Facebook news and stats
Facebook: 350m registers global users and counting.
Gordon MacMillan visited Facebook today and has posted some stats and news about the social media network: HERE
Filed under: 2009, November | Leave a Comment
Tags: Facebook, Gordon MacMillan
Speaking at the World Newspaper Congress in India today, Les Hinton, CEO of News Corps’ Dow Jones newspaper, has blamed the press of failing to monetise their journalism online.
Dow Jones turns a healthy profit from online subscribers; but its content is highly sought after of course from the finaincial services industry.
Les Hinton said that those involved in the newspaper business had been “taken-in by the game-changing gospel of digital evangelists.” He also raised the point “How can it be that the internet offered so much promise and so little profit?”
Newspapers have to monetise and mobilise their content – micro-payments, subscriptions and content bundling through third parties all offer viable and relevant opportunities to the newspaper industry to secure a return for their work.
In the UK, The Times and Financial Times are in strong positions to further leverage profit from digital content. While generic and less sought after suppliers, such as The Express Group, may well struggle to halt the profut decline already experienced with thier printed papers.
Read more at Media Week: HERE
Filed under: 2009, November | Leave a Comment
Tags: Les Hinton, Media Week
The Central Office of Information, who supply marketing campaigns to governemnt departments in the UK, have introduced a new 5 step planning process.
The new process is described as having a number of benefits:
· It makes it easier to identify where communications can play a role, and have the biggest impact.
· It allows for more realistic communications objectives to be set, driving more robust and meaningful evaluation.
· It makes it easier to select the most efficient and cost effective communications channels.
· It provides a unifying platform for both policy and communications.
The process itself is summarised as:
1. Identifying behaviours.
2. Understanding the influences.
3. Developing a practical model.
4. Building a marketing framework.
5. Creating a communications model.
I’m naturally suspicious of a marketing methodology that is called a behavioural change model and requires two models and a framework to implement. Is this overly complex? Or simply a case of using over-complicated Whitehall marketing speak for having the usual list of; a consumer insight, a single-minded proposition, a campaign theme, a media plan and agreed measures of effect?
But hopefully the idea of leveraging consumer insight to help change consumer behaviour will be more central to COI briefs from now on.
The COI have consulted some sensible and experienced marketing professionals in developing the system. Hopefully it will deliver better results for their campaigns.
Read more about it: HERE
Filed under: 2009, November | Leave a Comment
Tags: COI
Many thanks for reading my blog. I hope it continues to be of interest to you.
Below are the updated monthly stats, going back to the blog’s launch in April 2007.
The site now attracts 100 to 200 visitors per day. So the average now exceeds 4,000 per month.
Filed under: 2009, November | Leave a Comment
Tags: Blog Stats, Brand Tao, Kevin Sugrue
McDonald’s prepare to embrace Socialnomics.
Reported on Thinktank Media: Here
Presentation on Slideshare: McDonald’s Serves Up Social Media
Filed under: 2009, November | Leave a Comment
Tags: McDonald's, Social Media, Socialnomics
Gary Hayes’ Social Media Counts
Gary Hayes’ excellent blog contains a great piece of coding, providing live data feeds for some social media stats.
Visit: HERE
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Tags: Gary Hayes, Social Media Metrics
Mobile internet usage stats for Opera Mini are growing exponentially.
Read about the 500 million daily mobile page views and how the average consumer is downloading 6mb of data on their mobile each month: HERE
Filed under: 2009, November | Leave a Comment
Tags: mobile internet, Opera Mini
Filed under: 2009, November | Leave a Comment
Tags: Eye tracking research, Eyetracker, Neuroscience, Neurosense
Top 20 Guitar Riffs
I caught up with some friends over the weekend and a trivia debate started off the back of the recent Music Radar survey for the Top 20 Guitar Riffs of all time. The top 5 were obvious, but the debate on the best, what’s in and what’s left out of the top rock guitar riffs was entertaining.
The list is below, but you may wish to read the Sky News coverage too.
Without Sweet Home Alabama by Lynyrd Skynyrd in the Top 20, the list missed one of my favourite riffs. But I guess there must have been a lot of metal and heavy rock fans voting?
Top 20 Best Riffs
1. The Jimi Hendrix Experience – Voodoo Child (Slight Return)
2. Guns N’ Roses – Sweet Child O’ Mine
3. Led Zeppelin – Whole Lotta Love
4. Deep Purple – Smoke On The Water
5. Derek and the Dominos – Layla
6. AC/DC – Back In Black
7. Metallica – Enter Sandman
8. The Beatles – Day Tripper
9. Nirvana – Smells Like Teen Spirit
10. The Rolling Stones – (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction
11. Black Sabbath – Paranoid
12. Muse – Plug In Baby
13. Eddie Van Halen – Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love
14. The Kinks – You Really Got Me
15. The White Stripes – Seven Nation Army
16. AC/DC – Highway to Hell
17. Led Zeppelin – Heartbreaker
18. Black Sabbath – Iron Man
19. Led Zeppelin – Black Dog
20. Michael Jackson – Beat It
See the full list at MusicRadar.com
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Tags: Top 20 Guitar Riffs
In the mood for a drive?
There was a time when people used to go for a drive, simply for the pleasure of driving. Traffic congestion, driving costs and environmental concerns may have all played a part in diminishing the pleasure of motoring. And it’s fair to say that many other pastimes have gripped our interest. But today as it rained for the third day running over my home. I longed for an open road and took a peak at some of what National Geographic Traveler calls ‘Drives of a Lifetime.’
