Google Trends

If you haven't played around with Google Trends yet, now is high times to start. If you have an interest in statistics, pretty much any at all, and also fell like you want to know how people are spending their time using Google then this is your lolcats. I have easily spent hours upon hours weighting different searches against each other, looking at what the hottest searches trends are for this week, and trying to figure out why the Kardashians no longer are more popular than Justin Beiber.

However, Google have now upgraded their Trends with a new visual interface, and you can now find out what's trending in any given month with a new Top Charts feature from Google Trends.

Updated monthly and going back to 2004, Top Charts is built on Google Knowledge Graph, so it's smart enough to house related keywords under one term for more accurate rankings. For example, searches for "giants baseball" and "sf giants" would go toward pushing "San Francisco Giants" up the ranks in a sports-related chart.

Right now there are more than 40 top ten lists with more than 140 time periods available for your perusal. In addition to the charts, the Trends team has also rolled out a new visualization tool for "hot searches" that displays trending topics in a large colorful layout -- enjoy!

How prudence encouraged drinking

Systembolaget is a government owned chain of liquor stores in Sweden. It is the one and only retail location allowed to sell alcoholic beverages, other than bars and restaurants. With this great power comes great responsibility, and as such, one of the main focuses of Systembolaget's advertisements is the side effects of drinking, and the encouragement of drinking moderately.

Therefor Systembolaget developed an app to help casual consumers keep their bending under control. The app encourage its users to track their consumption by entering his/her age and weight, and then type and amount of alcohol, and the app would return a calculated blood-alcohol level.

The app went viral, was downloaded by the thousands, and was an instant hit - just not the type of hit that Systembolaget wanted. Turned out Systembolaget had missed their core target audience - young men. In an instant young men ages 20 - 30 could compete with each other on who was the drunkest. Actually compete. With quite accurate results. And how did you win? As with any game; by having the highest score.

No one was reported dead as a result of this, but over consumption with hospitalization as a result did increase dramatically within the "target audience".

Where did Systembolaget go wrong? The answer is quite simple; they had not accounted for the power of gamification. It turns out, even unwanted gamification will occur if there is an opportunity for it to occur. A quick user workshop would probably have revealed this flaw in the design, but this was probably never conducted.

Writing this the app is still live and available for your iPhone or Android.

Word of Mouth Failures

Sometimes, word of mouth doesn't work.

As much as personal testimony, first-person persuasion and even hands-on demonstration of products can be more effective than any advertising; there come times when others are impervious to such efforts. This is often above and beyond the usual array of television, radio, email, print, direct, search and other marketing swirling around in the background, doing their best to reinforce the brand and drive awareness.

Sometimes, people are just too set in their ways to ever try something new. Perhaps they are comfortable in what they know (or in what they think they know) and they can't begin to comprehend or believe that a competing brand has made great strides in quality or performance.

Maybe they don't want to believe. Or maybe they'd rather ignore the facts and instead stick with their comfortable little world of perceived realities they've built around them. When they've lived with a brand, product or experience for years, it's extremely difficult to overcome that with any kind of marketing. Whatever their reason, it's unlikely that you'll ever manage to reach such people with your messages.Stubborn or stupid don't respond to word of mouth.

So, what do you do - as a marketer or as a brand advocate - when you simply can't persuade even those closest to you?

Move on. There are plenty of people out there worth pursuing who are willing to hear what you have to say. Don't waste your time on people who refuse to ignore facts. Let them live their lives blissfully unaware while you go on improving other people's lives.

Facebook Engagement

Ever asked yourself; “Why is nobody visiting our Facebook page?”. You are not alone. One of the hardest marketing segments to understand for small businesses is social media, and but default so is Facebook. Honestly, most business do not understand Facebook at all.

The main concern seems to be the uncertainty of not knowing if the Facebook Page should perform better or not. Should we get more follower/likes, or have we reached the market we can reach through this channel? Is our online market segment already saturated? The answer to these questions is most likely; no, you can always increase your following base. The nice thing about online marketing is that is far much cheaper than regular marketing (should be a no brainer everyone by now), which gives you an enormous room for experimenting. And often just growing your online presence, increasing the frequency on your updates, will yield a tremendous return in fan-following – almost regardless the content!

