Three great sites to play with from a professional perspective, and an intriguing game from a non-professional perspective :-) Daylife “Daylife is a news site and distribution platform that organizes the world’s news into a rich landscape of related stories and images of every size and perspective. Designed to enable new ways to present and explore the world of news, Daylife gathers news from thousands of sources worldwide for you to: ...
As a director of a consultancy helping clients communicate more effectively, I’m used to analysing the difference between “winners” and “qualifiers”, between Seabiscuit and the also-rans. Maybe marketing communications has evolved so much in recent years, or maybe we just work with good people to start with, but I’d forgotten about the donkeys. I was rudely reminded of this reality over the Christmas season courtesy of Royal Air Maroc ’s Atlas Blue subsidiary. Crappy, very crappy customer communication. Oh so very crap indeed. Nevertheless, I’ve been able to wend the story of dealing with Air Maroc into my presentations to customers and prospects on good digital marketing relations, as a counter-example, even though I didn’t interact with Air Maroc digitally at all. ...
It’s December. Time for pseudo-snow to uphold the pretence of a white Christmas. Time for Christmas pop songs to replenish the coffers of faded pop idols. And, of course, time for reflections on the year. The biggest trends in marketing communications in 2007 were without a doubt the rise and rise of social networks, and the associated dominance of video content – professional and user-generated. Not a theme ignored on MarCom Professional I can see. This has been a subject close to our hearts since we ran the first blog training course for our clients in 2001 and introduced them to conversational PR not long after. That was the term we used then, but now we talk about the brand as the sum of the quality of its dialogue with its stakeholders, and our Chairman Larry Weber decided, rightly, that 2007 was the year the mass market wanted to read more about it. ...
I’ve just stumbled upon this service, Magpie Brandwatch . As an engineer by training, nothing quite appeals to me more than a good looking chart, but I’d like to ask a question of anyone who knows more about these things than me… How do they disambiguate brand names? In other words, when looking for commentary about Apple, how do they differentiate between Apple and the type you eat? What if you were trying to track where people are talking about Creative. Great brandname; very very difficult to disambiguate. Virgin? Next? Palm? Shell? Gap? ...
It started with the town crier. Then the daily newspaper. It broadened with radio and then television. Communication now comes at you from all angles – via papers, magazines, journals, radio, digital radio, satellite radio, terrestrial TV, TV text services, digital TV, satellite TV, cable TV, mobile portals, push alerts on mobile devices, newsgroups, websites, RSS newsfeeds, streaming media services and pod-casting. The choice has become so complex for consumers that there is even a choice of magazines and websites dedicated to helping us make a choice. The selection and diversity will continue to grow but the act of “choosing” is about to change significantly. We are returning to just one channel – myChannel. ...