Magic Marketing

CNN President "Really Afraid Of" Social Networks

2010-03-16T05:52:00.000-07:00

From Doug Caverly @ webpronews.com

Over the years, there have been more than a few arguments about whether online news sites are killing newspapers. Now, due to some almost startling comments made by the president of CNN, it looks like the next round of old media-new media disputes might concern social networks and cable news organizations.

According to the AFP, Jonathan Klein's remarks on this subject were in no way ambiguous. He said at Bloomberg BusinessWeek's 2010 Media Summit New York, "The competition I'm really afraid of are social networking sites. That's an alternative that threatens to pull people away from us."

Klein then explained, "The people you're friends with on Facebook or the people you follow on Twitter are trusted sources of information. . . . Well, we want to be the most trusted name in news. We don't want the 1,000 people you follow in Twitter to be the most trusted sources for you. . . . So I'm far more worried about the 500 million people on Facebook than I am about two million people watching Fox."

That's an interesting take on the power of social networks. It implies - at the very least - that CNN anchors are going to spend a whole lot more time referencing Facebook and Twitter from now on. An ad campaign and new apps could follow, too.

On a broader scale, Klein seems to be saying that social networks' users can easily - even unwittingly - make or break major corporations.

Golden Pages misleading people

2010-01-20T05:25:00.000-08:00

As someone who talks to people all the time about websites, their uses and their values i have become more and more concerned with what i am hearing about Golden Pages sales calls.
Golden Pages are trying to sign up business owners for massive amounts of money to just a directory listing, and convincing them its a website they are getting.

this is nothing short of disgraceful, and is simply false advertising. A space on the GP website with your name, address and number on it is not a website. There are no graphics, no optimization, no inviting pictures etc. For the money they are asking for you would get a 4-5 page brochuer website up and running no problem at all.

They seem to be preying on people who are not very web savy. For anyone who reads this, start asking questions. If you want just your name, number and address on the web and your not worried about your logo or brand being out there, and your willing to part with well over a grand, then the GP is for you. If not, contact a web developer.

Ireland heading right way digitally

2010-01-18T05:23:00.000-08:00

Here's a couple of articles recently in the SB Post about the growing Irish on-line market, both as a marketing tool and a selling tool.

The first one here from Cillian Barry deals with some of the industry trends we may see in 2010.

The second article is also from the Post and shows how a Google Ad words campaign can help a business, in this case the massive Bord Gais "Big Switch" campaign.

Somethings never change

2010-01-13T02:01:00.000-08:00

Its seems the Chinese government are making things extremely hard for Google in their most populated of countries. Obviously its a massive market were google to pull out, which may just happen, but at the same time, do they need the hassle? I'm not so sure. Maybe in 5,6 or 10 years time the Chinese government will come crawling back, well they'll let them in, even if there is no crawling involved.
See this BBC release below, some interesting links within as well.

Google to pull out of China?

The start of the end for the Print Media???

2010-01-05T05:33:00.000-08:00

Over the past couple of weeks one of the USA's best known newspapers, The Washington Post, has started closing its offices all around the States. The reason for this is to concentrate on the local market (see here). Since that news first came out it has also come to light that they are getting rid of their Sports department!!! What? is the first thing that sprung to my mind. This is crazy in my own opinion and could well be the end for the Post. They have 2 reporters who work on the Redskins Football team alone. Has it ever crossed their minds that a huge population of people, mainly men, will only buy their newspaper for the sport.
Ok the web is taking over, and print media is in trouble, but i believe there is still a place for it, just to a lesser degree. Also why don't the WP concentrate their sports to their website, go online with it all. Young people love sports, have more time to read about sports and are Web savy and online on a regular basis. The WP is just alienating all these young people with one big swipe.

Almost like Rupert Murdock they seem to be ignoring the rather large elephant in the corner of the world. And of course, more important than any of that, a number of talented people are going to lose their jobs.

Its sad to see. The internet is here, and will be for the foreseeable, its a pity some of the supposed smartest people in the world can't see this.