This Infographic by Quintly shows a report of the average engagement pages get based on their number of Fans/Likes in April 2013. Look for the correct bracket to figure out if your Facebook-page is performing above or below average.

While this will definitely not determine what kind of engagement your page should be getting because of course, your case is unique and you could be way higher or lower, at least gives you an idea of what’s normal out there for pages with similar sizes.

Shoot the messenger

I can’t stand bad presentations. I just hate them. Countless are the times I found myself trapped in a meeting where the PPT slides boarder graphical murder. Cluttered with a superfluity of needless jargon and useless word filling, these demonstrations habitually brings no clarity to just most any issue. You feel like your mind has been blown, sadly not in a good way. Rather in the same way a balloon reacts when you try to cramp too much air into it - it pops. So do brains when infused with worthless information. They pop.

Thankfully the answer is again simple. Keep it simple. Simple. Say what you need to say, and nothing else. Has the sales gone down ten percent in the last quarter, and you need to present this in you quarterly budget meeting, don’t write all that. Say: "Sales - 10%". People will draw the rest from context, and the number will stick - THAT'S the important part!

Thankfully there is help out there. Here is an awesome presentation that everyone who is think of presenting anything to anyone should

Why most presentations suck from Slideware Manager

Digging a Digital Grave

In this day and age messing up on the Internet can have irreparable consequences. One day you’re in, the other day you’re out, and the results of one missed step often spells doom for an entire online enterprise. One of the key factors when running an Internet venture is the number of users you have; this determines amount of ad-spots you can sell which in turn governs you´re revenue.

That is why I cannot, for the life of me, understand SVD.se´s latest Internet move. What it says, in short, is that if you´re not a subscriber (to SVD´s paper issues) you´re not allowed to read the articles on their webpage. It sounds in theory as a sound move, however if SVD.se keeps this up, it will surely be the end of the online venture. Here´s why:

1. In Sweden we have a few different news sources, DN.se, aftonbladet.se, expressen.se to name a few. Minute differences in wording may set them apart, but not enough for anyone to have a unique USP. That is, whatever SVD.se is reporting on I am sure to find it on DN.se. SVD is not unique enough to support this move! 
2. Even if I actually was a subscriber I doubt I would spend time finding my subscriber account, nor would I create it. It is simply too easy just to go to DN.se! 
3. When you have made one user turn away, you will never get the user back! 

It’s quite simple; SVD.se are digging their own grave, and for some reason they seem not to understand it. A months subscription will set you back 273 SEK. Currently SVD has about 600 000 paper subscribers, compared to DN who has about 900 000. To add insult to injury, SVD already tried and failed with an SVD-app for mobile devices, which collapsed miserably after just a few months of service. Additionally SVD.se - last year - passed DN.se, with about 1 587 000 unique weekly viewings, compared to DN.se´s 1 500 000 views per week for the month of May 2012. I hope SVD publishes the same survey for May 2013. The numbers will NOT be as favorable.

So, SVD.se please put away the shovel before it’s too late. If not – you may not have a website to publish to by the end of this year!

101 ways to increase your conversion

Our friends at unbounce have compiled an excellent list on how to increase your ROI. In here they cover most everything from the fundamentals of campaign-related landing pages to actually seeing your conversion rates going up.

Whether you've just begun to scratching the surface of conversions or if you´re already a complete conversion stallion, this presentation is definitely worth a few minutes!

101 Landing Page Optimization Tips from Unbounce

Welcome to the Social Gnome!

Hi all and welcome to the Social Gnome!

I hope you will enjoy this, my latest blogging venture, focused on Social Media, Marketing, and CRM. In this blog I will try and give an insight to my thoughts concerning how to grow your own and your company's network.

I hope you will enjoy the upcoming entries!

Cheers!