Posted by Andrew Nicholson in Content marketing, Marketing speak, Personal, Tech Talk | 0 Comments

Creating, using and targeting content to engage with prospects (Part 1)

It’s been a busy couple of weeks for me recently.  Not only was I lucky enough to be invited to speak at the EConsultancy Funnel marketing seminars (see part one below), where my specialist subject was “Creating, using and targeting content to engage with prospects”, but I also picked up a plethora of awards on Thursday night at both the Sodexo Stars Awards (Innovation and change award) and the B2B Marketing Awards (Marketer of the year and Best internal marketing campaign).  It was a bit of a logistical challenge being at two award ceremonies in one night, but with the aid of London’s finest Black cabs I pulled it off and spent all day Friday recovering as a result.  A fantastic night, and a huge thank you to all involved.

Posted by Andrew Nicholson in Personal, Social Networking | 0 Comments

Pipped at the post

You know how sometimes you come up with a really great idea?  One that you’re sure will make you “a millionaire by this time next year”?  Well that happened to me a few weeks back.

Hang on, I thought to myself whilst writing my econsultancy presentation on content targeting.  Wouldn’t it be great if on pulling out my final slide, instead of having a long and unwieldy list of all my social profiles for viewers to note down, I could just have a single page url where everything was amalgamated?  It could be a really simple page.  Content managed and aesthetically pleasing, it would be a doddle to add new social feeds as and when you signed up to them.  This is it, I thought.  This is the big one.

Then along came about bloody me.  About.me does everything I was planning, and to be fair, they’ve probably done a far better job that I ever could have.  Swines.  So, in the spirit of fair play here’s a plug for their tool.  It really is a great bit of kit.  So good in face that I’ve even signed up myself at about.me/webconsultancy.

Now, who’s in the market for this great new collaboration tool I’ve just invented?  I’m going to call it an ‘Internet’.

Posted by Andrew Nicholson in Marketing speak, Personal, Tech Talk | 2 Comments

Can big agencies ‘do’ digital?

I was sitting in a cafe in Greenwich Park last Sunday having a chat with a very good friend of mine about the effectiveness of  large agencies when dealing with digital, and in particular, social marketing (I know, I know, I really do need a hobby).  She’s in a good position to understand any issues, working as she does for one of the big five agencies, and I was surprised to hear that she shared my concerns.  Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I have a bias against the larger agencies. I’ve had lots of bad experiences and have been charged quite a large amount for the privilege.  But maybe I’m just unlucky, or really bad at briefing, so I opened up the debate to a few marketing colleagues and their responses seem to have confirmed that the problem appears endemic.  So, what are the issues?

Posted by Andrew Nicholson in Google, Personal | 0 Comments

Google brings a friend to the party with +1

Fresh off the print, Google have today launched their very own Facebook like button with the introduction of Google +1, an FB doppelganger that will be available to all users that are logged into their Google accounts when browsing.

But what does this mean for the likes of us?

Well, for those Googlers that have made use of the friends feature within their Google account, it means that websites that their friends like will feature more heavilywithin their search results, and vice-verser.

Posted by Andrew Nicholson in Personal, Tech Talk | 0 Comments

Server frustration and bad practise

I’ve had a very frustrating couple of days dealing with a server hosting company on behalf of one of my clients.  Amazingly, despite finding a rather nasty Trojan sitting on their server, the hosts, www.netbenefit.com initially refused to wipe the site unless my client was able to come up with the original login details.  We produced FTP passwords, user passwords etc, but all to no avail.  Two weeks, and much pleading later, they eventually completed the wipe, and I was able to add a clean version of the site.  Below is an excerpt from my email ping pong: