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LinkedIn now has over 120 million users worldwide, including six million in the UK. Two new members join every second and there are nearly one million groups on the site.

It is now the mainstream tool for professionals to network online – and that is why it can’t be ignored as a marketing tool.

An increasing number of businesses are promoting their brands through staff profiles and presence on LinkedIn.

However, making the most of the social media website is a science- as with all social media websites information and security are key issues.

Here are some hot tips on how you can market your business successfully through Linkedin:

• Tell a compelling and authentic story about who you are, how you got to where you are, what you do and why you enjoy it. It is critical that a profile is “personally professional”. Individual profiles that only talk about the company or brand are a big turn off. Encourage your staff to take the same approach.
• Join relevant discussion groups and get involved in them. This can be interesting and rewarding and helps to raise your company’s profile.
• Make sure that your profile and all employees’ profiles link directly to your company page. An individual’s profile should also include information about your company, its products and offerings.
• Ensure you have a comprehensive company page including detailed pages on all products and services.
• Ask for and publish recommendations from satisfied customers for your products and services section on your company page.
• Ensure staff have profiles that are 100 per cent complete. LinkedIn is not like Facebook – individuals are representing a company or brand in a professional capacity on LinkedIn. The more visible your staff are on this network, the greater the visibility of your brand. But this only works if your employees are actively using their LinkedIn account.
• Encourage employees to use blogs, PowerPoint presentations and videos promoting your brand in their profiles and help them with the material.
• Provide guidelines on how to effectively communicate, reminding staff that their activities are representing the company- and can be read my literally millions of people- including your competitors.
• Provide all staff with copy to use to describe your company within their profiles. This ensures a consistent approach and helps avoid disclosing commercially sensitive information to competitors.
• Start your own group to build a community where you can indirectly promote your brand.
• Remember that search engine optimisation is important for every article, profle and group. LinkedIn allows open profiles which means that the search negine will alos pick up on your activities.

After testing in Brazil, Spain, and Portugal, Google will roll out a new algorithm globally that gives more weight to landing page quality when it comes to AdWords Quality Score. This means ads with landing pages that Google deems to be most relevant to the query will be able to rank higher for lower cost per click bids.

“What we’ve seen is that there are ads available in the auction that are as good a quality as the top ads. But the landing pages — the merchant sites, the advertiser landing pages — are of much higher quality than the ads that we see at the top of our auction,” Jonathan Alferness, director of product management on Google’s ad quality team.

This, says Alferness, means the user experience isn’t what it could be. Hence the change to give more weight to landing page quality. “In the end, we believe that this will result in better quality experience for the users.”

Landing page quality has long been a factor in Google AdWords, but more as a negative signal.

If an advertiser’s landing page was particularly terrible or misleading, advertisers could have their ads rejected or their accounts suspended or revoked — depending on how bad the policy violation was.

The new change will assign landing page quality a positive value, incentivising advertisers to make sure the landing page’s keywords and content are closely aligned with the keywords for which they’re bidding.

Ads with high landing page quality will get a “strong boost” upward in the auction, according to Alferness.

Alferness says Google will crawl the landing pages associated with every ad and make a determination as to its quality.

“What we always ask our advertisers to focus on is relevance — choose a landing page or site experience that is both relevant to the keywords that you’re targeting and also a good experience for end users,” said Alferness. “This is just continuing to push on those best practices. I gives us the ability to really reward those advertisers that have been doing this, whose landing pages really are some of the best in our systems.”

The change will roll out in the next week or two. Advertisers may see some variations in ad position and keyword Quality Score at first, but things should settle down within a couple of weeks, according to Google.

From: http://searchengineland.com/google-tweaks-adwords-to-give-landing-page-quality-more-weight

More than half of online traders failed to give full refunds to customers who pulled out of online purchases during a cooling-off period, research have found.Under consumer rights law, all costs – including delivery costs – should be refunded if consumers decide to cancel the contract in the allotted time.

