Please help

Sport Relief
(I should apologise for bringing you here by illicit categorisation and tagging, but I won’t. You might have wasted just 10 seconds. Hopefully you will make the choice to change someone’s world in less than a minute).

The 26 Week Internet Marketing Plan

If I said to you, you can learn about Internet Marketing in a weekend, and implement a thorough Strategic Internet Marketing plan in just 26 weeks, you might react in two negative ways; depending on your perspective. I know I did.
How can you provide me a strategic plan? That’s nonsence.
or
26 weeks? That’s [...]

Greatest Copy Shot Ever Written

In the year 2000, some of the stars of creative advertising during the 20th century nominated 115 best slogans, straplines, taglines, and headlines. Nick Padmore in The greatest copy shots ever written has analysed the list a bit further.Nick is a digital copywriter at bd-ntwk/London and admittedly has ‘an unhealthy interest in how language [...]

Usability: do’s and don’t’s

I am always plugging e-consultancy and their reports. I’m going to stop. After this last post….
Have you ever wondered if you are spending more or less than other companies on usability? Or wondered which sites you should be looking to for inspiration - i.e. the best-rated UK websites for user experience? What [...]

Three letter acronyms (TLAs)

I got an invite to a webinar today.  I get a lot of these.  Tech vendors LOVE their webinars.
I’ve read the title of the invite twice.  Twice.  Slooooooowly.
“TWO WORLDS COLLIDE:  Combining PPM and ALM, from the PMO Perspective” *

Now I’ve worked in technology marketing all my working life.  I get technology.
But the use of two, [...]

How to create an effective + unique blogging experience

This is simply a great presentation about creating an effective + unique blogging experience.

I particularly like the 4c’s of Blogging….

Content
Community
Consistency
Clarity

….and in particular the concept of bloggers aspiring to be ‘Conversation Architects’.
I’ve broken many rules by regurgitating this content. But when the content is THIS good I think it’s worth sharing.
And when your done [...]

Semicolonic Irritation

Make no mistake. Copywriting is a skill worth paying for.
But the rules are odd. When it comes to marketing: the less you need to write, the more you should consider paying a professional imho.
Anyway, I’ve paid Writing Machine for a variety of projects in the past (thankfully) - and regular readers will know [...]

80% of 1990s Usability Study still holds true

As Web usability testing enters its 14th year, it’s worth asking how early results have held up to recent user research.
10 years ago, Jakob Nielsen wrote an article on the changes in Web usability from 1994 to 1997. A few of his original findings were no longer valid a mere 3 years [...]

An Excellent Web Design Best Practice Guide

e-consultancy have just introduced their latest best practice guide. This time it concerns itself with Web Design.
Now this is a popular topic, and everyman and his dog has a perspective on what to do and what not to do when it comes to web design. But just for a change, e-consultancy introduced this [...]

Great ads that never ran

“Very few ideas are ‘new’, and no ideas are ‘bad’.”
That’s what I was told as a junior marketer in my first marketing post for db vendor InterSystems, and it has kind of stuck with me ever since. Maybe my ideas were poor and someone was being polite? I’d like to think not [...]

The Science of Email Marketing Creativity

There is no denying that marketers are continually pushing the creative envelope when developing campaigns that are both meaningful and influential to their target audiences. Email marketers, however, need to be even savvier. A superb creative is not enough to guarantee success in a medium where the audience is [...]

Interface decision making: in the blink of an eye

This post started a brief conversation about usability, interfaces and making first impressions count. In it David Hawdale discusses various usability issues in a little more detail.
After reading his comment, I jumped on his website to take a look around and was presented with these images.

Thanks for the laugh David. This sure flags [...]

Call - Speak - Get More Done

This could be very BIG indeed.
Too bad it is U.S. only at the mo.

Meet the Name Inspector and enjoy his 10 tips

The Name Inspector takes a close look at names and tells you what makes them tick (or tank) from a linguistic point of view. He does not offer marketing treatises on branding strategy or corporate nomenclature. He is concerned with the linguistic essence of names: how they feel and sound when spoken, what they look [...]

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 [...]