By the way, Happy New Year, i believe 2010 is going to blow 2009 out of the water.

First Organise 1,000

2009-12-23T06:50:00.000-08:00

Happy Christmas everyone, here is some great Tribal advice from Seth, have a great one.

Kevin Kelly really changed our thinking with his post about 1,000 true fans.

But what if you're not an artist or a musician? Is there a business case for this?

I think the ability to find and organize 1,000 people is a breakthrough opportunity. One thousand people coordinating their actions is enough to change your world (and make a living.)

1,000 people each spending $1,000 on a special interest cruise equals a million dollars.

1,000 people willing to spend $250 to attend a day-long seminar gives you the leverage to invite just about anyone you can imagine to fly in and speak.

1,000 people voting as a bloc can change local politics forever.

1,000 people willing to try a new restaurant you find for them gives you the ability to make an entrepreneur successful and change the landscape of your town.

Even better, coordinating the learning and connections of this tribe of 1,000 is not just profitable, it's rewarding. If you can take them where they want to go, you become indispensable (and respected).

What's difficult? What's difficult is changing your attitude. Instead of speed dating your way to interruption, instead of yelling at strangers all day trying to make a living, coordinating a tribe of 1,000 requires patience, consistency and a focus on long-term relationships and life time value. You don't find customers for your products. You find products for your customers.

Here is Seths Blog

What matters now

2009-12-14T08:50:00.000-08:00

This is from a number of the top bloggers, writers and general internet people of the world. It is compiled by one of our favourites Seth Godin. Check out your free e-book, its a little gem. print some of the stuff out that you like and put them around your office. Some great stuff in there.

Twitter - A fad?

2009-12-11T09:51:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking about this recently, and i'm coming to the conclusion that twitter is pretty much a waste of peoples time, and i mean a real waste. I have messed around with it for a couple of months, and really all it does is build links as far as i can see, and not very good ones at that. Now maybe i'm not putting enough into it, but i don't have the time, and neither do most other people, especially if they are running their own business.

I suppose i should be able to make up my own mind, but in conversation yesterday with a far more experienced "Internet Scientist" (i just made that up) than me it dawned on me that many others feel the same.

Think about what you get out of twitter. If you love gosip or have massive amounts of time for link building etc then it really could be worth it for you. Otherwise forget about it, it will only take time out of your day, for no good reason.

In short, what i think, Twitter is highly unlikely to make you money.

Social Media for your business, it won't happen overnight

2009-12-10T04:58:00.000-08:00

The reason social media is so difficult for most organizations

"It's a process, not an event.

Dating is a process. So is losing weight, being a public company and building a brand.

On the other hand, putting up a trade show booth is an event. So are going public and having surgery.

Events are easier to manage, pay for and get excited about. Processes build results for the long haul."

Link to Seth

Above is the latest of Seth Godins posts. Its something i meet every day, people wanting to know when they will be up on google, making money from facebook etc. I can't agree with Seth more, even in my own business, we're new, we realise it will take time for us to reach all the customers that are out there. It will take time for us to get up on the first page of google for keywords such as "Web Design Cork" or "Online Marketing Cork". Maybe someday we'll be up there for Irish nationwide searches, but it won't be tomorrow morning.

Like education has become a life long learning experience, from a business point of view so is social media for your business. If you rush in and try to be all things to all man you'll more than likely get caught somewhere in the middle, or the bottom............

Beware of the spammers

2009-12-09T08:15:00.001-08:00

This could be particulary relevant to Cork/Munster businesses. It relates to SEO spamming. Our advice is to ask for websites these people have already optimized, and do some of your own "googling" on keywords you might put in for the related business.

Read here

Richard Hearne is a very experienced SEO expert who i met recently through a course (he was the guest lecturer!). I highly recommened him from the brief encounter. His website is www.redcardinal.ie.

Find out what is being said about you on-line!!!

2009-12-08T03:33:00.001-08:00

Check out this interesting article from the Sunday Business Post.

We believe your better off knowing what people are saying about you. It may help you improve your service or product, and is almost another form of market research.

Some Solid Seth Advice

2009-12-08T01:38:00.000-08:00

The first transaction

Do you really expect that the first time we transact, it will involve me giving you money in exchange for a product or service?

Perhaps this is a good strategy for a pretzel vendor on the street, but is that the best you can hope for?

Digital transactions are essentially free for you to provide. I can give you permission to teach me something. I can watch a video. I can engage in a conversation. We can connect, transfer knowledge, engage in a way that builds trust... all of these things make it more likely that I'll trust you enough to send you some money one day. I can contribute to a project you're building, ask you a difficult question, discover what others have already learned.

But send you money on the first date? No way.

The question then, is how much time and effort does your non-profit/consulting firm/widget factory spend on pre-purchase transactions and how much do you spend on trying to simply close the sale?

You can find more Seth Godin @ Seth's Blog

Getting your website out there

2009-12-07T10:16:00.000-08:00

If your business customers can't find you on the internet your website is nearly worthless... (here is what to do about it).

1. There is no cheaper, more effective way to promote your site than by using search engines. We are amazed at how people overlook the potential of natural, non-paid search engine ranking and simply let the "other guy" have the free traffic.

2. Search engines are a free and ongoing service. Pay Per click options tends to bring immediate results when done right. However, when you run out of money or target too large of a market the, effectiveness of the advertising campaign will be lost.

3. Since visitors coming from a search engine were searching for your specific product or service, they are usually a highly targeted and often highly motivated group of visitors. These visitors will more often purchase your services.

4. Money invested in Search Engine Optimization has a long shelf life. If done properly your SEO investment (for as little as $100) can provide free traffic and revenues for YEARS!

Bing goes down!!!

2009-12-07T09:48:00.000-08:00

Bit late with this, but its not good news for these fellas.

Microsoft Bing Goes Down

Early in December 3rd last Microsoft Bing went wallop!

The search engine (which claims to have up to 15% market share, depending on who you listen to, although we have yet to meet ANYONE in Ireland who uses the product - except for the nice people who work in Microsoft and therefore appear to have no choice!) went offline for about 30 minutes last week.

Microsoft has apologised for the outage, which had web surfers be greeted with an error message on the search engine’s site. Microsoft stated that a “configuration change” made to the site during testing was the cause of the outage.

This, it said, had “unfortunate and unintended consequences” which included making the site unavailable. The glitch led to people either being unable to find the site or having their queries returned unanswered, Satya Nadella, one of Microsoft’s senior vice-presidents in its Online Services Division, wrote on the Bing blog.

“As soon as the issue was detected, the change was rolled back, which caused the site to return to normal behaviour,” wrote Nadella, who added that the problem was corrected in about 30 minutes.

Microsoft was looking into the root of the incident in order to take preventative measures to prevent such an incident from happening again, Nadella wrote.

You can read the blog posting (written by Microsoft) here.

Interesting facts about Google

2009-12-03T02:23:00.000-08:00

Some interesting reading about where the giant Search Engine (which powers this blog :-)) has come from.

20 interesting,amazing and funny things about Google which you dont know.Lets find it out below

1.Google started in January, 1996 as a research project at Stanford University, by Ph.D. candidates Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were 24 years old and 23 years old respectively.

2.The prime reason the Google home page is so bare is due to the fact that the founders didn’t know HTML and just wanted a quick interface. In fact it was noted that the submit button was a long time coming and hitting the RETURN key was the only way to burst Google into life.

3.Google is a mathematical term 1 followed by one hundred zeroes. The term was coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasne.

4.Interesting thing about Gmail is that it was used internally for nearly 2 years prior to launch to the public. They discovered there was approximately 6 types of email users, and Gmail has been designed to accommodate these 6.

5. It consisted of over 450,000 servers, racked up in clusters located in data centers around the world.

6.The Google search engine receives an amazing one billion search requests per day.

7.Google's index of web pages is the largest in the world, comprising of 8 billion web pages. Google searches this immense collection of web pages often in less than half a second.

