Podcasting? That’s old-fashioned – video is the online future

Professor Jeffrey Cole reckons that before too long we will be watching several hours of video programming on our mobile phones. At a conference in Sydney, Australia, he told digital marketers to expect a major shift to mobile video. We all know that video has taken off online – YouTube …

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British supermarkets show small online retailers how to succeed

British supermarkets have said a collective “thank you” to investigators who were looking at suggestions the stores were anti-competitive. The Competition Commissioners found that all was OK with the supermarkets. This is in spite of the fact that many small store owners complained that the large superstore owners were driving …

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Don’t get too excited about the MySpace and Google deal

All over the news sites in the past 24 hours you will have found plenty of coverage about the Google deal with MySpace. In essence it means that Google is working with developers at MySpace to allow applications to be built that work on any social networking platform. In other …

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Trust is a key issue in email marketing

Readers of email messages designed to sell them something are much more likely to buy if the top of the email carries a security logo. This is the conclusion of a study performed by a publishing company. What they discovered was the fact that if an email contained an isolated …

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Tricks or treats? How should you revive those email ghosts?

Ghosts exist in your marketing system. They are the subscribers and people on your email list who actually don’t read what you send them; everything you provide goes into some kind of void, into the ether. Clearly having ghosts in your machine for marketing is doing you no good. You …

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Successful blogs could make millions

Bloggers who have built up a loyal following of readers could be set for rich rewards. According to Business Week magazine, several blogs are being eyed up by traditional publishers as potential take-over targets. Great news for the bloggers. However, there is a revealing comment, almost as a throw-away line, …

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Back on the BBC again

BBC Radio has just interviewed me about the whole concept of “virtual assistants”. Nice little piece about getting your life organised by someone else!

Christmas shopping for The Scotsman

The Scotsman newspaper just called to interview me about Christmas shopping. They wanted to know why so many people do their shopping online – and what they should look out for in terms of any scams.

GAP trouble provides important message for online businesses

Children in India have been making clothes for the retailer GAP, in spite of the company’s well publicised policy on not using child labour. Now the company has launched an investigation into the incident. However, the company could have easily avoided this embarrassment with two simple pieces of technology – …

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Your Internet future depends on meeting people

Futurist David Zach recently spoke to a group of business people and told them to drink more..! What he meant was to go out and drink more coffee at places where you can meet people who can help your business. He is a clear advocate of the fact that business …

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High Street retailers fail the online test – again..!

Retailers with successful “bricks and mortar” stores are – once again – failing to capitalise on the Internet. That’s the conclusion you can draw from the analysis of the annual WebCredible Ecommerce report. The report looked at ten major retailers and got 1,000 people to score them for various aspects …

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Does social networking mean anything to the UK Government?

What does social networking mean to you? Probably, you think of things like Facebook, Ecademy, MySpace and so on. Do you also automatically think of teenagers? Well, the average age of people on Ecademy is mid-40s, for MySpace it’s mid-30s. So, sometimes our views about who is using social networking …

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