MarCom Professional

As I glanced through my regular Monday morning news feeds from various e-magazines about mobile advertising and marketing, one particular piece caught my attention. In between all the stories about the 3G i-phone launch and the varying views on what it can and cannot do (saddo’s) I read a very interesting piece in MobileMarketingWeekly about Fiat's new mobile portal (http://mobile.fiat.co.uk). This is not the first time Fiat has gone mobile so I was eager to see the output.

The portal is the work of AKQA Mobile (one of our industry friends). On a basic level, the site is swift to use, provides clear instructions and very detailed illustrations. More...

People love to see evidence that something or someone is what they claim to be. It's all very well having a web site that points out you are the most brilliant expert in your field, but without any evidence your web site visitors will not believe you.

One way, of course, is the use of testimonials. But these are having decreased value online because it is clearly so easy to make them up. You can add testimonials to your web site and pretend they are from someone else. Indeed only yesterday I was sent a "testimonial" which purported to come from Barack Obama; it didn't. Even using pictures and video testimonials has reduced value compared with a year or two ago, because even these are easy to fake. More...

When did you last visit a supermarket or a department store? Probably within the last week - most of us do. But did you find what you wanted the moment you walked in the store? Probably not. Either you knew roughly where the item you wanted would be and you headed off to that part of the store, or you had to look around.

That's precisely what retailers want. They don't want you to go straight to what you intend buying. They want you to have to hunt for it and get distracted by all those tempting offers you have to pass by. I remember once in my local Tesco stunning the checkout operator with my quip as she asked for £140. More...

The youth of today, eh? Just what are they coming to? They're an opinionated self-assured bunch aren't they? Today's youngsters certainly seem a lot more confident than the teenagers I remember hanging out with. And as for comparing them to those quiet, shy youngsters of the 1940s, well, there is no comparison. The youth of today are certainly very different to the teens of yesteryear.

Society changes constantly and one of the trends psychologists have noticed is the increasing egotistical nature of each generation. With each generation, scores of narcisim have risen constantly for the past 30 years. More...

Here at We Love Mobile we’ve been working hard on our brand spanking new mobile Internet site. Sorry, it’s not live yet… we just thought we’d give you a sneak preview. You see we’ve been taking great care over our little mobi site. We don’t cut corners. We want our mobile Internet site to be a really cool example of what mobile sites can be. Mobile is its own medium. Far too often people think of it as an extension of online. When it comes to building a mobile Internet site people think “hey let’s just shrink our online site into a phone”, no. More...

In May I wrote about third party hacks for the Wii Remote (Wiimote). Having spent the intervening period building some the applications posted on the web, I’ve developed a huge amount of respect for what is an incredibly sophisticated piece of kit and yet passes off as a £30 computer game controller.

The Wiimote contains a Bluetooth radio, an infrared camera capable of tracking upto four moving objects, a three-axis linear accelerometer, a joy stick, a motor (used to generate the rumble effect), a battery monitor, a speaker, numerous button inputs and four LEDs.

To begin to understand how extraordinarily clever this piece of kit is, connect it to your PC using Bluetooth and then download the library and test application developed by Brian Peek that gives you a read out of the 20 or more variables that the device is capable of measuring. More...

Sprout is a new, very cool service that lets everyday people create portable widgets for embedding on Web sites, blogs, and in social networks.

I was originally introduced to the service at DEMO08 in January and was immediately blown away.

We live in the widget economy and people today are empowered and compelled to lift and place encapsulated content and experiences from one place to another, however and whenever they'd like. With SproutBuilder, you can now build your own custom, portable and embeddable widgets featuring the Web content, links, gadgets, and capabilities you desire as simply as designing a flyer in Word. More...

You never know where you are going to pick up tips about Internet marketing. Sometimes the soundest advice for running your web site comes not from an Internet marketing guru, but from something that has nothing to do with the Internet.

Bryan McCrae is a psychologist who spoke at the National Coaching Psychology Conference. And you would never have thought a conference for psychologists involved in coaching would lead to Internet marketing advice - but it did.

Bryan's session was based on his Cognitive Sales "healthcheck" which he runs through with companies trying to improve their sales and marketing. More...

Psychologists sometimes use the "Johari Window" to help demonstrate aspects of the self. the "window" was invented by two researcher - Joe and Harry - and their "Johari Window" has become a common feature of many self development courses and text books.

A new article on the Johari Window puts the whole thing into perspective, summarising it very well.

However, this article got me thinking. Could there be an equivalent of the Johari Window for web sites? And I'm convinced there is.

We could have the "public site" - the part of your web site that your visitors can see and which you know they can see; you jointly agree on what's on show. More...