As a result, content creators are drawing blanks. It’s hard being constantly fresh and new, and doing it under a time limit is even more frustrating. Yet through our struggle we seem to forget a lot about some of the easiest, most authentic content available to us and produced on a daily basis: our experiences.

Some of the best content on the web today comes from companies that are not afraid to be completely transparent with their marketing strategies and business projects. Obviously there are some pretty big risks involved with this, especially when you know your competitors are following your every move. But when done delicately and efficiently, these posts promote confidence, inspire customer loyalty, and build genuine brand identity.

Here I’ll discuss a little more about my own adventures with project transparency and show you how to break it down so that it translates well to written and mixed media content. Once you’ve gone through, take the first step and share some of your own experiences with transparency in the comments below.

Moving Away From Traditional SEO

In Jacob’s earlier article, “Goodbye 2012, and Goodbye SEO!” he discussed how the SEM game has really taken a big 180 degree turn. In the past, SEO strategists would gather on secret forums or private chat rooms to discuss complex link building strategies and various other tweaks that were designed to systematically build PageRank and drive more traffic to your site.

Google caught on pretty quickly to these tactics and with updates to their algorithm like Penguin and Panda, they’ve effectively obliterated all of them. Sure there’s still a lot of shady SEO work going on and people who refuse to play along with Google’s game, but for companies that would rather focus on building a business, this basically changed everything.

Even building rank in the SERPs is something of an enigma nowadays. With local and personalized searches effectively taking up more and more traffic every day, you could argue that there really isn’t such thing as being “first” anymore. It’s really all about building a business community. To focus your attention on creating original content that attracts visitors naturally.

The Challenge

You need creative, quality, original content. You also need a lot of it and fast. So what can you do? Let’s say you have a small marketing team that handles this for you, or that you’re a lone entrepreneur that conquers everything on your own. You guys find a great topic to write about and then produce an 8000 word mini ebook talking about it. You share it on social media, respond to comments  and go the whole nine yards with this bad boy. Two weeks later, you’re ready to start again.

Two weeks! How the heck did time fly so fast? How are you going to speed things up without losing quality? What about actually running your business and making some money? These are just a few of the issues you’ll encounter with a small staff.

Let’s say you’re on the other end. Working at or running a big shot company with an entire marketing army at your command. Maybe you outsource your content marketing instead, relying on big content producers abroad to run your creative department. I can see these strategies taking a turn for the worst very fast.

On the one hand, with an entire army of people to work on your marketing team, you’ll be dishing out a massive amount of new content every day. By the end of the year you would have hundreds of articles on talking about everything you could possibly think of concerning your industry niche. Your social media networks would be so saturated with posts that it would have become borderline spammy. Producing a lot of content is good, but doing too much will inevitably sacrifice quality and creativity at some point.

As for outsourcing, this can be extremely risky and the pay off won’t be anywhere near what you’d like it to be. Most of these individuals spin articles like professional disc jockeys and whenever they happen to produce something original, it’s some of the most generic, poorly written, cookie cutter content you’ll ever lay eyes on.

So how do you produce fantastic creative content at a moderately fast pace with enough to keep talking about for a lifetime?

The Transparent Content Marketing Strategy

The easiest, fastest way to produce some of the best content on the web is by being transparent and authentic. Whether you’re committed to providing resourceful materials that make your readers think and applaud you for your insight, or if you’re hell bent on entertaining and attracting new visitors, your brand identity makes a promise to deliver that content no matter what.

It’s all about building trust and loyalty. But you can’t have that nowadays without being genuine. I’m a content writer at USB Memory Direct, where every day is a constant battle for creating bold, new, quality content. Talking about flash drives was easy at first, exploring ways in explaining how our products are useful to marketers and small business promotions.

But pretty soon we reached a dead end. There was nothing new to add, nothing original to say except announcing new discount offers or holiday special deals coming up in our monthly newsletter. It was a bit of a drag until we thought of a new strategy.

