The brand spanking new Foosball table is now in place. The first two games resulted in lots of shouting, accusations of “luck” and in the end it was one game each. Everyone was suitably sweaty at the end. Now to name each of the players…

With 28 million tweets a day emanating from Twitter and 3.5bn content posts per week on Facebook brands can no longer ignore the power of utilising social media as part of their marketing strategy.

And a lot of brands have indeed already tapped into this, but in many cases are not making the most of the opportunity or understanding the best way of engaging with the potentially huge captive audience.

A recent UK study of the top 50 brands revealed that although 90% of these companies have a Twitter account or a Facebook fan page 43% of them had never replied or retweeted anything on Twitter and only used it occasionally to push out information and ads for their brand, similarly 66% of these Facebook accounts had comments from fans, but only 25% of the companies are replying and engaging with their fans.

To properly implement a social presence for your brand you have to be prepared to put the time in, in much the same way as you’d dedicate your time to planning a press or online advertising campaign. These avenues have to treated in their own right and obviously the clue to doing this is in the name ‘SOCIAL’ media. Be prepared to reply to your Twitter followers or Facebook Fans. More brands are using this as a way to expand their customer service by searching Twitter for tweets that mention their brand and then sending an @ reply to the customer offering help or advice, likewise with Facebook reading the comments posted by Fans and replying to them or finding other accounts dedicated to their brand. Be it good or bad comments, the fact that the brand is prepared to engage with the customer and offer advice is always appreciated which can only be a good thing in the end!

One of the main rules of participating in these social activities is to always go where the conversation is. Don’t try to force your audience to start a discussion around a particular subject that you want to promote, track down where the conversation is already happening in a natural way and join in!
An already busy forum, Facebook account, Twitter account or blog that has established itself over the past few years is always going to have a dedicated and active crowd of people that are ready to hear from you and just by tapping into a fraction of this already established audience your social media activity can get off to a flying start.

By following a few simple rules your followers and fans will come naturally and if you keep the conversation light hearted and don’t try to push your product at every opportunity you’ll be surprised at the result!

After sleepless nights, working Sundays and ordering pizza to the Nzime offices we are proud of our efforts. So much effort went in to designing, building and launching the re-branded Rare that we think we should win the .net award for best redesign of the year! If you agree, you can nominate Rare here: http://www.thenetawards.com

Nzime have been appointed to work on a very, very exciting project which may even see one or two of us entering an event we wish we hadn’t. Sore bums all round.

We’ll keep you posted as the project develops and also if and when we commit!

OR….

Nzime avait été nominés à travailler sur un project très, très passionnant, ce qui peut même voir un ou deux d’entre nous de se presenter a un événtment vraiment penible. On aura tous mal au derriere!

Nous vous mettrons au courant des développements du project, et aussi même si nous nous resoudrons de s’engager!

I am under strict instructions not to reveal too much as this project is currently secret…  but there is certainly a buzz in the Nzime office. We have been asked to develop a Facebook application. We’re absolutely thrilled to be asked and we’re already beavering away to make this app as great as it deserves to be.

Brands are always trying to find new ways to interact with their customers and enhancing user experience by incorporating tools into social media platforms is a way for brands to make their products far more accessible and exciting.

Well, at least now we’ll have an excuse to be on Facebook all day now. No, I really am doing research…

Some outtakes from the recent Knox Handarmour photoshoot. Obviously there was no fun involved. Visit the lads at Scene Photography.

Over the last few months we have been working on a couple of new campaigns for Elastoplast. This one is for their new plaster which contains healing cream. Click on the banner above to find out more and check out the great kids quizzes.

The new Nzime pool bike. Anyone with a motorcycle licence has access to our rather modest form of transport. Is that sunshine I see? I’m off……

Many late nights and early mornings have paid dividends as the WIRED web site is now live. I think we may include ourselves within the testimonials. WIRED…. it certainly works.

Make sure you follow them on Twitter and Facebook as there are some great competitions coming up.

Don't just choose your keywords from random

If somebody isn’t looking to spend in excess of £30,000 on a beautiful, handmade gun that would make the gods weep at the sight of its loveliness, that visitor is going to bounce and make your stats looks bad. Remember, we are looking to be true to ourselves, not draw in traffic regardless of how irrelevant the site is to what the visitor may have actually been looking for. I have always been of the opinion that SEO is about attracting the right people to your site and being useful to thos people. It is not about attracting any old website through any means possible and trying to flog them something that they never wanted in the first place. Are you listening Acai Berry affiliates?!

Here are my tips for good keyword research:

- Use a good keyword tool like wordtracker. Not only does it tell you how many searches there are for your chosen key terms but these tolls suggest keywords as well.

- If you choose to use Google’s free external keyword tool, take the numbers with a pinch of salt. Even if you do hit page one position one for your term which apparently has 18,000 searches a month, don’t use that figure to make projections traffic. Even if say 45% of people searching for your term click on your site, you may be disappointed when 8,100 people aren’t coming to your site every month through that term. I have found Google’s results to be somewhat optimistic.

- Don’t pick the keyword with the highest number of searches to begin with. I usually go after smaller keywords first as they are easier to rank for and then when a site is ranking well for these terms I move on to the big hitters. This is so I can get traffic in quickly and this then gives me the time I need to put the work in to ranking for the more competative keywords without the site’s traffic suffering in the mean time.

- Never base your research on broad terms unless you are looking for keyword ideas. Broad search looks for your keywords in any order that are in close proximity. So if you search for jelly babies, you’re possibly including searches for the words ‘jelly’ and ‘babies’ that have no relevance to each other. #fail. “phrase” search shows how many people are searching for a term within a phrase, so they may be asking the search engine a question e.g. ‘why do I need jelly babies to function?’ [exact] searches show you roughly how many people looked for results for the term jelly babies on its own. Believe me, the numbers between the broad and exact searches are huge.

Ok, these tips should be enough to be getting on with. My most important tip is just not to get wrapped up in numbers. Your website will never convert if visitors feel they have been deceived into clicking on your link.