Maybe I need an electric car to avoid the guilt (a Tesla would be good for that). But today I’d rather enjoy some of the recommended routes in a VW Karmann Ghia, Citroen D5 or a Renault Alpine GTA.
Filed under: 2009, November | Leave a Comment
Tags: Drives of a lifetime
Should brands dare to go bare?
While marketers and politicians have made some small progress in reducing the environmental impact of product manufacture, marketing and distribution. One simple manufacturing and design idea caught my attention recently and holds some appeal.
The question relates to the packaging of products and how the addition of paints, inks and embellishing processes use significant volumes of chemicals and water to achieve their results. What if these could be reduced or removed? Would a brand dare to have its products go bare?
While design enhances packaging and attracts the eye of the consumer. The paints and inks may perhaps be less important than using the packaging materials themselves more creatively to convery the brand image and product message?
The example below of a Coke can makes a point. The design still ensures brand recognition and appeal, without any toxic paint or other embellishment required.
Designer Harc Lee has come up with the design and the work is intriguing, as the product packaging appears to have been enhanced, at least to my critical eye, while actually simplyfying manufacture and reducing both environmental impact and production cost.
While it’s only a small step, it appears to have some merit. If, as reported by Gizmondo, Coke manufacture 75 billion cans every year (of all the Coke varieties combined). It’s clear that not only would cutting the paint/dye process from manufacture save time and money. It would also aid recycling, as aluminium cans are currently stripped bare through a chemical process in order to recycle the metal.
View Harc Lee’s portfolio online: HERE
Filed under: 2009, November | Leave a Comment
Tags: Coke Can, Environmental Design, Harc Lee
“Once the mind has been stretched by a new idea, it will never again return to its original size.”
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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Tags: Oliver Wendell Holmes
Thanks to the Institute of Economic and Social Research for their tracking and comparison between the current UK recession and previous ones.
As Bette Davis said ‘ Buckle your seatbealts, it’s going to be a bumpy night.’
Visit IESR: HERE
Filed under: 2009, November | Leave a Comment
Tags: Compare Recession, Institute of Economic and Social Research, Track Recession, UK Recession
While I’ve been watching developments in OLED, surface computing and 3D screens with interest over the last few years. Sony now appear to be making significant steps forward in interactive digital screen technology. While some mobile phones already use touch screens and thin (TFT) screens. I’m looking forward to seeing more business and consumer products feature touch screen technololgy and flexible screens very soon.
Find out about their new OLED screen technology: HERE
Filed under: 2009, November | Leave a Comment
Tags: Flexible Organic EL Display, OLED, Sony, Surface Computing
Five years of Firefox
There was a period when time spent working online was measured in a similar manner to the way people think of ‘dog years’ (dogs being perceived to age 7 times quicker than humans). A year of digital experience was akin to 7 years working offline. It was an exageration of course, with a kernal of truth. But the pace of digital development has slowed a little (the internet hit 40 years old last week – could this herald middle age spread? Or a looming mid life crisis?).
Netscape Logo 1994 - 2002
In 1994 Netscape made the internet truly accesible for consumers for the first time, slow though it was, through a 14.4k or 28.8k modem and a Netscape browser. After their decline and fall, to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (which, to be frank, was great in its first few years). The Byzantine code that made up Netscape Communicator remained behind; from the once great Netscape Navigator, that plummeted from controlling over 90% of the browser market, to under a 1% share in the late 1990’s. But after the AOL purchase debacle, the code gained an interesting new life. Under the stewardship of Mozilla (entering into Open Source first in 1998), in 2004 Firefox was born.
So this month marks the 5th birthday of Firefox (or 15th year and a bit for its Netscape parent). And Firefox has finally become a relevant and compelling web browser again. There’s no lag (not in the IE8 sense) and with Xmarks it is easy to flip your favorites list from one PC/Mac to another. So you never need to set up another computer from scratch
So here’s wishing Firefox a happy 5th (15th?) birthday.
There is an understated, but interesting, celebration for Firefox: HERE
Filed under: 2009, November | Leave a Comment
Tags: AOL, Firefox, IE8, Internet Explorer, Mozilla
While the length of the name increases with each iteration of the game. Today is a huge event for video gamers – whether PC or console players.
While I won’t be splashing out for the Playstation 3 version of the game that comes packaged with night vision goggles. I will be buying a copy of the game today – along with tens of thousands of other gamers.
I know of several other account planners who play this game. Unfortunately we all use different gaming platforms, so can’t play either as a unit or against each other.
A review has been posted by MTV HERE. They have been lucky enough to play the game for 200 hours already (hopefully with some sleep along the way).
Infinity Ward have something to say about their new game: HERE
See you in the Spetsnaz ranks on the UK PC servers. My call sign is Jangle.
Filed under: 2009, November | Leave a Comment
Tags: Call of Duty, Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2, COD5
Recent Entries
- Group M forecast less doom, more gloom, in U.K. ad spend
- Facebook news and stats
- Les Hinton calls time on free digital newspaper content
- COI introduce a new 5 step marketing planning process
- Stats update for the Brand Tao blog from Kevin Sugrue
- McDonald’s Serves Up Social Media
- Gary Hayes’ Social Media Counts
- Opera Mini serves 500m mobile page views daily
- Eye Tracking and Neuroscience in market research
- Top 20 Guitar Riffs
- In the mood for a drive?
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