SEARCH CLINIC

Dr Search- the Search Clinic’s Principal Consultant has now been recognised by the Association of MBAs as a qualified Member.
The Association of MBAs is the international impartial authority on postgraduate business education and was established in 1967.

AMBA is the only professional membership association for MBA students and graduates, accredited business schools, and MBA employers. The membership network currently includes 9,000 members living in 88 countries.

The accreditation service is the global standard for all MBA, DBA and MBM programmes. They currently accredit programmes at 189 business schools in over 70 different countries.

In June 1967, a small group of business graduates, eight with MBAs from the US and two from the first intake at London Business School, gathered in London to found the Business Graduates Association (BGA).

Recognising that despite the value of the MBA, there was a distinct lack of knowledge about the qualification in the UK and Europe, the BGA’s intention was to promote the benefits of business education through five key objectives: help the development of existing business schools, support the founding of new business schools, encourage employers to take on MBAs, help increase the number and quality of students attending business school, and advocate the importance of professional business education in general.

By the end of their first decade the BGA had grown to a membership of 1,900.

In 1983, in response to the growing number of polytechnic business schools offering an MBA programme, the BGA established an accreditation programme to champion the MBA as a brand and to ensure standards were maintained. It soon became clear that there was considerable demand for this kind of quality assurance in the MBA market.

By 1987 the BGA’s stakeholder group had evolved into graduate members, accredited business schools and MBA employers. To reflect this change the BGA became the Association of MBAs.

Throughout the 1990s, the Association of MBAs continued to grow, adding members and accrediting programmes, including many outside the UK. The Association, until then staffed by volunteers, also adopted a more professional structure, adopting a full-time head and management team.

Jeanette Purcell came on board as Chief Executive in 2003. In 2007, the Association of MBAs celebrated its 40th anniversary as the leading international impartial authority on postgraduate business education.

You can contact Dr Search by clicking here now.

As it’s now December and people are opening the first windows on their Advent calendars Dr Search thought we would give you some insights for the Twelve Days of Christmas 2011 online. The 12 Insights of Christmas 2011

1. This December 350 million hours will be spent shopping online by the UK Internet population. This translates to an average of 8 hours and 45 minutes spent per person on shopping websites over the course of the month.

2. 2.1 billion visits will go to online retail sites in December with new record peaks in traffic both pre and post-Christmas.

3. Lego will be the most searched for toy this Christmas, in particular Lego Star Wars games and sets.

4. Cyber Monday (5 December) will be the biggest pre-Christmas shopping day online with 85 million visits to retail websites from UK Internet users.

5. Monday 19 December will be the biggest day of December for online Grocery visits as people do some last minute food shopping but also check store opening times across the Christmas period.

6. iPhones will be a third more popular online than iPads this Christmas. If search intent was reflected in sales, for every 3 iPads Apple sold this Christmas they would sell 4 iPhones.

7. Facebook will see a new peak in UK Internet visits as friends share messages of good will with one another. 25 million hours will be spent on Facebook on Christmas Day alone.

8. Searches for the post-Christmas sales will start earlier than ever this year, with eager shoppers starting to do their research online as early as Christmas Eve.

9. Friday 23 December will be the biggest day of December for retailers receiving traffic from email as the multi-channel retailers prepare their customers for the post-Christmas sales.

10. The fashion sector will be the most reliant on Facebook traffic this Christmas, with TopShop, River Island and ASOS among the biggest recipients of Facebook traffic.

11. 12 million hours will be spent watching video clips on BBC iPlayer this Christmas with the biggest driver of traffic being the Dr Who Christmas special.

12. Hull will be the online shopping capital of Britain of December 2011, with proportionally more people doing their Christmas shopping online than any other city in the UK.

These twelve days of christmas online insights were initially research by Hitwise.

Online video content creators are now making significant amounts of money from a range of ways.

Since the explosion of streaming video several years ago, hosting sites have become home to a growing numberof video makers attracting devoted followings for everything from music and sketch comedy to make-up tips.

Meanwhile, online video has become a career for thousands of video creators, with some making hundreds of thousands of dollars each year.

As online video viewership has grown – YouTube draws 500 million unique visitors each month – marketers hope to take advantage of the dedicated audiences and low barriers to entry.

Video creators in turn are making money from hosting sites such as YouTube, DailyMotion and Blip.tv, which share a portion of the profits derived from video and banner advertisements.

YouTube, for one, has distributed millions of dollars in advertising revenue to its 20,000 most popular amateur producers since 2007.

A still from an episode of Annoying Orange on Blip.tv Blip.tv, which hosts the Annoying Orange comedy show describes its content as “the best in original web series”

“We share millions of dollars with our partners every year,” said Tom Sly, the site’s head of strategic partner development.

