Photoshooting a McDonalds burger: honesty or multi-layered deceit?

Posted by Dave CollinsMarketing

Why Your McD’s Burger Doesn’t Look Like the One in the Ad has left me feeling slightly confused and dirty. In it, the director of marketing for McDonalds Canada shows why there’s such a gap between reality and what’s presented in their ads. A few questions spring to mind. – Did Isobelle really write to McDonalds and ask that question? Really? … Read More

Outweighing the pain of upgrading software

Posted by Dave CollinsMarketing

The psychology of pain is fascinating. We can remember incidents involving pain, yet we can’t precisely recall what the pain felt like, other than the fact that it was unpleasant. We can recall tastes, smells, sounds, images and touch with far greater clarity. Yet the more recent the pain, the greater our recall of the sensation, and the more we … Read More

Confessions of a late Twitter adopter

Posted by Dave CollinsMarketing, Social Media

I’ve been using Twitter for forty-two months, have around 10,000 followers, and have tweeted in the region of 3,000 times. For the first forty-one months I received a total of 560 visitors, almost all of whom spent an average time of 1-2 seconds on our website. Low quality is an understatement. During the forty-second month of Tweeting I received 16 … Read More

Twitter actually works (at more than procrastination)

Posted by Dave CollinsMarketing

Something unexpected has happened to me. I’ve finally seen the light. I now understand how to use Twitter for my business. Three years ago I wrote Twitter Flu – Win a $100 Amazon gift voucher, where I offered a $100 Amazon voucher for anyone who could tell me how to use Twitter for my business. Four months later I raised … Read More

There’s a war on data – and we’re all going to lose

Posted by Dave CollinsAnalytics, Marketing

Your website’s data isn’t abstract, academic or a goal in itself. It’s a means of understanding your visitors – where they come from, what they’re looking for, what they do once they arrive and more. If you’re against the concept of analytics, you’re effectively against understanding how people interact with your website and your business. Which is why many businesses … Read More

Still ignoring your mobile users? So are we.

Posted by Dave CollinsAnalytics, Marketing

I just looked in the Google Analytics accounts of 25 different companies, to see how many visitors are using a mobile device. The figures ranged from 0.5% to 10.3%, with an average of 4.9%. Most companies, ourselves included, choose to ignore the problem.

Today’s inspiration: spam

Posted by Dave CollinsMarketing

Don’t ask me how this started, but I’ve become very intrigued by spam. The figures are incredible: around 130 – 150 billion sent every day, and only a 0.0001% response rate is needed to make a profit.