FWD has provided clients with digital services for a number of years: recent projects have included a new website for Premium Credit ( www.premium-credit.co.uk). It’s taken us a while but we’ve finally launched a bespoke website covering all the digital services offered by the group.  You can see it at www.fwddigital.com.

Digital is a diverse and fast-moving environment.  A dedicated website and blog will allow us to keep clients and those who are interested up to date with developments and how FWD Digital can help businesses achieve their online potential. Our blog aims to provide ideas and insight into social media, blogging, search engine optimisation and web design.

Our latest post is here: ‘Where to start with social media’ and you can subscribe to the full blog by following this link: Subscribe to fwddigital.com by Email

We hope our site will help marketeers and CEOs alike understand how their business, whether it’s a consumer-facing or B2B brand, can use its website combined with tools such as search engine optimisation, social media marketing and site analytics to achieve a range of communication and business development goals.

The FWD Digital website can be found at www.fwddigital.com. Please feel free to contact either James or Craig through the site here: Contact us.

Written by Craig Freeman

Interesting column on CNN.com from Pete Cashmore, founder of influential tech blog Mashable. In this post, Pete lays out what he thinks will be the

Top 10 trends on the web in 2010. You can read it here.

Written by Adrian Beeby

In an interesting article from a few weeks ago, The Daily Mirror asked this question: is the model Kate Moss using search engine optimisation techniques to banish any references to her alleged drug abuse from the first page of Google?

According to the Mirror, Moss is one of hundreds of celebrities who’ve paid thousands of pounds to SEO agencies to optimise the results returned from Google based on a query on their name.

The process – a combination of a various techniques including spamdexing, setting up link farms, keyword stuffing and other forms of SEO (search engine optimisation) – serves to push more negative search results off the first page of Google so they are less likely to be seen.

According to the article, former prime minister Tony Blair is also suspected of having invested in modifying the results returned by Google.

So why the interest in spending money of trying to change the order in which the world’s most popular search engine lists its results? The answer is that Google has become the first port of call for anyone gathering information on a given subject or person, including journalists who now extremely likely to run a search on it for the CEO they’re about to interview.

Today, Google provides a free reputational snapshot of any business or senior manager. As the world becomes more trusting of online research, so the order in which that information is presented to the searcher is growing in importance.

PR can also play a major role is affecting the Google search engine’s reporting of a company. The more press releases a business issues which can be found on its own website, the more these will show as positive news within the Google results. Issuing social media releases or web-optimised releases via online distribution services will also affect listings. Or, posting press releases onto free press release distribution sites will multiply the number of times a press release is picked up by Google.

At FWD, SEO and legitimate search engine results management are areas we’re extremely interested in and are working on now. Banks and insurers live or die by the strength of their reputations, as the recession has shown. Google presents a dynamic embodiment or snapshot of that reputation.

If you’d like to know more about what we’re doing, feel free to get in touch. Try googling your own name or that of your business and see what you get back.

Kate Moss has cleaned up her act - literally

Written by Adrian Beeby

Tech website mashable.com has just  published a fascinating article examining the ways in which traditional newspapers in the US are tapping into social media (blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin etc)  to, well…save themselves.

Newspaper circulations across the board have been dropping for years – a source of much concern to their publishers. As a new generation of web-savvy Generation X-ers is swapping online news and content for hard-copy papers and magazines, the old media have been hunting frantically for new business models that will allow them to tap into the emerging culture.

You can read here how they’re trying to do it in the US.

Written by Adrian Beeby