The amount advertisers pay varies with the popularity and quality of the videos, with creators receiving as much as $20 (£12.70) per thousand views.

“Across the board we’re seeing those numbers increase as we see higher quality content and the ability to target users so that advertisers have more fine-grained control,” Mr Sly said.

In 2010, the number of YouTube partners making over $1,000 (£600) per month from advertising revenue went up 300%, the company said.

The company declined to release specific figures, but Mr Sly said “hundreds” of video creators make more than $100,000 a year and “thousands” make more than $10,000 a year.

The top performing web shows on Blip.tv are on target to take in more than $1m in advert revenue each, said Eric Mortensen, senior director of programming.

“There are certain class of people, and it’s not that they are rejecting TV, they never even thought to be like TV in the first place,” he said. “And because of that they are doing new and different things and that’s how they end up making money.”

Industry analysts say that online video audiences are loyal and attentive and feel a connection to the creators.

In addition to advert revenue sharing, some video creators make as much as $150,000 a year by cutting sponsorship deals with major companies, said former YouTube executive George Strompolos, founder of Fullscreen, a start-up that aims to facilitate connections between corporate sponsors and video creators.

Aware of the power of recommendations from such seemingly personal relationships, companies like Ford, GE, and Lancome are directly reaching out to video makers to hawk their products.

Online video creators work without the need for teams of agents, managers, markets and developers, Mr Strompolos said.

“Online video tends to be a one-stop shop solution,” Mr Strompolos said.  “You get not only the creative development and the authenticity of voice you’re looking for, but you also get distribution and reach.”

As the online video advertising and merchandising infrastructures become more sophisticated, analysts say more and more people are likely to strike out on their own in web video.

This is becoming the new television- a place where the average person has a much better chance of getting noticed and making money than if they were to go the traditional route via Hollywood.

Alan Lastufka, author of YouTube: An Insider’s Guide to Climbing the Charts, said: “The money may not always be headline-worthy, but it’s enough to quit your day job, stay in the basement on your computer and spend your time connecting with fans.”

You’ve got a wonderful new website- so the world is going to be knocking your door down. Or so you hope.After the initial disappointment comes the realisation that it’s a big world out there.

If your website starts with the word “welcome” congratulations- there are over three billion other websites listed by Google making the same mistake.

Go on- ask yourself how often do you search for “welcome”?

To get online traffic depends on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and SEO has a number of factors:

1. Technical (how well can it be crawled by the search engines)
2. On page (what’s on the page being crawled)
3. Off page (mainly building links)

Google and most other search engines use links to determine reputation. A site’s ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to it.

Link-based analysis is an extremely useful way of measuring a site’s value and has greatly improved the quality of web search.

Both the quantity and, more importantly, the quality of links count towards this rating.

Of course Google does not just use links; they use over 200 indicators such as:

• domain name
• meta tags
• alt tags
• directory names
• filenames
• heading tags
• link popularity (how many links back to you there are)
• link text (anchor text indicating the subject of the link)
• page title
• Page Rank

PageRank™ is Google’s patented method to assign a numerical algorithm and weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents that provides a rough estimate of the overall importance of a web page.

In short the whole basis of Google’s success- is that success of website pages breeds success.

If you think that buying links is the key to your future success- hold on!

To find the pitfalls of blindly building links, just have a quick look at Google’s own links building rules .

As the article on paid links makes clear: “Buying or selling links that pass PageRanking is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results”

So, what you need are good quality links and lots of them.

But what is meant by good quality links?

The seven most important factors for link quality are:

Contextual links. One way is obvious and contextual just means appearing within the natural flow of a page’s text. If the link is reciprocal, Google sometimes discounts some of the value of that link.

High authority websites. Getting one link from the Telelgraph or DMOZ is possible worth more than 10,000 links from your new site. Authority does not
just mean high PageRank- but a site that is also well established as one of the most important sites for a topic.

Relevant / related links. If you have loads of sites that are irrelevant / unrelated to your sites topic you will probably lose out. In natural linking by people, they tend to link to one another within the same topics and industry. Spammers- like addicts don’t care where they get their fix- or link.

Diversity of link sources. Having many links from another site is good but it’s probably better to have one link each from many sites. The former could be spam. The latter is harder to achieve.

Deep links. If you only have links pointing to your homepage and no deep links to other pages in your site then you will probably have less success than with a proportion of deep links.

Different anchor texts -the actual text of the link. For example “Dr Search is an online marketing professional” is something we might be able to place with small variations, but hundreds and thousand of individuals who may link to us will vary the text they use just because they will as they all think slightly differently.

Consistent links growth. Link building is a marathon, not a sprint. Acquiring 20,000 links on one day unless your marketing goes viral is very unlikely for the vast majority of sites, so any search engine will rightly be suspicious.