8.Google has a funny tradition of creating April Fool's Day jokes - such as Google MentalPlex, which allegedly featured the use of mental power to search the web. Some thought the announcement of Gmail in 2004 around April Fool's Day was a joke.

9.Google receives daily search requests from all over the world, that includes the lonely Antarctica as well.

10.Users can restrict their searches for content in 35 non-English languages. To date, no requests have been received from beyond the earth's orbit, but Google has a Klingon interface just in case.

11.Google has a world-class staff of more than 15000 full-time employees - Googlers. The company headquarters is called the Googleplex located at Mountain View at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway.

12.Google translates billions of HTML web pages into a display format for WAP and i-mode phones and wireless handheld devices.

13.Another funny fact is that the "I feel lucky" is nearly never used. It was a comfort button which actually takes to the first web page returned by the search results.

14.Google use the unique 20%/5% rules. That is ,if at least 20% of people use a feature, then it will be included. At least 5% of people need to use a particular search preference before it will make it into the 'Advanced Preferences'.

15.Employees in Google are encouraged to use 20% of their time working on their own projects. That's why we have such amazing products like GMail,Google News and Orkut now.

16.Google Groups comprises more than 845 million Usenet messages, which is the world's largest collection of messages or the equivalent of more than a terabyte of human conversation.

17.The basis of Google's search technology is called PageRank, and assigns an "importance" value to each page on the web and gives it a rank to determine how useful it is. However, that's not why it's called PageRank. It's actually named after Google co-founder Larry Page.

18.Googlers are people from different background. One operations manager, who keeps the Google network in good health is a former neurosurgeon. One software engineer is a former rocket scientist. And the company's chef formerly prepared meals for members of The Grateful Dead and funkmeister George Clinton.

19. Google’s Orkut is most popular in Brazil and India. It was the brainchild of a Google engineer who was given free reign to run with it.

20.In a 2006 report of the world's richest people, Forbes reported that Sergey Brin was #26 with a net worth of $12.9 billion, and Larry Page was #27 with a net worth of $12.8 billion

Be a Good Client

2009-12-02T03:40:00.000-08:00

More great stuff from Seth Godin here. Helping us to improve from both sides of the fence.

Be a good client

"Call to Action"

2009-12-02T03:13:00.000-08:00

Here is an interesting article about websites, and the marketing of them. Have a read, we found it interesting. Its from Silicon Cloud, atop on-line marketing company from the US.

7 great tips for optimizing your website

Rupert Murdock has it backward

2009-11-28T02:28:00.000-08:00

Seth Godin says

"You don't charge the search engines to send people to articles on your site, you pay them.

If you can't make money from attention, you should do something else for a living. Charging money for attention gets you neither money nor attention."

This is in relation to Murdocks belief that he can work against or without Search Engines, particulary Google.

What Murdock is planning

Murdock talks to Sky news

What Google says

This is Murdock not liking the fact that he can't control a huge part of the world media. It doesn't really matter if he stops his content going to Google, the web surfers, bloggers etc will still get the news, they will still read about whats going on, it just may not be from Sky News or another of Murdocks companies. It seems a needless war to be starting, and one that for once, may actually backfire or be lost by the media tycoon.

Seth Godin by the way is one of the most intuitive marketers around, his blog is here. I love reading his little notes every few days, they are always simple, to the point, easy to read and always have a timely relative slant on them.

Introduction

2009-11-27T09:39:00.000-08:00

Hi there to all,
I suppose i should have put this post in first before i uploaded a video, but its too late now. I'm Kevin from wizz.ie. This blog has been created to help both ourselves and our peers on the web to share information, tips, news, interesting facts or anything else that is related to the World Wide Web. We are an Cork (Ireland) Web Design & Online Marketing company in its infacy, and we certainly don't profess to "know it all".

Looking forward to the future.

K

Amazing soda shop

2009-11-27T09:38:00.000-08:00

Check this guy out, he really loves his work and his business. Some interesting details about soda pop as well!!!
Amazing soda shop