Digital Marketing Blog

Ellen Siminoff on Panama and paid search

Ellen Siminoff is the CEO of search advertising agency Efficient Frontier, having previously been part of the founding executive team at Yahoo!

Efficient Frontier applies mathematical models developed on Wall Street to calculate the best keyword prices and positioning advertisers should go for, and now manages over $250m in media spend.

Having recently launched an office in the UK, she talked to us about the company's plans to expand globally and into new areas of online advertising.

by Richard Maven 31 October 2006 14:08pm 0 comments

Pluck to close its RSS reader

Pluck, the two year old Texas-based social media company, has announced that it’s planning to shut off its RSS reader product line to focus into other business areas.

A notice on Pluck’s website advises that its RSS readers for Internet Explorer, FireFox and Pluck's web edition will be discontinued from January 7th, 2007. Subscribers will have two months to export their subscriptions to other readers.

by Graham Charlton 31 October 2006 11:45am 0 comments

Top ten viral marketing mistakes

Entertainment marketing outfit AzACreations has come out with a ‘How To’ guide on advergaming – not a new area but one in which campaigns still see widely varying degrees of success.

The report provides some useful tips on how to make the games themselves grab users’ attention. These include: setting targets for players, clear rules, allowing feedback, and enabling in-game characters to grow and develop.

It also offers ten reasons why viral campaigns fail, which we'll list after the jump...

by Richard Maven 31 October 2006 11:08am 1 comment

The Search Debate: media agencies vs. search specialists?

A recent New Media Age cover story titled “Search agencies feel the heat as media agencies muscle in”, which outlines recent big account wins by media agencies (like Carat Digital, Diffiniti etc.) at the expense of specialist search agencies, has excited much debate.

So which is right? Why would you go with a media agency, or a search specialist? Is paid search just a media buy, or something more?

by Ashley Friedlein 31 October 2006 11:01am 2 comments

Blogging tips from John Battelle of Federated Media

Michael Zhang at Folksonomy has a great interview with John Battelle of Federated Media, in which he shares his tips for bloggers.

by Graham Charlton 31 October 2006 10:43am 0 comments

Christmas shoppers WON'T cost UK businesses £7 billion

Employment experts suggest that the cost to business of employees surfing the net for their Christmas shopping on company time could be £7 billion this year, although frankly this research is somewhat misleading.

The prediction comes from the Employment Law Advisory Service (ELAS), which advises employers to lay down rules for staff to minimise the risk of losing hours to internet shopping.

All things considered, this sounds a bit Orwellian for our liking. But first, let's look more at this ELAS research...

by Graham Charlton 30 October 2006 19:23pm 0 comments

Accessibility - are 'trustmarks' the answer?

Accessibility group Segala’s recently-launched partner programme has been adopted by a number of agencies in recent weeks, which can now award ‘trustmarks’ to accessible websites.

by Chris Lake 30 October 2006 15:14pm 5 comments

Report - Myspace to announce copyright enforcement deal

Michael Arrington reports that Myspace is set to clamp down on copyright infringement through a deal with digital entertainment company Gracenote .

by Richard Maven 30 October 2006 14:40pm 0 comments

Bumper Christmas expected for online customer service

Online customer service departments may be dealing with up to five times more emails in the pre-Christmas run up than at any other time of the year.

The two weeks before Christmas will be a busy one as anxious customers contact retailer’s customer service departments to see whether their purchases are going to turn up in time for the big day.

by Graham Charlton 30 October 2006 14:38pm 0 comments

Reasons to avoid Flash on your website

Web developers and businesses continue to develop Flash based websites, despite the well-documented drawbacks in terms of SEO and usability.

When used well, Flash can be a great tool for the presentation of rich content, but pure flash websites, though they may look good, can annoy the hell out of visitors.

After the jump, some reasons why...

by Graham Charlton 30 October 2006 10:47am 12 comments