Equally interesting, however, were my neighbours at the dinner table. On one side, sat the MD of eHarmony one of the most popular and subscribed dating sites in 14 markets globally with 33 million members. On the other, the Marketing Director for Dyson, one of the most innovative UK brands selling machines in over 50 countries and employing over 3,000 people worldwide.

What fascinated me most was the complete disparity between not only the products, but usage, attitude, audience and reason for purchase.

Rational vs Emotional

eHarmony is about the most emotional subject of them all – love. It focuses on finding long term relationships for people who may otherwise not have met.

Its point of difference comes from its optimised matching process, using eHarmony Labs, a relationship research facility. When new members look to join, eHarmony takes over 250 individual pieces of data from the customer before a profile can be created. The basis of this in-depth information gathering, is that compatibility in humans can be modelled, in much the same way as company profits and performance.

eHarmony applies a scientific approach to what is effectively a hugely personal and emotional process. The technology used by eHarmony uses behavioural data for each customer and analyses a huge variety of other data points to drive compatability ratings. The statistics obviously work – apparently 542 eHarmony members in the US marry every day.

On the other side, you have a product which represents the pinnacle of product design. Its creator, Sir James Dyson, was vacuuming his house when he realised his top-of-the-line machine was losing suction and getting clogged. So, he set about using his industrial design background to fix the problem. He now has a reported net worth of over £1 billion, award winning products that are known for their design and efficiency, and has his own foundation to support design and engineering education.

The usage of these two products couldn’t be further apart. From a personal perspective, I don’t like vacuuming and will go to any lengths to avoid it. It’s boring and a necessity and needs to be done on a regular basis. But I long for a Dyson. They look fantastic and they work brilliantly. A fantastic example of marrying design and technology to create a must-have product.

This is why we have allowed technology to be a defining factor in our lives. Yes, there is a lot of choice and sometimes seemingly endless options and possibilities. And it can also often detract from peer to peer communication, face to face contact and create its own set of problems as we have seen with recent email and hacking scandals.

But I doubt that one of the 542 couples who will meet today on eHarmony believes that any of that is important.

I’m currently sitting in Sao Paolo waiting for a connecting flight to London. I don’t speak a word of Portuguese. And I was foolish enough not to bring a phrasebook.

I’m going to use this very experience to explain why at least a basic understanding of computer languages is helpful for anyone in business today.

I’m limited in what I can ask for

I read the menu in this cafe and didn’t understand what anything meant. So I selected my meal based on a few familiar words in the description and the pronounceability of the dish’s name. I would have been entirely unable to order a decaf cappuccino made with soy milk.

I’m ignorant of the possibilities

There may be something amazing that I can order here. A delicacy I won’t be able to find anywhere else. And without an understanding of the language and culture, I’ll never know. What I ordered was dictated by my ignorance.

I’m not quite sure what I’ve just ordered

I think it contains meat. But I’m not certain. And I’m clueless as to what variety of animal that meat might have come from. I’m trying not to think about that.

If there’s a problem I may not be able to deal with it

What if they give me something I didn’t order? Or it tastes awful? Or it has a hair in it? I’m not confident that I’ll be able to deal with the situation.

I’m unclear of the process

I wasn’t sure if I had to pay at the till or ask for the bill at the end. And what’s the etiquette for tipping? I don’t want to offend someone and end up with an unexpected ingredient in my dish.

I’m not sure about the price

It would be easy for them to overcharge me. I don’t understand the currency. I don’t know how much these things usually cost. I could be paying twice as much as I should – but I’d never know.

Other people are making me look bad

A French guy at the next table just ordered in fluent Portuguese. Now I feel like the idiot in the room.

I think a lot of people feel exactly the same way when they’re dealing with digital. It’s a foreign land to them and their ignorance can lead to missed opportunities, misunderstandings and mistakes.

You don’t need to be fluent in code. You don’t need to be able to handcraft a functional webpage in HTML. But – as you can see from my current experience – a little knowledge can take you a long way.

Now can someone please tell me what’s Portuguese for ‘indigestion tablet’?

Dave Birss has worked as an advertising creative for 20 years, leading the creative departments of agencies including: Ogilvy, Poke and McCann Worldgroup. He now runs Additive, a company focussed on inspiring and training the advertising industry.
Dave also leads Emarketeers’ Website Coding for Beginners course.

