No, it’s not a new action movie featuring Steven Seagal and Jean-Claude Van Damme (although that would be intriguing and very, very bad). The Cola Wars: Social Media Assault is the latest instalment in the battle for supremacy between Pepsi and Coca-Cola. Both companies see themselves as the top dog and have both taken to social media in the hope of one finally distancing itself from the other (maybe this would make a good movie?).
On Monday (April 30, 2012), Pespi launched a new campaign they call: Pepsi Pulse, a pop culture destination that aims to become the most talked about conversation topic on the most powerful internet marketing platform there is – social networks. Pepsi Pulse, which can be found at Pepsi.com will host top ten pop rankings, and give fans the chance to connect with their favourite celebrities. In addition to this, Pepsi has also teamed up with Twitter to stream live video from concerts from the likes of Nicki Minaj, who is also starring in an advertisement for the soft-drink giant. Minaj – who recently quit Twitter but has now conveniently returned to coincide with the start of the Pepsi Pulse campaign – has 11.2 million followers on the site, not a bad promotional tool to have at your disposal!
Use of Twitter hashtags “#livefornow” and “#now” are also being used for the new “Live for Now” campaign launched by Pepsi in early April to go hand-in-hand with Pepsi Pulse. Celebrities are to be used frequently on Twitter in different challenges, global head of digital for PepsiCo Beverages, Shiv Singh explains: “Singer Nicki Minaj, for example, might urge fans to share pictures of their alter egos to create an online photo album,” adding that the use of a different celeb as often as each week, “are all about inspiring and getting consumers to live in the now. This is about integrating into pop culture in a meaningful way.”
So what are Coca-Cola doing to counter the extra $600 million advertising budget being used by Pepsi? Well, they too are going down the musical route by partnering with social music site Spotify, integrating the Spotify streaming player into their Facebook, which has just the 41 million fans!
The use of celebs in a campaign is not beyond Coke either and they have already used Maroon 5 to promote the brand in a 24-hour interactive studio session. Cola and Spotify are also planning on being a big presence at the London Olympics so expect to see the brand on various Olympic-related websites over the summer.
Both Pepsi and Coca-Cola are right to be harnessing the power of social media for their marketing campaigns. And it’s not just Facebook and Twitter either, as we have referred to in previous blogs, sites such as Pinterest and Google + are increasing in presence. According to a 2011 report by market trend site Neilsen, consumers are approximately 55% more likely to recall an ad including social-media components than one that doesn’t.
The moral of this story is that you should market your brand on social networks, and hire a celebrity to endorse the product – if you have a few million to spare of course!
You may remember in a previous blog post we talked about Google’s web spam chief Matt Cutts’ speech at SXSW, where he revealed the search engine’s plans to penalise sites that were deemed to be “over-optimised.” Well the time has come for the algorithm changes to take effect – going live in the next few days.
Do you advertise on Facebook? It’s good isn’t it? After all, everyone is on Facebook; well, certainly everyone that I know is on there. If you want exposure for your product, where better to advertise than a place where everybody is, all of the time? For those of you that are placing adverts on the social network, or are considering doing so – today I bring forth some bad news, with a little added good news. If however, you are a Mark Zuckerberg employee and you are reading today’s blog unaware of the news – for you it is a good day.
You know how on this blog we love a new survey, study or report? Well today we’re in luck, which means you, as the reader, is going to benefit. Yes, yet another has been released with relevance to SEO and internet marketing.
Beware of the Black Hat: How to Spot Rogue SEO
The aim of the Penguin update is to promote user experience, valuing quality content over articles and sale pages written specifically for search engines and filled with mumbo-jumbo; this should effectively spell the end of those using immoral techniques to get ahead. However, it won’t put an end to rogue SEO companies promoting their services and taking your money. Black hat basically breaks all the rules and regulations in the book, unethically presenting content to search engine spiders. So how can you safeguard yourself against these vigilantes? By knowing what constitutes Black Hat SEO.
The following are some of the most used Black Hat techniques:
Keyword Stuffing
This is the oldest and most popular trick in the Black Hat book. Pack long lists of keywords into a site to make it relevant for a specific search term. There are different methods of keyword stuffing; the most obvious of these is to create keyword laden content which is of no use to anyone or anything but the search engine spiders. Keyword-heavy content is generally unreadable – and easy to spot.
The other method is even shadier, and cannot be picked up on by the visitor. It involves manipulating the site code so that keywords are implanted using invisible text. Once again, this is done specifically for the search engine spiders.
Comment Spamming
If you run a blog or have a large social network following, you may already be familiar with comment spamming. Back-linking is a key technique in offsite optimisation; however, adding irrelevant and pointless comments on someone else’s blog post is nothing but Black Hat, serving no long-term benefits at all. This technique involves basically finding a related (or unrelated) blog post and posting a comment with a link to your website – pointless and ineffective.
Doorway Pages
These are like the maggot on the end of the fishing line to search engine spiders. A “doorway page” is one that is never seen by the user, who will click on it only to be redirected to the site landing page. They are simply used as a way to achieve high ranking on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
Multiple Domains
The purpose of owning multiple domains is to increase traffic to a site. How it works is to have a wide range of web domains, all with the exact same content. In the old days of internet marketing, this was a pretty successful technique; however, today it leads to nothing more than duplicate content issues and very angry search engine spiders.
Link Farms
These are basically a fraud to swindle your money. By projecting the illusion of quality backlinks from credible sources, link farms doing nothing more that land you in trouble with search engines.
There you have it, the dirtiest Black Hat techniques money can buy. By knowing what to look for you will be able to avoid the tricksters and find yourself some credible White Hat SEO and a successful future in online business.