We went walking yesterday on the south downs, near to where we live and found a balloon.

It had travelled from Birmingham, all the way unaided to land in a National Nature Reserve called ‘Castle Hill‘. (If I was a balloon, that’s the sort of place I would want to land in).

A school girl called Raju, had sent this up into the sky in the Midlands not knowing of whether she would hear from her balloon again,

It was this interaction if she had not done it, that would not have affected us either way, but because we did it lifted our spirits on a cold winters day and got us thinking about the smile on her face when she learns about the adventures of her balloon.

It has travelled approximately 180 miles. Some made it across the channel to France, how ever her’s decided to land on the footpath we were walking down a day or two later.

We wrote to the school to tell them that we had found the balloon, along with the two photos below of Fiona and the landing site.

Interaction with users in real life, much like social networks where people who wouldn’t normally connect have the chance to share experiences and captivate their lives as well as others around them.

This is the good side of social networking.

Map showing distance ballon travelled

Fiona holding the balloon tag

Landing site – Castle Hill nature reserve

The theme for this year’s event was all about getting content out to your customers and getting them to connect with you through the various networks your message can be on, like Twitter.

Attracting and keeping customers

• Attract – ‘what’s in it for me’ attitude to why people should visit your web site
• Engagement – search, copy, tools – creates awareness
• Motivate – the dance between the customer and owner, you can “entertain” your users by following these steps:
  • Popular – relevant content
  • Useful – an online tool to save them time and costs having to research elsewhere
  • Accessible – not hidden, integrated with other networks – feeds, etc
  • Social – interactive, changing daily, eg: reviews
• Commitment – show customer you care and you value your relationship with users
• Make any offers online easy to adopt and participate, make it distinctive so your site stands out

Social media increase

A recent Nielsen report in the last year alone, time spent on social networking sites has surged 73 percent.

More recently, stats show that Online video more popular than blogging and social networking

Brand new world

Andy Hobsbawm’s (Agency.com) Keynote

Be a verb not a noun – be about action rather than words. All about the ‘active principle’ at the centre,
eg: topshop at fashion week, podcasts, rss.

The way to multi task and handle information is the way brands will be managed in the future – easier to get info from social network – Twitter search. May become a superbrand, completely up for grabs. No right answer now.

Technology is the campfire around which we tell our stories. These social networks allow us to tell our stories.

Unless you have a great product someone could ruin your product using social media. eg expensive acai berries, or organic pomegranite. Don’t always aim for a narrow slice of the shelf, or share of market. Compared to Tesco who manage all of these exotic fruit and much more.

Micro brands, enough people that buy them might make a business, but no right answer at the moment.

Media industry based on old costing model. DVD region 2. Publishing on Internet is next to nothing compared to costs of producing and marketing a advert on TV. Television at the moment is just another screen to display content.

Communication is what makes the world go round, and the essence of social media.

Link building refers to process building up a number of good quality and relevant links to a web site.

Why is link building important?

By getting carefully targeted traffic from related sites can lead to a natural, long-term increase in page impressions, with this comes increased conversions – where users either make a purchase or making contact with the company through the web site.

The result being increased awareness, visibility and credibility of your site. As well as link popularity and PageRank.

Extra links pointing to your site also obtains wider search engine exposure and helps the website get indexed by search engines.

Link building along with on site optimisation are the two factors which are vital to a
successful SEO campaign.

Tools for measuring the back links to your site

You will want to know how well your link building campaign is going, and how many links have been successful that you have submitted to other sites, and if your content is great other people would have blogged or posted links to your site as well.

With the tools below you can measure and adapt your link building campaign to work more successfully for you. Especially if you are paying for directory listings, you may find the low traffic you are getting from one site may be a complete waste of money.

• Google Analytics
• Google Link Operator – Where you type “link: www.yourwebsitename.com” to find out the number of links Google has found that are pointing to your site
• Yahoo Site Explorer Similar to Google Operator search, uses Yahoo’s cache instead – more comprehensive

Link building principles

• More inbound links (backlinks) to a page will increase your PageRank
• Link quality is important – one link from a high quality website may be better than 100 links from low quality ones
• Sites with on-page optimisation for a particular keyphrase are favoured by SEs

Use only ‘ethical’ search engine methods

When choosing a company to link building services make sure they use ethical techniques. As any ‘black hat’ or devious methods could violate Google’s Guidelines, Yahoo Guidelines or MSN’s Guidelines for search engine optimisation practices.

Link building Mind Map

The map below shows the methods you can use to build links to your site, as well as measure the success of them.

Instructions: Click and drag the map like a Google Map. You can expand or collapse the ‘nodes’ by clicking on the + or -, and also zoom in or out with the buttons at the bottom of the map.

Learn about our website promotion services.

Download this information a client eguide.

This was our second year to what can only be described as the mother of all Web Tech Events, each year thousands of entrepreneurs, start-ups, geeks, bloggers, and industry types attend SxSw in Austin, Texas.

Depending on who you talk to, SxSw is all about the 1000 different panelists talking tech to a very enthusiastic International audience, others refer to it as ‘summer camp for geeks‘. Being a super friendly conference means that it’s very easy to speak to a number of people from different backgrounds.

The best part of SxSw?

Is that everyone, whether they are ‘Internet Famous’ like Scoble, or whether they are freelancers is that the hierarchy is flat. So you can be sitting next to a CEO, and converse with a great variety of businesses in an informal setting. There are very few ego’s here, which I find quite refreshing compared to other events.

How to choose the right session

The level of information and user generated content that is generated from this event is staggering. 19 different panels happening at the same time, a choice of topics that covers everything from internet privacy to social media practices. Think like going to a music festival and having to choose just one panel out of 19, a tough choice. Two ways of getting round this, 1: if the panel you are in sucks after 5 minutes, walk out, and find the next one on your schedule. 2: Realise you can’t catch everything and listen to the podcasts when you return home.

The difference between this years event and last years

The mention of the word ‘downturn’ made some people look like you had just swore at them. However, the number of sponsored events around town and presence of silicon valley companies made it feel like the event was throwing caution to the wind, and giving people the opportunity to get on with business and make new connections.

Twitter usage. Each panel had a hashtag (#) on twitter so the panelists could take questions directly from twitter and also keep a track of what was being said in real time as they spoke. It’s hard to believe Twitter won a web award 2 years ago at SxSw for best newcomer web site.

The hashtag #sxsw has been a trending topic in Twitter search for two weeks now.

I must say that the Twitter network held up very well during this manic time where lots of data was being pushed from Austin over the week. The bloggers room was like a war room, there was a sea of laptops, people on phones, and after a few days it didn’t smell to good either.

Our favourite sessions

• The Kawasaki and Anderson keynote (youtube link)
• Version Control: No More Save-As (Matt Mullenweg, Wordpress) (no media yet)
• Cloud Computing: Defending the Undefinable (Folks from Google, Microsoft, and the CTO from Amazon) (no media yet)
• HOWTO: 149 Surprising Ways to Turbocharge Your Blog With Credibility! (podcast link)
• Curating the Crowd-Sourced World (podcast link)
• Designing for Irrational Behavior (podcast link)

Our favourite SXSW tweets

Our SXSW photos

This years set is here. More photos tagged SXSW are available on flickr.

Podcasts from SXSW

SxSw 09 Podcasts – More being added everyday. And from SxSw 2008 and the SxSw channel on YouTube.

See you next year Austin!