The folks over at Brafton have put together a great infographic on why content is important for your SEO efforts.

You can find the original infographic here

Today marks the public beta launch of Jumo, the social network created to facilitate social change in our world.

The brainchild of Chris Hughes, co-founder of Facebook and director of online organizing for the 2008 presidential campaign of Barack Obama. Jumo is a social network designed for the purpose of connecting people with the issues and organizations that they care most about. It is a network for social change and at the time of launch over 3500 charities were listed in more than 200 issue areas from around the world.

Jumo connects individual philanthropists and organizations working to change the world using three basic philosophies:

• Find: Issues and projects that you care about. This is achieved through an interface that works similarly to Facebook’s likes and interests where you get to choose the topics that matter to you the most.

• Follow: The latest news and updates. Similar to “liking” pages on Facebook, the user gets to select those charities that they wish to follow and assist and in doing so they manipulate the feed of information that makes up the user’s home screen.

• Support: Their work with your time, money and skills. Jumo is about creating action in a world where many people want to help but do not have the inclination to start helping. Jumo places the charity’s required actions in your own home, on your computer, and allows you to follow the results of your assistance on a daily basis as opposed to once a year when you attend the charity’s annual general meeting.

Kristen Titus, Jumo’s Managing Director has this to say:

“We were frustrated by the lack of opportunities to get involved with the issues and organizations we care about. How many times have you read an article or seen that video and wanted to help but just didn’t know how? We know there are millions of people working to improve the lives of others, many of whom don’t have the resources to have the greatest impact. And we know there are millions more who want to help, but don’t know how. Despite huge advancements in connection technologies—500 million people on Facebook, for example—it’s difficult to find meaningful opportunities to get involved. We believe we can do better,”

With an ever increasing number of tourists using the internet to facilitate their travel search and booking functions it is imperative for hotels to ensure that their own web sites are equipped to cater to their guests’ travel investigation and online booking needs. According to a recent J.D. Power & Associates survey about 6 in 10 hotel guests in the USA are making reservations in 2010 do so online.

With an estimated 60% of the market using the internet to source their desired accommodation and then to make a booking, can any hotelier afford not to invest in their digital marketing strategy?

Today I will take a brief look at some of the techniques that can be used to increase website reach and online hotel bookings.

Content is the primary source of organic search results and needs to be accurate and up-to-date. One important aspect that is often overlooked is that of seasonal demand, a website’s content strategy should incorporate an allowance for updates to be made relating to seasonal demand and always ensure that landing pages are optimized to convey the correct message.

Third party travel reviews play a large role in the decision making process of potential guests. Not only do reviews convey an opinion that is perceived to be honest as they are written by previous guests, they are also a large part of the reason that Online Travel Agents (OTA) often outrank the hotels that they are marketing bookings for. To counter this hotels should ensure that they include a section for reviews on their web site and that this section is populated with relevant and credible reviews.

Like the insurance industry, many potential guests are likely to be price savvy and thus hotels should always ensure that they have their best available rates on their own web site. If the OTA which is competing with you for search rankings and online bookings offers a better rate than if the guest were to book directly with the hotel then the hotel is going to lose out on many potential customers.

When using pay per click (ppc) campaigns to drive bookings, one should remember that the campaign needs to be targeted at your intended guests and not at the area in which your hotel is situated. If your primary market is European tourists then running a campaign that is trying to drive bookings from South African searches is going to have little effect. Hotels should also remember to bid on the keyword of their own name to alleviate competitive marketing from other online travel agents marketing bookings for the same hotel.

The setup of the booking process is our final and probably our most important aspect for today’s discussion. A flawed booking process will only result in frustration and resentment for the user being subjected to bad process flow. Key areas to bear in mind when designing a booking process are as follows:

Pre-booking registrations are bad, they make your potential guest feel like they are being asked for their life story before you have given anything in return and will often result in a lost booking. The registration requirement in the booking process should only occur once availability has been confirmed and the user has shown their intent to proceed with the booking.

The booking engine should facilitate the dissemination of both live rates and live availability information. A guest will not bother with an online booking process where he or she has no guarantee of actually obtaining accommodation at the hotel in question.

Lastly, users should be encouraged to interact with your web site in as many was as possible. Suggestions for this could include an application, either on your web site or on a social site such as facebook, for guests to interact and share their experiences. This way customer service becomes your best marketing tool and your content message will gain an element of credibility through the comments of your guests.

Copy Compass is a Worpress plugin developed by Talooma, a South African based digital marketing company.

