Pinterest has simply exploded on to the social networking scene. According to research from Compete, unique visitors to Pinterest.com increased by 155% in just one month from December 2011 to January 2012. What’s interesting about the meteoric rise of Pinterest are the differences in how countries, genders and businesses are using it.

The infographic below highlights the differences between users in the UK and USA. Interestingly in the USA, Pinterest is focussed on a variety of themes including crafts, gifts and interior design, and the audience is currently 83% female. Compare this to the UK where currently the Pinterest audience is predominately interested in venture capital, blogging resources and SEO/marketing (among others topics) with an audience split of 44% female to 56% male.

Pinterest is more established in the USA and perhaps as its adoption grows in the UK we will see these differences even out, for the time being though it looks as if UK users are tapping in to the platform’s potential for business usage. With the human brain receiving 90% of information from visuals (Source:Saleschase) the potential for B2B marketing strategies is exciting, and with the UK embracing Pinterest as a valid forum for marketing it’s certainly one to consider across future campaigns. What’s clear is that Pinterest shows a great deal of promise and versatility and is the new rising star in social media.

New Facebook Timeline is a force for good and a chance for B2B brands to shine. B2B can do branding every bit as well as B2C, and the new Timeline format is all about branding and brands having to work harder to stay relevant.

Facebook pages will automatically switch to the new Timeline layout on 30 March. Here’s a summary of the changes and what they mean for business pages.

Cover photo
You now have an opportunity to showcase one large image on your company Facebook page. The image must be a minimum of 399 pixels across and the maximum dimensions are 850 by 315 pixels. You can’t include any calls to action and you can’t tell people to ‘Like’ or share your page. You can’t feature any contact information.

Profile image
The size of the profile picture has been changed to 180 by 180 pixels and appears in the news feed as a 30 by 30 pixels picture.

Highlighted post
You can now highlight an important story or event on your Facebook page so that it expands to run across the whole Timeline.

Pinned posts
You can now ‘pin’ stories to the top of your Timeline for up to a week so you have more control over what content visitors to your page see first.

Milestones
This is a new feature that lets you tell your brand’s story. See how Starbucks has done it here by clicking the bottom of their Timeline to reveal a picture of their first store opened in 1971. Who knew Starbucks was that old?

Applications
One of the biggest changes affecting company pages is removal of the default landing tab option, which mean new visitors to your page will always arrive on your wall first. Applications, welcome tabs, contact forms, competition etc. are all still available and can be showcased in a new position top right beneath the cover image. New app buttons are customisable and the dimensions for these are 111 by 74 pixels.

Facebook offers
This functionality is due to be rolled out soon with easy ways to share offers. As Facebook has the user’s email address they are able to email offers to whoever claims them.

Analytics and messaging
You now access Facebook analytics, or ‘Insights’ as they are called these days, by clicking on the Admin Panel top right. You can now see Insight information about any page using the new Timeline format. Plus pages now have the ability to receive messages from fans, which means some of those customer services conversations (complaints?) can move off your wall. This is similar to the DM feature in Twitter and is a welcome new feature for brands. To protect users from unsolicited contact, conversations can only be initiated by your Facebook fans.

This covers everything you need to know to make the transition to new Facebook Timeline and start driving more web traffic and better search performance. Bear in mind however that not everyone in your marketing team is gong to be a Facebook expert. There may be 30 million users in the UK but they are not all expert users.

Like many businesses you may decide to outsource all or part of your Facebook marketing. If you’d like to talk to someone about anything from competition pages, apps, welcome canvases or fully outsourced Facebook account management, call us.

Photo: Mark Zuckerberg introducing Timeline at F8
(Credit: Facebook)

B2B Marketing magazine has published a Twitter Best Practice Guide which includes a chapter by The Crocodile.

The B2B buying process can be long and arduous, not to mention potentially risky. Choosing the wrong supplier or partner for a business-critical service or product can have ramifications beyond initial capital outlay. No surprise then that your customers are increasingly turning to the social web, seeking advice from colleagues and peers to support their decision making processes.

Twitter can help you tune in to what your target market is talking about. Joining in these conversations in a timely and appropriate manner is a key part of an effective nurture strategy, one that can quickly and cost effectively help your business acquire a position of stature and leadership.

By addressing your audience throughout the various stages of the decision making process with useful, relevant content you can engage prospects in social dialogue that will help prove relevance, drive consideration and set you apart from the competition.

Good quality content and conversation are key to cultivating long-term relationships and valuable repeat sales opportunities. The challenge is in understanding, firstly, how to use Twitter to create and nurture leads, and secondly to establish the qualification criteria that determine when a marketing conversation is ready to progress into a sales discussion.