Our flash drives are for promotional purposes which mean you can customize them with your company logos and artwork. One of our clients named UPSO is a very talented graphic artist who decided to add his own unique artwork to one of our drives. The final product came out so good that we just had to talk about them in a post. The post was incredibly successful and even attracted some of UPSO‘s colleagues to buy drives from us as well.

From there we decided to feature many of our most creative and interesting client projects on our site in a sort of “portfolio” showcases our work. In it we would describe more about the client, their story, and how our products have helped grow their business in a positive way. We also got to talk more about the manufacturing process behind the drive that allowed us to naturally promote our additional services and features. This was a great way to nurture a solid relationship with our clients and build trust with new customers as well.

Going forward we became more open with our clients about the company and how we provide services to them. In your own content marketing strategy, you can produce endless amounts of new quality content that people are actually interested in reading just by being authentic with them. Here are just a few ways you could add authentic content:

• Talk about how you implemented a new, more efficient customer service response system, or many the quarterly earnings for your company.
• Talk about a project you worked on with a client (with the client’s permission, of course). It’s free content and your client will appreciate the exposure!
• If your social networks grew in follower counts recently, mention what you believe caused the spike, don’t just celebrate the bump.
• Discuss a recent failure the company has had. What you learned from the experience, and what you’re going to change moving forward.
• Feature a company back story, new employee profiles, and any events outside of work that your business takes part in. Add new photos and images from these events as well.
• Do a case study or interview a relevant authority in your market niche.
• If you went to a seminar, talk about what you learned, (or didn’t learn).
• Post a video instead of just writing an article about something.
• Tell cool and interesting stories that you encounter as a business and as individuals.

These types of stories will always change because the times are always changing. People come and go, companies go through good and bad times. There will always be something new and interesting to talk about because running a business is a 24/7/365 job. Try to implement this tactics for your creative content strategy in 2013, and I promise the results will be anything but ordinary.

Vincent Clarke is a marketing specialist for USB Memory Direct, specializing in outreach, content strategy, and community relations. You can catch him on Twitter at @_vhclarke.

The post Turning Your Projects into Content appeared first on Dinkum Interactive.

As an Internet Marketing company, we anticipate a fair amount of client churn with SEO. Sometimes it’s impatience, sometimes it’s bad info from others, at other times it’s just appropriate to move on. I’ll often check up on these folks, out of curiosity mostly and more often than not, they tend to have continued to perform well. A recent one had me a little concerned though. The biggest issue with this particular campaign was that we built their website and followed through with a very effective SEO campaign. It brought in traffic, business, email signups, direct sales to the point where Search was responsible for a fair amount of their business (and Email Marketing which we had set up as well). Alas we came to a point where it was time to move on.

So for some reason they popped into my mind and I quickly checked in, actually did it using a known performing keyword phrase but no sign. So I check the website. The visuals had been slightly adjusted but the backend was very different. It was a fairly significant overhaul and not in a good way.

Without knowing the full scope of their project, nor the new target phrases (one could hazard some guesses) it’s tough to estimate the full extent of impact but given the loss of keyword visibility and loss of traffic, it’s tough to imagine there hasn’t been a negative impact on business.

So whoever took over the campaign (and they did tout themselves as being SEO’s) did not do the migration properly, the new setup was sloppy, replete with spelling errors and structural deficits and in a fairly short amount of time has now sent them back 4 years. Hopefully that slide turns around soon.

A couple of points I feel are important to outline. The first is that SEO takes time and should take time. You should expect it to take time as long as the overall trend demonstrates growth. The second is that if you are anticipating any significant change to your website, do your research. There are plenty of guides to help you co-ordinate this process appropriately.

If you are seeking validation of your current SEO company I can’t speak to the quality of SEO audits/website reviews out there, but for sure there are some good, reasonably priced ones that can tell you how you’re doing rather than your networking buddy who wants your business or cousin Gary who is an expert on everything.

Hopefully your campaign data doesn’t end up looking like this –

The post SEO Sustainability appeared first on Dinkum Interactive.

