Member Article

Weekly internet update

with Search Engine Optimisation consultant Pascal Fintoni.

In the news: A court case in Germany banned Google from using its brand ‘Gmail’ – the popular email system – following a trade mark dispute with founder of G-Mail. So I guess size doesn’t matter.

Social networking remains a hot topic and further analysis from Nielsen/Ratings confirms that MySpace, FaceBook and Bebo are the most popular platforms in the UK. Although MySpace remains in top position, FaceBook is racing ahead with an increase of 523% in the last six months!

Social networking again, this time the two search giants are working hard to release what is understood to be the next generation social networks. Yahoo! is keeping discreet about Mosh but a demo of SocialStream by Google can be viewed here.

An interesting survey undertaken by Shiny Red provides further evidence that when well executed online PR is good for brands. 35% of respondents agreed that they are more likely to visit a company’s website if they have read about it online.

Rave of the week: Pot Noodle have launched their own online video campaign inviting internet users to submit videos of themselves eating the product in unusual places. The videos are featured on YouTube and there are prizes to be won for the most viewed clips.

Rant of the week: A recent analysis of email marketing statistics revealed that Wednesdays offer better read and click through rates; now that this information is the public domain do we need to brace ourselves for a tidal wave of spam e-mails every Wednesday?

Try something different this week: If you are using Google to find information held in a specific file type (for example, Word document, Excel spreadsheets, PDF links), simply type filetype:[extension] (for example, filetype:pdf) within the search box after your search term(s). This will save you a lot of time.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ruth Mitchell .