As the EU Cookie law deadline looms, are you prepared? Perhaps you’re not aware of the Law? Here’s a quick run-down:

So what exactly are Cookies used for?

Cookies are used by almost all websites, for a variety of purposes:

• Analysis of user behaviour (Analytics)
• To personalise pages and remember visitor preferences
• To manage shopping baskets in online stores
• To track users across websites and deliver targeted advertising

So many questions…

What? Websites must obtain consent from visitors

Why? To protect online user privacy

Who? The law is regulated by The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO)

When? The Law is already in effect as a ‘grace period’. This will end on May 26^th, 2012

Not Compliant? You could receive up to half a million pounds fine (extreme cases only!)

So what should you do?

• Audit your site to find out what cookies your website has
• Find out what these cookies are used for, and which ones you need to get consent for (there are some exemptions)
• Work out how to get consent from your visitors to set cookies on their device. See some great examples here>>

We are proud to announce the launch of the official Olympus UK Facebook Page. We are currently working with Olympus on a number of projects but this is the first element to go live.

As a leading manufacturer of professional opto-digital products and pioneers in the technologies field of imaging and voice products it was important that the Page reflected this. The Page needed to showcase the creativity and originality Olympus deliver in developing new products and efficient systems solutions. As such, the Page and ongoing updates will be hugely visual with lots of imagery and video content.

The Facebook Page has been launched to coincide with the new Timeline conversion for Pages, with a fresh design and added functionality for users. The Page promotes both the UK Camera and Audio departments, showcasing the latest products and providing users with useful information and resources. The new timeline layout has enabled Olympus to promote interesting milestones since establishing in Europe in 1963. If you go back you will see some of the retro cameras, audio products and the numerous highlights, events and meaningful technological advances Olympus have made over the past 50 years.

The Page includes full social integration features including feeds from YouTube, Twitter and Flickr as well as a polling tool allowing customer feedback. The Page comprises a Welcome tab, introducing visitors to Olympus the brand and the latest video content from their official YouTube Channel as well as email sign-up functionality. The products tab allows visitors to select either Camera or Audio products and click amongst and view the latest collections, from where you can view associated accessories and buy directly online.

There is also an additional Customer Services tab reflecting the intense customer orientation and fast implementation of customers’ wishes Olympus demands.

Keep your eyes peeled for more updates and interesting new content coming soon…

View the Official Olympus UK Facebook Page here >>

Very organised and professional agency delivering excellent online campaigns and support from conception to close.

Georgina Pavelin
Marketing Product Specialist – Audio Consumer

Clicky have always been patient and great to work with, they have helped us out every step of the way and have offered advice and training to help us get the best out of our facebook page.

Sarah Cheetham
Product Marketing – Consumer Imaging

Leave it a few seconds and you’ll find your whole screen fills up with snow, to the point that you can even draw in it!

Merry Christmas everyone – enjoy!

The launch of Twitter Brand Pages coincides with a site-wide redesign and restructuring of the micro-blogging site and will enable additional features and functionality to company presences. According to reports, brands will be able to customise their profile header and improve the overall look and feel as well as highlighting their best content. Reports also suggest the ability to select a tweet to stay at the top of their page, with that tweet automatically expanding — even without a visitor clicking — to display a photo or video. Additionally, brands will be able to separate their @ replies and mentions.

Users and brands have been awaiting in anticipation for the launch of a more business orientated destination for users of Twitter, particularly since the improvement of Facebook Pages and the launch of Google+ Business Pages over recent months. Rumours began in April that the product was to be developed and launched in 2011.

Before we all get too excited though, Twitter has carefully selected a number of launch partners who are currently advertising on Twitter. Launch partners for the pages include Coca-Cola (in the example shown below), Dell, Disney, Hewlitt-Packard, McDonald’s, Nike, PepsiCo, Heineken, Subway and Paramount Pictures (specifically for the release of Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol).

It may be the case that the next roll out of Brand Pages are exclusive to high spending advertisers before this is available to the average Twitter user. In any case it is a proactive step forward from the social network giving brands a home and differentiating brand accounts from personal users.

To date most major brands have a presence on both Facebook and Twitter, but until this announcement, a brand’s Twitter page was more a place to push content to their followers’ streams and respond to customer service enquiries and was not a standalone destination in itself.

Watch this space for the latest updates…

Sources: Mashable and AdAge

The ads are then taken a step further, adding the expandable element. These ads will also expand to allow you to comment on the interaction and the ad message, as well as see other comments that have been made on it, in a similar way that Facebook users can now comment & “like” each others’ wall posts and statuses.

Sponsored Stories and Social Ads are becoming increasingly popular due to their appearance as more of a recommendation from a friend as opposed to a straight ad message, with the widely held belief that these are far more effective, generating more interest and clicks. By increasing the capacity for social interaction, these new ads look like they’re going to be even more powerful… watch this space!

If you’d like to find out more about different Facebook advertising options, give us a call today on 0845 257 1225 or get in touch via our website, click here >>

Source: Mashable

Following Facebook releasing the ability for users to browse Facebook over a secure connection, it is shortly to be required that all custom page content must be hosted securely. This means that all tabs on pages need to convert over to HTTPS by Saturday October 1st 2011.

If we have designed your tabs you should have heard from us either by telephone or email this week about transferring over to a secure server hosting package. If you haven’t replied or received an email, please ensure you get in touch with us ASAP as your page may not display as of Saturday.

