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22 March 2010

Listen the Latest Episode of The Bottom Line with Evan Davis

I can really recommend listening to the latest episode of the BBC radio business programme, The Bottom Line.

The episode broadcast 18th March has an excellent discussion between the bosses of a drinks firm, a housebuilder and an online gambling website, in which they look at issues such as competition, market trends in the recession, benchmarking and regulation.

The talk also touches on the topic of market disruption and disruptive technology on the internet, particularly from the view of the online gambling site, which is a general topic I hope to return to soon.

18 March 2010

Check out Tweetfeed for Building Quick Twitter Accounts

I'm currently a big fan of Tweetfeed, a free online tool for aggregating RSS feeds from different sources and then pushing them out to different Twitter accounts you manage.

This is a useful exercise because if you want to use Twitter to attract new followers and website visitors, the best way to think of Twitter is like a mini search engine.

Is the Facebook vs Google PPC Face-Off Coming?

A recent report on Brand Republic announces that "Social network Facebook has overtaken search giant Google to become the most visited website in the US for the week ending 13 March".

Now we usually expect new developments in the US to soon make their way over here (housing market crash, credit crunch, bank failures etc.) so it will be interesting to see how long it will be before Facebook possibly overtakes Google for usage in the UK.

9 March 2010

A Bad Day for Facebook

Facebook has been plastered across the media today because of its use by a sex offender, Peter Chapman, who posed as a teenage boy to meet a young victim on Facebook, Ashleigh Hall, who he subsequently met and tragically murdered.

Its an awful case that has repurcussions for everyone involved - the local police force which lost track of Chapman for 9 months, plus of course the social networking site he used, especially as he has now been dubbed the 'Facebook Killer'.

Whilst Facebook can't be held legally responsible for the actions of it's users, it does just remind us all quite how easy it is to pose as just about anyone online - after all what identity checks does Facebook use when signing up?

It also reminds us all about the importance of reminding young people about the often overlooked dangers of social networking online. When I was running a focus group of 13 year old social networking users for the planning of www.kent.co.uk, we discovered just how little structured education these youngsters felt they received from either their schools, or especially their parents.

It will be interesting to see if/how Facebook and other social sites grasp this important opportunity to help educate web users.

(Then, just as the Facebook team thought things probably couldn't get any worse,  the site has been mentioned in another case of a man who murdered his former girlfriend, prompted it is claimed, by her entries on her Facebook profile.)

New Online Media and Advertising Rules on the Way

How up to speed are you about the forthcoming new rules about how businesses promote themselves online?

Last week the Advertising Association submitted recommendations to the Committee of Advertising Practice to extend the non-broadcast code to company websites and even branded Pages on social networking websites like Facebook.

It's been suggested that a refreshed version of the Code will come out in Autumn and will be enforced by the Advertising Standards Association, who already enforce the Non-broadcast Code (CAP Code) which already covers paid for online advertising.

My guess is that like most of us, this has one has crept up unawares, especially on smaller businesses. So I'll be reviewing both the current code and the new proposals shortly and will report back on the implications for websites, socil networking and online advertising.

ASBO's for Dogs? Now thats what I call tactical.

Just heard a BBC radio news headline about a government proposal for ASBO's for Dogs. Yes really.

Now doesn't that sound just like something from an episode of satirical political comedy The Thick of It? Ollie Reader throws his desperate Minister a quick headline grabbing policy idea to take the heat off - "Quick Ollie, give me something I can go to Cabinet with this week; ASBO's for dogs? That'll do!"

Or maybe it's just coincidence that the proposal comes from the department of Home Secretary Alan Johnson; a former postman.

In either event, it sounds awfully like a short term tactical measure, at a time when surely the attention should be on strategy, and dare I say it the 'bigger issues'.

In other words, sounds like the tail is wagging the dog.

4 March 2010

Are Ebay and Amazon underated as E-commerce sales channels?

I've just been having a catch up with a former client who's coming back for some more work, and our discussion has raised some interesting issues about the use of Ebay and Amazon.

2 March 2010

Useful Free Link Analysis Tools

Here are a few useful free link analysis tools and backlink checkers....

Why Don't all Backlinks show up in a link: Search on Google?

Here's a nagging little issue that's been bugging me for ages, and recently came to a head when a client asked me why they had so few backlinks showing up when they use the link colon command?