Test purchasing by European authorities found that in 57% of cases, traders failed to reimburse delivery costs.

When buying from the internet, unlike in a shop, customers are unable to examine the goods before they buy them. As a result, a cooling-off period is available to people shopping online.

In the UK, shoppers have seven working days to return items bought on the internet that they do not want to keep. In some European countries it is longer.

There are a few exceptions, such as unwrapped CDs and perishable goods, but otherwise the money should be credited to the buyer’s account as soon as possible and within 30 days at the latest.

Consumer rights online

• In the UK, there is a cooling-off period of seven working days for unwanted items
• Traders should refund within 30 days, unless previously agreed otherwise
• Delivery charges should also be reimbursed
• Some perishable goods such as foods and flowers are exempt
• Rights for goods that are not of satisfactory quality are the same as the High Street – a refund, replacement or repair
• Any refund should include delivery costs incurred by the customer.

During a mystery shopping exercise by European authorities in 2003, these delivery costs were not reimbursed in 53% of cases.

But 305 tests earlier this year, by the European Consumer Centres’ Network, found that this had increased to 57%, although refunds for the items themselves were paid in 90% of cases.

“This needs to improve in order to ensure a continuous positive development in cross-border e-commerce,” a spokesman for the UK European Consumer Centre said.

In 7% of all the purchases made, the trader did not inform the customer about the price of the delivery costs at all.

Some results of the test purchases do make better reading for consumers.

For example, the delivery rate for items ordered online improved significantly compared with 2003, as had the number of items delivered within 14 days. There was also an increase in the number of websites offering information in more than one language.

Many of the current consumer rules operating in EU countries pre-date the widespread use of the internet by shoppers.

So MEPs have approved plans to update the rules, including a 14 calendar day cooling-off period for online purchases.

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.”

A quarter of UK Smartphone users see mobile advertising and nearly two thirds see online video ads according to new research.Among its findings, the analysis shows mobile and video advertising gaining traction in reaching a sizeable percentage of the total audience.

In June 2011, 63.1 percent (or nearly 2 out of 3 online video viewers in the UK) were exposed to video ads.

Among the total number of smartphone users in the same time period, 25.4 percent recalled seeing an ad while browsing the Internet or using an application on their devices. In comparison, 95.3 percent of fixed line Internet users were exposed to online display advertising.

Advertising Expands Reach among UK Mobile and Video Populations

Over the past two quarters, mobile advertising has seen a steady increase in reach. 5.4 million UK smartphone subscribers (25 percent overall) recalled having seen ads through a mobile browser or app in the quarter ending June 2011, representing a 28-percent increase from three months prior. In addition, nearly 8 percent of smartphone users recalled seeing ads at least once a week (up 28 percent), and 7.5 percent recalled seeing them almost every day (up 52 percent).

Of the 33.7 million online video viewers in June, 21.2 million (63.1 percent) were exposed to ad videos. While the total number of online video viewers remained constant from quarter-to-quarter, the number of unique viewers exposed to video ads rose 15 percent. Meanwhile, the online display market continued to show a high rate of penetration in the UK, with 40.0 million unique visitors exposed to online display ads in June 2011, accounting for 95.3 percent of the total UK online audience.

15-24 year olds most likely to be exposed to online video ads and smartphone Ads
A demographic analysis of people exposed to online advertising revealed that 15- 24 year olds were the most heavily exposed to online ad videos. Nearly 70 percent of 15-24 year olds were exposed to at least one online ad video in June 2011 – approximately 7 percentage points higher than the total Internet audience.

15-24 year olds were also 10 percent more likely than the average video viewer to be exposed to video ads, while 25-34 year olds have the second highest penetration and were 4 percent more likely than average to be exposed.

*An index of 100 indicates average representation relative to the base audience.

