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Absolute cracker! 

Nothing worse or sadder than seeing overweight kids

In my mind (and no doubt controversial) I'd go as far as saying it's child abuse. I'm talking about toddlers up to young teens. By late teens you can only hope you've put them on the right path as they hang out in MacDonald's stealing hub caps

But there is no excuse for having overweight young kids.

I know how hard it is, I'm a foodie chunky monkey myself. But also know how hard it is to be a parent and how hard it is to say no to kids, and the associated fall out/tantrum/riot.

Life would certainly be easier and quieter if I let mine live on rubbish. Bad enough the number of treats that sneak under the radar from Grandparents who play the "we're allowed card"! 

You'd have to be living on the moon to miss the Wonga story currently doing the rounds.

This is certainly going to hurt them financially, and no doubt they are in full negative media disaster recovery mode with a highly tuned PR agency churning out spin and trying to turn the tide.

But once the dust has settled (which it will) I wonder what the final analysis will be on all this exposure?

If nothing else, it has been a monumental link building exercise for them with links to their site from about every news-agency on the planet, combined with a multitude of blogs, forums and articles.

Then there is social media, which although the content and tone is negative and derogatory, there's still plenty of links back to their site being dropped.

Will reputation management be an issue?

I suspect not. After a very expensive marketing campaign, they are now a household name, and most people have already formed an opinion. The chances are if you don't need to utilise their services then you will have quite a low opinion of them, and any news coverage just reinforces what you already knew or suspected.

But for those people that are their customer base, it's unlikely their own financial position has changed, or their grasp on the implications of borrowing from payday lenders. Once they are over this crisis and have put their hand in their pocket, I'll bet 90 days from now it will be business as usual, with a secure and solid linking campaign that will have saved them a fortune in marketing.

So is all publicity good publicity?

For Wonga, I suspect it might just be 

What does anyone else think?

Hmm this is a worrying direction. According to Search Engine Land Google will be dropping the Profile photos from search results as Google announces major changes to the search results. eg:

Now there' no question they help click through, but Google seems to say otherwise, so we shall wait and see 

The search results are being tinkered with all the time, and to be fair most of the time none of us really notice any difference.

Forum posts currently display a tag showing how many authors:

But it's a static statement and not a link to either author/member pages or the article. Be interesting to see if this changes.

Things like review snippets are well proven to increase click through, but Google does like to meddle, and these seem to disappear for a while.

Does anyone utilise any author pics, rich snippets or some other form of structured data to influence the look of your entries on search results? For those that have, is it worthwhile, have you been able to track and monitor your results?

Have you had any problems with either getting things to show, or things disappearing? 

Ofcom have done a survey on the breakdown of stats of how people consume news.

It seems the online digital world has only just caught up with traditional newspapers, but TV is still the most common form of news consumption.

95% of UK adults surveyed said they follow the news, with 75% saying the TV is their primary source.

41% also use the internet or apps to access the news (up from 32% last year) with the main audience being aged 16 - 34. Newspapers are used by 40% of those surveyed, (same as previous year) and 36% listen to news on the radio.

You can see the full report here:

http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/research/tv-research/news/2014/News_Report_2014.pdf

It makes interesting reading when you put your marketing hat on, and you start to get a feel for where your audience is, and what media to use.

It shows there is plenty of life in traditional media, but is also interesting to get a feel for audiences. Newspaper readers tend to be older, and spend more time absorbing the information, with a younger audience consuming digital news and which will be less sticky.

Great question on the beeb site.

Personally I don't think it will happen, but hypothetically if it did, would we have to rename the UK?

"The rest of the UK" is the handle used most commonly - it appears 293 times in the Scottish Government's white paper on independence - but leaves England, Wales and Northern Ireland in danger of sounding like Scotland's cast-offs. It's also a bit of a mouthful.

Its abbreviation, rUK, is already used by Scottish universities to differentiate between students from Scotland and those from the rest of the UK in relation to tuition fees. It regularly appears in Scottish newspapers such as the Herald and Scotsman."

www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-27867406

Maybe them and us? Like the suggestion of Former UK and it's abbreviated initials 

From the beeb:

"Payday lender Wonga must pay £2.6m in compensation after sending letters from non-existent law firms to customers in arrears.

The letters threatened legal action, but the law firms were false. In some cases Wonga added fees for these letters to customers' accounts.

The City watchdog, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), said 45,000 customers would be compensated."

Unbelievable, and all of a sudden the cuddly TV adverts of the old fogie cartoon characters evaporates as we see what kind of company they really are, sharks.

Absolutely disgusting. I only hope that as the economy improves and the cost of living comes down that these pay day sharks all disappear where they came from, and stop preying on the desperate, needy and the gullible.

If people are excluded from mainstream credit options, then go and track down a credit union.

The guest blogging hysteria seems to have passed, and it's now back to common sense and using your head.

Guest blogs, posts etc are fine as long as you're not spamming/gaming, and the site you've posted on isn't spamming/gaming.

I hate thinking out of boxes, they are uncomfortable and fall apart when it rains

Blimey, be interested to know if they won or not, you'll have to let us know  Could open the flood gates!

Google is continually updating and modernising it's search engine, and you may have heard buzz words thrown around like semantic search, structured data, or Humming Bird updates and wondered what all the fuss is about.

This is simply just the way Google now catalogues and displays information it finds from various websites, in relation to users queries, ie what you search for.

Some great recent examples have been reported by Search Engine Land.

If you type how to make french toast into Google, you will get the following result:

This is structured data and semantic search results in action.

Google wants you to ask logical questions rather than just keyword searches, and it will try and answer the question within the search display window by pulling the results from a relevant website. Rather than you clicking through to a different website.

Good news for the searcher, not so good news for the original website? Time will tell!

What does anyone think?