Our Thoughts

Young & Shand is a Digital Marketing Agency based in Auckland, New Zealand. Founded by Ben Young & Duncan Shand we create and deliver remarkable marketing campaigns. With a word of mouth focus, we digitally leverage your marketing strategy to deliver customer engagement and business growth. Everything starts with a story so read ours.


Find out more about us


This Week In Digital Marketing 13-17 Feb: Facebook’s Timeline is Coming For Brands, Introducing Inbound.org, DuckDuckGo Hits 1 Million Daily Searches

February 17, 2012 by

This week in digital marketing search newcomer DuckDuckGo has it’s first one million search day, Two prominent internet marketers start Inbound.org, Facebook’s Timeline coming for brands and 7 Facebook Sponsored stories ad tactics to help brands.

Facebook’s Timeline Coming For Brand Pages

Mashable logo

Facebook will begin it’s roll out of timeline for brands at the end of the month if reports from AdAge are true. Initially only a handful of brands will have beta access. One issue that may pop up is the lack of information above the fold on timeline pages, another pointed out by a Mashable commenter is what is to happen to tabs, a hugely important feature for brands which can hold competitions, games, welcome pages and more. The report believes the announcement will be made at Facebook’s fMC event on the 29th of this month. Read the mashable article here.


Introducing Inbound.org

Inbound.org is a new website from two of the internets most prolific inbound marketers, Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz and Dharmesh Shah of HubSpot. The site’s goal is to provide the best content from inbound marketers on the web, offering content creators a new means of exposure and marketers with new knowledge. The site features a reddit-esque voting system which allows the sites users to determine what content is worthy of being on the front page. Sign ins are currently handled via Twitter, which gives you access to vote and comment on submissions. Read the article here.


Facebook Leads In Display Ad Impressions

Search Engine Land logo

DuckDuckGo, a search engine you may not have heard of, is experiencing rapid growth in the search market on the back of privacy fears around Google. DuckDuckGo has had it’s first day of one million searches. This is nothing on the big boys like Google and Yahoo but considering one year ago nearly to the day, they had a mere 176,000 daily searches, their growth becomes quite apparent. You can see thier historical traffic stats here, or read the article here.


7 Facebook Sponsored Story Tactics

All Facebook lolo

AllFacebook have compiled a list with some great uses of the new sponsored stories ads. Promoting a video is ideal with sponsored stories as the user can play the video in the ad itself, increasing views. Sponsored stories can display ads to friends of your fans, these ads show ‘social context’, so the person that sees the ad will be shown ‘John Smith Likes Brand X’ hopefully increasing the like rate. A solution to low engagement is being offered with the ability to include a post in the ad so more users can like/comment on it. Read the rest of the tips here.


On A Lighter Note…

A video showing a fathers rant on his daughters Facebook post went viral this week, as it’s over the top conclusion made headlines across the web. After a 6 minute rant the man pulls out a .45 calibre hand gun and unleashes a few rounds into his daughters laptop. Check the video out below…

Sean is a Digital Account Executive at Young & Shand.

Mobile: 021 029 35410   Email: sean.lewis@youngshand.com

This Week In Digital Marketing 30-3 Feb: LinkedIn 277% More Effective For Lead Gen, 5 Ways To Take Advantage Of The New YouTube and Facebook Leads In Display Ad Impressions

February 3, 2012 by

This week in digital marketing LinkedIn found to be more the 277% effective in lead gen over Facebook & Twitter, 5 Ways to brand your Youtube channel, Facebook leads in display ad impressions by a significant margin and Google’s latest algorithm update targets pages with too many ads.

LinkedIn 277% More Effective For Lead Generation Than Facebook & Twitter

Hubspot logo

In a study of over 5000 businesses released by HubSpot, LinkedIn was found to have the highest visitor-to-lead conversion rate at 2.74%. This figure is significantly more than Facebooks’ 0.77% and Twitters’ 0.69%. They provide a few tips for leveraging your business’ social, such as growing you network with quality contacts rather than quantitiy. Post content that is quality and has proven results, use what works best in your network. Finally, keep testing, analyzing your data, and increasing your results! Read the article at HubSpot here.