To help B2B marketers use and understand Twitter, B2B Marketing magazine has published a  Twitter Best Practice Guide including a chapter on using Twitter for lead nurturing and sales written by me and The Crocodile’s digital director Tom Marrows.

For brands, Twitter is no longer optional – it’s essential. The Twitter Best Practice Guide looks at the basics principles through to sophisticated techniques and examines all aspects of creating a sound Twitter strategy. Get your copy of the Twitter Best Practice Guide.

Follow us on Twitter or, contact us here.

Google’s new privacy rules roll out today. The main purpose of the change is to allow sharing of information across Google’s services in order to allow targeted advertising based on users’ behaviour across Google properties.

It’s causing quite a stink, with France’s data regulators in particular warning that the privacy rules may breach European law. Google have decided to press ahead and see what happens. It’s more than likely that after some initial mutterings the new rules will be adopted without much fuss.

When new ways of using data evolve, it’s important to have regulation and opposition to ensure the commercial desires of businesses are balanced against our rights to privacy. It seems though that we’re becoming more relaxed. Opt-ins to Facebook apps have a level of ambiguity that would have been unacceptable until very recently, but resistance is relatively low.

I’m reasonably comfortable with the idea that Google can share information about my behaviour across its services. After all they are Google’s services, and I’m choosing to use them. I’m happy to be shown more relevant advertising in return for free use of some pretty amazing stuff. Remember life before search? In fact, I wish Flickr would find a clever way to exploit my data, rather than charging me $24 a year.

Beyond the advertising benefit to Google, greater freedom with use of data will spark possibilities for whole new products, some of which will turn out to be very useful and popular. I’m very happy someone’s keeping an eye on service providers to protect my rights. But every so often boundaries must be nudged if they’re to bring us the next, more useful, more immediate and more intelligent product.

The Crocodile has been awarded a wide ranging online marketing account for delicious. magazine following a three-way pitch.

The agency will be working directly with the editorial team to plan and deliver online content to the magazine’s 420,000 monthly website visitors, improve the overall user experience and develop social channels to increase unique users and page impressions. The account also includes a brief to engage with the delicious. commercial team to create new opportunities for advertisers, online and on mobile devices.

Says Adam Wooff, managing director at The Crocodile: “We’re delighted to be working with the editorial and ad teams at delicious. magazine. Through our integrated, results-led approach, The Crocodile is well placed to help delicious. maximise the reach of its exceptional content, build the readership and find innovative ways to attract advertising revenue.”

Becca Bailey, promotions and web manager at delicious. magazine, commented: “With over a million page impressions a month, 27,000 followers on Twitter and over 5,400 Facebook ‘likes’, we have an excellent base from which to launch a more active programme to grow our readership and revenue. The Crocodile met our criteria for a dynamic agency we could work with creatively and to help us to reach our commercial goals.”

Discover delicious. online, on Twitter and on Facebook

According to a report by eMarketer only 14% of senior marketing managers consider their business to be fully integrated with social media. With that in mind, and as the 2012 trends for marketing all refer to the continued growth of social media as a platform, it is vital that marketers have a structure in place to fully benefit from their social offerings.

The most important thing to remember about social is that it might not be suitable for everyone (there I said it!), you don’t have to dive right into a social strategy if your organisation isn’t going to benefit. To see if your company could benefit from a social strategy, and whether that strategy stands a chance at success, we’ve put together this simple checklist:

1. Do you and your company have clear goals for your social strategy?

The more specific your goals the better. It’s a lot easier for the people taking on the task of growing and implementing the strategy if a clear set of goals is awarded to it. Keep in mind why you are doing it. Is it to increase conversion rates, build brand awareness or improve customer service?

2. Do you have the manpower to fully commit?

Social media is about the personal touch. Having a dedicated team providing content and real-time responses will stand you in good stead. Involving people from various areas of the business provides you with greater exposure to a wider audience. Using their collective experience will help to shape the approach going forward, driving an uplift in visits to your site or your blog. In the long run this strategy will yield impressive results.

3. Do you have the content?

The most important part to social media is having the content to ensure you can deliver thought-leadership, build trust and increase credibility. A good place to start is by looking at your existing material and deciding what can be recycled for social. As you create new content it’s important that the material is optimised for social. Use eye-catching headlines and visuals, as well fresh new ideas to make sure your content drives customers to find out more about you.

4. Do you understand where your audience is?

Research at the beginning is essential. There is no point placing all your content on Facebook if all your potential clients are on LinkedIn. Make sure your attention is focused on the right areas.