When I passed my driving test and had just started to drive independently (yes that was a long time ago in 1987!), I was always curious to know what was going on under the bonnet.

What actually happened “beneath the scenes” when I pressed the clutch pedal? When I pressed the brake pedal, what was the exact mechanism causing a one tonne car to decelerate from 70mph? Why didn’t my car start when it was cold?

Know thy engine room

I decided that if I knew how the components of my car worked together, it would have four positive effects: one, it would encourage me to fix the car myself (I was a penniless student at the time); two, if I needed a garage, I’d have a firm idea what I was being charged for; three, I’d be me more technically capable of driving my ungainly Renault 5; and four, it would make me a more confident driver; I’d recognise all the quirky noises and the reasons it would misbehave at times.

We’re driving the web

Roll on more than two decades and we all find ourselves behind the wheel; the only difference is, we’re controlling a mouse, a track pad, a tablet or a keyboard.

Instead of having to control a car, we find ourselves sharing social content; we’re editing our own blog; we’re asked by our agency to insert some tracking code; we need to understand what web analytics software our website is using; or we’re using our organisation’s content management system (CMS) to maintain our website content.

In all the above instances, wouldn’t it be helpful to know what’s going on behind the scenes? What’s unpinning my website? I don’t mean, knowing how to code in PHP or .NET. I don’t even mean mess around with JQuery or HTML. Nothing of the sort. I’m talking about looking at some HTML or CSS and having a basic idea of what’s causing a paragraph to break or a link to work; or to identify the fonts used across my website and whether or not they conform to my corporate identity guidelines; or how to locate where an image is stored on my web server. The list goes on.

We could all do with some idea of web coding

There are a multitude of content editors, marketers, bloggers, designers, community managers and PR professionals – the vast majority not able to code websites – but all of whom, on a daily basis, will be contributing to online content in some capacity.

Know matter how intuitive a CMS or blogging platform is (and WordPress ain’t that good), there will inevitably come a time where users come unstuck. Why doesn’t my formatting work? How do I add this social widget to my blog? Google’s asking me to add some conversion tracking code? How do I embed this YouTube video?

Having serviced clients for over 16 years, I can with confidence say that those clients who knew the basics of coding, (those who weren’t afraid to press CTRL-U on their browsers), were significantly more productive and confident managing or editing content online. It’s almost as clear cut as those using IE versus the Chrome or Firefox gang.

Jonathan Saipe is founder of Emarketeers and has 16 years experience delivering web design and development projects. Emarketeers’ training courses include Website Coding for Beginners and Web Project Management.

In 2011 Mark Zuckerberg introduced his law of sharing at the Facebook developers conference, which he illustrated by showing a mathematical formula.

You can find the formula here but I’ll spare you the geeky details for now and just cut to his definition which was actually very simple. To paraphrase:  “Next year people will share twice as much stuff as they do this year”.

Whilst this may seem quite self serving coming from the founder of Facebook, there is a huge amount of truth in it, and as the social web expands it becomes clearer and clearer that we are addicted to sharing. The staggeringly fast growth of the “digital scrapbook” service Pinterest this year only seeks to empathize this even further.

Sharing is the new normal

The sharing of thoughts and content online is the new normal, and although not everyone might currently be comfortable sharing yet  anyone who is using a social networking platform is benefiting from sharing by consuming the shared content of others.

Despite constant privacy scaremongering, Facebook and Twitter continue to grow at an ever-increasing rate. Sharing is so important to us, it would seem that a growing number of people are actually prepared to sacrifice aspects of their privacy to do even more of it!

Business-to-business sharing is win win

So how might all this be relevant in a business-to-business marketing capacity? Well, it’s true to say that with any ever increasing amount of information out there, people are relying more and more on their professional networks as a filter to highlight things that are most relevant to them.

An increasing number of companies are exploiting this by producing content such as blogs, YouTube videos and infographics that are easily sharable. Business to business sharing is also very much win win. Not only does the content producer benefit from an increased reach, the person who shared the content also potentially strengthens their network and their personal brand by sharing it.

LinkedIn sharing

Over the last 18 months LinkedIn has reinforced itself as the world’s leading professional networking platform by creating some powerful sharing features. Status updates offer users the opportunity to share content with each other and also post it into relevant groups. This can be done manually via the LinkedIn home page or via LinkedIn sharing buttons more ubiquitous across the web.