The US defense contractor who collated the UK census Lockheed Martin has come under fire after it emerged that the entire database may have been hacked.An alleged member of the hacking group behind the claim, LulzSec, was arrested in Essex this morning by specialist cyber crime officers from Scotland Yard.

The 19 year old was taken to a central London police station and remains in custody on suspicion of Computer Misuse Act and Fraud Act offences.

A “significant amount of material” was also seized from an address in Wickford, Essex.

The “pre-planned intelligence-led operation” in collaboration with the FBI followed claims online that the 2011 census database had been stolen and would be published in full.

“We have blissfully obtained records of every single citizen who gave their records to the security-illiterate UK government for the 2011 census,” a posting purportedly by LulzSec said.

“We’re keeping them under lock and key though… so don’t worry about your privacy (…until we finish re-formatting them for release),” it added.

The posting said the database will be published via The Pirate Bay, a file sharing website.

The Office of National Statistics said it was investigating the claims.

“We are aware of the suggestion that census data has been accessed. We are working with our security advisers and contractors to establish whether there is any substance to this,” it said.

“The 2011 Census places the highest priority on maintaining the security of personal data. At this stage we have no evidence to suggest that any such compromise has occurred.”

LulzSec first emerged in May and mounted a series of Distributed Denial of Service and hacking attacks on high profile organisations. Sony, the CIA, the US Senate, the Serious Organised Crime Agency and security companies linked to the FBI have all been targeted.

The group claims to be acting purely for amusement.”Lulz” is a derivative of LOL, the abbreviation for “laugh out loud” commonly used online.

Dr Search suspects that Lockheed Martin’s brand image “we never forget who we are working for” is about to become rather derided.

Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT) is an American global aerospace, defense, security, and advanced technology company with worldwide interests.

It was formed by the merger of Lockheed Corporation with Martin Marietta in March 1995.

It is headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland, in the Washington Metropolitan Area. Lockheed Martin employs 133,000 people worldwide. Robert J. Stevens is the current Chairman and Chief Executive Officer.

Lockheed Martin is one of the world’s largest defense contractors; In 2009, 74% of Lockheed Martin’s revenues came from military sales.

The latest social media network UK traffic figures for May 2011 have just been released by Hitwise.From: Hitwise social media network uk traffic figures May 2011

The overall result is that traffic to both YouTube and Twitter has increased whilst Facebook’s dominance of social media has declined.

This month’s search and social analysis release confirmed some interesting trends in the Social Networking and Forums category, including a bumper month of traffic for Twitter, continuing growth for YouTube and a declining market share for Facebook.

Last month Hitwise noted the growth of YouTube and how the video website now accounts for 1 in every 5 visits to all social networking sites. In May YouTube continued its growth, accounting for 20.52% of all visits to the Social Networks and Forums category.

Meanwhile Twitter had its biggest month of traffic ever, in part because of the super-injunction revelations, but also because the micro-blogging platform has carved a niche for itself as an excellent platform through which Internet users can share and consume news.

Recent examples like the death of Osama Bin Laden, the Egypt crisis and the resurgence of the ash cloud have all been shared and discussed on Twitter.

What’s interesting is that the growth of YouTube and Twitter is coming at the expense of Facebook.

Since the beginning of 2011, Facebook’s market share of visits within the Social Networks and Forums category has fallen from nearly 58% to hover around the 54% mark.

Despite the drop in market share in recent months, Facebook needn’t panic. Although its market share is declining slightly, Facebook still commands over half of the visits to the fastest growing category online, and having a slightly smaller proportion of an ever increasing pie is still a very healthy place to be.

However, it does raise the question: has Facebook now finished its growth phase in the UK? This is something that Dr Search will continue to monitor closely over the coming months and confirms our blog post of a couple of days ago when I posted: Facebook faces saturation claims as growth stops

Dr Search visited the Cheltenham Science Festival at the weekend and attended a lecture by Toby of GCHQ on security in the computer age.One of the many interesting facts I learnt were the top common passwords that people frequently use for making their various internet accounts “safe”.

The top 10 passwords are:

Rank Password
1                      123456
2                      password
3                      12345678
4                      1234
5                      12345
6                      iloveyou
7                      qwerty
8                      696969
9                      letmein
10                    abc123

If you use any of these, I strongly recommend that you change them as it is only a matter of time before you suffer security consequences.

Apparently these passwords are used so frequently that cyber criminals regularly start code cracking attempts with these.

I have repeated these as a warning, not as a purile suggestion but that you learn from these mistakes and don’t become fodder for cyber criminals.

Oh and one other warning- if you have a wifi connection provided by Sky- so unconcerned by security is Rupert Murdoch that the odds are that your login details are “sky” and “admin”.