It’s a very different scenario from 15 years ago. In those days, ice-cream came in a 2 litre plastic container with modest flavors and was relatively cheap to buy. Neapolitan – strawberry, chocolate and vanilla – was as exciting as it got. But then, someone realized that ice cream isn’t just frozen milk. It’s about indulgence, care and comfort.

A clever marketer looked at the emotions we have when we eat ice-cream. They discovered that people eat ice-cream when they feel alone or miss their loved ones. There’s a very strong emotional connection with indulgence and a sense of ‘pampering’.

And so premium ice-cream was born. It came in smaller containers, and the price went up. But we still bought it. Why?

Ice-cream had been reframed. It was the same (mostly) product, but we viewed it differently. We saw it as a premium product that met our emotional needs.

Reframing is a popular tool in marketing that uses an understanding of psychology to package and market items. It’s not only how a product is packaged. It’s also what you put a product next to, known as ‘price anchoring’.

Price anchoring is a form of framing that businesses use to ensure you spend as much money as possible. It’s the point at which you judge an item to be cheap or expensive – good value or bad. But how do you determine an anchor price? In most cases, not very well.

Imagine you visit a store and you see a jacket you love. You try it on and it fits perfectly. You then look at the price and see it costs $1200.00. The salesperson asks if you’d like to buy it, but you tell them it’s too expensive. They tell you you’re in luck because the jacket is 60% off today and only costs $500.

Although more than you wanted to pay, you’re more likely to buy the jacket because your anchor price had been set at $1200. The interesting thing about anchors is that they are often set arbitrarily.

What’s a reasonable price to pay for a BBQ? $100.00? $500.00? When you visit a specialty BBQ store, it’s likely the first price you see will be the most expensive BBQ available -$5000.00. This sets the anchor for what people expect to pay for a BBQ. $500 doesn’t seem so expensive in comparison.

This has applications for you if you have a product that you want to position in the market. Or, you might simply be a consumer who doesn’t want their emotions to be played upon.

The post Reframing: the Ice-Cream Effect appeared first on Dinkum Interactive.

Return on Investment?  Prove it!
In addition to the complexity in building and maintaining awesome campaigns is the difficulty in pricing our services. When I joined the Dinkum team about three years ago, we measured goals in terms of “ROI” (return on investment) to ensure the client made a clear return from the money spent on our services. It usually sealed the deal, since other SEO’s didn’t talk too much about business stuff. We meant it, but it was a dicey game – things changed and generally we’d end up doing more work for the same amount of money, which is no way to grow a business.

Real Business Stuff Continues
Just as today’s campaigns tend to involve a lot more components moving in a synchronized fashion (remember, three years ago Twitter was small, Pinterest didn’t exist, mobile was going to be big someday, and the browser wars were a reference to the 90′s) – the way in which companies budget for internet marketing is vastly more important. This is no longer a side game, an investment, or a case of black magic. This is, to quote a Philly peer Wil Reynolds, real business sh*t.

My Mea Culpa
To tell you the truth, when it comes to SEO, I never really believed you could have your cake and eat it too. You need to earn your stripes. Relying on just SEO (keywords on pages, link building, etc) is NOT a path to long-term, jaw-dropping, lots of big numbers success.   It’s a way to say you’re doing “SEO”, but in the end it’s really pretty frustrating. How do I know? Because I spend a lot of time talking to small and medium business clients who fork over hard-earned cash (cash they feel coming out of their pockets) and while they want to believe the fairy tale about SEO, they can’t take the risk of it not turning out well. Words like ‘scope’ and ‘ROI’ and ‘rankings’ get tossed around a lot at our weekly and monthly meetings.

There Has to Be A Better Way
When we built this website about a year ago, my partner Paul and I were looking for a way to articulate how we approached what we do. To be clear, we’re not SEO’s – we’re Internet Marketers. It may sound pedantic to slice and dice the terms, but to us the difference is fundamental, and it’s grounded in our approach.

