by nick on December 31, 2008
Plenty of bloggers are spouting New Year’s resolutions. Most are quaint rehashes of being less avaricious, and showing greater care to one’s fellow man and the weighing scales simultaneously.
Forget resolutions, try predictions. J.K. Galbraith said ‘there are two types of forecasters: those who don’t know and those who don’t know they don’t know’, but there’s always Tom Asacker. He hits it right between the eyes with his article, “Nine Predictions for 2009.” As ever, he is articulate, succinct and on the money (at least that’s my prediction).
by nick on December 26, 2008
Here’s your Apprentice moment:
If you had a fruit stall in a town centre market, and assuming your stock had a one day shelf life, toward the close of business, would you:
a) behave exactly as you did at 8am and bin all left over product each day;
b) slash prices hours before closing to sell out; or
c) keep relatively full pricing until reducing in the last hour or two and arrange with some local care charity to give the remnants to the homeless?
Unfortunately this is a common business dilemma and it usually doesn’t have the charitable option available. The classic example is selling ad space towards a print deadline: slash prices (sometimes to zero) or increase copy against advert ratio.
Phoning clients telling of ‘super one-off deals’ makes it incredibly difficult to go back next month with an invigorated rate card. Even though the timeline has changed will the client understand today’s price is 300% more than last month’s offer? All the more so as the clients now believe they’ve done the advertiser a favour and got them out of a jam.
M&S have been playing this card recently with their 20% off days but if they keep repeating this it makes the non-20% days much harder to carry and justify. They’re educating consumers to find bargains.
This is going to be a huge dilemma for many in the Q1 squeeze that’s coming. Then again, with PWC estimating that 82% of retailers discounted goods the weekend before Christmas, are there many retailers who think we’ll get back to full pricing any time soon?
by nick on December 17, 2008
Internet Explorer 7 is apparently vulnerable to a new Trojan that can steal passwords. Firefox evangelists are looking even more smug as 10,000 websites have been compromised since the vulnerability was discovered.
It’s apparently geared towards gaming sites, but everyone’s thinking it wont be long before fraudsters engineer something more sinister. Think about your online payment company’s details being opened up. On second thoughts…
by nick on December 14, 2008
In The Bear and the Dragon, Tom Clancy paints the courageous character of Gennady Iosifovich, a Russian General. Our brave General finds himself the senior man called to defend his country against a warring China, who massively outnumber him. Prior to battle he talks to his aid about soldiers’ universal trio of needs: training, resources and leadership.
Tom Clancy is more than intelligent enough to have created that himself, but I doubt there’s an organisation in the world that could’ve helped him write it any more succinctly. Can you name a workforce – from the factory floor to the football pitch – that doesn’t require training, resources and leadership?
by nick on December 8, 2008
The best advice anyone’s giving me regarding clearer communication is to write as Aryton Senna drove: fast. Take the shortest route and get there as quickly as possible. Remove all excess baggage. When done, look back and see if you can go even quicker.
That leads me to ask how did this badly written nonsense get past anyone in marketing and make it to their home page?
“The Content Group is a technology
agnostic Enterprise Content Management (ECM) consultancy and solutions provider whose proven ECM Expert best practice methodology ensures successful ECM projects for their clients across the globe”
What? Who on earth speaks like this within this firm? Cisco is one of the world’s greatest tech companies; you wont find any such drivel on their massive site. Or Microsoft’s. Or Nokia’s.
Another example is something like this:
Last week the dates for the next courses and workshops were finalised. These are the dates…
Does it matter that you finalised last week or last month? Why not just give us the info? It could become:
The dates of our courses and workshops are… [8 words vrs 20 = 60% less. It could be even shorter.]
We’re all bombarded with content, so help us out by getting straight to the point. An excellent business writing book is Read This by Robert Gentle. It has loads of suggestions that will help readers understand you better. Definitely one for your Christmas book list if you’re any sort of copy writer.
by nick on December 2, 2008
Google launched some really innovative services in November. Here’s a quick video round up:
1. Search Wiki:
I’m not sure I’m ‘feeling this’ but its going to be interesting to see how the long tail affects results. What if 1,000 people voted your site to #1 when searching ‘4 star restaurant London’? Equally, what happens when gaming shysters bin your site? Google are saying it wont affect ‘normal’ results one bit, but you can already hear Google’s algorithms working overtime on extra servers with this 100% fresh, user generated (therefore true?) data.
Regardless, Google is getting to know you better (because you’re signed in). The big question is what will it create now it has that knowledge?
2. Voice activated search:
Only on the iPhone at present and it’s said to prefer a Californian accent, so be warned. All very Star Trek though, eh?
3. (and my favourite) Gmail video chat:
This coverage could really give Skype a run for its money.
Not so the experience you’ll find online at most of our British newspapers. Check out this article by