Hot on the heels of my article yesterday – Mobile Website Design – Is it time to offer a mobile version of your website?, StatCounter Global Stats have released a press release with some interesting news.

As expected, Google’s Android platform is seeing a significant growth in it’s usage, with an increase of over 290% on last year. Android is now accounting for 23.8% of the Mobile Web usage market share.

Interestingly, in the US Apple’s iPhone has fallen from a high of 51.9% last year to just 33% this year. This means that Blackberry’s 34.3% share in the US makes them market leaders in terms of mobile Internet usage.

This trend however isn’t replicated worldwide, with the current statistics leading with Symbian OS leads with 31.9% followed by Apple iOS (21.9%), BlackBerry OS (19.3%) and Android (11.6%).

So I guess it’s safe to say that targeting just iPhones in terms of your mobile website, is not a good idea!

You can read the full StatCounter report here : http://gs.statcounter.com/press/blackberry-overtakes-apple-in-mobile-wars

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• Android Overtakes BlackBerry (Again) as Lead U.S. Smartphone Platform: Nielsen (nytimes.com)
• Android overtakes BlackBerry (again) as lead U.S. smartphone platform: Nielsen (venturebeat.com)
• Android to Overtake Symbian Next Year (pcworld.com)

It’s been nearly 8 years now since I started online marketing company 2bscene. At the time, there weren’t many dedicated online marketing companies around. Most companies offering online marketing services were either web design or advertising agencies trying to cash in on what was clearly going to be a massive growth area of business.

Search Engine Optimisation was still pretty much in it’s infancy and I had built up 4 years experience of search engine optimisation of websites before I started 2bscene. God, in those days it was a hell of a lot easier to rank than it is today.

Of course, Google Adwords wasn’t around then so there were fewer online marketing opportunities. We did have a number of online advertising options, but they were limited generally to banner advertisements and advertorials.

There was nothing as popular, nor as effective as Google Adwords is today. Banner advertisements were beginning their steep decline of impressive CTR and search engine optimisation was hardly heard of.

In fact organic search engine optimisation was the only real option for many businesses to get found online, yet little knew about this little secret never mind recognise it’s potential.

I have to admit, I didn’t come from a marketing background when I started 2bscene. I naively opted to study music and live my dream rather than contemplate choosing a college course that would enhance my career! However marketing was something that always interested me greatly.

I had gained significant marketing experience (and interest) in the companies I had worked with before setting up 2bscene and felt I could effectively build and grow a company selling online marketing services. Online marketing was a new and exciting way for businesses to promote their brand and there were very few companies offering the service in Ireland. Therefore the only thing I could be judged on was the results I got for other businesses.

Fast forward 8 years and oh how the landscape has changed.

I had many reasons for setting 2bscene up as a solely online marketing services company. One of the main reasons was to distinguish my business from other web design companies.

At the time web design companies were popping up all over the place, everyone you talked to knew someone who was a web designer. Of course, you could still only count the good ones on one hand, but the surge in growth of these cheap and nasty web design companies was rapidly helping to deteriorate the web design market. From students working from their parents bedroom to the fly by night web designers who have disappeared off the face of earth, they all did little to enhance the reputation of a “web designer”. In fact, they did the complete opposite.

I get it all the time from new clients “we had a falling out with our web designer” or “we can’t get in touch with our web designer”. The perception of a web designer followed through in many advertising campaigns with the likes of IBM featuring web designers off snowboarding while their was a disaster taking place at the office.Web designers became a breed of people who could simply not be trusted to be there in a time of need.

The student type web designer brought web design to a level where a lot of people expect them to work for free or next to free. In their naive approach to business, they’d undertake to do a job only to realise they would bore with the client and their requests quite rapidly. In some cases, they thought the best solution was to do masses amount of work for free to get the client off their backs. Then of course there were those who simple said the job is too big for me and disappeared, never to be contacted again.

Now the same thing seems to be happening with the online marketing industry. In fact, everyone wants to be or claims to be a search engine optimisation expert nowadays. I’ve never in my life encountered so many people in any other industry I’ve worked in that claims to know more than the expert they have hired to do the job for them.

A times it can be a major struggle to have a reasonable discussion with a client/potential client about how best to market their website, because most feel that they are near experts in search engine optimisation because they have done “a lot” of research on the subject and therefore they are pretty much experts themselves at this stage. A little knowledge is probably the most disruptive of all.

It doesn’t help much when businesses like “Snap Printing” decide that they are all of a sudden web marketing and web design experts because they now offer these services to clients. Pretty much all of our clients have been approached by UK online marketing companies offering to get their site listed at the top of Google for €x per month which is clearly a total scam. Yet, clients still question and compare the work we do, to what these shower offer.

Look let’s face it, search engine optimisation is not rocket science and is not hugely difficult when you know what to do. Anyone who has done even the most basic research on search engine optimisation could possibly rank a site for a non competitive keyphrase, that’s fact. But there is one key skill to search engine optimisation that I feel is the most important strength and that is… experience. Because search engine optimisation is changing all the time, having the experience to notice the changes that have occurred and why makes the job a whole lot easier.

Google Adwords and other pay per click solutions are similar. Pretty much anyone can get an account set up and get your site listed in the top results, but the value add from a professional comes in when they help you get the most bang for your buck. Experience is what makes the pros stand out from the rest.

I find it incredibly sad that the industry has come to this as I feel like the bubble is about to burst on the whole industry. In the past, there was a massive burst bubble for the web design industry. Web designers admittedly charged well over the odds for a simple website that never had a chance of generating a return on the investment. This led to many businesses believing that having a website was not a worthy investment for their business and opted not to have one at all. Web designers in the past year saw a massive rush by the companies without websites finally realising that the web was the way to go, but again a lot opted for the cheap option rather than choosing a true professional to do the work.

