Graphic Alliance – specialists in eCommerce for luxury goods and fashion brands – seeks a bright allrounder with a passion for the internet to help us extend and optimise our clients’ social media strategies.

This combined role involves a mix of editorial, social media, SEO and PR, and is primarily intended to help our clients’ marketing teams to improve the merchandising of its products in the digital space. This is a great opportunity to work with A-list clients like The Conran Shop, Vivienne Westwood, Silver Cross and Temperley London. Perks include a competitive salary, offices in Covent Garden, health insurance, monthly nights out, the legendary summer party, cookies of the edible variety, beers on a Thursday……

Day-to-day tasks

• Blogger & journalist communication
• Influencer engagement
• Social media management
• Reputation monitoring and management
• On and offsite community engagement
• Editorial / production tasks
• Press release writing and distribution
• Website content and copywriting
• Strategic SEO initiatives
• Measurement and analysis of results

Candidate requirements

• Excellent writing skills
• Attention to detail
• Passion for the internet
• Understanding and experience of SEO, PR and social media networks
• Excellent communication skills
• Ability to work autonomously
• Commercially astute
• Able to work in Central London
• Sense of humour
• Experience in online PR, SEO or social media role
• Digital marketing expertise
• Solid grasp of Google Analytics
• Onsite optimisation experience / knowledge
• Production skills (Photoshop, Word, Excel, multimedia etc)
• Experience of blogging
• Copy editing / proof reading skills
• Entrepreneurial flair
• Statistical analysis skills

Brownie points

• Relevant degree or higher
• Retail / merchandising experience
• More than three years experience in the internet industry
• Graphic Alliance facebook fan / twitter follower

Salary: £25-£35k depending on experience
Contract type: Permanent
Country: United Kingdom
Location Details: London WC2
Start Date: August 2010
Application Deadline: 8th August 2010

Please email CVs to Alison Young – alison@graphicalliance.co.uk

PLEASE NOTE THAT DUE TO THE AMOUNT OF APPLICATIONS RECEIVED IT IS NOT ALWAYS POSSIBLE TO REPLY.

Ford has been using the Ford Explorer Facebook Page to drum up excitement in anticipation of the launch day event. The automaker surpassed its goal of 30,000 fans prior to the reveal, which means that the company will be giving away an Explorer to one random fan!

However, just bear in mind that while Ford have done a great job, launching on Facebook only will not necessarily work for all brands – it really depends on your product or service. Nevertheless, do take note of Ford’s marketing activities and try taking a gamble – it could pay off if executed correctly.

Facebook is launching an online campaign to celebrate reaching 500m global users.

Facebook Stories will be a visual representation of members’ stories about how the social network has impacted their lives. The site will sit within Facebook, with users able to filter stories by date or theme, such as ‘coping with grief’, ‘finding love’ and ‘natural disasters’.

Randi Zuckerberg, marketing director at Facebook, said:

“As we anticipate our 500m milestone, we wanted to find a different way to announce and celebrate it. In the past it has been all about the numbers and milestones, and we realised we had never taken the opportunity to celebrate users.”

Members can already submit stories in the User Stories part of the site.

Now, six months later, almost half (47%) of 18-24-year-olds use real-time search results. However, just 8% of these users find them useful (according to research by Tamar).

But what about other types of search results?

Interestingly, by looking into the search habits of 2,210 people, Tamar’s report also showed that just 4% of people would choose paid search results over natural search results, down by 1% on 2009 and down 6% on 2007.

The research found that people over 55 were the least likely to trust paid search as a trusted source with just 3% choosing it over natural search results.

Younger people are increasing their use of mobile to search as 14% of both 18-24-year olds and 25-34-year-olds use mobile search every day.

Neil Jackson, search strategy director at Tamar, said, “Consumers have decided that natural search is the route they trust more and this defines the strategic starting point for all brands, which need to focus on being highly visible ‘naturally’ through campaigns that reach effectively across a wide range of media and devices, especially mobile – a huge growth area for the search engines.”

If you’ve been keeping on top of all thing digital, you may have come across something called Foursquare.

Well, if you’re wondering what Foursquare is, what it does and how to use it, then look no further, because our handy GA guide is here to explain (in plain and simple English!).

A bit of history

Foursquare is a location based social networking game co-founded by Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai. It was launched in 2009 at the South by Southwest Interactive festival in Austin, Texas.

Prior to the launch, both founders were heavily involved in geolocation based games and apps. In fact, Crowley even sold a Foursquare predecessor called ‘Dodgeball’ to Google for an undisclosed sum in 2006. Dodgeball sent text messages to friends when you checked into specific places and was described as “a networking service that helps co-ordinate location based social interactions between mobile users”. However, in 2007, Crowley quit Google and met Naveen shortly after.

What does it do?

Foursquare allows you to share your location with friends. So, when you walk into a bar, cafe, restaurant or shop, you “check-in” (Foursquare’s term) on your mobile device, and your friends will see where you are on a Foursquare map. It’s also a game too as you earn points and “badges” for checking-in frequently, or at a certain time. If you raise enough points you become “mayor” of a certain area.

How many people use it?

Foursquare has surpassed 500,000 registered users, and had its biggest day ever on March 11th, with more than 275,000 “check-ins.”

What do users get out of Foursquare?

