Year: 2007

There’s a recession coming? Not online….!

American commentators reckon there is a recession just around the corner. And one of the people quoted, economics professor Nouriel Roubini, believes that the financial difficulties could be greater than anything we have ever seen before. Such prophets of doom make for great headlines, but they are forgetting one thing.

Online businesses need to provide even more information

How many times have you ventured into an online store, only to find that you can’t get as much information about a company’s products or services as you would like? Only yesterday I wanted to know if my new video camera could take certain memory cards. Was that information in

Front page of the Reading Chronicle

My interview with the Business Editor of the Reading Chronicle led to a front page story in the main newspaper and then the whole of the front page of the Business Review sections. Wow!

The future of Internet Psychology

My son Elliot was 8-years-old yesterday and today we had a big party for 26 of his friends. It was a Harry Potter theme party with a wizard magician who kept all of the kids “spellbound” for an hour…! So what has all this to do with Internet Psychology? Well,

Internet shoppers must be confused

Shoppers online must be a pretty confused bunch of people. After all, we clearly want to shop online – the graph for items purchased on the Internet is near vertical; we just keep buying more and more stuff online, day in day out. That is shown by recent research for

Teenagers do not need our help online – we need them to help us oldies

Teenagers have been warned by men in grey suits to be careful online. According to the Information Commissioner’s Office, teenagers stand a chance of ruining their future careers if they are not careful when using social networking sites. Oh dear – here we go again – another set of adults

Internet users need symbols of identity

American Psychologists have discovered that we need to “get the T-shirt”. In an interesting group of different studies, the researchers from New York University found that in order for us to really feel we are part of a group we have to show that we are in that group. We

Email marketing has yet to achieve anything

British consumers would rather receive traditional direct mail than an email marketing campaign. That’s the conclusion of new research conducted for the Institute of Direct Marketing. Less than one in five people surveyed wanted to receive marketing material via email – they preferred to get it in the post. So

Five ways to engage people with your blog

There are over 100 million blogs in cyberspace now and the rate of growth is phenomenal. Indeed, if blogs continue to grow at their current pace there will be more blogs on the Internet than people on the planet, by 2010. If your blog is amongst all that noise, just

What can your online business learn from the credit crunch?

Bankers are not sleeping easily these days. First, the “subprime” problems emerged in the USA, then French banks took a cautious approach, before the debacle of Northern Rock hit Britain. Clearly, all around the world banking is hitting troubled waters. Even though we hear lots of technical terms like “subprime”

Is your online business ready for your employees?

Universities are pumping out technically literate graduates at a rapid rate. Indeed, you probably can’t even do a degree in Ancient Greek these days unless you are competent using online search methods, for instance. In other words, everyone joining the jobs market nowadays is technically competent. Until a few years

Internet shopping has no limits – so what’s holding you back?

Today is my birthday – hurray..! And I’m going shopping to celebrate. Many people get money, gift cards or vouchers for their birthday and I’m no exception, so it’s off to the shops later for a bit of a spending spree. I love shopping – as do most people. Indeed,

Social

Social networking crowds have no wisdom

Social networkers love numbers; “I have 20,000 friends”, or “My profile has just had its millionth view”, for instance. But actually, who cares? Other than massaging the ego of the individual social networker, numbers do not matter much. Take for instance the latest figures on social networking viewers (shown right).

Treat your web site visitors like children

Parents rarely agree on how to bring up children; put three mums or dads in a room and ask for a view on any aspect of parenting and you’ll get four different opinions…! However ask them to come up with one factor that is common to all children and they

You think business uses the Internet? Think again.

Small business owners are seriously bad at using the Internet. Two pieces of research combine to show that significant numbers of small business owners and those running medium sized enterprises are simply not aware they are missing out. For a start, research commissioned by “The Best Of” chain of web

Blogging will get your business more media attention

Bloggers are being used by mainstream journalists as a useful source of information. According to the results of a new study, 74% of business journalists already use blogs or will use blogs as a primary or secondary source of information for their stories. This means anyone who has a blog

Think small for Internet business success

Small business owners are at a real advantage online – providing they emphasis their “smallness”. Many people set up an online business to help them look big – but this could be working against them according to a new study in the USA. It seems that people trust small businesses