If you are interested in curating content (sifting, sorting, arranging, and republishing information putting it into context with organization, annotation, and presentation) to help establish the your expertise, thought leadership and capture attention in today’s information cluttered world then Pinterest may be something you want to think about.

Some people don't understand content curation, but so much is produced about almost every topic these days at such a rapid pace that a good curator can become the filter and tastemaker. It can also help with your own SEO by showing your interest in an area and also relate to your brand story and personality. Burt Herman, co-founder of Storify, has said: “Great curation tells a story and takes you through an experience. You’re creating something better by putting the parts together. Curation is about humans. It’s about thinking of the audience and giving them something they want to see.”

Some of the things one can do are:

1. Get your happy customers involved by asking them to submit images of themselves or something that relates to your business. A happy customer is an image that everyone will connect with.

2. Have pictures taken at your speaking events to position you as the expert.

3. If you have written a book, e-book, white paper, or report your cover images are a good pin

4. Use images from your marketing materials or website to pique the interest of your audience.

5. Pin images of your employees at work or enjoying everyday life. Consumers love to connect to a company in this way.

6. Pinning content straight from your website so you get links back to the source and create backlinks for your pages.

One of the Pinterest boards that we have set up is for Bath because we are based here, love the city and love the charm of it's architecture street scenes etc.

Some of the pins we have on that board are reproduced below.

Just been approached by a client to ask “should we do this?”

“As I said on the phone we will write 6 x 550 word articles a month (2 articles per each landing page), where each article will be placed across our relevant network and third party network of websites (e.g. one article on xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, one article on xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, and one article on xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx and so on). The pricing for this is £580+VAT per month and the minimum tenure that we work on is a 6 month agreement, which would be 3 months service with a 3 month notice period.”

Being 'diplomatic', this was my reply.

There is no ‘fixed’ answer here. It’s a question of how close to black are you getting or are you just in the light grey zone.

However, what is being suggested could be regarded as a link scheme.

Google says:

"Your site's ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to you. The quantity, quality, and relevance of links count towards your rating. The sites that link to you can provide context about the subject matter of your site, and can indicate its quality and popularity. However, some webmasters engage in link exchange schemes and build partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. This is in violation of Google's Webmaster Guidelines and can negatively impact your site's ranking in search results. Examples of link schemes can include:

• Links intended to manipulate PageRank
• Links to web spammers or bad neighborhoods on the web
• Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging ("Link to me and I'll link to you.")
• Buying or selling links that pass PageRank"

Whilst Google does not define link schemes or bad neighbourhoods they are thought to be:

• link schemes - interlinking of websites in an attempt to change ranking or pagerank
• bad neighbourhoods - a group of inter-linked websites that are, in general, not following the Google webmaster guidelines

So in any decision one has to avoid links schemes, and find ways to ways to determine if a link is part of a scheme.

The original purpose of a link was to recommend a website that you feel would be useful to your websites visitors.

Thus to determine if you are participating in a link scheme consider if you are making or receiving a link for any reason other than to recommend a website that is useful to the linking website’s visitors. If it is not you are probably in some sort of link scheme.

For more background see:

Google Link schemes – several shades of gray

Google Link Network

Why link schemes fail

The kicker was the P.S. where I said: “P.S. I would not do it for our site  ”

UK and European online retailers may have to tighten up their procedures following a new ruling by the European Court of Justice.

In the UK The Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations 2000 implement the Distance Selling Directive. The directive requires that suppliers of goods by distance contracts must inform consumers of certain information by, at the latest, the time of delivery of the relevant products or services. Traders are obliged to provide consumers with information about their businesses and about sales transactions including details of traders' names and addresses, the price to consumers and details of consumers' general right to withdraw from a contract.

The ‘kicker’ is that the regulations have always included a penalty for failure to provide information properly. The cancellation period is seven working days from delivery if the information is provided. If not initially provided, then it is seven working days from when provided, and if never provided the cancellation period grows to three months. Online retailers that fail to comply with the new ruling will not be sure that they have actually banked the cash for a sale for three months, because a consumer could change their mind and ask for a refund at any time during that period.

The information must be communicated via a “durable medium”, which is not defined in the Distance Selling Directive but is defined elsewhere in European Union law as a means by which a consumer can store information addressed to him in a way that is accessible for future reference for an adequate period of time. The UK’s Office of Fair Trading (OFT) has issued guidance which states that a website is not considered a “durable medium” because it can be changed at any time after it has been accessed by the consumer.

Now, the ECJ has ruled that consumers must actively receive this information rather than just be told where to access it online: it is no longer enough simply to provide a hyperlink on a website

The ruling gives two reasons for this:

1)    The Distance Selling Directive states that a consumer must “receive” the relevant information, which should not involve any positive action by the consumer; such receipt was not achieved by the consumer having to undertake the action of clicking on a link.

2)    The website in question was not a “durable medium” as it:

a)    did not allow the consumer to store information addressed personally to the consumer

b)    could be altered

c)    was not necessarily accessible for an adequate period taking into account the purposes for providing that information

d)    did not allow the consumer to reproduce the information unchanged

Best practice now is to send a personalised email to the customer with the order confirmation.

