Welcome to the Escape Blog

When I first discovered tools like StumbleUpon and Digg, I was like a kid in a candy store. An easy way to get easy traffic, right?

Well, no actually. As much as we may think we are creating the best content ever and loads of people will be queuing up to read it, so are the hundreds of thousands of other people (including marketers) doing the same thing.

As well as quality of content issues, there are also the avid users of these tools who effectively decide the success of the things submitted and they get a bit put out if you just try to join the party and spam the sites with your “amazing” content.

People work very hard to make headway as ’superusers’ as well as the people who are genuinely out there simply using these tools on a day to day basis in the way they were intended and they won’t take too kindly to you posting one story and the Digging it or Stumbling it.

In fact, when you sit back and think about it, these websites are like Google in that respect - they work on authority and trust. The articles that do well, only really start to take off after they are Stumbled or Dugg by an active member of the community - someone who has reputation.

So, why not just slip them some money and buy some love? Well, you know that saying that trust takes a long time to build and seconds to lose? It’s the same thing.

So, if you want some success, start taking part. Start making friends with other Diggers and Stumblers and become less biased about the stuff you contribute.

And, why not encourage other people to submit your stuff too by using some sexy little icons like these ones below?

Stumbleupon is a great utility and I’ve stumbled across many a great website by using it. It’s also a great tool for the odd submission of some of your quality content for some short bursts of traffic that can start the whole permission thing for your marketing.

Techcrunch report on the growth of Stumbleupon.

Next time you find yourself saying that social media won’t work for your business, you may be interested in these stats via NMA.

They are taken from some research by Universal McCann into social media, surveying 17,000 people across 29 countries, including the US, UK, Brazil and Pakistan during March 2008. Highlights include:

• 59% of internet users worldwide view at least one video clip every week
• 73% of internet users have read blogs while 48% read blogs every week
• 83% of internet users watch video clips, up from 62% in 2007
• Podcasts are listened to by 48% of internet users
• 57% of respondents said they are a member of a social network

If you don’t start talking, sharing and collaborating online, perhaps your customers themselves will. And, perhaps your competitors will join in too.

Other findings include that 31% of respondents have started a blog themselves. Maybe one of those is already talking about you?

I was watching BBC Click this morning about the evolution of the social network and it drove me to take a peek at Brownbook. I thought it was a clever idea using social networking to list businesses with the added benefit of customers being able to write a review.

It’s a simple site to use and totally free, so here I am spreading the word.

Not you personally, you understand, your website.

Check out how many links you are getting from some of the top social sites at Social Scan.

It’s official, Mars are the first advertisers to sell actual products on Facebook.

The application will launch on Valentine’s Day and is called Celebrate. The service will enable users to buy actual Mars gifts which can be redeemed at participating stores through the use of a scanable, unique mobile voucher ID.

A user on the Celebrate application will be able to select, for example, a virtual box of Maltesers and send it to a friend on Facebook. When this message is opened, the user will be asked to enter his or her mobile number and an SMS barcode will be sent. That user can then go into a participating store, pick up a box of Maltesers, have the mobile code scanned and then leave with the goods.

Sara Miles, a spokeswoman for Mars Snackfood UK said

We are very excited to be involved with this new ground-breaking initiative that gives our consumers a different way of sending confectionery gifts to friends and family.

Our Blog was born in October 2005 and now has over 800 pages of posts. “So what” I hear you say.

Well a couple of weeks ago (and this is a point in itself) we changed the buttons that appear at the bottom of each post to make them show just the icon. You may have thought that this would not have a massive impact, but since that change, we have had four separate posts “stumbled”.

Here is where the first point kicks in:

• Stumbled on 26th Jan - Javascript post from 24th January 2008
• Stumbled on 26th Jan - Business Card design post from 13th June 2007
• Stumbled on 27th Jan - Reducing Website Friction post from 14th June 2007
• Stumbled on 3rd Feb - Three Ways to Get More From Your Printer post from 8th August 2007

Three of these articles are over six months old. It’s basically a seeding technique; creating assets that sit on the web, gaining authority over time.

Another thing worth noting is the close proximity between the second and third ’stumbles’, which indicates to me that someone saw the Business Card article, clicked to see the next post and thought that was worth stumbling too, perpetuating the effect.

So, Microsoft want to buy Yahoo, who has been struggling in recent years to compete with Google.

Microsoft have also struggled to compete online with Google as the race for first-point domination continue to move towards Google maybe they’ve taken exception to Googles online Office killer.

In the UK, Google accounts for at least 75% of search, although Yahoo is the number one web property in the world (although not in the UK).

I have two takes on this news:
(more…)

Maybe you use Facebook just to poke your friends, compare who is the ‘hottest’ or just to play Scrabble, but there is a whole other side of it you may be missing in terms of business reach.

I have seen company ‘group’s start to appear - which is interesting, although I think a lot of people creating these in the context of their business, me included, haven’t worked out how to make the most of them.

So what if you could understand who likes you and why? (more…)

Viral marketing is not just for the fancy tech companies as this example from Pazazz proves.