If you’re in the IT profession, you’ll have heard of Cisco.
Well, back in late 2012, Cisco announced that they had aquired a company called Meraki, which offer cloud managed networking devices, such as routers, wireless access points, and other networking hardware.
If you watch one of their webinars, they’ll ship you a Cisco Meraki Access Point, totally free of charge. You don’t even need to cover shipping costs!
To get one shipped for you, simply look out for an email after watching the webinar – you’ll be asked to get in touch with someone.
Now, there are a few conditions, but simply put, anyone working in the IT industry can get their hands on one.
So what’s the catch?
There’s always a catch, right?
These are ‘cloud-based’ devices, which believe it or not become useless without the cloud licence (which costs $150/year). The free device comes complete with a complimentary 3-year licence, which is long enough to give you time to test the device and integrate it into your network. gives you enough time to get the device integrated into your network, then they hit you with the annual licence renewal fee; by which time you’ll have no alternative.
Also, if a company can just routinely send out free networking equipment, how much do these cost to produce? I’d expect there’s a big markup on these to offset the cost.
Ubiquiti is my personal choice when it comes to wireless networking, since their devices are of great value, whilst still being a high quality product. Support offers a bit to be desired from what I’ve heard, though for the price of their equipment, you really can’t complain..
SEO alone is not enough. Once, being ranked high was enough.
Now we need press coverage, social shares, and of course links.
When it comes to consumers and brands, only 8% of brands are meaningful to consumers, so we should aim to be the 8% that people actually love.
What is a brand?
What do meaningful brands do?
1. ‘Meaningful brands find opportunities to delight customers (great interactions stand out & are shared)’
go the exta mile to respond in a novel way
DunkinDonutes
have a library of images they can use for customer interactions
ArgosHelpers
TescoMOBILE
A cheeky response cn get shared well. But you need a really good understanding of your audience.
2. ‘Meaningful brands give people the ability to define themselves to others’
Why do we share what we share? Why did I tweet this?
If you consider what we tweet or share on Facebook
Two ‘modes’
68%
45 days
Camembert
Nike greatness video
3. ‘Meaningful brands stand for something above and beyond their products & services’
….
Questions
Getting to the point where a brand trusts you, that’s the goal. If the team or agency wins the trust of the client, that’s the goal. In-house teams, agencies and teams need to be trusted.
Cross-domain tracking passes on the client ID via a URL parameter.
KissMetrics
Mackenzie Fogelson – ‘The Measurement Behind Your Integrated Marketing Strategy’
Measuring tactics
Key points:
Nothing works in isolation (don’t silo!). Instead, combine all of your efforts to accomplish the client goals.
It’s not just about what you measure.
Continually test and change the KPIs you’re using to prove your value.
LUNCH
Wil Reynolds – ‘Marketing In Your Sleep: How To Build Links, Engagement, Mentions and Shares with Big Content’
Wil was an incredibly passionate speaker, talking about
Content is too easy, it’s a commodity.
Do one thing really well.
Great content is sustainable and continues to get visitors.
A great way Wil said you should look at it is, if your content was removed from the web, would anyone miss it?
Google Display Network
David Sottimano – ‘Data Driven SEO’
Forgot to track the data?
SEMRush’s historical search results
Historical screenshots
SpyFu
How do I find examples around the web?
NerdyData
LinkRisk Peak
I need to gather data from webpages.
import.io
scrapinghub.com/scrapy-cloud
BigML
Let’s define ‘great content’
What makes content ‘good’?
Build a better practice by binning best practice
If you say something, Prove it! Data, or it didnt happen.
David Mihm – ‘Bulletproofing Your Local Search Presence for 2015 and Beyond’
By the end of 2014, mobile searches are expected to surpass desktop.
Google are spending lots of money on local search.
Knowledge graph
“79% of people trust reviews as much as personal recommendations”
‘Barnacle onto brands’
Think beyond your website.
Pigeon [update] is coming.
When it hits, study.
Will Critchlow – ‘The Threat of Mobile’
Will started off his presentation talking about the decline in desktop websites.
Don’t build things differently. Build different things. I.e. don’t just make a website responsive, but actually create a whole different experience and design for mobile users.
More mobile search queries than desktop this year.
Mobile App indexing
Is Google crawling apps?