The EOS Model
At this same time, we were working through a business development process with the brilliant Steve Smolinsky. The process is called EOS (read about it, really) and it is a packaged-up, highly-researched, formulaic approach to getting your business in high gear.

EOS was developed by a guru named Gino Wickman to work for businesses of all sizes and industries. I said to Paul, if we had a methodology like ‘EOS’ for ‘SEO’, we’d be able to communicate its value to our clients and remove some of the anxiety, mystery, and black magic from this process.

Here’s how Gino describes the EOS model:

The EOS Model provides a visual illustration of the Six Key Components of any business that must be managed and strengthened to be a great business. This model applies to big and small businesses alike, in any industry.

What I love about this model is that it can be applied to any type of business. I wanted something similar to describe our approach so it wouldn’t have even a scent of black magic about it.

Prove It

Paul has been telling me for years that our approach is the same. The exact initiatives have changed and evolved for each client, but the concept is the same. I told him we needed to prove it.

The Dinkum Model
Our model consists of having the right buckets for the various activities that exist, used to exist, could exist, and will exist. The beauty and the challenge of any Internet Marketing strategy is allocating resources to the proper channels, when the channels are shifting and growing all time. We feel the following four buckets are the key components of a successful, ass-kicking, self-regenerating, results-delivering, stress-reducing approach to Internet Marketing. They are Core, Production, Outreach, and ROI Drivers.

1. The Core is all about your website and your data. Make sure the health of your website is strong (onsite and offsite) and that you comply with best practices, both for Google and for your users. Collect the data you need and include split testing, heatmaps, and our old friend, Google Analytics. Have a process to review this data and drawing actionable conclusions from it.
2. Production is about getting stuff done. There is no great website, landing page, ad campaign, email marketing, infographic, video, or other initiative on the internet without the hand of a pixel crafter, wordsmith, or a code monkey at some point. Managers tend to drastically under-budget for quality production. Understand the resources involved.
3. Outreach is a popular word in our industry but it’s often misunderstood by “normal” business people. In our view, outreach is the practice of getting out and about. It’s about sharing your value, participating in conversations, listening and learning from others, and ensuring people know who you are and what you have to offer. This bucket changes and grows to include new outlets including social media and guest blogging, video diaries and text messages. It might even include a phone call! Whatever it is, it’s currently our #1 activity for many clients.
4. ROI Drivers is the practice of proactively driving a direct transactional event. This includes Pay Per Click, display advertising, remarketing and retargeting, and the like. It also includes tools to help reduce shopping cart abandonment, and to increase lead nurturing through marketing automation. These are the tools and approaches to step on the gas when you’re confident about your foundational activities, processes, and team.

Why This Model Works
While this model doesn’t account for all aspects of your approach to internet marketing (choosing the right vendors, allocating the proper resources at all levels, communicating strategy throughout an organization) it DOES provide a holistic way to look at the big picture, and then drill down to the specifics that make great campaigns great.

And for us, it’s also organic. It flows from one step to the next and back again, with each new achievement in one area feeding success in another.

• Improve your core and you’ll have a better strategy for what to do with your homepage, your landing pages, or your checkout process. You’ll know which sites refer the best traffic, and where users are having issues completing the goals you’ve assigned.
• Invest in your production capacity and you’ll see your campaigns become refreshed. Creative, worthwhile content and high quality designs and coding will encourage your users to act and interact.
• Engage more deeply in your outreach and you’ll see more qualified leads coming to your website prepared to buy, or talking about your brand or product in a fluent manner. You’ll gain loyalty, trust, and goodwill and you’ll have enormous ears for feedback.
• Hone your ROI Drivers, and commit to them for the right reasons, and you’ll see your bottom line grow fat with increased conversions and efficiencies throughout your marketing and sales life-cycle.

We’ve implemented this methodology into our proposals and pricing structure. We no longer charge a set fee per month for 12 months. Rather, we break the pricing structure out and work with clients to ensure all elements are covered. We also review the strategy each quarter to make adjustments (up or down) to take advantage of new opportunities or a changed environment.