15-24 year olds see an even more pronounced relative skew when it comes to exposure to mobile advertising. In June 2011, 31.6 percent of UK smartphone users age 15-24 recalled having seen ads on an app or browser, the highest penetration among age groups. With an index of 125, 15-24 year olds were 25 percent more likely than the average smartphone user to recall exposure to mobile advertising. Meanwhile, 45-54 year olds and those 55 and older showed a significantly lower likelihood than average of recalling mobile ad exposure.

*An index of 100 indicates average representation relative to the base audience.

The research can be found at: http://www.comscore.com/Mobile_and_Video_Emerge_As_Significant_Online_Ad_Platforms_in_the_UK

Travel websites in the UK have recovered a lot of UK searchers according to new research.Highlights of the ecommerce research include:
• Travel websites bounced back this quarter with all of the major travel brands rising up the rankings since May 2011. One in five websites in the Hot Shops List this quarter came from the travel sector.
• Having dropped out of the Top 50, cinema brands Odeon (ranked 37th) and Vue (44th) both returned to it this quarter. Cineworld also rose up the rankings in a strong three months for the movie industry.
• The fastest movers in the Hot Shops List during the last three months were: Travel Republic (up 18 places), Odeon Cinemas (+14), First Choice (+12), Travelodge (+12) and Cineworld (+9). Next was also a notable climber this quarter, moving up two places to 3rd in the Hot Shops List above Tesco and Play.com.
• Entertainment retailers Play.com, HMV and GAME all fell in the rankings , revealing a decline in demand for video games, DVDs and CDs.

Overall analysis revealed that discount fashion brand Matalan was the success story of the quarter, up 15 places in the Hot Shops List since May.

Matalan reached its highest ever position in the Hot Shops List , ranked 40th overall, up from 68th position in August 2010.

The fashion and homeware retailer revealed in its Q1 trading statement that online sales had doubled compared with Q1 2010, and UK internet visits to the Matalan website reached record levels in July 2011, accounting for 2.14% of all visits to fashion retail websites.

Next was another fashion brand to perform strongly during this period becoming the third biggest retailer in the Hot Shops List.

In the process of climbing to third spot in the August list, Next overtook Tesco, which fell to fourth place this quarter.

Other supermarket brands also dropped down the rankings between May and August, including Sainsbury’s (down 5 places) and ASDA (-2).

Travel brands surged back up the list this quarter with Thomson the best performing travel brand ranking 10th overall.

Travel Republic was the fastest moving retailer of the quarter, up 18 places to 28th in the list. Budget airlines easyJet and Ryanair also climbed the rankings as consumers booked last minute flights abroad.

First Choice returned to the Top 50 after a dip in performance last quarter.

You can download the IMRG-Hitwise Hot Shops List : http://hitwise.chtah.com/a/tBOSkRXB8U3jIB8c0UgAAAb42q-/download

All businesses make mistakes – but how those mistakes are handled may often decide whether the business retains or loses its customers.Businesses are not philanthropic institutions: they exist to make money in the form of profit. To make money businesses have to anticipate and satisfy customer’s demands, so that customers provide the necessary income to the business in return for the goods or services that they require.

Identifying enough potential customers who have the requirement for the goods and services on offer, is the primary problem for every business. Having identified the potential customers, the next difficulty is to convert them into customers that pay for their goods and services.

It often costs businesses more than they realise in order to gain a new customer – and considerably more than it does to retain them, so it is surprising how businesses can often take a casual attitude to their customer relations and to retaining customers for their repeat business.

Gaining and retaining customers is a privilege not a right. Customers don’t have to give their business and they are not obliged to remain customers, especially if the marketplace is filled with competing offers for products and services.

Maintaining customers depends largely on how the product or service is delivered.

As a minimum standard customers should always receive their goods and services at the price agreed and delivered in the manner and time expected. This is certainly the case in business to business transactions, where delivery to price and specification have particular importance to companies involved in manufacturing, or where their supplies inventories work on “just in time” deliveries.