5 Ways To Brand Your New YouTube Channel

Social media examiner logo

Youtube’s new design brings more than just a new interface, with video and channel customisation key changes in the recent update. These changes introduce a more engaging brand experience on your channel, with some people reporting increased click-through-rates as a result of the changes. 5 tips are provided in the article for branding your channel. Use overlays on your videos to provide people watching your videos a call to action by promoting them. You can prevent other ads from displaying on your videos if you wish, by checking the box: “Prevent ads from showing in my videos on this page”. Send users to the feed tab on your channel, in this view they can see your recent activity and have the ability to comment, the goal is to increase user engagement. Read the full article here.


Facebook Leads In Display Ad Impressions

Mashable logo

Facebook’s share of display advertising impressions has reached 28%, reported ComScore, extending the lead as the top display network. ComScore has regarded Facebook as the leader in display impressions since 2009. Yahoo is some way behind in second place holding an 11% share, with Google, Microsoft, and AOL share sitting at 5% apiece. Read the details at Mashable here.


Google’s Newest Algorithm

Search Engine Watch logo

Google’s latest algorithm update, which Google Engineer Matt Cutts calls, “Page Layout algorithmic improvement” will affect 1 percent of searches globally, targeting websites that have too many ads visible when the user arrives at the page. This update aimed at providing searchers with results that have a better user experience, websites splattered with ads are ugly and their layout is generally poor. Read the article at Search Engine Watch here.


On A Lighter Note…

This cool interactive billboard comes from BMW. Set up in major South African cities, users could interact using their iPads. Check out the video…

Sean is a Digital Account Executive at Young & Shand.

Mobile: 021 029 35410   Email: sean.lewis@youngshand.com

This Week In Digital Marketing 16-20 Jan: 7 Mistakes On Your Business Blog, Gamification Livens Your Commute & Web Giants Fight SOPA

January 19, 2012 by

This week in digital marketing Mashable makes a few predictions of whats to come for Community Managers in 2012, HubSpot review 7 common mistakes that businesses make on their blog, 3 ways to overcome the dull commute with Gamification and web giants band together to fight SOPA & PIPA.

Community Management Predictions In 2012

Mashable logo

In this article from Mashable, some predictions are made on the relatively new ‘Community Manager’ role in companies with an online presence. With many new niche community networks popping up and gaining popularity like Pinterest, Instagram and Stamped, brands can gain a following and interact with their customers. Mashable predicts it will become more common for brands that are relevant to a niche network to have a presence. They also predict there will be more user generated content for brands, due to having tools that make it easier to create content. Read the rest of their predictions here.


7 Common Mistakes Your Business’ Blog May Be Making

Hubspot logo

Are you making common mistakes with your businesses blog? HubSpot have seen how easy it is to get wrong and have produced an article outlining 7 commonly made mistakes and easy solutions to remedy them. The first mistake was not having the blog integrated with the company website, this is the worst in my opinion (as an SEO). You lose a huge amount of keywords, views and most importantly, if someone were to link to your blog your business’ website, you wouldn’t gain the link. Publishing to much information pertaining to your own business is also a mistake. Your readers will get bored quickly and see your blog as simply an advertisement, try and write more educational or thought provoking content, relevant to your industry. See the rest of the tips here.


3 Ways To Overcome The Commuter Blues With Gamification

The Gamification.co blog has presented three ways to get over the commuter blues with these gamified apps and programs. The first implementation is a smartphone app called ‘Waze’ which incorporates crowdsourcing, location-based, and gamification and has become the top navigation app in Israel. Game mechanics encourage drivers to head down roads that don;t have traffic and road conditions and to report their findings back to the app. Other drivers can consult the app to see the most efficient route of travel. Another use of gamification is in new Ford vehicles which provides a visual representation of how efficient you’re driving the car, encouraging you to save gas. Sensors around the car send data (rain, traffic and fuel levels) to the program which processes it and calculates fuel efficiency and exports it into a graph. Read the full article here.


Wikipedia to Join Web Giants – Taking Action Against SOPA & PIPA

Facebook logo

Wikipedia is joining Mozilla, Imgur, Greenpeace, Reddit, WordPress and thousands of other sites in ‘blacking out’ their site on January 18th in protest of two anti-piracy bills, SOPA & PIPA, under consideration by the U.S. congress. Google have also taken action by placing a message urging users to contact congress on their homepage, directing them to this landing page. You can read more about why this bill is bad for the internet here.


On A Lighter Note…

This creative video was produced by the Google’s Maps team to promote exploring the city with their product.

Sean is a Digital Account Executive at Young & Shand.

Mobile: 021 029 35410   Email: sean.lewis@youngshand.com

Page 1 of 612345...Last »