Google’s ‘Priority Inbox’ feature has just been given the all high and mighty approval for mass consumption but what exactly is it, how does it work and what potential impacts does it endeavour to have?

Priority Inbox is a new way of taking control of your Gmail account. It attempts to automatically identify your important incoming messages and separates them out from everything else. Google servers look at several types of information to identify the ‘important stuff’, including who you email and chat with most, how often you email these people and which keywords appear most frequently in the emails that you read. (more…)

In a recent piece of work for one of our clients we started experimenting with Drupal for Facebook, a set of modules and themes which turn Drupal into a Facebook application framework. This is a great addition for us at White Hat Media, because we love Drupal, and we love social media.

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Many feel that Facebook is the best thing since sliced bread in the social media world at the moment and perhaps the whole social media buzz is becoming a little cliche in both the consumer and business world. However, there are also many companies who have yet to embrace Facebook as a mean to grow their business and connect with consumers on an individual basis as well as en masse. (more…)

We’ve uploaded my presentation for the Brighton SEO conference to SlideShare where it’s currently featured on the homepage. A big thank you to Kelvin Newman for organising the event.

We are currently in the era of Web 2.0. An era focused on the predominant principle of participatory based communication. New virtual mediums of communication and technology offer many social and cultural benefits, shaping the way in which we commodify ourselves. Looking to the future of communication, Web 2.0 will shift to a semantic based Web 3.0, providing full context to the information we search for online.

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Marketing as an Art

The art form of marketing involves many non-verbal communication processes involving subtle and subliminal messages addressing specific audiences. The art form of good marketing consciously and unconsciously creates connections by playing on emotional ties and utilising certain aesthetics, creating involvement between consumers and the advertising. For example the Andrex brand uses some fundamental tools to create emotional ties to their adverts. Their image of a golden Labrador puppy connotes cuteness, playfulness and loyalty, initially from the dog but this symbolises their brand, so ultimately from the company as a whole. This results in unconscious and conscious emotional ties being developed between the consumer and the brand.

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A recent blog post and case study by Econsultancy has brought social conversations into the search realm. The post outlines a case study undertaken by Econsultancy on Magners cider whereby it appeared that online conversations mentioning the brand drove the Magners.co.uk website up search engine rankings for both brand and generic key words. Econsultancy had optimised the new Magners web site but there were no back links to it yet as it was sitting at a new domain.

It seemed that social conversations may have played a factor and Econsultancy set up a test site for the theory and you can read about the full results here. These social conversations did not include hyperlinks but instead seemed to rely upon a strong connection between the brand and the keyword “cider” in online conversations, and between the website and social media platforms.
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Our society has turned into a television based culture. People are depend on television for a source of entertainment. It is estimated that 4.5 billion people watch television, attracted by the wide variety of channels and high quality picture to viewers. It can be said that television is branching into social TV to become more interactive for viewers, in order to keep up with the phenomenon of social media and the trend of online television. The Internet is a potential threat to TV lead societies due to the easy accessibility of free information, and Internet sites commandeering more user viewing time than television ever did. Both social mediums; television and the Internet, lack what each other needs in order to become dominate over one another. Cue… Google TV.

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Part 2 of 2

Social networking online means that we are now at least able to keep in contact with more of the people we have met throughout our lives through moves, job changes, lifestyle changes and so on. It’s highly probable that people whom you would previously have buried deep at the bottom of your memory, relegated to dark corners of your mind as the years pass, are remembered more easily due to reminders of who they are when they post pictures/status updates/links/discussion points. Just checking your feed will bump your memories on those who are posting at that time and their relationship to you. Even so, it’s your choice whether you reach out for contact regularly. Only a true social butterfly will make use of this feature on every social site they visit.

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Part 1 of 2

The online community phenomenon is radically changing who we meet, our friendships and our ability to stay in contact. So has online social media really given a massive boost to the real and virtual social networks of each of its users?

The much discussed 1992 anthropological paper by Professor Robin Dunbar estimated a set number of individuals who we can have as a stable social network, as dictated by the size and ability of our neocortex. This study indicates that we don’t have the capacity to have a social network of any greater size despite increasing social network abilities within our everyday lives. Are we really limited to the number of relationships we can monitor with our neocortical neuron numbers?

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