Best Served Cold

Web design and development

We pride ourselves on producing high quality websites that fully conform to the highest web standards. Our sites are accessible and search engine friendly, making sure that all our sites have the best possible chance of succeeding where so many others fail.

Pressitt now has customisable Newsrooms

After a lot of development we have just launched the latest update to Pressitt: customisable newsrooms. This update allows users to create their own branded newsroom to hold their releases and link to their social networks around the web. We’re very pleased with the new system and hope that it will bring Pressitt to the forefront of Social Media News Releases.

We’re already working with Eurosport on their jump into social media and hope that a lot more big names will start to see what Pressitt can do for them. Some of the companies that have already used Pressitt for their releases are: Google, Groupon, Lovefilm, Nokia, AVG, Intel and British Airways.

View the SMNR here

Find out more about Pressitt.com

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TK0jT25-h4s[/youtube]

Pressitt allows you to create your own Social Media News Release (SMNR) – also known as a Social Media Press Release (SMPR) or Social Media Release (SMR) and publish it to an online community of journalists, the blogosphere and the general public.

Many journalists use the Internet as their primary source of research when compiling a story. Pressitt SMNRs are designed primarily with journalists and bloggers in mind. A Pressitt SMNR encapsulates all the information, multimedia and images needed to prepare a story, and offers contact details for more information.

Through Pressitt you can create news that is truly ‘social’, as well as enhance your SMNR with images and video clips. You can also add relevant links, upload PowerPoint presentations, PDFs, or whatever you need to get your message across.

Once published, Pressitt allows your news to be bookmarked, commented on, and shared.

Facebook Fan Pages

Creating a fan page on Facebook sounds like a quick and easy way to generate traffic to your site and gain new customers for your business. With the explosion in social networking traffic over the last few years there’s a buzz around Facebook almost like the buzz surrounding the internet in 1999! But creating a successful fan page and making social media work for your business takes more than just throwing up a page and expecting new visitors to flood in.

I’m sure most people reading this will already have a profile page on Facebook – there are over 400 million users on Facebook now, it’s the largest social network in the world and one of the most used websites. Most users check their profiles at least once a week with a large number checking several times a day.

Most marketing people have a profile on Facebook and try to use that to promote their businesses and network with likeminded individuals around the world but to keep your private life a bit separate from work we’d usually suggest setting up a Fan Page for your company. It works just like a profile but allows you to provide a public page for your business without getting your personal profile mixed up.

From Facebook:

A Facebook Page is a public Profile that enables you to share your business and products with Facebook users.

When your fans interact with your Facebook Page, stories linking to your Page can go to their friends via News Feed. As these friends interact with your Page, News Feed keeps driving word-of-mouth to a wider circle of friends.

View our Best Served Cold Fan Page

Recently we’ve been involved with setting up a couple of Facebook fan pages with bespoke applications for high profile campaigns – please contact us for more information.

To get the most out of your fan page you need to remember that Facebook works best as a two-way conversation. As with all social networks the idea is that you can talk directly to your customers but they can also talk directly to you – don’t ignore them. Make sure you respond, join in and give your visitors a reason to recommend you to their friends. By giving something back you can increase your fan page visitor numbers and in turn increase your customer base.

If you’d like to know more about how Facebook and other social network sites can help improve your business please contact us. We’re always happy to talk through ideas and discuss potential benefits of social media with all types of business.

Nylon Films is live

That’s right, another new site designed and developed by Best Served Cold! The site is for a London video and stills production company: Nylon Films.

Nylon films helps clients tell their unique stories through film, video, stills photography and other multimedia formats. Whether it’s corporate films or documentary films, training videos or music videos, viral ads or internet ads – we think the end product should always make for compelling viewing. Therefore, at the heart of all of our productions, you’ll find good storytelling and high production values; and, using state of the art technologies, we are able to provide these multimedia solutions cost effectively.

You can find out more about Nylon on their Facebook and Twitter pages.

