When the Anonymous hacking collective hacked and released onto the web the usernames and passwords of Syrian President Assad’s ministerial office staff what surprised me most was that almost 40% of the passwords were “12345″.
It just makes it too easy for hackers when security is that lax. I bet here in the UK our security would never be that easy to break through… Yeah, right!
If you have accounts with passwords that are simply ordered sequences of numbers or real words, you are open to getting hacked yourself, so please, look after your data by securing your passwords.
Go for at least 10 digits of random jumbled letters and numbers in no order that anyone else will understand.
To remember it you need an acronym.
E.g.
PASSWORD: bbwfi2007bnac
ACRONYM: brown bear was founded in 2007 by nicola and chris
Simple to remember… and no, ‘ bbwfi2007bnac’ is not a password we have ever used (or ever will now that it has been published on the web).
Tweeter, Facebook, Linkedin, Google Plus, YouTube, Blogs, Newsgroups… and that is just for starters.
Have you seen this video?
Sure you have and so have more than 6million brits in the last 8 weeks alone. Thru facebook, twitter, youtube et al videos, pictures, ideas and web posts gain a momentum that can leave you breathless (and shouting ‘Jesus Christ’).
As marketers we need to be part of the conversation or at the very least be listening to it, but many marketing departments tell us they simply don’t have the time to engage with social media.
Our response is that for most of them they somehow they need to find some time. Not just because it is another route to market, but because if you ignore it your brand can suffer serious damage. If you don’t at least listen to what is being said you may not find out until it is too late that your company’s good image or product reputation has run off into the distance, never to be seen again. The world really has changed.
In the new media age one bad customer experience can go viral. Negative comments can get out there faster than Fenton chasing deer in Richmond Park. One little video rant about poor service could be seen by hundreds of thousands of your customers within hours.
Fast response is the best defence, so at the very least set up some alerts that tell you when you are being discussed and have a rapid response plan in place.
Don’t end up chasing the problem yelling for it to stop when it has already crossed the road, left the park and taken a herd of your clients with it.
You never know, you might even start to enjoy social media. the positive possibilities are as big if not bigger than the negatives. Just one message that goes viral could bring more new clients than a decade of traditional campaigns could ever hope to produce.
The above video from quicksilver has attracted 10 million views and is still pulling them in.
In conversation with a Google representative today I was told that 60% of smartphone users click on ads on their phones at least once a week. The implications for adding smartphone advertising to your rosta of advertising locations will seem, for most of us inescapeably clear.
However, it is clearly just as important to consider the user experience unpon landing on your site. Although the site might display OK on an Iphone or Android device, does it really ‘sing’? The screens are so much smaller than a laptop or desktop, and so the user experience is radically altered.
A four column page might still look fine at first site, but is it practical for a smartphone? Only by spending time browsing your site with a handheld device will you get a real feel as to whether the site needs a special layout for smartphones.
If a new layout is needed, and your traffic levels from mobiles are growing at the same rates that I am seeing on my stats, then you probably do need to consider investing to service the mobile user’s needs.
Tinymce is the wysiwyg editor of choice on millions of websites. It comes as standard in the Drupal CMS and is often used in bespoke content management systems.
However, when you try to embed a youtube video, Tinymce strips the code and stops the youtube videos from displaying.
The youtube code is wrapped in an iframe and it is this thatTinymce strips out. This was done for security reasons, but it is easy to make a small alteration to the tinymce init and get around the problem.
(This is the small bit of javascript code which sits on the actual page where the wysiwyg actually appears).
Simply add the following line to your init code and youtube videos will magically become embeddable.
“Entrepreneurship is the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled.”
When you start a business from scratch you have no resources, so anyone who starts a business is effectively on the track to being an Entrepreneur. The difference is that once the business is up and running most people rarely pursue new opportunities that sit outside the resources they have built up within their business.
The dangers of Entrepreneurship are primarily based around the risks involved and so over time as a business grows there is more to loose and consequently less incentive to act in an entrepreneurial manner.
We are so lucky to live and work in Windsor. It really is a fantastic place.
Great travel links with the M4 just across the river.
Great heritage, with the big house at the top of the hill that lots of people seem to like to visit.
Great outdoors with triverside walks along the banks of the River Thames and the expanse of the great park only minutes away.
Great for kids with Legoland just down the road.
Great for horseracing with two racecourses (Windsor and Ascot) within 5 miles of the town centre.
But above all Windsor is great for shopping and eating with some really excellent places to eat. In fact we like it so much we decided to create a website to share our Windsor memories and recommendations with the world.
Many years ago we were choosing good names for a new teacher’s newsletter. We came up with “schools express”, everyone liked it and I went and bought the domain name without writing it down on a bit of paper first.
Big mistake! www.schoolsexpress.co.uk could as easily be interpreted as ‘school sex press’ which is not a good domain name if you are trying to create a grown up, sensible brand.
