Marketing Tom - Internet Marketing

Filing From Flock

If this goes the way I intend, then this post will have been created through Flock, the Social Web Browser. Flock, according to its website is "powered by Mozilla, the same fast and secure engine that powers the Firefox browser."

After months of hearing about people using it, I have finally decided to dip my toe into the water.

It looks like a superb tool for updating your Facebook profile, Twitter account, Flickr, YouTube, Photobucket and Picassa accounts. It also looks like an ideal tool for publishing direct to your favourite blogging software - in my case Typepad.

Having just started to read Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff's brilliant book Groundswell, where their Social Technographic Ladder breaks consumers down into 6 categories, I was quite taken by Flock's use of tabs to reach out to:

• Social Animals
• Shutterbugs
• Bloggers
• Media Junkies and
• News Hounds

Go ahead, give it a try!

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tags: flock, browser

Xobni - Now Open To The Public

After 7 months of invite-only access, Xobni is now open to the public. For those who don't know, Xobni is:

"the Outlook plug-in that helps you organize your flooded inbox"

Xobni appears in your Outlook screen as a panel. It allows you to see your Outlook contacts in a whole new light by letting you see their conversations with them, the network (from your Outlook contacts) they belong to and even the files you have exchanged with them. At a glance it shows you how many emails you received from a given contact and the emails you also sent them. In graph format it will even show at what times of the day the contact is most likely to email you!

I haven't been using it for a couple of months and boy, does it offer you a whole new outlook on the way you handle email contacts.

If you haven't used Xobni, I would strongly recommend that you take a look at it. Here's a video to get you started:

May 2008 - eMarketing Award Courses

As some of you may be aware Marketing Tom Media became a Chartered Institute of Marketing's Accredited Study Centre in January of this year. To date we've been very busy doing consultancy and training: we have delivered Social Media Marketing workshops to Further Education colleges in South West, South East and North Wales; we have  begun some Internet Consultancy work with the Welsh Assembly Government and a number of SME's and we have just completed a 2-week Internet Training programme in Jakarta, Indonesia.

Now, for the first time Marketing Tom Media will be delivering the eMarketing Award from a venue just outside Cardiff. The first dates that we have are: 12th, 13th, 19th and 20th May. If you would like to sign up for the course we still have 1 or 2 places available. Costs are £695 plus an application to study fee of £70 for CIM Members or £190 for non-CIM members (the latter inlcudes studying membership). For more information, take a look at the eMarketing Award page.

Another CIM eMarketing Award course will be run in July and we will shortly be announcing the dates for the Business Blogging, Social Media Marketing and Google AdWords 1-day courses. If you would like more information on any of these, please send an email to: alun@marketingtom.com.

BBC Ads on International Pages

I am currently delivering an eMarketing course in Jakarta, Indonesia and one evening (well, every evening), I thought I'd check the news from home on the BBC. I was quite surprised to find on this occasion that, on opening the BBC website, they are now delivering banner ads. So far I have seen rich html ads appearing above the general BBC homepage template and in the top right corner (just below the nav bar) and video ads, appearing just before sports news stories. Let's just hope that some of this money goes to reducing the amount we have to pay in the UK for license fees (current cost £139 per year)!

Google Goes Black for the Day

I must say I thought my computer was playing up this morning - I went to my Google search page and it went completely black. On closer inspection I found the line:

We've turned the lights out. Now it's your turn - Earth Hour

Apparently,

Google users in the United Kingdom will notice today that we "turned the lights out" on the Google.co.uk homepage as a gesture to raise awareness of a worldwide energy conservation effort called Earth Hour.

It will all culminate in Earth Hour, where people around the world are invited to turn their lights off for one hour (8-9 pm on Saturday night in the UK).

It doesn't look though like Google.com, based in the country that wastes more energy that any other country on earth, is following suit!

24% Of Internet Users Can't Find Google!

An interesting (should it read alarming) stat comes out this week from Jakob Nielsen who says that 24% of people were unable to get to Google in order to perform a search.