We created the new site using WordPress for the CMS and also spent time talking to Nylon Films about setting up Social Media profiles on the best sites to show off their work: Vimeo and Flickr. By getting started early with Social Media they are already generating interest from users on Flickr and Vimeo.

Social Media and how to use it…

Social Media is an often used term and it covers a broad range of different websites – almost all new websites include some form of social media: in comments, embedded media or links to social tools. I like to think of Social Media as an umbrella term that as a basic rule covers three main types of website:

Social Media

Sites such as YouTube, SoundCloud and Flickr are all Social Media website. Literally speaking they are used to display Media in the context of a Social community. In this sense media is used with the traditional meaning of an act of communication – via film, art, photography, music etc.

Social Networking

Since the arrival of MySpace and Facebook the importance of social networking sites has increased dramatically over the last 3 or 4 years. These are now the most used and most active type of website in the world. The basic function of a Social Networking site is to allow users to chat, view and interact with each other via a simple interface.

Social Bookmarking

This is the most difficult type of social website to describe and understand. The idea behind Social Bookmarking sites is to easily store and distribute useful information and links to websites. Rather than storing favourite sites on your personal computer you are allowing anyone to view your links and rate the web pages based on the relevance to topic, how interesting they found it or some other criteria.

So that’s a brief overview of Social Media but how do you use it to your advantage when marketing a new website, prodcut or service? That’s where the work starts!

There are lots of blogs that will help with talking about social media and marketing and how to optimise your Facebook pages and Twitter tweets but one of the easiest to understand I’ve read recently is this:

16 Rules For Social Media Optimization Revisited

Here at Best Served Cold we can help you get started with Social Media and guide you on the best sites to register with, who your audience might be and how you can utilise the social internet to promote your brand or website.

Getting Started with Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is the process of promoting your site or business through social media channels and it is a powerful strategy that can get you links, attention and large amounts of traffic. Sometimes the work involved can be quite time intensive but it is always low cost.

The two main benefits of developing a good social media marketing strategy are:

  1. High numbers of new visitors
  2. Quality links from external websites

Both of these translate directly and indirectly to a higher search engine ranking and increased traffic to
your website:

  1. New visitors from social bookmarks or networking sites may find your site or article, read it, and then leave the site. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t interested in the content. Online success is, at the most basic, a numbers game. The more visitors you can attract to your site, the more people will read your content and the more people will register with your site or bookmark you for future reference.
  2. A well written article, marketed across social networks will encourage other bloggers, journalists and network members to write about and link to your site. These links get picked up by search engines such as Google and this in turn increases the value / ranking of your site within search engine results.

If you already have a Social Media online marketing campaign in place we can still help you further by talking you through Social Media News Releases or SMNRs. We have helped to create Pressitt.com which is a frree service that allows you to publish online press releases across your favourite Social Networking and Social Media platforms. From Pressitt:

The Pressitt SMNR template offers all of the core information found in a traditional press release, but additionally takes advantage of linking, multimedia and Web 2.0 shareable features. It allows users to host downloadable hi-res images within their releases, along with PowerPoint presentations, and PDFs – YouTube videos can also be embedded. Each brand using the service is assigned its own RSS feed, and press contacts can be reached via LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. Additionally, up-to-date bookmarking and sharing icons are presented including Posterous, Yammer and Sphinn.

Once created your SMNR can be published to the Pressitt platform and shared to social networks or via an email link to your contacts and colleages.

With a Pressitt newsroom you can collate all your Social Network links in one place giving your customers an easy way to find you and your products. More importantly it gives you a high profile online presence to talk about your brand directly to your customers. If you’d like to find out more about Pressitt and Social Media News Releases why not contact one of the Pressitt team?

Pressitt.com gets some TLC

Over the last couple of months we’ve been working hard on the new version of Pressitt. If you haven’t heard of Pressitt it’s a site dedicated to the creation and release of social media news releases. We’ve been involved in the design and development of the Pressitt platform and the latest version has several updates and improvements.

http://pressitt.com

So, what is Pressitt?

Pressitt allows you to create your own social media news release (SMNR) – also known as a social media press release (SMPR) or social media release (SMR), and publish it to an online community of journalists, the blogosphere and the general public.

