Nov
28
howard | 
11 28th, 2006| 
Nov
23
Over at pronet advertising they’ve got a nice post touching on the concept of customer loyalty in the online space. Whilst it doesn’t go into great detail about how to achieve this most elusive of goals, it does a nice job of introducing the concept to people, making them aware of the fact that there is so much more to life inside the digital marketing world than just traffic driving banners and email campaigns.
Customer loyalty is a long game - it’s not going to be an overnight success, and it’s certainly not going to be an easy sell into a client or your own company. it can take a lot of time and investment to do properly, many times more than the costs to setup the system/website/ or whatever in the first place, but when done right, and you manage to create a community around a product, service or brand, it can be invaluable in both retaining existing customers, and attracting new ones through word of mouth.
Howard
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Nov
21
From GigaOm written by Robert Young:
Companies… increasingly gain their competitive edge
from the consumers themselves (now that they are also producers and
developers). As such, it’s critical to realize that the priorities of
“marketing” have been inversed… whereas the primary function of
marketing used to be to broadcast a product’s benefit to consumers, the
priority of marketing now should be to be a proxy for consumer control,
because it is the consumers who will lead your company to success. Just
look at the recent successes of MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, etc. These
companies let their users create their competitive advantages… the win
did not come from central product planning.
Nov
21
YouTube founder Jawed Karim gave an interesting lecture where he describes how YouTube fits into the
Internet’s history of killer apps, with some nice stories about the
early days of a company whose success has left many bedazzled and confused.
Just skip past the boring 1 minute intro
Nov
21
You are going to have to click on this image to expand and read it without a magnifying glass.
I just found this on a blog called Thinking and Making and found the distinction between the different types of online design and the problems that each tries to solve interesting. I say interesting but what I enjoyed is the distinction between Big IA and little IA. I am thinking that the interface and experience design issues seem undervalued here compared to the Big IA or Technical Architect sounding system design.
<meander>
The interaction is the User Experience, and I guess by Goal oriented design we are looking at User Goals. So by examining System Problems as separate to the user goals in my mind we are looking more at the business goals and objectives here.
</meander>
Nov
16
Seems a hot topic for a lot of people right now is "the end of TV", TV on IP, or whatever you want to call it - but basically TV style video shows delivered over the net.
Reading a post (more like a snippet pointer) from Mike Butcher over at mbites entitled "The end of TV as we know it" has led me to a couple of posts which discuss the IP-TV debate from (sort of) a VC point of view.
Both "Tivo Vs. the web" and "Internet TV - it’s the end of the world as we know it" mention that they think a TV set will effectively become a stand alone screen attached to a PC, and that the PC will be the delivery hardware for the "TV" rather than any piece of hardware inside the machine (admittedly one more than the other).
For me I find this hard to imagine, certainly in the short term. The reason being that I think TV as it now exists, in terms of the user interface (take remote, press on, press channel number, watch) is almost perfect for everyone. Compare that then, to the current state of Windows MCE or even Apple’s Frontrow, and throw in the whole operating system as well, and all of a sudden the basic premise of how easily everyone, from 1yr old kids to 100yr old adults, can use the device falls apart. Obviously as we all get older and more used to using complex OS interfaces this could get more familiar, but the whole beauty of TV for me (as someone who really enjoys watching something) is it’s simplicity of operation.
As soon as you throw a complex device that’s even slightly related to how a computer works it’s going to lose some of it’s appeal for a lot of people I suspect.
I’m not saying IPTV won’t happen - it most definitely will - but will a PC really be connected to a TV? or will the TV merge into a smarter grey box with a set of common protocols inside it? I suspect it’s somewhere closer to the later.
Howard
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Nov
13
This Saturday, 18th November, London hosts the 2nd annual UK Podcast Con at the CCT Smithfield venue in the city.
Speakers include CC Chapman of Managing the Gray, and Suw Charman of the Open Rights Group.
Registration opens at 10am with the final session finishing around 6pm. A full programme of events can be found here.
I should hopefully be attending so I’ll aim to have a report from it some time early next week.
If you want to go, tickets can be purchased via an eventbrite site here.
Howard
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Nov
10
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nice flash promo piece for M&Ms dark - 50 dark movies hidden in the picture