The ‘physical web’ (a world where physical devices have URLs)
I admit, I’m a bit late on the bandwagon here. Though Pocket was mentioned to me around a year ago, I didn’t feel I had a need for it at the time so didn’t really look into it.
However, during my recent trip to Turkey, where WiFi is slow and 3G data roaming incredibly expensive, Pocket turned out to be just what I needed!
The concept is simple, but works.
Basically, you download the Pocket app to your devices, then when you’re online, add the article to your Pocket list, then it’ll download to your device so you can read the full article (with pictures) when you’re offline on the go.
Here’s a quick guide to getting it setup:
1. Create a Pocket account. 2. Download the Pocket app to your devices (apps are available for iOS, Android, Windows and Mac). 3. Click ‘Share page’, then ‘Add to Pocket’.
It’s as simple as that! Your device will then download the webpage via WiFi/3G/4G, ready for you to read offline if you wish.
Turkey is a pretty interesting place to say the least.
Here are a few things I learned whilst staying in the tourist resort of Olüdeniz, also visiting a few surrounding towns, including Hisaronü and Fethiye.
1. Turkish roads are a free-for-all. You basically do as you wish. It’s very common to see drunk drivers and drivers using their mobile phones too. Imagine a combination of New York City and Bangladesh.
Health and safety doesn’t exist either. You wouldn’t see a bin lorry like this back home!
2. Buses are called Dolmuş’, which are basically minibuses packed to the brim with tourists. You pay the driver at the start or end of your journey.
They give you your change whilst they’re driving, so you’ll likely have more chance of arriving at your destination if you pay when you get off.
3. If you’d rather take the Taxi/Taksi, look out for a couple of garden chairs under a parasol at the side of a roundabout. Yeah, really.
4. Their equivalent of the Police are called ‘Jandarma’. From what I’ve seen, they basically sit around on garden chairs all day until something happens.
Oh and they wear those terrible hi-vis tabards.
5. Disabled people get their own lane on roads.
6. The roads are generally in terrible condition, so good luck.
7. Their mosques are well signposted. Clearly a quality job.
8. They have fold out seating with a view of.. a road. Bit close, too.
9. You get freebies with most multipacks, such as Coca Cola and Domestos.
Considered buying the Domestos for the toy and just throwing away the two bottles. Regrets.
10. Most biscuits and chocolate are made by Ülker. Including this pack of incredibly boring-looking dry biscuits.
11. But these look more appealing. Want a negro?
12. They have much more interesting varieties of Magnums. Such as this double-layered raspberry and chocolate one.
13. There are carts in most areas during the afternoon selling grilled sweetcorn, which seems to be a popular snack for the locals.
Though I actually tried some, and it wasn’t bad.
14. Efes is the local beer everywhere.
Image credit – worldfolio.co.uk
15. Turkish people drink these, even the cool kids. It reminded me of cottage cheese for some reason, so I gave it a miss.
16. They seem to like this weird powdered ‘apple aroma’ drink. Sometimes, it even comes complete with a set of glasses. Classy.
17. This is their equivalent of Red Bull, though I was too scared to drink it.
18. They also like this weird lemon drink which reminded me of Christmas and vodka.
19. Whilst on the topic of vodka, in AZDA, they light up the vodka aisle with flashing lights. Party time.
Here’s a video if you’re feeling in the party mood.
20. They’re obsessed with this symbol. It seems it’s called “Nazar” or the ‘evil eye’, supposedly keeping evil away.
21. WiFi in most places is slow. I mean, painfully slow. This is one of the best speedtest results.
22. If you ask for the WiFi password, many bars give you a receipt with a unique WiFi login too. What happened to just giving out the password?
23. To attract the British tourists, many stores are similar or identical to stores we have in the UK.
For example, they have ‘AZDA’ and ‘SPAR’ supermarkets, in addition to others such as ‘TK Maxx’.
Here’s my AZDA card too. Wonder if they’ll take it back home?
24. They’ve truly mastered the art of outdoor dining.
(We definitely didn’t eat here)
25. They’re really skilled too.
26. I found this lovely clock at a store in Hisaronü. Lovely.
27. ‘Cushion world’ sounds a bit more exciting than it actually is. Don’t get your hopes up.
28. They even have a few markets selling more dangerous items..
29. Their bins are quite.. rustic.
30. There are pictures of authoritative-looking men everywhere.
