Qube Media.

User-generated comedy app set to create a buzz

Qube has been up to its elbows in Social Media Marketing activity of late – we've just launched a new user-generated comedy app to get users involved with a new entertainment show.

To reach a fragmented youth audience for the launch of the new online show, Apollo's Pad, we found new and innovative ways to attract web visitors. Meet the comedy stage.

This innovative web-based app allows visitors to create lip-synced cartoon avatars to tell their jokes and compete for top place in an online league table - and it's going to get budding comedians online buzzing.

Built by New York based developer Oddcast, the app lets people choose a cartoon character and customise its appearance then record a joke or comedy routine to which their character is animated.

As new comedy creations are posted to the gallery, other people rate the jokes to decide who's the funniest.

The comedy stage is an integral part of the Apollo's Pad website, a unique comedy entertainment offering produced by Galleon Holdings plc and backed by Sony BMG.

Qube Media was commissioned to develop and manage the digital strategy for Apollo's Pad, including launching and marketing the show online.

Read our case study

Check out The Comedy Stage in action

Search and social media - a match made in heaven?

Here's an interesting and effective idea about how search and social media can complement one another, from Pauline Ores of IBM Corp in B to B magazine's recent social media article.

'Ores said search and social media go hand in hand, and that by interacting with its community of customers, social media informs IBM’s search strategy. By “listening to social media” to learn what people are talking about, IBM is able to buy relevant keywords against those conversations.'

More and more at the moment we're seeing social media as an essential component of search. By getting out there online and talking to customers, marketeers are not just building relationships but getting an insight into key areas of their customers lives and attitudes towards products and services that feeds into improving search rankings. It's a strategy that can translate across any industry, and yields surprising results.

Success cannot be measured in a click

Recently we've been thinking about the increasingly complex issue of accurately measuring the returns of your online marketing investment.

If you're embarking on an online pr or social media campaign it's no longer realistic to measure success simply by totting up clicks.

NMA' s Michael Nutley has some interesting things to say about the waning importance of the hallowed 'click through' and how we might measure our marketing success in an increasingly diverse online world.

Search marketing client wins

Just a quick update on some of our client wins... we've just won the search engine marketing consultancy and campaign for a soon-to-launched private jet charter company in addition to the search marketing and content consultancy for a global specialist recruitment company...

Friend Connect: Social Networking for all?

Google's upcoming Friend Connect service aims to give anyone the opportunity to add social networking features to their website, without the exorbitant development costs.

Site owners just cut and paste bits of code to add functions like  user registration, invitations, members galleries, message posting and reviews.

Visitors to these sites can also sign in using their existing social network registrations from FaceBook, Hi5 and others, sharing content with their groups of friends elsewhere.

It's a great move that offers small independent websites some of the reach of social media marketing, even if they'd previously dismissed it as being outside budget.

However, it won't meet the grade for businesses and brands – the slightly clunky look and feel combined with the fact many important networks are yet to be integrated means that, at least for a while, Friend Connect may well be limited to artists and interest groups.

See the previews of Friend Connect

Improved image recognition for Google search

New Scientist reported that Google's image recognition for search is about to make leaps forward.

Traditionally, it's hard for a computer (or Google's infamous 'algorithm') to 'see' or understand an image - especially when it needs to relate that back to a users search term. That's why on the most part, image search relied almost solely on the text that accompanies the image.

But that's all about to change.

"Now researchers at Google have combined image recognition with their ranking software to sort pictures according to their visual characteristics. The highest-ranked are those that have the most features in common with the whole set of images found for a particular search query," reports New Scientist.

Read the full image search article here.