I’ve decided to take a look at two brands this week: Easyjet & Ryanair. With the holiday season rapidly approaching, it made sense to check out which of the two budget airlines is more popular online.

Viewing the results below, and as an avid user of Easyjet myself, it was to my surprise that Ryanair trumps the low-cost British airline in Google’s trend results. Considering the wide range of destinations Easyjet offers, it was to my surprise that, after research, Ryanair in fact offers a wider range of destinations.

It should be noted however that this was in fact a global analysis of the brand terms. By filtering the results to display the search volume within the United Kingdom alone, Easyjet proves the more popular.

What do you think? Is there something I’ve missed? Let us know on Facebook.

In 2008 Interflora found M&S using their brand name in an ad to promote their flower and delivery service. High Court representative Justice Arnold said that the M&S ads in question didn’t enable well-informed and reasonably attentive internet users to ascertain whether the service referred to in the ads originated from M&S or Interflora.

“On the contrary, as at 6 May 2008, a significant proportion of the consumers who searched for ‘interflora’ and the other signs, and then clicked on M&S’s advertisements displayed in response to those searches, were led to believe, incorrectly, that M&S’s flower delivery service was part of the Interflora network.”

M&S still have to right to appeal but it’s looking like they will have to pay a hefty amount in damages and costs – the amount will be decided at a later date when both companies will again be summoned to court.

This does not mean though that brands can’t bid on keywords of rival names!

After queuing for a short time with rats to the left of us, a cockney peasant hurling abuse to the right and a glass of wine in hand, we were KIND OF ready for the experience….

The journey starts by taking you through the haunted times of Henry VIII, a pitch black boat journey which jolts you through the Dungeons, including a special appearance from Brian Blessed as Henry VIII.

The other shows includes visiting “the Judge” where you have to prove you’re not a traitor in court, to Jack the Ripper stalking you through a desolate Whitechapel. Each corner held a nasty surprise, such as projectile vomit and alleys which are filled with the stench of the plague, unless you were in Ms Lovett’s pie shop, which surprisingly smelled quite nice..

After a chilling experience through the darkness, you’re led to a dungeon bar with the soundtrack of a peasant playing the harp, the ambience is surreal and it is certainly time for another drink !

Definitely worth a visit and a great alternative date night!

Check out the new ‘ Dungeons lates’ show and find out more here…   http://www.thedungeons.com/london/en/book-tickets/london-attractions-combi-tickets.aspx

The business model is incredibly simple. You tell Songkick which bands you like and they build a personalised calendar for all upcoming relevant gigs in your area. As soon as a new gig for a band you’re following is announced, Songkick send you a notification. As someone who previously suffered from ‘oh look who’s playing! Too late, it’s already sold out’ syndrome for many years, the service has been a blessing. Songkick generate their revenue from commission earned on ticket sales using good old fashioned affiliate links. The service is completely free for users.

I was lucky enough to be one of the first 100 people invited to participate in the Beta release of their latest feature, Songkick Detour (you can sign up here) and last night I attended the official launch party. I firmly believe that this will have a massive impact on the future of live music and like all great ideas, it’s a very simple one.

For example, I am a big fan of American Analog Set. A quick Google search only returned with details of one previous London gig back in 2009. It doesn’t look likely that I’ll get to see them any time soon, which is a real shame.

This is where Detour comes in. It is essentially a crowdfunding platform for live music. I have pledged that I am happy to pay £15 per ticket to see AmAnSet if they ever come to London. Not only that, but Detour shows me exactly how many other people have pledged. Once enough people have committed to seeing the band live, Songkick approaches the promoters to make it happen. If the gig goes ahead, you’re guaranteed a ticket ahead of everyone else. If for whatever reason you can’t make the gig, you won’t be charged a penny.

As you can see from the screenshot below, a total of 34 tickets have been pledged to see American Analog Set and a promoter has now been selected. The next step is for the concert to be confirmed and I’ll be going to see a band that otherwise would never have come to London.

This eliminates the financial risk for the promoters, which in turn enables more gigs and more fans get to see the bands they like. It’s another product from Songkick where literally everyone wins, which I think is the reason I like those guys so much.

The news feed is now three-columned stream of posts and has interactive animations all over the place. Google says that the stream was flat, so it needed a fresh take.

Hangouts are a big focus, releasing an app for iOS, Android and desktop. It has video and text chats, complete with emoji and presence. Google knows that people want to talk to friends and family using technology like Whatsapp and Snapchat, so the logic is that if it can integrate features to facilitate your communication from anywhere — desk, phone, tablet etc. — then you are covered.

The audience response to the changes has been quite immediate, the streaming of news feed is proving to be an either love it or hate it fix.

