Social Media Affecting BtoB Buying Behavior
Posted by Reggie James | March 25th, 2010 | Filed under Uncategorized
The Empire Strikes Back: Indian Art Today at The Saatchi Gallery
Posted by Reggie James | January 26th, 2010 | Filed under Uncategorized
http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/the-new-india.htm
Tags: Indian Art, The Saatchi Gallery
Morgan Stanley's Mobile Internet Report ("Key Themes")
Posted by Reggie James | December 15th, 2009 | Filed under Uncategorized
Tags: mobile, Mobile Internet, Morgan Stanley
David Shrigley, The Show at the ICA
Posted by Reggie James | December 10th, 2009 | Filed under Art, Contemporary Art, David Shrigley, Uncategorized
Profile of the illustrator David Shrigley taken from ICA: The Show.
David sees the absurd in the everyday, capturing and rendering it in a variety of different media. His work is provocative, quirky and at times disturbing. More importantly I find his work darkly humorous. A wonderful anecdote to the X factor generation.
Reggie James
Tags: Artist David Shrigley, David Shrigley, Glasgow School of Art, Reggie James, Ronnie James, The ICA
Google extends personalised search to all users
Posted by Reggie James | December 7th, 2009 | Filed under Uncategorized
Tags: Google, personalised search
Microsoft and Yahoo! Finalise Search Deal
Posted by Reggie James | December 7th, 2009 | Filed under Uncategorized
Microsoft and Yahoo! have finalised the terms of its search and advertising agreement, four months after the deal was announced.
Tags: BingHoo, Microsoft, PPC, Reggie James, Search Advertising, SEO, Yahoo!
Is Tiger Feeling Lucky Today?
Posted by Reggie James | December 7th, 2009 | Filed under Uncategorized
A story of the Tiger in Search…..
Building Across The Social Web – The Implications of Social Web Technologies on Social Media Content Strategy
Posted by Reggie James | November 19th, 2009 | Filed under Uncategorized
An excellent presentation given by Michael Lazerow of Buddy Media at Web 2.0 in New York
Tags: Social Media, Social Media Content, Social Web, Socila Media for Business
Cassetteboy vs Nick Griffin
Posted by Reggie James | November 2nd, 2009 | Filed under Uncategorized
Better late than never – v.funny
The Google Story – on video
Posted by Reggie James | October 27th, 2009 | Filed under Uncategorized
An excellent post from Creative Review on Twitter that highlighted this wonderful video on the Google timeline.
Thanks CR and Nick Scott Enjoy the video -Reggie
The Google Story from Nick Scott Studio on Vimeo.
Google | New Website Optimiser features just launched
Posted by Reggie James | October 27th, 2009 | Filed under Uncategorized
The Google Website Optimiser team have been busy introducing an Experiment API which includes new reporting feature called over time charts.
Like otherGoogle APIs, the Experiment Management API allows for the creation and management of experiments outside of the Website Optimiser interface. Creating and launching a Website Optimiser experiment involves a series of steps. Depending on the design of your website, the content you want to test, and how technical you are, these steps can be easy and quick or potentially difficult.
Google Website Optimiser
Learn more at: Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Google AdWords, Google Website Optimiser, Over time charts, Reggie James
Main points from Google's latest Qtrly results
Posted by Reggie James | October 16th, 2009 | Filed under Uncategorized
- Total revenues grew 7% to $5.9bn, the fastest growth seen this year.
- Net income jumped 27% to $1.64bn.
- In search, the amount of paid clicks rose 14% year on year, with evidence of a recovery in search pricing, with cost per click up 5% from the second quarter, though it is still down 6% year on year.
- Money in bank $22bn.
Tags: Google results, Paid Search, PPC, Reggie James, revenues up
Digital Clarity to manage Paid Search [PPC] for Web only England World Cup qualifier against Ukraine
Posted by Reggie James | October 6th, 2009 | Filed under Uncategorized
Already creating news by the fact that this will be the first game streamed live and exclusively online, the move is a major milestone for broadcast of live England matches as well as an endorsement of the growth of the internet as a stand alone medium for major sports events.
The rights to distribute and market the game were made available after the Setanta collapse to Perform and will be delivered via Perform’s platform www.ukrainevengland.com
http://www.digital-clarity.com/press-releases/digital-clarity-manage-ukraine-england-ppc
Tags: Digital Clarity, Paid Search, Perform Group, PPC, Ukraine v England
Posted by Reggie James | October 1st, 2009 | Filed under Uncategorized
Twitter Logo
An excellent peice from Chris Crum at Web Pro News
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/09/29/an-equation-for-getting-retweets-and-traffic
Tags: Chris Crum, Reggie James, twitter
Collaborative Messaging from Google – Wave – is this the future?