From time to time, mistakes will be made – products may fail to meet their specification, deliveries are incorrect or are late, or perhaps there are mistakes in the invoicing.

When a customer complains, the customer is not always right.

But customer complaints need initially to be treated in the first place, as if the customer were right. It is easy for some employees not directly involved with the customer to treat such complaints as a nuisance, but complaints are a valuable source of information about how customers perceive the product and service  for which they are paying.

It is all too easy for  employees not directly in contact with the customer to be unaware of how their actions can alienate both potential and existing customers; for example a delivery not being made on time, a credit level exceeded that prevents delivery, incomplete orders.

When such events occur, provided that customers are informed of the problem at the earliest opportunity and kept informed about progress to its resolution, the harm to customer relations will be minimised.

The worst situation is to not inform the customer of any problem, but allow the customer to find out the hard way, which may create problems for the customer, and breaks the trust of reliability between the customer and supplier.

For managers responsible for getting and retaining business, it is important to ensure that all employees understand that however remote their jobs appear to be from a direct relationship with the customers, their actions can have a significant role in the acquisition, retention or loss of a customer’s business.

Getting customers and retaining their custom is hard work which can easily be undone and negated by others who don’t appreciate the consequences foreseen or unforeseen of their activity or lack of it.

If a customer complains, and there is shown to be a problem, the first action is to admit it to the customer and apologise. It is the job of the manager responsible for getting and retaining business to investigate the complaint, its possible causes, and to provide a swift remedy for the problem. In doing so, managers should consider the following principals:

• Don’t assume that approved business procedures are followed, always check.
• Can procedures and policy it be verified?
• How do you know?

Managers who are responsible for getting and retaining business, must take ultimate responsibility when customers are lost through failings of company staff.

Managers must check that the policies, procedures and results are maintained by their employees, and be ready to help when foreseen and unforeseen problems arise that effect the customers.

All businesses make mistakes, but how those mistakes are handled may often decide whether the business retains or loses its customers.

From: http://businessperformancemaximized.com/it_is_easier_to_lose_business_than_to_get_it

Rural areas in England and Scotland have been allocated nearly £363 million to improve their broadband connections.Cumbria gets one of the largest shares of the £530 million pot, with over £17 million to cope with its 96.2% of homes eligible for subsidies.

By contrast, London gets nothing as it assumed that private investment will cover all parts of the capital.

It is a change of strategy for the government which originally asked counties to bid for money with local authorities and residents deciding how the money should be spent.

County councils and private enterprise partnerships will be put in charge of broadband rollouts in their areas, and will be required to draw up delivery plans and find additional funding from elsewhere.

The areas receiving most funds are:

• Cumbria: £17m
• Devon and Somerset: £31.3m
• East Sussex: £10.6m
• Kent: £9.87m
• Lancashire: £10.8m
• Lincolnshire: £14.3m
• Norfolk: £15.4m
• North Yorkshire: £17.8m
• Suffolk: £11.68m

Wales and Northern Ireland have already been given their share of the £530 million broadband fund which was set aside from the TV licence fee.

The government hopes that by allocating money instead it will speed up the process and has pledged to make the UK the best place in Europe for broadband by 2015.

Up to one third of UK homes will not get fast broadband services from the big commercial players without government subsidy.

This is because the number of people living in rural areas versus the cost of creating a next-generation broadband do not represent a good return on their investment for players such as BT and Virgin Media.

So for example Northumberland has 71% of premises that will not be reached by commercial projects. It has been allocated over £7m.

Berkshire, with only 8% of homes unlikely to get next-generation services via commercial firms, gets £1.4m.

But some have questioned whether the £530 million will be enough to fill in the gaps.

There are two inevitable privacy-related consequences of the current spate of riots and civil disorder across the UK. The first is that technology such as social media and mobile networks will feel the heat of condemnation for facilitating the chaos. The second is that there will be a renewed attempt to implement new surveillance and law enforcement measures.

