There’s been a shocking lack of work on this blog over the past couple of months, although i do have a very good excuse!!
i can now break the silence and officially announce the launch of the new agency i’m heading up called Make It Rain. It was time for a new challenge and i always believe things can be better no matter what you do, so with a business partner and some VC funding, we’re now about to make some waves in agency-land!
Make It Rain is driven by the belief that we can deliver online business transformation by taking the next step beyond traditional online marketing agencies with a real no-nonsense honest approach. What’s the magic formula? well it’s not rocket science! Combine the best skillsets in online marketing channels - PPC, SEO, Affiliates, Social Media and display advertising, then continue the journey through web design, CMS programming, tracking systems and you have a really good end-to end solution.
Now that’s nice, but that’s not the winner. Tie all this together with some awesome people who also possess great business strategy and commercial acumen and you have online business transformation.
Why? Online marketing is now way more ingrained into any business than just how much traffic or clicks you can get. It’s now about re-shaping the product offerings, commercial messages and business focus for the most cost-effective marketing channels to deliver real business.
We’re lucky enough to have some extremely receptive clients already and I’m very excited about how we’re helping them change their way of thinking to be ahead of their competition and more importantly really use online as a fully integrated part of their business.
I’ll now be putting all my industry commentary and tips over on our site at www.make-it-rain.co.uk and using this for the more regular fun stuff!
Feel free to drop by over there and say hi! I’m looking forward to getting out and about and meeting everyone again!
I love this, Bert and Ernie the two best characters in Sesame Street by my reckoning, hit the big time with some gangsta rap. Watch out for a late appearance by the sheep gang. Genius.
Forget Google Earth, that’s soooo last week. A quick search for Sky, the home entertainment provider, and i got a ppc ad from Google promoting, their new Google Sky service. All the data is taken from the Hubble telescope and it works in the same fashion as Google Earth but also guides to you points of interest if you haven’t got a clue where to start. But why stop there?
Checkout Google Moon and Google Mars with data taken from NASA, you can now explore where the Apollo missions landed amongst other things. The really cool thing is the built in search function in each of these services.
I recommend you try it out but be prepared to be sucked in to spending loads of time looking at stuff a’la Google Earth. The only question is which planet is next?
My recent lack of blogging has been shocking. Yes i’m still alive! Rest assured, I will be back on form within the next week or so with lots of really cool stuff to talk about, i’m just going through a media blackout currently….
11 hour flight from London, and another 3 hours to go through LAX security and get my bag.
Now after a few days in Santa Monica, i’m stuck in LAX again after being told my flight to Vegas has been delayed by 2 hours! After a heavy night out, 2 hours sleep and hooning it down the freeway i’m not best pleased…
Seeing as it’s April fools day, there’s a lot of ‘hilarious’ pranks going round. To be fair they’re all pretty lame apart from one which came up again today which always makes me laugh, ‘rickrolling’. It’s when you get a link to a video you think is a cool gaming preview or something but it sends to you to a video of Rick Astley.
I knew it wouldn’t be long until search marketing was seen as cool (ahem). But now theres proof it’s hitting the underground rap scene, forget sex, drugs and drive-bys….. PPC, SEO and social are the new status symbols on the mean conference streets.
Here’s Poetic Prophet with PPC 101 to ease you in, also check out his other work on his youtube profile…..
I’ve never had much fun with MySpace, but i thought i’d re-visit the tired old dog and see if their recent raft of changes would entice me into becoming more involved…..
I tried updating my profile first but the UI is still as messy, the photo uploader crashed on me and when i did manage to get a photo up it distorted my face to fit its parameters so i now look like Gollum. Not a good start.
For inspiration i went fishing around other people’s profiles and some of the new featured celebrities they’re now pushing on the homepage including a strange mix of Katie Price and Rihanna. Hmmm not the best.
However that was the tip of the iceberg, a strange thing always happens when i open a myspace page, my web connection drops out. EVERYTIME. Now is this because there’s too much crap on people’s pages? Does my ISP drop my bandwidth because it thinks i’m downloading heavy content? Or does Tiscali just hate MySpace too? Whatever it is it’s the only site the does this everytime guaranteed. So i gave up. That’s the end of my MySpace experience for now.
