Against all expectations, not all of these branded Vines from December are actually Christmas related.
In fact five of them are stoically unfestive, however they are also too good not to highlight, so I’ll present them first before hurling the remaining 12 Vines of Christmas down your chimney.
Ford
Ford’s continuing lo-fi ingenuity and surprising sense of humour are captured perfectly here in what can only be described as a grotesque reimagining of what hell must be like for funfair workers.
General Electric
Bill Nye the science guy introduces a GE series named #EmojiScience and encourages other viewers to share their own experiments. Points will be deducted for loss of eyebrows/limbs.
Converse
This French Converse fan managed to complete a whole year’s worth of Con-self-portraits. Obviously in France there are only 12 days in a calendar year.
Dior
Beautiful piece of stylish stop-motion, if made unrealistic by the lack of empty chewing gum packets, unidentifiable lint and bunches of keys.
McDonald's/Coca-Cola
Enter the world of brand partnerships, as McDonalds declares its romantic intentions towards Coca-Cola, and it's got nothing to do with being rebuffed by Pepsi on more than one occasion.
And that ends the non-Yuletide selection of Vines. On with the cavalcade of mini Christmas crackers!
Old Navy
Much like all elephants in December, this one can play a selection of smooth jazz covers of Christmas standards from out of its trunk. For the rest of the year it’s just Toto’s Africa.
Best Buy
Now you can text while wearing gloves. You still have to take them off to go to the bathroom though, otherwise you’re just a weirdo.
Red Bull
Celebrate the 12 days of Christmas with an extreme sport stunt and the possibility of making any one of those days your last.
Dyson
I’d like to think I’d have guessed what this was before I unwrapped it, but will always be secretly disappointed it wasn’t an AT-AT.
HTC
It’s the gift that keeps on giving and giving, until you drop it down the toilet because you still had your gloves on.
Intel
Finally, no more getting up from the sofa to turn on a light switch or start a fire apparently. Lazy arsonists take note.
Mastercard
Great, now Rudolph constantly looks like he’s just been sniffing around an underwear drawer.
The Home Depot
The buzzsaw then visited the presents underneath the Christmas tree and caused untold childhood trauma.
Disney Parks
Dear Santa, I want to have ‘Let it Go’ permanently removed from my brain.
Sprint
Magnetise your Christmas tree with Sprint. Warning: do not keep any spoons or watches nearby.
Oreo
There’s a whole series of these telling you how to make Oreo Cookie Balls step by step. Santa’s got some unresolved issues here.
Samsung Mobile
Finally ending with a New Year’s bang, with a surprising lack of vomiting and punch-ups.
The purpose of this post is to tell you exactly what negative SEO actually means, whether you need to worry about it and what you can do to defend yourself from it.
What is negative SEO?
As opposed to using black hat techniques in order to illicitly rank your own site higher up search engine results pages (SERPs), negative SEO is about using similar underhanded techniques to attack a rival’s website and scupper their ranking.
This can be done a number of ways…
Pointing hundreds of low-quality, spam-heavy links to your website, particularly ones using particularly unsavoury keywords or ones that are nothing to do with your content.
Copying your website’s content and distributing it around the internet, therefore placing you at risk of transgressing Google’s ‘duplicate content’ policy. As follows...
In the rare cases in which Google perceives that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users, we'll also make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved. As a result, the ranking of the site may suffer, or the site might be removed entirely from the Google index, in which case it will no longer appear in search results.
Crippling your website speed by sending thousands of requests per second to your server.
If you have quality backlinks from other authority sites, someone could potentially get in touch with those sites and using your name and details ask to have them removed.
Negative SEO can also refer to website hacking. From removing content or even deleting your site entirely, to changing the robots.txt file to tell search engines to stop crawling it.
It can also be about damaging your reputation, perhaps through fake social media accounts set up to specifically badmouth your company.
Should I worry?
According to Kissmetrics yes it’s a very real threat and numerous websites have had to deal with the problem. However as Google’s Matt Cutts states in his own video response to negative SEO:
If you’re just a regular small business you are not likely to run up against this. There are a lot of people who talk about negative SEO, but very few people who try it and fewer still who actually succeed.
This quote (and related video) was published back in 2012, the same year that Google released the first version of its Penguin algorithm created to reduce and penalise the use of spammy and unnatural links. It also released the disavow tool, which we’ll talk about further down the page.
