Archive for July, 2011

Jul 28, 2011

Google Analytics Releases Global Data – What Does It Reveal?

Author: kevinfitzsimons | Filed under: Lead Generation, SEO, Social Media

As a key analytics tool for many businesses & marketers, it’s always worth paying attention to the latest stats from Google Analytics.

And for the first time, Google has released analytics data collected over the last two years from hundreds of thousands of websites who opted in to share this information anonymously.

The findings reveal some interesting trends, most notably about the correlation between bounce rates, page visits and time on site:

Page visits & bounce rates down

Overall, sites have seen a reduction in pages visited by 0.4% and time on site by -0:26, but curiously they’ve also seen a decline in bounce rates of 1.2%.

Geographically, UK sites had a bounce rate of 41.5%, comparable to the US but significantly lower than sites from Europe and Asia.

Though the margins are small, is this an indication that sites are distilling their content more effectively and proving to be more ‘sticky’, yet in doing so requiring users to spend a shorter time on-site in order to find key information?

Or perhaps more users are now being referred through from social networks or blogs with a specific purpose and/or destination?

Equally, Google is improving its ability to serve up more relevant results in the SERPs, highlighting the importance to businesses of providing targeted content on each page of their site.

It’s hard to know for sure, but it will be interesting to see how and if the trend continues when the next round of data is released in the future.

Do you use Google Analytics? Do these findings reflect your experience? Let us know what you think…

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Jul 25, 2011

Pinnacle Takes Media On Sandvik Coromant’s ‘Road to Success’

Author: kevinfitzsimons | Filed under: Business, Exhibitions, Technical PR

In early June, Sandvik Coromant hosted its two-day EMO 2011 preview press event. Key media from around the world were invited to join Sandvik in Sandviken, Sweden for a look at the company’s latest business forecast and trends, new product developments and technologies, plus methods and processes due to be announced at the EMO exhibition in Hanover, Germany (19 – 24 September 2011).

Pinnacle Marketing was charged with ensuring a high media turnout, eventually securing attendance from more than 50 key media representatives, including editors from Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and the UK, along with their counterparts from Asia and the USA.

The preview event was designed to highlight to the media how Sandvik Coromant has a lot more to offer than just the cost savings and productivity achieved through using their tools. Editors learned about the company’s value chain offering and looked at key business areas such as tool library services and tooling management, logistics, machine tool solutions, recycling and manufacturing economics.

The itinerary was packed with presentations and demonstrations of the latest advancements in automotive, aerospace and composite machining and gear milling applications, plus numerous photo opportunities and one-on-one briefings. All media walked away fully up to date with the latest from Sandvik and the event received excellent feedback from attendees. We anticipate confirmation of their satisfaction via media coverage in the coming weeks.

Sandvik Coromant will exhibit at EMO from the 19 – 24 September 2011 in Hall 5 (Stand B20).

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Jul 18, 2011

Social networks popular with engineers?

Author: lewistonkinson | Filed under: Business, Social Media, technical blogs

Which social networking platform do you use most in your day-to-day work?

We recently posed the question to a number of professionals* within the electronic engineering design industry.  Our findings showed that amongst our sample group, LinkedIn was the favoured platform for 37% of professionals due to the number of specific interest groups and information sharing features.

  • “I only use Linkedin. Topics suit my interests and discussions are with other professionals in the trade.”
  • “Essentially I use Linkedin and several groups of interest.”

Facebook was the second most-preferred with over 20% of professionals using it, whilst Twitter and Element14 have been adopted by 13% and 12% respectively.  Nevertheless, there are still many professionals not using any social network at all, with their needs being met by Skype or blogs.

  • ”If I had to pick one I’d have to say I use Skype more than anything. It’s great because you can chat/IM, place calls, video conference, transfer files, and make presentations.”
  • “Can’t say I’ve seen any meaningful discussions on Facebook or Twitter.”
  • “For Social: Facebook. For Professional: Linkedin.”
  • “Phoning up or shaking hands. As good today as it ever was.”

Beyond forums – where engineers have actually set the pace in terms of adoption – it appears the electronics industry is still to embrace the many opportunities social media can now offer,  in particular connecting individuals across networking groups. Look out for our follow up blog as we delve further into social media usage with the engineering community.

*91 professionals consulted

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Jul 15, 2011

The real new media are not what you think

Author: andrewtown | Filed under: Social Media, Technical PR

Magazine style aggregation of social networks

A recent discussion on LinkedIn named Flipboard as one of the must have iPad apps for marcom people. In case you are not familiar with it, Flipboard pulls together popular content from your own social networks and the web automatically and presents it in a pleasing well laid out fashion.

I mention this here because it heralds one possible future. There tends to be a division of battle lines currently in the world of technology PR and marketing communications between those who believe social media as ‘the future’ and that other, traditional formats will wither and die; and the opposing camp who think most social media channels are fluff and best left to the B2Consumer companies. Both may be mistaken.

Too much information

Social media flows from Twitter, Facebook and the like are immediate, fluid and responsive. They are also truncated, repetitive, and – even when corralled via tools such as HootSuite – often confusing due to the sheer volume of data. In other words, they are much like real life. To use an analogy, if you want to find out what a crowd thinks, the best way is to walk among it speaking to as many people as possible (this is the social media bit in case you’d lost the thread); but most of us can’t or don’t want to invest the time to do this and would rather someone else gave us a (perhaps less than perfect) snapshot of the opinion of the crowd – this person is often a journalist.

Coming back to Flipboard, if you followed the link above or are already familiar with it you probably know where we are headed. It “pulls together popular content…and presents it in a pleasing, well-laid-out fashion” – sound familiar? That’s a magazine. And it does indeed look like an up-market glossy magazine; except it generates itself, without the help of an editor, primarily from Twitter streams.

Social media that feeds in a consumer friendly format

So, if this is one possible future, people will increasing consume information on their tablets from Flipboard-like digital magazines whose content is sourced via personally selected social media. But what does this mean to technology companies who want to communicate with real people in other businesses? They probably have no truck with the celeb-dominated whimsy of Twitter and don’t believe that engineers use social media for their work but the realisation will soon start to dawn: Twitter and Facebook are not the end product, they are the new pipe. It doesn’t matter if your target customers never actively follow Twitter streams, before long much of the information they read will be transmitted in this way.

And if you are not communicating via these channels, you won’t be seen or heard.

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