If you’ve ever had that tense moment in the office when someone sends you a bit.ly link only for you to regress into the nervous shell of yourself in fear that link your friend from across the desk has sent you might indeed be NSFW as opposed to the hilarious cat clip from YouTube he promised.

However, for all you paranoid androids out there, there is a small little feature within bit.ly links that can help. Not only will it indulge your curiosity but it should help keep your ‘upstanding pillar of the office-community’ cred intact!

By simply adding a + to the end of the bit.ly link you are sent, once clicked you will be brought to a bit.ly preview page of the intended destination with a full length preview of the shortened URL.

For example;

If your sent –      http://bit.ly/JdF8A0

Try using –         http://bit.ly/JdF8A0+

And there you have it! Curiosity served, indulged and no little Kitts killed as a cause!

Thanks for reading.

More good stuff coming soon.

Murdo Mackenzie

@Murdo_Mack

@BrandFluentDig

www.brandfluent-digital.co.uk

They describe themselves as so:

“We are a search engine with:
• Way more instant answers.
• Way less spam and clutter.
• Lots and lots of goodies.
• Real privacy.”

Essentially DDG has set its goal to be a highly efficient search engine for the user without all the clutter that goes with Google’s constant expansion that has come with its forays into “social”. As far as achieving its goal goes, I think it’s fair to say by the rapidly increasing user base it’s not doing a bad job at it so far.

Search Engine Land tries to explain this by arguing that the “core goal of the searcher remains unchanged since internet search first became a reality: to ‘get in and get out’ with the information they are looking for” and it’s this retrieval and presentation of information that DDG makes as simple as possible.

DuckDuckGo aims to do this by trying to innovate search result presentation by making the results as streamlined as possible and to give information concisely in direct conflict at a time where the large search engine over recent years have been fighting to add as much media as possible from images to video to the SERPs as possible.

Have a try of DDG and give us your thoughts via our Facebook or Twitter:

Article By Jerome Josy

However these figures shouldn’t be as alarming as it may seem for Pinterest according to Business Insider, referring to the following graph collected from Google Trends:

The remarkable rise during February and March of 2012 could probably be credited to the hype that engineered a lot of the ‘try-out-the-latest-hot-thing types’, as Nicholas Carlson from Business Insider refers to them, to er, try out the latest hot thing!

There are a couple of caveats to this to consider though. The first being, that once the aforementioned types are shedded, the figures may well return to a positive curve as word-of-mouth continues to push growth organically.

The second is of course that these figures only consider the Facebook-involved users of Pinterest, which inevitably isn’t reflective of the entire user base.

If you have anything to add to these observations, please hit us up on our Facebook or Twitter:

Article By Jerome Josy

Facebook have made an announcement today defining their stance against the “distressing increase in reports of employers or others seeking to gain inappropriate access to people’s Facebook profiles or private information”.  The statement addresses reports of employers asking prospective and actual employees to reveal their passwords.

Erin Egan, Facebook’s chief privacy officer, added “This practice undermines the privacy expectations and the security of both the user and the user’s friends. It also potentially exposes the employer who seeks this access to unanticipated legal liability.”

Another way to put it is that it’s frankly astonishing really that this practice exists at all, although it’s probably inevitable considering the level of access social media has allowed the world to one and other.  In any case, various states have already introduced legislation aimed at banning access by potential employers which has been followed by Facebook altering its privacy policy.

You can read their full statement here.

Let us know if you have personally been violated by overzealous employers on our Facebook or Twitter.

Article By Jerome Josy

Job Title:                          Online Marketing Intern.

Working Hours:                9:30am to 5:30pm

Hourly Rate:                      TBC

Job Details:                       

We are looking for a junior account manager who has strong writing abilities and a proven aptitude for learning.  We do not require technical know-how, only an interest in entering in to digital marketing and ability to sponge information.  We will provide training and are willing to accept completely novice applicants who we feel we can mould in to an exciting and valuable member of the team.

Your position will be heavily immersed in the world of Social Media Optimisation with a heavy focus on creating interesting, unique content. Must be a keen Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Stumbleupon user with a passion for the internet and all thing digital.

This is a very exciting opportunity to be part of a growing digital marketing agency in the heart of silicone roundabout

Location of Job:               

Shoreditch, London

How to Apply:                  

Email your CV and a covering letter to hello@brandfluent-digital.co.uk

One of the main attractions of social media is that there is amazing potential of reach as a reward to creative campaigns. The concept of a viral video is a testament to this, but that’s not all. There was recently an excellent PR stunt by dating website CougarLife.com who had ‘offered’ Caroline Flack, the 32 year old television presenter, a fairly ludicrous £500,000 to front their website.

Flack is renowned for two things in particular – her occupation as the presenter of The Xtra Factor and also more relevantly, her past relationship with Harry Styles, a 17 year old boyband member. The joke is obvious but coupled with the power of Twitter being what it is, the results have been astonishing.