Moz has summarised all of Google's communications related to negative SEO and distilled them as follows…
Google works hard to ensure that a competitor cannot hurt your site by pointing bad links at it and if you notice a bunch of bad looking links pointing at your site, most likely they are not going to do any harm to you. In fact the vast majority of cases where people report negative SEO attacks end up not being negative SEO.
However Google admits itself that it may not get things 100% correct all of the time.
Protect yourself
If you do run a website in a highly competitive market and are worried about the risks of negative SEO, especially if you yourself have received penalties from Google in the past, there are things you can do to help.
Webmasters will need to ‘build-in’ to their monthly SEO activity an element of on-going backlink monitoring and health-checking to ensure that negative SEO attacks are picked up quickly and can be rapidly remedied. This will involve iterative updates of disavow files and manual link removal processes.
Monitor your backlinks
Make sure you have Google Webmaster Tools set up for your site. Then you can sign up for email alerts, which tell you as soon as any suspicious activity occurs or malware is uploaded. It will also tell you if you’ve been served a manual link penalty by Google, which can be a sign someone is maliciously attacking you.
There are also other third-party companies offering monitoring tools. Search Engine Land has a list of available tools it recommends. It also suggests you should monitor on a monthly basis, keeping an eye out on a large number of new links uncharacteristic of the website and large numbers of links from low quality domains.
Ask for the bad links to be removed
Go directly to the source and ask for any spammy backlinks to be removed. Keep a record of your correspondence, as it’s good to have evidence to show you’ve done everything possible to solve the situation amicably before contacting Google directly for intervention.
Google’s disavow tool
You can ask Google not to take low-quality links into account when it crawls your site by using the disavow tool. Although this should come after you’ve done as much work as you can to remove spammy links and are unable to make further progress.
First you need to download a list of links to your site. You can do this via Webmaster Tools, under Search Traffic>Links to Your Site.
Next create a file containing only the links you want to disavow then upload this to Google.
Use this tool with caution, as if used incorrectly you may end up doing more harm then good.
Further reading…
During my first year at Econsultancy I’ve been making a point of writing beginner’s guides to any new terms or phrases I find particularly baffling, or that I might suspect other people may find baffling too.
The following related articles should help clear up a few things...
With this elongated holiday season, retailers have had more opportunities to target different customer segments and this has paid off.
In the US, ecommerce orders between November 1 and December 14 have risen by 15% when compared to that same timeframe last year.
How does that break down into the various shopping holidays now commonplace during the holiday season?
Thanksgiving shopping
Overall, Thanksgiving revenue grew 17.7% over 2013. Some shoppers pulled out their mobile devices to get some shopping done on Thanksgiving, but not as many as last year.
This year 46% of Thanksgiving shoppers chose to buy on their mobile devices, compared to 49% in 2013.
Black Friday
ChannelAdvisor reports that online sales jumped 22% on Black Friday, compared to the previous year.
When that is broken down into two of the largest marketplaces: Amazon and eBay, that growth stands at 24 and 27%, respectively. Custora deemed it the biggest shopping day in history, but it was quickly surpassed by Cyber Monday.
Thanksgiving weekend
Custora reports that during Thanksgiving weekend US ecommerce orders grew by over 15.4%, when compared to 2013.
For just the Saturday and Sunday following Thanksgiving, comScore’s data showed a 26% increase from last year.
Cyber Monday and beyond
Cyber Monday 2014 ecommerce revenue grew by 15.4 - 17% over 2013. This year represented a milestone because for the first time ever, online sales reached over $2 billion in just one day.
It is now known as the biggest online shopping day in history with the most online sales revenue we’ve ever seen.
Retailers kept up the strong growth beyond Cyber Monday. From December 2 to 14th, US ecommerce orders grew by 16.5%, compared to 2013. Revenue also grew by 15.6%.
The role of mobile
On all of the big shopping days this holiday season, one thing was constant; the prevalence of mobile devices. Between December 2 and 14, 24.3% of ecommerce orders came from smartphones or tablets. Mobile orders accounted for 18.2% of orders from December 2 to 14 in 2013.
This further exemplifies the fact that if online retailers don’t already have easy-to-navigate mobile sites, now is the time to invest, because mobile adoption is only increasing. On top of that, 30% of mobile shoppers will abandon a transaction if the site they’re on isn’t mobile friendly.