By giving users the option to “like”, “comment” and ” share” other people’s status updates, LinkedIn has also created a huge marketing opportunity within the site. Every time users interact with a status update in this way, it appears in their own home stream and notifies their network. If the update contains a link to a blog post or other content then that link is also included. This means that any article or blog post can travel far beyond the original poster’s own network.

LinkedIn Today

The launch of the LinkedIn Today service shows just how seriously LinkedIn is taking this concept of sharing.

The functionality dynamically builds a magazine style news page based on the most popular content in a user’s individual network. Again this offers a fantastic opportunity for content to go viral and potentially reach a very large audience.

My personal view is that sharing on LinkedIn can be used to drive specific business objectives with genuine ROI and the emerging case studies certainly seem to prove this. There is a great example from Reconverse, a small business that has used the company status update feature to build an audience outside of their original network, and this is already converting into increased sales for their business.

Sharing is now a vitally important part of digital marketing and LinkedIn is positioning itself at the centre of this from the perspective of business to business marketing. If you’re not currently using the platform as part of your strategy, the fact it now has an audience of 160 million professionals that is growing at a rate of two users every second should be pretty compelling reason to start!

3 top tips for successfully sharing content on LinkedIn

1. Get maximum reach by ensuring you are fully utilizing both company page status updates and the personal status updates of your employees

2. Don’t just share your own content. Sharing content from third parties that is interesting to your network will raise your profile as a trusted news source and help to get your content more attention when you do share it

3. Fully optimize your LinkedIn Company Page and the personal profiles of your employees. These represent the corporate and personal brands you are attempting to enhance by sharing so making sure profiles are as compelling as possible is vitally important

These questions often surface in our SEO training courses, so here’s my attempt to clarify.

1. If I have error 404′s, will this impact on my search rank?

The short answer is, no. Pages on the web are sometimes ephemeral. They come and go as content changes. Google accepts this as part of the normal evolution of content. In fact Google themselves claim that they prefer you to return a proper 404 response code rather than a “soft 404″ explained below.

Error 404′s can harm your SEO performance when you have broken links on your own website. If a search bot follows a broken link that should have linked to a key page, there’s a chance this page will be ignored and excluded from the search engine index. And even if that key page did manage to get indexed (e.g. by submitting a sitemap), the broken link may prevent it from inheriting the maximum amount of link equity.

Don’t forget humans!

From a UX perspective, if your website is strewn with broken links, this is sure to have a negative impact on brand and user experience. The chance of a user continuing their user journey when confronted by missing pages is minimal as their tolerance to adjusting the URL or going back and choosing alternative navigation options will be pretty low.

2. How come Google Webmaster Central reports lots of error 404′s on my website when all my website links work ok?

When you log into Google Webmaster Central, click on “Diagnostics > Crawl errors”. The report displays the error 404′s found by Google. Even if your website is squeaky clean with 100% link integrity, you may well find other websites linking to your pages that no longer exist. Equally, these external links may contain typos in the link URL. In both these cases Google will report error 404′s.

Link building opportunities

The above example has important link building implications. If you’ve retired pages that happened to have lots of backlinks, the crawl errors report will act as a prompt for you to set up 301 redirects from incorrect URLs to new ones. That way you will preserve the link equity from those backlinks.

You’ll also do your visitors a favour when they click on these external links and get redirected to a useful page rather than an error 404 page.

Equally, if you have external backlinks with typos in the URLs, again, set up 301 redirects to the correct spelling of your page URLs to maintain the link equity.

As an alternative to Google Webmaster Central, you might want to look at the Link Juice Recovery Tool which effectively does this the above for you.

3. What’s a soft 404 and do I need to worry about it?

Ok so this gets slightly more technical. A soft 404 is when your web server returns a response code other than 404 for a web page that doesn’t exist.

Two common mistakes

The most common reason this occurs is if a website owner creates a customised error 404 page with a cool design and returns the page with a 200 response code. Google then interprets this as a “normal” page which is actually incorrect. Remember, you can return a 404 response code for whatever content you want – and your error pages are the obvious pages to return this code.

Another really common example of incorrect use is redirecting unknown URLs to the home page rather than a page with a 404 code.

You’ve been warned

Google claims that both of the above can change how the page is interpreted and indexed and thus could have a negative SEO impact.

If you want to check what server response code your web page returns, it’s easiest to use the “Fetch as Googlebot” feature in Google Webmaster Central.

Transcript

Welcome to another Emarketeers live session.

