All posts tagged marketing

Why the word webinar is half-cocked

You may have trouble reading this if semen makes you giggle. Webinar comes from seminar plus web. The word seminar means ideas (semen) plus a context in which to share those ideas (–ar). Webinar is supposed to mean a place to share ideas on the web. Surely if you wanted to coin a new word [...]

Where has the free hour offer gone?

You’re not going mad – there was a ‘free sample’ offer on SmyWord. But I canned it. Here’s why. I wanted people to be able to try before they buy – to sample the difference strategic thinking about content can make up front. Give me something to work on for an hour, and I’ll do [...]

No charge for the photo: marketing Cambridge’s biggest landlord

How many properties do you think the biggest landlord in Cambridge owns? 20? 50? 100? Amazingly, having bought his first home in 1965, Dennis Whitfield has accumulated a portfolio of over 500 properties in the area. That’s a lot of houses.

The Whitfield Group are a genuine, local success story, having started small and built over time. The only thing they didn’t have in place was a useful presence on the web so they approached us at Endis Solutions asking for a simple site through which to advertise their services and empty properties.

The challenges from the content side were:

Red Gate’s free iPad and an offer you probably missed

You can go and enjoy the culture of a larger organisation or you can get stuck in to creating the culture in a small one.

There are currently six of us at Endis Solutions. We build web sites for SMEs. We’re looking for a developer who has some flair and vision to come and make the company awesome.

Our culture so far involves finding genuinely good clients and building them genuinely useful web sites. We provide so much more than a site template, because we want our clients to succeed. We custom-build. We give business advice. We learn. We create stunning content and design. This means close collaboration between design, development and content, which you can do in a small company.

Microsoft copy: Nietzschean emptiness with a Freudian slip

By now you’ve probably seen the monumentally embarrassing Windows 7 party video from Microsoft. Hopefully, you’ve also caught the censored version that imbues an entirely different meaning to ‘make sure you have the right devices to hand’.

And you’ve probably worked out, shortly after asking the question, ‘how could a global corporation with billions of dollars and swathes of talent at its disposal come up with something so crass?’ that it is meant to be deliberately bad so that it will spread virally around the Internet. No publicity is bad publicity and all that.

And here we are talking about Microsoft.

I’m wondering whether the same is true of Microsoft’s marketing materials for Windows 7. Are they deliberately terrible to ensure that people talk about how bad they are, thus spreading the word? After all, you can always blame your marketing guys for badly describing a product, while enjoying the attention that your product is gaining.

Converting coffee table book into compelling web site

After the fourth edition of SevenHolidays’ successful book Resorts of Maldives, it was time to go online. Firstly to serve the same purpose but to a wider audience and for free: to educate holidaymakers about which resort is best for them with personal, unbiased reviews and photography. Secondly, to sell those holidays.

The book is a page turner. Enjoyable to read, as you marvel at the luxurious top resorts, and get sucked in to deciding which resort you would like the most. Putting all this information online (free) from a content perspective was about finding a neat way to present the reviews and photography, but more importantly, of sucking people in in the first place.