Digital Doughnut

(M2 Bespoke News) – Excessive time spent commenting and flirting on Facebook has been cited as the reason for one in three divorces in the UK in 2011, a new survey has revealed.

The results come from a review of 5,000 divorce petitions by the Divorce-Online website. A similar survey was carried out in 2009, when only one in five petitions contained the name of the social network as a reason for separation.

The three most common reasons why Facebook´s name was present on the divorce petition are: sending inappropriate messages to a person from the opposite sex; making negative comments about separated spouses; and revealing details about a spouse´s behaviour to Facebook friends.

By contrast, Twitter only appears in 20 petitions, meaning it could only be blamed for 0.4% of the cases. Although, once again, the microblog is used as a communication tool to make comments about separated spouses.

A Divorce-Online spokesperson commented in a statement that spouses often use Facebook Walls as a means to express their negative emotions, including anger and disappointment with each other, as it is less confrontational than face-to-face communication. However, they are often unaware that during a divorce, their posts will be carefully scrutinised and used to resolve child custody and financial issues.

Experts commented that social sites cannot be blamed for divorces, as typically the problems stem from the relationship itself and the marriage is likely to end with or without the platform.

Wish your emails looked better? You don’t need to be a designer to have beautifully designed emails – you just need to start improving your emails bit by bit. This blog post is aimed at helping you get started by sharing some very simple and easy to implement design tips.

1. Pick your colours wisely

So you’ve got a logo and maybe a corporate colour or two but how do you decide which colours go with them?

Check out this free online ‘colour picker’ from Adobe’s Kuler it allows you to enter the colours you have in your logo and suggests colour schemes that will complement them.

Read the rest of this entry →

Just so you all know, I’m a little frightened to write about Pinterest – an increasingly popular social platform for people who love, “Cupcakes, Boots, and shirtless Jake Gyllenhaal.” A website dominated by the female demographic.

I feel like I may not be the best voice to expand on the subject.

But as I sit at my computer listening to Adele, sipping wine, and watching college basketball, I’m starting to think that I actually could be a good fit for this. I mean I do like cupcakes… and I certainly respect Jake Gyllenhaal’s work. I can make this happen.

I first learned about Pinterest from my girlfriend.  It was about a week ago. We were watching TV one night and I noticed that she was intensely focused on her computer, much more so than usual. She had a look on her face that I had never seen before.  A look I would compare to the looks you saw in the movie, The Social Network, when programmers were “plugged in” and taking shots to earn a job with good ole’ Zuckie. It was that intense. I tried not to take much notice at first. But as time went by, and as my questions and comments were all being ignored, I began to wonder what the heck is going on. Usually she would put up with my annoying questions and bad jokes… but this night was different. She had nor the time nor any interest with what I was bringing to the table. Read the rest of this entry →

Facebook has probably realized what the adage on great power coming with great responsibility really means with what it has gone through over the past year. The social media giant has had to deal with widespread outrage from hundreds of millions of users and a complaint by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on its allegedly deceptive privacy practices.

But finally putting an end to the saga and perhaps effectively avoiding any onerous sanctions, Facebook reached a settlement with the FTC last week. The social network essentially agreed to the FTC’s terms of practicing transparency in implementing its privacy policies in order to protect the users’ personal information and interests. Read the rest of this entry →

How many people in your database truly want to receive marketing emails from you?

(Hint: It’s probably not as many as you think). Unfortunately you can’t just look at the size of your database to answer this question. Just because someone once gave permission to receive marketing emails from you, it doesn’t mean that they’re still wanted today.

I recently presented on this topic at the Email Marketing Summit Australia and spoke of how up to 60% of subscribers become inactive after only 6 months.

Inactivity can be due to a number of reasons. Email addresses become abandoned. Content can become boring and repetitive which causes people to lose interest. Or maybe people aren’t really interested in the first place because they signed up only as part of a competition. In any case, the worst thing you can do with inactive subscribers is nothing at all. Read the rest of this entry →

(M2 Bespoke News) – The number of UK consumers who share their bad shopping experiences in reviews or on social media is growing, a survey from Internet access provider Fasthosts points out.

The survey, which polled 1,300 British consumers, showed that one-third of them have voiced their dissatisfaction by posting a bad review online. Young people are more likely to criticise, as 52% of consumers under 24 years of age have written such a review. However, 84% of the respondents claim that they would give brands a second chance, provided that their negative comments are taken into consideration and discussed.

Meanwhile, another study of 400 small UK businesses suggests that only 12% respond to online complaints.

Stephen Holford, marketing director at Fasthosts Internet, comments that while pretending that negative reviews do not exist is an instinctive reaction, many brands do not realise that dealing with unhappy customers may benefit the business. In fact, it may boost consumer loyalty and brand reputation, he explains.