Should you wish to host/continue to host your own page yourself, then you will need to purchase an SSL certificate and also make the relevant changes to your application settings. For more information please see the official Facebook developers blog here >>

Twitter competitions are an excellent way to engage your current Twitter followers in a fun and exciting way, as well as rapidly growing your Twitter following. Your competition (and awareness of your brand) will be spread virally, reaching potential new customers, making them aware of your business. It can also potentially help with your SEO rankings, as Google is now taking into account the amount of noise made about brands on social networks.

Twitter competitions are a brand new phenomenon, so running one would put your brand at the very forefront of something new and exciting, so it’s bound to achieve a great level of interest and exposure. Why not find out a bit more about our Twitter competition service? Click here for more info…

The iPad is something that has created an enormous amount of intrigue and discussion in both businesses and the general public. The revolutionary new device has been extraordinarily popular with more people than ever now owning one. So obviously it wasn’t going to be long before they became a powerful marketing tool as well. That time is now here and we are proud to announce we can offer both display and search advertising specifically for iPad and other tablets.

iPad users browse the internet & search to find products and services in a way that mirrors laptop & desktop users. As such, iPad search ads appear virtually the same as on a desktop computer. However, display ads can appear as magazine-style full-page with high quality images, or in an animation or video format.

Whether your ads are targeted contextually, are related to users interests or are targeted to previous visitors of your site, iPad advertising is an extremely effective way to get your business’ message straight to the hands of a user – literally! In addition, iPad ads are also a great way to promote iPad apps and drive traffic to them directly.

So, have you got an iPad? Use it a lot? Well so do millions of other people; the time is ripe to promote your business on the nation’s iPads. Get in touch with us today and find out more about iPad & tablet advertising.

Click here to find out more about iPad & Tablet advertising >>

Click here to learn more about Twitter competitions >>

Or just get in touch with us! We love talking bout iPad advertising and Twitter competitions, so let’s have a chat. Call us now on 0845 257 1225. Or alternatively get in touch via the website… click here >>

No prizes for guessing the leader; Google is still hugely dominant with over 90% of market share. Bing & Yahoo make a notable contribution with just over roughly 3% each, leaving the other two major search engines, AOL & Ask, trailing with less than 1% each. These of course all still way ahead of all other search engine brands, which combined only account for less than 0.2% of this year’s market share. When you consider just how many are included in this bracket, the significance of these results really starts to sink in – remember Lycos, AltaVista or MSN search? All have practically sunk without trace, scary stuff.

So what does this mean for your marketing? Well, if you’re not advertising on Google, you should be. Whether you like it or not, Google has total dominance in the Search market. It’s been reported that globally Google receives over 1 billion monthly unique visitors, that’s huge – it equates to approximately 1 in 7 people around the world visiting Google each month. To see just how popular Google is, use the below link to see a great 3D representation of the number searches around the globe – it’s something to behold:

click here >> Google Search Globe << click here

To find out more about Search Engine Marketing, click here, or alternatively give us a call on 0845 275 1225.

Sources: StatCounter.com, SearchEngineWatch.com, ComScore.com, Google Trends

The buyers Specific Media scooped up the website for a mere $35 million (approx £22m), a snip for the once dominant social network? Well that will be proven in the coming months. However, if Bebo is anything to go by, the purchasing of once popular social networks could prove to be a poor decision. Bebo sold for whopping $850m to AOL at its peak in March 2008 but sold a year ago for a measly $10m.

It appears that CEO Mike Jones will be leaving the company along with a large number of the current staff, some reports indicating up to 50% of the team could lose their jobs.

“In conjunction with the deal, we are conducting a series of restructuring initiatives, including a significant reduction in our workforce. I will assist Specific with the transition over the next two months before departing my role as MySpace CEO.”

A more interesting rumour is that Justin Timberlake is to take the ownership stake in Myspace as the new owners concentrate on giving the website a core music focus.

Source: Mashable

As we have been working in Social Media for over three years now we can reflect on the growth of social networks and look back in amazement at the figures. The graphs don’t fail to impress and as ever we have some interesting facts for you…

Overall Worldwide Users

As it is well reported, Facebook is still by far the most popular and well used Social Network both here in the UK and worldwide. Its two closest competitors are still not to be ignored however, Linkedin has now accumulated over 100 millions users and earlier in the year Twitter announced that they had over 175 million global users.

Worldwide Facebook Users

Despite the fact that we are seeing figures begin to plateau in some large countries which were early adopters of the social network, the overall worldwide user numbers continue to rocket at an impressive rate. Although not officially announced by Facebook it now seems as though the site has surpassed 700 millions worldwide users, almost exactly a year after announcing that they had achieved the 500 million user milestone. Although in terms of percentage growth it has nothing on the previous year on year stats, it is still a huge achievement. What Facebook will be most pleased about however is the fact that a year on and with an even larger audience they are still citing the 50% active rate of a year ago, meaning that on average over 350m users are logging into Facebook every day!

UK Facebook Stats

Back by popular demand, please see below a round up of Facebook Statistic for June 2011. This time we look back over the last four years to see the growth of Facebook in the UK. Although the growth doesn’t quite match the worldwide figures over the past 12 months the social network is still slowly increasing in users. Facebook has also reached another domination landmark by becoming the second most popular website in the UK behind Google. This month it surpassed Microsoft portals (including combined MSN/Live/Bing) to reach the latest ranking.

As the BBC reported yesterday, the greatest growth area in UK users is that of silver surfers aged 50+ and as you can see from the comparison graph below this is the case across all age groups 30+. The thirty-plus demographic now represents around 48% of all UK Facebook users.

Sources:

Facebook.com
BBC Technology
SocialBakers
Econsultancy