Blog

a4uexpo 2012 3

The High Street Moves Online

Town and City centre high streets are beginning to look bare. What were once the central shopping hub with independent retailers, butchers, bakers family-run businesses, and grocers in the past have, in recent years, been replaced by chain stores.  However, this trend seems to be ending as quickly as it began.

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a4uexpo 2012 3

Facebook are announcing a new feature expected to be a search engine

Facebook have been fighting with Google for as long as we can remember to be the cool brand. They’ve tried commercials with chairs, they’ve tried making sponsored stories their premium service to brands but they still haven’t gotten over the hump.
All this is set to change within the next few minutes or so when Facebook announce a new feature, which if rumours are to be believed will be a search engine-type service.

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a4uexpo 2012 3

Advertising: What not to do

When you are a copywriter you will most probably be asked to come up with ideas for advertising your company and words that can be used. Be creative, think of words that are going to persuade people to buy your product or services, that’s what advertising is all about. Advertise your company with words that best fit.

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a4uexpo 2012 3

Need help with your advertising? Here's some damn good advice

Have you ever come across the book ‘Damn Good Advice’ written by George Lois?
No? Well you had better get hunting it down and purchase it quickly! Why you may ask? Because this has got to be one of the best books I have ever read and I would recommend it to anyone who needs advice on being creative. I have to say that George Lois is now one of my biggest heroes and I admire him greatly!
When you read this book you will slap yourself with disbelief but you’ll also be annoyed that you didn’t think of some of the ideas yourself. Well, that was my first reaction. But then I started to laugh because of some of the things he has done; he has been extremely eccentric with some ideas but then other times he has been really simplistic but every aspect of his idea has been effective.

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a4uexpo 2012 3

Upset with Instagram photos no longer showing on Twitter? Easy fix found

Facebook ruined Instagram! Or at least some would say. You may have seen that when you post from Instagram and share to Twitter, it no longer shows up on your Twitter feed as a photo. It’s now just a cold link and doesn’t populate your photo feed either. Most disappointing!
When I have a photo I want to share, I post it on to Instagram and then use the auto-share functions to get it on my Facebook and Twitter. When I found out the functionality was going, I had to find an answer.

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a4uexpo 2012 3

Why You're More Likely To Watch A Will Smith Movie Over A Foreign Film – A Gentle Discussion About Preferential Attachment

We have those things in life we prefer over everything. You have those people who wouldn’t use any other phone other than an iPhone and those that believe that Android is the best thing ever. There are those that would only ever buy jeans from Gap. Quite rightly, some would call this brand love – though it’s just an extreme use of preference.
I’m sure you can think of many occasions where you have exercised this right. It’s perfectly natural to only want an Innocent smoothy when you are in a smoothy mood – you’ve tried the other ones and they don’t satisfy you the same way. I’m the same about grapefruit juice, I’ve tried to enjoy Tesco grapefruit juice… trust me I have but I only have time for Tropicana grapefruit juice. It’s the best.

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a4uexpo 2012 3

How can social networks increase your conversions?

More and more we are seeing that online social networks are beginning to reflect networks which have formed in reality. In real life networks the most successful and fruitful business relationships (and relationships in general) are those which have been introduced via social referral.

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a4uexpo 2012 3

A dash of TV marketing with a twist of social media – Christmas ads in the digital age

It’s that time of year again. Yes with Christmas around the corner, companies go into marketing overdrive and we see an array of effective Christmas adverts crop up every year, all of which aim to get us in the Christmas spirit.
One of the things that makes Christmas marketing so different nowadays is the fact that social media can play a big part in aiding the Christmas marketing process with a number of companies having a strong presence on Facebook and Twitter. This means that as well as having the advert we have all come to know and love, we have a further drive when we log into our social networks.

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a4uexpo 2012 3

Web Conversion: Peer Review 101

There is a lot of talk out there about which practices are the best but it is all subjective hearsay and  unless you compare and contrast techniques, it can be difficult to know what is objectively the best practices.
So, I recently undertook a peer review of the online SEO community, in order to determine what the consensus was about the best SEO practices. This involved finding 50 blogs about the best on page techniques, blogs ranged from top 5 and top 8’s to top 20’s and above. Then I counted the number of times a particular technique was mentioned. The results are detailed below:

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