Today we’re going to look at the targeting opportunities Facebook gives digital marketers.

With access to the demographic data of nearly a billion Facebook users, Facebook’s advertising programme gives us ample opportunity for segmenting.

[switch to Facebook]

So, I’ve logged into Facebook’s advertising programme and am looking to create a new ad or campaign.

Let’s see it in action…

Ok so I’m a retailer and I want to target men in Wales [United Kingdom] who happen to like cycling and hiking. Here we go, I can see how many users I’m targeting on the right.

Or, I’m a jeweler with a great deal on engagement rings and I’d like to target women who have just got engaged. And here we can see how many people fulfil those criteria.

Or taking a more b2b approach, I might be a publisher and want to target anyone who has an interest in journalism or journalists who also work at the BBC. Although it’s a relatively small number, I know these ads will be targeted.

If I’m a retailer with local outlets, I might want to target women who live in and around London and Manchester who also like gardening or horticulture.

Or, back to B2B, I’m a recruiter looking for French speaking marketers and French speakers interested in marketing.

Or, I’m doing some market research and I might be interested to know how many 18 to 20 year old men versus women are interested in Lady Gaga.

Finally, I might want to know how many parents on Facebook have young children as opposed to teenagers; clearly the latter is more popular.

So, if you haven’t already done so, log into Facebook, click on the advertising link at the bottom and you may well discover a new segment for your ad campaigns.

There are literally gazillions of SEO tools out there, both free and paid-for. As an attempt to distil these, I’ve put together a list of the most popular essential SEO tools and software to help digital marketers run their SEO campaigns.

Everyone has their favourite SEO tools and I’ve avoided temptation to call this post “the best SEO tools”. Feel free to contribute your thoughts and experiences with these and other tools.

A must tool for any SEO’ers arsenal. The Google Keyword Tool provides search demand data which can be filtered by region and device (mobile versus desktop) among others. But the real power of Google’s Keyword Tool is when using its broad, phrase and exact match types which help provide a fuller understanding of short and long tail search habits.

Take a look at the Google Keyword Tool »

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If you’re worried out duplicate content or plagiarism, take a look at Copyscape. There’s a free limited use option or a paid-for option providing unlimited use. Great for writers, bloggers or content editors in addition to SEO folk.

Take a look at Copyscape »

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This is YouTube’s equivalent to the Google Keyword Tool. Great for optimising your video titles, descriptions and tags as part of a Video SEO strategy.
 

Take a look at the YouTube Keyword Tool »

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This tool has so many features, it’s hard to list them all here. Google Insights allows you to measure search trends by time and region as well as filtering by Google web, news, product and image search. It also publishes popular and rising search trends; great if you’re an SEO copywriter or content strategist and need to think about your keyword co-occurrence.

Take a look at Google Insights »

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Only recently out of beta, Google Correlate shows the relationship between search trends and is a popular tool with planners. Have a play with Google Correlate and you will discover some fascinating correlations – some more useful than others.

Take a look at Google Correlate »

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Any SEO copywriter will tell you the huge importance usability plays in online copy. Once you’ve drafted your copy, check its readability using the Juicy Studio’s Readability test. You will be exposed to a wealth of metrics including the Gunning Fogg index and Flesch Reading Ease scale.

Take a look at the Juicy Studio Readability Test »

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If you have a small website of less than 500 pages, XML-sitemaps will, for free, let you easily create XML sitemaps for submission to Google and Bing’s webmaster tools. It can even handle other sitemap formats such as news and videos. If you have a large site, purchase a copy from these guys at minimal cost and let the software auto submit for you.

Take a look at XML-Sitemaps.com »

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Despite its low market share, you may want to check out Bing’s webmaster tools. It isn’t anywhere near as comprehensive as Google’s, but one benefit is that it allows you to submit sitemaps to Bing and Yahoo at the same time. Bonus.

Take a look at Bing Webmaster Tools »

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Google’s Webmaster Central is an absolute no brainer when it comes to SEO tools. What it lacks in beauty, it makes up for in functionality. It’s packed with essential tools letting you manage your sitemaps, sitelinks and localisation as well as providing crawl diagnostic information and URL parameter management plus a lot more. If you’re serious about SEO this is an obvious starting point.