5. Does your company website engage with new prospects?

It seems like an obvious one but it can so easily be overlooked. It is important that traffic driven to your site can be assessed. Where are the leads coming from? Once you can establish the reasons people are coming to your site, and from where, you can use this information to direct future social strategies. Make sure you have prepared your site beforehand. Make sure it is a site you are proud of, and above all ensure you have a strategy in place for dealing with any lead generation (contact forms for example).

6. Are you able to ensure your social media is useful at every stage of the buying cycle?

It is vital to customer retention that your social brand remains consistent throughout the buying process. Make sure you have steps in place to both monitor and track your customer’s conversations, supplying them with the content they need at the right time.

The bottom line is social media is important to a modern marketing strategy, but done badly it can be damaging. The difference between social media and more traditional marketing is that it takes time to build momentum and provide a visible ROI. However, by making sure you have all the above steps in place you can ensure a great foundation for social marketing success, and by maintaining a long term strategy it can deliver real business benefits.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) has always been reliant on the location and frequency of keywords within a webpage, but as the Internet continues to grow and develop that isn’t all there is to it.

The ranking position of pages searched by an Internet user is decided by what happens off the page, in the form of links from other sites. The complexity of SEO is getting those links to form organically. The emergence of social media marketing has helped to define a new era of SEO by creating an appealing and natural way for these links to evolve. However, if your content fails to attract these natural links your social media can’t do its job.

So what can be done to enhance your social media and effective SEO? Content, content, content. The more valuable the better. Your content needs to tune into the needs and wants of your target audience. Before you begin writing for SEO understanding your audience is key. Simply asking “What creates value for my customers?” can help to focus your online marketing efforts.

Understanding search engines
Most of us use search engines everyday yet many don’t understand the basics of how they work. Taking a look under the search engine hood and discovering what makes the engines tick is the best way to focus your SEO and achieve the rankings successful businesses need.

Search engines use three techniques to rank your web pages.

1. Crawling
Search engine “spiders” are perhaps the most widely recognised search engine tool, they effectively “crawl” around the web sifting through content. These computer codes find information on a web page, “reading” it as they go and following the links from your pages to others.

If your site isn’t “crawable” then your ranking capacity is already disadvantaged. As search engine spiders crawl the links of your site, they make copies of the pages – and using additional analysis – give your site a score for the page, and the association of the page to certain words.

The search engine spiders regularly return to re-evaluate your content but if it can’t see your content, or doesn’t understand it, it will fail to index you correctly. So with this in mind easily accessible and fast-loading code is vitally important.

2. Indexing
The job of the crawling spiders is to not only browse but to also store the content in a database.

This indexing system allows searches to become faster and more efficient, constantly checking how relevant content is to the search terms being used.

3. Ranking
The most important element of search is the way in which the relevant results are delivered to users. These occur through complex and closely guarded algorithms. That said they follow a set of rules that allow your content to battle with other content to satisfy a user’s keyword search, delivering what the search engine feels is most relevant.

Effective SEO copywriting

So what can you do to make sure that you’re making the most of your web pages? Well, complicated as it sounds, search engines are relatively simple in their needs. All they require is for the information to be delivered to them in a way that they can understand. The complications arise when you’re trying to deliver keyword friendly and searchable copy with genuine reader appeal. This is where the SEO Copywriter can add significant value to your site. Ensuring that the balance is right is vital to success, of course you have to have research your keywords and phrases, that’s SEO 101, but you also need to remember that the search engines aren’t your customers. Ultimately copy needs to sell and persuade, not just tick the search engine boxes. Do both and the results can be staggering.

Here are our top tips for ensuring your content is optimised:

1. Use research tools
There are many SEO tools and a lot of SEO software available online to help you find the best keywords; Google’s Keyword Tool is a great place to start. You can also give your SEO a boost through Sponsored Ads, paying for design and usability to give you a great start.

2. Be specific
Keywords are key but keyword phrases are just as important, base your keyword terms on geography and specialty, as well as synonyms.

3. Research the popularity of search terms
Pay attention to popularity of search terms associated with your businesses or sector. You can also enhance the success of your search terms by behavioural-targeting and using long tail keywords (a keyword phrase used when the website wants to refine searches to the web page, or when the user is searching for a specific term)

4. Make sure you’re relevant
Your search terms should be highly relevant to your service, product or end goal. Keyword relevance measures how well your keywords match what a potential customer is searching for. By analysing your keywords through online tools you can replace poor-performing keywords with more relevant ones, keeping your web pages featuring highly.

5. Build up content resources
Keyword phrases and search terms are what are valuable to your potential users; use them as a foundation for your content. It’s essential that your content is up-to-date and fresh. Regularly reviewing your content helps search engines pick-up on the date of when a page was last updated, and can give you an opportunity to review and tweak your keywords and phrases.