On the one hand, 76% is a high success rate. On the other hand, getting to Google is a very simple task. It's not even a true task — that is, it's not something users want to accomplish for its own sake or something we'd pose as an assignment in user testing. Getting a Google search box is the first step in searching the Web, which is only the first step in doing something real (such as, in one of our test tasks, to find "a strong vacuum cleaner that is easy to use, can pick up pet hair, and costs under $300").

All too often we, who work in the Internet industry, take it for granted that what for us are very simple tasks, will also be simple for other people. I am often guilty of assuming that everything is simple myself. I will ask people on my eMarketing Award courses to type in a URL in the “address bar” or the Google box and am occasionally (not too often!) met by blank stares!

Tiger Woods Putt and the Long Tail

In April of 2005 I wrote an article entitled Tiger Woods Putt Goes Open Source. I write about a putt he did in the Masters of that year but mainly focus on a video that appears on Jaffe Juice: Tiger did it a.k.a. the next Nike Commercial. The article is only one paragraph long but appears in position number one of Google for the keywords:  "Tiger Woods Putt".

Why? I think there are a few reasons why this is so.

1. Page Title: Tiger Woods Putt goes Open Source

2. H3 Tag: Tiger Woods Putt goes Open Source

3. Keywords in article: golf, tiger woods, putt, masters, nike

4. Outbound links:

Tiger Woods Official Website
Woods Captures Fourth Masters
PGA Tour
Callaway Golf
Nike Golf

Why mention this now?
Well, yesterday I had a huge spike in my traffic and it was caused by people searching for "Tiger Woods Putt" - and trying to find the 25-foot birdie putt that he did in the Arnold Palmer Invitational on March 16th, 2008. If it is this putt that you're looking for, here it is:

Subscribe To Marketing Tom

If you like the articles on this site, why not subscribe to the blog? Here are a couple of options for you:

RSS Email Updates

Just add your eMail address and we'll send you notification of every article that's posted here .

Delivered by FeedBurner

RSS Feeds
Or how about just getting the RSS feed for your Reader:

Get our Feed Today!

The Boys From 37 Signals on Wired

Wired magazine has a very good feature on Jason Fried and David Heinemeir Hansson of 37 Signals. It talks about how they got together, the fans of their Ruby on Rails web application network and the applications developed by RoR. It's quite incredible that before Heinemeir developed BaseCamp, the first application created using Ruby on Rails, it was considered by most developers to be too slow and limited to be of much use. It is quite ironic that today Ruby on Rails is recognised for its speed and versatility and according to Wired:

"an adept programmer can create a simple blogging application in 15 minutes or a photo database in five. Two guys built Twitter in two weeks."

Apart from Twitter, the popular web applications Odeo, 43 Things and Writeboard were all created using RoR. There are some great quotes in the article which have been lifted from 37 Signals' blog Signal vs Noise. Let me share some of them with you:

"If BusinessWeek wants to say it only takes $50 and an internet connection to be the next mogul they may want to cite a valid example. It's certainly possible, but Digg isn't that example."

"Windows in general has been like a confused and slow person. Vista is like a person who lost their meds and is trying their best to ignore the voices."

"What's with the social bookmarking icons at the bottom of every single friggin' blog post out there? ... The hectoring is tiresome, it results in extraneous visual noise, and the benefits are dubious at best."

"An open letter to people who wear those Bluetooth headsets that blink: ... That blue light that blinks incessantly can't actually be seen by you. The rest of us, however, do see it. And it annoys us. Stop."

"Only in the perverted world of the Web can something as simple and fundamental as making money be in need of a fancy word like monetize.'

Yes, We Can!

It's very rare for me to blog about things outside of Internet Marketing, Marketing or Business but I am Welsh, I love my rugby and today's a big day! Wales play France and, if they win, will win the Grand Slam (having beaten England, Scotland, Italy and Ireland).

So, in the words of Barack Obama:

"Yes, We Can!"

Post Script

Of course we did it!