Google’s ‘Priority Inbox’ feature has just been given the all high and mighty approval for mass consumption but what exactly is it, how does it work and what potential impacts does it endeavour to have?

Priority Inbox is a new way of taking control of your Gmail account. It attempts to automatically identify your important incoming messages and separates them out from everything else. Google servers look at several types of information to identify the ‘important stuff’, including who you email and chat with most, how often you email these people and which keywords appear most frequently in the emails that you read. (more…)

Marketing as an Art

The art form of marketing involves many non-verbal communication processes involving subtle and subliminal messages addressing specific audiences. The art form of good marketing consciously and unconsciously creates connections by playing on emotional ties and utilising certain aesthetics, creating involvement between consumers and the advertising. For example the Andrex brand uses some fundamental tools to create emotional ties to their adverts. Their image of a golden Labrador puppy connotes cuteness, playfulness and loyalty, initially from the dog but this symbolises their brand, so ultimately from the company as a whole. This results in unconscious and conscious emotional ties being developed between the consumer and the brand.

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Having worked for a leading email service provider the methods and effectiveness of email as a marketing channel has always been held in high regard by me. Having preached and taught all my clients about best practice, great techniques and how to utilise email marketing to it’s full potential, it dawned on me that a lot of these principles can be implemented through your messaging on social networks like Twitter.

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Now that we’re well into the first month of the New Year I started to think of what might be a few digital marketing New Year Resolutions for a business in 2010. Many will already be doing many of these things but if not then maybe these will help you. (more…)

Snow has been here again, reminding me on my last trip to Paris, for XMAS, on Eurostar.

So to start this year’s blog, I thought that I would look back on my Eurostar experience over the Xmas period as I was trying to go to Paris to spend holidays with my French family.

Soon after five trains had broken down in the tunnel on December 19th, Eurostar started to send email updates every day, asking their customers to check the Eurostar website every evening at 8pm for traffic information.

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L’instant décisif

At home I have a framed picture of Henri Cartier-Bresson, a famous French photographer. It was published on the first page of a French newspaper printed the day after HCB died at the age of 96. The head line runs “L’instant décisif”, the decisive moment. This expression was coined in the fifties to describe the type of photography that HCB practiced and advocated. It means that photography is about capturing this unique moment, when everything falls into places, composition, characters and light…

How on earth does this relate to online marketing you ask? Well actually looking at this picture yesterday I was thinking that everything in life is about timing, and that online marketing campaigns are no exception. (more…)