Author Archive

Like the latest fad in fashion, Conversational and Community Marketing is all the rage in marketing today. So what’s so special about it? Do you really need to be bothered, or can you happily go about your business and ignore it?

None of us can escape the fact that the Internet has changed many things for businesses. In my earlier post, I talked about the growing importance for total transparency in everything from a company’s behavior to their pricing and profit margins. Guiding this need is the every growing Internet population of ‘Prosumers’, or rather ‘empowered shoppers.’

Read more about how to use conversational and community marketing to motivate your growing base of prosumers.

This is the first in a series of articles on establishing marketing leadership online. Over the past few years, I looked into how brands behave online and established a brand positioning model which takes into account the different types of strategies employed by different brands in the online space. There are a number of different [...]

This past year, I have been recommending to my clients that they should include a price comparison service, using a trusted third party provider, on their own website. Research has finally emerged that backs up the argument. he new survey by e-tailing group, “Comparison Shopping is a Way of Life”, shows that putting shopping comparisons on brand sites has a significant impact on visitor loyalty and trust.

As any researcher will tell you, the difficultly of visualising complex datasets is quite simply, the challenge of finding a way to represent the numbers so that they actually mean something to the person who uses it. In the interesting US/China trade example, the line weight gives an immediate indication to the size of the [...]

If you’re bored of those plain Forrester charts, then take a look at this gem from Ruder Finn. The pro’s of the research is the interactive data visualisation that lets you view the details of any data point and compare ‘intent’ across demographics and categories. The huge con of the research is the methodology. Ruder [...]

Recently I came across some very cool data visualizations, which I am really a big fan of. So I have decided to post some of the best one’s I have found to date. First off is this nice one on Starbucks and McDonald’s. Some interesting highlights to note. The total sales of McDonald’s in 2003 [...]

Some will remember the past decade as the decade the people started to claw back power from business and government. What with the rapid growth of online consumer activism, whistleblower sites and consumer driven watchdog organisations that has proliferated on the Internet, I have started to wonder if we aren’t nearing a future in which the current shape of government itself is outdated. What if there was a better way of running the country? One in which everybody could directly effect the direction we are heading and the laws that we pass?

In light of the recent UK elections, I thought it would be helpful for people to have a different view on politicians. Given the fact that we currently live in an age where the technology exists to enable “direct democracy” over “representative democracy,” we need now more credible reasons to elect professional politicians to spend time sitting in Parliament endlessly debating issues face to face than they happen to be running and belong to the right political party.

The beauty of found copy

Posted: June 1, 2009 in Uncategorized
Tags: ,

I have been a bit lax in my postings recently. Frankly, I blame the combination of work overload and the beautiful weather. Anyway, while I work on researching my next post, please enjoy a wonderful piece of found copy.     In this age of conversation marketing, I have to wonder if found copy isn’t [...]

In a new twist, the complete lack of social prIvacy potentially could be a good thing. At least according to the author of We-Think, Charles Leadbeater. In his book, he proposes that we apply social participation strategies to government to foster communities that govern and police themselves, without the need of interfering politicians or police. In a kind of neighbourhood watch on steroids if you will, whole cities/populations would essentially be activated to watch over each other in a mutual peer support fashion.