These are my links for July 23rd through July 27th:

  • The Subjective Web: Semantic Evolution – A nice, easy to understand article on what the Semantic Web will mean for searching and finding information online, by Raymond Bentinck.
  • International SEO – An informative 26-page e-book by Hallam Internet which gives some great advice on considering your options for an international website – considering different trends in search, findability and language.
  • Facebook to launch PayPal-style ‘Credits’ in September – I'm sure we've been here before but it seems that Facebook will be launching their own credit system, going head to head with Paypal to allow users to pay for physical and virtual goods within the network. If anyone can take on PayPal it's Facebook – but the jury is out as to how many of it's users will adopt it. If this works well for micropayments this could be a big step in allowing all kinds of transaction models.
  • Companies Throw Their Weight Behind Online Video – State-side, we're seeing more and more growth in online video, with the vast majority of Top 50 retail companies now using video for product advertising and video blogging. The growth of video for marketing looks set to continue onwards and upwards.
  • Reality Check: Just Six Percent Of TV Viewing Is Non-Linear – As us people of the future wax lyrical about time-shifted TV and video-on-demand, the stark reality is that although many people do watch VOD channels, it only accounts for 6% of TV viewing time. It seems people are happy, after all, with scheduled TV.
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These are my links for June 25th from 08:03 to 19:25:

  • What Makes Up a Social Marketing Strategy? – Research on marketers use of social media strategy – a shocking 52% are operating "without a game plan" and only 45% have a social media comapny policy. Most believe planning and delivering on social media is the main responsibility of the marketing department. Whatever happened to joined-up thinking?
  • Legal considerations for people responsible for websites – Useful little primer and links for legal responsibilities for those running websites, explaining a bit about your responsibilities as moderators and for data protection.
  • Marketing week: Digital Strategy supplement – Marketing bible Marketing Week have a selection of useful articles on digital strategy including the important of data, search and social media in making marketing decisions.
  • Consumer health trends – Useful stats from Creation Healthcare on international health search trends in relation to digital engagement.
  • Manual for bands and brands – Brand sponsorship of bands is probably the biggest growth area for investment in music. This mini e-book (a sort of commercial tribute to the Bill Drummond 'How to Have a No 1' Manual) has some good food for thought on what as a band you need to consider to make the partnership work.
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These are my links for June 18th through June 23rd:

  • Social Media Playbook – A little 101, but some useful up-to-date stats on the latest hip and happening social media networks, and some tips as to how to use them well for business in this E-Book. I disagree with some of their frequency guidelines: this should depend on the quality of content you have and the level of engagement of your audience.
  • New training courses I’m delivering: Creating Online Video for Web and Personal Branding – I've recently started to develop and deliver e-marketing training courses for Derby's Creative Exchange, a professional media training centre at University of Derby. I'm really excited about these new courses which are really expanding the reach of e-marketing to new practical and strategy elements. The first two courses are on Creating Online Video for the Web (29 June) and Personal Branding (30 June). Both are free to Derby city residents, and cost £25 if you're not.
  • The future of social/E-Mail Integration – E-Marketer research on businesses linking their social media to email campaigns, and vice versa. Seems very few are doing it (which seems like a no brainer to me) but more are going to step up their integration. I always say to clients: don't throw baby out with the bathwater: email marketing is still the highest conversion, highest sharing of 'social' media and best way to build in a long term opt-in customer base.
  • Margaret Gould Stewart: How YouTube thinks about copyright – Video from the Iconic TED conference series on how YouTube's technology allow rights holders to register tracks and when matches in the system are detected (including music in the background and mashups) the rights holder can decide if they wish to allow their film & music work to be used in its new context, presenting a new twist on copyright in the digital age.
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These are my links for May 9th through May 16th:

  • How to create compelling content that ranks well in search engines – A great 29 page e-book by Copyblogger author Brian Clark on how to make great web writing copy that also pushes all the SEO buttons. Some very useful tips, as a long pre-amble to promote his Scribe software which I admit has my interest: you enter your copy and the software gives you tips on how to improve it better for your chosen keywords.
  • The Internet Conference: Powerpoint Presentations – Susan Hallam organised the Internet Conference last week in Nottingham, an impressive collection of speakers and presentations from major e-marketing, e-commerce and SEO experts. Here's are some presentations from the day.
  • Matrix: How Facebook’s ‘Community Pages’ and Privacy Changes Impact Brands – Jeremiah Owyang's review of how Facebook's latest raft of changes are affecting brands: mostly as a negative effect. Facebook strategy is to aggregate the web, including wikipedia style aggregation, which negatively affects brands as well as personal privacy. In other news, web people vote overwhelmingly to say they prefer Facebook's 'fan' to 'like' status – which seems to have had the affect already of diluting loyalty to a Facebook Page. http://polldaddy.com/poll/3183296/ Overall, Facebook's endless tweaking and twisting seems to be having a negative affect on it's community. It's international gathering of staff to discuss privacy issues this week may signal a sea-change in their steam-roller approach to aggregating and connect all user data.
  • Is Your Social Media Strategy Just Digital Flyering? – Good article by Andrew Girvan on lessons from theatre producers on the digital equivalent of flyering – Twitter broadcasting. Some good tips on doing it better: running special promotions, targetting groups of interest, and of course making your Twitter presence be conversational.
  • From Realities to Values: A Strategy Framework for Digital Natives – No great answers here but a useful framework for understanding how to define and consider the needs of 'digital natives' (or the under 28s as this article defines them) when planning a digital strategy including content creation, engagement and advocacy.
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These are my links for April 16th through April 18th:

  • (Infographic) What Musicians Get Paid In The Digital Age – This is seriously depressing stuff. It shows how much a musicians needs to sell if relying on online physical sales and digital distribution alone to earn their keep just to the minimum wage. The greatest gap is the multi-million streams needed on services such as Spotify to achieve less than a few pence in revenue – clearly not achievable if you do not have some trigger from 'mass media' to generate it. Further evidence that musicians need to develop a mix economy of live, work-for-hire, licensing to survive.
  • Near2Home – The local business finder – Here's a new service that may be interesting to hyper local businesses: it's a link you put on your site so if businesses are far away from the areas you serve, you can route them to the Near2Home network. For every three you send, you get two referrals back. May work for more generic types of businesses.
  • Healthcare Engagement Strategy Awards 2010 – Case studies and presentation from yesterday's healthcare engagement strategy awards organised by Creation Healthcare – great examples of how the healthcare and pharmaceutical sector are finding imaginative new ways to communicate important public health and marketing messages to patients and customers.
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