There's been some comment at Website Magazine and Marketing Pilgrim recently about the latest American Customer Satisfaction Index report on social media and customer satisfaction.

For those who don't know this is what ACSI says about itself:

"ACSI is a national economic indicator of customer evaluations of the quality of products and services available to household consumers in the United States. The ACSI uses data from interviews with roughly 70,000 customers annually as inputs to an econometric model for measuring satisfaction with more than 230 companies in 47 industries and 10 economic sectors, as well as over 100 services, programs, and websites of federal government agencies.

ACSI results are released on a monthly basis, with all measures reported using a scale of 0 to 100. ACSI data have proven to be strongly related to a number of essential indicators of micro and macroeconomic performance. For example, firms with higher levels of customer satisfaction tend to have higher earnings and stock returns relative to competitors. Stock portfolios based on companies that show strong performance in ACSI deliver excess returns in up markets as well as down markets. And, at the macro level, customer satisfaction has been shown to be predictive of both consumer spending and gross domestic product growth."

So, if all that's true then these results have to be good news for Google and really not quite so good news for Facebook.

Larry Freed, President and CEO of ForeSee, a customer experience analytics firm has commented: “Facebook and Google+ are competing on two critical fronts: customer experience and market penetration. Google+ handily wins the former, and Facebook handily wins the latter, for now. It’s worth asking how much customer satisfaction matters for Facebook, given its unrivaled 800 million user base. But I expect Google to leverage its multiple properties and mobile capabilities to attract users at a rapid pace. If Facebook doesn’t feel the pressure to improve customer satisfaction now, that may soon change.”

However, that's not the whole story as the time on site figures quoted recently in The Wall Street Journal indicate.

According to this Facebook users spent an average of 7.5 hours on the site during January but Google+ users spent just 3.3 minutes for the whole month. In fact, it would appear that Google+ users are spending increasingly less time on the site as the months go by. In December users spent 4.8 minutes, down from November when users spent 5.1 minutes, according to Bloomberg.

And we must not forget that with about 100 million members and whilst more than doubling since October, according to The Wall Street Journal, compared to Facebook, with 845 million members, it's still small.

All in all it seems that there is plenty still to play for.

If you have a website and have not yet read the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) guidance to the new EU cookie laws then we suggest you do so. Website owners / publishers have until May 26th 2012 to comply. The ICO has powers to fine website owners up to £500,000 for serious breaches!

This law isn’t going to go away and cannot just be ignored. The Information Commissioner has been clear that he will take a practical and proportionate approach to enforcing these rules where organisations are making the effort to comply, but if you are not…..

So, what’s the law about? You can get some good simple guidance form our friends at Roxburgh Milkins. Their blog about the new cookie law covers it simply and gives some good advice, but in simple terms:

• Cookies are small text files used by web developers to perform certain functions on a website. They are not anything like a virus but they can include some information about a user and their activity on a site. So because they can allow websites to track visitors and can be utilised by advertisers to target ad campaigns they can - perhaps, sometimes - be regarded as a privacy threat. Cookies are actually specific to the device a visitor is using to view the site - like the browser or mobile phone. Almost all websites use cookies in some way or another, and every page you visit in those sites writes cookies to your ‘computer’ and receives them back from it.
  
  
• So, now, any user has to be “provided with clear and comprehensive information about the purposes of the storage of, or access to, that information”.

Before the new law a website owner / publisher could ‘assume consent’ to cookies, place cookies on a user’s hard drive and collect data on the basis that the user had not opted-out. Now the website owner / publisher must expressly obtain any users’ informed consent and opt-in before using any cookies unless the cookie is ‘strictly necessary’ for the operation of the site. This is not a get out. It means that, for example, a cookie used to remember the goods a user wishes to buy when they proceed to the checkout or add goods to their shopping basket is allowed but that a cookie used to recognise a user when they return to a website is not.

The question is, what does this actually mean for you?

Well, firstly you have to know whether your site uses any cookies (and as noted above, most do in some way) and what those cookies are for and there are a number of things to consider:

• Client side cookies such as some used by Google Analytics can be found with relative ease using the details you can find in a browser or using a plugin.
  
  
• Server side cookies such as those used for a shopping basket will need your web development team to accurately list and identify these from the server side source code.
  
  
• 3rd party cookies such as those used for Google Analytics or by Facebook and Twitter utilities or other services you may have on your site have to be identified by them. So, for example Google has a whole section about Google Analytics cookies.
  
  
• Understand the degree to which each cookie impacts your website's visitors' privacy and consider how necessary each cookie is, whether any can be removed, etc.
  
  
• Decide how you are going to describe the cookies you use so that your site visitors can easily find the information to understand and give ‘informed consent’. The ICO privacy page may be a useful guide here.
  
  
• Decide on a solution for obtaining consent. The ICO gives some guidance on this from page 13 onwards of their Guidance PDF.

Post written by Richard Hill