Want to see your internet marketing perform at its best? Is your approach healthy, balanced, inclusive, and thought-out? Or are you running a bit blind, hoping for rock star moves and growth to meet your numbers?

The post A Methodology for Internet Marketing appeared first on Dinkum Interactive.

Google 2013 Doodle

We made some fairly significant changes in 2012 to accommodate Google. These sort of changes are not really uncommon in our field and interestingly for most of us, none of them were a real surprise but what has occurred this past year, does represent a shift in thinking for many in our industry. A big part of it has been a lack of understanding on many SEO’s part. Using unsustainable practices is just that, unsustainable. They have been able to get away with it for a while now, some figuring the risks were worth it, others just blissfully ignorant that they would be penalized. Many did indeed get penalized and we heard a lot of grumbling about it. Sometimes Google gets it wrong and penalizes the good guys. Sometimes they will make an adjustment that targets an activity that was once acceptable (like sitewide linking) but fortunately none of our websites saw any significant hits and validated our strategy which has been less about the tricks and more about simply trying to make things right or what we like to refer to as a “healthy web ecosystem”. This one sets you up for strong long-term Internet Marketing performance.

It seems there have been a lot more “what you need to stop doing for SEO” posts this year, many of them addressing key issues that are known tricks of the trade, a definite sign that something is up. The biggest challenge we’ve always found is in justifying the way we do things against those who suggest that they know what they are doing. Clients send us articles from “experts”, blog posts, we were forwarded an email from Network Solutions wondering why we didn’t put meta keywords on a client website, others just wanting us to go ahead and “do our SEO thing” which isn’t something we “do”. Historically, these have all served as good opportunities for us to educate our clients but it’s still a tricky concept to grasp. Some also don’t seem to want to hear it. For those interested though, here are a few of our top features for Internet Marketers in 2013.

Technical – this is biggie for us. We’re stacked towards the technical because it can be the cause of a lot of issues for your healthy web ecosystem. Unknowing developers can create pretty significant issues for clients; duplicate content, linking issues, poor navigation, usability, URL structure, and of course some big ones like blocking search via robots.txt and keep previous websites on servers. On the other hand, a well crafted web presence can be a huge benefit.

Content – right up there. Writing for the web has always required a unique skill as well as writing for Search Engines. The most skillful ones accommodate those 2 but place priority on the user. Overusing keywords is probably the biggest issue here and will earn Google’s ire if abused. The goal here is to create worthwhile content, not content around a keyword or how many times a keyword phrase is used or the percentage of anchor text time relevance + y then carry the 1.  Probably the biggest adjustment many had to make this year was the shift away from creating content just to create content. Thin web pages have started to prove more and more useless.

Link Building – this has always been something that felt a little unnatural to us. Comment spamming, social bookmarking, link wheels, forums…are all pretty cheap tactics to build incoming links and as a result we’ve never really done it in excess. We will still do directories (where appropriate), we will also offer up comments where necessary and making sure to join in the conversation but overall these tactics are done. Figuring out new ways to earn links, are not done.

Social – I’ve separated it from content but they really are closely aligned. People really struggle with this a lot and I certainly understand; time constraints, lack of direct value but it’s worth noting that it should not be ignored. I’m not suggesting that it will be the difference between success and failure this year but there is most definitely value in social contribution and I would not discount G+. Also don’t forget about active listening about your company and your community because it’s an essential activity.

Data – last on my list but one of my top requirements for someone in our industry and for sure a tool that really helps to validate what we do, analytics and statistics should not be ignored. I still hear about SEO companies providing ranking reports without ever mentioning analytics and whether or not those keywords were actually working. Learn to read and work with data that counts. Bottom-line goodness.

It’s important to note that keyword rankings are an even more flawed metric than previous years. We understand that clients love them and we do still provide them but with significant caveats. For us they offer an overall “health check” and that’s pretty much it.