Some are even calling Black Friday “Mobile Friday” because mobile shoppers made up 30.3% of online orders, a substantial jump from 22.5% in 2013.
Apple devices have long reigned supreme in ecommerce, but this year Android shook it up a bit and accounted for more purchasing power than usual during the holidays. Apple devices made up 77.6% of mobile ecommerce orders, but Android accounted for 22%, a 5.6% increase from last year.
Regardless, iOS shoppers spent more, drove more traffic, and of course, made up more sales on Black Friday. iOS shoppers spent $121.86 per order versus $98.07 for Android shoppers.
Traffic from Apple devices drove 34.2% of all online traffic, compared to 15% of online traffic from Android. In terms of sales, iOS devices really showed who’s boss with 21.9% of all online sales, compared to a paltry 5.8% for Android.
Even though Android has grown substantially, it still can’t be compared to Apple just yet.
The competitive landscape
This holiday season has been fierce. With so many shoppers armed with their smartphones, tablets, and computers, it has been tough for retailers to secure sales. That’s where pricing and added value come in.
While all retailers can’t (and might not even want to) match Amazon’s low prices, having prices that take into account competitors’ pricing definitely increases the chances of winning the sale.
Even if having the lowest price doesn’t align with a retailer’s overall strategy, justify a premium over your competitors with free shipping. It has been hot this holiday season as an added bonus that helps shoppers complete their transactions.
With such high traffic and sales this year, many retailers will be wondering how they can get the most out of the 2015 holiday season. One thing that many of the most successful retailers in the US have in common is a dynamic pricing strategy.
Dynamic pricing can improve sales and profits for online retailers. Even if you’re not selling 426 items per second like Amazon did during the 2013 holidays, it’s important to know that the behemoth changes prices every 10-15 minutes for a reason. All retailers want to ensure that they are optimized for success so that the holiday season is truly the most profitable time of the year.
What other factors do you see driving ecommerce growth in 2015?
Contributing Writer: Angelica Valentine, Content Marketing Manager at Wiser
By NewsCred Contributor, Dawn Papandrea If you’re an aspiring entrepreneur, chances are you enjoy reading about successful business owners who were once starting out like you. Through their stories, you can find inspiration and score some start-up advice. Better yet, if you really want to think like an entrepreneur, you should tap into the sources that inspire, motivate, educate, and inform them on a daily basis, and make them part of your required reading as well. Lucky for you, NewsCred connected with some company founders, CEOs, and awesome innovators for their go-to blog picks to give you an inside track [...]
Say hello to 2015 by looking back at 2014 at saying to yourself “oh God, I hope that doesn’t happen again”.
Just before Christmas we published our annual best things to happen to the internet list. Think of this as its scheming, hand-rubbing, soul-patch wearing, evil twin brother.
#Gamergate
It’s a difficult one to sum up in just a couple of sentences, but essentially #GamerGate" is an online movement that, although apparently concerned with ethics in game journalism, in actual fact started as a deeply misogynistic attack on one female game developer and her sex life, which spiralled into an even more disturbing, threatening, women-hating cultural monstrosity.
Click below for a more detailed account from Gawker…
The fappening
Misogyny, narcissism, shaky privacy… almost every bad thing about the digital world reared its ugly head during a deeply depressing week in August, as anonymous hackers uploaded thousands of stolen photographs from mainly female celebrities private accounts onto the seamier parts of the internet.
As for the reducing of a serious crime into a bawdy hashtag, here is Jennifer Lawrence herself: “It is not a scandal. It is a sex crime… It’s a sexual violation. It’s disgusting.”
U2 invaded your iTunes folder
It wasn’t ‘savvy marketing’, it wasn’t ‘a brilliant new way to market new music in a struggling industry, it wasn’t a ‘gift’. It was an intrusion. An unpleasant Frankenstein’s monster of various annoying marketing practices. It’s up there with autoplay video, Spotify ads and downloading spyware onto your browser.
For iTunes it's a desperate, grasping move that's indicative of how much of a dying platform it really is. For U2, it's just business as usual.
The crass co-opting of a triumphant moment during an otherwise horrifying time in human history in order to persuade you to shop at its supermarkets was as offensive as it was disrespectful.
Featured wartime chocolate is available at your nearest Sainsbury’s.
The Oscars selfie
Doing more for the ubiquity of the selfie than anything else in 2014, this desperately cloying image is the reason why your mum now knows what a selfie is and why your office demands your team takes one at your Christmas party.
