Advertising crisps the political way – the election’s in the bag
How many of us left Waterloo (or another major station) this morning and were accosted by people handing out free REAL Election Politi crisps?
I’ve never voted tory before but… spoof conservative adverts go viral with dedicated sites
The new Conservative adverts are everywhere – and so are the spoofs. Read more
Interview with Jordan Lane of Email Moxie
Jordan Lane is an Email Marketing Expert. He is the founder of the blog www.EmailMoxie.com and is also a contributor to the blog www.emailresponsibly.com.
Who needs a whole website when you can just have one word?
Yep – just a single word – No design, No images, No, well… point… to be honest – but these one word viral sites really speak to us. They amuse on such a basic level that they often immediately go viral and seem to draw traffic stats which laugh at all our SEO optimised masterpieces by suceeding without any obvious effort at all to do so. Read more
New iPhone app for freelancers – Laptop Friendly Cafes
iPhone apps are cropping up for everything – one of my favourite new ones being the new app which allows you to find a tube stop wherever you are using googlemaps (which can be seen on engadget here).
But another one, aimed at freelancers which helps you find cafes where it is easy to setup and work online using your laptop has just been released.
The iPhone app called ‘Laptop friendly cafes’ does exactly that – and has data for several major cities including London and utilises the iPhone Geolocation and Google Maps & Directions features. It is easy to use and is quite handy if you need to find somewhere nearby to get some work done.
The new app can be downloaded here: http://tinyurl.com/yjwqj3u
Interview: SpyreStudios
I cam across SpyreStudios the other day and was impressed with their Wordpress customisation and web design portfolio so caught up with Jon Phillips to find out more about the company and his experiences:
Will share to social replace forward to a friend in email marketing?
I read a post on Email Responsibly which details figures from a series of email tests to see which links people used when presented with a range of options to share their email with others.
The question posed is an interesting concept, I must admit that I hadn’t until now considered the idea that share to social might ever fully replace forward to a friend in email marketing.
Social networking offers users a place where they can share links and comments with a much wider audience with a single click – and I can see how that would be appealing to both the sender and he recipient. The uptake on social networks is also still growing so it looks likely that this trend is only likely to increase in the near future.
Want to engage your customers using social media? Can Facebook really return a high ROI for B2C campaigns?
These are questions I have been asking myself more and more recently.
Is the use of Facebook, Myspace, Twitter and other social media really something that can directly increase profits and return a high ROI? Are such activities useful for brand awareness and for increasing your online presence in a way which will only ever indirectly increase businesses and will always be a secondary activity? Or is it just something everyone is doing, so we feel we should be doing as well – even if the market is so full now, with a mix of those doing things well and badly, that people are beginning to ignore attempts to engage them in their social networks… will they end up being ignored more and more and go the way of the banner advert?
This blog, now hosted on my webspace bubblegumkitten.com
Just a quick note to let you know that soon the old URL http://bubblegumkitten.wordpress.com/ where this blog used to reside will become dormant – as I have moved it over to my .com – I started out on wordpress.com as a sort of tester, but have realised that I enjoy blogging and want more control over it. All the current content and new posts will be available here from today onwards.
I will leave the old blog live for a while for those people who have links to it – but if you could repoint your favourites and RSS feeds to this URL: http://blog.bubblegumkitten.com (The RSS feed being now http://www.bubblegumkitten.com/feed/) you will receive uninterrupted service.
Links:
Please bookmark the new blog URL: http://blog.bubblegumkitten.com
A bit of shameless self promotion – How to get business for your freelance graphic design services
I hate to use the phrase, but in these ‘credit crunch’ times self promotion for freelancers has by necessity become quite competitive. The best way to gain business, in my opinion, is via referrals, and I have always worked using this basis. If I do great work and stay in touch with my clients, they will suggest me to people they know and give good references. And ideally I would gain all my business by this method. The best clients are those who are engaged with your ideas, trust your work and have spoken to someone who they know who has given a glowing review.
However, everyone’s budgets are tight and spending in some areas of marketing and advertising has decreased or at least moved to another channel. I have seen some companies taking as much work away from agencies and moving it in-house in order to try to produce the same amount of work for less overhead. I have seen clients halve budgets for departments I have generally worked with for their company. I have also seen companies who used to do a lot of direct mail and resisted methods such as email marketing starting to swap over. They have done the maths and see that for them it can be much cheaper and that the material created can often be tweaked and reused for a much lower cost per send. That isn’t to say that people have stopped using print. It is just an example of how some marketing departments are changing the way they spend their budgets to stretch their pennies further. And shifts like these affect the freelance world, in fact they affect every graphic designer’s job. More and more companies are looking for designers with design and also AS or CSS skills than ever before, I would go so far as to say that although great print designers are still in high demand, there are less slots for them to fill compared to online designers or those with a mix of skill sets.
