If you want to attract more visitors to your website, then one effective approach is “link baiting”. This is where a website features content that is so compelling that people want to link to it through their own websites or social media accounts. This not only increases your visitor potential, but also boosts your website's overall performance in search engines, as sites receiving more links are ranked higher in search engines like Google. Blogging is a great platform for this. I've recently been working on the new FBU and Prospect websites, and we've made blogging far more prominent in both

Have you ever wanted to get a message across loudly on Twitter or Facebook? Thunderclap is an online tool aimed at activists that can help do just that. It pitches itself as a ‘crowdspeaking’ platform, in a similar vein to ‘crowdfunding’ websites like Kickstarter. Successful campaigns result in the same message being broadcast at the same time across the multiple Facebook and Twitter accounts of the campaign subscribers. It’s being used by a range of people, from activists to companies and even the White House. Unions are starting to use it as well. The Communication Workers Union (CWU) has

There was a lot of interest in my report about trade unions and search engine optimisation. I've been asked about the scoring metrics I used to estimate how well a website would rank in search engine results. The metrics I used are the Page Authority, Domain Authority and MozRank provided by the leading Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) tool provider, SEOMoz.org. I’ve also used the most famous metric of all, Google PageRank. We need to be careful when using metrics. They do not necessarily reflect how high a website will appear in results from Google or other search engines. For example, a well

There has been a lot of coverage recently regarding Google’s new privacy policy. The company will now have access to more data regarding the searches individuals make; information they will use to target adverts aimed at each user. However, campaigners and governments alike have raised concerns about the implications for privacy and the legality of the move. Google have been collecting information about our searches for a long time now, and already use it to target the adverts that we see. So what’s changed in the privacy policy? Basically, Google are merging all the results from their

Viral marketing is a way of using existing social networks to reach an audience for campaigns and advertising on the internet. The idea is that, if the message is good enough, people will tell their friends about it through email, Facebook posts, Tweets etc. People are more likely to value the opinion of their friends, so if the message is successful then a large amount of viewers can be reached for a relatively small outlay. Unions have been experimenting with viral marketing for a number of years, with varying degrees of success. The TUC was one of the first to experiment with this approach

The increasing importance of the media has been a feature of recent general elections. This next election is no exception, but one thing that has changed is the emphasis on online campaigning. The Obama campaign was much heralded for clever use of online strategy. Some of this was hype though – the failed Democrat nominee John Edwards and Republican nominee Ron Paul actually had more advanced online campaigns. However, when it came down to a battle between Obama and McCain, the Democratic candidate’s superior use of the internet was seen a key contributor to his success. Now British political