Firetop

I should have remembered how disappointing I found Internet World to be last year at Earls Court, but with free mini seminars on offer covering SEM, PPC and Web 2.0 it again seemed to be worth a visit. Unfortunately within minutes of arriving I was reminded of why the free seminars are NOT a good reason to attend the Internet World show; over subscribed presentations causing a massive shortage of seats and some very basic topics being presented. Quite why a packed crowd was sitting listening to one guy go over slides on SEO which I could well have written seven years ago I don’t know. (more…)

A Firetop client recently had problems with an impolite search engine robot which was indexing links on their website to ‘add to basket’ when it should have followed instructions and ignored them. The result was that many items were being added to a non-existent basket and taken ‘off sale’ for several hours at a time (they are unique one-off items and have to behave that way). Having fixed the matter and installed a new ‘basket watching’ function on the client’s customised Content Management System the question came up – “Why, when shopping online, do so many genuine people still abandon their transactions? (more…)

Each day spammers try to automatically post comments on this blog (and others) containing links to their websites. They do this to try and inflate the number of links pointing to their sites which in turn drives up their search engine positioning - especially when their links contain relevant keywords for the Googlebot to pick up. Mostly these comments are for the usual ‘email spam’ array of topics (viagra etc.). Today the WordPress plug-in Akismet stopped its 11,000th spam comment - taking the average to forty spam attempt postings per day since my July installation. (more…)

For the past week BBC online has been quoting games producer and researcher ‘Emma Westecott’ who says ”Although women outnumber men in playing games online, only 18% of game developers were women”. “Hang on a minute” I thought to myself when reading the article - “Women outnumber men in playing games online… since when?”. I play on Xbox Live for at least ten hours each week, and in three years I’ve only come across two female gamers (and one of those could actually have been a small whiny American boy). Xbox Live was reported in March to have hit the six million member mark - are more than 3 million of those members women, and if so where are they? Since moving to the Xbox 360 in 2005 I had (until yesterday) met absolutely no females at all (more on that later). On closer examination of global industry metrics and demographics, it seems that what is crucial here is the definintion of a ‘female gamer’. (more…)

April 1st saw the launch of the new website for the African Child Trust - a UK charity supporting the education of widows and orphaned children in Africa. Frequent readers may remember the ACT open day I attended in October 2006; I’ve been working with ACT for a number of years to support their web activities free of charge (we all need a bit of karma don’t we!). After two years of planning and development at my end (Suzie_Q included), and with the kind donation of free build services by Atto New Media, ACT have a shiny new website. On the back end is a Content Management System built with TYPO3 - giving the staff at ACT free reign to edit their content without waiting on developers. Should you be feeling particularly generous please visit the new site and test out the online donation options… there are plenty of children who need sponsoring so that they can go to school. (more…)

It’s official… I’m now an ‘Agent’, I won’t be cloaked in black or sneaking around in dark glasses but instead boldly going about my day to day life telling people what I think of products that I’ve received for testing. Recognising the increasing power of social networking and word of mouth in an Internet age, BzzAgent are a US company bringing a ‘Word of Mouth‘ marketing (WOM) solution across the Atlantic to the UK.  It’s an interesting approach – targeting the social innovators and trend setters (or Mavens as Malcolm Gladwell calls them) in the hope that some of what is trialled catches on and spreads across a network of personal connections. (more…)

Email campaign open rates seem to be continually dropping, this is in part due to the unrelenting volume of messages being received from both illegal and legitimate sources, but also because of increasingly complex spam filtering techniques. Email marketers often ask why their email copy failed to achieve high open and click through rates, usually it’s because of a reliance on blocked graphics or poor audience targeting criteria. However, there are things that can be done to lower the odds of an email falling into a spam filter because of its content. (more…)

It’s easy to get carried away with all the social networking hype; one has only to spend a few minutes eavesdropping on the train to hear how successfully young people have latched onto the current tools for keeping in touch with their peers (think Bebo, MySpace and Facebook) as well as the proliferation of Instant Messaging. It’s fairly evident that as this young tech-savvy audience moves into the world of commerce, the networking tools they’ve grown to love will be put to new uses; job searching, candidate location, news & information gathering, even supplier research and contract negotiation will be second nature in the modern virtual world. This in addition to their existing love of all things Web 2.0 for the entertainment aspect of their lives - which already carries so much weight in setting modern music and film trends. (more…)

On Thursday evening I was privileged to attend the first AdMonsters event of 2007, this time a cocktail & dinner evening at Axis / One Aldwych. One Aldwych is a hotel not too far from Temple tube station, ‘Axis’ is one of their restaurants (a rather nice one). This online advertising operations event was, as usual, pretty popular - a few familiar faces from agencies and publishers were present to discuss the daily grind facing us all in delivering online advertising efficiently and effectively. (more…)

Towards the end of 2006 I wrote a short article about the legality of digital broadcasting to UK audiences using SHOUTcast; essentially it’s quite legal to broadcast music in the US - to the US - at a small license fee, however if UK residents download the stream then a separate license is needed – and at the time of writing it was believed that there wasn’t one available… (more…)