MarCom Professional

Woolworths is back; it's alive and trying to re-establish itself as an online store. But the question is, will it succeed? When the company collapsed and closed all its stores in January, 30,000 jobs went, as well as a High Street icon. The name, however, was bought by Shop Direct which relaunched the brand as an Internet shop a week ago.

But will it work? The last Woolworths web store was pretty much derided. Have the new owners learned from the past mistakes of the company and brought their online experience to help? At first sight, the answer is no. More...

Social networkers are usually quite nice people; they are, after all, social. Even though in the corners of Facebook or the alcoves of Twitter you'll come across a nasty piece of work, generally the vast majority of people you meet online are easy to get on with.

 

 

One of the features of crowds is anger and violence; put loads of people together in one place and arguments soon break out, sometimes leading to violence. Football stadiums are not the only place to have witnessed the crowd effect. You see it at public demonstrations, for instance, and even recently at an Oasis concert. More...

How many Twitter followers have you got? Are you ashamed by the low number of contacts you have on LinkedIn? Do you wish you had more friends on Facebook? Have you ever wanted more visitors to your web site? Wherever you look online there is an apparent competition to reach the top in a vast array of league tables.

 

But it's all nonsense; you are truly wasting your time if you worry about all of this, not to mention the stress and anxiety it is causing some people..! You can find blog posts about increasing your Twitter following and there are tools to let you know how much traffic your web site gets. More...

Google is no longer a search engine. Instead, it is fast becoming a "short cut" engine to get to content we already know about. The fact that "Michael Jackson" is the current number-one search term on Google should not amaze us. But the remaining "searches" show a surprising trend.

 

Kate Winslet surprised teenagers in Reading the other day by dropping in to her old drama club, Starmaker, where life as an Oscar-winning actress began for her. She immediately created connection with her audience by saying they could ask her anything as she was "very normal"; she then proceeded to answer questions, speaking to children individually by name and showing she was really interested in them. She created instant rapport with the people in the room.

 

It's an important lesson for us all, especially online businesses. You don't have much time to create a positive connection with people - fractions of a second nowadays. More...

Michael Jackson's sad death is a shock to us all; people will always have that "flashbulb" memory of always knowing where they were when they heard of his demise. For many, they will have been sitting in front of their PC screen, suddenly aware of a flurry of tweets in Twitter about an announcement on the TMZ blog that Michael Jackson was on his way to hospital.

 

The celebrity gossip blog said: "We've just learned Michael Jackson was taken by ambulance to a hospital in Los Angeles ... More...

Twitter could replace Google as a place to go to find useful content. New analysis from Hitwise Intelligence shows a remarkable difference in how people use these two services. It seems that around one in three searches on Google are for transactional sites - we are frequently looking to buy something.

 

 

However, over at Twitter, the clicks are all about content and information; less than 10% of the clicks on Twitter go to transactional sites, like shops. It looks like Twitter is beginning to be used as a reference source for useful information, whereas Google is increasingly being used as a means of finding a specific product or a kind of shop. More...

Visitors to your web site will be looking for guidance as to where to go next. Traditionally, this has meant that web sites have a menu of options across the top or down the left hand side. Indeed, eye-tracking studies show that this is precisely where people look first for information, so it makes sense to put the navigation where they will notice it.

But is that actually the most sensible thing to do? Most web site navigation offers text based "labels" that make sense to the web site owner. Hopefully, too, they make some sense to the visitors as well. More...

Bloggers often debate how often should they publish. "Should I blog every day?", they ask, "Or should I blog twice a week or once a week?", they add. Every blogger has the same quest - finding the perfect frequency of blogging. They are seeking a "magic pill" kind of answer; they want some expert to say "Once a week is the perfect frequency", for instance.

 

 

But here's the truth; there is no "perfect" frequency of blogging. It's a bit like asking "how often should a newspaper be published" or "how many times should there be an episode of a soap opera each week on TV?". More...

Marketers often have a "gut feel" - they simply "know" they are "right" about something. Often, this turns out to be true; much psychological research shows that "gut feel" is surprisingly accurate. However, "gut feel" can also be wrong - as many Internet marketers will tell you. They have assumed something to be true - such as a particular market demand, only to discover that no-one actually wants what they are selling.

Testing is the only true way to find out; studying your audience behaviour, analysing poll results - whatever you do, research should be the basis of your success, not assumption. More...