Users can connect with friends, earn badges, and various perks from the places where they check in. Foursquare also gives you access to your check-in history, which gives you a snapshot of where you go, who you meet there, and what you’re spending money on.

How does it relate to other businesses?

Foursquare is being taken very seriously by big name brands. Starbucks is the latest and most prominent company to sign a deal with Foursquare — you can earn a “Barista badge” by checking in five times at the coffee retailer.  Starbucks is testing Foursquare as part of its customer-loyalty program, and other companies are also using it to reward frequent visitors. Foursquare is rolling out a free analytics program that will give participating businesses detailed information on who is checking-in to their locations, and give them the ability to communicate with the visitors.

Foursquare says it now has 1.4 million venues logged in its system, with 1, 200 businesses offering special deals to people who check-in via Foursquare.

Is anyone else doing something similar?

Yes. Geo-location based games are massive right now. Gowalla is foursquare biggest competitor and Yelp, Twitter and Facebook are also vying for a piece of the “checking in” market.

Take a look at Temperley London’s facebook page , click on the ‘Store’ tab and you’ll see a page that acts as a shop front to the Temperley online shop – directly from Facebook.

Of course, Temperley aren’t the first brand to embrace this idea (brands have been using FBML (Facebook Markup Language) in Facebook to modify pages for a while now). However, what’s so clever about the Temperley Store page is that website and social media administrators at Temperley do not need any knowledge of HTML or FBML in order to modify the page.

In fact, this page is created and controlled entirely through their CMS. So, if they wanted to change their hero product, layout of the page or link through to a specific product instead of to category pages, they could do this quickly and easily in house.

Although it seems as though Facebook will be launching a payment platform very soon, this is currently not available and (for many reasons) may not be right for them in the future anyway. So, for Temperley London, this method of directing Facebook users straight to purchase on the website is  a perfect way of monetizing their page quickly and efficiently.

How can social media be used to actively benefit a brand (or, more specifically, be monetised)?

It should be accepted that whilst there are obvious benefits behind extending a brand’s footprint across a number of platforms, there must also be an accompanying strategy to ensure on-going community engagement. Without a clear plan a brand could ask too much of its community, either by relying on them to add content, outline the brand narrative or remain loyal in the absence of a compelling reason to do so information. As such, a brand should take the time to consider who their audience are and where they are operating; once this has been identified they can consider how to develop a mutually beneficial relationship.

One recent example is that of Getty Images and Flickr.

Getty Images is a global supplier of images for both businesses and consumers. With a library of 70 million images, their success relies on having the requisite stock imagery for their clients, first-time.

Flickr is an image hosting website which allows its community of amateur and professional photographers to upload pictures and subsequently share them with their friends.

Getty Images saw an opportunity to utilise the vast number of photos uploaded onto the site and created “The Request to License”. This is an initiative whereby any community member can put forward their photography to be used by a commercial venture that is looking for stock photography. Getty realised that reward would be crucial to both the longevity of the scheme and the quality of the photos added and therefore took the business decision to remunerate photographers, with what is thought to be between £100-£160 for each image.

In a recent interview with the BBC News Douglas Alexander, Flickr’s general manager, summarised the ‘win-win’ mantra of The Request to License: “Flickr users are the eyes of the world”. “We have contributors from over 100 countries and images are coming in from every corner of the globe. This deal broadens the horizons and the global marketplace for commercial photography and gives our users the chance to make some money.”

Of course there is an obvious synergy between Flickr and Getty Images, however it should prompt you to think about what your customers are doing online that could be aligned to your company’s overall goals? Moreover, owing to the two-way stance of social media, what could you offer your community to entice them into building a mutually rewarding relationship?

Equally important is the fact that British web users now spend 65% more time online than they did three years ago, which equates to 22 hours and 15 minutes each month.

These statistics beg the question, ‘how are you communicating with your audience?’ Do you currently ask them to search for you, and then present them with content on one platform which has been published and largely left unchanged? That might be the right strategy for you, but could you be doing more?

Could you use multiple channels to interact directly with your audience, asking questions about your products and using feedback to shape future releases? Could you promote new services or ‘flash deals’? Could you answer customer service questions quickly and efficiently? Could you acquire new customers by talking to them in their environment?

When it comes to social media, maybe the most pertinent question is: ‘why don’t we do this?’

But remember that YouTube isn’t the only video online video community on the web. Although Google sites (YouTube is owned by Google) continue to dominate the space, they account for just under half of videos streamed during a month. According to comScore.com, the main growth drivers were sites such as BBC properties, Megavideo.com, and Facebook.com.

The time has come to showcase another brilliant viral, and how fitting that this one should include the much anticipated iPad.

Right now we just can’t get enough of the guys at Blendtec who have created a superb collection of video virals entitled ‘Will it Blend’ to market their Blendtec blenders. Each week, Tom Dickson (the founder of Blendtec) asks the all important question, “will it blend?” and attempts to blend a varity of items to demonstrate the power behind his blenders.

Click here to see the iPad being blended.

Although we’ve chosen to showcase the iPad episode here, other previous experiments have included: Toms’ Tom Tom, Nike trainers, a Rubik’s cube, 6 Bic lighters, a 15 foot garden hose, Spam, Cubic Zirconia, an iPod and oysters.

To see more of Tom’s crazy antics visit: http://www.blendtec.com/willitblend