Apparently the Murdochs’ overriding concern is to make your wifi work- and make money in the process, so all of the default settings are easy to use.

If you want to set up a secure phrase- use 16 characters which include upper and lower case letters, numbers as well as a few punctuation marks.

European Union data protection regulators will probe Facebook after it started a global rollout of its new face recognition photo tagging system without allowing it’s users’ to opt in.
The new feature “recognises” faces in photos, shortening the often tedious tagging process, which enables users to connect a face in a photo with an actual friend on Facebook.

The process has now been semi-automated- Facebook provides suggestions for individuals in photos, and the user chooses to accept or reject them.

The feature is enabled by default although it can be disabled by customizing your privacy settings.

However, European Union regulators think that this feature is a potential privacy risk.

“Tags of people on pictures should only happen based on people’s prior consent and it can’t be activated by default,” said Gerard Lommel, a Luxembourg member of the Article 29 Data Protection Working Party.

In the past, EU regulators have criticised companies such as Microsoft and Google as well as Yahoo for storing data search queries for too long.

Facebook, too, was criticised for not doing enough to protect the privacy of its users.

Dr Search isn’t surprised by Facebook’s ongoing disregard to it’s users’ personal security. They have a long track record of blunderbussing ahead without care and sufferring the consequences later.

Hopefully a large fine might bring some sence- if only to delay their impending IPO due to regulatory uncertainty that this investigation will cause.

Twitter has said it was prepared to hand over data and information identifying tens of thousands of people who have used the website to break privacy superinjunctions.A senior executive from Twitter has admitted for the first time that the social network might turn over information to authorities if it was “legally required” to do so.

Experts had previously assumed that people who breached gagging orders on Twitter were protected from legal reprisals because the website is outside the jurisdiction of British courts.

The admission came after Dominic Grieve, the Attorney General, warned earlier this week that people who breached injunctions online were in for a “rude shock”.

Ryan Giggs, the Premiership footballer, last week started legal proceedings against Twitter and “persons unknown” after more than 70,000 users revealed that he had obtained an injunction to hide an extra-marital affair.

On Monday John Hemming, the back-bench Liberal Democrat MP, used parliamentary privilege to identify Giggs in Parliament.

The admission by Twitter, however, could encourage legal action by a number of celebrities who have been named on the website as having obtained injunctions to hide alleged affairs.

Tony Wang, Twitter’s head of European operations, has said that the website would notify users in advance so they could fight the application in the court before Twitter handed over the information.

He said: “Platforms have a responsibility, not to defend that user but to protect that user’s right to defend him or herself.

“If we’re legally required to turn over user information, to the extent that we can, we want to notify the user involved, let them know and let them exercise their rights under their own jurisdiction.

“That’s not to say that they will ultimately prevail, that’s not to say that law enforcement doesn’t get the information they need, but what it does do is take that process into the court of law and let it play out there.”

When Mr Hemming named Giggs earlier this week he said: “With about 75,000 people having named Ryan Giggs on Twitter, it is obviously impracticable to imprison them all.”

Dr Search wonders if it will possible to trace the anonymous users if they have used fake email addresses and set up Twitter accounts in internet cafes as tracking the culprits will be very vague- especially as the most controversial Twitter account appears to have been posted to on only one day.

The CIM- Chartered Institute of Marketing is 100 years old this week.The CIM was formed on May 16 1911 and marketing as a profession began when 12 people met at the Inns of Court hotel in London and created a new professional association.

Dr Search the Search Clinic’s Principal Consultant is a Chartered Marketer and Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing.

The Institute’s solid branch and regional network, first established in 1926, reaches marketers throughout the UK and overseas.

Since the founding of the Sri Lanka branch in 1995, the CIM network has expanded to champion marketing best practice in 11 overseas regions from Asia to Africa.

This is supported by its established professional qualifications, which began in 1928 with the first annual certificate examinations, and today comprises of entry-level marketing certificates and degree-level qualifications, CPD and training programmes.

The CIM is the world’s largest group of marketing professionals.

Events and celebrations planned during this centenary year will provide marketers with an opportunity to show off the positive power of marketing and demonstrate the beneficial contribution that marketing provides to both an organisation’s bottom line and long-term future.

To mark our momentous milestone, a Centenary Banquet was organised on 4 April 2011 at Windsor Castle in the presence of our patron His Royal Highness The Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, K.G., K.T.

Our long standing patron H.R.H. supports our quests to promote the positive influence marketing has for organisations today and in the future. The Centenary Banquet was an excellent opportunity to celebrate the importance of marketing and the beneficial contribution it makes to organisations’ success and long-term future.

Around 300 selected guests attended the Banquet where H.R.H. The Duke of Edinburgh addressed the guests followed by one of Britain’s most popular public speakers Tony Ball, MBE.