The digital marketing happening of the year

Internet World 2007 is just around the corner - the UK’s most influential and inspirational event for digital business.

The biggest names and the brightest brains in the digital age through keynote sessions from IAB, Google, Channel 4, BBC, John Lewis, Bebo, IKEA, Sainsbury’s, Yahoo!, Cheapflights.com, Six Apart and many more in 150 hours of FREE [...]

Walled garden to gated community

Stuart Hogue has written a great piece for Brandchannel.com.
From the walled garden to the gated community—why social networks would benefit from keeping the riffraff out
When social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook first emerged on the scene, their emphasis was on quantity, rather than quality, of connections. Friends were collected, groups joined, walls posted [...]

Is it time to swap your agency?

Andrea points us to the WSJ.com which is running a very interesting story about Nike and its choice of marketing agency.
It is fascinating to speculate whether this is simply Nike exercising its right to change its agency roster - or whether something more significant - a trend - is begining to emerge.
“Industry executives say the [...]

two steps to heaven

Strategic Alternative Marketing is the phrase we give to the plethora of constantly evolving marketing techniques that make a (significant) difference to technology based brands and how they are perceived and consumed.
We essentially focus on trying to make technology brands more remarkable, approachable, relevant, attentive and capable of cultivating strong and meaningful relationships with their [...]

Emerging Media in B2B: “The times, they are a-changin.”

Jeff Ramminger is executive vice president of KnowledgeStorm, an Atlanta-based company that helps B2B technology vendors reach technology buyers through online lead-generation and brand-awareness programs, including online content distribution of white papers and product and service information, targeted e-newsletters, webcasts, and online advertising.
His perspectives are always worth reading - and in this piece for Brandchanne.com [...]

Usability 2.0 and Psychological types

There is a nice article here by David Hawdale which discusses the positive evolution of usability.

The Dip by Seth Godin

The Dip by Seth Godin. More here.

Steganography anyone?

A technique stemming from a 2,500-year-old practice called steganography (which saw the Greeks sending warnings of attacks on wooden tablets and then covering them in wax, or tattooing messages on shaved heads to be subsequently covered by the regrowth of hair) has found new commercial applications.
Fujitsu’s technique works by taking advantage of [...]

Sack the webmaster?

A great post by Josiah.
19 things NOT to do when building a website. 
Thanks to Tomorrows Playground for pointing us in the right direction.

Apple v Microsoft 2007

Apple v Microsoft 2007. Snore.
But I simply can’t believe the poor quality of their home pages today.
Microsoft is trying to look like Apple 2005. Badly.

Apple has tried to go all minimalistic. Hell that menu looks very nasty in this context.

I can’t help but assume that both these companies are too fixated with [...]

Red Nose Day today

‘Comic Relief’ is a super UK based charity that needs support.
To find out more go here.  To give go here

The bells and whistles business

Take away the bells and whistles, drums, guitar, mics, speakers, audio mastering etc and this group remain ‘remarkable’.
If you were to take away the ‘bells and whistles’ of your marketing operation - what are you left with? If you were to take away promotion, offers, advertising, direct mail, email, SEO, “spin”, booklets, tradeshows, leaflets, call [...]

Mission statement-itis

Despite widespread mission statement dissing from the likes of Guy Kawazaki in the last year - little has changed in the UK IT/S sector when it comes to defining the value a technology oriented company provides.
Most mission statements I see are complex, unwieldy, technical and loooooooooong.
From the technology vendor’s perspective this is usually much to [...]

Shoot the puppy

If you have trouble understanding modern slang, you may find Tony Thorne’s, ‘Shoot the puppy - A Survival Guide to the Curious Jargon of Modern Life‘ the book for you.
Shoot the puppy’ – which is business slang for doing something unthinkable – has been put together by Tony Thorne using the archive of slang and [...]

Green leverage

First it was charitable Christmas cards.  Then it was donating the aquivilent spend on Christmas cards directly to charity.  And then it was participating in hands-on activities with a chosen charity during the course of the year. Marketers, it seems love their companies to be seen doing the right thing.
But lets face it.  Most companies [...]