certainly don’t do much to drive traffic to my blog site, although I am tinkering in this area. Cross links from work colleagues, joining up to Technorati, playing around with the Tags for different search results…. Google Adwords, Adsense and some SEO/SEM activity may step in there if I can be convinced. Manually fettling the Permalink post names has been useful i.e. changing the About page to also include Colin Yeung

http://www.theculturemind.com/about/
http://www.theculturemind.com/about-colin-yeung/

Metrics for success? This is where it gets interesting. Currently I’m just writing this because I enjoy it. I’m getting asked to offer an opinion on particular things and rather than repeat it 5 times over (I hate going over ground I’ve already travelled) I’d rather write it once and reference it. However the derivations of success by the millions of bloggers out there and their levels of satisfaction with a “job well done” vary so widely that subsequently measures of success are also widely divergent. The focus by way of questioning bloggers, assessing their methods and highlighting the tools and approaches with which they are availing themselves of improved market data were all fascinating to myself and my shiny new 6 week blogging awareness.

What also had me intrigued was the notion of 5 different topics groups was the average. Looking at my list, this translates roughly as:

• Opinion on Digital/New Media
• Interesting Stuff that Makes me Smile
• A little bit about my Family here and there
• The odd Movie , Book or Website review
• Interesting & Noteworthy images and articles of cool stuff – or more correctly what I rate as cool – usually photography, cars, web culture maps (driving the office nuts in the process) and other such popular culture.

Now looking at this statistic, I couldn’t help but be reminded of a Philosophy of Science subject I took during my Uni years which assessed, theorised and extolled the notion of “natural kinds” and the empirical limit that these states enforced on a system. Looking at my above groups, they’re pretty broad. Vaguely objectified, they are Reviews, History, Opinion and Emotion (the Family & Make me Smile). Problem is they aren’t “kinds” as such, being abstracts. Gah. Stuffed up there.

Anyway, in a nutshell, there is much to learn about Blogging “successfully” and this report gets you thinking about it in a different and factually presented light, by virtue of its participants and the vast amounts of data they have put together. The eye opener for me was the droves of people who are earning upwards of $75,000 USD per year by blogging part time.

That sounds like an existence I could get very comfortable with.

Web Trend Map 2009 – Information Architects Japan

Hard on the heels of my post a few weeks back, Information Architects Japan has just released Version 4 of its Web Trend Map. The full version can be viewed here at http://www.informationarchitects.jp/wtm, or click on the below image for a full size 6740 x 4768 (JPG 2.56Mb) on Flickr. As at time of writing the Map wasn’t up on IA Japan’s website yet….