Posted by Reggie James | September 30th, 2009 | Filed under Uncategorized
Collaborative Messaging from Google – Wave – is this the future?
Interesting developments today regarding the new open platform – WAVE from Google. Early days but interesting.
Google WAVE
Tags: Google, Google Wave, Reggie James
Cranleigh Indor Cycling – it's here!
Posted by Reggie James | September 28th, 2009 | Filed under Uncategorized
Been thinking about going Schwinning. That’s Schwinnig, not swimming.
I’m talking about indoor cycling, or spinning. The trend that seems to be sweeping the country and literally getting people’s heart beats racing – indoor cycling is a major way to improve personal fitness as well as meet people and have fun in the process.
The Schwinn element is named after Ignaz Schwinn, who founded the Schwinn Bicycle Company, Chicago in 1895 and became the dominant manufacturer of American bicycles through most of the 20th century.
So, where am I going to go for this experience? Well, an excellent company has set up near my home town in Surrey called Cranleigh Indoor Cycling (CiC) – check out the website – http://www.cicfitness.com/
CIC is the first bespoke indoor cycling centre – specialising in fitness classes on bikes, some liken it to aerobics on a bike but cyclists say its the nearest to cycling outside without the boredom of a turbo trainer.
One of the trainers and founders, Chris Spink says “It is high energy, fat burning and great fun so grab your sweat towel, water bottle and enlarge your lungs whilst sculpting your body – CiC start your fitness here”.
Chris, a former trainer with the Royal Marines and a mentor for trainers added “CiC brings you the simplicity of exercise through Schwinn qualified instructors who are self motivated, passionate and versatile in their class design”.
With words like this, it’s a no brainer – sign me up!
Tags: Chris Bennett, Chris Spink, Cranleigh Indor Cycling, Lee Kemp, Sam Schuchter, Simon Flatau
BingHoo vs. Google: A battle of the Titans or 1st round KO?
Posted by Reggie James | September 23rd, 2009 | Filed under Uncategorized
BingHoo vs. Google: A battle of the Titans or 1st round KO?
The news that Yahoo and Microsoft have finally tied the knot and will provide advertisers with a combined search offering has been a long time coming. The dominant partner in the relationship — Microsoft, has been trying to drag Yahoo kicking and screaming down the aisle for the best part of a year and the on going saga has claimed many an exec along the way; not least founder and former CEO, Jerry Yang.
In essence, the fait accompli was almost inevitable given Google’s dominance in the search space. Alongside the worsening search ad revenues of the respective number two and three in the market, the Seattle giant really had to push this deal to appease shareholders. With both companies announcing poor recent results, the deal will also help boost morale and confidence at Microsoft, whose staff are probably sick and tired of playing 2nd (and 3rd) fiddle to the incumbent leader.
So why is Google so dominant and what’s it going to take the new ‘BingHoo’ to grab a slice of the Google pie? To answer this, lets take a quick look back to remember how we got here and how two major areas lie at the heart of this question –technology and reach.
Technology
Yahoo today is the combination of a variety of acquisitions, namely GoTo — the original pay-per-click auction-based engine that started the whole journey. This engine changed its name to Overture and then acquired AltaVista — the first text -based search engine — this was then all bolted together and has evolved to the Yahoo Search Marketing (YSM) platform we have today. Google’s AdWords AJAX based software technology sitting on the open source Linux platform allowed the Mountain View Company to create a lighter front end and kept the process simple. It shared its vision with the development community and created an API allowing for large scale ad uploads and changes. Google also built its platform from scratch.
Yahoo, in essence didn’t. Along the way, YSM has desperately tried to update, change and integrate all the various technical platforms it had acquired and then had to overhaul all over again (via the Panama platform) when Google’s AdWords engine introduced a more intuitive and blind bidding based platform.
Reach
Augmented to this challenge of technology delivery for the Yahoo/Bing partnership is one of reach. The key question for advertisers is how can they justify running on any advertising platform which is clearly costing them more to facilitate than the return achievable as well as the volumes available.