The blame game has already started. Inevitably, it begins with parents.

They should be keeping their children under control – or at least keeping them at home. Parents should certainly be turning their children over to the police if looted items are discovered under the bed.

This, for the moment, is the cross-party line being held by police, government and Opposition. However, as with previous city-wide disturbances elsewhere – including Paris – this fantasy is unlikely to hold viability for long, and so the blame will need to become more specific.

The MP for Ealing – one of the affected trouble spots – told the BBC that the riots are being organised on social media sites, while Twitter is a conduit for disinformation intended to confuse police operations planning. “Something”, she declared, must be done.

For example, the Home Office’s Interception Modernisation Programme – rebranded as the “Communications Capabilities Development Programme” – will almost certainly be presented as a crucial tool for crime prevention.

That project aims to technologically infiltrate social networks on a mass scale but until recently it had been abandoned in the wake of the Coalition government’s commitment to place limits on the extent of State surveillance. The Home Office will at some point argue that the scheme should be escalated and expanded.

Private briefings to journalists by police and Home Office officials claim that ringleaders are using “clandestine” and more private communications methods such as BlackBerry Messaging – methods that officials argue are largely immune from open scrutiny by police. Law enforcement by this reasoning is being outflanked by systems that are intentionally designed for private communications.

Now technology commentators are being wheeled into television studios with a remarkably similar analysis: new technologies are gifts to criminals.

The consequent media reporting is confused. One BBC report today holds encryption responsible for the cloak of criminal secrecy offered by Blackberry.

This, despite a public statement by the company that it continues to cooperate fully with authorities.

Notably, no government MP has so far pinned blame for the riots on the decimation of police budgets and resources over the past eighteen months. Of equal note, few MP’s have so far pinned blame on failed fiscal policy, a generation of institutional racial abuse by police or the collapse of support for community and family support programmes.

Needless to say, no-one has dared question the quality of media reporting and its’ possible role in the chain of events. Remarkably, little has been said of the role of computer games, though that link will emerge (the acting Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police gave it away when he stated “this is not just a game”).

Where does all this leave us? Clearly new technologies are an easy target for blame, just as monarchs of centuries ago would blame coffee houses as the cause of social disorder and treason.

It remains a mystery why police continue to claim that they have been taken by surprise by the nature of these events. Anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of actions inspired through 4-Chan would understand that the ground rules changed years ago. To hold information networks liable would be a dangerously short sighted position.

If there was ever a need for an evidence based approach to a social problem, this is it. When Parliament meets to discuss the riots it should demand evidence to back up any claim of blame, and it should institute a rigorous process to ensure that any response is justified, lawful, viable and fair.
This article was origonally at: https://www.privacyinternational.org/blog/privacy-consequences-uk-riots

A leading German privacy official has accused Facebook of using face recognition software in a manner that violates German and European law.Facebook was also scolded for collecting and storing biometric data without users’ consent

Johannes Caspar, a data protection expert with the city of Hamburg, called on the US-based social networking company to delete from its site the individual biometric data it has collected.

“If the users’ data falls into the wrong hands, it would be possible to compare and identify anybody captured in a photo taken with a mobile phone,” Mr Caspar told the Hamburger Abenblatt newspaper.

The programme allows Facebook users to locate new “Friends” after discovering their identity through a biometric data scan.

The programme tries to match data captured in a picture with the trove of data it has already collected from its hundreds of millions of users.

“This is what’s most problematic. The programme feeds off a stock of data designed to physically identify millions of users,” he said.

He further scolded Facebook for collecting and storing biometric data without users’ consent, insisting the practice violates privacy laws.

Germany, which is considered a leader on Internet privacy issues, has criticised Google for its “Street View” programme, which makes street-level images freely available online.

German officials also previously urged Facebook to beef up its privacy protections, notably over its Friend Finder feature, which allowed the site to register or even import users’ entire email address books without notifying them.