We really hope that the idea of an SEO “tricking” the Search Engines to push them to the top is finally over. For us, SEO may still be a valid concept but we’ve moved away from it. Often spending more time on other elements like usability, CRO, email marketing, PPC, web development, mobile, design etc makes more sense…the SEO that we once knew, is gone and the holistic Internet Marketer (digital marketer, web marketer) is where we are heading. One thing is for sure, it’s going to be an interesting 2013.

The post Our SEO Paradigm Shift for 2013 appeared first on Dinkum Interactive.

1. Rankings mean less and less every day (personalized search means there is no single #1 ranking anymore)
2. It’s harder to get the data you need for SEO to make sense (the whole ‘not provided’ thing, lack of user data)
3. A diversification of what it is to “search” for something means there are no easy ways to get to the top.  What is the top? Where are the users?  (The answer: everywhere and they are moving to a new place fast!)

Of course, search engines remain a dominant source of business and visibility – and we base all of our campaigns around a strategy founded on search.  However, the time has passed when our industry could rely on the halo effect that “SEO” brought to the table. The mystique! The promise of tons of traffic! The simple logic of it all!   “Just tag your pages with the right keywords, and wait for the traffic to start rolling in.”  Like rainbows with pots of gold at the end, this magical rise to fame and fortune through just the right tricks and tweaks is no more…if it ever existed.

It’s About Driving Business, Mate!
So, what is the path forward?  At Dinkum, we’ve seen a pragmatic, get-your-hands dirty approach provide phenomenally consistent results to clients of all sizes.  The basis of this approach isn’t rock-star moves or huge one-day spikes in traffic. Instead, it’s thinking about business earnings and the true value of leads and conversions generated by various activities. It’s about message clarification and understanding your audience. It’s about having a great product and a connection with your customers, prospects, peers, and employees.

In short: What’s your message? Who is your audience? How are you going to communicate with them and compel them to act? 

Our 2013 Approach, Summarized in Four Bullet Points
Answering these questions and getting the core elements in place is what every organization (ours included) should do with their New Year’s Resolution. In 2013 you’ll see us (and we guess many others) doubling down on the foundational efforts that drive business.  Here’s what we think they are:

• Core - This is about your website, your user experience, your keyword and overall marketing strategy, and your process for collecting and reviewing performance data.  Hunker down on the known best-practices and look critically to ensure that your most valuable channels are getting the attention they deserve, and that you have the tracking and expertise in place to make solid decisions.
• Production - This is about getting stuff done.  Make your homepage better, develop a landing page, rethink your email, deploy a mobile strategy. It’s about getting pixels and words and graphics and code produced in a timely and high-quality manner.
• Outreach - This is about getting out in your space, listening, participating, being social, being helpful, being engaged.  Promote your message, share your knowledge, and make yourself valuable and highly regarded.
• Revenue Drivers - This is about stepping on the gas, including paying for visibility and access to your audiences.  PPC, remarketing, retargeting, display advertising, and more.

In the end though, it’s about focusing on what’s always been important to us: the bottom-line.  Marketing is a tough game, but the internet offers enormous potential for many organizations (large and small) to stand out from the crowd, and be rewarded as a result with greater visibility, sales, donations, etc.

The key isn’t a magic trick, or just the right tags on a page, or just pushing tons of content. It’s about investing in a holistic process that takes advantage of the unique aspects of the internet to help you reach your marketing and business goals.

Goodbye SEO, and hello 2013!

The post Goodbye 2012, and Goodbye SEO! appeared first on Dinkum Interactive.

Happy Holidays from the team at Dinkum Interactive. Have a happy and safe time of it. Hope to catch up with you in the New Year.

The post Happy Holidays, 2012 Style appeared first on Dinkum Interactive.

I’m always a little surprised at how well our site does given how much we neglect the poor thing. This ends up annoying me because I know we should leverage it more than we do and we even have the skills to do so. We get decent visibility, we get leads through it so we really should be pushing it more. Next year!