According to Internet psychologist Graham Jones, social networks are giving consumers the feeling of power and freedom to share their negative shopping experience, hence the growing number of bad reviews. However, businesses need to know that various studies indicate that if a consumer´s complaint is being dealt with, he or she ends up being more supportive of the business than before, Jones adds.

Major brands – from Walmart to Kmart to Sears to Old Navy, to name but a few, will be open for business on Thanksgiving night. As if that’s not bad enough, one major department store is running a commercial which features someone stealing something out of another person’s shopping cart.

Look, I get it… I really do. I’m in advertising and marketing and have been for over 20 years, so I know all about the need to move merchandise/make money, and if people are willing to shop, far be it for a retailer to not oblige them. If a retailer wants to open its doors on Thanksgiving night, so be it.

But have we reached a point where nothing is sacred anymore? Is there any day that is off limits when it comes to consumers spending money in a bricks and mortar location? Obviously in today’s digital world, consumers can go online and shop anytime they damn well want to. However, they cannot of course get the instantaneous satisfaction of handing over their money and receiving a physical item in exchange. If you order online, you must then wait. And when it comes to the holidays and shopping, some of us don’t exactly have an over abundance of patience. 

Sure we will do plenty of shopping online this holiday season but give us a chance to get in our cars and drive to a mall and spend the next X number of hours fighting through crowds as we listen to piped in holiday music… hell yeah, many of us will jump at the chance.

But does that make it right? Read the rest of this entry →

(M2 Bespoke News) – Google is continuing its streamlining policy with a third wave of product shutdown, the company announced in a post on its official blogspot.

The most popular among the products going down this time is Knol, the Google´s version of Wikipedia, which has seen technological difficulties. It will continue to operate until April next year and users are invited to download their knols onto files and transfer them to WordPress.com. The knols will no longer be available for viewing but will be downloadable until October 2012, when the content will become entirely inaccessible.

Friends Connect, Google´s social networking widget platform, will also be terminated from March 2012. The Social Web Blog, which was linked to Friends Connect, already stopped working in September. Users can join Google +, which provides them with many more functions.

The rest of the products that will be removed are Google Bookmarks Lists and Google Gears, which will both shut down in the next month; Google Search Timeline, as users are now able to set a time frame for searches; Google Wave, which will become read-only at the end of January and by April will be stopped completely; and Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal, which Google feels should be developed by other institutions in future.

Several months ago, Google started to close products, which did not manage to become mainstream or whose functions were incorporated in other, more popular ones. The reason behind this clean-up was the company´s ambition to provide fewer but more sophisticated and improved products and services.

This week I had a meeting with a client who was complaining that he wasn’t getting any business from his Facebook page or his e-mail list.  After all, it’s been four months that we’ve been working on this, and there has been almost no interaction on his wall, no sharing of the articles being offered to his “fans”.  No comments.  Nothing.

I took a deep breath, pulled out his analytics, and told him, point blank, “You’re absolutely right.  Your content isn’t being shared.  Because, even you aren’t sharing it.”

Bold statement, directly to a client.  But it had to be said.  Every article we post, every piece of advice given, ends with his fans.  No-one is re-sharing it.  Not even him.  Not his partner.  No-one.  How can the interactions grow, when no-one is sharing the content.

In the beginning…

When we were two, we learned to share our cheerios.  When we were five, and starting kindergarten, we learned to share our crayons and glue.  In college, we even learned to share our papers. Read the rest of this entry →

Who is Listening to You?

My wife went to a conference this past weekend, in Rye, New York (she is an educational consultant that owns Literacy Builders). Once she arrived at the hotel, she had numerous problems entering her room, which culminated in a visit from security at 11:00p.m, who proceeded to blame her for the issues.

My wife did what she usually does, and blogged about the incident, but related it to education (check out her blog, The Blame Game to read all about it). For her, that was the end of the matter. Her key worked the rest of the conference, and that was that.

Except it wasn’t.

The blog was posted on Monday, October 24, 2011, at about noon. Sometime in the early evening, she received a direct message on Twitter, from Hilton Online (@hiltononline) asking for her to follow them and DM (direct message) her information so that they may assist.

Wait, what?

She never tweeted. She never put it on Facebook. She didn’t even link to them in her blog. She merely mentioned which hotel she checked in to.

Talk about listening.

One of the things we tell clients to do before attempting to jump into the social media swimming pool is listen. Listen to how people interact. Listen to what people are saying, whether it be about your brand or topic. It will give you an idea as to what’s being said about you, your brand, your company, your topic of choice. It will help y0u frame how you will use these social media tools to join the conversations. Read the rest of this entry →