Copy Compass strives to bridge the gap between SEO best practices and the flood of user generated content that is added to websites on a daily basis. This WordPress plugin aims to simplify the learning curve required to write content that is both easy to read and that ranks well in search engines. After all, every author is writing for an audience and that audience needs a mechanism by which to find content about the subject which holds their interest, this WordPress plugin greatly simplifies this task.

Once installed into your WordPress plugin directory, Copy Compass becomes available for use through the admin section by placing and “Analyze Content” button just above your WordPress publishing controls. Upon clicking the Copy Compass analyze button, content is parsed through the Copy Compass API and given a rating based on various elements including keyword density, reading ease, title and meta descriptions. The results highlight areas which can be improved thus enabling an author to ensure that their message is accessible to as wide an audience as possible.

Copy compass is available for download from the Copy Compass website or from the WordPress plugin directory.

Below you will find a video tutorial demonstrating the use and some of the search engine theory behind the development of Copy Compass.

On 28 August I had the privilege of being invited to attend a session at the Gordon Institute of Business Science, this particular session was entitled social media for social change and revolved around a subject that is becoming increasingly relevant to global humanitarian efforts. How can social media be used to promote and accelerate social change. Opportunities abound in an era where technology has made communication and social interaction easier than ever before and the following two examples highlight only two ways in which social media is being adapted to give momentum to various causes.

The session consisted of a round table format of discussions along with 2 presentations from the people behind forgood and IfWeRanTheWorld. The participants were drawn from many backgrounds ranging from social entrepreneurs wanting to find out how social media can assist with their respective ventures to Social Media Pioneers who are building platforms to help communities engage with each other and act together for the greater good.

forgood is a South African initiative that is aimed at promoting action within communities and creating a platform which can be used to highlight social activities that are taking place withing a specific geographical area. Although it looks and feels very similar to facebook and is aimed at generating action for social projects, it has one other very key differentiator, it uses Google Maps to facilitate geotargeting of other users that may want to participate in your social initiative. Lets say for instance that I am creating a social project to get people involved in the restoration of a children’s home. Using forgood I can create my project, include a place mark on the Google Maps interface and I can then invite any members that have listed an interest in this type of social project within a radius of 50km of my project to come and offer their assistance. This facility helps to ensure that I am targeting interested parties within a reasonable travelling distance and then notifying them of the fact that there is a social project occuring that could use their assistance. Conversely, a user can also browse the map to see what projects are occuring in their vacinity thus creating a proactive culture within the community.

IfWeRanTheWorld takes the concept of social change a little further by creating a social platform where users do not gain popularity in the usual social manner,  by their looks, number of friends or stated intentions for good. They gain respect and stature solely through the performance of actual tasks called micro actions. Ciny Gallop came up with the concept after realising that many a good intention is wasted because action cannot be taken at the exact time of the intention, such as when one reads a newspaper story relating the plight of someone in need of assistance. The desire to help is there but the ability to help at the exact time of reading the article is lacking and as humans are inclined to do, we move on to the next demand in our lives, whatever that may be. Through IfWeRanTheWorld big tasks are split into many microactions and it is these microactions that people can partake in as and when they find them and as and when they have the ability to do so. This way you can assist in saving the Rhino simply by printing 1000 flyers for someone else who wants to save the Rhino yet does not have access to printing facilities. Once a microaction has been completed the user is recognised within the social network for their contribution.

The two initiatives that have been described here rpresent only a small part of the social media landscape and already they show outstanding promise. Social media platforms can definitley support social change if implemented in the correct manner and platforms like facebook already provide a great place to interface with volunteers and donors alike.

Cotlands is a South African organisation offering shelter for abused, abandoned, HIV-positive, orphaned and terminally ill children from birth to twelve years of age who are using facebook successfully to keep their volunteers and donors informed. What else could be done to assist them in their support and protection of South Africa’s youth?

Having gained over 500 million users since being founded in 2004, Facebook marketing is difficult to ignore. Not only is its user base approximately 10 times larger than the population of South Africa, it also has a wealth of relevant personal information from education through age and sex to detailed likes and dislikes. To ignore this marketing gold mine would be folly. What better place is there to communicate with your customers than through a web site that already services a significant portion of most target audiences on a regular basis? In the post below I will discuss four key areas that can make or break the success of a Facebook page.

Lets start with a call to action. Facebook pages are designed to allow communication with a group of individuals who have shown an interest in your brand. The key here is that they have to have shown an interest before you can communicate with them and if you have a typical Facebook page with no key differentiators then you are going to struggle to entice new users to “like” you. One way to improve your appeal is to create a custom welcome page that entices the user to “like” you rather than just waiting for them to click the button themselves. BMW has done this very effectively in the image below. Try to come up with something unique, something that will pique interest and help to ensure that your marketing stands out from the crowd.

