Geek Video of the Month

The Independent ran an article on the 21st August 2013 asking the question:  Is Google’s Chromecast the future of television?  With the author stating that he believes the £30 dongle / USB device will transform the way you watch your favourite shows.  

Sounds pretty exciting? And this is precisely the reason why the Google’s Chromecast teaser advert / video has won Geek Video of the Month for September.

Find out more about the Digital media streaming adapter developed by Google here:
http://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/devices/chromecast/

The video, shows a number of situations where you may need the USB attachement, highlighting the main USPs as computer to TV mirroring, streaming YouTube, Netflixs and other sites to your TV.

Google's Chromecast is expecting to hit the shops before Christmas?  Will it be on your Christmas list?

Personally I will be sticking with our Apple TV as this plays videos from many more services than those found on Chromecast.  An additional negative of Chromecast is that it only lets you mirror what is on your PC from Chrome tabs to the TV, also mirroring is not available from a mobile device.   

Alas if we didn’t already have Apple TV, Chromecast would be a must have, as it is a steal at £30! 

It will be interesting to hear more about the devices popularity in the coming months.  

Author: Sarah Griffiths

Marketplace Websites: The Future of Ecommerce?

Ecommerce, it appears that everyone is doing it these days. And why shouldn’t they?  After all it’s dead easy to register a domain name and put together a simple on line store.  Ta-da! Your online, OK now what?

Well that’s when the hard graft starts. You will need to get your name out there, building brand awareness and crucially, trust. Stock management and overheads all have a role to play as well.  And after you have done all this you will be ‘thrown to the proverbial wolves’. Today’s internet savvy shoppers want every product at the lowest possible price, with fast, free delivery to an address of their choice. Be it work, home or Auntie Edna’s house just in time for her birthday (and woe betide you if it arrives late, because it will be on Facebook before you can say ‘refund’).

So all is not as simple as it seems for a new business that is trying to get a leg-up in the world of online trading.  Of course the word ‘Ecommerce’ has been around for a long time, longer in fact than the Amazon or Play.com websites. However, when we look at these businesses, we get an insight in to how traditional ‘pure play’ ecommerce traders have evolved their platforms in to marketplace’s, that allow smaller traders to piggyback off the brand name, by setting up trader accounts within the website. Now marketplace owners like Play.com and Amazon benefit from an increased product offering, with no additional stock overheads, increased cross selling opportunities and regular commission payments made by traders for every sale. 

So why join a ‘marketplace’ when it’s so easy to set up your own site?

Exposure – By trading on a marketplace website you will not only be benefiting from your own traffic sources, you will also be benefiting from traffic driven to the site by other marketplace traders. So even if your marketing budget is small you can still have substantially more traffic driven to your products than if your where to build a standalone ecommerce shop.

Simplicity – Understanding today’s tech terms is not everyone’s cup of tea.  With a marketplace this pain is taken away as somebody else has considered the importance of how ‘usable’ the site has to be. After all it’s in the marketplace owner’s interest to make the site easy to use, to attract more traders to the site.

Trust – Having a new build ecommerce site liked and respected by customers will take time. Will they commit to spending £££’s on a website that they have not heard of or has no reviews? Probably not.  By trading on a marketplace, you will benefit from the trust and loyalty which are fundamental to its brand.

Cost efficiency – With marketplace websites there is not usually an upfront set up cost, so you can start building your online presence straight away.  However long term you will need to consider if the commission you pay to the marketplace owners outweighs the costs of building your own ecommerce store.

Speed to market – Design considerations, site development, testing and SEO all takes time, and can give you a lead time of 6+ months before you own site can realistically be in a position to trade online. With a marketplace you can start listing products as soon as your account is created. Market places allow sellers to be online and trading…fast.

Market awareness - By joining a marketplace, you can easily view the prices your competitors are charging for their products, and see the marketing messages they are using. Any small business relies on targeted, intelligent pricing and marketing, and a Marketplace site can give you a real leg up in this crucial area.

Here at Rocktime we love Ecommerce, and our very own Source ecommerce platform provides the perfect launch pad if you're considering setting up a marketplace website. Like all the best platforms, it is built to open standards so you can explore the developer marketplace after the initial development phase if you wish.