6. Link, link, link
Search engines are able to analyse the popularity of a site through the number of links back to it. Using this analysis, the ‘spiders’ can discover how pages are related to each other, and in what ways, and because trustworthy sites tend to link to other trusted sites this method provides a vital cycle of sharing that can provide a great way for search engines to identify useful sites.

SEO doesn’t, or shouldn’t, stifle your content. The most effective SEO is when creativity and these tips build a foundation together, creating an easily searchable and valuable site. Getting these simple steps right is a great basis for reaching your target audience more effectively now and in the future.

EMC Corporation, the world’s leading information management company, has appointed independent London agency The Crocodile to lead global campaign development in IT Transformation and Big Data, following an international five-way pitch.

The Crocodile has been an EMC roster agency for some years, participating in project-based campaigns at global, EMEA and UK level. The pitch, which took place in late December, has coincided with the creation by EMC of a new internal campaign team with a brief to drive EMC growth in the rapidly developing ‘IT as a service’ market. The win hands The Crocodile a key strategic agency role working alongside campaign teams in Boston and London.

EMC’s pitch brief required a fully integrated results-based approach using digital, social, email and direct mail to drive leads through to sales qualification via an internal CRM platform. Additionally, participating agencies were required to demonstrate clear understanding and experience of the global technology market and the dynamics of both direct and indirect sales channels.

“Working with EMC plays to our core strengths as an agency,” explains Adam Wooff, founding partner and managing director of The Crocodile. “We bring informed strategic focus and cut-through creativity to the table, along with a clear perspective on the mix of activities that will genuinely impact the buying behaviour of EMC’s customers and prospects. These days there’s simply no room for tokenistic marketing – anything we do has to prove relevance, tie in to sales activity and make a measurable contribution.”

Chris Blaik, senior director, Global Campaigns at EMC commented, “The Crocodile has a proven track record in not just building world class, award winning campaigns but an ability to truly understand the go-to-market priorities of our business and channel, crucial to driving value in today’s end to end environment”

Question: What do PG Tips, Travelodge, Birds Eye and Comparethemarket.com have in common?
Answer: A love of cuddly toys.

With varying degrees of success an increasing number of B2C brands are choosing to adopt cute, stuffed animals as the face of their brands. Since hitting TV screens in January 2009 as the ‘face’ of price comparison website Comparethemarket.com, that cheeky meerkat Aleksandr Orlov has become nothing short of a marketing phenomenon.

Comparethemarket.com is now one of the most popular UK price comparison sites, hundreds of thousands of people follow Aleksandr on Facebook and Twitter, and now the brand is cashing in on ‘pester power’ in the run up to Christmas, giving meerkat dolls away to anyone who buys insurance through the site and flogging 5,000 talking Aleksandr dolls at Harrods.

Before Aleksandr there was PG Tips’s tea-guzzling Monkey. Now joining the ranks are Mr Sleep and the Zzz squad and Clarence the chilled out polar bear. The cuddly toy marketing strategy, when executed well, can create a deep connection with a brand and a rich dialogue with customers across multiple channels. Which leaves us asking is there any room for soft and cuddly sentiment in the B2B world?

There is undisputed value in establishing a dialogue with customers, yet no one has much interest in thinking about let alone talking about insurance or frozen food. Introduce a quirky Russian meerkat or a cool-as-ice polar bear, however, and you have yourself something worth tweeting. But could sensible, rational IT directors have their buying-behaviour swayed by a knitted monkey?

At The Croc we’ve had some success with anthropomorphic characters. Mr Click, a character we created for longstanding client EMC, embodies ease of use and brings a friendly face to a crowded unified storage market. The challenge was getting the balance right between appealing to fact and logic as well as emotion. All too often B2B brands overlook the emotional aspects of the brand, and how it can deliver an enduring ‘stickiness’ that can establish a level of depth and connectivity with target audiences.

As is the case for any good campaign, cuddly toy or not, it’s crucial to know the right touch points to reach buyers and how to tickle them. It’s also important to remember that in the B2B world buying cycles can be long and arduous. Lightness of touch can ease the pain and give a brand a boost in a competitive marketplace but remember to think long term not flash-in-the-pan.

Simples!

The best B2B marketing strategies no longer stop at the door of the sales department. In fact, marketing professionals should be insisting on shared ownership of revenue objectives with sales colleagues. We believe the starting point for that process is the simple question: How many sales do we need for business success?

To help you make the most of your B2B marketing, as well as making the role of marketing clear, we’ve put together a bite-sized guide:The Slide One Principle. Find out about our approach to asking the most important question in marketing.