Bing is making good headway and is very slowly chipping away at the vast Google search monopoly. Over the course of June and July, the site has jumped up 1 per cent to 8.9 per cent market share. Sadly, Bing’s 8.9 per cent market share still has a long way to go if it will dent Google’s dominant 64.7 per cent, but the seed has been sown and the fruits of this hard toil should start to show nearer the early part of next year when the combined force of the companies goes live.
Is this a good time for the combined Bing and Yahoo to make a wholesale dent in the Google traffic armoury? It would seem so. Google is currently looking to move a little further from search and into the more traditional areas of Microsoft’s domain — operating system software, programmes and ad serving as well as Yahoo’s old area of expertise: display advertising.
The reach question goes hand in hand with the technology question though in this case, not technology for the advertiser but technology for the end user of their platform — the consumer and business buyer — the basis on which the whole growth platform was built.
So what does the future hold?
Well, if the recent uptake of Bing and the ongoing rebrand of Yahoo, with its user-generated facility is anything to go by, the folks at Mountain View may want to re-examine where their focus lies. Mass investment in Android, Chrome OS, Maps/Street View etc., may be reviewed if the momentum in the tie-up gathers pace. Augmented to all the hoo-ha is the recent news that after three years, a $1billion investment made by Google for 5 per cent of AOL was finally bought back by AOL’s parent, Time Warner for a mere $283 million.
There is no doubt that if you use paid search as a part of your online marketing strategy, Google has been front and centre and an obvious choice for the past few years. On the other hand, Microsoft’s search engine has all-too-often been viewed by marketers as a peripheral option and a non-essential media buy with not enough traffic to justify the time you would have to spend implementing and managing it. Because of this, it was common to simply be left off of the schedule entirely.
Since the new deal could deliver Bing as much as 28 per cent of the U.S. search market share (according to comScore in June 2009), or around 4.1 billion monthly searches, from the perspective as a marketer, the question is this: is Bing now a must-have on the PPC media schedule?
Although the partnership will leave Bing far behind Google in terms of market share, Microsoft has eliminated a competitor and now has a fairly compelling argument to take to advertisers.
Assuming that Google does have to share the paid search media schedule with Bing, this perhaps leads to a more concerning question for the search giant; where is the budget going to come from?
Tags: BingHoo, Digital Clarity, Google, Interent, Reggie James
What is Orange Canyon?
Posted by Reggie James | September 14th, 2009 | Filed under Uncategorized
Been hearing a lot about a new blog on a few forums called Orange Canyon.
Anyone heard of it?
Reggie
Tags: Blog, Digital Clarity, Facebook, Orange Canyon, PPC, SEO, twitter
How Will Yahoo’s results affect the potential Microsoft deal?
Posted by Reggie James | July 21st, 2009 | Filed under Uncategorized
Yahoo! has released it results today. Profits rose to $143 million or 10 cents a share, from $132.4 million, or 9 cents a share a year ago. Net revenues fell to $1.14 billion from $1.35 billion a year ago, and gross revenues were down 13% to $1.57 billion.
Operating profit for the quarter fell 25% from a year ago, to $101 million and display ad revenues on Yahoo’s own sites fell 14% from a year ago, a little worse than the 13% drop in the first quarter
For Yahoo! shareholders the result will be another disappointment in trying to recoup return from an already trying stock performance by the former darling of the tech market.
To ad to further woes to the search portal, it was reported earlier in Business Week that forecasts for the third quarter came in somewhat below what Wall Street had hoped: $1.45 billion to $1.55 billion in revenues.
All this as the company is about to unveil a company wide rebrand. The ‘I told you so’ from the Carl Icahn camp will be audible on the street tomorrow.
Tags: Carl Icahn, Yahoo & Microsoft, Yahoo reults, Yahoo!
Make a Payment – improved payment control for Google AdWords
Posted by Reggie James | July 16th, 2009 | Filed under Uncategorized
Google is adding a new feature to ease the way it currently charges for credit card advertisers. The arrestingly titled Make a Payment allows advertisers to initiate a credit card payment for any amount they want. The advertiser can even overpay the balance to cover future advertising costs. You can still be automatically billed according to your regular billing cycle, and the plan is designed to give a more improved and convenient method of payment as posted on the company’s blog today.
When initiating a payment, you can choose to pay off your entire balance or just a portion of it, which is particularly useful if you’d like to divide your balance among several forms of payment. You can also make a payment for an amount larger than your balance if you’d like to prepay for a certain amount of advertising costs.
For further information about Make a Payment please contact the Account Management team at Digital Clarity
Tags: Google AdWords, Paid Search, PPC