Another key differentiator is to host exclusive content on your page, content that is not available through any of your other marketing mediums. Something like a competition or exclusive offers would go a long way toward growing your Facebook community. Jeff Dunham has in excess of 4.3 million fans and you can only obtain his iphone app through the Facebook page.

Effective moderation and frequent updates will ensure that your target audience is not only left spam free but that they also have a reason to check back frequently. You are after all creating a conversation with your users and given the fact that posts are time stamped, effective conversation requires diligent input.

Lastly, social is about sharing, integrate your other social media platforms to broaden your fan’s ability to experience your brand and marketing through their preferred medium. Be it Twitter, Flickr, LinkedIn, YouTube or Facebook. In the following example Audi has used their info section to highlight their other channels yet their call to action on the welcome page leads the user directly away from the fan page which is not always a good idea.

Over the past couple of months I have had a bout of subjective indecision (Indecision brought on through my subjective analysis of each theme that I have used on my WordPress blog), this ailment has manifest itself in a flurry of changes to different themes which have appealed to me. On reflection I believe that one of the primary reasons for the constant change is that I was using free themes. Free WordPress themes are by no means inadequate, however they often do not contain the advanced theme functionality that makes a theme great.

After heading over to themeforest to browse through their premium themes, I decided on a purchase for my blog and it was primarily through the use of this theme that the benefit of advanced theme features was highlighted. Below I have listed and described 5 of the theme options that I find most useful.

1. Custom Menu Population

First and foremost I would like to highlight one element that has made a bigger difference than any of the others; a fully customisable menu manager. This menu option enables both the page and post menu sections of the theme to operate independently of whatever pages and category structures are used while creating the content. The image attached to this posts shows an example of the menu system used on this blog theme.

2. Reader Article Submission

The user article submission is a nifty little feature which I first encountered on the theme which I am currently using. It is a function which provides a concise form which integrates with the theme and enables blog readers to contribute their own articles to the blog, which can then be reviewed and utilised by the blog author. The feature also enables the administrator to select whether any user or only registered users can submit content to the blog.

3. Custom Page Templates

One misconceived perception that still exists is that WordPress is blog software and not a fully functioning CMS. On the contrary WordPress is, in my opinion, one of the most powerful and user friendly open source content management systems available and one feature that theme developers should make use of is the ability to create different page themes. In doing so, the user can create varied content for their web site by simply selection any of a number of available template layouts.

4. Custom Home Page Content

Typically the landing page of a WordPress theme can only be set to display either a selected page or the “blog” page containing posts. This is no longer the case and modern themes can now provide functionality which allows the administrator of the site to add content from any category or post to designated areas of the landing page. This option can also be taken one step further to allow the author to write custom content for these sections which will not appear anywhere else on the web site.

5. Ad Content Manager

My last nifty feature for the day is the very basic ad manager that enables an author to post images and link them to other sites of their choice without the need for any html knowledge.

• The availability of features such as those listed above make the choice of using WordPress as a CMS an ever easier decision. If you are looking to set up a blog it is definitely going to be worth your time and investment to buy one which has been developed to maximise the feature rich options which are available in each new release of WordPress.

On a recent trip to Germany I encountered first hand how something as simple as ordering lunch can become very complicated if you have no means to understand the language and no written translation available for tourists. This is not to say that Germany does not cater to tourists, on the contrary it ranks as one of the most organised and tourist friendly countries that i have been too. We did however go to a lot of places that were not on the tourist map and often found that menus in the smaller towns did not have english translations available.

Along comes Google Goggles, a brand new release from Google Labs which looks set to revolutionise visual search. On my next trip overseas I will definitely be making sure that my phone has Google Goggles to assist me with translation of everything from menu items to street signs.

Google briefly describes the process as follows: “You may wonder what’s happening in the background. On the simplest level, this prototype connects the phone’s camera to an optical character recognition (OCR) engine, recognizes the image as text and then translates that text into English with Google Translate.”

Paying overtime to employees is something that every business has to deal with from time to time, with the recent update to overtime thresholds this liability has been increased for businesses with employees that fall under the new overtime threshold.

Having not been updated since 24 March 2003, the Basic Conditions of Employment Act will now be amended to increase the the annual earnings threshold for employees from R115 575.00 per annum to R149 736.00 per annum.

This change will become effective on 1 March 2008 and means that employees will now be able to earn a higher monthly income while still maintaining their eligibility for overtime pay.

The previous threshold meant that an employee earning more than R9631.25 per month was not entitled to overtime whereas this figure has now been increased to R12478.00 per month.

As a business owner this simply means that you may now have to pay overtime to more employees than you did before and it would be prudent to bear this in mind when calculating overtime budgets and employee increases.