Marketing
Does online marketing scare you?
Things are looking up for the online marketing community. Recent surveys and media reports widely credit the region’s online advertising spend to be growing fast and becoming increasingly important to more and more people. Although last year was a difficult one for many, some believe that this gave big advertisers pause for thought and time […]
Tweets like grains of wheat
The story appears to be apocryphal – I’d always thought it was Archimedes but apparently there’s also the inventor of the chessboard (an Indian bloke, according to certain online sources that can’t be used in scholastic research) and a Roman geezer. Everyone has done the old ‘one grain of wheat on the first square, two […]
We’re no longer wowed…
In my thirty-odd years of involvement with technology, my favourite acronym remains TWAIN. In an industry so littered with acronyms, that’s some achievement. You may well recognise it if you’ve ever used a scanner hooked up to your computer – changes are that you’ll have been told you’re using a TWAIN driver. To my continued […]
The coolest agency in the world
The coolest agency in the world can’t execute brilliant social media campaigns if the client doesn’t want to invest in the idea – not just of using social media as a megaphone like an advertising replacement, but of actually changing things around to make open social communications a long term investment. That investment necessarily takes […]
5 reasons Spot On PR uses Twitter
@SMEXbeirut asked recently if we’d written an article on why Spot On PR uses Twitter and what we get out of it, so now is probably as good a time as any. Those that have been following our social media efforts will know that we embraced Twitter almost as soon as it was unblocked in […]
Losing the battle for control
A man goes into a shop to look for a new electronic product. He’s already been researching his new purchase online via the manufacturer’s website as well as news sites, product review sites, blogs and by asking his online and offline friends about which brand and products they know and recommend. Armed with this store […]
Social media measurement
Spot On’s Alexander McNabb is taking part in a panel session on PR measurement in social media at News Group’s PR Measurement Summit in Dubai today. So, as the region’s public relations practitioners meet to discuss the region’s demand for monitoring, research and measurement methodologies, it’s probably as good a time as any take a […]
Social media isn’t socialist media
The idea that social media is a new way of running marketing communications on the cheap is a beguiling one and, sadly, totally incorrect. It is also a piece of thinking that is increasingly common. In fact, using social media for marketing is time consuming, expensive and dangerous. The Internet is filled with examples of […]
Market monopolies
I have always been terribly fond of the image of a small urchin throwing a stone to knock the top-hat off the fat, pompous businessman. I’ve even run campaigns based around the concept in the past, where we’ve been working against an incumbent telco on behalf of the challenger. Taking the role of the urchin, […]