Developing Ecommerce solutions for our client’s sites is something our tech guys have been doing since 1999 and they will happily talk to you about it until the cows come home. So if you fancy a cuppa (or two) and a chat then give me a call.  I would love to hear from you. Visit our contact us page here.

Author: Martin Bradbury

Team Event: Paintball Warriors

This month’s team event was organised by Martin (Business Development) and Craig (Quality Assurance).   The team were invited to a Paintball Warriors Paintballing afternoon in Wimborne. 

Paintball Warriors in Dorset state on their website in their About Us section that they “offer the very latest innovation in cutting edge paintball technology”.  As we offer the "very latest innovation in website technology" then, we already had great synergy before we even arrived.

We would like to send a big thumbs up to the staff at Paintball Warriors who were extremely helpful and focused on making sure everyone had a great time. We would recommend them to anyone thinking organising a Dorset Paintballing event.

Krishna from Rocktime’s Business Development team was our roving reporter on the day and has provided us a selection of observations on skills spotted. Overall everyone participated well throughout the tournaments and a great time was had. 

Krishna’s top observations on Rocktime players:

 

Safe Player: Craig – he managed to not get even one hit in the whole tournament as he was very careful throughout and used clever tactics to keep away from enemy firing line!

Courage – Kieran Bell – I must say, Kieran Bell at times got in the firing line and got hits but never gave up till the last tournament and kept fighting.  Really impressed with his not give up attitude!

Skillful – Kieron Matthews – he was quick and also rallied team players at times and somehow his team won 3 of 2 battles (cheats! Lol).

Accuracy – Mark – he was focussed and many of his shots were on target.  Though, at times he shot the opponents but few of them denied walking away from the match.

Entertaining – Martin – he made the event interesting and exciting and also was the one to throw grenades etc. and giving a realistic battle ground feel!. Sadly at times, also took consecutive hits on same spot on his hand but was energetic throughout the tournament.

Author: Sarah Griffiths and Krishna Rayalu

Aysegul talks about Facebook Graph Search

Facebook Graph Search has been recently rolled out to everyone using Facebook in US English.

The tool lets users find specific information including their friends’ favourite hotels, restaurants, films and more, using filters such as location, gender, specific personal interests etc...

In some ways, Graph Search is a natural extension to the News Feed. However, rather than reviewing friend’s news feeds, now you can ask questions to Facebook about your friends and quickly find out the results. For example; searching 'Friends that have gone to Barcelona on holiday' would bring up a list of all the friends in your network who have either listed Barcelona as somewhere they have visited on their timeline or have checked in to a location in that city. You can then message your friend to learn more about it.

With its features, Facebook Graph Search is believed to be really big for marketing from creating awareness to purchase decision making process, as most of the people searching for pubs or restaurants etc... that their friends ‘Like’ when they’re figuring out where to go and in general friends’ recommendations are important decision making triggers.

Via this tool, people will be exposed to a huge range of new results.

Let’s try a research for hotels:

You can narrow it down by making it more descriptive:

What does Facebook Graph Search mean for brands and businesses? 

From a business perspective, whether you’re a small or a large business, you would really want to get your data into Facebook so that you’re showing up on the results pages.

Not all the businesses probably have physical locations on Facebook, so that they will need to think of clever ways to get themselves found in Facebook.

In terms of marketing, this change also support the need for an Integrated Social Search approach as this development is additional proof that the search and the social teams can’t be separated anymore. Brands and companies would want the SEO efforts to be taking into account what is happening in the search as well as in social media and in this case Facebook.

Below we have listed a couple of points about how your Facebook pages can best take advantage of the opportunities presented by Facebook Graph Search.

1)      Make sure your Facebook listings include the right information and are optimised.

This can be ensured by checking if the right category has been chosen and the added business address is correct. To fully optimise your page, suggest completing your profile including important keywords, posting and correctly tagging photos and videos, and encouraging your fans to add recommendations to your profile as the reviews will show up in Graph Search results.

2)      Encourage Check-ins

For local optimisation, encourage your fans to check in to your business page whenever they visit. It is one of the most important features as people mainly tend to search by location.

3)      Learn more about your fans to provide more value

This tool lets you learn about your fans’ interests and likes by sorting them into behavioural (hobbies, recent activities) and demographic segments (age, gender, location).

