Google officially introduced Hummingbird on its 15th birthday. It’s a sign of the times that Google’s announcements on search algorithm updates get about the same press coverage as  Ben Bernanke used to get for his Federal Reserve updates to Congress.

Bernanke should’ve made investors nervous but didn’t. Google has made marketers nervous for several years now, and it has done that with cute animals like Penguins and Pandas. Hummingbirds are the most nervous of animals: they hover in mid-air by flapping their wings up to 80 times a second. They can fly at speeds up to 50km/h, and they can fly backwards. Feeling nervous yet?  Read more

Every has or should have a blog these days, so there’s a lot of competition for your target audience. Yours needs to stand out from the crowd. We'll show you how to push your blog to the front of the pack. Let's first recall why so many organisations invest so much time and effort in blogs' they work. Surveys have shown that companies that blog actively:  Read more

2 out of 3 Digital Marketers admit they don’t know what they’re doing. 4 out of 5 CEOs Don’t Trust Marketers.

That was the headline in a press release published by the Fournaise Marketing Group in the UK. Fournaise said it had interviewed more than 1,200 large corporation and SMB CEOs and decision-makers in North America, Europe, Asia and Australia. This was the majority view:   Read more

Would you pay $1.5 billion dollars for a brand and pour it down the drain?

By the turn of the millennium, Rosemount was one of the most recognisable wine brands in Australia. It was the country’s fifth biggest wine company, and it was profitable. It made large volumes of cheap and cheerful Chardonnay under its diamond label, along with premium wines such as Roxburgh Chardonnay and Balmoral Syrah.  Read more

Big Data or Big Brother?

Big Data is one of those terms that suddenly appeared on everyone’s lips. Did you miss that crucial moment when you could still ask what it meant without people giving you strange looks? We’re here to help, because the Big Data industry does a lousy job explaining what Big Data is and what the fuss is about.  Read more

Have you been stalked by a pair of shoes lately?

If you’ve looked at products on a website, you may find ads for these things following around. ‘It’s weird to have a pair of shoes I looked at on a brand’s website follow me around the web for days or even weeks,’ writes Doug Kessler at Velocity Partners. I had the same experience after I downloaded a PDF on lead generation from a site: now the banners follow me everywhere I go.  Read more

What about a goal?

I was gob-smacked the other day when a new client CEO asked us to focus the meeting on strategy. He then  proceeded to detail tactics for the next hour. I didn’t want embarrass him in front of his team, but it wasn’t just the strategy-tactics confusion; he hadn’t shared the big picture with them, but had with us. We knew the end game and the agreed strategies to get there, but they didn’t, so strategy wasn’t going to be blinding anyone that day.  Read more

Yet we see these mistakes every day. 

You can come up with the smartest headlines and subheads; you can craft terrific content and polish it with the skills of a master wordsmith; you can target the distribution of your content with exquisite specificity … you can do all of this but you’ll fail to reach your audience if you haven’t taken care of the 3 biggest turn-offs.  Read more

The Deluge is already here. 

You’ve read about the flood of mediocre content coming your way, created by people who used to do SEO and link building and more, and now claim to be content marketers.   Read more

The Yacks are Back. 

‘Could you put your yacks on the job?’ a client asked once. Thinking of hairy, horned, Himalayan bovines, I was puzzled, until it clicked that those ones have no ‘c’. He was talking about ‘the ones who yack’ – my telemarketers – and five years later we’re still using them - but very differently.  Read more