Marketing Tom - Internet Marketing

Call of the Wild - Welsh Small Business of the Year 2008

Congratulations to a client of mine, Call of the Wild, who have won Welsh Small Business of the Year 2008 at the Western Mail Business in Wales Awards. The company which offers Team Building, Management Training and Development and Leadership Training beat off some stiff competition to win the coveted award and this certainly goes a long way to recognise the hard work and commitment that they and their team of trainers and facilitators have put into their business. The judges for this year's awards were the Federation of Small Businesses, KPMG and the University of Glamorgan Business School. Bill Turnbull, from BBC Breakfast News, presented the Western Mail Business Awards for Wales.

New CIM eMarketing Award Dates Announced

Marketing Tom Media is pleased to announce some new dates for the Chartered Institute of Marketing's eMarketing Award Course. The next course will be held over 4 days, on the 7th, 8th, 14th and 15th July. The venue for the course is the University of Glamorgan's Conference Centre. For more details, please take a look at our eMarketing Award page.

Eurovision, Terry Wogan and Flickr

If you've listened to the 43 songs (yes, 43!) on the BBC site, downloaded your scorecards from the party planner section; read the latest news and still want more, you could add your Eurovision photos to the BBC's Flickr group. Much as it did with its social bookmarking links on news articles, the BBC proves again that it really has its finger on the pulse and knows when to turn on the utilize the latest web 2.0 technologies.

For the uninitiated, the Eurovision song contest is an annual competition where singers (who sing very average songs!) from different European nations compete against each other. Once the final song is sung, the phone voting takes place. Though you can't vote for your own country you will always find that Balkan states vote for their neighbours, the Scandinavian for theirs and the Russian Federation countries for their neighbours. It is quite fun even though nobody seems to vote for Britain and song quality counts for absolutely nothing!

New Look Flickr?

Going on to Flickr this week I thought I spotted something different - "comments", "faves" and "notes" displayed in a new way on the results page. And, checking the cache, I was right! Here's a view of the new-look results and the Google cache of the same page from a few days' previous. You have to admit that it looks better and is much more in keeping with "Web 2.0 principals".

"New-look" Flickr

"Old-look" Flickr

Some Keyword Tools To Consider

Having just delivered a session on Search Engine Optimisation (as part of the CIM's Emarketing Award Course), I may have to inform the class of other tools that they may want to consider. They come via an article - 5 Tools For Keyword Brainstorming - from Ann Smarty, over at Search Engine Journal, and one of them - the MSN Clustering Tool - is certainly new for me.

If you can't be bothered to read the article, here are the quick links to these keyword research tools:

1. Google Sets
2. MSN Clustering Tool - this one reminds me of Clusty
3. Searchradar - like a tag cloud and
4. Keyword Map
5. Urban Dictionary

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:

Related Links
Xobni (Inbox spelt backwards!) - a New Outlook Plug In

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.