Let’s Do Digital held at the Southampton City College Hub by
Bournemouth Digital Agency Adido was an inspiring and forward looking event. The
themes of the day were changes to search functions and social media. Speakers from
Google, Microsoft Bing, Linkedin, RNLI, Adidio and Santander entertained the
crowd with powerful insights and tips for the future. The next twelve months
are set to be very exciting! Delegates also attended workshops covering
analytics, website development, effective content creation and integrated
campaign planning.
The event’s killer headline was Google’s voice search, which
saw the crowd shouting Ok Google! The voice search not only understands your
exact search criteria, replying audibly with intelligent results, but can also
associate following searches. The demonstration was to search for top New York
Hotels, which listed them by location and Trip Adviser reviews. The following
question was: ‘Where are the bars and clubs?’ The results showed the best bars
and clubs in the near vicinity of the previous search results. So how does this
affect us as digital marketers? Well with users now searching for full
sentences and linking follow up searches, key words are no longer the top
factor for good SEO. Copy needs to consider the developing full sentence voice
search style.
The crowd went wild when learning about the impact Google
Glasses will have when released to the public (scheduled for early 2014). Users will be able to utilise Augmented Reality technology alongside, social media,
image capturing and search functionality, all weighing less than the average
pair of sunglasses. Another innovation from Google is the Google Now app which
intuitively presents information before you search for it, using previous
common search queries and intelligent data tracking. Google Now tells you how
long your journey to work will take before you even ask. It is fair to say
Google stole the show with the demonstrative style in comparison to Microsoft
Bing’s sales pitch approach. Although Bing raised some excellent points about
the personalisation of search results through intuitive big data.
Personalisation is definitely the buzzword of 2014 and Microsoft Bing have
nailed the concept with their paid experience.
LinkedIn revealed the forthcoming changes to business pages. There will be the opportunity to add pages for divisions, departments
and teams, which interlink to create amazing networking opportunities and
targeting options. This could revolutionise the way B2B social interaction is
completed, allowing for online speed networking (the corporate hospitality
trend of 2014). Microsoft have counteracted this notion with Yammer, Bing’s
answer to LinkedIn. The options for Office 365 integration and share points are
excellent, but the pricing is more complex than that of LinkedIn.
Top tips from Let's Do Digital:
1. Really start to think about your content and the
way new search technology will use this for your SEO.
2. Consider the use of liquid content alongside linked content to really engage the user with clear calls to action, don’t overload with purchase or product messages.
3. Start speed networking. Try to regularly get involved with conversations in your industry or engage with your industry’s eco system.
4. Don’t sent digital junkmail. Be realistic, is this content adding value to the reader? Is it ugly, sales lead, pushing product or branding? Target, profile and engage is the steps to building a long- term relationship.
5. And finally, nothing beats a cute animal picture for boosting engagement, which RNLI refer to as the animal klaxon. Don’t fight it, innovate it! See my token animal klaxon above.
Let’s Do Digital was an informative and
social event that left me with some excellent perspective and insight. My only
niggle was that event timings weren’t followed and this left the afternoon very
rushed.
By Maria Parker - Harris
Let's Do Digital - http://www.dodigitalbetter.com/
#letsdodigital #digitalmarketing #socialmedia
#SEO #hummingbird #Google #animalklaxon
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