Warren Dell

If you head over to the projects pages now you can see the latest ones I have added which tell you about the work I have been involved with to train staff in understanding the various web analytics packages that we use, putting Ad creatives on our website and the creation of email campaigns and also helping writers understand the benefits of SEO.

Training & Support – Ad Serving and Email Packages
Training & Support – SEO for writers
Training & Support – Web Analytics Workshops

A new service has just been launched by iSites which allows you to create an iphone app in as quick as ten minutes. The service costs only $25 and allows you to take your websites RSS feeds to provide the content and add in your Twitter feeds, Flickr accounts and other social media before finally giving you the options to customise the headers, logo and menu.

Already regional newspapers in the US have taken the service up from the Daily Californian to The Stanford Daily and it’s something UK regional newspapers should be looking into and other content providers that may not have the resources or time to creating an app from scratch but want to distribute their content on the iPhone.

Compared to other services I’ve seen that can build you an app this looks the quickest way of getting one together for your website or blog and onto the Apple store. One thing we have been looking at for our titles at Redactive Media is producing iPhone apps and iSites is a service I’ll be testing out shortly to create one so will report back on the process next week.

Social media has become such an important part of the digital marketing mix that with so much time spent on the medium it’s important that you are able to report back to your client or colleagues how your campaigns are performing.

You may have 60,000 followers on Twitter but if this isn’t resulting in increasing your traffic you need to see why. I’ll be looking at that in part two but for now I’m going to show you how you can set up Google Analytics to work for you and track in one place how your social media is performing in relation to your other traffic sources – direct, search and other referring sites.
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Since publishing this post The Manchester Evening News report on the story has confirmed that United’s neighbours and rivals Manchester City have also advised their players not to set up social networking pages.

Manchester United football club have banned their players from maintaining social network profiles on sites such as Twitter and Facebook. Twitter accounts held by players Darren Fletcher, Wayne Rooney and Ryan Giggs were all removed, as revealed by football blog EPL Talk. Ryan Giggs also had content removed from his Facebook page as well as team mate Rio Ferdinand.

The football club may have done this to make sure traffic that they feel should be coming to their website isn’t aimed elsewhere and missing out on revenue opportunities.  Although there are literally thousands of fan created sites around out of their control so it seems that they are doing this to protect themselves from any comments from their players getting them in trouble as has already happened in the sporting world.

With many incidents causing teams to punish or ban permanently players from using social networking sites this won’t be the last time professional sports and social media will collide. Read the rest for my favourite incidents where sports teams have put their foot down over social networking or a star player has landed himself in a bit of bother.
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People behind any new social media tool after wowing people inevitably have to ask themselves the question, “How can we make money from this?” It was a question asked by people about Youtube and Myspace and since it’s popularity increased on a massive scale, Twitter. They recently announced deals with Google and Bing to share Tweets on their website which they say make the micro-blogging tool profitable. But many people are asking how they can make Twitter pay for them.  Twitpic, allows users to upload photos with their Tweets is one company who recently turned a profit and has received between $1.5 and $2million in advertising revenue.  But how can others replicate this success?  Two recent articles caught my eye on this in the last couple of days which are worth reading.

Startups cash in on Twitter with pay-per-tweet from the San Franscisco Chronicle

How small newspapers can make money from Twitter from Econsultancy

I’ll be updating the projects page of my website during the next week so you can gain a further insight into my work.  The first project I have wrote about and is now published in the project section of this site is for the website of People Management magazine – the magazine of the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development.

The requirement from the client was to increase People Management’s presence in Google, to bring in more referrals from the search engine and also to use SEO and other traffic building techniques to increase the visitors to the website.

You can read about the work on the People Management project page.

After finally succumbing to the dark side and getting the iphone, I’ve been excited about what apps I’m going to get.  An important one being which news apps I’m going to get for my on the move intake of what’s going on in the world.  I found this excellent resource from the Online Journalism Blog about ‘iphone News Apps Compared’ which covers news sources from both sides of the Atlantic.
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Welcome to my blog.  My aim is to discuss my work as a digital marketer, join the debate with issues that are happening in the industry and hopefully you the reader can take away something that may help in your own work.

It will also be a place to share ideas and you’ll get a little insight into things I’m interested in outside of digital marketing.  The plan is to use this blog as an extension of my website WarrenDell.com which is about my digital marketing work, but there will be a few other things of interest on here until I re-launch It’s The Shiznit – a place where any posts about music, fashion and culture will go.