So a good place to start is to have a look where your traffic visitors are coming from. Go to Traffic Sources >> All Traffic and check through the list. Google is top for us but we’ve also got a few interesting sources like wplift.com, Facebook and tutorialswebdesign.com amongst others. Overall it tells us what we had been suspecting which was that we’re not practicing what we preach. Our clients may be benefitting from our activities but we’ve been neglecting our own backyard. It’s also surely a reminder of the pains that many of our clients have with internal resources.

So let’s move on to your Search referrals. We don’t do any Paid Search advertising so selecting the Search >> Organic is the best option. This is where you’ll see some useful information. Maybe you’ll be surprised at the keywords that are driving users to your website. For us, there are a few surprises. Phillies? Happy Birthday? Not so sure about those ones but “writing and seo” is a clear indicator that there is continued interest in that subject. Might be worth another post next year. Our “Open Source Face Recognition” post we suspected would do well given its interesting subject-matter and it has brought in quite a few users. These highly technical posts seem to be sought-after so it means our developers need to do more blogging! Then the “Marketing Companies Philadelphia” and “Internet Marketing Philadelphia” referrals make sense considering that’s who we are and what we offer. While we have very little desire to go back to being an “SEO Company”, we do know a lot of people are still searching for it so looking at this data may inspire such action. Or maybe we need to think about “Digital Marketing Company”. For you it may mean narrowing your keyword focus or possibly making a shift. This is a great time to do a little more research.

Another useful place to check out is the top content. This you’ll find under Content >> Overview and will be a good indicator for what people are checking out on your website. For us the About section is the most popular so maybe we need to spend a little time curating this next year.

Finally, make sure to check through your goals. Conversions >> Goals >> Overview. This is where you’ll see where your most effective channel. For some it may be a contact form or an email signup…a place where a visitor takes some action…a phone call if you’re tracking it.

It’s a great time to think about beefing up your data in general. Every year there are more weapons available to capture the right information to help direct your business planning and 2013 will be a big one for data. We’ll be offering up our recommendations soon enough. Have a great rest of the year and look forward to catching up in the next one.

The post Looking Back at Your Data to Look Forward appeared first on Dinkum Interactive.

1.2 trillion searches. 146 languages. What did the world search for in 2012?

The top trending searches for 2012.

By trending, it means growth compared with the previous year. The death of singer Whitney Houston in February topped the world’s trending searches list for 2012, followed by Korean pop sensation, PSY, and his song Gangnam Style, which Google says also became the most watched video in YouTube history. Here is the list.

• Whitney Houston
• Gangnam Style
• Hurricane Sandy
• iPad 3
• Diablo 3
• Kate Middleton
• Olympics 2012
• Amanda Todd
• Michael Clarke Duncan
• BBB12

By the way, BBB12 stands for Big Brother Brazil. Brazil has a big population, and from the looks of it, is one of the last remaining countries where the Big Brother franchise is still popular. In one forum decrying this fact, there was this response.

Well, don’t panic. Grass is not greener on the other side. France nº1 is a phone provider, nº2 football and nº3 is the French equivalent of Big Brother. The presidential election is not even in the TOP 10. Oh, and yeah, McDonalds is nº5. So much for French gastronomy…

I’m amazed that Kate Middleton features so prominently, with or without her top on.

Top Trending Events for 2102

Hurricane Sandy was the top trending event in the U.S. for 2012. The presidential election came in second, followed by the Super Bowl, Olympics, and UEFA Euro 2012.

• Hurricane Sandy
• Presidential election
• Super Bowl
• Olympics
• UEFA Euro 2012
• KONY Movement
• SOPA protest
• Aurora shooting
• Trayvon Martin case
• Hurricane Isaac

You can also take a look at other categories, such as film and TV. There’s an interactive map. But one of the most popular elements of Google Zeitgeist is this video summarizing the year in visuals, which has become a popular form of communication.

Click here to view the embedded video.

What do we make of these search lists? I think it shows we are a herd animal, wanting to know what everyone else is looking at. The viral nature of certain trends seems evident – what else explains Gangnam-style? I’m sure there are millions of searches about significant events, such as the discovery of the Higgs-Boson particle.