After all, it’s unlikely to say the least that the monetary offer was genuine but that’s beside the point as all it took was the rumour to get to Caroline Flack who jokingly responded with a tweet to her 666k+ followers: “Half a Million to be the face of Cougarlife.com? YES! Finally I can afford my stannah stair lift sex swing!”

All it took was one creative pop culture referencing joke, twitter and it resulted in coverage in Daily Mail, Metro as well as of course, two-thirds of a million people directly!

Let us know if you have seen any other examples of creativity reaping rewards on our Facebook or Twitter.

Article By Jerome Josy

One slight down side to the new layout is the restricted number of featured tabs. At present on timeline you can feature 4 with a click to reveal a further 8 slightly limiting passing visibility for those who land on your profile.

With timeline you are now able to post status updates which are double the width of the old layout. Great if you have something you want to shout about or some great photography that deserves the extra space. Starbucks are already using their new timeline rather effectively

“The goal is to make Pages more engaging and more social,” said Gokul Rajaram, Facebook’s product director for ads.

The addition of a cover photo presents a great opportunity to display some brand specific photography or artwork as can be seen below in Coca-Cola’s new page.

What are your thoughts on the new timeline? let us know on our Twitter or Facebook

Thanks for reading.

@Murdo_Mack

@BrandFluentDig

www.brandfluent-digital.co.uk

Google offers a wide range of free services for site owners, these tools are very helpful to build effective online campaigns and to monitor performance. An important step in SEO is to choose the right keywords for your website. Google Trends provides valuable information about keywords, for example when they have been searched by users, from which location and in what language.

How Google Trends Works?

The tool is meant to show useful stats about keywords, which can be used to assess the desirability of the terms you are short-listing.  The main benefit of the tool is that makes it possible to compare the performance of keywords over time.

As Google explains:

Google Trends analyzes a portion of Google web searches to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you enter, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. We then show you a graph with the results – our Search Volume Index graph.

In addition to the Search Volume Index graph (a separate graph) – the News reference volume; shows how many times the keyword appeared in the Google News stories, (if the keyword has created a lot of traffic and interest then the graph will show a spike and it will be highlighted in the graph).

For the sake of an example, below we have searched for the terms “SEO”, “PPC” and “social media”, which can be seen in the graph.

As we can see from the graph the keywords “seo” and “social media” have registered an increase in search volume; SEO is becoming more and more important in order to have strong search-engine friendly websites; Social Media, of course, is a big part of online marketing and it is likely to keep growing as the graph clearly shows. Finally “ppc” has registered a decrease in searches and that can be interpreted as shift in the choice of online marketing strategies.

Google Trends’ Pros and Cons

The tool has both advantages and disadvantages. It can provide valuable information about the amount of searches of a particular keyword, for example some keywords clearly show that they are searched only at certain times throughout the day; which is helpful in order to understand when the best moment is to start a campaign (hence online consumer behaviour can be studied over keywords and their search trends). However, there are some disadvantages, the data is not 100% reliable, therefore, it is suggested to not put too much weight on the data given by the service.  In addition the service will only provide information where a substantial number of searches have occurred, therefore if your term is niche or particularly long-tail you may not get any results.

Conclusions

Although the information provided is useful, it is important to bear in mind the stats are accurate only to a certain point therefore best practices should always be carried out considering Google Trends current data as well as prospective data.

Thanks for reading,
Article By Francesco Giunta

Job Title:  Online Marketing Account Executive
Deadline: 20th March 2012
Contract: 4 month internship, potential for permanent position.
Working Hours: 9:30am to 5:30pm
Hourly Rate: tbc
Job Details:
We are looking for an account manager who has strong writing abilities and a proven aptitude for learning.  We do not require technical know-how, only an interest in entering in to digital marketing and ability to sponge information.  We will provide training and are willing to accept completely novice applicants who we feel we can mould in to an exciting and valuable member of the team.

Location of Job: Shoreditch, London
How to Apply: email your CV to hello@brandfluent-digital.co.uk

Over the last couple of months I have very much being working on building the brand (Brandfluent digital) and we are now in a place where I can sit back a little bit and chill J (if that word would ever apply to me).

Ok let’s jump in,

WHAT is an API? & what do they do

First let’s break the acronym down, API stands for Application Programming Interface.   An API is a key that is specifically designed to allow interaction / communication between Software components, which will allow a user, developer or machine to query other databases, libraries, source codes and more.  There are many API’s out on the net which allow web communities to create an open architecture for sharing content and data between websites and applications.

Now you understand what an API is you now need to learn how to use one to interact with your site.  In order for your programme / site to interact with a third party you need to have something called an API key .The API key is a Universal Unique Identifier (UUID) generated by the system you want to interact with, using a 32 bit alphanumeric string.  Using this key will allow you to connect with the system and pull down the data you require, most programming languages will allow you to query the site / database and compile the information into your preference.

Thanks for reading,
Article By Jamie Bennett