As an example, here is Sony's latest ad for Far Cry 4. The URL is briefly seen in faint writing at the bottom of the screen, but you’re too busy being attacked by a snow leopard to notice it.
However if you type farcry.com into your browser, the website doesn’t exist…
The actual site is far-cry.ubi.com.
Authorship no more
Having removed author photos from the SERPs in June, Google went the whole hog and removed authorship altogether in August. Our editor Graham Charlton investigated expert reaction at the time, and there are a lot of opinions in both the pro and con columns. However it does seem highly likely that the reason for the removal of authorship was because it was taking attention away from paid-for listings.
Breaking Bad ban
A Florida mother successfully petitioned Toys ”R” Us to remove Walter White action figures from its stores.
Here’s the Bryan Cranston's suitably measured response.
"Florida mom petitions against Toys 'R Us over Breaking Bad action figures." I'm so mad, I'm burning my Florida Mom action figure in protest
Irrelevant of who performed the hack, it’s a worrying sign for the future that a company can be held to ransom so easily and that a piece of art can even in the 21st century can be so easily sacrificed.
And that it was Seth Rogen’s fault.
To tweet, to you
The Chuckle Brothers gave social media a go. From rapping with Tinchy Stryder… (click to play)
... to taking selfies outside the court where they were called as defence witnesses during the trial of DLT, the Brothers Chuckle hit social media hard this year. It didn't hit back nearly hard enough.
Let’s Get Social
From the ranking of bacon as the third most important thing to share after your pets and kids, to the unbelievably toneless 'backing singing(?)' to the rap... The rap!
You may want to take a break from the internet for at least a week after this one.
Actually I might be on the fence with this one.
Food became an instant killer
Of the many food crimes of 2014... Presenting The Scotch egg burger, barreling down your arteries like the boulder that chased Indiana Jones.
Photo printing website Shutterfly accidentally mass emailed “congratulations on your new baby” messages to thousands of people who weren’t pregnant.
Reactions ranged from the furious to the suitably withering.
In doing this Shutterfly experienced the red-hot-flush of embarrassment that comes after asking “when’s it due?” to a woman who turns out isn’t actually pregnant. Only on a national scale.
In honour of Martin Luther King Jr...
Here are some of the very worst examples of brands co-opting this year’s MLK Day for its own use.
Happy MLK. In honor of his death, make sure to only use the Ebony category today.
You really, really, honestly shouldn’t have. And please never come near me ever again.
Marty, we gotta go back...
I'm not sure who is worse, the people doing the tricking or the people who fall for it. If the 'today is the day that Marty McFly went to the future' meme drives you as nuts as it does me, and you’re wondering who the hell is responsible for creating all of these fake Delorean dashboards… they’re right here in this tumblr.
A new image is generated every day of the year.
If you wish to troll your Facebook friends whenever they fall for this ruse, smarmily post them the following video to prove them wrong. FYI: the real date is 21 October 2015.
#VATMOSS
As Graham Charlton stated in November, changes to EU VAT place of supply of services rules constitute a threat to small businesses which provide digital services.
Whereas VAT was previously charged in the country of the supplier, the new rules state that it will now be payable in the country where services are bought. This applies only to digital services such as ebooks, downloads and other non-physical resources.
If a business sells, for instance, an ebook to a customer in Italy and one in Spain, it will have to pay VAT at the rate for each country, and to each country.
For small businesses this means they will lose their VAT exemption if they sell to Europe, leading to either more costs or the passing of these costs on to customers, which will inevitably mean a less competitive price and fewer sales. Also there will be more bureaucracy as businesses face a choice of making purchases harder by asking for more customer details, or hunting around for details such as IP addresses every time they make a sale.
And finally...
Oh right, I see what you mean by a Downton Abbey costume now. Uh… no you can’t come in.
Click on the above image to see how you can make your very own, but don't.
By NewsCred Social Media Strategist Alexa Biale (@Alexa_Biale) Last year we created 50 Stats You Need to Know About Content Marketing, which garnered over 200,000 views on slideshare and was one of our best performing blog posts of all time. This year we’re taking it a step further, demonstrating not only why you should invest in Content Marketing, but why you need to as well. The following SlideShare will demonstrate the value of Content Marketing and how it can help build your business. We hope you can walk away with a better understanding of Content Marketing – and even convince [...]
