I don't want to teach my mother how to suck eggs but for those of you who are

Twitter newbies you may be confused by all the #FF and #followfriday tags you will be seeing today.

Follow Friday is a quick way for you to recommend other Twitter users to your Followers. The good news is you can use an Automatic #FF tool to automatically follow Friday - more on automatic ff's later.

Best way to automatic FF

Note - It's best to personalise your Follow Fridays to make the people you're FFing appreciate them. AutoFF allows you to edit the FFs before you send them - so it's a great tool for helping you to identify the most valuable people to FF, and tailor each one!

Now off you go an send some loving #FF's

Need to get your online presence in shape for the summer? Look no further than our new Pick ‘n’ Mix deals on a great range of Social Media, Search Engine Optimisation Courses, and Web Design Training.

We cover a variety of Social Media strategies in SEO Training, you can also learn more about online marketing on our Google Analytics courses in Brighton, Sussex.

Well, there has been a lot of fuss about Abs Man, Hunky Guy Old Spice man, and I can understand why. It has caused such a stir that I wrote about it earlier today. But wait there's more to this viral campaign that meets the eye.

In just a few short weeks the campaign can claim

• Nearly 90,000 followers on Twitter, including a host of celebrities.
• 100 million views and 100,000 subscribers on YouTube
• 666,000 fans on Facebook

So it's a great success yes? Well yes if your goal is to increase brand awareness, to put yourselves on the Facebook Map or become king of the twittersphere. But what about sales? What if your goal is to increase sales? What about your ROI?  These questions arrived in our comment box soon after posting - thanks Nicholas Butler for making me think and have to write a follow up!

Today, news breaks that Old Spice sales have dropped 7% since the campaign started and critics are out in force talking about how viral marketing doesn't equate to sales.

So before you invest in a massive marketing campaign you or your agency should be asking what your end goals are. The fact is, the highest ROI campaigns may not use Twitter, Facebook or hunky guys. It is important to have clear goals in order before you start a campaign. If the Old Spice wanted a campaign to increase the online buzz increase brand awareness, gain thousands of fans, build a network of advocates and reach a new audience with its product, while being brilliantly entertaining, then the campaign was an overwhelming success. If the goal was to increase sales then the campaign failed.

It would be interesting to know if sales would increase if the product itself were sexy Food for thought.

followers and their followers are in the audience that you want to achieve. They can be journalists that report about your industry, colleagues, partners, or even competitors that can add value to your own profile when they interact with you.

So, how can you find “influencers”?

We do a lot of project management training here at Silicon Beach - including our most popular PRINCE2® courses - and we're often asked: "should I take the PRINCE2® Practitioner or the APMP qualification?"

There are some important differences between PRINCE2® Practitioner and the APMP qualification, and we'll cover those as quickly and clearly as we can here.

Direct traffic in Google Analytics 

During Google Analytics training delegates frequently ask what does direct traffic means? Here's our concise answer to help all beginners - if you're already familiar with Analytics basics you may be interested in our Advanced Google Analytics training in Brighton, Sussex.

We run SEO training and frequently blog on all things SEO e.g. optimising Facebook for Google and do MicroSites work?; do get in touch if there's some SEO information you'd like to see covered.

FAQ: Is training tax deductible?

At Silicon Beach Training we're commonly asked whether training is taxable 

or vatable so thought we would explain the general UK tax rules for both self-employed and employers here. Many business owners and HR managers presume that any costs incurred on training are tax deductible, however there are some exceptions depending on who is paying and what the purpose of the training is.

Once you've cleared up your tax confusions, have a browse of our many IT, Business and Management training courses: we offer SEO Training, Photoshop Training, PRINCE2® Training, HR Training and Train the Trainer Training.

Thanks to everyone who entered our "My Home Town" photography competition, in the end we had around 220 entries and a really high standard. The time has come to announce the winning photograph, with a free Silicon Beach Training course here in Brighton for the photographer: the winner will be able to choose any one or two day course with Social Media Training, Photoshop Training, Wordpress Training or Advanced Excel Training in Brighton, Sussex, being just a few of the training courses on offer.

There's only one winner, but entries were so impressive that we've also featured the six shortlisted runners up. Thanks to our fantastic photographer judges Miss Aniela and Pete Barr Watson who kindly took the time to pick a winner, based on Originality, Interpretation of the Theme and Composition.

For those who missed out last time, see our current "Summer" photography competition with an amazing Photoshop workshop for the winner.

Silicon Beach offers a range of Programming Training courses. We also offer Social Media Training, Ajax Training, Photoshop courses, PRINCE2 Training and Web Design Training in Brighton, Sussex. Bespoke courses are also available.

A robot that can detect faces and emotions!

Went to a breakfast meeting today called "Likemind" in Brighton and met some interesting people. Ian Oszvald a self-confessed Entrepreneurial Geek popped this little gismo out of his bag, brilliant! It is called the Headroid1 and is a face-tracking robot that can follow people’s faces, it is being developed to detect emotions and react to engage with people, I believe Ian is working on the "Smile Detector".

He says that programming is getting easier and is using a programming language called Python. Python is a programming language that lets you work more quickly and integrate your systems more effectively. It's supposed to be easy to read, quick to write, runs on all popular platforms and is open source (which means it's free) "Anyone can make stuff like this now." he says (yeah right I'll just knock one up - give me a minute!).

As you can see from his demo the camera is tracking me as I move shifting and tilting so that my face is always in centre of the screen.

It's a collaborative project by BuildBrighton. Ian developed the AI for the device. If you want to learn more about the programming and code side of things you can read up about it on his blog.