Fans interests can be used for Custom targeted campaigns, contests; and by identifying the other pages your fans like you can learn what content to share will be liked by your fans.

This may help you to provide more value to your fans and to increase brand loyalty.

For more tips and the possible search combinations you could use to help you conduct your research, suggest viewing the article 17 Ways Marketers Can Leverage Facebook Graph Search from Social Media Examiner.

If you have any queries on how social media can benefit your business, please do get in touch with our Sales team.

Author: Aysegul Yigitbasi

Geek Video of the Month

Last week (August 4th of 10th) was the first annual Geek Week on YouTube. So if you are a geek or a wannabe nerd, head on over to view geek culture from around the world.

The Agenda for the Geek Week was as follows:

• Blockbuster Sunday 

• Global Geekery Monday

• Brianiac Tuesday

• Super  Wednesday

• Gaming Thursday

• Fan Friday

• Best of Saturday

This month’s ‘Geek video of the Month’ was part of Geek Week’s Brianiac Tuesday and features 10 Videos that will make you smarter. Excellent work.

You may also want to get involved with the Geek Test that is featured on their channel, to find out ‘What’s your Geek IQ?”.

We are really looking forward to the next Geek channel takeover, hopefully for a month next time, as their is clearly too much Geeky content being shared.

Well done to Jason Bradbury (of Gadget show fame) for launching his own YouTube Channel 'Supa Robot Attack' on Gaming Thursday, the channel brings remote controlled fighting robots to YouTube.
Sounds fun!

Author: Sarah Griffiths

Team Event: Go Ape Tree Top Adventure

A great afternoon was had at Moors Valley Country Park, where the team experienced the outdoor ‘Go Ape Tree Top Adventure’.   We chose a great day for it, the temperature was ranging at about 18 degrees, which was ideal for the amount of physical activity that was required.  It was an awesome group activity, with team members giving each other encouragement to take the difficult crossings. Lots of giggles and some great photos have been shared.

• Krishna (New Business) battled through a recent cricket injury with a smile on his face when climbing up the many ladders.
• David (Web Development) progressed with gusto through the 1000 metres of high rope crossings, giving those who needed it confidence to progress further.
• Fiona (Search Marketing) showed no fear on all the activities, coming down the Zipwire like an elegant fairy.
• Kieran (Design) showed adventure with a head first landing into the wood chip from the last big Zipwire.
• Farah (Project Management) went for the difficult crossings on the swinging rope bridges and got so involved in completing the course managed to rip her trousers.
• Alex (Director) took the first jump on the free fall drop Tarzan swing, with much force. Think he was trying to impress his two lovely boys who were watching on the forest floor below us.

We would highly recommend this activity to other companies as a great team bonding event. We will definitely be booking again. Lots of smiles and lots of fun.

Thanks to David and Alex for organising the event. This month's team event: ‘Paint Balling’!

Author: Sarah Griffiths

Top Ten Tips for LinkedIn for Business

We are regularly asked for our top tips for engaging on social networks. Sharing with you this month, our top ten tips for engaging and optimising on LinkedIn, including updates and optimisations on Company Pages and personal LinkedIn accounts.

Feel free to share your LinkedIn tips in the comments section below.

Top Ten Tips for LinkedIn for Business

1. Know who, what and why you are looking to connect on LinkedIn. Define your goals. Listen and search.

2. Edit the description of your Company Page. Add keywords within speciality section. Choose the most appropriate industry. Optimise on the products and services pages. 

3. Create a professional headline and a summary about you and your experience on your personal account.

4. Select an appropriate networking approach. Send a personal message when reaching out and connecting. 

5. Develop a campaign on the Company Page to create community dialogue. 

6. Get involved with communities / Engage in group discussions and news. 

7. Add interesting and useful content to your Company Page, the type of content that would receive recommendations, likes, comments.

8. Follow influencers and news channels, so that stories you are interested in appear in your 'Home page' feed. 

9. Stay up to date with changes within the LinkedIn network.

10. Cross promote other social channels from your LinkedIn Company Page and personal profile page.  

You may also be interested in reading our Top Ten Twitter Tips for Business and Pleasure.

Author: Sarah Griffiths