Take a look at Google Webmaster Central »

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Although many are lagging behind, some brands have realised that their viewers aren’t trapped into watching content any more, so in order to work, their content has to be seriously useful, interesting or entertaining.
 The past few years have seen massive changes in the way we consume video – not least that Internet users now upload more than an hour of new video to YouTube every second and watch 4 billion videos per day.

Although many are lagging behind, some brands have realised that their viewers aren’t trapped into watching content any more, so in order to work, their content has to be seriously useful, interesting or entertaining.

In 2011 we saw break-away successes like Yeo Valley’s ‘The Churned’ generating 10% in sales uplift, and T Mobile’s ‘Life is for Sharing’ ad reaching more people on YouTube in the run up to its premiere than the peak X Factor ad break.

We also saw significant growth in branded online TV channels that offer customers new ways to explore products and engage with brands.

The main benefit of this branded TV channel approach is the opportunity it creates for revenue generation.

By focusing on driving viewers to their own online channels, brands can offer viewers relevant options to engage further or make a purchase. Using this approach M&S TV saw a doubling of average site dwell-time and a 23% increase in average basket size. Meanwhile Kiddicare TV is an in-house success story, achieving more than 3/4 million monthly views largely of product-page videos.

The next phase of online TV will likely see brands stepping outside of the world of their products and focusing on pure entertainment.

“Brand Entertainment” is the new way for marketers to earn people’s attention and build engagement. Waitrose’s sponsorship of ‘The End of the Line’, a documentary about sustainable fishing, is an early example of a brand understanding their audience and offering them something they’ll find interesting.

After all in an age where young adults are watching more TV-originated content online than on television sets, why wouldn’t people go to boots.com to watch a series on healthy living?

Brand Entertainment will deliver benefits through overall awareness and engagement as well as direct sales click-through. But achieving this ‘halo effect’ relies upon a thorough understanding of what audiences will find interesting, useful or entertaining.

Although the competition is tough, content that achieves this will reach its audience more easily than ever before thanks to social sharing – meaning there is an opportunity for low-budget success too.

Transcript:

Welcome to another Emarketeers live video.

Today we’re talking about effective ways to use Twitter search. This can be carried out in a variety of ways be it via twitter.com or using Twitter API tools such as Tweetdeck or Hootsuite for example.

For now we will use twitter.com and I’m using the search bar at the top.

For now, we are going to search for conversations about restaurants in the UK.

Remember, with millions of tweets happening every week, it’s important to use Twitters search function to refine our search so that we get relevant results quickly and easily.

I’m going to carry out a search initially for “restaurant”.

[search]

As we can see, I get the latest tweets when people have mentioned the word “restaurant” in their tweets. Not especially useful at this stage as its too broad.

Now if I’m a restaurant brand looking to better understand consumer needs, I need to search using more appropriate search terms.

I’m going to search for “anyone” and “restaurant”. This will bring back tweets of people asking questions or looking for recommendations. I could also add a question mark [?] to ensure that the results also contain questions rather than statements.

[search]

As you can see, the search results are much more relevant. But they aren’t all local to me. So, if I want results of local people tweeting I can add a region or city by typing the search command near:”scotland”

[search]

The results I now get are more focused on tweets around that region.

Sometimes it’s useful to filter out all tweets with links as these can sometimes include businesses promoting their services.

If I’m a phone supplier looking for any tweets worldwide of people looking for advice on the iphone 4S I can search for “iphone 4S advice”  adding “-filter:links”.

This will filter results ensuring I only see conversations rather than promotions.

[search]

As you can see, nearly all of the results I get contain people looking for help or advice without businesses pushing their own messages or products.

Of course, it’s now up to me to engage with the relevant tweeters to better understand their needs.

I have always had an issue with brands or domains that are ambiguous in their spelling or interpretation. I don’t think it helps consolidate a brand identity and for that reason I feel it’s something that branding or design agencies should note.

According to the trending data from the last 30 days, Google Plus trends higher than Google+ in search. The trend reverses in the news index where website content refers to it the correct way rather than as Google Plus.

Geographic Trends

When it comes to geographic differences, there are some distinct trends.

In countries such as India, Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh, Google Plus trends higher. Whereas Far Eastern countries such as Taiwan and Hong Kong refer to the correct spelling.

Correlations

When measuring correlations using Google Correlate, Google+ correlated strongly with Google Plus in the US.

However in the UK, Google+ correlated most strongly with Dobara - a Hindi film, and Zelda Williams, daughter of comic actor Robin Williams!

We’d love to hear any explanations of that correlation!