Learn how to finally reach a targeted, responsive audience with your campaigns by attending Tug’s breakfast seminar on “Display and Real Time Bidding” hosted by Ollie Vaughan, Media Director, and Nick Beck, CEO.

Thursday 6th June 2013 – 8.30am – 10am.

The session will be an introduction to display and real time bidding, the most efficient way of reaching your customers across multiple channels via a single campaign.

Topics covered will include:

• What is RTB?
• Optimisation and buying strategies
• How Facebook has started to capitalise on the dynamic, real-time bidding market.
• RTB vs traditional digital display

Coffee and breakfast will be served at 8.30am on the terrace of Tug’s stunning Shoreditch office, with an opportunity to meet the rest of the Tug team.

Please RSVP to:
hannah[dot]melbourn[at]tugagency[dot]com

We hope to see you there!

Tug 61 Charlotte Road Shoreditch London EC2A 3QT

It also has a cool new features more related to PPC in particular – These are new icons, which overlay the map, highlighting businesses who run ads and promotions.

At the moment the only way to differentiate a PPC campaign on Google Maps is the blue pin at the side of the screen, which was not clear to most users. However now the name of the business will actually show on the map itself with a couple words from the ad copy in a box superimposed over the location. Also, if there are any special offers to promote, a blue shopping bag icon will appear next to the name.

Skype was bought out in 2011 by Microsoft, and the software giant has recently retired its Windows Live Messenger service in favour of it – an understandable move in an effort to streamline its product range and take advantage of the integration both networks offer.

What I found interesting in the screenshots below is the developers’ reference to  Kazaa in the 2003 screenshot, designed to give the VoIP software credibility (how times have changed!). The notoriously famous P2P network shot to fame in the early 00′s by offering users the ability to share and essentially pirate media such as Mp3s.

Another intriguing observation is Skype’s eventual brand colour transition from red to blue – with the logo itself surviving the changes and remaining almost identical to its predecessor.

Click on the image for a clearer view.

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]]> http://www.tugagency.com/blog/2013/05/15/way-back-wednesday-skype-com/feed/ 0 http://www.tugagency.com/blog/2013/05/15/900m-android-activations-and-counting/ http://www.tugagency.com/blog/2013/05/15/900m-android-activations-and-counting/#comments Wed, 15 May 2013 16:23:46 +0000 Ben Romberg http://www.tugagency.com/blog/?p=7856 900m Android devices have been activated to date according to Sundar Pichai, who runs SVP, Chrome and Apps at Google.

“Google is very fortunate to have two large open platforms … two fast-growing platforms,”

Roughly 2 years ago Android just clicked 100m activations, and a year ago, Android had reached 400m, which shows a dramatic increase, over doubling annually.

“What is a Robots.txt and would I need to implement it for my site?”

Last week we talked about redirections, this week we will be talking about utilising Robots.txt file.

Benefits of a Robots.txt file and what they are used for…

Ideally in the SEO world, we are great cooks; most ever welcoming hosts and we certainly love inviting search engine spiders to attend our site and feast on our pages. We would love them to crawl all over our pages and be impressed with what we have cooked up, so that they will eventually give us as much thumbs up as possible and list us on their billboard search engine index for our keywords.

Having a site crawled is a great opportunity to show off our site and impress these judges, but then again their might be a few places we don’t want them visiting and this is where a Robots.txt comes in place.

A Robots.txt file is a room which houses certain URLs that indicates to search engine spiders to not crawl upon. No juice or equity will be passed along when blocked using a Robots.txt.

It is not advised to use a Robots.txt for disallowing duplicate content as you can always use a “Rel Canonical” tag instead. It is also worth to mention anything disallowed will not prevent them from showing up on search results which may lead to “suppressed listing”. This means that Google’s search engine spiders will have no access to content which are blocked using “disallow” hence will have no information or snippets regarding this URL. When this URL comes across a point where there is a possibility of being linked to and being displayed on Google’s Serps (Search Engine Results Pages) then this will appear to be a bad user experience. Note: disallowing a URL will not prevent it from gaining link juice & equity, but blocking this URL will supress it and prevent this URL from passing valuable equity. As referred previously, it is recommended to use alternative methods for duplicate content issues.

Robots.txt is a good way of letting search engine spiders know which parts of the site you want to exclude from crawl or alternatively highlighting to them specifically where i.e. your sitemap is located. Blocking URL’s with a robots.txt does not prevent URL’s from displaying on Serps, it prevents crawls. It is also advised to have a Robots.txt file in place in comparison to none at all.

Ahoy fellow passengers! Follow us & stay tuned next week for more information on alternative methods… and every Tuesdays for more technical issues reviewed by Tug.

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