When I look around at the new so called experts that are leading the industry today, I find it hard to see any real quality. It seems to be the same old faces who you can rely on and trust. The problem with that is that a lot of these are too busy to handle the smaller clients and therefore the smaller online marketing companies are picking up the pieces and doing a pretty woeful job.

A recession is no better time to weed out the poor companies, but I just hope it doesn’t take too long for these guys to get found out!

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• Tools for Building a Successful Online Marketing Campaign (tomdoyletalk.com)

In our business, we’re constantly asked by new clients to “rustle” up a logo for their business. Although we have the skillset in-house to do a basic logo, it’s not something we like to get involved in. Why you ask? Well put simply, we feel a logo is a really important part of your overall branding strategy. It’s not enough to just throw something together for the sake of having a “company logo”.

Although a lot of the world’s largest brands have, what can be classed as a simplistic logo, you should never underestimate the work that has been put into that logo to get it exactly right. Getting a kid just out of college to rustle up a logo just isn’t going to cut it if you really want to make an impression.

Of course, there are some exceptions to this rule, Google being a classic example. Overtime they have improved their inital logo, which was a very simple font  and made it more professional and strong logo. Most probably didn’t even notice the change, yet those subtle changes make a massive difference in the perception of the brand.

Just last week, GAP decided to change their logo and opt for a  more basic logo than their well known brand identity. The new logo was simply the word “Gap” with a square, gradient box to the top right (as pictured below). A lot of people picked up on the change pretty quickly, with many web, facebook and twitter conversations discussing how much they disliked the change.

In fact, there were more than 2,000 comments on GAP’s Facebook page criticising their decision to drop their well-known logo. Some clever chappy even set up a “Make Your Own GAP Logo” website which attracted 5,000 followers to his Twitter account. A GAP spokesperson admitted that they had clearly gone about this the wrong way…

To me this all just smells of a publicity stunt by GAP and a good one at that. They’ve had a lot of people on the web discuss their brand and have no done a u-turn on it’s use.

So the next time you plan on getting a new logo for your business, make sure you are getting the right person for the job. Not everyone needs to spend fortunes on a logo and in a lot of cases a simple logo will suffice. But just make sure you make your brand look like a brand people want to do business with. Never under-estimate the impact your logo can have on your business.

Related articles

• The Gap is Having a Logo Crisis (shoppingblog.com)
• Is Gap’s New Logo a Crowdsourcing Black Ops? (enterpriseirregulars.com)
• Is Gap’s New Logo a Crowdsourcing Black Ops? (jeffnolan.com)
• The Gap’s New Logo: Bad Fit or Savvy PR Move? (crenshawcomm.com)
• Gap’s New Logo?? (thebudgetfashionista.com)
• GAP’s logo (chicandcharming.com)
• Gap Debuts New Logo (stylelist.com)
• Gap Harnesses Hatred of New Gap Logo (businesspundit.com)
• Survey: 88 Percent Dislike New Gap Logo (adrants.com)
• New Gap Logo Causes Uproar, Company Backpedals (blippitt.com)
• Revising the New Gap Logo (mymodernmet.com)
• Famous logos and brand designs simplified (imjustcreative.com)

It’s not even a month old, but I’ve already tired of Google Instant Search.

It’s not because I don’t like this new feature, I do, it’s what they’ve taken away or what I can’t do that I could before that really gets to me.

The first most annoying issue for me is the fact that they no longer have a search box at the bottom of the search results.

I’m sure Google spent plenty of time with their UX experts looking at all aspects on the page to see what elements were most important and I’m sure the search box at the bottom of the page wasn’t deemed to be one.

That is probably because most normal joe soaps don’t even go that far in the search results and therefore this feature wasn’t used as much. I used it a lot however and I really miss it.

The second most annoying aspect is a new feature. Being someone who rarely uses as mouse as I prefer to navigate with my keyboard I was dismayed to see the new feature that tabs through each search result when you use your “down” or “up” arrow on your keyboard. What that means is that I can no longer browse through through the search results as fast as I used to. It actually takes quite a bit longer to tab through each result on the search results page. I’ve no had to resort to using my mouse scroll wheel to do something I could do without my hands leaving the keyboard…

Google need to be careful that with their massive success they don’t forget the web savvy users who helped build their profile by making things less user friendly for them. They’ve clearly chosen UX features that suit the less computer savvy masses, which is fair enough, but some things didn’t need to be removed, it wasn’t as if they have added any value in their place.

If you haven’t used the Google Keyword Tool lately to find keywords to target in your SEO campaign, you should really go back and check again. Google recently updated their keyword tool and have made it a lot more accurate than it was in the past.

Those used to using the Google Keyword Tool, probably took these results with a pinch of salt. Google Keyword Tool was nothing more than a very good guide as to what the most popular search terms being used to find a product or service relating to your business.

Every SEO has his/her way of deciphering the data presented by Google’s keyword tool. Some simply divided the results by 10, while others divided it in half. Whatever your method was,you should really go and reassess your keywords as soon as possible.

Some examples provided by other online marketing experts show massive differences in what is reported in the latest update compared to the old date. For example the term “Golf Clubs” once recorded as having over 165,000 searches per month is now down to just over 33,000.

Google of course, haven’t commented on the update – it’s no wonder considering a lot of people based their online marketing strategy on the free tools they provide.

What are you waiting for? Go check your keywords now https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

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