Domain names are your website’s first contact with the customer, so keeping them short, on-topic and memorable are the three graces of domain name choice.
Of course it is never easy to find a domain that fills all three criterea so order the three according to what you percieve as important to your firm and go from there.
Brand Names or Generic Domains?
If you own ‘widgets.com’ and you sell widgets, then you are pretty much set for success. Many startups try to get these ‘generic’ domains as lots of people simply type a keyword folloed by dot com into the browser’s url bar when they want something in a hurry.
However, if you then want to expand into other products you will find a missmatch between your brand and offer, which is a big marketing error.
If you already have a strong brand you really should get the domain that matches it as closely as possible. Nike for example, own Nike.com and would not settle for www.nike-trainers.com (although I suspect the own that too!).
Then of course, it is a fair bet that some other genius has got there first and already registered your chosen name. Hyphenated versions are sometimes a good alternative, but other times you might consider contacting the owner and making an offer on the domain name you want. Be prepared to spend a good stretch of time looking for the right domain. However, this is time well spent because the rewards of a good domain name will be worth it in the end. Your customers will find you with ease and they will return more frequently (because your site name will spring to mind readily).
The form below will check availability of domain names. It is service provided by 1and1.co.uk and should help you find the right one.
The web is a powerful tool for direct marketing, but it isn’t a magic wand. The web generally makes things quicker and easier, but not necessarily better. An badly written marketing email will fail regardless of how easy it is to create and how cheap it is to send out By contrast, intelligent use of data reaps huge reward for the smart business.
So, fundamentally the web changes nothing. We still have to plan our marketing messages carefully, tailoring them depending on whether we are talking to the general public (“Business to Consumer” or “B2C”) or businesses people (“Business to Business” or “B2B”).
Within those two groups we need to subdivide if we are to be effective. This is what we call market segmentation. The methods of segmentation are different for B2B as opposed to B2C and that is what this article is about. By understanding the segmentation approaches which are appropriate to the markets we can create better performing marketing campaigns.
Some forms of segmentation are equally applicable to both B2B and B2C. Recency/frequency/value of previous sales is the obvious way of splitting an in-house mailing list, regardless of wether that list is business or consumer focused.
B2C marketers have many other ways to divide up their lists. This is because research tells us that similar people do similar things. So, if we know that certain people buy our products we would do well to find similar people and offer our products to them too.
Since people who live close to each other often lead similar lifestyles, we can segment a cold list by postcode. The ACORN classification system has been used by marketers to segment by postcode for decades. A real life example of this would be where a travel marketer who does well in St. Albans might choose to extend a campaign to include the town of Richmond upon Thames. Although not geographically close, both towns are in ACORN group 19 and therefore the people often behave in similar manners. Naturally this data changes over time so it is important to get up to date Acorn records when conducting a campaign.
Gender, age and number of children are pretty obvious segmentation vectors, but religious beliefs, political preferences and where people go on holiday are also powerful vectors. Obviously in a B2B setting, the holiday choice of a buyer is unlikely to be a relevant vector in the purchase decisions of a large business.
Slicing a market according to when people buy is also a good strategy. In B2B this can be particularly effective. Many compaies have their own accounting year and funds are more likely to be available at certain periods than at others. Knowing when these periods are for each potential customer can be the difference between success and failure. Sadly knowing the financial cycles of consumers as opposed to businesses is pretty much beyond most marketers, although seasonality in general should of course be factored in to marketing planning.
I have enjoyed building a “solar panel calculator” this week. The client wanted a tool that allows visitors to their website to enter their postcode, be presented with a map of their house, click the four corners of the roof and be given back an estimate of how much money they could make from solar panels.
Phew, quite a challenge, but by breaking it up into steps I have now got the prototype working well. Now just need to make it look pretty before handing it over to the client.
Do you need a tool for your website or a smartphone app? Why not challenge me to make something cool for you.
One of the many ways that Google et al define the quality of a page is by looking at how long people spend visiting that page. Crudely, a longer visit indicates that the information the visitor wants has been found.
This is nothing new, but what is new is that the relative importance of ‘time on page’ has been boosted during the 2011 algorithm changes.
Therefore, site additions that encourage longer viewing times are likely to benefit the site much more than they used to.
To put this theory to the test, last week we found a page on one of our own sites with consistent heavy traffic and added an appropriate video to it. Today I can reveal that the analytics are in and the page has performed amazingly.
Time on page has jumped 85% from 46 seconds to 1 minute and 25 seconds.
In addition the bounce rate fell by 29.6% which was pleasing.
Now this was hardly a conclusive double blind study, but the early indications are that this is a technique that will benefit most sites.
The issue of finding or creating an ‘appropriate’ video are of course not being addressed here, but with modern mobile phones offering quality video as standard, it shouldn’t present any technical difficulties.