Many journalists use the Internet as their primary research source when compiling a story. Pressitt SMNRs are designed with journalists and bloggers in mind. A Pressitt SMNR encapsulates all the information, multimedia and images needed to prepare a story, while offering contact details for more information, all without the usual PR fluff.

The Pressitt SMNR template offers all of the core information found in a traditional press release, but additionally takes advantage of linking, multimedia and Web 2.0 shareable features. It allows users to host downloadable hi-res images within their releases, along with PowerPoint presentations, and PDFs – YouTube videos can also be embedded. Each brand using the service is assigned its own RSS feed, and press contacts can be reached via LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. Additionally, up-to-date bookmarking and sharing icons are presented including Posterous, Yammer and Sphinn.

Once created your SMNR can be published to the Pressitt platform and shared to social networks or via an email link to your contacts and colleages.

pressitt.com

You can also view and talk to Pressitt on Facebook – why not become a fan!?

Our new Facebook page

That’s right, we’ve been working on a new Facebook page. Getting to grips with how to use the fan pages to showcase our work and allow our friends and clients to talk about us and show everyone what we’re working on at the moment.

Best Served Cold on Facebook

If you’d like to find out more about setting up a Facebook page for your company or would like to know how getting involved with social networking could improve your business website, please contact us.

Social Media Consultants?

Over the last year there has been a lot of discussion in the news about Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed and Myspace and other social networking sites. In the wake of this there has been an influx of new businesses calling themselves Social Media Consultants. Is Social Media the new SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)? Should you be paying someone to tell you how to promote your site on social media?

At Best Served Cold we like to keep up with new trends and ideas – over the years we have signed up to hundreds of new sites – and we’ve been using sites like Digg, Reddit and Mixx for a number of years to help promote our new releases. Recently we’ve been experimenting with Twitter and Plurk and have a couple of clients who are trying YouTube as a way to gain traffic and interest.

SEO vs. Social Media

Well, that’s a bit of a leading title. It’s not a case of versus, it’s more a case of what to use and when best to use it. There is still and will probably always be a need for good SEO on a website. Along with Accessibility (the two go hand in hand) it’s one of the building blocks of a good website and needed to ensure your site gets indexed and found on search engines for the topic you want.

Social media is a broad term for a lot of different sites. It started with social bookmarking sites such as Delicious and social rating sites like Technorati. Closely followed by social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace the term has finally come to include all sites that allow communal interaction around a topic, personal accounts or news.

Modern websites are often built around a Content Management System (CMS) and as such will often have some from of social media built in – usually comments or a rating system – but to get the best results you need to look at other websites to see what they can offer you.

To take full advantage of the social media revolution a company has to consider how to get people talking about their products and services on other websites, do they write a blog, set up a YouTube account, do they Twitter, create Social Media News Releases or need a FaceBook page? There are a lot of options and it’s not always easy to understand the advantages one site has over another.

That’s where Social Media Consultants come in, they can advise about what’s best for your company and which sites you need to be joining. It’s not rocket science and with a bit of time most people would be able to figure it out themselves but, like SEO, it’s much easier to get someone else to do it!

Best Served Cold have been working with social media for a number of years and have a wide knowledge of what works and doesn’t work on various websites. If you’d like an introduction to social media and SEO for your site why not contact us. We can review your site and business and work with you to improve and build a social network of your own and, if needed, give advice on how to improve your SEO while you’re at it.

Pressitt newsrooms

We’ve been working on Pressitt continuously over the last few months and the latest update sees the release of our first social media newsroom: brightone.pressitt.com

If you’re not sure what a newsroom is, here’s an excerpt from Pressitt:

The Social Media News Room is a unique company landing page offering access to all of your multimedia news releases and developed to your specifications. It is a first touch for brands wanting to engage and participate with online communities, including journalists, bloggers, and even consumers researching your product or services.

We have lots more ideas in the pipeline for Pressitt, we’ll be talking about them in more detail soon!