What is love? is still an enduring question. We can add that to the new search query, what is YOLO – you only live once. The teens are getting into it. YOLO.

What surprised you about Google Zeitgeist 2012? Leave your comment.

Photo Credit: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1104082

The post Google Zeitgeist appeared first on Dinkum Interactive.

In 2009, German-based car company Volkswagen launched its BlueMotion technologies that were part of its environmentally friendly cars. In deciding how to market these cars, Volkswagen’s advertising agency, DDB in Stockholm, believed the easiest way to get more people to drive them was by making it fun. The company set up a competition in which people from across the globe were encouraged to come up with a fun solution to a common problem. It was called ‘The Fun Theory”.

To kick off the competition, DDB gave this example. At a busy train station in Odenplan, Stockholm, commuters have the choice of exiting the station by walking up around 40 stairs or riding on the escalator. As you’d expect, most people take the escalator. But one day, the stairs were transformed into a giant piano keyboard. When your foot hit the step, a note of the piano played. With a camera capturing the behavior of commuters, many decided to walk up the stairs, flitting between the white and black keys, moving fast and slow. 66% more people chose the stairs over the escalator. The video went viral and thousands of people entered the competition.

The winner was Kevin Richardson, a tall, lanky man from San Fransisco, USA, who also happens to be a producer for Nickelodeon’s games division. His idea was the Speed Camera Lottery. “The Speed Camera Lottery does two things,” he explained. “One, it would photograph speeders and give them a citation and that money goes into a pot. But if you’re obeying the law, your picture will also get snapped, you’ll be entered into a lottery and win some of that money from those speeders.” The concept came about from asking this question: could we get people to obey the speed limit for fun? “I really think fun can change human behavior and I was really thrilled to see that my idea that really started as a scribble submitted into this competition might even become reality.” Less than a year later, his idea was trialled in Stockholm Sweden. A speed camera was placed outside a school zone where the speed limit was 30 kms/hr. Drivers who obeyed the limit were sent a lottery ticket. The lottery prize was generated from the money paid as fines by drivers who broke the speed limit. Over three days, 24,857 cars passed a speed camera. The average speed before the experiment was 32 km/hr. During the experiment, it was 25 km/hr, reducing the incidence of speeding by 22%. By making it a game, more people complied with the law.

The most common way to diagnose malaria, a disease spread by mosquitoes, is to take a blood sample and examine it through a microscope. There are two stages to the process. Firstly, you need to detect the parasite in the sample. Secondly, you need to count the number of parasites that appear in the sample. The more parasites that appear, the worse the infection. It’s quite a resource-intensive process with a specialist taking around 30 minutes to do the test. Is there an alternative way to undertake the detection? Dr Miguel Luengo-Oroz from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid in Spain had the idea of using online gamers to do the detection, devising MalariaSpot. In his study, volunteer online gamers were invited to play a web-based game in which they had to identify and count parasites in blood smears that appear on their computer screens. The site invites users to ‘Click here to play – 1 minute game against malaria’. When you click, some music plays, and you’re shown a screen that reveals what the parasite looks like. And then you’re invited to ‘Click on the parasites’. The screen goes pink and you can see various blotches. When you correctly click on the parasite, a nasty grey cartoon face appears. When you click on other material, a red cross appears. An hourglass in the top left hand corner of the screen counts down, as you race to identify all the parasites. Your score can be seen in the top right hand corner of the screen. And when it’s ‘Game Over’, you receive your score. It’s quite addictive. You can also see how many points other malaria hunters have scored.

In this study, that took place over one month, anonymous players from 95 countries played more than 12,000 games, generating a database of more than 270,000 clicks on the test images. When 22 games from nonexpert players were combined, there was a parasite counting accuracy higher than 99%. It’s a bit like playing Angry Birds, but you’re making a contribution. It could become the new diversion as you travel on public transport.

How can you turn your product offering into a game?

Photo Credit: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1407331

The post Gamification – Make It Fun appeared first on Dinkum Interactive.