#SASCHOOL11 - Digital, Search and Social Media Marketing Event

Our DMCM (Digital Marketing Communications Management) group attended Search and Social School Manchester yesterday at MMU Business School where we learnt lots of interesting information about digital, search and social media marketing.

James Hanson and Simon Alexander from MediaVest spoke about PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising and SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) - Below are some of the points they mentioned:

Google currently holds 70% US market share and 90% of the UK's market share. With other search engines such as Yahoo and MSN holding less than 10% between them but slowly growing their share is set to rise with the future merge of MSN and Yahoo.

A quote from Eric Schmidt (Google) "Microsoft, not Apple or Facebook, is the biggest rival Google has right now" - even though Google hold the largest search engine market share they still feel threatened by the smaller search engines as they are all constantly bringing out new tools and competing against each other to gain bigger market shares.

They also talked about how mobile is going to be big in 2011 - this was very useful because one of the aims for our Digital Marketing Communications Management project, based on Canal Street Manchester's LGBT community is to create a mobile friendly website.

All in all the event was very useful to help with our current Gay Village Manchester project and it has also given us an insight into how PPC, SEO and Social Media Marketing work within companies which will be useful for us once we have graduated and hopefully start working for a Digital Marketing agency.

The Ball is Rolling...

Things have started kicking off for us this week! We met the client, Iain, at the bar he co-owns on Canal Street.

We discussed the history of the Canal St website and it's future and where Iain would like to go on holiday! We've amassed pages on pages of notes and currently sifting through them to figure out how to get from here to there with the information we've got. Ironically, all of our note-taking has left us with more questions than answers and searching to define a clear set of objectives to move our project forward.

What makes Canal Street unique is that it's not just a geographic district like The Castro in San Francisco, or Greenwich Village, NYC, but its also very symbolic of  the LGBT community-at-large and the website acts also as a resource. This make devising an inclusive strategy a bit more complicated than we first thought.

It's a laborious process, but if when it gets Iain onto a white sandy beach in the South of France then we'll know that we've done a good job!