I’m no foodie, but if I did want to eat at Heston Blumenthal’s soon-to-reopen Fat Duck restaurant, it’d take more than just picking up the phone. He’s apparently been vetting (potential) customers for years by Googling them. I find this interesting on two fronts: the building of a profiling dossier of patrons; and, profiling in […]
The F1 season begins with the Melbourne Grand Prix on March 17th. Like all season starts, the preamble and build-up contains huge excitement to pique a fan’s interest in the foreplay of this spectacular international road show. Vodafone McLaren Mercedes will, of course, finish victorious with both the drivers’ and the constructors’ titles returning to […]
How do you explain Twitter to someone who’s new to the whole thing, as many are with their new tablets from Santa? I’ve always said it’s like the modern CB radio. CB radios were (and still are) used for short bursts of speech – an open broadcast. Twitter is exactly that but it’s online instead […]
Apple, Microsoft, Samsung and other tech giants will have to reply to Google’s Glass project, but I shudder to think about the court cases over patents that’ll follow. The only folks wealthier than the company board members will be the lawyers that represent them. These glasses (and their many successors) won’t be for the nerds, […]
I love to talk about social media with enthusiasts of the game. How they’re practising it, where they see the benefits, where will it be in a year or so’s time. But I see more and more so-called specialists coming into the market where they sell their (apparent) expertise to businesses that either don’t have […]
Google’s free websites are great for the micro business out there who’s not online at all. They’re going to hurt those digital firms who’ve built a consultancy around helping getting such SMEs online. Well, putting a positive spin on it, perhaps it’ll just put more fish in the digital pond and those newbies may get […]
The modern business model from Silicon Valley is build. Don’t just make a computer, make digital products (as Steve Jobs said by launching a music player, then a music store, then a phone). Build and build again is what the dominant players are showing us to be the winning formula. Google was just a search […]
Evan Davis on the brilliant Bottom Line asked his guests what the business world will look like in 2020. Justin King of Sainsbury’s commented that it’s difficult enough looking at 2013 and 2020 is impossible. Laura Tenison of JoJo Maman Bebe claimed M-commerce would be commonplace, and Michael Birch, co-founder of Bebo said connectivity to […]
I was asked to call out some examples of those using digital innovation well. It’s very easy to say Dell are making money via Twitter and the new Old Spice videos are viral winners but here’s half a dozen less-heralded examples that might tickle your marketing fancy: Company: Disney Category: Social Media promotions What: Toy […]
I attended Doug Richard’s School for Startups recently. The title is a bit of a misnomer as the day had nothing specifically to do with starting a business, but it did have plenty of action points for marketing. The day was fast-paced with lecture-style talks from Mr Richard and three colleagues. Let’s be honest, you […]
News Corp’s readership numbers are on the up since they introduced their paywall last July. Surely that’s all good news? The Times and The Sunday Times has grown from 50,000 monthly digital subscribers in October to 79,000 at the end of February. They seem to have brushed under the carpet the fact that the growth […]
Linked In added the Signal this week. It’s a new product that, “gives you a whole new way to consume information and news that’s most relevant to you as a professional.” Hmm… The trouble is, I fervently disagree with those who hook up their Twitter feed to Linked In. It’s failing to understand that different […]
Answers.com sold this week for $127m. This coupled with the growing buzz around Quora, highlights the fact that Q&A sites are the poster-boy targets on the web. Added to that firestorm is Mahalo giving up on human powered search and pivoting to answers. Although it looks like they’re going for ‘how to’ queries more than […]
A website isn’t a necessity for every single business in existence but few would argue it’s a massive opportunity. When business people ask my opinion about website designers or what type of site they should employ, I say 90% should use a blog. This will usually cause a lifted eyebrow or two as the word […]
There are so many experts (perceived and real) out there, that some might feel the need to distinguish themselves from the crowd. Suddenly they’re no longer the consultants or practitioners they once were; they’ve invented self-aggrandising titles like guru, ninja and samurai instead. If someone thinks you’re pretty damn hot at something and they afford […]
Modern marketers (whatever they are) might well say TV advertising is dead, that it’s a bygone era. I’m not sure I agree. The communications group and advertising giant, WPP sells more than its fair share of TV ads and they’ve just had their best quarter for ten years. According to chief executive Sir Martin Sorrell, […]
Robert Tyler started the blog ‘I hate Ryanair’ back in February 2007. It really does what it says on the tin by publicising any and all grievances with Ryanair, ‘the World’s most hated airline’ according to Tyler and plenty of his readers. The comment section of his blog extends the frustration and anger further still […]
‘Follow us’ and ‘Stay Connected’ buttons are now as commonplace on websites as the word ‘like’ is ever-present in a teenager’s vocabulary. I’m seeing it in the most unlikely of businesses this year. This photo was taken at a country park. Do you really want to follow and interact with the tweets of a park […]
Go out with a group of friends and notice how many times Facebook crops up. Did you see it on Facebook… don’t put that on Facebook… I read about your holiday on Facebook… are you on Facebook (instead of the hassle of swapping mobile numbers). It really is becoming ubiquitous with socialising. Where there are […]
Managing Director of Emerging Media for Proof Integrated Communications, B.L. Ochman recently wrote about ‘the top 10 companies in the Fortune 100.’ She’d been checking if ‘they included their social media involvement on their homepage.’ Ochman quotes a study by Burson Masteller and her own firm indicating that 54% of Fortune 100 companies employ Twitter; […]
Nestle are used to their fair share of bad press; students the world over have seen to that. But March 2010 is when they will go into social media case study history. For anyone who’s not read the full saga, here’s the short version: a video was staged which drew a play on eating Kit-Kat […]
Twitter is on a meteoric rise. In 2007 folks were tweeting 5,000 times a day; 300,000 times a day in 2008; 2.5 million per day in 2009 and now it’s 50 million tweets per day. This month the whole shebang crossed the 10 billion tweet milestone. Which of your eyes would sell for a growth […]
You know all too well that traditional journalism has changed. We’ve read the Huffington Post and heard about the Google-Murdoch punch up. The journo genie has left the bottle. So when change has taken place in your industry and the future indicates far more, what are you expected to do? Unsurprisingly Gary Vaynerchuk advocates jumping […]
You’re having a conversation with a company Big Wig, perhaps an interview, and she asks, “What do you think of this social media phenomenon?” Well, imagine it’s the 1960s. Horses pull milk floats, colour TV is just around the corner for most households, shillings are in your pocket and the Bay of Pigs has petrified […]