I watched the amazingly funny new Keith Lemon show, Keith Lemons Very Brilliant World Tour, last night on ITV2. The character is a creation of Leigh Francis of Bo Selecta fame and has popped up in a few small doses here and there. However, this is his first major series and i was in stitches. I don’t know whether it’s just the Leeds accent (being a Yorkshire fella myself) that cracks me up, the amazing way Leigh played the character or maybe i see a bit of myself in him? A bit of everything methinks. How he stopped himself from laughing i’ll never know.
Bang Tidy.
Now here’s the rub. With the success of TV broadcasters such as the BBC moving online with their iPlayer (which i Beta-tested and was very good BTW) all channels are following suit including ITV. You’ll see at the end of most of their new programmes now a web address for the show. Being as i wanted more Keith Lemon i went straight to the address they flashed on-screen, www.itv.com/keith. Awesome. ‘Page does not exist’ i was told. after checking it wasn’t my eyesight or chunky fingers still no joy. So ingeniously (ahem) i tried itv.com/keithlemon….. bingo. First sour lemon to ITV. But i was well excited when i saw they had outtake videos and extra content. Bang tidy is that.
After selecting ‘Learn Japanese with Keith’ the video player went in a constant loading loop and wouldn’t play. WTF was this a mac issue? Ah no. Amazingly ITV have chosen Microsoft Silverlight as their player of choice…. sweet jesus. So after installing the fabled Silverlight (and i was getting bored at this point) i tried again. No joy. Just a message saying they were using Silverlight to enhance the experience for mac and firefox users. And that was it! No Keith Lemon, no Japanese learnt. A couple of classic lemons from ITV. So i did the only sensible thing and went to youtube, where it worked…. so here’s learning Japanese with Keith Lemon
Is this another nail in the coffin of real social networking? Another media giant trying to make money out of people’s inbuilt intuition to communicate? Are they going to do anything clever or just whack display ads all over bebo (genius)?
I wasn’t too thrilled to hear the news but bebo going for a more ‘realistic’ $850million shows the silly-money market for social networks calming down a little. So what are they going to do with it? Well, bebo’s users are predominantly teenagers who are heavy future influencers but cash poor and prone to dis-loyalty.
AOL’s first thought is to integrate their messenger products like AIM and ICQ into bebo, ok i can see that working…. but supported by, you guessed it, loads of display ads from their platform A system. Ugghhh. Turning it into myspace is not the right way to go!
I think we’ll see a backlash from bebo users (who are predominantly in the UK) with less usage patterns occurring and a migration to other platforms as we near the 18 month churn period. As everyone knows the worst person in the world to piss off is a teenager.
What they should be doing is nurturing this audience for the long-term in the way that banks (sometimes!) get it right. AOL need to consider this young intelligent audience and their future potential for having a positive view of AOL and it’s products over the next 5 years. If they get it right and genuinely offer more to this community now such as quality content into bebo’s Open Media platform then there might just be a glimmer of hope for turning around the ailing fortunes of AOL.
They need this to be a positive generation-shift to move away from the tarnished old AOL users like me.
*Definition:ASBO - Anti-Social Behaviour Order (For my American friends, just spend a week in the UK and see any chav worth his salt has at least one)
There’s been a shocking lack of work on this blog over the past couple of months, although i do have a very good excuse!!
Forget Google Earth, that’s soooo last week. A quick search for Sky, the home entertainment provider, and i got a
11 hour flight from London, and another 3 hours to go through LAX security and get my bag.
I’ve never had much fun with MySpace, but i thought i’d re-visit the tired old dog and see if their recent raft of changes would entice me into becoming more involved…..
I watched the amazingly funny new 
Is this another nail in the coffin of real social networking? Another media giant trying to make money out of people’s inbuilt intuition to communicate? Are they going to do anything clever or just whack display ads all over bebo (genius)?
They need this to be a positive generation-shift to move away from the tarnished old AOL users like me.
